Boost up Facebook Chat with a Jetpack!

Mozilla's new Jetpack has some neat features. It can help you to err.. "Explore new ways to extend and personalize the web". This Jetpack is waaay better than your usual jetpack, and it won't help you to earn a Darwin award (unless you have waaay too much creativity in you).

New, and improved.

I was messing around with Jetpack, and at the same time *trying* to chat with someone on facebook chat. It's pretty annoying, facebook really really need to implement an XMPP based chat system soon. But until they do so, I used the useful "slidebar" feature in Jetpack to put together a little "slide in-and-out" facebook chat thing.

Hopefully it would be useful for someone. Here's the code.

jetpack.future.import("slideBar");

jetpack.slideBar.append({
 onSelect: function(slide) slide({ size: 400}),
 icon: "http://facebook.com/favicon.ico",
 url: "http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php",
 width: 400,
 height: 600,
 onReady: function(slide) $(slide.doc).click(function() { slide({ size: 400, persist: true });
  slide.icon.src = "http://facebook.com/favicon.ico"; }) 
}); 

After the chat loads, you can click on the pane that just slided, to make it stay. Or if there aren't any useful contacts online, you can just let it slide away.

Well, this is only a "little" thing that you can do with Jetpack. But shows that Jetpack can be used (just like Greasemonkey) to make some annoying stuff usable.

Back to the blogosphere

It has been a while since I made a post on this blog. I have been busy, with the start of school, and IOI and the ISSC and many other stuff. This year the school work is more intense, so I find myself with a huge backlog of homework :P well.. home work is not as interesting as many other things :P

The IOI was great, but wasn't able to get a medal. The trip was fun. Met old friends from the 2007 IOI, and met Manar in Alexandria, although we didn't went around the Cairo city much, we were able to enjoy the Pyramids :) but sadly, I lost the memory card of my camera :( so most of the photos that I took at the IOI is lost :(.

And finally, after another conversation with Zhasha about arch vs. ubuntu. I switched to Arch. And it was all great. And he also introduced me to the wicd network manager which is also great (Although it doesn't look pretty in KDE).

Most of the accidents lead to interesting stuff.. and I also had an accident like that. I was crawling on my bed, found my laptop opened it, and searched to the power button with my hand, and pressed the Dell "media-direct" button. And, well it booted up the computer, and said that it can't find the media direct partition. So I just turned it off, and pressed the good old power button. And grub started giving out some odd errors. So I booted up the other computer, used dd to write an arch iso to my pendrive, booted the laptop with it, and found out that my entire partition table has been erased, and replaced with the table, that came default out of the box. I was very happy with dell, until then. That media direct (or shall we call it nuke-it-all or destruction direct, like some people in the forums had referred to it) button thing is totally SHIT, and I'm really dissapointed with Dell. Some people tell me that if I dd the drive with /dev/null then the media direct will be gone for good. But that involves lot of work and lots of backups etc. So I found a temporary solution for it, "stick a double sided tape with one side covered over the button". It isn't the best solution. But it works for now. And it's red so it gives a nice WARNING feeling :P

Anyway, I was able to recover my partitions with testdisk. And reinstalled GRUB. But the Arch wasn't booting :( so I'm back with my old Ubuntu instllation. And had to get about 400 MBs worth of updates :S.

I'll be updating my blog more frequently from now on :P (Or at least I hope to do so).

Update: KDE4, Ubuntu, Laptop

I haven't been able to write in my blog for some time, so I decided to update it now, because I have some free time (not much, but enough to make a post).

I got a new laptop a dell vostro 1500. And it came with vista :S so.. I replaced it with ubuntu, I installed ubuntu because I wanted to start using it quickly, and didn't want to mess with Arch, but I'm going to install Arch on it soon. But well.. Ubuntu works flowlessly .. everything just worked out of the box(other than the built-in mic, it required some hacking).. webcam, wireless, it all worked. So I'm pretty happy for selecting the vostro 1500 :) but it's not for sale now, dell has introduced the vostro 1510 :P

First I used GNOME, because that came by default. But I switched to KDE4.1 few weeks ago. And it's good. I actually like the new Kate, it makes Coding much more interesting :P with the fancy GUI. And the Oxygen stuff in KDE is quite nice for the eyes too.. but it's still missing some stuff, but i feel more at home, when using KDE :P

I don't like the new Amarok, as much as I like the old one.. so I'm stull using the old/stable Amarok :P and, I had some problems with the media buttons in my laptop with Amarok, but now it works fine :)

I have to invoke the guidance-power-manager to enable power saving modes.

The new kde-pim suite is great, but it can be more stable and less buggy.

I'm quite happy with my laptop, other than for the *shiny* vista sticker on it :P I'm planning to replace it with some better stickers. If anyone reading this has spare sticker you can always send them to me ;) same goes for any extra swag that you guys have :P :P.

Here are some pics of the laptop :P

KDE 4.1 Is it ready for everyday use ?

In my opinion.. yes !! I think KDE 4.1 can be used for everyday work now :D The KDE development team has done a good job at recognizing what the users need.. I'll list out the advantages that we have with KDE 4.1 now. Some people might want to wait until the KDE 4.1 is realeased, it will be released on the 29th July 2008.

KDE 4.1 is scheduled for final release on July 29, 2008. This time based release falls six months after the release of KDE 4.0.

• When people asked me, why I'm using KDE, the answer was "I can make it look/work like I want it to, easily". When I first tried out KDE 4, it didn't work nicely for me.. mainly becuase it lacked the ability to customize it. We weren't able to change the look of the Panel. It was huge and wasn't very usable. But now, The Plasma widgets can be resized, as the KDE.org says, "it's as flexible as before"

• And most importantly, KDE PIM (Personal Information Management) suite is back !! That means my favourite mail client and the feed reader is back :D This was one of the main reasons why I didn't want to use KDE 4 before.

• There's a new media player, called the Dragon Player maybe this will be a good replacement for KMplayer, although I prefer to use the normal mplayer for my media viewing tasks.

• Dolphin has tabs now, makes it more easier to use, and maybe.. it will be a good replacement for konqueror.

• And there are some other changes too.. but they are not very important for me, and to many others I guess. But those are some nice changes, you can take a look at the changes from the KDE website's KDE 4.1 beta release announcement.

I didn't install KDE 4.1 yet, I'll be doing that within this week, I'm kinda busy these days, so I decided to leave it off for a day or two, and then install it.. when I have time :)

Now we just have to wait for a good review of KDE 4.1 from Polish Linux. I always liked their great reviews on KDE :)

Fresh Domain && Fresh OS && Fresh Comp

Maybe some people noticed it or maybe I told some people about this (even when they didn't want to hear about it ;) ). I bought tuxv.net :D

Yesterday was a good day to me :) the Computer which was damaged by the lightening a few weeks ago was fixed, and now I'm installing arch linux on it. Installing arch linux can be a time consuming task ( I've gone temporarily deaf, and can't hear what gentoo users are saying ).

But you can always enjoy the installation process. For me it's connecting to my bro's computer via ssh and having a random chat with some people via centerim, and hanging out in IRC rooms with irssi. Oh and playing random songs from my bro's computer, which pisses him off :P.. and shouldn't forget ejecting the CD tray.
Oh and my emai address changed too it's now, hope all the humans who read this blog sends me their comments about what they think about this blog ;) oh.. and don't forget that because I'm using google apps for that email, it's also my shiny new Jabber/XMPP/GTalk account. I'm thinking of adding a reddit button to all the posts as well ;) so y'all who use reddit can help me spread my thoughts around the globe too.

Back to installing arch issue, I got into some problems with GRUB (GRUB doesn't like me very much :S ) so I had to boot into my newly installed not-so-shiny new arch box using the live CD. It's not much of a deal, but I'd prefer using the plain ol' GRUB to boot into it.

Just in case you were wondering how to do it, at the boot prompt type


arch root=/dev/sda2

your root partition may be different.. so use the necessary name in the place of /dev/sda2.


I'll be posting another post , as soon as I get the other computer working swiftly with arch, until then Good Bye.

News Alerts

Recently Dialog has been offering a "News Alerts" service, with a monthly charge of 30 Rs. ( ~0.30 USD). It is cheap, but why pay for something when you can get it for free ! and dialog is only offering BBC news alerts. What if we want some other news alerts service ? well.. then we are screwed, 'cause dialog only offers BBC ( And derana news alerts - which I turned off after they started sending utterly useless updates )

What's the free alternative to news alerts ?? what else it's TWITTER !! well there's a little catch.. because you are only allowed 250 updates per week.. or something like that.. but it doesn't really matter (at least for me) because when you are logged in with Jabber/XMPP (Gtalk) twitter sends you the updates via IM. So the txt quota is saved :)

The best part is that there are so many news services that you can subscribe to. There's BBC, CNN, Slashdot (yeah !), Wired and even various Digg feeds. So you can stay up-to-date with the things that you want to know ;)

Get a twitter account, configure device updates, follow CNN, Slashdot or whatever you want to follow.

Here are some interesting tweets.

• CNN Breaking News - cnnbrk on twitter
• BBC News - BBC on twitter
• ./ - slashdot on twitter
• Wired - wired on twitter
• Digg Front Page - digg_feeds on twitter
• Digg tech feed - digg_tech on twitter

Hopefully this little idea of mine will be practical :P to the users who use the dialog bbc news feeds ;) The people who use twitter won't find this much useful ( Mainly because they are mostly online, and doesn't need txt alerts much / And they may have other tweets that they are following and will find this an a nuisance).

But if you are interested, then you can try this and give some comments about it :) and you can follow me on twitter.

A New Begining

After more than a month of !blogging (NOT blogging) I'm back on my blog again. This time I'm going to blog something at least weekly. If you are reading this post, then most likely you have seen the new theme (and impressed by it ;D ). Oh.. and if you noticed the shiny new Digg buttons. try clicking on them ;) I'd really appreciate it :P .

This time I decided to use ScribeFire. I thought that I'd blog more frequently if I used that.. dunno why :P but I just thought so.

So keep waiting for more posts.