If you have seen beryl in action on ubuntu, you would’ve said “wow” atleast 5 times!!!
yod’m 3D does some of it on windows. Multiple desktops with a slick cube rotation to switch sides.
Deskpot is a decent virtual desktop manager too.
btw… this is how to embed youtube videos into blogpost on wordpress.com
[ youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=_dIya1aJJKA]
on google videos. These things are enlightning. I watched a very few of them and found the one on human computation is especially interesting. I thought captchas were the final solution to bots.
On an another note… sysinternals (yeah! ms bought them over too!) tools are helpful. I just seemed to have fixed a long standing issue with bad wireless connections.
I absolutely don’t like all the messenger clients hogging up system resources and precious taskbar area. The alternative till now was to use a multi-sign-in IM client like trillian, gaim or jabbers. I’ve also heard friends working in other organizations complain about these IM clients disabled in their network. Well, not anymore I guess. Check out the browser-based meebo, brining IM to Web 2.0. Ofcourse, it doesn’t have all the additional features like sounds, emoticons, webcam sharing, etc, but good enough for one-on-one text chat. Also, recently launched is gtalk on gmail.
Windows, Skins, GUI is all good, but I do often find myself launching the good old command prompt for various little things. Command Prompt Explorer Bar is a wonderful little utility that adds hooks to plug-in the command prompt window right into Windows Explorer.
It can keep track of your browsing in the explorer and sync it to the path of the command prompt. Also, a set of frequently used commands are stacked up for reuse. Ctrl + M it is!!
Update 2006.02.17: Documentation of all the win xp command line tools.
One of the attractive features of Mozilla Firefox the customization and extensibility. GreaseMonkey is one of the many such cool extensions, that can totally change the browsing experience. It allows to configure running of a script everytime a site/page is visited. It means that… you can zap the (ugly-big-flashing) ad-banners in yahoomail or skip the raaga.com audio ads or many such things. Also, it looks quite easy to write one yourself. Finally some ad-free browsing??!!
To try the next best thing… Fx 1.5 beta2.
Here are some screen shots and a whole demo of the microsoft office12 UI. I’m impressed (I thought… I would not… but still… I am!!) . I like the idea of “ribbon” allowing contextual usage of the toolbar space. Currently, almost all apps allow customizing toolbar buttons, but its wonderful to have a “right set” of them presented to you at each step of your work. Guess, it’ll be a a lot of fun.
At the same time, openoffice is a great open-source alternative. I downloaded 1.1.5 to check-out what’s in and what’s not. Though, it misses quite a few features, its quite a good for the daily basic needs. Besides, it comes free!
Its the same .NET and visual studio that I’ve been using for years! But (re)discovering these little features/tips make working with it more interesting. Here are a few.
The tweak for single instance of an application is cool, but I remember seeing another code snippet elsewhere that brings into focus the existing instance.
* (re)discovers… thanks to Sanjay for the title
Got to know from GS that Google is coming up with Google Talk and IM text plus Audio chat utility. Its still beta, nevertheless looks impressive. You can get it from here .. http://www.google.com/talk/index.html
I don’t like to switch between messenger clients and was happy to see support for google talk using other IM clients. But the client is not big and not a RAM-hogger either!
Anyways, happy chatting!
Unlike the earlier days of Fortran – COBOL where positioning and length of lines of code were strictly defined, C# or VB.NET allow free styles of writing code. However, if you are from those good old times of 80 char wide screens and interested to avoid horizontal scrolling, here is a hidden registry entry to help you.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.0\Text Editor]
“Guides”=”RGB(128,0,0) 80, 120″
7.0 = VS.NET 2002
Red vertical guides at columns 80 and 120
…from here
Being very used to the professional editions of the desktop OS, I found a few things very unfriendly with XP home edition, like no IIS!, no file security! etc. Ofcourse, some of these “silly” XP home limitations can be worked around.
For testing out the file security with the scesp4i.exe, I had inadvertantly locked out a whole drive to all users accounts! And it first looked very clumsy to get back the ownership and reset the access to each folder and every file in it. But hey, we have xcacls.exe to modify the ACLs in a batch recursively.
