Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

Update: Yahoo mail with new layout renders this obsolete. The newer Yahoo mail beta (neo) really is a faster UI. However, The large header with room that is unused is a let down.  This one time, it appears that, Yahoo did not take into account the importance of real estate on top of the page, hitting User Experience. Reduce Yahoo mail neo header space for more room by installing SarathOnline's " Spacier Yahoo Neo " userscript below Install YNeo UserScript by SarathOnline Before: After: The user script is fairly simple. You could install it in Firefox as a Greasemonkey script. Or install it on chrome directly. If you are new to UserScripts, follow these instructions to install them on your browser. Be assured, it has no malicious code. All it does is install a correcting css to the document. The css file is located here .  And the script itself. (function(){ var d=document,sid='__sar__yneo', fn='http://www.sarathonline.com/dyn/sfs/userscripts/y...

Want to install a userscript on your browser. Go no further. Here are simple instructions and caveats for installing Userscripts in Firefox, Opera, Chrome. If you want to author your own scripts, here is a beginner's tutorial .

If you administer a bunch of identical Linux boxes, and have to run same commands on all of them, say like manual deployments, restarts etc. – you probably log in to each of them manually and run commands. Or at best you would have a script looping through them and executing an ssh on each. However there are times when you need to be interactive on each box, yet run the same and/or series of commands. In those cases, cssh on Unix (with X) and PuTTYCS on windows are a godsend for any administrator.

Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that Ubuntu will do away with GNOME, The good old, desktop environment – as the default. Making Unity, (which is the current default for netbook version) THE default. The switch was barely absorbed by ubunters and is now followed by another announcement of replacing the X.org server with a newer, minimalist X server - Wayland. Wayland is still in alpha. So, for the pessimists this announcement and the switch is a little cavalier. For the optimists, this is a huge step towards a better GUI. To put simply, Wayland is different from X.org in that it (Wayland) leverages the newer kernel's ability to do much of the work X.org's complex layers do. It natively uses 2D and 3D support from OpenGL.Technically – Quoting Wikipedia Wayland uses existing technologies in the Linux kernel such as the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), kernel mode-setting (KMS) and the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) batchbuffer in order to provide a minimal display ser...

Firefox Panorama has a unique way of organizing tabs into groups so that you can work with a loot of tabs (really lot of them). While the Side Tabs experiment is totally disjunct concept, The effective use of screen real estate is key measure in both. With just screen real estate , its still Panorama that wins the battle. Side Tabs seems turned out to be a sore experiment. For one thing, it may be designed only for netbooks. There are other considerations for developers perspective. Many a time, the height is considered variable. The width, however is counted to be under standard 800, 1024, 1600 etc, those of the video resolutions. Many fixed layouts are drafted to work on these width numbers. Free flows however do not have this issue. Now, having Side tabs in picture, it creates two sets of fixed layouts to work with. Firefox Panorama not only tackles width issue in question, also provides a organising benefit. So Which one is it? Most probably Chrome will eventually mimic Pan...

Day 2 missed James. But the tech series remained just as educating as Day1's. I dug deep into the JEE6 foundation laid by Yesterday's  sessions. Today: I Jugged in knoweldge from Java Persistence API 2 Overview of Servlet 3.0 ZFS (a Whole lot on ) Context and Dependency Injection in JavaEE 6 Java EE 6 Tools Show: NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ I have to bold all of them, but the ZFS really instigated me to push OpenSolaris into my dev space. Look forward to some OpenSolaris entries coming.

Finally, I been to Sun Techdays – here in Hyderabad. Now I can say.. "Been there".. done that!.. But it was an amazing experience, with more than 1500 people in HICC, Novatel, Hyderabad. Best of all, I was able to see James Gosling. Live. In Person. They were very exhaustively educating 9 hrs. Although I was keen on Enterprise Track, I was able to sneak some time in JavaFX and Solaris Technologies too. I stuck myself in: Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3: Paving the path for the future. Designing and Implementing Secure RESTful Web Services. Hands On Lab: Build End-to-End RIA Applications Using JavaFX, Dojo, REST, JPA, and MySQL. Glassfish and JEE 6 Features (Stall at the exhibition). OpenSolaris Installation desk (Okay, I got OpenSolaris on  my vbox). Enterprise Java Persistence with Oracle TopLink. OSGi & Java EE in GlassFish. I loved ArunGupta 's talks about Glassfish. Especially, the OSGi one. Overall, its was a fascinating experience. I will loo...

Search Engine Providers , you know the ones you see on the browser - next to the address bar.These have become more and more popular with new age browsers getting open to user search. Its easy to create your own Provider. A real application for this would be like, say, your own site for search. Or putting all your favorite forums in the search bar. This example uses a Google custom search engine(CSE).   A Google CSE (create your own here ), can be used to include exclude content and show results accordingly. Like all other Google products, a lot of customizations can be done on this. Most of the sites that use Google Site Search can be considered a candidate CSE. Once you have your own CSE, To create a search provider, You will need a place to host one xml file and one HTML file. The xml file is a OpenSearch descriptor. Its like an installation file for your browser. <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"> <ShortName>SarathOnli...

I am back from a big vacation. I found this decent presentation for Cloud Computing from sun. This gives a very basic but good explanation about how cloud benefits Enterprise. The presentation can also be downloaded as a mp4 here src: https://slx.sun.com/node/1179275657

I just posted a tease in last afternoon and late in evening SNF game ads has this.. Great.. Now Verizon (and Android - Droid V's first gPhone?) are getting on an offensive.. Seriously.. Simmer this again " Everything iDont " (classic slick Black text on pure white with a drop shadow, Cheesy music running in the background "Its magic.. " : See where it is going?). Snap, fuses out to a powerful Transformers like backdrop with " DROIDDOES ". Yes It does. And this is going into OT! Deep into Festive season.. Am I going to get one? Fingers crossed :)

Meld is a popular diff viewer in linux (gnome). It is extremely light weight. UI is very similar to WinDiff. Although it is not comprehensively robust yet, It is still a great help for people like me, handicapped to read huge diffs in command line. Git is awesome when it comes to managing version control, esp in command line. However, while committing, you would want to check what changes are going in. git gives git-diff for this purpose. Spitting out a (unified) diff format text for showing changes. But reading this could be cumbersome at times. To visually inspect git diff, you can use the latest version of meld. The version that comes with debian or ubuntu 1.1.5 lacks git support. You need to build the latest meld (I got 1.2.1) from source. Here is how you can do it. resolve dependencies: sudo apt-get install pyorbit pygtk gnome-python intltool Get the source from here (opens new window). Extract the archive. In the exploded directory, run make. It makes an executable mel...

Look What I found on my webware feed last night :D NullPointerException -Open Source!

I made some minor updates to the blog site over the weekend, it now covers a wider screen area. Wider Sider bar. And a very own Ajax Search Engine. More coming. To widen the layout, I not only had to change the width attributes of container and side bar, but also recreate newer top, bottom and shadow images using gimp and existing images. The Search bar uses google Custom Search Engine and Ajax Search API . Also there is an attempt to solve IE 6 png transparency fix via this jquery plugin . I havent tested it myself, but if someone has IE 6 or less, please let me know.

Yet another weekend, Yet another fix :).. Well a workaround, actually.. This has been a problem for a while. Ubuntu Intrepid has very annoying too fast key repeat rate. and the gnome-keyboard-properties ignores any setting changed. There were some workarounds proposed like xorg.conf . they dint work on my lappy. I also played around experiments, in vain . Miserably. But very well pointed out by Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto , You can set the repeat settings with kbdrate just add the following line in /etc/rc.local #/etc/rc.local kbdrate -r 25 -d 500 This should solve the quick repeats. If this fixes your issue, Please contribute at the bug in launchpad.

Side Stepping on my OSGi trail , I saw a few articles on the new Azure platform for Cloud computing from Microsoft! People claiming it to be up agains Amazon EC 2 and Google App Engine . Come on.. Having never used it, I cant speak for EC 2 but; App Engine and Azure? Where is the comparision. By Choosing Azure, I am basically TIED to Windows all the way! Just look at the long list of Auzure SDK Requirements: Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 Standard; Windows Vista Business; Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Home Premium; Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Ultimate; Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition   Required Software   Windows Vista SP1 (when installing on Windows Vista)  .NET Framework 3.5 SP1  IIS 7.0 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation)  Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008  Windows PowerShell (optional) O...

Big news, Android - the collaborative effort from Openhandset Alliance and Google to take mobiles to the next level - has been open sourced today. The code, 2Gigs in total size, is now available to anyone interested in its research and/or development. In another story, Sun meekly released Java 1.6.0_10 (dubbed - Consumer JRE) available to download . There is no confetti this time, I guess the management is all the more concerned with its share value. Hopefully, it will reduce the stress on the java *user* world. Change is good :)