Google Wave in 2 Minutes

And like the video says, “if I could get an invite, it would be great!” Anyone?

[via: Lifehacker]

Open Source on the Desktop

The desktop wars have been heating up since the arrival of ubuntu on the scene. There’s been many articles stating that Linux has arrived on the desktop and so on. But last month while at an open source conference I realized that aside from ideological battles, balance is what’s needed. My friend had a laptop running the latest version of Ubuntu, he quickly ran into trouble when doing something as simple as a hibernate and ended up having to reinstall the OS to fix the problem.

So what do I want to say here? Well, to me where open source makes sense is in the enterprise. A place where the cost of software is minimized and the benefits of open source are quickly realized. But on the desktop, where I don’t have time to deal with unsupported hardware or small issues it makes no difference! So at this moment, the deciding factor should be what runs what I need to run painlessly and seamlessly…

VIA Rail Website Failures

Someone at VIA didn’t think that introducing a 60% off sale would slow the site to a crawl. Since yesterday, their stunt (thanks to the strike) has made their site and all the services they offer through it inaccessible to the public.

I’ve been on their site for 2 days trying to get a ticket. During the day it’s non-responsive and even past midnight the site doesn’t function. I’m not sure if they thought about this rise in traffic. But in today’s world, this kind of weak infrastructure really looks bad on the organization, especially the guys greasing the wheels in the server room!

Here’s a thought guys: before you put out a call for a going-out-of-business sale, buy some bandwidth!

I Fought Windows And I Won!

Yesterday I went to my home theatre pc to be greeted by an endless barrage of error messages. In my efforts to fix the problem, I forgot to take a snapshot of the error, but suffice it to say that it was some odd error about svchost.exe being unable to write to a memory location.
I tried a reboot hoping it would fix the problem, but after the system came I was bombarded by pop-ups! Good old adware! It was years since I was a victim of one of those…

I saw this chance to put one of my diabolical plans into action: Install Linux.

So, I didn’t even try fixing the computer. I quickly backed up my important files, and knowing my media files were safe in a separate drive popped in the latest copy of Linux in – which happened to be Kubuntu 8.04. The install took no more than 45 minutes, and right away the difficult stuff was over with and the Logitech diNovo Edge was detected with all buttons working!

As we speak the system is updating itself to the current version of Kubuntu: version 8.10 and soon I will be able to install MythTV and have a proper HTPC.

Man, I remember the days when I had to scour the internet boards to get info on get X working on my old 90MHz Pentium. Or when a simple install was a frustrating experience.

I just like to say great success!.

My Surfing Habits

Yesterday I was feeling a bit unproductive, and a bit guilty for not doing more during the work day. So I looked at my trends on Google Reader and realized I could improve by looking at its data.

So as the data above shows my websurfing is at its highest on Mondays after coming back from the weekend. This statistic makes sense to me, considering I don’t read any news over the weekends and I try to catch up on the news. But on the other hand, I think the opposite would be better for my productivity. Where I work getting the bulk of work done on Mondays and Tuesday is more beneficial and leaves me the rest of the week to debug and troubleshoot.

This graph is a bit embarassing and I could do a lot to fix my work habits just based on this. Here’s what I see along with my excueses in italic:

• I do most of my browsing during the work day. I guess it’s a form of a mental break at work!
• At 9am and 10am I do a lot of websurfing, along with 12pm (during lunch) and at the end of the day. I just start my day a little slowly that’s all!
• My surfing remains high during the work day and is never that high in the evenings. I prefer to chill at home!

So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Can you interpret these graphs?