The Lonesome Road

The new version of Colibri (15a) is out today!

Major changes include changes in the UI, a memory leak fix, and most importantly - Winamp control! All basic winamp operations can now be performed through Colibri now.

Click here [colibri.leetspeak.org] for a direct download link.

I (thankfully) am not a frequent flyer. So, when the time comes to make a  long(ish) air trip, I look forward to it.

I flew to California yesterday, and it’s easy to distinguish the frequent flyers from the newbies and recreational travellers. The FF’s, once they board the plane, simply use it as an extension of their office (well, most of them are business travellers) and get to work immediately. They don’t even bother to look up during the safety instructions - I’m pretty sure they know it all by now.

Newbies on the other hand see everything. It’s fun to watch the kids with their wide eyed wonder. And then there are people like me who sleep through all the boring intro to the flight - and wake up when the food service comes in .  But this time, I had a secret weapon during the flight. My camera.

I wanted to take pics from an airplane for a long time - and I got my chance yesterday. Height really gives perspective - it shows us how small we really are on this planet of ours. By the time you climb to cruising altitude, almost all the man made structures look like dinky toys. The cool thing about the US is that there are vast areas of unused space. As we were nearing California, I took snaps of this huge area where the only things that I could see were mountains and ridges (and a lot of dirt). Another nice effect that can be seen is when the landing approach is over water - from high in the sky, the water looks unmoving, but as the plane comes lower and lower, the illusion is dispelled. However, since it happens so slowly, it almost looks as if the water is going from “pause” to “play”.

Anyway, I will stop now. Need to go out and have some fun!

Until next time - enjoy the last days of summer!

At the Apple Keynote today,
Steve Jobs had a lot to say
Leopard was the topic of choice,
And he spoke in a bold tone of voice!
One by one the features were called,
Which left the audience members enthralled.

64 bit apps were taked of first,
Then the bubble of time was burst.
Time machine Mr.Jobs said,
Brings back all files from the dead.
It seems to be an idea neat,
But what happens to space when you delete?

Three toys were then on us bestowed -
Bootcamp, Photobooth and Front Row.
Virtual desktops came on next,
If you steal from Linux - take the best!
Core animation is so pretty,
Screen saver coding can be so gritty.

Text-to-speech was the next new feature,
It was shown to be a whole new creature.
To-do’s and notes were also touted,
Till his voice was hoarse Mr.Jobs shouted.
Dashboard widgets - a bag of tricks,
From webpage to widget in just a few clicks.

Last but not least comes the new iChat,
I say Adium is more non-fat!
To be honest, as I saw what he said,
I prefered to use my XP instead.
The moral of the story - where do I aim?
Yes! Tout not featues that are totally lame!

Well, Anshul and I were seeing the live transcript of the WWDC presentation together - and we both though that the features on Leopard sucked. While Anshul put down his thoughts in words[anshul.info], lack of sleep caused my thoughts to come out as a bad poem.

Enjoy!

Michael has done it again (and again) - Two new versions of Colibri in one night!

There are more features and a few bugs have been fixed. What’s most important is that there is now an online community on the site. It’s small now, but I’m pretty sure it’s only going to get larger as time goes on.

Get Colibri here [direct download link] and read about what it can do here.

Go on, what have you got to lose - except all that constant searching and clicking through the Start Menu.

Until next time - the keyboard is your friend

I am a long time user of Gaim now, and I think it’s a really good multi-messenger. This is the second multi-IM client that I used. The first one I tried was Trillian (free). It’s a good client with a lot of features. The problem is that it’s very system heavy. It’s has a large footprint and is a little sluggish on the response.

So I switched to Gaim, and it made my life so much easier. It interfaces perfectly with Gtalk, MSN and Yahoo allowing me to use one program to talk to people instead of using three. Today, I had to install two of the “standard” IM clients cos for all it’s good qualities, Gaim does not support webcam chats. Kind of unfortunate, but I guess that’s the price you pay.

In any case, I started off with MSN messenger [15.3 Mb]. To be honest, I liked the old versions a lot more. The new MSN messenger has a lot more of the vista look, more eye candy and a lot of sluggishness to it’s credit. It took nearly five seconds to come from the taskbar minimization to a restored state. Also, the webcam connection did not take place inspite of repeated tries.

Yahoo messenger [11 - 15 Mb] was what was tried next. This immediately got negative marks as it installed the yahoo toolbar in Firefox - though it did uninstall with a single click. This messenger is definitely lighter than MSN and the webcam and phone call features worked perfectly.

Here’s the thing. Gaim is all of 6.5 Mb and does almost everything that the other two can do. it’s much lighter on system resources and is open source. Here’s another fun thing. My yahoo account was one of the addresses which was affected by the worm attack on the yahoo servers. Thus, I had to create a new address. I was bothered about the fact that my entire contact list was gone. Today, while exploring the Gaim menus, I turned on the “Show offline buddies” option. Here’s where it get good. Every one of my contacts from my old email address were present in the list, albeit with a “Not on server” message. Adding them back into my list was a simple matter of right-clicking on them and saying “Add as buddy”. I could never have done that (and believe me, I tried) with the normal messenger.

So, eschew the eye candy and the memory hogging. Try Gaim - you just might like it

Later!

This is not a public service message to encourage you to vote during local elections - but hey, go vote!

Anyway, this is more about the whole reality tv crap that has been going on forever. I’m pretty sure most of you know this, but for the few who don’t, more people voted during the American Idol season than during the Presidential election. And here’s the best part - they *paid* so that they could vote. Does it get dumber than this?

Anyway, here’s the part that always gets me. I was channel flipping yesterday and I came across “America’s Got Talent” and decided to stay awhile. (Well, it’s like the ghoul factor. You know, like people always stop to look if there is an accident). Don’t judge me! So, here’s the funny thing. The show was being broadcast live (?), the host kept reminding people to vote *after* the program got over. The really funny part was that even though this message was being repeat after every performance, people were still calling in before time. Now I do understand that you want your voice to be heard, but at least hear what the man has to say.

Now came the thing that really cracked me up. I’m currently watching a repeat telecast - and now after every act, there is a big orange bar with a large font message that says - “Previously recorded. Voting now closed” or something in that vein. How much do you want to bet that as of this minute there are people calling to vote for their favourite contestant?

I used to think that with the glut of reality TV shows that the whole voting thing would have become old by now. But it seems that I am wrong - and the phone and television compaines are making a lot of money with the whole game. Well, more power to them.

A wise man once said that Lottery is simply a tax on stupidity. Seems that times have changed…

The last two days have been pure hell. With temperatures in the range of 40 degrees (celcius) and almost no wind, any place feels like a sauna. It’s not that I’m not used to the heat and the humidity. The places I’ve lived in boasted temperatures and humidity that would rival local conditions easily.

There just seems to be something different about the heat here. I mean - I’m home, with the fan (yes, I do not have air conditioning) on and I’m sweating.

Anshul seems to have a theory that I have become used to the cold over the last half year and can no longer take the heat. I’m not so sure of that theory. If I need to have some climate control, the only place I can get that is in college. Imagine going to college during summer holidays - just to beat the heat.

The thing is, the more you know - the hotter it is . Back home, I never looked at the daily weather forecast. Here, with the ever-changing weather, it’s become a bit of a habit to see what the forecasters say. The problem is that Weather.com has these huge warning signs and temperature maps that scream out bad news. Today’s news is that the temperatures are neat record high and that there is an Air Stagnation advisory. With all these warnings, it just feels hotter than it is.

I wish I had air conditioning…..

Until next time, stay cool!