smr’s blog

yea.. the ones up there.

I have always been a tabs freak. Opening multiple windows of IE in old days always freaked me out.
The quest for tabbed browser on windows took me to Crazy Browser, which was a kindof wrapper around IE. It was nice, but I soon got a lot interested in Opera for its smoothness and integrated mail support. The tabs were ofcourse there. Opera taught me mouse gestures, which I can’t browse without now. Later after much resistance, I ditched opera and shifted to firefox.

FF had nice tabs support but that wasnt’t enough for me now. I had multiple ff windows open with 10s of tabs in each window. So for better tabs management I ended up using tabbrowser extension. It had nice hierarchy view of tabs, which would go to side of browser. I was hooked to it. But it was never ported to firefox 2. I too tried but it was so much work. I then found TabGroups which is serving the purpose well enough.

Tabs! who needs them ?
Well I do. On a random day I counted 62. Average would be above 40.

How come ?
Browse a lot. And then work related stuff. And accumulate it. Get a nice link, don’t get time to read it, and it stays there. At this moment, longest pending is What every programmer should know about memory, 10 days and counting. When it gets too much, i sit and scan them all, do some quick reading, and close them all; almost all.

Memory ?
Yea, ff is screwed up big time about memory usage. It used to eatup upto 70% of my 1Gig. I never tolerated any app to consume memory more than required. But ff was exception. I always said ‘Get lost. Its for firefox. pkill’. Current version is though more friendly with memory. Stays near 20% of 1.5G. But yeah, its never running for too long.

I would also like to mention other apps for providing tabs and making my life easier : Vim, Pidgin, Mrxvt and Icewm(workspaces).
Never used, but like Yahoo Mail for keeping tabs.

wth?
A poor soul sitting all day in front of monitor can’t think nothing better to blog about than tabs.
Tabs were worth a mention on my blog.

got this in some feed. reminded me of what i had written on another bc blog sometime back. reposting here.
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There has been a lot of buzz for some time now on WebOS. Its defined as virtual operating system that runs in your web browser..

If you are not totally computer illiterate, you must know the very basic definition of OS ( Operating System ) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer.

WebOS is not supposed to be anything of that sort. To be more precise.. it tries to mimic what a desktop does : manages files and folders, helps in running other apps easily.

If i have made my point clear, lets correct our terminology before we more forward.. lets call it ‘Web Desktop’.

Here is a nice review of 10 popular web desktops. If you have not yet tried your hands on any of the web desktops.. you must. A few of them are really cool and can become the future.

WebOS needs a browser to run into. And there is yet no clean way to run a browser without a Desktop Manager. There is not much point in going for web desktop, while you have a PC Desktop. A simple solution like syncing your files on some public server can serve the job of Desktop available from anywhere. And while you have a PC to run full ( and trendy ) Desktop, why should one go to still primitive interface of web desktop. The point i want to make is that there is not a environment for a web desktop yet.

But.. still webdesktop is the future. But different than the current form. There is need of thin OS first.. which allows one to run a web desktop directly on a very low end machine. This will allow reducing the cost and size of the desktop ( or laptop ). And a good internet (wifi) ofcourse.

Web Desktop will not be able to enter mainstream if the problem is not approached from three directions simultaneously : Web Desktop, thin OS, and light hardware. This will probably happen only if a single organization pack all of it into a single package.

Yes! I did it.
Full FC4 (without kde and gnome) on diskless thin client.
Using PXE, NFS and this help.

Rough Procedure -
- set the thin client to use pxe bootup.
- configure dhcp server to give ip and tftp server link
- configure tftp server to serve kernel and initrd image
- configure the initrd image to start network and mount root filesystem over nfs. optionally set home on nfs.
- install a filesystem you want to provide to the thinclient and publish it over nfs.

The available ram in the thin clients is just 90Mb (128 actually, but shared with onboard graphics). This is less and cause logs ot pagein/out. Upgrading the thinclients to 256Mb ram will make them just perfect. I will try to push it.

PS : Earlier they use to run using PXES. Its good but root over nfs using current method provides full OS thus works out better.

PS2: The image above is shown during the bootup. If you can send me another cartoon i can put it up. if i like it. anythign creative and original. shiben u there ?

the is password c4mp

i didnt pay much attention to BAR camp before and though about it as just another get conference. but coz of a few nears - and - dears writing about it recently i digged it and found that its not a conference, its un-conference. this link explains it very well. “Think of BarCamp as the open-source equivalent to a traditional conference, in which top-down planning is replaced with bottom-up self-organizational models.”

the name BAR camp troubled me for a while, until i read about FOO camp. that was disappointing coz i was thinking the name to in relation to some drinking business . btw FOO meant Friends Of O’Reilly.

and guess what. its coming to hyderabad… our campus.. yeah! IIIT. its going to be an unique oppertunity to get in touch with the tech/geek community of Hyderabad.

and more.. its on Web 2.0, RIA etc… the hottest things around one can think about. i feel so excited about it.

here is another effort to bring hyderabad based technology bloggers at one place. do add your blog to it if you write something technical on your blog.

dont miss it. BAR camp Hyderabad.

related -
* wikipedia / barcamp
* foo is cool. bar is cool. (thats diplomatic)