January 2007

Windows Vista is being officially released for home users in many countries.

In New York, they hired acrobats to display the Windows logo, In Australia, they had skywriters grab attention, while in Agra they had dancers perform in front of the Taj Mahal, and all this to try and get PC users the world over take notice of its latest offerings — Windows Vista and 2007 Office System. [Via ET]

I am not sure if I would upgrade to vista, however this bLaugh comic is worth a laugh :D

Ultimate Tag Warrior, one of the best plugin's for Wordpress is broken on Wordpress 2.1. Yesterday I noticed that some of my popular posts were showing "No Tags".

These popular posts were among the few lucky posts in my blog which receive some comments. It turns out that the comments themselves were the culprits which were making the tag disappear.

In fact Neato has documented a temporary patch for this "tag resetting" problem. So if you have recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and if you are using UTW do the following

Install the latest UTW release Modify ‘ultimate_save_tags()’ function on ‘ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php’ at line 502

if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return

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Some time back I patched the Windows Uxtheme.dll and installed a nice looking theme called BlackMesa.

I got bored with that theme and decided to install a Mac theme. A search for the same lead me to a software called FlyakiteOSX.

FlyakiteOSX is not just a theme, its a complete transformation pack (30 MB download) which converts your XP desktop environment into a complete Mac Simulation. (I have not worked on a OSX, so I cannot comment as to what level of simulation has been done)

The transformation pack:

Patches the Uxtheme.dll so that the Tiger theme can be installed and used. Also skins for some app's such as WinRar,MSN Messenger are ...

Every time I try to edit a file in Unix using vi, I end up corrupting the file rather than "editing" it.

To get out of the mess I resort to q! command which helps me to exit from editor without saving the modifications. Incidentally this command (q!) happens to be one of the most used commands by me :(

An alternative to avoid this mess is to start the XServer and use gedit/kate to edit the file. However this is not suitable if you want to quickly make few changes in the file.

So I have decided to master vi in one week (hopefully it should be enough).

If you are also in a similar soup and want

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Launchy is a free, must have windows utility for people who want to use more of keyboard rather than the mouse.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

To know more about launchy, read my previous post here.

If you want to be a "power" launchy user, read each of these tips and tricks (via Launchy home page)

Search Google Type in Google, then tab, then your search query and press enter Check the Weather Type in Weather, then tab, then your zip code or city,state and press ...

Two days back I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and as mentioned in my earlier post, there are lot of new features added to 2.1 release. I saw many blogger's mentioning the "AutoSave" feature as the highlight of the release.

As far as I know "AutoSave" would be the least useful feature for regular blogger's since many of them would use a desktop based weblog client. The most important feature that I was looking forward to was the "Efficient Database code" which was supposed to improve the page load speed of the site using Wordpress.

Sites hosting Wordpress rarely survive the Digg Effect and this was blamed on the inefficient database code of Wordpress. However after upgrading to Wordpress 2.1

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If I wanted to created a directory tree say /first/second/third this is how I used to do it, till now.

$ cd /$ mkdir first$ cd first$ mkdir second$ cd second$ mkdir third$ cd third

Today I learnt that you could do this in a single swipe using the -p option!

mkdir -p first/second/third

And its not just restricted to simple hierarchies, you could even create a complex tree structure like this

$ mkdir -p project/{lib/ext,bin,src,doc/{html,info,pdf},demo/stat/a}

You can find 9 more such interesting tips on the IBM post titled "Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits"

Wordpress Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for download here. Some of the new features in 2.1 include

Efficient database code, faster than previous versions Autosave Tabbed editor Lossless XML import and export for moving between WordPress blogs WYSIWYG spellchecker Search engine blocker for private blogs You can set any "page" to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else Links can now have sub-categories Redesigned login screen More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, etc all instant Pages can now be drafts, or private Minor admin redesign Upload manager Faster dashboard

I setup the 2.1 release on my local Wordpress blog. Here are some snapshots of the new features !

BSNL recently introduced 2Mbps broadband bandwidth and I believe many BSNL users are getting constant/min 700Kbps bandwidth.

Airtel will probably soon be offering 2Mbps bandwith from next month i.e. Feb 2007. This news is based on the feedback I got from few of my friends who got this confirmation from the Airtel Customer Service !

Anbody else got this confirmation from Airtel ? Unlike BSNL, I hope they open up this bandwidth for users on unlimited plan as well !

Digg is one of the best sites to look for quality content and hence is one of the places I "search" (other than Google) when I need to find quality links for a particular keyword.

However more often than not, when I search in Digg, I end up with this screen !

First of all it beats me as to why the traffic on Digg.com should matter in returning the search results ! Or is the message trying to convey that the traffic on the search domain(Digg.com/search) is high !

I am sure that you can map a subdomain(Digg.com/search) on to a different server. However the server under high traffic might be the Digg

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