c s shyam sundar’s thoughtpad

f1 - Cant Boot windows, Grub has taken over. FixMBR doesnt work ...

chromium os - initial thoughts and links to my vmware image.

I don't want to waste time in explaning what chromium os is or what it does. My thoughts are this:

1. Debian rules! And after a long time, I see SCons put to good use.
2. Still needs a lot to work on Offline access, FIle/Folder view, etc.
3. No support for Asian Language. I havent checked others. ( My Gmail was configured to show stuff in Tamil, all I ever got was some boxes ).
4. No Shutdown/PowerOff stuff :(

IMHO, it would sell nice for netbooks. But for mainstream, I don't think so unless it is flexible like Jolicloud.

Techcrunch has a detailed step-by-step instruction on how to run this image on VirtualBox.

Anyways, my build produced 999.999.32409.085041-a1-ide.vmdk. Download as two parts ( ~251 MiB in total ) at:

http://rapidshare.com/files/309592474/999.999.32409.085041-a1-ide.vmdk.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/309593256/999.999.32409.085041-a1-ide.vmdk.part2.rar

Today, I was reading The Mass Production of Living Tissue at /. where they plan to sell a $1500 meat band-aid with living tissue inside it.

The comments ofcourse had links to the future. ( Looks creepy :P ).

Launching only one instance of Evolution mail client

I’m starting to like evolution more than thunderbird nowadays. Ubuntu had this nasty habit of launching multiple instances whenever I clicked Evolution on the panel. This nifty perl script by Lisandro saved the day.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Gnome2;
use Gnome2::Wnck;
Gtk2->init();
$stamp = time;
$screen = Gnome2::Wnck::Screen->get_default();
$screen->force_update();
foreach $window ($screen->get_windows()) {      
        if ($window->get_name =~ /Evolution/) {
                $evolution = $window;
        }       
 }
if($evolution) {
        $evolution->unminimize($stamp);
        $evolution->get_workspace->activate($stamp);
        $evolution->activate($stamp);
        print $evolution->get_geometry;
}
else {
        system('evolution');
}

Gtk2->main_iteration() while (Gtk2->events_pending());
Gtk2->main();

Note, it requires libgnome2-wnck-perl as dependency.

XKCD / 660 : Sympathy. The ‘very wrong’ part was really hilarious.

Why do we have an IMG element?

via dive into mark. An Interesting writeup on the history of IMG tag.

12 Tips to make you more productive using Eclipse

Like me, there are many people who use Eclipe as their primary IDE. And for one, I like using keyboard shortcuts a lot. The link here has the cream of them.

god is real, unless declared integer!

What is the most advanced rootkit for *nix you've ever seen? How did you remove it?

I’m surprised that the answer boils down to one of these:

• you don’t remove a rootkit. you reinstall or restore from backups.
• even bsd and its variants are susceptible for attacks.
• physical security and sane user policies are as important as patches and monitoring utils.