Category Archives: The Geek In Me

Clockwise or Counterclockwise ?

Posted by za3tar on October 15, 2007 2 comments

From Sabbah’s Blog:

Clockwise or Counterclockwise ?

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!

Stupidity

Posted by za3tar on October 10, 2007 6 comments

Geekiness Warning: This post might be inappropriate for normal human consumption.

After 3 days of downloading the dvd via the slow peer-to-peer network (since the direct link was not working yet), burning the iso onto a couple of DVDs (since the first copy was erroneous), performing three formats and repartitioning operations, and moving 30 Gigs of data back and forth, openSuSE 10.3 has finally installed successfully on my machine …. “successfully” here means “with some quirks”.

SuSE ships with a bunch of desktop environments, of which i mainly use KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately it does not ship with what i really would be using …. fluxbox … but i guess i can download that later.

Well …. the thing to know about openSuSE is that it is an awesome .. awesome distribution …… but it comes with a few quirks (or at least that has been my experience with it). This time around, GNOME had two problems. First, the panel and the dialog boxes would assume that my screen resolution is only 1024×768 and would sit in the upper left hand corner of my screen. To add to the oddity, YaST (the system configuration über-tool) correctly detects my normal resolution, and so does KDE and the rest of my system (except KDE4 preview). Not only that, even in this faulty GNOME, the background extends to cover the rest of my screen, and i can actually use the rest of the screen correctly. It is just that it thinks that its resolution is 1024×768 (and it displays that in its control center), but it also acknowledges that the screen is actually bigger !!! So, dialog boxes are centered in the upper left corner of my screen …etc.

In addition to that, the right click menu does not work on the desktop, and i can not see any desktop icons (not that i actually want to). Even worse …. i could not browse the filesystem without using the command line shell !!!

What could that problem be … what could that problem be ?!! …. Oh wait …. apparently i have accidentally installed GNOME without (guess what) … nautilus !!! For god’s sake, how could the system allow me to install GNOME without nautilus !! .. I installed nautilus and i can now use my desktop and browse my filesystem ….. (i wonder why :-) ).

Unfortunately the 1024×768 dilemma was still a problem. I later on found out that it is somehow kdm‘s fault … it seems as if it was not passing the correct parameters or something .. i don’t know. But switching to gdm seems to have fixed the problem. Now all is left is to see why is NetworkManager giving me a hard time recently .. but other than that everything seems great (specially that 1-click install spiel).

Eh …. anyway, i hate formatting and setting up systems (last time i did that was 15 months ago). I have to get back to my Rails project. Unfortunately i have deleted the development database and all the dummy data, but luckily i have the entire db schema in migration files (which is one of the very nifty things about Ruby on Rails).

Giver – Easy File Sharing

Posted by za3tar on October 8, 2007 2 comments

From the openSuSE news blog:

Another tremendously helpful application that came as the result of Hack Week was a nice new application called Giver. This little application docks into your system tray, and when you open it up you can see a list of all the users on your network who have Giver open:

Giver - Easy File Sharing

To transfer images, files or even folders, all you have to do is drag it onto the person you want to send it to. They will get a small dialog asking them to accept or decline receiving the file:

Giver - Notification

..and then if they accept, it’ll pop up right onto their desktop. Simple!

Giver requires absolutely no extra configuration to get it up-and-running. All you have to do is start the application on the computers that you want to be able to send stuff to, and it will do all the rest. Another nice touch is that you also have the option of adding pictures to your user entry, as is displayed above.

Here is a great video demonstration as well: