some thoughts on portable device

Posted by Raj Shekhar on

Almost 2 months back, I got myself an ipod shuffle. After using it for some time, I am totally in love with it. I can now understand why the Macheads sell out their souls to Apple - the bargain is well worth it ;-) .

I was thinking about why portable devices like ipod and mobile phones are so close to their owners and I came up with this list.

  • They are truly personal. You can customize them (think mobile wallpapers, ringtones, playlists) quite a lot.
  • The are small and portable (duh!)
  • They can serve multiple purposes. A mobile phone can also serve as a watch, address book, radio, m3 player, camera. A ipod can also be used as a memory stick, FM transmitter and it can also fit in your car's music system.
  • These devices become useful as soon as you buy them. You can start using a mobile phone as soon as you insert your sim card into it and you can start using your ipod as soon as you transfer music into it. Instant karma! :-)
  • They have long battery life.

This list is just something to keep in mind when I am designing my Killer App (TM).

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emacs registers

Posted by Raj Shekhar on

If you have not heard about emacs registers, you are missing a very powerful tool in your arsenal. Think of registers as "clipboard" on steroids. I had been using registers to store text -i.e. C-x r s a to copy region into register "a" and C-x r i a to insert text from register "a".

Today, while reading the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup, I came to know that you could save your current (emacs)frames layout to the register and then restore it back again.

  • `C-x r w R' Save the state of the selected frame's windows in register R (`window-configuration-to-register').
  • `C-x r j R' restore a window or frame configuration stored in register R.

Here is the email where I saw this.

Re: how to keep/restore my view and mode?

On 20 Sep 2006 22:23:54 -0700 Leo Hou wrote:


> Dear all,
>
> I am not sure if I am using the right term of "view" and "mode". My
> problem is as follows:
>
> I am using C-x 3 and "follow-mode" to view my source code. Every time I
> compile, the other column becomes the result of make. I need to use a
> lot of keys to switch it back to normal: C-x o; C-x k; C-x o; M-x
> follow-mode
> Is there a better way?



C-x r w <some letter or number> to store a window layout and
C-x r j <the same number or letter> to restore it. And there
is no need to kill the compilation buffer.  It gets reused
anyway.



David

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Unnoticed bloggers

Posted by Raj Shekhar on

Hiren wrote this comment on my previous entry

I come across so many blogs which have good posts but the poor guys get unnoticed. They put in so much of effort and no comments. Two recent ones are:-

I think this is best answered by this sentence from Scoble

But, Steve Gillmor has it right: this isn't a game of traffic. It's about sharing what you love.

Most of my blog posts have 0 comments, but that still does not deters me from writing. Once, I too had despaired of the '0 comments' phenomenon, but I was motivated to start blogging again when I read through the Those Cute Kids archives of Aaron. Reading through that, I thought "Wow! I too would like to have something like that" (where that means a record of the days of my life :-) ), and you know what - it is not that hard to write a blog post everyday or at least every weekend. These days, my motivation for writing blog is to keep a record of the highlights or the lowlights of a day or sometimes to record something new that I learnt that day (or in most cases, that week).

Coming back to Hiren's point of undiscovered bloggers, I guess those bloggers are driven by their own motivations. Or it might be the case that they are writing for their own family and close friends. If their idea is to be an A-list blogger (hehe), there are gazillion of pages dedicated to that too.

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Three good tips

Posted by Raj Shekhar on

Three good tips that have made my life more productive

  • Not to open my emails until I have completed at least one task in the morning. I read this tip on lifehacker.com
  • No personal web surfing until at least noon. Found this tip on TheNowHabit mailing list
  • Creative Observation . The advice sounds a bit corny, but I have been trying it out in small things and it works (somewhat).

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why 'proud to be an indian' ?

Posted by Raj Shekhar on

The Hindu has a thought provoking article on Isarel's militarism. The most striking line in that article is in the first paragraph.

AS a Jew, I've been asked if I'm ashamed at what Israel has been doing in Lebanon. And the answer I give is that I am disgusted, I am angry, I am appalled, but, no, I am not ashamed. Why should I be? I bear no personal responsibility for this criminal activity — except, of course, in so far as I fail to take whatever action I can to stop it.

If you are on any of the mailing list or if you have had an email id for at least one year, you might have received an email titled "jai hind" or "proud to be an indian" around 15th August. The email has a bunch of questions and answers like

Q. Who is the creator of Pentium chip (needs no introduction as 90% of the today's computers run on it)?
A. Vinod Dahm
Q. Who is the founder and creator of Hotmail (Hotmail is world's No.1 web based email program)?
A. Sabeer Bhatia

and so on.

The email ends thus

Say proudly, I AM AN INDIAN. Please forward this email to all known INDIANS...............

I have always been baffled by this chest beating. As an Indian, why should I take credit for the success of Sabeer Bhatia, Azim Premji and Vinod Dahm - what contribution did I make to their success ?

I am totally unpatriotic.

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