/DEV/ZERO

The stalk thunderbird worked fine, everything is in order and behaving quite nicely.
The only problem was to get it to run...

Hardy comes with libstdc++6 and thunderbird wanted libstdc++5.... not a big deal but just an 'apt-get install libstdc++5'. However i do wonder why mozilla is still distributing binaries based on older libstdc++5? or is it buggy???? or is hardy using a development library? or is this just the way things are in linux ... a chaos !!!

I love thunderbird.... its fast, lean and mean. I got extensions to do almost everything i need. Be it consolidating my bank statements or squashing the spam or managing imap folder. Hell it even comes with "gmail" as a new account option. IMAP is comfirtable only under thunderbird for some reason. And with lightening it completely replaces evolution.

But for some reason thunderbird+lightening on my latest hardy are quite broken the email part works as usual but the calendar screws up pretty bad.

Well now i am trying to download thunderbird+lightening+gdataprovider straight from mozilla, rather than from hardy repos ...
lets see if these work.

I am so dumb :D

When we setup apt-cacher in office, I switched my laptop sources.list to point to the cacher.
It worked perfectly fine. Until one day I tried to install something from home. Ofcourse it couldn't find the cacher server in my office.

But then what I did and kept doing for last one and half _years_ is that I created separate sources.list.home for home use... and kept manually switching between them by hand copying. And ofcourse every time I made the switch I had to do a lengthy fresh apt-get update (dumb dumb dumb.......)

Little did I know that all I had to do is append real repos at the bottom of the sources.list and apt will automatically fall back to it when the cacher one is not available.........

Sometimes i am just too afraid of the technology to trust that it will do the RightThing,(TM), probably remains from the windows era.....

Till now i didn't realise that drupal blog would strip off all the html formatting if i blogged from a external tool.

Then I found an option to set the default post filter to full html....

Testing dose this work now?

To set the default filter the path is

Administer->Site configuration->Input Filters

I came across this article "ELECTRICITY" MISCONCEPTIONS IN K-6 TEXTBOOKS - - -William J. Beaty

It reminded me of my  school days (7-8th standard), i had a long discussion about electricity with my father. Which led to realize that, a lot of things in my physics book were not really the way they appeared at first sight.
Especially i remember my great revelation about concept of elasticity.... and a fact that i determined on my own later that day (i am quite proud of that till this day) that a steal ball is actually _more_ elastic than rubber ball. A concept that many haven't grasped even with their phd's in place.

Worth a read if you want to know a thing or two about electricity. i am sure many of you will be surprised at how wrong you are when you call yourself educated :)

While i keep admiring how little i need to change in gnome especially Ubuntu from defaults to start getting productive. There are occasional times when i wish i had some flexibility. so that i can make my desktop look "cool" once in a while. At the most i can do is compiz cube and some gtk themes.... i sometimes miss the thousands of options kde gave :( but i miss them only couple of times not more, so far am still sticking to gnome.

Drupal really does make the default settings work well....

Example is the core module blogApi which now lets me blog from scribefire straight to my drupal blog, well atleast in theory, this is my first test.

I lost my mobile phone a, beautiful w810i, i am now starting my search again to  buy a new one.

Following were the lessons learnt/must have things....

1. Sony ericsson sucks at calendaring functions, especially the alarm for appointments and reminders. A settable tune and volume for those alarms is a _must_ in new phone.

2. Email and imap push is really convinient and is a must have.

3. New email alert is essential.

4. Imap ssl is needed for gmail (wich is my primary email provider even at work).

5. After last one i am not going to go for >6000 INR phone :( (i lose things....).

6. Good music and video playback is must(i am ok with just 3gp playback since i can convert my collection easily with linux|). But sony ericsson is hyped up and offers nothing special in that area against i thought previously.

7. Edge is a must have gprs sucks.

8. Bluetooth while ok is not a must, hardly used it except for transfering files to other mobiles, never with comp since usb was much faster.

Unfotunately there is just too much choice in the market... and by the time i digest the current situation which takes about couple of months the market has gone leaps ahead. So i will probably still wait it out for another 3-4 months and stick with my nokia 1100 (best phone ever which i part with only for lack of email/EDGE function). Unless i stumble upon a good find. (w200 came very close but the EDGE and same crappy calendar from sony).

I switched devslashzero site to drupal from joomla....

Few of the advantages

1. Easy configuration : even though at first sight joomla might look better in this area, i find drupal a lot easier to configure. May be just because it has less features... kind of like kde vs gnome thing. Lot less had to be configured to get out of the box experience in drupal. What tipped drupal over the edge was the "clean urls" were just a one checkbox config in the installation itself.

2. Lot more mature templates: I found the templates on drupal to be lot more pro and clean.

3. Availibility of modules(extensions) : This one might be false but finding a drupal module that did exactly what i needed was much simpler.

And in the end

Over all lean and mean approach won enough points for drupal.

Few quirks remain ...

The immediate todo's

1. Integrate blogger.com blog in the site somehow.

2. Html editor defaults to funky settings making formmatting go all wrong.

3. Add content as always :D).