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This is indeed rediculous. Not only that, but i also hate it when services require you to sign up with a username & password even if you just want to try that service for a brief time. Too many user accounts online, ultimately you run out of memorizable unique passwords, and sharing passwords or using a service-dependent naming scheme is not wise. Check out this website for a neat tool btw.

In these days (and specially if the whole “cloud-as-a-service” model is to become successful, oh and it will) we should have a concept of a single global account, or a managable federation of accounts that form a global account, that would allow people to “turn on” services on the web to try them out (or use them), and then “turn them off”.

I know about openID, but having a single account (be it from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo) to log in to many places is too “big-brothery” for my taste. Plus, not all online services allow users to use openID, even though they really should.

It is bollocks! Bollocks I tells ya! *shaking his fist*

Is it just me, or do you sometimes feel like you just love your computer/operating system ?

I have encountered this annoying bug recently on my Linux box. I have a laptop with a widescreen monitor that gives me a 1440×900 desktop area (not much i know). I’ve noticed that with any desktop manager except for KDE3 i would encounter a problem whereby the screen would be displayed at the correct resolution but windows will not maximize to the full screen but instead to an area that is 1024×768 in size at the top left corner of the screen.

The weird thing is that the display driver is configured correctly, and i can see the full screen area and can move the mouse and windows around .. it is just the full-screen on flash and maximizing windows that does not work as needed. Another thing that added to the weirdness is that things are working perfectly fine on KDE3.

Anyway, i found the easy fix to this problem. The following file
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager contains some configuration for your display manager. The following two lines demonstrate the problem:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA="auto"
DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto="1024x768_60 64.11 1024 1080 1184 1344 768 769 772 795 -HSync +Vsync"


It says in the comments that this is supposed to help laptop devices somehow .. i didn’t totally understand that part. However, some online searches revealed some advice to comment out one of the lines. What i personally did to fix this problem is modify the first line above so that it won’t refer to the configuration on the second line. So i have something like this:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA=""

I am posting this here so that it could help somebody some day … when i was facing this problem i did a ton of search and found nothing. So, if your screen is displaying a small area (1024×768) in the top left corner of your monitor, this might be the fix.

This all started a couple of months ago. Our little corner of the blogosphere was in its periodic slump, and i thought to spice things up. Being the mischievous kid that i am, i decided to write a little applet to break Qwaider’s famed and/or touted spam protection mechanism. (Un)fortunately, i got extremely busy immediately thereafter, and dropped the idea.
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I LOVE desktop wallpapers. Specially colorful, vibrant ones. KDE (wikipedia) and GNOME (wikipedia) usually never fail at providing a good selection of default wallpapers. Recently, the Oxygen Team unveiled the wallpaper collection for KDE 4.0 (more on KDE 4 here). The wallpapers were breathtakingly beautiful. You can see or even download the entire collection here.