Hilton receipt

Mass or weight

When I say that my "weight" is 70kg, do I really express my weight or am I expressing my mass ?
Not that this is going to have any effect on my resolution not to diet. But I am just curious.

I want to do this,
Some day....

I want to start my whole life again.

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.

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.

Ridiculous!!!

From BBC News article :
"... 12 children were killed in Lower Dir on Saturday after playing with a bomb they mistook for a football."

Our neighbors are in deep mess!!

Too many editors drive you crazy

We like to get used to things we do. Like using a text editors. Most of us are so used to using editors with GUI that after every few lines we mechanically press Ctrl+S to save our work. However, It becomes a real PITA if we are forced to use different editors with totally different shortcuts.

I have ended up in a very frustrating situation. I used vim for some basic shell script editing (especially when connected through ssh). For all my local work I used Kate or Kdevelop (KDE IDE), both of which are pretty standard when it comes to shortcuts (so Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Ctrl-S works). These days I have been using MATLAB a lot and that too using X11 tunneling :-( Although basic MATLAB editor is standard, the one which uses X11 tunneling has a totally different (and weird) shortcuts. For example, to save, you have to use (Ctrl-X Ctrl-S) and to copy Alt-W while (Ctrl-W) and (Ctrl-Y) is for cut and paste respectively.

The problem comes when you get used to using all of them. Now I type :w in matlab and expect it to save stuff or (Ctrl-x, Ctrl-s) in kate and wonder why did it cut the selected text.

It looks like even though this is exagerrated, it is not very far from truth :-) User interfaces do have profound impact on the way you do work ...

Long time .. no post

I am coming here less frequently. I started blogging mainly to get rid of frustration and to write random crap I will not talk about otherwise. But the priorities have changed now. I am getting less and less time to spend here. And have even fewer things to write about.

So close , yet...

After getting totally pissed off with kopete in KDE 4.X, I finally decided to install Windows XP with VirtualBox. First, I was amazed at how smoothly everything .. just works. I even managed to make Windows detect my USB webcam. Though never really succeeded in getting it to work. I could play in windows and hear them. Everything seemed to be going well. Alas, for some god forsaken reason my microphone wont work in Windows. No matter what I do. Windows does detect it. I mean, sound recorder does attempt to record. But nothing gets recoded. I did some searching and realized that it is a well known problem. Mic seems to be working for some users. However, a lot of them have the problems.
I will just wait and see. I went through all the pain just to get my voice chat enabled but .... Afsos :-(