The Epic Web Browsers

A few days ago, Yahoo.com informed users of a browser that is Made In India for Indians - Epic.

Well, to me this is just a marketing gimmick since any FOSS guy can tell that anybody can build a browser based on Open Source tools. The browser in question is based on Firefox.

There are many browsers that have forked from Mozilla Firefox mainly due to Mozilla Corporation's policies that do not strictly confirm to the Linux philiosphy.

Among these are (the ones I have used) :
IceWeasel
SwiftFox
Nakamora
Flock

There is no dearth of Open Source browsers in the planet today.

A few are:
Chromium
Konqueror
SeaMonkey
Epiphany
Galeon
Kazehakase
Midori
lobo
links2
dillo
netrik
netsurf
chimera
lynx
elinks
links

The first Windoz post

Just a few days ago a friend of mine was troubled with a kind of virus that corrupts the setting of Windows Explorer and hence no matter what the user tries to do, hidden folders are always hidden.

So I gave him the good old solution:

1st : Open up 'msconfig' and search for any odd start-up programs starting up. un-check these start-up programs. The names may include explorer.exe or similar confusing names (for the not-so-worried).

2nd: Simple save the following as 'fix.reg' (or anything.reg) and double click on the file to execute it.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion­\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL]
"CheckedValue"="1"

Wordpress Blogging Software

Wordpress is by far among the best Blogging software out there. Using the raw power of PHP and the Open Souced MySql RDBMS engine, it has a lot of stuff under it's hood.

Just installed Wordpress on my system today, seems Debian is really complex as far as configuration is concerned.

In its quest of making things simple for the new user, it has complicated matters and the regular Linux tarball guy will be ill at ease. So, the regular wordpress installation was not so 'regular' as far as I saw it.

So this is how the good debian administrator would install Wordpress:

Voice Notification System

Want to make the computer remind you the time every hour, so you don't lose track?

Here's a simple voice (I've chosen a female US speaker for this ;-) notification system that will remind every hour the time.

Pre-requisites:

festival

To install festival:

sudo apt-get install festival

Learning about Web Technology

I am a C fan, hence I love PHP. The world of ASP.NET seems to be very attractive due to the obvious reasons of GUI designer and Rapid Application Development. Again, JSP has got a similar attraction.

However, due to poor support of ASP.NET on Linux, (or perhaps my lack of knowledge in this field!) I am still unable to say hello world on MonoDevelop. JSP appeared pretty complicated at first due to the oh-so-many XML files and odd looking folders. So PHP seemed natural.

Well I have to admit that I like things hand on, so the toolkit based approach in Netbeans, Eclipse and Mono seemed a little too heavy for me. Another reason may be these tools are so sluggish! On my 1-Gig P4 machine, it takes ages for Eclipse to load.

A poem I wrote for my sister on her 17th Birthday

To my sister