Life is Like That

Anyone active on the technology/software blog scene has surely heard of Joel Spolsky and Jeff Attwood . Their fascinating brainchild - a series of free community-driven topical Q&A sites, combine the best of forums, online support and Q&A sites into one very useful offerring. Each site focusses on a particular topic but underlying all is the same engine which gives a familiar feel to all other sites once you know about one. Each site also has a "meta" site where the community discusses how the site should be driven. The flagship site is Stackoverflow - a website for aksing and answering programming questions. There are a host of other sites in various stages of construction and Area 51 has the overview. Some of the more interesting ones ... SuperUser - For powerusers (all OS) ServerFault - For system admins and server users Ubuntu SE - For Ubuntu. This site is beta so the url is likely to change once it gets out of beta.

xkcd is IMO the funniest geek comic strip ever... and courtesy of Tech Drive-in here are some real gems. Just 10 of them per link so won't take long to scan :-). Favourite XKCDs - Part 1 Favourite XKCDs - Part 2

Recently a friend of mine started complaining that he doesn't see icons for the minimized windows on the desktop bottom panel. Any application opened from the menu will work ok, but will simply vanish when he clicks the minimize button. Upon investigation I realized it could be because the windows list applet is not visible in the gnome panel. There are 2 methods to try to fix this. First try method 1 and if that is not solving the problem then try method 2. 1 Method 1 Check bottom panel for a small vertical bar with three black stripes on it - something as shown in the screenshot below (circled in red). Look really really hard. If you still don't find it anywhere on the panel then go to Method 2. If you find it, right click on it and select "Move". Then move the mouse to expand the window list all the way to the left of the panel. Left-click again to finish resizing. If the "Move" button is disabled (greyed out) and there is tick next to "L...

With rise in popularity of ubuntu as the distro of choice for mainstream desktop users (at least until 10.04 version) the number of people looking for help has also increased. The people behind stackoverflow.com (a popular Q&A site for professional and enthusiast programmers) recently launched ubuntu.stackexchange.com - a website focussed on ubuntu Q&A. This site is very user-friendly - posting and answering questions is very easy and the summary views and powerful search capabilities enables newcomers to find existing answers easily. There is also a "karma" system - like in stackoverflow.com that is, IMO, a very neat way to setup a hierarchy based on merit and initiative which naturally helps those users with the right intention to gain control and moderate site functions. The site is currently on beta. Based on participation and feedback from the beta the final is expected to be launched sometime next month (max beta time is 90d). Overall a great concept applied...

Anyone who has worked in a project involving writing some software would have come across specifications of some kind - those holy documents written by the project elite that are a pain both to implement as well as to maintain and serve nothing more than as a hurdle to getting to a working product. Often spec documents either derive from another or many such documents build, by way of cross-reference, a connected specification which soon creates a need for another document to describe the relationship between these docs... which, of course, has to be kept up-to-date not only whenever any specification is updated but also when there are relationship updates or when new nodes come up etc. Soon anyone entering the project has to pass through this wall made of the interconnected web of specs only to understand soon enough that the product he/she is working on is quite different from what the specifications are dreaming about. Often times, to the authors the specs are sacrosanct and reality...

With Google's acquisition of ON2 approved by ON2 stakeholders, there is an opportunity for the owner of the largest video website YouTube to unencumber the entire collection of patented codecs. Codecs are a commodity and with HTML5 this is the right time to push for the standard video format on the web to be an open one. This is in keeping with the spirit of the web and provides the springboard (along with other innovations like ubiquitous broadband connectivity and media-rich apps & services) for the web to expand into the multimedia dimension. The FSF is quick to realize this and has issued an open letter to google asking them to free VP8 and make it default format on Youtube. I am very interested to see Google's reaction to this. I hope for the best ! Good luck, fsf ! Good luck, people !

"The magic of thinking BIG" by Dr. David Schwartz's is an inspirational, motivational and a success mantra guide to a happy and successful living in your personal as well as professional life."You are what you think you are," says Dr. Schwartz.Remind yourself regularly that you are better than you think you are.The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief.Think success,don't think failure.Once trained you will learn valuable lessons just through the very simple process of knowledge.Age is not a problem.We can do whatever we want.We should not say any excuse.Try to do as much as we can and think positive...