Death claims another great artist...

Bergman is dead.

I cannot emphasise how influential his movies have been to me.

LOL

A rant against the Americans

I know I have a few rants against the americans but one thing ZI hate is their toilets. The toilet stalls are created with the least concern for privacy but more than that, somebody taking a dump in one of them stinks up the entire toilet! I mean what is wrong with creating a more enclosed place which has its own exhaust system like we do in India? With all their extravgance, with pretty much everything, I refuse to believe that they are saving up on something...

Futuristic comics

Head over to Boingboing

California summer

Now I know why people rave about California and its summers. The days are like the sunny winter days in North India, days that I always thought were best spent outdoors. Love the weather and have a car this time to roam around the nearby beaches.

Ubuntu Mania

Photograph By: Urban_Data

"pursuit of hapiness [sic] is the distinct privilege of a few."

A new website called "New Avatars of Slavery"

Amardeep at Sepia Mutiny has more...

As I've said before, the cost of an extremely slow and unpredictable immigration system comes in people's lives: waiting 5-10 years for a Green Card without being certain of success is dispiriting at best, and soul-crushing at worst.

Quick Blogger Tip..

Do you like the "Recent comments" feature that worpress provides but blogger does not?
Do you like sharing things from google reader but absolutely hate that their widget does not match your page style and sticks out like a sour thumb? Have you used Yahoo! Pipes and created some feeds that you wish you could display on your blog?

If so, fear not. This is a little tip that you will find useful if you like adding snippets of your feeds to your blog.

First, you need to be on Blogger 2.0. If you are still on the antiquated blogger platform, this will not work.

If you are already there, you will also need to upgrade to the new layouts manager.

Ok, let us suppose you are already there and I am just wasting your time.

Now, click on the "Add new page element" that you can see there in the layout manager. This will open a popup. fear not, this is not an ad that will tell you that your system is infected with viruses and you need to download a software to clean the system! This is just blogger's way of presenting an UI to you to add a little box in your sidebar. Do not get overwhelmed by all those options in this little window. Stay calm and you might notice that there is one heading called "Feed" and it has a blue "Add to blog" button underneath it. Click that one! This will take you another page which would have a textbox in it. Now all you need to do is add the feed url that you want to share with your readers.
If you want the cool "Recent comments" box, just like the one you see on this blog, just put in "http://{your-blog}.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default" in the box.
If you want to add your google reader share, find the link for rss feed for your shared items and key in that url in the text box. If you want both, repeat the process twice, once with your comments feed and once with your google reader share feed.

Have fun.

What is he doing?

Daily dose of laughter

Feisty Fawn

I finally got fed up with windows and installed Ubuntu on my laptop. The reason why I had windows was not because I have some special affinity to windows but because I had a lot of trouble installing linux distros on my laptop. Trusty RedHat could not detect and install the graphics card. Mandrake could not work out the sound cards drivers and suse just could not do anything... I spent days trying to fix the issues in each distro. I recompiled the kernels and tried manually installing the drivers but could not make any of the distros work properly. So, I had to turn to Windows XP.
Ubuntu has been making a lot of waves recently and the release of its latest version - "Feisty Fawn" - has been universally welcomed. Besides, I also went to their website and had them mail me a CD of the latest version. And I was already tired of crappy Windows. So, I installed Ubuntu yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised.
The installation was extremely breezy with minimum configuration and all my hardware got detected automatically! I had a little trouble with resolution (I have a widescreen LCD display and the resolution available were not for widescreen. fixed it using 915resolution) and had to hand configure the touchpad but besides that there were no other problems whatsoever. All the windows specific functions in the keyboard (for volume/brightness control, etc) work without any configuration! And it comes packaged with Firefox 2.0.0.3.
I think this distro of linux comes closest to challenging Windows on user friendliness. And needless to say, Windows is scared...