Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

I admit, its not a public build but I really couldn’t help myself so I got hold of a copy off a public torrent and here I am. I’ve had Windows 7 discs and keys around for a couple of months now but I never really got time to install them. Finally, I queued up the latest build a couple of nights ago and FINALLY it completed downloading.

Needless to say the new taskbar is pretty cool. I do have a few suggestions though.

1. Aero Snap for minimization: Aero Snap provides us with a set area on the screen, where if a window is dragged to, it snaps vertically or maximizes. Taking it to the left/right of the screen causes it to vertical snap to the left/right of the screen (respectively) while taking a window to the top causes it to maximize. Why not allow minimization when the window is dragged to the bottom (towards the taskbar).
2. Jagged Icons: Seriously.. this is 2009. Anything that expects to show up in the taskbar deserves a 256×256 pixel icon to be shipped with it. Also, I am not sure how the UI team didn’t notice that the middle click to scroll (what I call “smooth/easy scroll”) icon is terrible! For an OS with high emphasis on UX (User eXperience), this sure seems to be a bad move :P

All this being said, there are a few things to give Microsoft real credit for. On my desktop, I didn’t need to install a single driver to start using the machine and get on to the internet. Now that’s called a fully functional operating system ;) I’ll try the same on my laptop (Dell Studio XPS 1640) and I hope to get a similar result. The only thing I expect to install is the Sensible Vision FastAccess facial recognition software which I hope works. It certainly is bound to Dell machines (I’m sure it checks for Studio XPS 1640s via the same source as dxdiag) but I hope it won’t mind if I try to make it work on Windows 7 :)

One of my favourite parts about this OS so far is the ability to easily hide system tray icons. I hope that unlike previous versions of Windows, it doesn’t have a habit of forgetting these settings :) Hopefully, it also remembers the new applications options instead of tagging everything as new randomly. I’m also yet to check out if the Vista start menu bug of “Programs” showing up still exists, after all Windows 7 is an incremental build of Windows Vista, ain’t it?

Another change is that Windows 7 doesn’t calculate the Windows Experience Index (WEI) score during first boot which is surprising to me because I remember it doing something like that. WEI takes a lot longer to run through now as compared to Vista but also has increased the maximum WEI score from 5.9 in Vista to a 7.9 in Windows 7. I’m sure all you high end machine owners can’t wait to run the new WEI ;) I know I can’t wait to do so on my laptop :D

Speaking of WEI, the ugly Games folder opening freeze bug hasn’t come up so far. For those who aren’t aware, Windows Vista came up with the new style Games folder (that people like me love and use a lot :D). Its extremely useful, though there could have been a few improvements. Quite a few games aren’t automatically detected and added and so their game art isn’t downloaded either. You could always add the icons there automatically but you would be unable to have game art unless you have a tool. But this wasn’t the worst thing about it. Some times, the games folder would take up to 30-45 seconds to open up which was because it was reading the WEI score for your system (speculation based on observation but no conclusive proof). I think Vista saw that your WEI score was outdated and tried to do something about it. Hopefully, Windows 7 won’t fall prey to these two issues. The former I can test in a couple of hours by installing a few games. The latter on the other hand will have to wait a while for :) If I have any interesting results, I’ll let you know :)

In the up coming weeks, I’ll try to go deeper into Windows 7 trying to unravel new features along the way. I shall also try to check out if Microsoft has fixed every annoyance I have ever had in Windows Vista in Windows 7. That way, we can all expect a better UX (User Experience) ;) Hopefully, my orals examinations in the upcoming weeks and final project presentation in college won’t come in the way :)

Once upon a time, not too far long ago, I got a Dell Studio XPS 1640. I found that the laptop was great. I knew before I got it that it had a slight heating problem so ever since I got it, I would give it some cooling space. The performance on this machine was simply amazing but I had a few issues. Here are the issues I had:

1. Didn’t receive any Intel Centrino 2 and Microsoft Windows Vista labels.
2. Bottom (access) panel wasn’t correctly fit in.
3. Left hinge on my laptop was incorrectly fitted.
4. Broadcom Ethernet card was a 10/100Mbit card instead of a 10/100/1000Mbit card as promised.

Of all of them, the final issue was the most serious so that’s the one I took up first. The list however is the order in which I noticed these issues so I will continue this post in that order. It is my request however that if you’re reading this as a Dell Studio XPS 1640 that you please make sure you pay close attention to the last problem. If you have the same issue, I’ll let you know what exactly to do :) (Note: I’m writing this so that I can let other Dell Studio XPS 1640 users know what it is that Dell has done)

It is important to note that this isn’t something that I have against Dell exactly. I just think they could have handled this issue better. They did nothing for me for well over a month until my family members go tired of listening to the same old story every time, took the phone from me and started getting a bit more aggressive asking the case to be immediately elevated. So here is my story.

The day I got my laptop, I was in college and I got a call from my family about the package having arrived. I gave a call to the “service engineer” and asked him to come over to my place. Dell India has a policy of having them open the package and making sure everything is in there rather than us doing it since that prevents customers from making false claims of missing/incorrect received parts. So the guy came over on time as requested and opened up the package. The machine seemed perfectly fine but the labels were missing. Problem 1 found! We searched everywhere but it was no where to be found. So I asked the guy what the protocol was in case of a missing element in the package. We did make sure that the order list confirmed that the labels are supposed to have been sent. Since they were clearly no where in my package or by default stuck on on the palm rest. He asked me to make a note of this on the report sheet that he had. I did so in the customer comments section. He told me I’d be called back about this in a couple of days.. lol :D

Center of the image shows the incorrectly fitted access panel. Click image to see it in full size.

Ok, I agree. Its something minor and picky. So I didn’t really worry about it. I was more in awe with the awesomeness of the machine so I just used it for a couple of days. The next morning I flipped over the machine and checked out the bottom. That is when I noticed that the bottom panel was incorrectly fitted. If you refer to the image to the right, you can see that the access panel was not properly fit in. Not a big deal, right? That’s exactly what I thought. I decided that I’d wait for the call that I was supposed to get for my labels. On getting the call, I’d simply ask them to send another one of their technicians to refit it. Sounds simple enough, eh? :)

Incorrect Fitting around the hinge cap and the hinge. Click image to see it in full size.

So I opened up the laptop and started using it on the second day, not at all freaked yet.. other than about how great the machine was. Right then, I noticed something. The left hinge is incorrectly fitted :O I have attached at image of what I mean. Now that is something I don’t really fancy. This is serious. A machine hardly a handful of days old and it has a defect :O :(

At the time, I was a tad bit busy. A few important things had cropped up. Of course, this could wait a day or two, right? Sure it can :P

A couple of days later, I’m transferring files from my desktop to my laptop over wi-fi. I’m only getting about 5 MBps (obviously :P). Of course, if I were to connect using a cross over ethernet cable, I should get 1000Mbps because that is the card I supposedly have on my laptop and on my desktop as well :) So I get the cross over cable (a brand new one that I got with my newly bought router) and connected my desktop with my laptop. I then started the data transfer only to get about 10-11MBps. Wait. That’s the speed I get on a 100Mbit network too. Clearly, its time to do some troubleshooting. Is it the cable? No. I tried out an alternative cable that I had lying around. It clearly couldn’t be a switch/router of a lower rating because there is nothing between these two machines. Are one or both of the machines not set to work on a 1000MBit network? Well, last I checked my desktop was on auto negotiate mode. So I checked out the setting again and it was set to Auto negotiate. That seems fine to me. Now lets check out the settings on my laptop. Its set to auto negotiate. Lets ask them to force 1000MBit. So I set the option on my desktop. I click the drop down menu on my laptop and there seems to be no 1000MBit option. Oh jeez. This is a problem! I seem to have received a 100MBit card instead of a 1000MBit one.

Desktop (Non OEM Machine) Network Card Options. Click image to see it in full size.

Dell Studio XPS 1640 Network Card Options. Click image to see it in full size.

To the left you can see a screenshot of my desktop’s network card properties. Clearly, I have an option to set it into 1000MBit Full Duplex mode. I was expecting the same for my laptop who’s screenshot is to the right. Now do you see the problem? Quite seriously concerned, I decided to contact Dell the next morning. But I then realised that it was a Friday night so I wouldn’t be able to call them until Monday. I was seriously pissed at the magnitude of the blunder that Dell had committed and I wanted to talk to them immediately. In came Dell’s award winning support website. I instantly wrote them a note using the site. I realised I’d have to stand the excruciating pain in my heart for the duration of the weekend but that is something I’d have to deal with.

Yes, I did notice that the device is called a “Broadband Netlink Gigabit Ethernet” card but I guess the word “Gigabit” had nothing to do with the actual device speed :( If you’d like to check out this on your laptop then click start, right click on my computer and click Device manager on the left side pane of the window which opened up. If you’re asked for elevation, please do allow Device manager to open up. Once device manager opens up, go to the Network Adapters section and expand it. Right click on “Broadcom Netlink Gigabit Ethernet” and click properties. Go to the Advanced tab and click “Speed & Duplex” and check the values you have available.

A couple of days later, I got a call from the people at Dell asking questions. For the next 2 weeks, I told them the same thing over and over again. I always gave them my system service tag number followed by a few details of mine for confirmation. Then I’d explain what my problem was and they would ask me the same set of questions for checking i know what I want. I knew it that they used to have logs of past customer interactions and so I was unsure why they would ask me the same questions over and over but being the guy that I am, I’d answer them perfectly nicely. Now I do realize the magnitude of the mistake here and how it could probably happen. Ethernet cards come along with the motherboard which is supposed to be an Intel PM-45 and is. I’ve checked :) How could the ethernet card be incorrect? My only explanation was that the manufacturer Dell gets their motherboard from, at least for this model might be incorrect. If that is the case, it isn’t Dell’s mistake directly but I would have assumed that they would check the system out before shipping it out. In the next few weeks, my interaction with Dell got them to conclude things along the same line. In the end, I was offered a motherboard change or a machine replacement. Now my question is, if your entire lot of motherboards is incorrect, wouldn’t the replacement be faulty too? Also, I don’t want you to open up a brand new laptop. The service tech agreed and decided to get the replacement over but it would take him a few days to get the permissions. So I waited another couple of days. Like all previously promised call backs, I got nothing! So I happened to call them back again for the millionth time and this time it went into the same type of conversation again.

At this point I must tell you that my brother works in the service industry and is used to talking to a couple of customers daily. He has a fair bit of experience in talking to service techies. Even though he doesn’t live with us anymore, I did keep him updated about what was happening. He happened to be in India on that faithful day when I called Dell. This would be the single longest tech support call I’ve ever been part of. What happened next was 2 hours of argument over the phone and it had nothing to do with the shitty service they were providing. I had been patient with them for well over a month and my brother was tired of listening to this entire thing go on and on. He took the phone from my hand and immediately asked for the lady’s superior. Eventually we reached the a senior on the Tech Support team at Dell (or at least their call centre) in Bangalore. I’d rather not take names so lets just refer to him as Mr. X. Now we didn’t just have Mr. X on the phone but also a certain Ms. Y who was the customer care representative who was handling my case. Both of these people were on the line conferencing with me and my brother. I was handling all the technical questions but all of this was after about an hour’s worth of telling them how they have handled the entire case quite poorly just telling me things were being done with absolutely no results. It seems that Dell wanted me to send my laptop back for a replacement, something I straight out denied. You don’t want to know what my brother did to them after this to show them why they were wrong when they asked me to do this. I was against the motherboard change since I thought it was a stupid idea (as explained earlier) and that the machine was brand new (who really wants to open up a new machine. At the end, Mr. X said that the problem seems to be a Broadcom-Vista compatibility issue. Oh God!

Are you telling me, despite Broadcom being a decently big sized company and that Dell being a pretty big company as well, never saw that Broadcom’s network cards didn’t work on Vista which I must say has been around for a couple of years now and has millions of user, didn’t give a 1000MBit option? I know, the number of people using 1000MBit networks is slim but its not that slim. And why didn’t Dell’s tech team check the system on a 1000MBit network while deciding to use a Broadcom card in their machine? Mr. X could only say “Sir, you’re the first user to have ever reported it to us” Oh. My. F*%$ing. GOD! So I just asked him what’s his next step? He replies that a patch should be out soon. Now this day was the 26th of March, 2009. He asks for time till the 3rd of April, 2009 which is a week away. I accept his terms. He promises to call back and I laugh at him telling him his organization’s pathetic call back record.

Surely enough, the third came and went and nothing happened. Now I’m pissed off. I call them back on Monday and ask to speak to Mr. X but he is apparently on another call, which seems to be Dell’s single most common excuse. I ask for his superior but all of them seem to be in a meeting. The guy on the phone how ever gives me an update about the case. Seems that the patch isn’t out, surprise surprise. Now I’m in the right mind to install XP one of these days and check out their theory of it being a Vista-Broadcom incompatibility. The guy says that Mr. X should be available some time later and that he can have Mr. X call me back. I let him know about how I never get a call back so I’d rather wait. The guy asks me if I have any other problems and them I realize I hadn’t brought up the other issues in ages. The hinge and access panel issue I’ve mentioned once or twice to a few other people but nothing was done (spot a pattern yet? :P). I told him how I’ve shown a couple of people including Mr. X the pictures that I have shown you guys a bit earlier in this post. He asked to see the images himself so I sent it to him as well. He came to the conclusion that the face plate and the access panel would have to be changed. Now, I thought the face plate means the thing which has the Dell logo on it because that and the silver metallic finish seem to all be connected in one piece. I was wrong, I got the entire monitor 2 days later. As for the access panel, I told him I didn’t really need a new one and that refitting should do but he sent me one (seems they replace such things so oh well.. who am I do argue? :))

I also told him about the labels so he transferred my call to the missing parts team. Get ready, another problem to arise here. The lady on the other side, Ms. Z, noticed that it had been 37 days since I got delivery and that Dell only accepts missing/incorrect part reports for 30 days. Wait. I told your representatives a couple of times. None of them told me this was the wrong department to say this. Even Mr. X’s inbox has a mail with all the above mentioned issues when sending him snaps (he hadn’t done anything about it for over a week while the guy I was on the phone a couple of minutes ago, Mr. A, solved the issue in a couple of minutes). She just kept saying its their policy. I asked her if its my responsibility to know where exactly to complain. I also told her about the fact that I had made a note of the missing labels to the first Service Engineer who had come to my place when I got my laptop and that his report had a note of this. He was supposed to do things but nothing happened. She read out his report to me and told me it said nothing about the labels. I asked her to read my note. The funny part is that, she didn’t get the document I signed but an electronic receipt of the guy’s report. How sad. I told her to fetch the original report and read my note. This would take a day or so according to her so she gave me a case number and sent me back to Mr. A who had by this time finished writing up a request to get me the 2 things I needed. His work was done. About time someone solved one of my problems. Mr. A said that he would ask Mr. X to call me back the next day and that’s the best he could do since it was past their work time. I agreed and decided to call it a day.

2 days later I received my packages and got a call from the team in Mumbai asking when they could send a techie over. The issue was that I know that the package is at home cause my dad called me about it. I wasn’t at home. In fact, I couldn’t get home till 4 PM cause I was in college. They, it seems, didn’t have anyone who could come by then. What the hell? Their work timings are till 6 PM. I don’t stay out of the way in the corner of the universe. The previous techie didn’t mind coming over at that time for the system check up. I wasn’t in a mood to argue so I accepted the offer to have him come over the next day at 4. By now, its the 9th of April and the engineer comes over to my place. I’m out with a couple of friends so my parents over see the guy replacing the parts in question. A couple of hours later, I have a new monitor and access panel with my old one still lying beneath my bed. While he was working on it, I decided to talk to Mr. X about the driver/patch update that I was supposed to get. Excuses excuses.. nothing again. He now wants to get a guy over to give me a new motherboard and check it out. If that doesn’t fix it, he wants to keep waiting. I’ve told him that I’m busy next week but I will be calling him back on Monday telling him that if he wants to test on motherboards that he can get a spare machine (which I’m sure he does have already) and test on that. If he has a fix, he should let me know. If its hardware based, he can replace my motherboard. If its software based, I’ll accept a patch. He is still waiting for Broadcom to reply.

So this is what it comes down to. I’m playing hardball. I have exams till the 25th of this month and I hope they have a fix till then else I’ll be going out with this. I’m prepared to take this to the next level. Do I have a card capable of working at the promised speeds? If yes, why isn’t it? If no, why not? Either way, I want a fix. I’m a customer who has paid in full for a product and I accept my device to work.

This is where you come in. Are you a Dell Studio XPS 1640 user, do you have a 1000MBit Ethernet card on a Dell Machine of yours or do you have a Broadcom 1000MBit Ethernet card? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you’ve come to the right place. Please make sure you have the right hardware that works at the right speeds. If you have the same issues as me, I urge you to call your local Dell support number and ask them what’ should be done about this. You can tell them that Dell India is looking into it and that they should do the same in co-operation with them. The quicker we get a solution, the better.

If you have any suggestions or thoughts, let me know. Have I gone wrong somewhere? Do you want help in looking if you have this problem? Feel free to ask me. Let your friends know. This is serious. You must believe that I am not looking for trouble or any freebies. I just want what I deserve and have paid for. I want the ability to use 1000MBit networks. I am a peace loving person which is why for the longest period, I was totally patient with them. They just took forever in my opinion. They’ve never shown that something is actually being done other than over the phone assurances. They refuse to acknowledge the existence of the problem on paper or e-mail. So this is where we are. Dell better fix this or I don’t mind wasting my time going through the headache of either publicizing this issue letting other Dell users (at least in India) know that they should look out for this issue or worse. I just hope it doesn’t come to that and I actually get this fixed soon. May be that’s just the eternal optimist in me speaking.

Updates: I shall keep updating this post regularly with the latest information.

10th April, 2009 @ 21:58 IST: Its been around 6 weeks since I got the laptop and made the complaint. This is when I’ve written this post up. I’m about to link people over on the Notebook Review Forum about my issues so that they can check their machines. I’d be glad if they’d tell me if they have similar problems and if there are any other places I can reach out to other Dell Studio XPS 1640 users. The label issue has apparently been investigated and according to the call yesterday, I’ll get the labels by the 15th pending an approval from the managers of the department which I hear I should get. I hope that’s the case else I’ll be calling them all over again. Thank god for Toll Free numbers :)

My new laptop is a work box and doesn’t inherit the obsessive compulsiveness of File naming and sorting that my desktop hard disks have. I have, for this reason, dumped all wallpapers which are applicable to be used with my desktop (wallpapers with aspect ratio 16:9) into my “My Pictures” folder. Randomly, I have an urge to change the wallpaper and I really don’t want to go select one. So I thought I should have something that would change my wallpaper to a random image. I tried finding something but most such applications were installables and would change the wallpapers after periodic time intervals, something i didn’t want.

Thus was born the Random Selection Wallpaper Changer (RSWC). An extremely simplistic, single exe application that does what is required.

Default Values:

• RSWC takes images (bmp, jpg, png) from the user’s My Pictures folder.
• It sets this image as your desktop wallpaper using stretched mode.

Pre-Requisite: A pre-requisite is that you have .NET 2.0 installed on your machine.

Future Plans: The exe is 416kb, something I wish to reduce. I might rewrite the code in C++ to get rid of the .NET dependency (despite Microsoft claiming .NET is common enough to no longer be a  “requirement” and even reduce the file size. Also, I might contemplate creating a light weight application to change wallpapers at regular time intervals as well. (People requesting for such things would certainly compel me. I’m not motivated to do this for personal usage :))

If someone requires it, I might work a way in to set the source folder and mode of setting the wallpaper and still keep it portable and single filed. I could write to registry but that isn’t really portable in my opinion. Ideas/Suggestions/Feedback/Advanced Critique is always welcome ;)

Known Limitation: Setting png wallpapers sets the desktop to a plain coloured background (your default background color) because Windows doesn’t support png wallpapers. It converts pngs into jpgs and then applies them and I shall do the same in the next update.

Download: Random Selection Wallpaper Changer (RSWC) v1.00 (416 KB)

First of all, I should say, the only source I have is this youtube video.

Apple wheel is a “revolutionary” laptop with no keyboard, just a giant scroll wheel :| I kid you not, that’s what it says :-/

The guy in that video apparently took 45 minutes to type a mail (with a million mistakes) and he still likes the product… jeez. I like write a few hundred lines of code in that time :|

Me and SK call this Apple’s Reality Distortion Field™. This is single handedly the shittiest technological innovation I have seen in my time on this planet. I’m sure there might be something equally (or may be more) stupid in the past but this certainly is the stupidest thing I have heard of in the mainstream.

It looks seriously slim. I think it was a 12 odd inch form factor which is cool. Its nice to see Apple put stuff in such compact spaces but the idea of removing a key board all together, to me at least, is JUST WRONG! Typing on that machine would be next to impossible. Using it would be really cumbersome too. You want the “next generation” of Hardware User Interfaces? Go Touch Screen. Go take a page from Microsoft’s book (Windows 7, to be precise).

The worst part is that Apple Fanboys are loving it :-/ I admit, I am a slight Microsoft Fanboy. I do like their work but this does not, in any way, mean that if they pull of something as stupid as this, I wouldn’t slap them to oblivion.

Please continue doing what you do best. Keep making products like the new MacBook Pro 17, the MacBook Air and the iPod Classic/iPod Touch/iPhone. Thanks! :)

Bad Apple! :(

Earlier today at CES 2009, Microsoft announced that they would release 2.5 million copies of Windows 7 for public beta (build 7000) which came out around 25th December, 2008 for all those lucky people who have MSDN subscriptions.
The plan was to release the ISO around 12 CET and a page to release 2.5 million keys but here’s what happened.

12 CET – Nothing’s up on TechNet :(
12.30 CET – A statement stating the site is ill equipped for the load and things are being “set up”.. sure I’d buy that :P
13.30 CET – Start download from direct download links.. not ETA on the keys
13.45 CET – Download links killed. If you have the beta, good for you. If you don’t.. well.. :P

I guess I’ll have to wait for the official serial. I guess I can run the 30 day beta till then and keep rearming the beta (if any of you tested the Windows Vista beta or used the Windows Vista RTM early, you’d remember that :P). Either way I can’t install the beta until I get my new 1 TB HDD (should take a couple of days) due to lack of space :(

* JA has to wait a bit longer before getting a chance to test Windows 7 :(

Thanks for ruining my sleep for tonight by making me wait for a key for nothing :(

Adding Search Engines

1. Custom Search Engine: Right click the address bar and click Edit search engine. Click add, fill in a name and a keyword followed by the search query.
   For adding the Messenger Plus Forum Search engine I used the name as “Messenger Plus! Forum Search” (doesn’t really matter what you use here), the keyword as “mpf” and the url as “http://msghelp.net/basicsearch.php?do=search&keywords=%s” where %s represents the search query entered. As a result of adding this, I can now search the MP!F simply by typing “mpf “. I love search shortcuts :)
2. Searching Google.com instead of your local (regional) google site: This is really a continuation of the previous tip but I just felt it was worthy of being here :P There is a fault (imo) with the default google search engine in Chrome. The keyword is set to “google.com”. Why type all that when you could simply use “g” ;) Also, if you have a look at the google search url in chrome, it uses a base query identifier to redirect to your local google. I just changed mine to “http://google.com/search?q=%s” because while posting google links (especially on irc) to have to remove my browser info every time and sometimes even my country tld in the google domain. This way, it makes it easier for me to paste links though I do realise that google might lose out on accurate statistics of its users because of this but I don’t think it’d mind a handful of users changing their queries when it has billions of searches everyday ;) I’ve also changed my wiki keyword to “w” and urbandictionary.com keyword to “ud“
3. Memory stats for nerds: Well I am a geek/nerd who likes his stats, memory or otherwise ;) Typing about:memory in your url bar ought to take you to some stats while you can do the same by clicking Shift+Esc for basic stats and then clicking “Stats for nerds“. The advanced stats also shows details of Chrome vs other browsers (which should be running at the same time). So you can run Chrome,  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari at the same time and compare statistics if you wish ;) Having it update live would have been cooler but that might take up a lot of resources in itself :P Maybe it should auto refresh when someone’s watching but if you go switch to another tab/application or are idle you could stop refreshing it automatically. :)
4. Resizing Textboxes: You can now resize textboxes by holding down the left mouse button at the bottom right corner and dragging it. And here’s poor dt who wrote a ton of javascript to do the same in dtblog.
5. Check Loadtimes: Want to know what took the page so long to load? Do you want to know how long it took your javascript code to execute? Chrome is here to help! Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect Element”. Just move on over to the resources tab and analyse away :)
6. Detaching and reattaching tabs: Tired of having so many tabs in one single window? Want to sort tabs according to what kind of work you’re doing? Sure that’s possible! Drag a tab outside the tab area and drop it. Voila! Brand new chrome window. Each tab in Chrome is a new process anyway so it doesn’t really matter ;)
7. Private Browsing: You could need to browse privately either to not tell the world of your searches on medical histories, viewing porn (:P) or planning that secret trip for your significant other, who cares? Incognito to the rescue! Press ”Ctrl+Shift+N” or just click the new page icon followed by “New Incognito Window”. Incognito is basically opens a private browsing session for you where no traces of what you were doing show up thus maintaining full privacy.
8. Easter Eggs: Lets end with something fun! Hopefully most of you already know of the about:mozilla easter egg in Mozilla Firefox which pulls out a quote from The Book of Mozilla. Here’s one for Chrome that doesn’t work on Vista. Type in about:internets in the chrome window and you’ll see sspipes.scr run with the title “Don’t clog the tubes”. Doing so on Vista will show a gray tab with the title “The Tubes are Clogged!” since it doesn’t have sspipes.scr. If you don’t get why this screen saver was used, you should know that the Internet is a “Series of Tubes” ;) Don’t clog them with your p0rnz! :P

Google Chrome: The Next Gen Open Source Web Browser

Having heard all the rage about Google Chrome, I decided to try it out this Friday morning before leaving for college. What’s this I see? An online install? Of course it doesn’t mean much to people who have connections which can download the 7.3MB installer in a few seconds but for others, its a bit more arduous. Here’s a direct download link to the Google Chrome installer for others like me who have connections which are as slow as if not slower than broadbad ;) To download the full Google Chrome Installer (7.3 MB) click here.

Chrome is Google’s Next Generation browser and I must say, it does feel good :) (This post is being written in Chrome :P). It did take some time to load up the page but I suspect that’s because of the page not being cached yet and that Chrome doesn’t seem to have Google Gears. O.o I distinctly remember reading that Chrome has the Gears engine in the Chrome Web Comic but when I tried enabling Turbo in the Wordpress panel for Chrome it said that I didn’t have Gears installed. So it sent me to the Gears webpage which said my browser wasn’t supported. :P Seems like I’m not the only one who noticed ;)

Like most other Google products, Chrome has a simplistic yet powerful UI which puts UX above everything. Its technical specs are pretty impressive too. The process isolation for tabs, sandboxing them for extra security and omnibox are things that almost every experienced internet user would want. Moving from Firefox to Chrome would be easy considering that all the shortcuts remain the same :P Ctrl+J opens the downloads window in Chrome, Ctrl+T for tabs (pretty standard), Ctrl+Shift+T for opening recently closed tabs etc. If you don’t already know about memory fragmentation and how Google Chrome deals with it, you should read Page 6-7 of the Google Chrome Web Comic.

You can right click any web page in Chrome and click “Inspect Element” and this would take you to the page source. Viewing page source in a browser was never so awesome. Chrome highlights and formats the code beautifully but I can’t get it to search through the source for some reason. Also the resources tab allows you to “put the blame where it rightfully belongs” when it comes to memory leaks ;) But the Firefox addons development community is huge and the 3 addons that are going to keep me using Firefox are delicious bookmarks synchronisation (for access to bookmarks across multiple computers), FlashBlock and the almighty AdBlock! :) Also, having individual processes for each tab is a neat thing when it comes to functionality but for someone like me who lives half his life in the processes tab of Windows Task Manager, seeing all those chrome.exe processes does get a tad bit annoying :)

Chrome is an excellent start and I’d say, with a few tweaks and changes its going to be a great browser. I’ll just wait a few builds (or at least till I have ports of AdBlock and del.icio.us bookmark syncing) and then use Chrome a bit more regularly.

PS: Why do I have the feeling that the age of the browser war threads on forums across the intarwebs are back? :P

Update: Oh I knew this would happen!

iPod 30GB (5.5 Generation; Black)

Every gadget I’ve owned to this day has been personalised. Its just something I have to do (if the hacks make the device better). I’ve done it so far with my i-Mate KJAM (custom ROMs for WM5 and WM6 and even cooking some up once in a while), my brother’s PSP and my computer (that counts too, doesn’t it? :P) among others.But when my brother came home last month, he exchanged the 2nd hand 30 GB iPod (5.5 Generation; Black) that he had.

I had always heard of the legend that is the iPod but never actually used it, believe it or not. I did like my Sony NW-A608 because of its size and battery life but after testing the iPod out for a few days, I decided to keep it because the 2GB Network walk man was no longer enough for me, it was when I got it 3 years ago but not any more.

Knowing that the iPod was so famous, searching for any softwares for it would be nearly impossible. Most content was replicated from one site to another. So I decided to go through most things out there and make a definitive list (for myself, if not anyone else :P). This post is not meant to only have info on iPod tools. This is a post to get the most out of your iPod and customise it in whatever way possible. So shall we get started?

First things first. You’d need a software to manage your connection with the iPod. There are quite a few out there that do the job quite well. This list would include foobar2000 and WinAmp. Despite using the latter as my daily mp3 player on my pc, I decided to go with (don’t frown..) iTunes :P I do know that iTunes has a reputation of being called “bloatware” but I use it for a different reason. I give you iArt. It took me a really long time to find an application which would go through the thousands of songs I have on my hard disk and add not only album art but also lyrics all with little or no human interaction if necessary. Yes, it can go through your entire iTunes library and add album art and lyrics in automatic mode :o Asking me to do those things manually is insane and anyone who knows me, knows full well that I organise my files perfectly and always have them ID3 tagged (even before last.fm came along :P). iArt will automatically go through your entire iTunes library (or selectively through playlists/song lists you want) and find album art/lyrics from various sources for you. You can select album arts and lyrics manually or set iArt to do them automatically for you. So get iTunes and iArt and you can be sure that the music on your iPod has album art and lyrics. In case you need a portable manager, you could use YamIpod.

Now that you’ve got music that’s well tagged with its art and lyrics, you can start thinking about how to make it look good because face it, you want your iPod to look hot. Never fear, iPod themes are here! All you need to do is download iPodWizard from its official website, then go to the iPodWizard forums and go over to the Themes subforum where you should select your iPod version. In my case, this was the 5th generation subforum. Now you can download the themes you want and apply them. Info on how to do so is available on the forum and their wiki as well but I’m going to write an article on that soon with my experiences in this field.

Till now, we’ve spoken about how handle your iPod with different managers and how to theme it. But what if you are tired of the way the in built firmware for the iPod works? You could always change it. RockBox, an Open Source Jukebox Firmware is an excellent alternative to the in built firmware for not only the iPod but a lot of other portable music players. If you’ve not checked it out already, I seriously suggest you do that now. It is pretty good and supports a wide range of file formats unlike the default firmware in iPod. It can even be themed among other things. Is your life dependent on the linux prompt? Well then Linux on iPod is for you! Why do it? Because you can ;) Now the question that everyone wants to ask, which one should I run? RockBox is pretty awesome but has a few issues and so does Linux on iPod (freezing while playing high bitrate songs and browsing through large file lists at the same time). Other than the pretty major issue of having videos to be in mp4s (though even RockBox doesn’t support xvid and there are a ton of videos out there, I just don’t wish to keep my TV shows, movies and Music Videos in formats that the iPod likes. I prefer them to be in xvid which is a standard for me) to work on the default iPod firmware, I find that it works the best. And with theme-ability (as talked about in the previous paragraph), things look well for it.
There is one thing I had hoped someone would have told me (which would have made me move to these alternate firmwares quicker for tests). Installing these firmwares (it seems) gives you a boot up option to select which firmware you want to load so you don’t lose your original iPod firmware.

If you’ve not thought of ever using your iPod as a hard disk, shame on you! You should slap yourself right now! I personally have a ton of portable applications that allow me to do almost everything I do on my home desktop on computers in college. I use portable versions of 7-Zip (for access to archives), Firefox (web browser), FireFTP (Firefox addon for FTP), Floola-win (portable iPod manager), Notepad++ (text editor with syntax highlighting), Portable OSK (just in case ;)), pdfProducer, Pidgin (multi platform chat client), PlainEdit.NET (another text editor with syntax highlighting), PuTTY (ssh access to server), Autoruns, Process Explorer and uTorrent. If you have any suggestions for good portable applications or need help with (getting) any of the ones I have then do let me know :)

This was some of the more general things that you could do. The next few posts will contain information specific to certain feilds and which will talk in detail about iPod 5.5G based hacks. Now you could do it with other iPods but then you’d have to figure out equivalents or get me one of those iPods :P

Its been a long road going through the SDI National Finals where we came second, going to IIM-A where we got project incubation and then finally to the World Finals where we won the interoperability award. Along the way, we made lots of new friends and learned a whole lot more.

Here are a few related posts on my blog: Imagine Cup 2008 World Finals and Imagine Cup 2008 Gallery. Be sure to check out the latter post which has never before seen footage.

Another announcement to be made is that the development for my custom CMS j@x has been put to halt indefinitely due to shortage of time. As have a few other projects like Scribble Scrabble. Some of them, I’ve signed over control to other AXIS members while others (like PHPIRCBot) shall be released in their current state. This decision had to be made considering my schedule over the past year only keeps getting busier and busier.

Next month, I’ll make sure I tell the world about a few products I have under development and others I have ready in my garage ;) The releases include DarkLight, PHPIRCBot and a brand new CountPrime.

So welcome to the new home of j@x, the minimalistic CMS made by.. well me :-)

Lets clear up a few things. I was supposed to release the new version of j@x with the arrival of this domain, this didn’t happen.
The new version will have quite a few improvements along with an alternate theme and may be even AJAX. Who knows? :P One thing it won’t have a set of emotes. In true j@x fashion, this site has to remain geeky and ASCII emotes are certainly the way ;)

Moving on, why this domain name? For those who don’t know, I, John Anderton/JAnderton am known in the real world (IRL) as Karun AB.

So why did I get this domain? Jatonian Life has always been and will always be a blog. This on the other hand is far more technical (a bit too technical I’ve been told :P) so I decided to maintain it separately.
Basically karunab.com will act as my

1. Place for putting out my technical writings
2. List of all my projects and works (ie. the ones available to the public :P)
3. Sort of an online resume for me.

Not to mention I can now have an awesome email address on my domain :P
I wish I could have more time to develop j@x to the fullest extents of my imagination. Every time I sit with it, I get new ideas so its really fun. I’d like to take this site a long way.. so it can represent me electronically or at least attempt to come as close to it as possible.

Do stick around and show your appreciation. It only urges me to move forward quicker with my work :)

PS: I’d just like all of you to know that team SKAN has made it to the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 India Finals! You can read about it on the AXIS forum. Hurrah!
Also, you can have a look at a related post on Jatonian Life (named Day of Reckoning approaches)