I have been a happy Gnome user for many years now and only recently started thinking about switching to KDE 4.2 when Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) comes out. However, it so happened that I bought two new widescreen monitors and setup a dual-monitor environment. This is when I started realizing the Gnome was clumsy at best when it comes to managing windows across monitors.

The reason I bought multiple monitors is to maximize my work area so I do not have to keep switching between overlapping windows. Gnome it seems is ill-suited to effectively and effortlessly managing space.
Continue Reading »

I had written earlier about my experience with Microsoft Surface. I’ve captured some videos of me using it. Here they are …
Continue Reading »

Greetings webizen, I tried hard to get back to my blogging schedule but my laziness got the better of me. I am back truly with a new batch of posts which I will publish over the next few days.

Recently, I went to Veveo’s main office near Boston, USA and had the privilege of experiencing a finger freezing winter! (Not to mention a three day power-cut which I spent under multiple layers of blankets).

A few weeks before I was going to return to India, I started shopping. One of things I bought was a Refurbished NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ by EVGA. It was the best deal I could find on NewEgg in terms of value for money. I bought it primarily to have a betterr experience when flying over Paris … in Google Earth.
Continue Reading »

Today, we received the shipment from Microsoft at Veveo. If you have not heard of Microsoft Surface before, It is a touch screen based computer embedded in a table. The surface of table is illuminated from underneath by a projector (rear-projection) and touch input is implemented by reflecting IR radiation off the fingers and then being captured by five IR camera hidden inside the unit.

To learn more about Microsoft Surface head over to:

• Microsoft’s page on Surface
• Wikipedia article on Microsoft Surface
• Watch a Youtube video on Microsoft Surface

Continue Reading »

Snore …. Snore …. Zzzz ….

Knock … Knock …

Bleh! Bleeeeh!

I’m awake folks. Will resume posting soon

I am trying to write a program to test my arithmetic skills. The program should pose arithmetic problems involving the four basic operations - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. When the testing session starts, the program should issue problems of less difficulty and the difficulty should be ramped up gradually. A score should be computed based on number of questions and the difficulty of questions. The hope is that if I keep using this program for a little time every day, I’ll be able to improve my abysmal arithmetic performance
Continue Reading »

The first programming language I coded in is QuickBasic. I loved the simplicity and especially the IDE. It made things simple for a starter. Later I discovered Visual Basic which extended the same simplicity and added the “Visual” element with a splendid editor for GUI.

In between I did some projects using Java, C#, C, C++. None of these impressed me too much. I hated Java’s imposition of stiff rules and it’s dogged adherence to “everything in a class” attitude. C# was better. C++ just turned me off because of the monster it is. I did not like C at all because of its total lack of automated memory handling (like GC). I’ve been doing a lot of coding in C now-a-days as part of my job and I must admit that I like it a lot for its simplicity in primitives and promise of “closeness to hardware” and hence the predictability and performance.
Continue Reading »

vikraman: hey!
me: hey, solra.
vikraman: just to say hi
me: hi
vikraman: hi
me: okay. bye.
vikraman: bye

If you want to have more interesting conversations with my friend Vikraman, head over to his blog.

Firefox 3 has been getting rave reviews ever since it got in to beta. The blogosphere was abuzz with reports on how much more efficient and snappier FF3 is compared to its earlier incarnations and more so with respect to the competition (Opera, IE7, Safari).

Features like “Places” (Bookmarks on steroids), Cairo for rendering and OS specific widgets have made the best browser better. At the time of writing of this blog post 6 million plus downloads from around the world have already happened.

Everywhere I look at work, I see the “Download Day” certificate from Mozilla corp … I got one myself too

But the question is ….

Do you know who else got the certificate ???

Continue Reading »

What, why

I’ve been reading up on TDD and it has struck me as particularly useful methodology to achieve “clean code that works”. TDD encourages writing unit tests to cover all the code (because by definition, you write a test before a line of code is written). Because all your code is covered you are freed from the fear of breakage due to change and can instantly be more confident and productive. Also, the test cases act as a specification in code - very useful.
Continue Reading »