Firefox 3 Rocks

Its official. Firefox 3 rocks. Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker.com blog is one of my personal favourites on the web. I am a regular visitor and subscribe to the blog on my Google Reader too. She has a nice post up about the recently released Firefox 3 and some of its quirks. Nice, nice browser, better than Firefox 2 in its memory usage. Tasty extensions as usual. Rock on!

Web 2.0 on the Desktop

Ever wished you could do away with folder structures on your desktop/laptop computer? The visual idea we have about files and folders as objects and collectors has become so innate to file organizers that it gets irritating some times to find files. With the proliferation of high bandwidth and the huge increase in the data being collected and stored by people, the mp3 revolution, the p2p revolution, etc., finding data and organizing data has become a bane on the desktop. None of the three primary operating systems offer a convenient way to automatically and intelligently sort the data in downloaded files into categories, which explain what the files consist of and what they do.At least I have this problem of downloaded files not getting noticed after I download them. I download papers, articles, files, programs on to my desktop and at times, they clutter the desktop, but when I am done organizing them (into folders) I find it difficult to find the files I need. With file names such as “do2376.pdf” “math_izz_ipr_pdf.pdf” and “web45ghu.exe”, most downloaded files and programs have neither an unambiguous name nor an indicative meta data which shows what the file/setup program contains.

• A useful and underused technique in Windows could have been implemented into the tooltip system. The tooltip is a very common meta data organizer which lets us know what we are doing in Excel sheets, tells us the names of commands or what they do, and so on. Unfortunately, although people use tool tips well otherwise, it is not popular with the masses who create content which can be downloaded or programs.
• The linux desktop offers a great alternative to the folder maze. Enter Leaftag. This is a nifty little set of utilities which can tag folders and files and make the information inside the folder make sense. What is especially interesting is that on linux systems with Leaftag there will still be files as usual, but they could be tagged in case you want to remember something about them.
• Delicious‘ system of social bookmarking is a great way to organize information on the web specific to a user’s browsing activities. It is interesting what a combination of RSS and Delicious bookmarks can do. Why is it not possible to do the same within the framework of a desktop?
• There is a software for Windows too, as shown in this lifehacker post:

In order to encourage you to tag new files as they’re created, tag2find can also monitor your new files and prompt you for tags. tag2find then provides a couple of ways to search through your tags, both of which seem to provide snappy results. Add to that automated tagging by filetypes, tag clouds, and Windows Media Player integration, and tag2find is a surprisingly powerful tool.

I await more proliferation of the ideas of Web 2.0 to the desktop. But this is second in line after my favorite wishful hack idea: instant-on computers. (And no, I don’t mean boot times of under 15 seconds as you get in SSD powered computers.)

Enlightenment 0.16

Well, Enlightenment 0.17 is the latest version, and 0.16 is the most loved version yet. Of what? A window manager for Linux desktops. If you are a new Linux user, you probably don’t know about desktop environments or window managers other than KDE and GNOME. While these projects have been around for some time, they are less scalable and are feature packed than old ones and light ones like TWM, FVWM2, WindowMaker (which I will cover in a future post) and also the new and popular lightweight desktop environment, XFCE.

A screenshot of E-0.16. Pager on the left-bottom, and iconbox on the right-bottom.

Note transparency on the terminal program E-term.

Each mouse button is assigned a menu when clicked on desktop.

While all these other window managers are more about functionality than style, Enlightnment (simply and affectionately called E ) is in a different league. And it is not my favourite window manager, but it is what I would like my favourite window manager (WindowMaker) to look like. Simply put, E exudes class. It is the Mercedes Benz – no, make that the Bugatti, of window managers in Linux. It has some great graphical eye candy in all its themes, especially Ganymede, which will make other window managers look positively sedentary. Enlightenment was developed from code used on FVWM2. This window manager was highly customizable, and these characteristics continued into E. There are plenty of image maps and all are put to good use on the title bars and the decorations and window borders. Transparency used in locations which you would not have imagined. There is a set of applets called Enlightenment Epplets, or simply Epplets, which run on your desktop, everything from music players and sound mixers and desktop lock and screensaver controllers, a command line, a drive mounter, CPU and memory and network traffic shown as “flames” of different intensities, all right there, on the desktop. These applets, called Enlightenment Epplets, are themed by each theme which comes with E, and so everything on that graphical real estate in front of your eyes is a visual treat.

The menus don’t come on a task bar. There is no concept of one. All menus are accessible on a click on the desktop. And there are multiple desktops, virtual desktops and pagers. You can customize wallpapers for them, you can scroll down to the desktop above or below. Move your mouse to the edge of the screen and voila, you have moved to the next desktop. Navigating in a multi tasking environment could not be easier.

Then there are the task management facilities – there is an iconbox, which catches any window you may be minimizing, and stores it as a small image icon of the same. The kind of feature which Windows and some of these other Linux based window managers would have to kill to have. The titlebars and endlessly customizable. There are also the special effects – FX Ripples and FX Waves which create ripples and waves on your desktop. The menus are customizable, and there is the popular E-conf tool, which is also known as the Enlightenment Configurator – E-Conf, for short.
Enlightenment has been subject to criticism – for being a resource hog especially on lower end machines. It has crashes with some themes, but things can be set right by editing E’s configuration files in a text editor and restarting the window manager. Which is another superb feature – you can simply restart Enlightnment from a menu command and not affect the other processes you have open. This is really useful if you want to install a new theme or test a theme you have created.

E-themes are highly customizable!

Note E-epplets on left cluster and right, also a special menubar on the extreme right! There’s plenty to play around with in Linux, and Enlightenment window manager is a good place to start. It is a clean desktop environment and is really very slick in terms of visual quality and the “gnarly” factor. If you want functionality with style, albeit without the heavy customizations and conventional styles of the other window managers like KDE and GNOME, try Enlightenment. It won’t let you down.

MIT OpenCourseWare

 

Are you a student or a lecturer in a college who is looking for good class notes and study material to help guide you? Are you looking for self learning programmes through which you can learn about new concepts in various fields or reinforce the fundamentals of some science, or mathematical technique? Are you looking for interesting ideas and theories in literature, art or for “further reading” books in various subjects? If so, MIT OpenCourseWare is a web resource that you should definitely look into. It is an online course material website, which has published around 1400 courses, in various fields ranging from the sciences, through engineering, art, literature and many more fields. MIT is well known as one of the world’s best universities in engineering, technology and science courses, and some of MIT’s initiatives are being followed by some other prominent universities, both inside the US and outside it, like universities in China.

My experience with MIT OCW’s course notes has been memorable, since their collection of course notes have helped me understand many aspects of aerodynamics, aeronautics and structural engineering, which I needed to learn in detail for certain projects on the job. Apart from these areas (and other engineering subjects), my friend and the other poster on this blog, Phoenix, comments that the courses in literature and psychology are well compiled and interesting and informative.

I think that distributing knowledge freely is one certain way to encourage students to embark on higher learning. This free course ware would also help people discover the things they want to study and perhaps lend focus to one’s career or academic interests. I feel that anyone who is interested in educating themselves on the job, should really consider visiting MIT’s OCW website and downloading the course notes of the subjects which they need to gain proficiency in. It worked for me, on my job. Needless to say, students will find this collection of course notes very useful. I wish I had had such course notes for some courses during my college degree!

Technorati Tags: MIT, OCW, Open Courseware

Etymonline

First things first, thanks to Phoenix for giving me an opportunity to post on this tech reviews blog!My first post covers a website called Etymonline.

 

Etymonline is a website which helps you find the origins of English words of all kinds. There are many of us who are keenly interested in etymology, the origin of words, or perhaps some of us just get curious enough at times to want to find the origin of some word, like “onomatopoeia“, or “braggadocio” or perhaps “distend“. What does one do at these times? When you don’t have a dictionary with you which gives you even the meaning of these words, it is best to resort to etymonline.com.

Etymonline is a simple search site. You just have to key in the word you want to find the origin of, and hit the “search” button. There are several options for searching – Natural language searches, which search within the known set of English words, you can search for single terms, exact phrases or terms with the word in the search field inside them. All this makes it really interesting to do a great deal of jargon busting with. If you, like some of my friends and me, are taken up with how much you don’t know about the internet despite not being computer illiterate, and in fact, despite being pretty internet-efficient, then this site is for you. If you are a linguist who wants a nice reference, this site is for you. If you have a passing curiosity in words, or are preparing for an exam like the GRE or the TOEFL, which require English proficiency, this site offers an easy way to discover the roots of difficult words.

All in all, a superb site!

Technorati Tags: etymology, online etymology search