Open View

A stage for inner voices, opinions, ideas and experiences

My Blog is Licensed!

Posted by Harish at Sunday, June 29, 2008
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Today I am licensing my blog under the Creative Commons licence. Lets kill the jargon and put in simple words what it means. It means that you can copy the works in my blog, even edit them if you want and use them where ever you like for non commercial purposes. But you should give credits to me and provide a link to my blog. To license your blog too visit the site http://www.creativecommons.org. Simple but effective this licence is. Use it in your blogs too. I got this idea from my friend Mano Ranjan. Thanks to him. To visit his blog, click the link on the left.

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GLOSS Inaugration

Posted by Harish at Saturday, June 28, 2008
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Hi folks!!! Today, this is going to be a really small post as my SXDE download is about to be completed and I am dying to try it :-) As I said already, GLOSS DTSi is scheduled for the 5th of July only but we thought of inaugrating GLOSS for the seniors even before that day (talk about the power of becoming a senior :-)). So, we have planned to have the inaugration day after tomorrow itself! That's right, on June 30th, GLOSS will be inaugrated for this year. With the aim to become the biggest contiributor to the open source community in India, we are inaugrating GLOSS amidst the presence of the deans of SASTRA and also, Abhishek will be discussing OHAC for this session. We have lots of plans to organise the event and this time, we are planning to try out the new videography team of GLOSS! If things are successful with the new team, GLOSS can release video newsletters, video tutorials, documentaries and many more frequently. I will post many pictures of the event and if possible some videos too here on Monday evening. Till then...bye!!!

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My Laptop is Virutally OpenSolarised!!!

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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My laptop is virtually OpenSolarised because I use OpenSolaris in a virtual machine. I used Virtual Box for this. Virtual Box is extremely good and easy to work with. I installed Open Solaris in this virtual machine. I configured wifi and everything is working fine except the audio. OpenSolaris still doesn't support my laptop's hardware. Anyways, I advice anyone interested in trying out a new OS safely to try it out in Virtual Box. You can get Virtual Box here. I have installed OpenSolaris to take up new projects on OpenSolaris and contribute to the community. Another interesting thing to note is GLOSS has taken up Open Solaris as its operating system. So we got special OpenSolaris wrist bands from Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park for all the GLOSS members! Here is a pic of it :-)

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Adding Page Elements To Header In Your Blog

Posted by Harish at Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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With your default blogger template, you can add page elements or gadgets to your footer. Adding such elements to your header is also possible with a little tweaking of your template. Here is how

  1. Go to Layout -> Edit HTML
  2. Create a backup of your template with 'Download Template' button.
  3. Check the 'Expand Widgets Template' button.
  4. Find for the following piece of code
    <div id='header-wrapper'>
    <b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='3' showaddelement='yes'>
    <b:widget id='Image1' locked='false' title='' type='Image'>
  5. Here the maxwidgets specifies the number of page elements you can add to your blog in the header. Default will be 1 for your title and description. Change it to any value you wish and press save.
  6. Now click 'Page Elements' and you can see additional space for page elements in your header. Add anything you wish. Enjoy!

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Digital Twin Spark Ignition (DTS-i) For GLOSS This Semester!!!

Posted by Harish at Friday, June 20, 2008
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You may be wondering at the title. Let me explain you why. Since all the activities and events in GLOSS are based on digital, we start it with 'Digital'. By now you would have guessed why 'Twin Spark Ignition' came in. That's right, we have two great events to start this semester for GLOSS with a Kaboom!!! Here are the events

July 5th, Saturday : GLOSS kicks off for first years

You may be wondering why this is very special. Read the list of chief guests attending this and you will search for some word more apt than 'very special' for the event.

The guests are: Ganesh Hiregoudar(chief co-ordiantor for Campus Ambassador programme in Asia Pacific, Sun Microsystems), Anil Gulecha (Campus Ambassador, Sun Microsystems) and Angad Singh (Campus Ambassador JIIT, Sun Microsystems)! Great guests na? Abhishek is talking with these guys for coming to the college for the event.


July 9th, Wednesday: Even bigger event

If you thought the first one was too good read this. This is the second event planned. Here is the notice forwarded by Abhishek.

Event: A Live OpenSolaris Chat in Second Life. People not familiar
with second life do not have attend with an avatar but can watch and
contribute via the web.

Goal: To educate, build awareness, gain adoption and answer questions
on
OpenSolaris

Audience: Community Members, Students, Web 2.0 developers and employees

*Date: July 9th - new date
*
Time: Early morning (7:30/8:00 am) so all geos can participate

Duration of Chat: 1 hour - 20 minutes of presenting/round table and
then
40 minutes for Q&A

*What will be discussed and who will be involved with the Chat:*

This discussion will give community members, students and all others
that join the chat an opportunity to ask questions regarding
OpenSolaris
and to hear about what direction OpenSolaris is heading.

Some Topics to discuss: (TBD)

OpenSolaris direction
OpenSolaris support
Contributions to respositories
Support Packages
Contributions to Community from Sun

*Potential Speakers: (TBD) 2 presenters and 2 additional experts for
Q&A
session*

Tim Cramer
Stephen Hahn
Glynn Foster
David Comay

What is more exciting is the members of GLOSS get to attend it!! As for people who don't know about Second Life, its like the Matrix. If you need more details, visit this site.

Now that's the way to kick off GLOSS in super style for this semester rite? Our GLOSS team members are already holding conferences to discuss plans for this kick off. Hope every thing turns out fine. I will keep you guys updated.

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Firefox Certificate!!!

Posted by Harish at Thursday, June 19, 2008
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Hey guys!!! Just now read a couple of blogs regarding Firefox's Guinness Attempt. The download server has recorded 10,989,608 million downloads in 24 hours and made into the Guinness Book of World Record!!! As a token of thanks to the people who downloaded Firefox 3 on its release date the Spread Firefox team is giving out certificates!! Here is mine :-)


This certificate makes me feel proud. You can get your certificate by clicking here. The Guinness World Record authorities are evaluating this record attempt. Soon we can enjoy a Guinness World Record under our favorite browser's cap!

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Hiding Nav bar in Blogger Template

Posted by Harish at
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There are many cool customizations you can make with blogger. Some are really easy while others are a bit tough. So I thought I can blog about some blogger hacks as well. Here is the first and the simplest one in the series "Removing Nav bar from Blogger Template"

Removing Nav bar from Blogger Template

Its perfectly legal to hide the nav bar in your blog. So feel free to try this simple hack. Here it goes

Step 1: Log into your blogger account and click Layout -> Edit HTML.
Step 2: Before editing the template, I recommend taking a backup of it. The simplest way is to click the 'Download Template' link and save an XML copy of your blog template.
Step 3: Now find the following line
/* Variable definitions
====================
Step 4: Paste the following code before this code
#navbar-iframe {
 display: none !important;
}
Step 5: Press save and preview your blog with the nav bar hidden.

Next time, I will post a simple hack to add page elements or gadgets to your header section of the blog.

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Labs for GMail and Draft for Blogger!

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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GMail Labs

Most of you would have tried the labs feature in GMail. For those of you who don't know about GMail Labs, log into your GMail account and click Settings -> Labs. There you get to test some of the newest innovations in GMail. Most of these are created by individual engineers in the GMail team. When some spark is produced in their brain for improving GMail, they code it and put it in the labs section. Most of the features introduced in this section are untested (mostly) and you get to use, test and send feedback to the GMail team. When a feature is really popular it is made a part of the regular GMail. Cool nah?


There are many cool features in GMail labs. Try them out and I recommend you to try mouse gestures definitely.

Blogger In Draft

Now lets move on to Blogger in Draft. Similar to Labs in GMail, GOOGLE guys introduced draft in blogger. To use this feature go to http://draft.blogger.com and log into your account. After logging in, the first thing you will notice is the new improved dashboard. They made it look sleeker and is very neat with all the required options in one place. Here is a pic of it

You may wonder why this is similar to the labs feature in GMail with out giving some special addons. Click on edit layout in your blog and immediately you will see the striking difference. You will see 'Add a Gadget' instead of the usual 'Add a Page Element'. Click it and a new window pops up with the usual 17 page elements put up in a cool fashion on page 1.

There are several categories listed on the left side. Click on any and you can find thousands of gadgets to add to your blog. This is really cool. Absolutely anyone in the world with working knowledge of Java can create a gadget and submit it to GOOGLE. They test it and put it in this page with full credits to the author of the gadget. Pretty sleek huh?

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I m a Weird Nerd!!!

Posted by Harish at Monday, June 16, 2008
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Weird Test

Today my friend Adithya mailed me about his blog. Me being pretty jobless (as usual), checked his blog. It was very neat and was frequently updated. I started to read through the blog and there was this weird post on weirdness quotient. His score was 80 with a percentile of 80. Just this weird image was enough make me want to take up that weird test. I tried to click the image but it was not working. This made me more interested in it. So a simple GOOGLE search helped me to find the weirdness quotient test. It had some ten simple questions. Some answers to the questions were really very weird. So I just clicked my way through the questions and finally pressed 'Submit'. The results were displayed and to my astonishment my score was a staggering 131!!! There are 1 percent of people about as weird as me according to the test, 3% more weird than me and 96% more normal. After seeing the results I was like wow! So I thought I could blog about it so that you guys can also take the test and tell me how weird you are :-). Oh, btw, here is the prize they gave me for my hardwork (whatever it was).

What is your weird quotient? Click to find out!

Even the HTML code they give for embedding your weird prize in your blog is weird. It is supposed to be a link to the test page but you can't even click on it. I made a small change to it so that it can be made clickable. Simply remove ?im from a href="http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_weird.php?im". Pretty weird huh? :-)

Nerd Test

The result of the above test was enough to leave me asking for more such funny tests. So I browsed around the same website (http://www.nerdtests.com) and found another such test the Am I a Nerd Test!! That too version 2! I clicked it immediately and a long page with tons of questions loaded up. Trust me, this is the longest test page I ve seen in my life! This test was too much. It took me some time to clear through the test. Finally I hit the Submit button and the results page loaded up. This was even longer and more detailed than GOOGLE Analytics may be :-). It had my percentile in various fields like Science, Math, History, Litereature etc along with some fun facts too. I scrolled down to see some beautiful numbers my scoreboard and suddenly this message struck me "From this time forward, you'll hold the title Mega-Dorky Light-Weighted Nerd!" Yuk!!! How do they find such titles!!! I was still eager for my prize (the usual image). I expected something really crappy as above but this one was neat with proper HTML code. They even gave an option to add a custom image to this prize which I didn't. Here is my Nerd Test prize.

NerdTests.com says I'm a Mega-Dorky Light-Weight Nerd. What are you? Click here!

Take up the test and let me know your scores and titles. C ya!!!

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Firefox 3 is here!!!

Posted by Harish at Sunday, June 15, 2008
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Finally its here!!! Yes, after all the beta releases and release candidates, Firefox 3 is all set to hit the cyber world on June 17th!!! This is a very special occasion for all the Firefox fans across the globe. People are hosting parties to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and they are doing it in many crazy ways. Mozilla guys also give away free Firefox goodies for people who host parties to make it even better. If you are interested in partying for the release of Firefox, visit http://mozillaparty.com. Now, at this point of time, I would like to address the people who are not aware of some of the features that make Firefox the best browser around. Yes, its far better than IE or Safari. Here are some of its super cool features.

Lets start with Security:Firefox is simply the safest browser on Earth! Here is why
1. Security experts are engaged even before the development of Firefox is started.
2. If any critical security bug is found at any point of time be it the beta stage, RC stage or even the post release stage, it is made public so that it can be fixed by anyone across the globe asap.
3. Firefox has many special features like anti-phishing filters, automatic password manager, protection from Spyware and Adware etc. More importantly, security updates are released every 6-8 months and more frequently if it fixes a critical bug
4. It is open source. So anyone in any part of the world can contribute to the development of Firefox making it very very robust.

What's a software which you can't customize? With Firefox, you can realise the actual meaning of customising your browser. With more than 3000 plugins which help you to stay in touch with your friends, listen to music, prevent your kids from accessing inappropriate sites, find better shopping deals and everything under the sun! You can have millions of themes and skins for your Firefox as well. Trust me, there aint any browser in the world which can give you these many customizations.

Finally, Firefox is a 100% Organic Browser as they call it. Its because Firefox is a non-profit project which is developed by hundreds of thousands of people across the world coming from various geographic and cultural backgrounds as a result of which more than 120 million people use it in more than 20 languages in regular basis!!!

I think all this talk should get you atleast a bit interested in trying out Firefox 3 . So go ahead and download your copy of Firefox 3 on June 17th from here and help set a Guinness World Record on The Download Day!

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Holidays!!!

Posted by Harish at Monday, June 9, 2008
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Finally one year of BTech is over for me in SASTRA and holidays have started!!! My favourite fourth years have returned to their homes and some good juniors (hopefully!! if you know what I mean :-)!!!) are yet to join the college. I m sitting at my home with my new laptop just enjoying life. Many of my friends ask me what they can learn during these holidays. So here are some useful and simple stuff you can do to make something useful out of these holidays.
1. Try to learn Java. Atleast the basics.
2. Learn HTML if you don't know.
3. Learn some multimedia software like Photoshop or Flash.
4. Learn some UNIX stuff.
5. Read the newspaper daily regardless of watching news channels or reading news online. Trust me, newspapers are gold mines.
And most of all, meet your friends, go out and party!!! :-)
That's it for now. Catch you later guys. Bye!!! Take care!!!

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