lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

One of the methods used by normal humans to send other (normal humans) on the "guilt trip" is to use the cliche "every time you do THIS or THAT god kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens..." For an even bigger guilt-trip, you can use "every time you do THIS , somewhere a kitten gets run over by a Monster truck. given not ten minutes ago to the five year old girl standing by the side of the road, spattered, red, and crying as she fumbles with her inhaler" (Thanks to Brian Bilbrey, member of The Answer Gang for the picturesque description )

Frankly, the whole killing of the kitten part leaves me rather unmoved. Having lots of free time on my hand lately, I thought of things that would send me on a guilt trip.

• every time you do THAT, your email id gets harvested by Mr. Joseph Adisa of Lagos, Nigeria
• every time you do THAT, Microsoft issues ten critical updates
• every time you do THAT, some clueless bastard says "Linux has less viruses because it is less popular " (my veins are throbbing just writing this)
• every time you do THAT, some luser says "IE is better than Firefox since IE supports advanced features like ActiveX"
• every time you do THAT, someone starts building a new Linux distro

I know I am not normal

I had gone to visit my village for the ocassion of Chhat. Some of the conveniences that I had started taking for granted were missing. It made me appreciate how easy city life is and how hard a rural life is. However one thing that stood out was the ubiquity of the mobile phones.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of a few fellow-geeks. The points that make a geek gathering different from normal people's gatherings are

• The idea of the meeting was conceived on an IRC channel
• More time was spent on planning what to do, than the time spent on actually doing
• People kept referring to each other by their IRC nicks
• Pictures were taken using a mobile camera
• After the geeks had a shot of beer/vodka, they started debatng the OO capabilities in Python, history of python, squeak and other obscure topics.
• And of course, how can I forget the debate on which CMS rules - mambo/Drupal or Plone

An evening I enjoyed a lot

Firefox 1.0 got released yesterday. Yay !! If you have not downloaded it as yet, get it and reclaim the web. Google has put up a firefox on their search too. . Surprisingly BBC is covering the launch too. Officially, Firefox is not "just for geeks " anymore. Welcome abroad unwashed masses. Here is the list of newspapaers covering firefox launch.

While reading through the talkback pages at mozila, I saw that most people were having trouble getting Firefox from their local mirrors (which I guess had not gotten updated) or in accessing the Mozilla's website. Well, I took the easy route and just used the torrent to download my favourite browser. It was the first time I used torrent, and i must add I was amazed at how easy the whole process. Bittornado put a nice GUI and a easy to understand interface to the whole process.

There is a Bloglines Web Services (BWS) . Never knew about it . In another news, I discovered a nice skin for my wiki. \0/ One of my friends has launched a new blog devoted to books, music and movies. If you are a geek who enjoys reading and movies, have a look or volunteer to participate in the effort

I have been experimenting with a few wikis for my site. A great place to look for your wiki needs is the Wiki Engines page on the WikiWik (which incidentally was the first wiki). I have settled for Pmwiki, which you can see here. My reasons for choosing the Pmwiki are

• Written in PHP and released under GPL
• Does not need a database backend to run
• Easy to understand documentation
• Customizations are in a separate configuration file
• InterMap capabilities to provide links to other WikiWikiWeb systems
• Ability to organize pages into WikiGroups, with headers and access controls shared among all pages in the group

Link to my wiki

Now available for your downloading pleasure, is my GoogleSoap class. have you eveer felt the sudden need to use the Google's web APIs through PHP ? Worry not as help is at hand. You can use the GoogleSoap class to make your job easier. I have put the code and related documentation/examples in the public domain, so you can hack it up further. Some rudimentary instructions are included in the README file, I will add more to it as and when time permits me. Any additions/suggestions are always welcome.

Get the code here