Twitter killed the user experience

Hi there

As I do with most of the new websites I come across, I created a login in Twitter when I first heard about it, played around it for a little while and abandoned it. After reading about Twitter’s massive growth and seeing the ecosystem that was breeding around it, I decided to give Twitter a second try in April, this year. I realized that Twitter could be the single integrated news source that I always wanted. I “followed” all the popular news blogs that I read every day and was very impressed with Twitter. Every journalist, blogger and celebrity was on Twitter. It became more than a news source – Twitter “connected” me with these people because it told me what these guys were up to all the time. And I was even able to reply if I wanted to. The 140-character limit for tweets made perfect sense for me. “If a 140-character description (or rather title) cannot impress me, the article is not worth my time”, I thought.

It was all rosy and romantic, like a person who found his perfect soul mate he has been looking for all his life. But then, like any other typical American relationship, this romance didn’t last long. Now, after 6 months into this relationship, I was loitering at TechCrunch when I realized I have lost something – the experience of reading from a blog. These news blogs usually have a beautiful layout with the right font and colors for a good reading experience (although some kill the experience with pop-up and flash advertisements all over), have pictures with each articles, had the most popular articles highlighted and the home pages usually had one or two paragraphs from the article (usually the introduction-to-the-article paragraphs). I realized I read more articles in detail when I am reading from the blog than Twitter. I then realized how important a good user experience is. Twitter has killed the pleasure of reading. I am now slowly “unfollowing” the blogs in Twitter and switching back to scanning the blogs. I will still continue to read Twitter – I have many friends there and I am still interested in knowing what they are thinking and doing. But Twitter will never be my source of news.

Cheers!

Wifi on Dell 1501 with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

Hi there

If you are an Ubuntu’er on Dell 1501 with Broadcomm wireless card, you would definitely have gone through the pain of making wifi work. My first Ubuntu version was 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). I like Ubuntu. But, it was a nightmare to get wifi working. There were no drivers for Broadcomm card and making NDISWrapper work was not trivial for a Linux amateur. I hated to upgrade to any newer version of Ubuntu because it would break it and I had to fix it again. This continued till Hardy (8.04). In Intrepid (8.10), I realized that Ubuntu now came with a driver for Broadcomm cards and “ping” in terminal worked. But I still was not able to browse with my browser. In one of the forums, I read NetworkManager does not work well with this driver (I don’t know if this is true, but I was already tired of trying to make wifi work). I removed NetworkManager and installed Wicd and it detected the driver and worked like a charm. I was a happy camper until I got the desire to try out Ubuntu server edition.

I downloaded and installed Jaunty (9.04) server edition and again, ‘ping’ in the terminal worked but not the NetworkManager. It simply said ‘Wireless Networks Device not managed”. After some googling, I finally found out that its because, by default, NetworkManager  is not configured to manage the wireless card.

This is what I did to fix this issue:

In the terminal type

sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

The file nm-system-settings.conf will open in the editor. Now change “managed=false” to “managed=true”. Save and close the editor. After this, in the terminal, type

sudo killall nm-system-settings

NetworkManager will detect the wireless card and everything will just work. The feeling of making wifi to work in Dell 1501 so easily is magical.

Have fun

Raj

My return to blogging

Hi there

It has been more than a year since I last blogged and I have been planning to break my laziness and start blogging again. I have been planning this for about 6 months now

I am marking my return to blogging again with a quick update on what has been happening in the last year of my life.

I was doing my Master of Science in Computer Science at Arizona State University when I last blogged. I have, since then. completed this program successfully with a thesis under by belt. I moved from Tempe, AZ to San Jose, CA to start work for a networking company. I am in business intelligence and data warehousing team here. My life-style has changed a bit. I own a Nissan 35oz, a Mac mini with a 23″ samsung moniitor, have a bedroom for myself now with a queen-size bed, a very large table and a comfortable chair, all neatly arranged ((I think) in my bedroom. I have a very close friend from my undergrad in India, living about 6 miles from my house. I have come out of my sedentary life at ASU and I am hiking every other weekend. I go to my friend’s house about 3 times a week. I am reading books now. I read ‘Engineering your start-up: A guide for the High-tech Entrepreneur‘ by James Swanson and Michael Baird. I read the book ‘Emotional Intelligence‘ by Daniel Goleman. I am now reading ‘Designing Quality Databases with IDEF1X Information Models‘ by Thomas Bruce. I have ‘Getting to Yes‘ by Fisher, Ury and Patton, and O’ Reilly’s ‘High Performance MySQL‘ and ‘SQL Tuning‘ in the queue.I have formatted my Dell 1501 and have only Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit Server running now. It used to have Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04 previously. Above all, I feel I have grown a lot more mature, patient and ‘understanding’ (nice people-skills to have). I stiill love gadgets and am still trying out most of the new websites that i come across (though I am not visiting most of them for a second time). Having spent about 10 months in the corporate world, I now have some good and bad opinion about it. Certainly, the speed at which things get done in a corporate environment is much slower than in a class project, thesis or a even a startup. But, overall, I am liking the transformation I am going through and I am picking up a lot of as skills in this new journey.

More to come soon!

Googled!?!

How often do you come across totally absurd definition when you search in Google? I came across one when I looked up for the word ‘spilt’.

A quick lookup at Princeton’s WordNet and reference.com reveal the meaning. I know Google gets these definitions by looking up multiple sources. I am wondering why the Google bots couldn’t find a single sensible definition.

Google search is one of the most reliable online services available and I think everyone will agree with me. How often do you encounter an error message in Google search? I guess I am one lucky person to catch one.

Ubiquity – A whole new internet experience

OMG. Not very often have I been so excited as I am now. I, about an hour back, installed Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. Ubiquity takes internet experience to new heights. Mashups – I have heard this term used quite often, but never really experienced it before (sorry for my ignorance). I read an article about Ubiquity in Techcrunch today- and boy, I was amazed at what is possible with Ubiquity. I simply cannot find the right words to describe my excitement. Watch the following video to believe:

To believe it, install Ubiquity 0.1 plugin yourself and experience the rich new internet experience. If you want to read more about it, well, I would suggest you to read the creator, Aza Raskin’s blog.

Ubiquity also lets you extend it by adding your custom commands. You can share your commands with others and you can discover more commands here.

There is one issue to watch out though. If you subscribe to commands from untrusted sources, there is a potential threat to privacy and risk of stealing personal information. Read Mozilla’s warning here. Mozilla has promised to create a “trust network” where users can share knowledge about which commands are trustworthy. Until this service is rolled out, watch out what commands you are subscribing to.

Cheers!

Remote login to Ubuntu Linux machine (laptop, wifi connection, dynamic IP) from Win XP

I finally was able to get remote login to my ubuntu machine working, after working on it for about several hours. I had a few complications to start with: I wanted to remote login from Windows machine outside the firewall, I had a dynamic IP address and my ubuntu box is a laptop connected wirelessly to internet. And I wanted a GUI to work on, not just a terminal window.

I first needed a domain name. There are a whole bunch of free dynamic DNS services out there in the internet. I used DynDNS and I am happy (so far) with the service. If you want to know what you have to do to setup DynDNS service, go here. You will have to register an account and install a free update client that will update your dynamic IP in the DNS servers.
Update: As Naresh pointed out in the comments, I am adding more details about the update client. I used ddclient for this. DynDNS service recommends this tool. Simply type the following in the terminal
sudo apt-get install ddclient
to install ddclient. Once this is done, the config of ddclient has to be modified. Type open /etc/ddclient.conf file in your favorite editor and change the variables use, if, server, login and password. My ddclient.conf file looks like this:

# Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf

pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
protocol=dyndns2
use=web, if=checkip.dyndns.org
server=members.dyndns.org
login=my_login_name
password=’my_password’
my_domain_name

You have to start ddclient by typing
sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient start
I would recommend adding this command in startup list to start every time automatically.

You have to set up your network manager for static IP. I am using nm-applet network manager that comes by default with Ubuntu 8.04 and it works fine for me. Click on nm-applet icon in the tray and choose ‘manual configuration’ or go to System>Administration>Network. Unlock with the root password and choose ‘Wireless Connection’ and click ‘Properties’. Uncheck ‘Enable Roaming mode’ and enter the Wireless settings and connection settings. These details can be found out by right-clicking on the nm-applet icon in the tray and choose ‘Connection Information’ or type ifconfig -a in the teminal and look for wlan0. For the IP address, you can use the IP addess assigned to you now or conveninently choose an IP that is not assigned to any other connected devices. This address will always be assigned to you from now on when ever you connect to internet wirelessly (until to change it or enable roaming mode). You might also have to configure port forwarding in your router. You will have to enable Remote Desktop. System>Preferences>Remote Desktop and check ‘Allow other users to view your desktop’.

Once this is done, restart your network manager by typing the following in the terminal
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Now this is done, you have to install vncserver. At the terminal, type
sudo apt-get install vncserver

After this, just follow the steps here. This describes the steps to be done for install tightvnc (one of the popular vnc viewers) in the windows machine (client machine). If you are using just a VNC viewer, the connection is not encrypted (except the password). You can setup a SSH server in your Ubuntu machine and first login to SSH server from client machine using any one of the SSH clients available (I use PuTTY). The steps are described in the above link.

If you feel its slow to redraw the screen, you can install x11vnc instead of using the default Remote Desktop utility with Ubuntu. If you like to cut-copy-paste text (cannot cut-copy-paste files) between the remote machine and client macine, install autocutsel as well. You can learn to do this by following this link.

You can add these to the Startup List if you want them to start everytime you boot Ubunutu. System>Preferences>Sessions>Startup Programs.

Good Luck and have fun!

Technology and Leisure

I was working hard late in the night, trying to fix a bug in my program, when suddenly a thought struck me.

How much time people have for leisure and how technology advancement and leisure is related? Though I did not travel around the world to witness the different societies and the lifestyles, on a broad sense, I can claim that people living in technologically backward countries enjoy a lot more leisure. Technology makes life more comfortable, no doubt. Having a washing machine and a microwave does help a lot, but how is technology “improving” peoples lives?

Is the net amount of time an average person spends in leisure the same across the world? If not more, are people in technologically advanced societies enjoying at least as much time for leisure as their technologically backward counterparts? If you think the answer is no, is technology helping increase leisure time? As it claims, is technology really making life more comfortable? So, is technology really serving its purpose?

Lets get back to the golden Stone Age, at the least, we can enjoy more leisure time.

At this point, my sequence of thoughts were broken by the monitor turning off. The computer went to Hibernate mode. I rebooted my computer and resumed my work.

Too many questions.. One-word answer?

Some time back I was lying on my bed asking myself ‘why am I doing what I am doing? why am I living the way I am living? why does one need money? Why does one marry? Why does one love and expect to be loved? Why? Why? Why?’. I started asking ‘Why?’ for everything. The number of whys grew exponentially. For every ‘why?’, I had an answer and every answer asked another ‘why?’. The whys became more complex and convoluted.

After a string of thoughts and after killing about an hour, the dark cloud that loomed over my head started becoming clearer. The answer to all the whys suddenly seemed to converge to a single, surprisingly simple, word. HAPPINESS. More precisely, SELFISH HAPPINESS. Every thing that a person wants to do is, directly or indirectly, for HIS OWN happiness. So why does some people go to the extent of sacrificing themselves to save their loved ones? How can sacrificing their lives possibly make them happy? I was lost, again. This was a contradiction to what I had concluded earlier. How is this selfishness? Is it that they, directly or indirectly, realize that losing the loved one will give them more pain than their strength or will take away all the happiness in their lives? The thought of losing their happiness instantaneously drives them? Why does one need Happiness? I don’t know. Computer Science has made my brain more logical than abstract to think any further about this.

Am I being happy with everything I do? If happiness is the ultimate aim of my actions, am I deriving happiness from them? What makes me happy the most? I can’t imagine what will give me happiness 10 years from now. I don’t know what make me happy the most. But right now, solving problems with code, watching movies with friends, playing cricket in tennis courts in ASU, talking about what technology can do with friends who are equally excited about it, watching movies based on true stories, dreaming about what I can do with my life, makes me very happy. After a couple of minutes, I fell asleep.

Novice approach to remove colored spots (dots) in pictures using GIMP

Hi everyone,

For all those who are looking to remove colored spots in pictures, you have landed in the right place. I’m an amateur photographer, a proud owner of a Nikon D40. A few days back, I took a picture of the sun with a jet passing across. The picture came out as I expected but for two spots. I wanted to remove the spots from the picture. I looked around as to what software to use to remove them and finally landed in GIMP. I agree Photoshop is an amazing software, but for a casual user like me, the reasons for choosing GIMP are simple and obvious:

• GIMP is compact. The installer is 12 MB compared to Photoshop’s 329MB
• GIMP is free. I didn’t want to pay a mammoth $599 to buy the Photoshop for editing 1 picture
• The user interface is as simple as Photoshop

I googled for few minutes as to how to remove spots in pictures using GIMP, but I could not find any solution. So I decided to give it a shot myself and I figured it out in a couple of hours. Not too bad huh considering this is my first shot at photo-editing. Worth the effort!

The procedure I followed is pretty simple. The original picture is

1. I started with the black dot. Choose Dodge/Burn Tool in GIMP
2. Browse for the color (just click on black square below the tools). The Change Foreground Color dialog box appears. Choose a color that matches relatively closely to the background near the spot. If you are not able to find a close match like me, choose the color picker tool and click on the color you want to choose in the image. Then choose Dodg/Burn tool again
3. Choose the brush size depending on the size of the spot.
4. Place a single dot on the spot with the Dodge/Burn tool
5. Choose the Blur tool and click on the dot you just placed. Then choose Smudge tool, click on the dot and hold the mouse button down and smudge the area like a mad man or a small child scribbling on a paper . If the spot is relatively small like my black spot, this should be good enough.
   
6. But, if the spot is relatively larger, like the other spot, this will not be enough. After smudging, choose the airbrush tool and spray the color over the smudged area (the smaller the brush size, the better). Again smudge the area with one of the following brushes Repeat this step till you are happy with the picture.
7. Voila! You have successfully removed the spot!

Hope this is helpful.

-rAj

Disclaimer: I am not claiming this is the best way to remove spots, I am saying this works fine for me! I am an amateur, trying GIMP for the first time. There can be (and I hope there is) a better way of doing it. If you know how to do it better, please post a link to the article in the comments. Thanks!

Welcome!

Hello everyone!

Welcome.

I have been thinking about writing blogs for some time now. I created this blog account and played with it.. Tested creating new blogs, comments, changing the layouts.. But never really got off to a start. Now the time has come. I plan to blog all the interesting experiences I come across in my life. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed experiencing them. Your comments and suggestions are welcome!

-rAj