This is one of the best racing videos I have seen lately. It was the final race of the ALMS 2009 season:
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Split your desktop in Windows XP
For my Windows Operating system needs (Ubuntu is my primary OS), I am still stuck with using Windows XP. So recently when I saw a Windows 7 ad showing how to split your desktop in half (vertically) I wanted to find out if Windows XP had that option. To be honest, I was looking to find an application that would enable that feature. Turns out, XP did have this feature out of the box. Here is a link to an article/blog post that shows how this can be achieved in XP: Split desktop in Windows XP
I guess I will be sticking with good ole XP for some time.
I guess I will be sticking with good ole XP for some time.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Interesting Email
So I got this email this morning. Too good to be true! =)
------email begin-----------------
I like your profile as well as your pics which seem to express you really well.
As for me, I am a hard working, warm, outgoing & optimistic girl
looking for the special someone to put on a pedestal and just have fun together.
I am a little adventurous and ambitious as well.
I would enjoy chatting some on here if you are up for it, and I hope to connect in
a special way. If you will, tell me a little about you. What was your best first date?
Have you ever been in love? Please let me know if you'd like to talk further. My e-mail
xxxxxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com . Write me .
Regards,
Kiss
------email end-------------------
I did some searching online and found another person who also got the exact same email today. It's clearly some sort of spam. I wonder what they are up to!
------email begin-----------------
I like your profile as well as your pics which seem to express you really well.
As for me, I am a hard working, warm, outgoing & optimistic girl
looking for the special someone to put on a pedestal and just have fun together.
I am a little adventurous and ambitious as well.
I would enjoy chatting some on here if you are up for it, and I hope to connect in
a special way. If you will, tell me a little about you. What was your best first date?
Have you ever been in love? Please let me know if you'd like to talk further. My e-mail
xxxxxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com . Write me .
Regards,
Kiss
------email end-------------------
I did some searching online and found another person who also got the exact same email today. It's clearly some sort of spam. I wonder what they are up to!
Monday, August 24, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Google Voice SMS pushed to Iphone using Prowl + Python
I have been using Google voice for sometime. I am having a hard time figuring out what it could be useful for however. I like their SMS feature and use it to shed load from my phone company's messaging plan. There is a major drawback to using Google Voice for SMS though. Google does not allow you to send email or other notifications when you receive an SMS. So you will have to visit Google Voice using your browser to check for SMS messages.
This is probably something Google left out so it does not anger phone companies. I can see how people will switch to using Google SMS if email notifications were sent when messages are received. It will literally provide you with a free unlimited texting plan with your own phone number.
Mikeyk came up with a hack to create a Google Voice client to send push notification to Iphones. In short, you will need to have a computer connected to the internet running a python script which will send push notifications to your prowl client. In this case, the prowl client will be installed on your Iphone.
Mikeyk's instructions are fairly self explanatory in setting up his client. I recently did this and it took less than 20 mins to set it up correctly. Having a little bit of python experience definitely helps.
A little more detail about my setup: I installed the scripts on my diminutive Ubuntu 9.04 workstation. I already had python installed so I just added the three dependency package that Mikeyk mentions. One thing that was a little interesting to me was that I didn't quite know how to download the scripts from github! Silly me! I later noticed that github provides a download option which basically creates a zip or tar of all the files the source author had published. So make sure to download Mikeyk's code from github unless you like copy pasting and indenting Python code.
I did run into a few small issues trying to run the code. When I run the script, it keeps telling me that it can't read the cfile (credential file) but it does extract the values. So no worries there. It was clearly getting some sort of exception trying to read the credential file and was printing out the general exception message. I was being lazy and didn't delve much into it.
The other issue I ran into was, python kept telling me it needed a float type variable to store the sleep time (loop interval) which I had set to 60. Again being lazy I just hard coded the value 60 into the script, as shown below which took care of it. To my defense, I had to meet my friends for lunch and I was running late!
Excerpt from mikeyk's code - these are the last three lines from the prowlgooglevoice.py script:
while True:
# uncomment below for debugging
# print 'sleeping...'
gv.check()
sleep(sleep_time)
Python was complaining about the sleep_time variable, so I replaced it with the value 60, lame!
It seems to working great for me so far. I received close to 20 texts through Google voice yesterday and got notification for all of them.
I can almost say good bye to my ATT messaging plan (which I won't) if I wanted to and just use Google Voice for SMS. Give it a try if you send a lot of text messages. It's not very convenient but does work for many. I am hoping that Fring will come up with a plugin to Google Voice which will make it easy to send SMS messages from smart phones.
Cheers!
Credits: Mikeyk
This is probably something Google left out so it does not anger phone companies. I can see how people will switch to using Google SMS if email notifications were sent when messages are received. It will literally provide you with a free unlimited texting plan with your own phone number.
Mikeyk came up with a hack to create a Google Voice client to send push notification to Iphones. In short, you will need to have a computer connected to the internet running a python script which will send push notifications to your prowl client. In this case, the prowl client will be installed on your Iphone.
Mikeyk's instructions are fairly self explanatory in setting up his client. I recently did this and it took less than 20 mins to set it up correctly. Having a little bit of python experience definitely helps.
A little more detail about my setup: I installed the scripts on my diminutive Ubuntu 9.04 workstation. I already had python installed so I just added the three dependency package that Mikeyk mentions. One thing that was a little interesting to me was that I didn't quite know how to download the scripts from github! Silly me! I later noticed that github provides a download option which basically creates a zip or tar of all the files the source author had published. So make sure to download Mikeyk's code from github unless you like copy pasting and indenting Python code.
I did run into a few small issues trying to run the code. When I run the script, it keeps telling me that it can't read the cfile (credential file) but it does extract the values. So no worries there. It was clearly getting some sort of exception trying to read the credential file and was printing out the general exception message. I was being lazy and didn't delve much into it.
The other issue I ran into was, python kept telling me it needed a float type variable to store the sleep time (loop interval) which I had set to 60. Again being lazy I just hard coded the value 60 into the script, as shown below which took care of it. To my defense, I had to meet my friends for lunch and I was running late!
Excerpt from mikeyk's code - these are the last three lines from the prowlgooglevoice.py script:
while True:
# uncomment below for debugging
# print 'sleeping...'
gv.check()
sleep(sleep_time)
Python was complaining about the sleep_time variable, so I replaced it with the value 60, lame!
It seems to working great for me so far. I received close to 20 texts through Google voice yesterday and got notification for all of them.
I can almost say good bye to my ATT messaging plan (which I won't) if I wanted to and just use Google Voice for SMS. Give it a try if you send a lot of text messages. It's not very convenient but does work for many. I am hoping that Fring will come up with a plugin to Google Voice which will make it easy to send SMS messages from smart phones.
Cheers!
Credits: Mikeyk
"District 9" - the movie
I went and watched "District 9" yesterday. Without giving away details of the movie, I have to say, it's one of the most genuine movie plot's I have seen in the last couple of years. The trailer for the movie, basically gave nothing away. Watching the trailer I thought this would be just another Sci-fi movie based on alien invasion. I, however, did not read the plot synopsis before going to the movie so it was a total surprise for me.
I suspect, the plot of the movie was taken from common human suffering and aliens were used as a metaphor. Many of the sufferings depicted in the movie, are experienced by humans on a day to day basis. After you watch the movie, you will be able to relate to some recent events in Darfur, Sudan and other places around the globe.
I was exceptionally impressed with the lighting, mood and the general display of direction. Director of photography did an excellent job in creating the correct mood for the plots. I was engulfed in anticipation to see what would happen next. At no point during the movie, I could predict what to expect next. Even though the movie was about 2 hours, I didn't feel that any of the scenes were stretched to fill in time.
The movie was based entirely on Neill and Terri Tatchell's screenplay. Neill had shot a 6 minute long mini film in 2005, which had similar theme to it.
Wikipedia link to Alive in Joberg by Neill.
In conclusion, kudos to Neill Blomkamp for an excellent direction. It's a great movie and I recommend watching it =) .
I suspect, the plot of the movie was taken from common human suffering and aliens were used as a metaphor. Many of the sufferings depicted in the movie, are experienced by humans on a day to day basis. After you watch the movie, you will be able to relate to some recent events in Darfur, Sudan and other places around the globe.
I was exceptionally impressed with the lighting, mood and the general display of direction. Director of photography did an excellent job in creating the correct mood for the plots. I was engulfed in anticipation to see what would happen next. At no point during the movie, I could predict what to expect next. Even though the movie was about 2 hours, I didn't feel that any of the scenes were stretched to fill in time.
The movie was based entirely on Neill and Terri Tatchell's screenplay. Neill had shot a 6 minute long mini film in 2005, which had similar theme to it.
Wikipedia link to Alive in Joberg by Neill.
In conclusion, kudos to Neill Blomkamp for an excellent direction. It's a great movie and I recommend watching it =) .
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