This weekend I finally manage to jailbreak my iphone. The process is pretty painless, and is well documented on various sites; here, and here, for example.

The best part of doing this is that I can now unlock features of the iphone that would normally be closed to me. I can now record video with the phone, tether the phone to a laptop, and most importantly and ridiculously I can use the native terminal on the system. And a very cool side-effect is that I can now ssh to a remote host from my cell phone!

Dec 16, 2008 Update:I added a nicer screenshot of the terminal app to the above shots.

Today I noticed a couple of new additions made by google. First, is the addition of themes into gmail. The theme feature is cool, especially considering that I had been using stylish firefox extension along with a nice theme. For people familiar with the cool ninja theme easter egg in the google reader. Even that’s available!

Second is ranking in google search results. With this google is stepping further into the crowd oriented internet a la digg and friends.

Recently I was thinking about the pervalence of social media sites. I am of the opinion that they are the reality TV of the internet technology. In the sense that there’s no great innovation behind them. There’s no real renaissance that’s happening. Only a re-packaging of existing material. Reading this article on Startup North I find myself agreeing with him. The fact of the matter is that in the end social media is merely a platform for the lazy.
» Continue reading “Social Media is dead!”

I was surfing the web today, and stumbled on an article about various application icons and how effective they are in conveying the usage of the application. The comparisons mostly deal with Mac vs. Windows icons.

But he also brings Firefox and Thunderbird into the picture.

In the end it looks like the UI design team at Apple has given more attention to icons and their effectiveness. It’s no secret that the various design teams at Apple are very good at what they do, from the packaging of the devices to their OS, to the hardware design, but it’s interesting to hear it from a different point of view.

The Importance of Icon Metaphors [Louie Mantia]

Back in 2003 when I still had enough time to follow up on the latest Linux applications, there was a new tool (or toolkit) developed called Karamba. It aimed to bring desktop widget functionality to KDE on Linux. Soon there was a new application called Superkaramba that improved on the old application and got a lot of attention. Curious as I was, I downloaded it, compiled it and was soon running it on my desktop.

Looks like the idea of using desktop widgets was catching on at the time. At the same time there was an application called Konfabulator (which got bought out by Yahoo and is now called Yahoo! Widgets). When I started working and was forced back on Windows, I started using konfabulator and liked it quite a lot. At around the same time Mac OS X had an application called Dashboard, which did all the things the other two were aiming for. With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft entered the field and released native widgets called Gadgets. The final development - as far as my exposure lets me believe - was the development of Plasma in the new version KDE. There is also one other player in this game that introduced its own version of widgets. Google created the desktop search back in 2004, and soon after added a sidebar with gadgets and other plugins. As one would guess, these gadgets performed the same general tasks as all the other flavours and aimed to provide the same solutions.

I this article I will try and review each of these implementations both from a user perspective. Part 2 will carry reviews from a developer’s point of view.

» Continue reading “The World of Desktop Widgets - Part 1″

I upgraded Wordpress about a month back to version 2.6.2 and since then I’ve had issues. First problem was the upgrade script thought it was a fresh install so it created a new DB instance, and I had to go in change the configuration. And I just realized last week that for some reason my RSS feed generator was not working anymore. I looked into it and found out that all my pages had stopped working as well. So now, I have to do a fresh install of Wordpress to fix the issues. In the meantime, the website will be somewhat flaky.

After today science will have a chance at discovering great unknowns and proving or disproving some of the most fundamental theories in physics. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will go online in CERN. Although I have no expertise in this subject matter I will try my hand at a quick summary of the most important points. Follow the jump for a brief introduction and a very nice video explaining it all in rap!

» Continue reading “Large Hadron Collider Goes Online”

So my laptop died this past Friday, and I have been slowly realizing how useful virtualization or cloud computing would be RIGHT NOW! I am by no means cut off from computers. I have access to a couple of them here at home, and all day at work I stare at various computers. And on top of all that, the laptop that I lost (oh, cruel fate!) didn’t even have many personal files on it. It was a work laptop, but I had gotten so used to having access that I’m in a mini-withdrawal right now.

I think most of all I miss the customization I had done on there, which made my day-to-day tasks easy. I’m beginning to think that if I had that level of customization on a cloud computer, I would never run this risk again. Something like igoogle or the upcoming Live Mesh.

I was having a chat with someone who is by no means a tech-savvy person. She had heard of google adsense and that someone she knew was making about a $100 a month from it. She wondered how she could do it. That got me thinking, why can’t I?

» Continue reading “Making money in the age of internet”

I have finally managed to port over my site from the custom code that I had to WordPress engine. I was lucky enough to have put all the content into database previously when I had started to dabble with PHP+MySQL and so it took me no time to transfer it over to this new engine.

The only time consuming work was picking the right user interface and colorscheme for the site! All the sub-pages of the old site still need to be moved over, but the blog is now completely finished.

Great Success!