sparkymat

My level 45 ranger from Age of Conan.

Xorag the Ranger

I have started a programming blog here.

Ubuntu continues to amaze me!! Trying the RC for the Intrepid Ibex. I don’t know if its just me, but I think there is a significant speed boost. Everything feels faster and smoother. The user experience has improved quite nicely. Screenshots below (note: I am using the Dust2 theme from here) . Oh, and love the new VLC (note the playing-from-youtube feature in action).

Ubuntu Intrepid Screenshot

Ubuntu Intrepid Screenshot

Ubuntu Intrepid Screenshot

I have bid farewell to Dreamhost. After 2 long years of association with one of the most popular (??) shared hosting providers, I am moving on to bigger things (read VPS). I have now allied myself to linode.com

I finally have my “ideal” mail system up and running. Everything goes into a “wait” queue which is cleared on a regular basis. Only white-listed mails are moved to my Inbox.

Bye-bye spam!

Of course, I need to review mails in the queue periodically to make sure I am not about to purge valid mails, but considering how spam mails seem to bypass most spam filters, I feel this solution is more resilient that blacklisting (but yeah, not fully foolproof).

Using: qmail + courier_imap + procmail + RoundCube
And yeah, currently have to white-list by adding entries manually in .procmailrc, but will get off my ass and hack the RoundCube interface to GUI-fy this.

Some screenshots of my current Debian desktop

[Click on the thumbnail to see them full-sized]

I have a fairly powerful machine. A 3-GHz C2Duo (45nm) processor. 4 gigabytes of DDR2 800MHz RAM. An FSB of 1333MHz. SATA chugging at 3GBps. A Geforce 9600GT with the latest (beta) driver installed. Yet, it takes 62 seconds for my Ubuntu installation to load up. And don’t get me started on application launch times or Firefox response times. I need more speed!! That too, without sacrificing eye candy.

So, I am starting Project Need For Speed. The aim? To configure a Linux desktop that boots in a jiffy (not setting any concrete goals here) and is light on the resources. No, its not Arch Linux for me. I need everything to be just download-able and installable/configurable. That, and my love for Ubuntu, drove me to try Debian as my distro of choice.

I debootstrap-ed a new partition with Debian Sid and installed a 2.6.26 kernel and pppoeconf onto it. Switching to that now.

Watch this space for regular updates on this!

Update 1:
Xfce4 desktop w/ GDM auto-login. Desktop ready to use in 21 seconds!!! That’s good progress! Now starts the part where I add in useful stuff and pretty them up.

Update 2:
Switched to E17. 16 seconds!! And the thing looks damn beautiful! Expect screenshots

A couple of days back, Google Chrome was launched. The Firefox crowd scratched their heads and muttered ‘What the hell?!’, the Opera crowd sighed and the IE crowd pretended they didn’t notice. Apart from the usual Google trumpet-blowing, what caught my atttention was benchmarks that claimed that it was faster than the competition by a HUGE margin. So, out of obligation to my experimental side, I tried it out. My feelings are as follows.

The Good

• Fast. Blazingly fast. Blows the compeition clean out of the water (IE7/8 would hit escape velocity)
• Clean, slick (white) interface. Typical Google-ish style. Nice and easy-to-use.
• Open source!
• Larger real-estate. Title-bar and menu-bar done away with.
• (Possibly) The ability to kill individual scripts/tabs via the “task manager” (haven’t tried this out yet)

The Bad

• Not available on Linux/Mac (yet)
• Per-tab memory consumption is larger (though for my typical usage, the total seems to be lesser)
• Extensions
• Themes

The Ugly

• Have you seen the EULA?!!! (this has been corrected now)
• Security. Where the hell is my security? (http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16889)
• Anti-phishing (not sure if its there in Chrome)
• Google (post pending on my long-standing distrust of Google, and yes, I do use their search a lot)

The Meh

• Separate process per tab - Mixed bag. Task-manager : good. Overhead : bad.
• Mozilla: “How could you do this to us?!”

The Random

• Was fastest browser for a whole day (or two?) before Mozilla came out with benchmark results that showed the Firefox 3.1 nightly build to be faster than Chrome (or was it just V8 vs TraceMonkey?)
• Linux users can build PARTS of it. x-( . Well, screw you Google! We will stay loyal to Mozilla! (of course, only until you release the Linux version )
• Most of the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’ will (probably) get fixed in subsequent releases, but some things won’t change.
• What are they planning?

Managed to compile and package Ruby 1.9.0-3 for Openmoko!!!

Download: ruby19-complete_190-3_armv4t

[Update]

Here’s the ruby package without dev and documentation (this would be smaller and more appropriate on the phone) - ruby19_190-3_armv4t

at The Dark Knight: No superpowers..? I like that…

The Watchmen: Then you’re gonna love me!