lshw -html > sysinfo.html

You may need to install it first… For Debian and Ubuntu users installation is simple..

sudo aptitude install lshw

You can find the detailed information about lshw from the following page: http://www.ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter

After putting a little thought into it, for me it comes down to two words, new and challenging… It’s these two words that makes software development so addicting as well as fun.. :) As developers we are always looking for that high, however we can’t always get it, making it better, making it more efficient keeps us going, with a reward in the final product…

New….. new is obvious, writing anything new is fun because it’s void of the same old structure, new code is fun to write but what’s even better is the underlying framework in a new environment, or better yet something you’re convinced, per google, has never been done; or posted anyway. New could also be a paradigm shift, for instance that first time instead of parsing a Notes view you walked an xml file, or used a new language to walk that same Notes view.

Challenging…. the challenge draws you in, or makes you step back, and look at it, you make notes on paper and then start typing, only to turn away to make more notes. Lately the most challenging things I’ve worked on take more time thinking on the way to work then they do writing. Imagine taking a picture, easy enough, now imagine taking the picture as Ansel Adams would do… On your commute to work tomorrow think about the subject, the angle you want to shoot at and the angle of the sun… and then execute. Which one takes longer? As for the picture, is it rewarding? Now that’s CODING… ;)

So to some up these maybe the reasons why geeks like us just love to code day n night.. :)

Swirl uses algorithms, metadata, and facial recognition software to distinguish between structures, places, people, and even time of day in digital images. For example, if you search for “New Delhi,” you will get sets of New Delhi state maps, and various scenery of the state. As you drill down further into the results, you get to see more tightly refined sets of images based on what you choose.

Clicking on any of the subgroups opens a window into additional “sub-clusters” of pictures categorized by factors such as angle, time of day, and whether an image is a close-up or a panorama.

We can play with Image Swirl at Google Labs.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine

What is a good application? or lets put it this way what defines a good application? It’s not just one thing, of course, there is no magic formula for making a good application.

What makes me love an application or what i think is a good application: the buttons and features should be in the right place. This is one of the reasons why i love applications by Google. Nearly all their applications make sense.

Example: I was working on a Word as well as an Excel document today and I was thinking that wouldn’t it be great to be able to access this document from anywhere. In other words, I wanted to upload it somewhere. The first thing that strikes anyone is to Gmail it to myself so I have a copy in my mailbox, but then I though: I’m sure Google is smarter than that, and they already have a better solution. And they already do, at the top of the page, next to Gmail and Calendar, there is Documents. Which does exactly what I expected it to do. This, for me, is what defines a good application. It’s made by people who already thought of what you want, and implemented it in the most logical and reasonable way. All I have to do is think “where would I put the button if I was a programmer/user of this feature?” and I will find it instantly.
Cheers :)

A software development cycle is a structure imposed on the development of a software product. There are several models for such processes, each describing approaches to a variety of tasks or activities that take place during the process.

I’l  share with you for the first time the details of the cycle. The following are the important steps in the development cycle.

1. Programmer produces code he “positively believes” is bug-free.
2. The product is tested by the testing team and they find 30 bugs.
3. Programmer fixes 15 of the bugs and explains to the testing team that the other 15 aren’t really bugs, they are so called “special features” in the product.
4. Testing team again tests the product and finds that five of the fixes didn’t  work and also discovers 15 new bugs.
5. Repeat steps 2 to 4 ten more times.
6. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
7. Users find 250 new bugs.
8. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
9. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 250 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Hawaii. Entire testing department quits.
11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires programmer to redo program from scratch.
13. Programmer produces code he “positively believes” is bug-free.

So all computer science students, learning various kinds of development cycles remember those cycles never comes into use in real world… ;)

A lot of us also use different instant messaging clients on a day to day basis. Pidgin is one of these clients that runs on a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and other UNIX operating systems. The advantage of using pidgin is that instead of running GTalk, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger separately, you can have everything-in-one.

Now Pidigin allows us to set a status message and that is exactly what we do in twitter. So here’s what we can do.. update twitter status alone and then get Pidgin to retrieve and set the tweet as the IM status automatically.. This can be done with a help of a code found at Google Codes.

To do this follow the steps below. (I am taking it that you have already got Pidgin installed on your system.)

1. Firstly we need to install Perl. Most Linux distros come with Perl preinstalled. Windows users, download and install Perl from here.

2. Take a Command Prompt/Terminal and enter: perl -MCPAN -e shell (Linux users, would have to add a sudo before this). In the CPAN prompt that you got now, enter install XML::XPath and hit enter. This will download and install the Xpath module from Internet.

3. Now launch Pidgin. Go to Help -> About and scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see a line : Perl: Enabled.

4. Download twitter.pl from http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-twitterstatus/downloads/list and put it into your Pidgin plugins folder. Usually the plugins folder is C:Program Filespidginplugins for Windows users and ~/.purple/plugins for Linux users.

5. Now restart Pidgin and go to Tools -> Plugins. There will be a new plugin named Twitter Status Feed. Enable it and click on Configure Plugin. Enter your twitter user name in the dialog box that pops up.

6. Now in the drop down box where we select our status choose Twitter.

Note : sometimes in Linux copying the twitter.pl in “~/.purple/plugins” may not work. If you have root privilege then copy the script in “/usr/lib/purple-2/“.

Please leave comments if you face problems. :)

If you face problems please leave comments. :)

To install Adobe AIR on Ubuntu 8.10 follow these steps..

Open Terminal window from (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal ) and issue the following command in the terminal window.
wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Now :
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

After That :
./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

After the above command you will get a installation dialog box like this follow the instructions to install Adobe Air.

After installation is over you will find a menu item (Applications -> Other ->Adobe Air Application Installer ) which allows one to easily install Adobe Air applications.

Some interesting Adobe AIR applications are :

ReadAIR
ReadAIR is an rss reader. But it lacks keyboard shortcuts.
You can download ReadAIR from here : http://readair.googlecode.com/files/ReadAir.0.3.air
You can install the downloaded the (.air) package using (Applications-> Other -> Adobe AIR Application Installer).

RichFLV
RichFLV is a video editor for flv files , some of its features are :
* Read flv Metadata
* read/edit/modify/delete cuepoints
* cut flvs
* convert the sound of the flv to mp3
* convert flv to swf
RichFLV is still in early stage of development and is an alpha release.

Download and Install RichFLV from here : http://www.richapps.de/files/richflv/RichFLV.air

RoadFinder
RoadFinder combines Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps into a single application. It allows one to easily look up address using its intiuative interface. RoadFinder allows you to search maps for physical directions anywhere in the world. It also allows you to view satellite images.
Download and install RoadFinder from : http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/samples/1/RoadFinder.air

Spaz
Spaz is an Open source Twitter client and features an extremely user friendly interface. Some of the important features of Spaz are :
* Built-in global search powered by Summize
* Short URL creation tool with support for multiple services (is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com, and more)
* In-line short URL decoding
* Markdown syntax support
* Multiple themes and support for user-created themes
* User-defined CSS overrides
* Event sounds using the Tokyo Train Station soundset by Dominik Dimaano
* Directory listings of users you’re following, and your followers.

Download and Install Spaz using this link : http://funkatron.com/apps/spaz/AIR/SpazAIR.air

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is also an Open source Twitter client, i find it better than Spaz..
Download and Install TweetDeck using this link :
http://www.tweetdeck.com/

I hope you enjoy AIR an its applications.. If you face problems please comment… :)

As i explained before you need imagemagick installed on your system to run the script.
In ubuntu it can be installed by typing in the terminal sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Heres the script :
#!/bin/bash
# A script to resize images.
readonly OUT_FMT="_new.jpg"
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ] ; then
echo "A script to resize images "
echo "How to use : $(basename $0) add_of_image1 add_of_image2 ..."
exit 1
fi
read -p 'Enter name of Folder where compressed images would be located (would be made in your home folder) : ' fname
mkdir ~/$fname
for pic
do
# New filename
out_name="${pic%.*}$OUT_FMT"
if [ -e "$out_name" ] ; then
echo "Output file $out_name exists, Not resizing!!!"
elif [ "${pic#*$OUT_FMT}" == "" ] ; then
echo "$pic already resized!!!"
elif [ ! -r "$pic" ] ; then
echo "Error : could not access $pic !!!"
else
echo -n "$pic -> $out_name"
convert -quality 80 -resize 800x600 "$pic" "$out_name"
if [ ! -e "$out_name" ] ; then
echo " Error .. No output file!!!"
else
echo " ($(du -h "$out_name" | cut -f1))"
fi
fi
mv "$out_name" ./$fname/
done


I also didn’t explain the script properly in the previous post so i’ll that now.
Firstly the script should be copied from here and pasted in a text editor. Then save it as resize.sh in your home folder(you can save it any where you wish but then how you call the scritp would change thats why its easier to save it in the home folder :)). Now open a terminal type:
animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ sudo chmod +x resize.sh

after this do animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ ./resize.sh aaa.jpg
This would ask a for a folder where new image should be placed
Enter name of Folder where compressed images would be located (would be made in your home folder) :
Specify the name of a new folder where you wanna save the image.
The new compressed image would be saved in the folder you specified with the name aaa_new.jpg

You can also convert all pictures of a directory at once by
animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ ./resize.sh Desktop/linux09/*.JPG
This to would ask for a folder where you would like to save the new compressed images.

Now in the line convert -quality 80 -resize 800×600 “$pic” “$out_name” in script the value after -quality is the argument specifies the amount of JPEG/MIFF/PNG compression level, the lower the value(meaning 60 or 50) the higher is the compression(change it according to what you want). The -resize is used to resize an image, the argument following resize(i.e. 800×600) can be changed to what you want.
Leave a comment if you face any problems. :)

Firstly you need to install package Imagemagick…
In ubuntu you can install by sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Now just copy the attached in an editor:
#!/bin/bash
# A script to resize images.
readonly OUT_FMT="_new.jpg"
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ] ; then
echo "A script to resize images "
echo "How to use : $(basename $0) add_of_image1 add_of_image2 ..."
exit 1
fi
for pic
do
# New filename
out_name="${pic%.*}$OUT_FMT"
if [ -e "$out_name" ] ; then
echo "Output file $out_name exists, Not resizing!!!"
elif [ "${pic#*$OUT_FMT}" == "" ] ; then
echo "$pic already resized!!!"
elif [ ! -r "$pic" ] ; then
echo "Error : could not access $pic !!!"
else
echo -n "$pic -> $out_name"
convert -quality 80 -resize 800x600 "$pic" "$out_name"
if [ ! -e "$out_name" ] ; then
echo " Error .. No output file!!!"
else
echo " ($(du -h "$out_name" | cut -f1))"
fi
fi
done


Now save it as resize.sh in your home folder.

Now in the terminal type
animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ sudo chmod +x resize.sh

after this do animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ ./resize.sh aaa.jpg
This would return a file aaa_new.jpg

You can also convert all pictures of a directory at once by
animesh@animesh-laptop:~$ ./resize.sh Desktop/linux09/*.JPG

The only problem with the script is that all the resized pictures would be in the same folder as original pictures. I am not able to move it in a new folder don’t know why. If you face any problem please leave a comment or if you know the solution to my problem please lemme know… :)
This post has being modified.