za3tar

I am a Linux fan. A quick look at my site will tell you that. So naturally I was pleased when Google announced a new Linux distro (Google’s “Chrome OS”). It is good because it will hopefully encourage more OEMs to write better drivers for their hardware.

What I hated though is how some techies and all techy-wannabes had a spontaneous collective orgasm at the first sight of the news. I mean come on! I think some of the guys at TechCrunch had to go change their pants after they read the announcement. Heck, this guy at the “IT Portal” has already written 5 Reasons To Love Google Chrome OS and the product doesn’t even have a web page yet! I like how he explained “reason #3″:

Google has a blank canvas to work with and doesn’t need to rely on code that is 15 years old, nor does it have to deal with software compatibility issue

Oh really ? Somebody should tell that guy that Linux (what Chrome really is) was first written in 1991 and is thus 18 years old!

Finally, some common sense articles are popping up. I like this one (specially how he catches TechCrunch for calling an OS like Linux a mere “bag of drivers” .. anyone who knows anything about operating systems knows that is not true). This article is also nice.

There are reasonable predictions of what we can expect from Google Chrome OS, and I’ll try to talk more about this later.

P.S: I hate over-hyping. I REALLY REALLY HATE over-hyping. That is why I dislike Apple, they overhype everything, even basic features! In all fairness, Google didn’t overhype Chrome, but many of those “techies” did.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »