Green’s the word

Rising energy and water costs are forcing Americans to go green. According to this article from Reuters, over the last 3 years, more than 330,000 homes have been built in the United States with more and more “green” and environment-friendly features, like solar-power, environmentally sustainable energy, and other green technologies. And the best part is, such homes, once thought to be a luxury for the rich, seem more and more accessible to the average middle class American families. It is a country-wide trend and it is growing. And well, why not – it is cheap, it is environment-friendly, and it saves the big blue planet we call home.

Python is a beautiful language

I just dove into Python (literally, with DiveIntoPython), just because I wanted to learn a programming paradigm different from the ones I am most familiar with, and I really am beginning to like it. I am just starting, but so far I am a big fan of the facts that everything in Python is an object, and that everything can be called with an argument. The simplicity of the program structure, the existence of doc strings for all functions, the use of indentation as code blocks thereby removing clutter and imposing uniformity and readability (so all the Python code in the world has the same format and is therefore very readable), and the existence of a command line interpreter, which could even be used as a calculator, only helps in increasing Python’s usability and attractiveness. Furthermore, creating, appending to, expanding and modifying lists and hashes is a jiffy, and last but not least, a negative index to a list returns elements counting from the end of the list – which is something I’ve never seen so far in any other language. Hm, very interesting.

Yeah, I am apparently a big Python fan in the chrysalis – only time will tell.

What’s with Ubuntu and Firefox lately?

There are two (actually there’s more, but these are the biggest two) camps of computer users in the world. Windows users and Linux users. They hate each other I am not going to get into the details of everything – there are details to be found elsewhere. For a small sample, check the relevant sections on Ubuntu Forums. Suffice it to say that there are positives and negatives in both.

In short, Windows is more integrated and better supported by the leading hardware companies, it looks prettier, is stable, user friendly, and you can legally listen to music and watch videos on it, because they pay the codec companies. A lot of software that runs on Windows is clearly very polished and of a much higher quality than that in Linux.

Linux on the other hand, is more secure, more customizable, and if you are a programmer you pretty much don’t want to live without it – there’s absolutely no limit to stuff you can do in Linux, from customizing virtually everything to looking at the actual source code and changing it, to doing some serious hacking. Developers just feel more in control with Linux, and it doesn’t hurt that it is completely free and so is the bunch of software that you can use on it.

These were the positives of both these environments. One can compile a similar list of negatives too. Now, I desperately feel the need of both, and I dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu currently. Lately, however, I am having misgivings about the latter. See – FireFox 3 for all its fanfare is far from being stable on Ubuntu – open a Youtube flash video and you will see it lose strength and die right in front of your eyes. Ubuntu itself just freezes up randomly and totally locks up out of the blue, even when all I am doing is just browsing the Ubuntu forums (no pun intended). Then I have to do a hard boot, which at the very least is not good for the health of the hard drive. According to the Internet this is a very common problem, and people are working on it, but this makes the whole thing look less reliable and flimsy, you know.

For various reasons it is in my best interest to learn Linux as much as I can, and I am wondering what to do. I even thought of depending solely on virtual machines and getting rid of the dual boot, but then on second thoughts I’d much rather not isolate myself exclusively to just one OS, as the EULA of Vista is not exactly user friendly. So, my decision is:

• Let the dual boot be and hope the huge Ubuntu community will come up with a solution soon. Nothing is perfect; shouldn’t just give up faith at the sight of a storm I might even try a manual compilation of the latest kernel, which seems to be the source of the problem
• Until then, run virtual machines (a whole lot of Linux flavors) right from inside Vista. Virtual machines are not as great as the real thing (because they won’t recognize nVidia and won’t run Compiz Fusion, and the display size is half the screen size), but they are the next best thing
• Later, get another computer and make that Linux-exclusive (can’t be too cheap, otherwise I won’t be able to run Compiz Fusion, and what is Linux without Compiz Fusion??

Tweaking my HP Pavilion and Virtualbox

As would be expected, my dv6375us came with Vista Home Premium, and a bunch of bloat-ware, not the least of which was the Norton Symantec anti-virus. This anti-virus is reputed to be hard to remove from the hard disk, and I had to play around with my registry quite a bit to get rid of it completely. That was one year ago.

Now I began realizing that it’s time for a major system overhaul, and I tweaked my computer as follows:

• disabled automatic indexing for search that Vista performs – improves performance manifold
• uninstalled HP Customer Experience Enhancement, and HP Connections
• owing to the fact that the HP Total Care Adviser was unable to perform an update and showed that my computer’s health was “poor”, I googled for relevant information and ended up reinstalling the Total Care Adviser itself (because this seems to be a common problem). After this, the TCA showed that my computer was in perfect health; so I restarted the system, and before I knew it the TCA wouldn’t run any more. I ended up uninstalling the damn thing. It was causing slow boot-up anyway. I still have the automatic updates from Windows as well as HP enabled, though
• performing a system health check (Control Panel -> System -> Performance Information -> Advanced Tools -> System Performance Report), I realized that the HP Quickplay was causing an abnormal service, so I uninstalled Quickplay. I hardly use it anyway; I much rather prefer Windows Media Center. My only concern was that my in-built Webcam won’t work anymore with Messenger, but luckily it still does
• so, as Quickplay also served as a tool to take pictures and videos using my Webcam, I needed another software for this purpose. I found a simple Java-based program called Yet Another Webcam (yawcam), and it works like a charm so far
• I had a trial version of MS SQL Server 2008 which I also got rid of at this opportunity
• The interface for my Bluetooth application was way too convoluted on Vista for my tastes, and I hardly use any of the features provided – I only use Bluetooth to transfer pictures from my Motorola phone to my computer. So I removed the software; my Bluetooth adapter works seamlessly with the generic drivers in Ubuntu and is good enough for simple file transfer
• The beautiful QuickLaunch buttons with blue LED’s on my notebook weren’t working before (apart from the mute and volume keys), and now that Quickplay is gone I wouldn’t be needing them anyway
• Finally, I installed VirtualBox, and I am at a loss of words about its virtues Free, sleek and trim, and creating virtual machines has never been this easy. I already created virtual machines for Arch Linux and OpenSolaris, and also FreeDOS, wanting to expand my knowledge beyond the Unix-like realm. FreeDOS is like MS-DOS, but free… it’s still not so different from what I’ve seen before, but now that VirtualBox is working fine I am going to go ahead and create virtual machines for a lot more, intricate and paradigm-wise different operating systems
• In conclusion, my notebook is not 100%, but honestly, what is?
• I next had a good mind of doing a sort of an exhaustive and critical study of all the operating systems of times past and present, but looking at the Wikipedia articles I figured I can’t even comprehensively study the entire Unix and Unix-like family of systems, with years of history behind it and various branches sprawling from it, nay, I can’t even allocate enough time to do a complete evaluation of the X-window system (and gnome, kde and xfce), and am therefore content at the moment with the cursory knowledge I have about these matters. Time will dictate whether I actually pursue this, but as I have lately come to realize, there’s way too much information in the world, and one doesn’t need to know everything. It’s the job of machines to keep everything archived

Mozilla Sunbird

I have been feeling the need of a calendar application for quite some time now, and even though I use Yahoo calendar reminders, I wanted something more, something with better detail and more options. I was kind of reluctant to use Google calender, partly because it is going to be online. And then I found Sunbird from Mozilla.

So far I’ve used it for 15 minutes and have created 3 events, but might I say I am impressed. Neat and clean, streamlined, aesthetic, and with a lot of options – this is a clear win-win situation! Creating new tasks and events and setting up reminders is a jiffy. Multiple views are available – daily, weekly, multi-weekly, monthly and so on. You can see the events separately and sort them in various ways. The events, the calendar (for any view that you choose), and a smaller, overview calendar are visible in three different frames. You can search for events. You can create multiple calenders – for you and anybody else using the computer. You can go as far as you want in the future to set some event or task, and getting back to the current day is a matter of one right click and one selection. It sure is a very beautiful and user-friendly application, with a chic and pleasing interface. The download was 5MB for Windows, and it runs like a charm, knock on wood. Give it a try! Good job, Mozilla.

Sunbird from Mozilla

Shibboleths

Shibboleth is any usage of language which could be used as an indication of the user’s origins, nativity, or in some cases even affiliation to a certain group. It doesn’t seem to be the same as jargon, argot or cant, because the user seems to have more of a problem disguising the former than the latter three. This article shows a lot of similar such usage in times past and present, in almost all languages in the world, mostly related to how certain specific words can be used to clearly separate a native speaker from someone who just learned the language, because of an overwhelming number of a specific sound that is hard for non-natives to produce, and so forth. Very interesting read.

Mozilla scores Guinness record

Our beloved Firefox has done it – it now has the Guinness world record for the maximum number of downloads in a 24-hour period. Over 8 million copies were downloaded worldwide on June 17^th, 2008. The article from Webware here.