lunatechian (lunatech-ian) - link

RIP John W. Backus

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:34:22 +0100

The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

the mozilla manifesto

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:55:29 +0100

draft of the mozilla manifesto - short and sweet.

ingenious use of the HL engine

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:03:01 +0100

This looks very obvious in hindsight, but I am sure not many would have thought about this. This guy uses the HL's source engine to produced a model of the Kaufmann House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution.

Links: the HL map for Kaufmann House and a walk through available here

having trouble reddit's rss on bloglines ?

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:47:27 +0100

If you use Bloglines and you have not been seeing any updates from Reddit on it then try to get your reddit feed from this rssmix feed. I have no idea why Bloglines is not showing updated feeds from reddit.

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 20:27:43 +0100

I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote

My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

The article is old, but do check it out.

General Tips & Strategies for Dining Out

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:23:43 +0100

General Tips & Strategies for Dining Out - excellent tips for people who are trying to lose weight.

webcomics

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:54:05 +0200

I discover wonderful things through webcomics. Today, I was reading this comic, where I saw a mention of Miyamoto Musashi. I checked out his wikipedia entry, where a I found a link to his book The Book of Five Rings and that is what I am reading now.

making glossy, dark button

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:56:36 +0100

Since del.icio.us is down, this a note to self. How to make glossy buttons with rounded edges - I tested it out and it really works .

BLUG - whatever happened to it

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 12:18:57 +0200

Back in Delhi, we had a very good Linux User Group (LUG). When I came to Bangalore, I had expected the LUG here to be even more active. However, I was very disappointed - the BLUG had been dissolved and replaced by totally listless BoF (beards of feathers) meets. Kingsly has posted a good summary about the state of affairs. Seems like too much politics was involved.

yahoo whoring

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 02:26:38 +0200

Since everyone has been busy drinking the Google kool-aid and simply going in an orgasm over the Google Gulp, I will take the road less travelled and point out the Yahoo Slacker here.

technorati tag to bring this into entry into its radar

Notepad++

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 03:39:15 +0100

Notepad++ is an excellent replacement for Windows notepad.

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 20:08:05 +0200

A bit of Mozilla-goodness overdose today. Discovered del.icio.us > PHP yesterday, saw quite a few interesting links on it today and have taken the RSS feed for it now. One of the links was XUL: rendering GUIs with PHP, which has a load of useful links and ideas.

emacs goodies

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:35:19 +0200

Ftrain.com has a bunch of productivity enhancing tips that can be used with emacs. I could not get the "search the web within emacs" working but I hope to write a shell script that will do the job and then call that script from withing emacs. I had found that link from this post by Merlin, called Calling all Terminal nerds. One of the comments there has pointed to the rockin' the emacs post, which points out how to use planner.el from Sacha Chua.

checkinstall

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 14:03:39 +0200

Installing compiled packages with checkinstall

mp3 blogs

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 14:32:55 +0200

I knew that a whole different universe of mp3 blogs existed, but was never motivated enough to go out and investigate them. In my office, I have cycled through most of my music collection (I like to hear Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ministry of sound, Yahel(sp?) while working) and decided to find out what these blogs offer. A good starting point is Fluxblog. There is also MP3 blog Aggregator (however it does not show full postings and there are just a "lot" of blogs being aggregated). This article MP3 blogs serve rare songs, dusty grooves, points out some good mp3 blogs too. I have bookmarked the following sites