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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.

I believe that a user-friendly and reliable electronic replacement for paper is necessary. Take newspapers for example, they are daily consumed and wasted. Many people just take a quick glance at them and then just throw them away, big paper waste! In addition to that, since daily newspapers are targeted for the mass public audience, they have to include many different sections in each issue that do not necessarily fit the interests of every single reader. But you get these sections anyway because they do not know your individual interests. More paper waste!

An electronic version will not only save trees and be cheaper in the long run, but it will come with many added benefits. Easy archiving and quick searching is among the more obvious benefits. However, using PCs exclusively for this task is not an appropriate solution. While many of us spends alot of time infront of their laptop/desktop screens, most people are used to reading books and newspapers in a different manner. Reading habits that were formed and inherited through centuries of reliance on handwritten and printed press are not easily replaceable with the ~30 year-old invention that is the personal computer.

Lots of research has been done on producing electronic papers. Some companies have tried that before, but i really did not see anything usable to hit the mass market through big retailers. Until now. Amazon introduced an eBook reading device that is more of an ePaper to me. Hopefully this new product (named Amazon Kindle) will be better than its predecessors. The cool thing about Kindle in my opinion is its integration with the Amazon store. It is integrated with their Amazon store such that if you buy a book, you can have it as an eBook through Kindle. Amazon already scans every single book they sell in order to gather these statistics (regarding topics and most prominent words/places), so i assume they will be able to deliver all books in an electronic version (even those ones that are not currently available as eBooks). At least hopefully.

Although i am not affiliated with Amazon, and i have not tried Amazon Kindle for my self, i am deeply interested in this topic, and wish there would be a good solution soon.

For some reason, i could not find this information easily at one location, so i am dumping it here.

Running Ubuntu 7.10, i found myself re-installing ruby and rails on my system. Although prepackaged solutions containing both ruby and ruby on rails, i usually prefer to install ruby, and RubyGem, through my system’s package manager, and have gem freshly grab and install rails and all its dependencies.

So, here it goes:

1. sudo -s … (this sends you to an admin mode so that you do not have to type sudo over and over again … do not abuse it and exit as soon as you are done)
2. apt-get install ruby rubygem … should take care of installing ruby and rubygem on your system. (Debian system assumed, On SuSE Yast does that as well).
3. gem install rails --include-dependencies … oh oh … Gem::GemNotFoundException … no rails !!!
4. gem env … should show you your “GEM PATH” (in my case /var/lib/gems/1.8). In that directory, there is a source_cache file.
5. rm /var/lib/gems/1.8/source_cache …. Delete that file!
6. gem update … update your gem cache file
7. gem install rails --include-dependencies … yaay it works
8. exit … you must do this … do not abuse your root priviliges

This is it! The problem is that the stupid source_cache file is out of date and it needs to be resynchronized.

For some reason, after the successful installation i could not run the commands rails and rake directly from the console (without specifying the full path). This was because they were not added to /usr/bin. I didn’t bother googling for this because the solution is simple. If that happens with you, simply do the following:

1. cd /usr/bin … this directory contains links to all your executable … do not mess with it … baby pandas will die if you do.
2. sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails … this creates a symbolic link to rails … notice that the bin directory is in gem path specified by gem env.
3. sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rake … do the same for rake … it is useful.

This is it … i hope somebody finds it useful.

I was going to rant about how it is the18th of October already (the scheduled release date for Ubuntu 7.10), and yet the banner on the main page of ubuntu.com still claims that the new release is coming soon, and no news brief is available in their little news section … even though their little counter does proclaim that there are 0 days to go for the new release, and one can actually follow the download links to download the new 7.10 (not RC) iso. I even got a screenshot to prove this.

However, as i refreshed the main page one last time … i discovered that they have updated their site in celebration of the new release. They managed to sneak in that update while i was writing this post!

Touché Ubuntu …. Touché!
Oh well … i am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have scheduled the release for 12:00 GMT. I guess i will be downloading 7.10 now and installing it.

From Sabbah’s Blog:

OK, it’s Eid holiday, so this is not politics-related, but it is a cool way to find out if you are a right-brain or left-brain dominant. Look at the dancer and decide which way she’s spinning.

Focus!

If you think she’s going clockwise, you’re apparently right-brain dominant (imaginative, philosophical, touchy-feely, impetuous); if you see her going counter-clockwise, you’re left-brain dominant (logical, practical, detail-oriented, safe).

The publisher claimed that “most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it,” but I see it only clockwise!