Tools and Software

too large title, eh? ;) check this: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article02-137 landed there when I was searching on how to do this, for a friend of mine who wanted to get rid of the background color on the icon texts on his windows XP desktop. Thought, did mention it here. Very useful for M$ Windows XP, 98, ME users. btw, there are a lot more annoyances on Win XP usage listed there. [ tee hee ;) ]

Couldn't resist trying terragen, finally. After watching all those nice stuffs our dear pal Swaroop did, and a brief session of experimenting at ~ Avinash's place, I decided to try out terragen on my PC. This image is one of those that I created just to see how the software functions. The Software is more than what you can ask for :) It has great number of features, and is free for personal use at this point of time. You can create all sorts of terrains within just few clicks. The most commendable thing in the software is how water is rendered. The applications is light weighted on both hard disk and RAM usage. It rendered 1024X768 image in just few minutes meanwhile none other applications that were open coughed... :) The application is smooth, has a thumbnail rendering preview before you can actually go for the large image. Looks like they are heading towards a real nice software that can go to lots of places in terms of usage! There are also options for saving your generated terrain, and also the work (each render is called a world ;) ), adding child surfaces (terrains) and lot more. All in all, a nice piece of software!

Using Firefox on both Linux and Windows? You would know what I'm talking about... To comply with the GNOME HIG, the preferences option has been placed under Edit Menu for Linux version, instead of Tools->Options, in Firefox. For windows, though, the Tools->Options thingy has been retained. This thing is a bit confusing for users adapted to any of the versions, while trying out the other. here's a discussion on this thing http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=82702 Now, it is to be agreed that Firefox needs to abide to the GNOME HIG since it makes use of GTK toolkit on Linux. But hey, the confusion stays... ;) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245765 ( The bug mentioning this discrepancy.)

Its already a well spread news that Google has acquired picasa. I got a chance to download picasa's photo organizer and use it on my buddy's machine, today. Here's the review :-) This wonderful sotware is available for free. What I liked the most was that even on such a low end system, the thumbanails appeared smoothly (even WinXP on that machine flickers to show thumbnails in even small folders). More to that, the thumbnails can be resized with a slider! Next, the datewise albums... which is just wonderful. Adding keywords to each photo is very easy, too. The editing segment has the red-eye correction, rotation, cropping and a preset image enhancement. The search is too well made, and very easy to use. You can import pics from your digicam, scanner. The best of all, was the slideshow... called the 'timelines'. The slideshow really is the exquisite piece in that whole software. You can add an MP3 to get it played during the slideshows. Additionally, there's a picture manager, where you can tell the software to keep a watch on your favourite folders. Then, there are various customizations that you can do with the albums. The whole album can be exported as a web page, making it easier to publish. Bloggers at blogger get to add the photos to their blogs, very easily. The images can also be shared with hello. But, alas... both picasa and hello are avalable only under Microsoft windows :( Here's the screenshot:

err... I was surprised to see this one when checking my mail in my gmail account... The related pages menu has a link to 404! (see the related page to which arrow points) something that is weird... looks like googlebot is sniffing 404 pages and adding them up, too!

The script that I wrote for fun, is now on Hotscripts! Thanks to hotscripts guys for including it in their listing. Hope the script would be of use for many, in coming days.

thanks to mahendra, I got fedora Core 2 CDs today! woohooo! time to install it and build the latest GNOME and Evolution on it!

Starting from yesterday, yahoo! has started blocking the third party IM clients. This, unfortunately, includes even our favourite client on linux, the gaim .

LDKit (or digikit) was our 6th Semester project - a small utility that simulates the Logic Designer Kit that is made use of in Engineering college Labs. Initially, the mini-project had a GUI done up in hand coded gtk+ 1.2. I revamped the GUI for this handy application, porting it to libglade. Here's a screenshot of the new GUI: Click to view the screenshot I've made few changes to the backend, though it is as simple as ever... should be soon finished with it. Thinking of putting it on sourceforge :-)

The first ever build of OpenOffice in Kannada is out. So, all you Kannada fans, pick your copy from here. Screenshots have been put up at sourceforge kannada page. If you need more information on this thing, irc.freenode.net, #kannada is the place to hop into :-) Now, Start moving to Kannada!