Wednesday 13 May, 2009

Indian English

While reading random Wikipedia documents, I stumbled upon this. I never realized that we Indians do have a style of English so different from typical British or American forms. I used to think that the main difference is just the pronunciations and some grammar which is directly inspired by our respective mother tongues. Read the wiki document if you have nothing constructive to do. It's nice.

Monday 11 May, 2009

No Desktop Calendar ?

Calendar is something we all need to refer to while planning things. I have been a Linux (with KDE) user. KDE has a small calendar app which pops up every time you click on the date. It just lets u go thru the dates if you are not an admin. Makes perfect sense. I recently installed Win XP - SP3 and I realized that unfortunately a normal user (who is not an admin) CANNOT double click the date to see the calendar. So I begun hunting for a simple solution that is
1) Light weight
2) Does not come with a lot of nonsense I don't need.
3) Is installable as a non-admin user.
4) which just sits in the corner (say system tray) and is invoked if and only if I click it.

Surprisingly I haven't found ANYTHING that satisfies all three conditions. Almost ALL of them need administrative privileges which is something I find hard to understand. Why do you need admin privilege to build an app which provides READ ONLY access to system date. I cannot understand this ...
Even mighty google does not have solution. There calendar widget is the funniest widget I have ever seen. It keesp changing size for no apparent reason(also BTW Google widgets need a platform installation which again needs admin privilege. And I realized that I dont need most of the stuff it offers).

So far the best I have is a firefox add on which sits in the corner of my FX3 and provides the same functionality. But if anyone knows of a simple solution that works please let me know.