Friday, September 29, 2006

Books of note

I've always been quite fond of reading and though it's been some time since I've read a book, a discussion with someone today got me talking about the books which have had some kind of influence on me, so here is the short list in no particular order:

  • Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach
  • Illusions by Richard Bach
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
  • A Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  • Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray
  • Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  • Delhi Is Not Far (A Collection of Short Stories) By Ruskin Bond
  • Best of O' Henry by O' Henry
  • We, The Living by Ayn Rand
  • Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
I am currently reading Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (I've been trying to read that for past 2 months!), the to-read-next list contains Bhagvat Gita, Fountainhead among others. Any recommendations based on kind of stuff that I like reading (life philosophy, love stories et al)?

Oh, by the way I stumbled upon this quote on /. today, which I found to be quite funny:
The only person who got all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Se A Vida É

How many times you come up with a situation where there's only one place in this entire world where you'd want to be at, one place which you would take anyday without even a thought, without even worrying about the other aspects and then one day you are asked to be at that place and you have to turn it down...because you just can't be there no matter how much you yearn for.
There are few things that are just way too painful but perhaps Se A Vida É (that's the way life is)...

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Messageboxes

How many times have you come across a messagebox with some weird text and error number that you want to search for on the net? Well, till date I'd have to hand write the entire text, but not any longer cause now I've learnt that pressing CTRL-C while the Messagebox has the focus actually copies over the entire contents of the MessageBox to the clipboard! Guess, I am very slow learner.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Never trust a stranger...

Just learnt it the hard way today!

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Sled Menu on Ubuntu Dapper and other stuff


I've been hearing a lot about SLED off-late and the fact that it's menu has been ported to Ubuntu, so I decided I'll give it a shot. The installation was quite easy, I followed the instructions from Angelic Penguins and got it up and running in a matter of 5 minutes. I won't say this is the best thing that could have happened to Linux after Linux but it sure looks a lot better than the original gnome menu. I had to manually tweak few things to get it fully working after the installation though, the tweaks were minor and required changes through Configuration Editor (gconf-editor). Firstly, the "Favorites Applications" section showed only 2 applications, you can add more applications by editing the /desktop/gnome/applications/main-menu/file-area/user_specified_apps key; finding the name of the .desktop file to add can be done by issuing "ls /usr/share/applications" command at the terminal. Secondly, the "Control Center" link was broken, this can be fixed by setting the ..../main-menu/system-area/control_center_item key to /desktop/gnome/applications/main-menu/system-area/control_center_item and the "Install Applications" link can be changed to Synaptic by changing "package_manager_item" to synaptic.desktop.
Taking Screenshot of a menu:
In the process of installing SLED menu and trying to take the screenshot, I learnt that taking a screenshot of a menu is not possible with PrintScreen and you have to resort to deferred screenshot i.e. after some time interval of the keypress, this can be achieved by issuing the following command: gnome-screenshot --delay n; where n is the seconds after which the screenshot would be taken.
Defining a keyboard shortcut:
I decided to map the "take deferred screenshot" to Shift-Print key, if you've been using Ubuntu you would have noticed that not all the applications can be mapped to keyboard shortucts using "Preferences-->Keyboard Shortcuts", so to map this keyboard shortcut to our app we need to again resort to gconf-editor, more details about the how to go about can be found over here. Also by tweaking the keyboard mapping (all you need to do is goto Preferences->Keyboard, select "Layout Options->Alt/Win key behaviour" and check "Hyper is mapped to Win keys"), you can map shortcuts like <win>e to nautilus (<mod4>e), <win>d to "show desktop" (<mod4>d) etc.