Category: Uncategorized

Isn’t is great? Isn’t it cool? Isn’t it mind-blowingly attractive?

Yeah, it’s all of those – and more. Rahul Gaitonde (er, that’s me…) has just finished Part One of the Great Blog Redesign. And what do people think?

Friends and Peers: “Very good indeed. Very easy on the eyes; very readable. Great content too, of course.”

True friends: “What?! It sucks!”

Female Fans: “Choooo chweeet! Just like you! (Swoon).”

Mom and Dad: “You’ve been wasting time web-designing again? Why don’t you help around the house over the weekend?”

Business associates: “Great stuff, my lad. You have all the makings of a top-notch technology professional!”

The rest of the world? Well, let me know what you think! Once more, this site renders well on Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla. It would on Netscape too, if only they’d come out with an Xft build on Linux. I don’t care if it renders well on Internet Explorer or not. If it does, count yourself lucky. If it doesn’t, count yourself luckier – this is a perfect opportunity to go and grab Firefox or Mozilla. And enjoy a whole new Internet.

From the Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” website:

Desktop Search and Revenue Streams

I can sense some sort of wave building up regarding the whole search thing. By the end of this year, Search is probably going the be the “hot” thing!

This sure is interesting!

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are working on a book on business blogging. Only, they’re working on the book via a blog! This means, drafts of every section of every chapter of the book will be put up, reviewed by the authors and sundry readers! This is one of those initiatives which gives me the “What the…?” moments!

For a better idea, here’s the first post:

Welcome to our book blogWelcome to our book blog. This is where Shel Israel and Robert Scoble will create a book. Really. An entire book will be done interactively right in front of you and WITH you. So, subscribe to the RSS feed here. Welcome.

Followed by:

Where we came from

You might want to check out where we came from. We’ll be moving things in here today and setting up the furniture and all that. Making this new place a home. The two authors are Shel Israel (he has done a bunch of stuff with a bunch of Silicon Valley startups) and Robert Scoble (he is an evangelist at Microsoft). Our old Red Couch site is on MSN Spaces. Great place to blog, but couldn’t handle multiple authors, which this site needs.

Here are the IndiBlog Awards, the ‘desi version of the Bloggies’!

The results were declared on January 24th. Wonderful to know India’s blogger community’s this vibrant – I’d never have guessed! One amusing fact is that even the Lifetime Achievement Award nominated blogs are only about 3 years old! I guess 3 years *is* a lifetime in the Internet age!

There are all sorts of categories for these awards – I was pleased as punch to see nominations for best Marathi blog. And the winner, meemaza.blogspot.com, write really well! Hilarious stuff!

Anyways, I now have a whole new bunch of blogs to read. Expect my “Blogs I Read” page to be updated today or tomorrow!

Came across a Google-centric blog today morning (no, not the Google Blog)
InsideGoogle – part of the Blog News Channel.

Also, speculation is rife about a Google Calendar. I guess this’ll be something on the lines of Yahoo! Calendar, but only better. If GMail’s interface is anything to go by, I’m waiting for this one excitedly!

Once it’s out, I’d like some comparisons between it, Yahoo! Calendar, and Hula.

I’ve started using Mozilla Sunbird, mainly as a TODO-list organiser. First impressions are more than pleasing. Will post a more detailed review once I’ve used it for a few days.

I’m completely smitten by Tomboy, the note-taking application for Linux/UNIX. It’s quickly become an indispensible tool, some sort of instant notepad/scratchpad, and I use it all the time.

I’ve written about Tomboy before too, but lately I’ve come to rely on it a lot, especially with its reminder plugin.

I use Tomboy extensively for my TODO lists. Given its ability to link between notes, I create one note per task, and use one master TODO list, with links to each one. It’s also got simple text editing capabilities – the text strikeout feature is one I use with particular satisfaction!

One great feature of note-taking applications in general is that you don’t have to keep saving your notes – that happens automatically. Just type/paste and close the window!

The search feature in Tomboy can be hugely useful. If you know you’ve jotted down something but don’t know where, you can search through all your notes, not just the recent ones that appear in the drop-down list.

Express Computer Weekly is carrying a special feature on Open Source Software adoption and usage in Corporate India.

XFce’s got a great new graphical installation method. A GTK2 front-end, it automates:

• dependency checks,
• configuration of multiple subcomponents,
• the entire build process,
• the actual installation.

Here’s the screenshot gallery:

Get the installer from here. The installer also helpfully defaults to installing XFce into your home directory hierarchy if the script isn’t running as root.

I wonder if there’s such a cool way to install GNOME. Some sort of a graphical front-end to GARNOME. This’d be able to present a nice configuration menu, a la “make gconfig” for the kernel, then use wget in the background to fetch needed packages from the Internet. This is something I’ve always wanted GARNOME to be able to do: download packages at one go before beginning the build, as opposed to fetching a package at a time, building/installing it, before getting the next one.

XFce’s got a great new graphical installation method. A GTK2 front-end, it automates:

• dependency checks,
• configuration of multiple subcomponents,
• the entire build process,
• the actual installation.

Here’s the screenshot gallery:

Get the installer from here. The installer also helpfully defaults to installing XFce into your home directory hierarchy if the script isn’t running as root.

I wonder if there’s such a cool way to install GNOME. Some sort of a graphical front-end to GARNOME. This’d be able to present a nice configuration menu, a la “make gconfig” for the kernel, then use wget in the background to fetch needed packages from the Internet. This is something I’ve always wanted GARNOME to be able to do: download packages at one go before beginning the build, as opposed to fetching a package at a time, building/installing it, before getting the next one.

Today, OSNews.com published an article I’d written two weeks ago. This is article number 4 in the OSNews list. Here’s the link:

An analysis of HP’s future strategy, post Carly Fiorina.

I didn’t actually intend this one to be a 4-page, 3000-word article – I started taking notes to find why Carly was fired. There were rumblings about this within IBM a few days before her resignation. I also wanted to find out if IBM was vulnerable to the same threats that HP faced. After all, I surmised, we’re pretty similar in size and product range. Well, things were a lot more complicated than on the surface.

So what’re you staring at the screen for? This is end of the post! Enough said! Go read the article! Yeah, now!