Gnome 3 is not a small upgrade for GNOME… nearly 5 years of work has gone into this with around 3500 developers working around the clock… This is a massive change from the earlier versions of GNOME…

Its got sort of a polarizing effect on GNOME fans… You adore GNOME 3 or you simply end up hating it… But overall looks like most of the fans seem to like this change…

The first time you fire up GNOME 3, the most noticeable change is the lack of, well, anything familiar… You’ll see a tool-bar at the top of the screen with a clock and some familiar panels for Wi-Fi, volume and the like, but there is no bottom panel and no menu items to click on save one – “Activities”… The Activities menu is your gateway into the new GNOME Shell. The GNOME Shell sits on top of the desktop and moves aside the traditional window lists and menu bars in favor of what the GNOME team believes is a more streamlined interface with fewer distractions… So instead of a messy desktop of icons or a Start Menu, Gnome-Shell puts your application shortcuts and active windows behind a screen you activate by merely throwing your mouse into the top left corner… I forgot what rule of GUI design this adheres to, but its the same philosophy behind Mac OS X’s application menus: instead of having to specifically aim for something, you just throw the mouse against the screen edge and you’re where you want to be…

Like Mac OS X’s dock, your favorite applications are located in a favorites panel for easy access, or you can navigate all your applications in categories… Previews of all your active windows are also contained in a tab, much like Mac OS X’s Expose which is vastly superior to Windows’s awkward Alt+Tab and cluttered task-bar… One thin what i really like is the quick keyboard application launcher. Being able to simply type the name of an application I want and hitting enter is so convenient I’m lost when I go to a machine that doesn’t have it…

The other important feature to view is the new notifications system, which introduces persistent notification messages. The message tray in GNOME Shell will pop-up alerts, (just like GNOME 2 does), for a certain period of time… But, in GNOME 3, even after the message time expires, the notification message is still available in the message tray… The persistent messages mean that you no longer need to interrupt your work and immediately deal with the message window during the short time it’s visible… In GNOME 3 the message will be there whenever you decide to interact with it. In some cases – like instant messaging – you can even respond to a new message without leaving your current app. Just click the message, type your reply and send it – all from the notification window… AWESOME right???

Nice though GNOME 3 may be, I don’t suggest upgrading just yet… It is an unfinished product, this is essentially a 1.0 release and not everything is quite there just yet. But more important most distros haven’t yet fully integrated with GNOME 3…

If you’d like to get up to speed on GNOME 3 before your favorite distro ships it, you can grab a live CD from the GNOME website…

First I installed the prerequisites: freetds and the python headers:

aptitude install python2.5-dev freetds-dev

There might be some other packages that are needed but that was the only ones I needed to install…. Then I decompressed the latest release from pymssql at sourceforge and installed:

NOTE : for me the latest package did not work so I used pymssql-0.8.0

tar -xvzf pymssql-0.8.0.tar.gz
cd pymssql-0.8.0
python setup.py install

Now you can test it out by creating your own test script and it is as follows :

import pymssql
conn = pymssql.connect(host='<hostname>', user='<username>', password='<passwd>', database='<dbname>')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('SELECT * FROM tbABCD')
row = cur.fetchone()
while row:
 print "ID=%s, Name=%s, Address=%s" % (row[0], row[1], row[2])
 row = cur.fetchone()
conn.close()

The script ran perfectly…
For more information on pymssql you can view its documentation here…

ASP stands for Active Server Pages and PHP formerly stood for Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor…

ASP is basically a toy from the Microsoft development toy chest and is used with Internet Information Server (IIS) which is a program that runs on Microsoft servers… However, there are 3rd party applications that can make it compatible with a few other servers. ASP is widely used for large companies Web needs…

Rasmus Lerdorf originally designed the PHP parsing language during 1994/1995… Some other major contributors were Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who rewrote the parsing engine to create PHP version 3… The major NT and UNIX Web servers support it and it is widely used with the mySQL database. Small and medium Web developers use it religiously…

PHP has it’s own language and syntax, the language is simplified due to the programs incorporation of a parsing engine that is especially designed to make short work of translating PHP code into machine language that executes commands… If you were a programmer adept with the C++ language, you would probably be more comfortable using PHP than ASP… PHP uses C/C++ as base language and most syntax are similar to each other… Because a big chunk of programmers are still using C++ language, PHP are by far more popular than ASP…

On the other hand ASP makes use of a language that was dying before Microsoft managed to breathe new life into it… Visual Basic Script is the language used in ASP and was formerly used as a client side scripting language that was in direct competitions with JavaScript… This was back when Internet Explorer was still the #2 browser behind Netscape Navigator… During this era, JavaScript was whooping the pants off of Visual Basic Script with its wide acceptance amongst Web developers… ;)

PHP is very much flexible when it terms of database connectivity… It can connect to several databases of which the most commonly used is the MySQL… Note that MySQL would not cost you a thing to use… But if you were to use ASP, you need to purchase MS-SQL, which is a Microsoft product… This makes PHP very attractive to the independent web developer…

Loading speed is a big factor in maintaining a website… If you are particular about speed, then you need to go with PHP… PHP codes runs much quicker than ASP basically because it runs in its very own memory space while ASP uses an overhead server and is uses a COM based architecture…

In working with PHP, most tools associated with the program are mostly open source software so you need not pay for them… As for ASP, you might need to buy additional tools to work with its programs…

In conclusion, both PHP and ASP have its own advantages and disadvantages… It basically depends on which part of developing a website you are most concerned with… Choosing between ASP and PHP basically depends on your own personal preference… It doesn’t hurt to confer with other programmers or webmasters and research more information on which programming would best fit the requirements of your website…

Truly speaking, I am not that much interested in ASP .NET… All I have is some basic knowledge on C#, Visual Basic and J#. But in the case of PHP, I love it!!! I have been developing PHP applications for more than a year and trust me, it is the simplest and easiest, yet, very powerful and efficient programming language for the web…

Cheers.. :)

Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created…

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the operating system phenomenon Linux, tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s..

First, install the curl package:

sudo apt-get install curl

Next, create a script anywhere in your $PATH, for example tweet.sh inside ~/bin, where ~ is your home directory (make sure ~/bin is included in your $PATH variable, in case echo $PATH doesn’t return it, edit ~/.bashrc and add a line like this: export PATH=/home/USER/bin/:$PATH)…

The script tweet.sh should contain the following:

#!/bin/sh

############EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINES...###########################
user="USERNAME"
pass="PASSWORD"
##################################################################

######################DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS######################
tweet="${@}"

if [ $(echo "${tweet}" | wc -c) -gt 140 ]; then
    echo "FATAL: The tweet is longer than 140 characters!"
    exit 1
fi

curl -k -u ${user}:${pass} -d status="${tweet}" https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null 2>&1

if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
    echo "Successful tweet!"
fi

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Twitter username and password, and then make the script executable:

chmod 755 ~/bin/tweet.sh

And now test it.. Just use it as :

tweet.sh YOUR MESSAGE

This should be all…

If you don’t want to copy paste the code for tweet.sh then use the following link to download tweet.txt and RENAME it as tweet.sh

Recently, I found a site that let’s me learn awesome command line tricks.. Its called commandlinefu.com

This is a community driven site, where users submit various commands everyday, to do all sorts of tricks and jobs…. Commands get votes from fellow users, and often, better versions are posted…. This makes Commandline Fu one of the must visit sites for geek…s. Commands are tagged, and hence searchable….. The site also has an API and a simple javascript widget, making it ideal for embedding a command in blog posts….. Commandline Fu also provides Twitter and RSS feeds for commands posted to the site, and discerning users can subscribe to commands which have more than 3 or 10 votes…

Do visit and join this site!!!

1. Boot the Desktop/Live CD of linux.
2. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal)
3. Start grub as root with the following command :
sudo grub

4. You will get a grub prompt (see below) which we will use to find the root partition and install grub to the MBR (hd0,0)

[ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For
the first word, TAB lists possible command
completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
completions of a device/filename. ]

grub>

Type the following and press enter:
find /boot/grub/stage1

Using this information, set the root device:
grub> root (hd0,1)

Install Grub:
grub> setup (hd0)

Exit Grub:
grub> quit

5. Reboot (to hard drive). Grub should be installed and both Ubuntu and Windows should have been automatically detected.

6. If, after installing grub, Windows will not boot you may need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (That is a small “L” and not the number 1 in menu.lst)

* Open a terminal and enter :
gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Or, in Kubuntu:
kdesu kate /boot/grub/menu.lst
Your Windows stanza should look something like this :
title Windows XP/Vista # You can use any title you wish, this will appear on your grub boot menu
rootnoverify (hd0,0) #(hd0,0) will be most common, you may need to adjust accordingly
makeactive
chainloader +1

Best Alternative:

If their is a problem with grub or u want to make this still easy u can reinstall your grub by a application known as Super Grub Disk iso Image..
Boot your system using the disk and follow the instructions…

The Pencil Project runs as a standalone application or as a Firefox add-on. You can download it at the main site or directly from the evoluspencil code repository where you can also find more stencils packages.

Go get it now!

Last week I sent an email to Googlers about the meaning of “open” as it relates to the Internet, Google, and our users. In the spirit of openness, I thought it would be appropriate to share these thoughts with those outside of Google as well.

At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important….

Read the full Article here……

Giving things away for the good of others

I find this to be a noble thing to do.. It’s quite generous to help someone… That is the case with commodities and money. How is it different when it is applied to knowledge??

It’s hard for some people to understand why should they be a part of Free and Open Source Software(FOSS)… Well lets put it this way.. With money, if you share it, you lose some part of it. With knowledge however, sharing never decreases it in any amount, and as a result of feedback from those you have shared it with it may increase… This is the core concept of FOSS..

But there are people who look at monetary value of Knowledge… They hide code from others and sell the results, to make profit…. This is what proprietary software is about….

So why would a student of Computer Science share knowledge instead of hiding it from others and make money from it….. There are many reasons… Lets look at some…

1. Popularity/Fame – People on the web get to know what code you wrote…
2. Feedback from better people – A chance of learning more from better hackers…
3. Finding solutions to problems he/she can’t fix…
4. Help with documentation and planning….
5. Popularity/Fame may result it recruitment…
6. Extending the skills acquired to grab fellowships/Summers of Code
7. And last but not least… Money…. :)
8. Its also about giving something back to the community from which you gained all your knowledge of programming….

So after all these reasons i think its simple to understand:

FOSS = (Gain of knowledge + Money)
WHILE
Proprietary S/W = (ZERO*(Gain of knowledge) + NOT a LOT of money) 

Now after all these reasons why the hell would a CS student still want to hide the codes they have written instead sharing them with everyone??? o_O

Hope you get what i mean… Cheers.. :)