Around 15 minutes of starting the browser, I had over 8 services integrated with Flock with just simple logins on the sites of each, ranging from this Blog (This’s posted by Flock) to Facebook (A service I’ve just started to use).

Twitter works well with it and so does the Flickr and YouTube media browser implementations. Things I miss are very few actually, one being Google Reader integration. Mozilla’s feed-reader Liferea was supposed to have gotten that by now (GSOC), so I’ll check that soon.

But what overshadows all its feature and gloss is its ability to work smooth even when its all loaded up with services and other enable-able things. Its clearly built for this, one can have no doubts. Firefox loaded with a couple of extensions on the other hand works much slower and the drastically long close-times proves that well. The optimizations are well seen in Flock.

Currently am using it without any of the Flock branding, thus named ‘Minefield’ like my Firefox is named ‘Gran Paradiso’. Managing so many Web-2.0 accounts can’t get easier than this over a browser!

I’m too engrossed with Nokia’s Qt all the while that I was thinking of QPainter transforms even while giving my university exams. I guess its my fault I spend too much time learning it for Fresco. And then there’s that innocent looking ghci command that takes away more of my time.

My blog’s being spammed random and massive these days, with a daily count touching up to 300 or above. Though Akismet takes good care of them all, I still feel something’s gone horribly wrong here. Or was it due to those old LP posts I had?

Python 2.6’s with statement (introduced in 2.5, though) is sort of fun but I think I’d have to see a lot more examples before I actually go about using it in my code. I’m used to try-except-finally and decorator syntax more than this, though it *does* look a lot neater where appropriate.

I think I’ve hit a block again. So that’s it for this <p>tag</p>!

About 37 episodes long, I don’t quite recall who-and-how many of them recommended me this series, it was worth one watch.

The Death Note

Series starts off with our main character, Light, picking up a supernatural note book titled ‘Death Note’ and he discovers that you can actually wish death upon anyone by writing names in it. Also comes free with the notebook is its original owner, a Death God from some other realm, who possesses the humans owning the death note.

Light, being an exceptional thinker, kills all criminals he deems fit to be a curse to the society. That is his way of justice. Of course, the law doesn’t like this nor know who he is, and there begins our story of mystery, suspense and intellect, as a detective called just ‘L’, investigates.

The series goes very good till the 16th episode. This is where the main character loses ownership of his notebook for the first time and all his memory is erased. He then partners with ‘L’ and they begin to hunt the new killer, since the ownership had been transferred. This, till the death of ‘L’ was pretty boring and very predictable. And they must have atleast ended the series there.

The remaining part is about two more detectives coming in to fill in as ‘L’ and they vow to avenge his death. And as it would be with evil, the good always wins. And as with many mystery filled series’ in the world, not all mysteries are solved or explained in the end. Savvy, Potter?

But overall, it was quite enjoyable, not having much of science-fiction induced atomic-explosions or world-domination robots that I have otherwise seen in these style of cartoons.

I’d rate the entire series as 3/5. Good story, slightly bad ending. A movie is on the way as well.

Official Site | Wikipedia Entry

Ayman Hourieh's Book

I’m mainly looking at Django to build a custom CMS (Reinventing the wheel, blah blah) to serve some needs of mine. And also possibly, a replacement to this blog here. WordPress is lovely but having something written from scratch by yourself is a different level of satisfaction altogether. Plus, I got lots of free time coming up.

I’ve never written so much of HTML before in my life, and its pretty fun writing the tags in the Template files of my django project. Till this my thought on web development was plainly - boring.

Since the book is rather old now, compared to the amount of Django improvements that followed it, there is one small change to the registration/login.html file example provided in the book. Instead of the code {% if form.has_errors %} it must simply be {% if form.errors %} if you are using any recent version of Django.

Django Website | Documentation

Also am working on adding several language options to a much-more pretty Tinge theme (For gedit / gtksourceview 2). You can expect the new version to it soon, with more pretty colors. Rich colored yet simple syntax highlighting is bliss!

Why do they do this?

Of course, Somalia would need more focus first. That country badly needs prosperity if it is to have any citizens left over the next few years. The plight of these countries sometimes makes me think colonialism is not bad at all. War, poverty, hunger, gah.

Anyways, my semester exams are nearing and here are the announced dates for B.Tech IT (The course I am in)

Anna University Timetable for U.G. (B.Tech IT) 5th semester

• 06/11/08 - Telecommunication Systems
• 10/11/08 - Database Management Systems [DBMS]
• 13/11/08 - Object Oriented Analysis and Design [OOAD]
• 17/11/08 - Operating Systems [OS]
• 20/11/08 - Computer Networks
• 24/11/08 - Environmental Science and Engineering [EVS]

The resulting pattern is oddly nice, 3-2-3-2-3 day gaps.

I’ve been busy being lazy lately, and very lazy indeed. Though I managed to finish up my lab work and other things, I’ve not written down even a small function for self’s sake. While resolving that now, I’ve also moved from Gentoo to ArchLinux having learnt enough and wanting a functional distro now rather than a testing one.

Arch is very fast at installing things, too fast to even compare it with something! But I could be wrong, having not used any other distro for like 8 months now. But comparing to how apt, yum and smart had behaved on my system earlier, pacman is the creamy layer on the cake!

I need to do some serious studying on system calls and the memory management parts of Operating Systems, else this semester would seem a total waste for me. Telecommunication Systems didn’t turn out to be bad at all, its very interesting, being application-oriented. OOAD and DBMS passed by without notice since they are more necessities to learn than something you can ‘try and experiment’ with. Networks has me in a puzzle with so many header formats, but it was great to finally learn something in that field. I’ve got to implement programs to understand the standards more, which I haven’t till date. The EVS class ender with ‘An Inconvinient Truth’ being played was a fantastic way. That pretty much sums up my current semester. The semester where I literally fell asleep in class twice.

Now onto implementing some system calls in C, for the OS lab examinations.

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Though am not totally addicted to it, its good to post short thoughts or replies at Twitter. I still find the place a bit weird to browse through but I’m beginning to get a hang of it, unfortunately not while I’m mobile. I think that’s the best point of Twitter, a scribble pad to post upon as you travel.

Twitter - Cause birds "tweet"?

I’ve had many nice ideas, thoughts and such while travelling but never have I cultivated the so-said good habit of carrying around a small notebook to scribble them upon. I find that quite odd to do, non-wash-proof kind of odd. Twitter, however, with the advance of the mobile devices into every man’s pockets, promises to help cultivating the same habit in a digital way. I need to setup the texting feature and give it a spin, and also try some gprs methods while am at it.

On my desktop I use Ping.fm for “tweeting”, as they like to call it, and I use it along with Bitlbee. Nice integration into one single irssi IRC interface. Ok I got a bit off the topic there, admitted. I’m turning quite the jargon guy here I notice, but I can’t really help changing that back, but yes I can dumb stuff down a bit maybe.

So, more tiny updates at my Twitter account - QwertyManiac

Heroes - Season 3 - Villains

Hope what they promised us, that the villains shown in there would be far worse than even Sylar, is really true. Atleast the first episode spoiler pointed a little bit in that direction, but not many new characters were revealed in it.

And the promo poster looks awesome, to add pretty redundantly.

Previously Meanwile, on Lost, Locke’s death has smashed all the left-over interest I had left by the third season. The moving of the island was a nice thing to see though, and so was Benjamin’s departure. Lost has some good music in it at times. I wouldn’t be watching this show anymore though, am done with the madness it keeps on adding in. Yes I’ve been saying this every season from the second but this time I just won’t!

The other shows I used to watch (Aliens in America, Bionic Woman) have both gone out of production and have not been taken up for another season. That’s just great, both were good shows!

First off, music.

3 Doors Down

3 Doors Down

This band is pure awesomeness, rock awesomeness specifically!

Though their latest self-titled album had released a few months ago, I only got them this week and every track on it is splendid and not even one makes me skip to the next! The only other album that I’ve enjoyed so much would be Flipsyde’s We The People. Here’s their Last.fm page if you are interested in trying them out.

However, there is always a favorite no matter how much you like all the tracks on an album and mine were It’s Not My Time and She Don’t Want The World.

Their older album, Away from the Sun was also good, with great tracks like When I’m Gone and Here Without You. Nice music!

Didn’t like the even-older album The Better Life though.

Off to Programming.

Ruby

Ruby Programming Language

I messed around with Ruby a few days. It’s brilliant, and nearly as easy as Python is. But it didn’t fit me so well that I’d shift from Python to it. My prime reason to try it was for seeing how good Ruby On Rails development could be, my interest being sparked by the rave reviews its been getting. It sure is good, web-dev stuff but I’ll go ahead with Django finally.

But doing things in Ruby is sorta easier than in Python. Sort of. But I haven’t poked around much to be sure if it wins over Python or not. Ruby is definitely more Object-Oriented than Python, with every darn thing being an object. With a good editor, ruby files look great and are easy to read as well. Might explore more with it at Project Euler perhaps.

Now for some more KDE4 mixup.

KDE’s Dolphin is a boon for external-storage device users with its neat split screen feature and not to mention the tabbing power. I’d say this is overkill, giving both! And if that were not enough, there’s a button

KDE's Dolphin File Manager

that would launch the terminal below the window in another splitter pane. This power feels good to handle, too good. Ironically for me, its philosophy page says otherwise. Ark, the KDE’s default archive-extract/create program is just not good. It fails at basic tasks and stalls while extracting from split RAR files, but thanks to it am more comfortable with the unrar and tar command line programs now.

Am building Amarok 2 (Alpha 2 - 1.86) as I type this now. Will write about it in a later post, if I manage to get it built and running properly. KTouch is another nice application, for improving your touch-typing skills and am addicted to KBattleShip and KHangMan in my free time, for some educative-arcade fun.

Finally, about my life. (Hey who said all above is for people with no life?!)

Not much is happening at college except for some mild interest of mine rising up for IBM’s TGMC 2008, but I most probably won’t be doing any worthwhile thing in it, I don’t like being forced into Java and accompanying technologies from IBM. This Java thing can form another post actually, haha.

Implementing those OS Job-scheduling algorithms in a preemptive manner in C is a nice practice though the syllabus doesn’t clearly require it. And what is this whole Rational Rose thing, I never get it why designing the construct of a software project is easier this way than hard-coding it down from scratch, I find it too confusing drawing diagrams!

Saw some old Sonic the Hedgehog videos thats been doing some spikes lately, and also saw Hancock and The Dark Knight off which the latter was the most awesome movie ever! Its IMDb rating is justified IMO, with Heath Ledger’s death clearly contributing a lot to it.

Thats all for this syscall of random. *Urgh, goes back to the OS Concepts book*