Every Flavour Beans

Yesterday I bought an Apple 30 GB iPod with Video Playback (Black) MP3 Player to use it as a 30GB USB drive(I have no intention to play music or video files on it). Here is the reason why.

I always prefer audio devices from Creative for their superior audio quality in general. When I ran through the reviews of most the popular MP3 players over the Internet more than a year back, most of them recommended Creative Zen Sleek 20 GB MP3 Player for better audio quality than the iPod. I eventually bought a Creative Zen Sleek as an MP3 player and Creative Zen Portable Media Center as a video player(which is an audio player too, but it’s a buggy product, so don’t go for it). When I later checked with one of my friend’s iPod player, I too found that the audio quality of Creative player was better, albeit marginally.

I also found some minor annoyances with the iPod player, some of which I would like to point out in the next blog post. But one area where iPod certainly scores over the other MP3 players is the ability to use all of the memory available in it as usual USB storage. The same feature is available in many other MP3 players, including my Creative Zen Sleek, but only iPod allowed me to convert all of 30GB available on the player as storage space for data files, and also providing with easy access to the stored files from both Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems - I just have to plug in the MP3 player and it is immediately recognised as a USB storage device in all the operating systems that I use. Creative Zen Sleek, for example, has a limitation on how much space can be used for storing the data files and for storing the music files, and it also has to be switched into a special mode if it is to be seen as a USB storage device by the operating system; irritatingly enough, it keeps crashing all the time in this special mode.

So why iPod? Why not a simple 30GB USB storage device? The secret here is that I have a relatively slow Internet connection at home where as the company in which one of my friends works has a very fast Internet connection. Most of this bandwidth goes unused every month and hence he can afford to download some of the personal stuff too on the office line. He needs to carry the downloaded stuff to his/my home in a removable media, but the company policy doesn’t allow carrying of any media inside of the working premises. End of the world? Fortunately, it is a common sight in the office to see many people carrying their MP3 players to their work desks and also plugging them into their computers to synchronise the music. Got you there! USB storage device disguised as an iPod MP3 player :) It is also very light weight, can be charged using a light-weight USB cable and is accessible from both Windows and GNU/Linux. It’s not too costly either. The only limitation(because of the underlying file system that it uses - FAT16) is that it can’t store files larger than ~4GB in size, but I’ll live with that :)

One of my friends sent me a link yesterday asking me to use it submit my ‘dream’ features that I would like Google to add to their GMail service. I like GMail like no other Google product I have ever used; I have abandoned all the previous email ids that I was using once I started to get used to GMail’s Conversational Stacks, Labels, Filters and Starred Items. Ability to track a large number of mailing-lists will be severely limited without these features. Its spam protection and searching ability are also better than that of the others’. My friends love the browser-based chat feature. What else could be added to what is such an excellent product already? The more I use this product, the more intensely I feel the lack of some functionalities. So I didn’t had to think for a single moment before preparing the following list of features that I want to see supported by GMail as soon as possible.

1. The ability to view all the unread messages at one place. There should be a link/button called “View Unread Messages” or something like that which will show only the unread messages.
2. The ability to view all the messages which have no labels.

   I have created a separate GMail Id to track the mailing-lists of different products/services and the emails from each mailing-list are collected(using filters) under their respective labels(‘wordpress-hackers’, ‘gentoo-java’, ’sounder’, etc). Occasional emails do get to my email account which don’t belong to any of the created labels, and such emails are so few that they get lost among all the labeled emails. Even if such emails are 5-10, I have to wade through several pages in the “Inbox” section to read them all. A predefined label called “Unlabeled” containing all the emails not labeled with anything can be very time-saving in such a situation.

3. Disposable emails. I want GMail to allow disposable email ids to be associated with a main account so that the main account can be shielded from those whom we don’t trust(yet) and hence help fight the spam menace. One can create a real GMail id and then use its forwarding feature to get the similar result but a simpler way would be more desirable.
4. Quotes as random signatures. Many desktop email clients support this feature: From a list of quotes entered in the “Signature” box(or uploaded through a file), one quote per line, GMail should automatically select one of them as part of the signature(in place of a placeholder such as ${quote}). It’s boring to use the same quote in the signature for 2 months and having to remember to then manually change it to something else.
5. An option to add signature at the top of the quoted message while replying. I prefer bottom-posting in the user group and forum messages but top-posting for the individual emails. I want the option to select where the signature should be added in the replies, for each GMail account individually.
6. Be able to work with multiple GMail accounts simultaneously.

   Because I love GMail so much, I use it for all my purposes - even for getting group messages from the Yahoo Groups. One GMail id for one purpose though, so that I can control the frequency of checking each id according my preference. But on occasions when I want to check the messages from multiple accounts at the same time, I have to login into one account, check the messages, logout, login into the second account, check the messages, logout and keep going on like that. I have tried to let the browser remember my passwords(Firefox does it by domain name and not by pages, so it doesn’t work when I want to work with GMail, Google Analytics, Google Reader, Personalized Home, etc at the same time. Opera claims to remember by both domains and by individual pages, but it has never worked for me yet) but it didn’t turn out to be the solution I was looking for.

   Because a machine can be shared by multiple users(who might have their own GMail accounts), the owner of a group of GMail accounts can authorize the set of ids which can remain active simultaneously on the same machine/browser. Currently I login into each GMail account from a different browser to get around the problem, but it is still less than convenient. Even when using multiple notifiers(one for each account), I still need to login to check the actual messages and reply to them. They also work only for email and not for Google Analytics for example.

That’s it for now. Do correct me if some of the features I have mentioned here are already supported by GMail(some might be supported as a Greasemonkey script for example) - I am not a GMail power user. I am sure that other GMail users too have their own favourite features that they want to see added to the GMail service. Which ones are your favourites?

UPDATE: sewar has got some nice suggestions in the comment section to get around limitations (1) and (2).

Mozilla has recently announced Release Candidate 3(RC3) of the next version of Firefox - Firefox 2.0. Those who can’t wait for the final version to be released before having a peek at the new features(not too many actually) that will be part of Firefox 2.0 can grab the RC3 version and install it on their systems. For Windows users there is an all familiar wizard based installer file to install it, but remember that it will overwrite the existing Firefox installation, so make sure that you really want to move to a version that is not completely bug free yet(release candidates are fairly stable but of course not as stable as the final version) and you understand that you might have to live with a broken installation if luck is not on your side. In any case, backup the current profile before attempting to upgrade to RC3 so that you can go back to it by reinstalling the stable version if things do go wrong.

The same thing applies to the GNU/Linux users too: grab the tar ball of the RC3 version of Firefox 2.0 and install it on your system(again ). But if you want to minimize the risk of corrupting the current Firefox installation and still want to get a sneak peek into what the next version of Firefox is going to be like, you can just extract the Firefox 2.0 RC3 tar file into a separate folder in your home directory, create a new profile for it and run the new version of Firefox using this newly created profile; this way, you can continue to use the stable version of the Firefox with your older profile. Below is the procedure on how to do this.

NOTE: Remember that we are only trying to use separate profiles with the two versions of Firefox here, they might still share a lot of other files between themselves. That is why it is always a good idea to start with a complete backup of the existing installation. I usually backup the entire “.mozilla” directory present in the home directory like this:

Download the latest Firefox 2 Release Candidate version and extract it in your home directory(link of the English version is used in the following example):

Now we need to load the new version of Firefox with a freshly created profile. Run the following command from the extracted directory:

From the popped up dialog box, click “Create Profile” button and follow the wizard(enter a name like “firefoxrc3″ when prompted if you wish, or accept the default profile name).

Click Finish to dismiss the wizard box. You can now see the newly created profile being listed in the “Choose Profile” dialog box. Select it and click “Start Firefox” button to start the web browser.

You can customise the environment to the heart’s content now, without worrying about corrupting the older profile. From the next time onwards, just run the command from the Firefox 2 RC3 directory and choose the profile that was created for it. When you want to run the older Firefox version, just remember to pick the default profile and you will get into the same old environment.

The process can be simplified by creating a new desktop/menu/panel item and entering the appropriate command(“$HOME/firefox/firefox -ProfileManager”) in its property box(right click and select properties).

If you don’t want to start with an empty profile for the new version of Firefox, then you need to search the Internet to find a way to make a copy of the existing profile(or have a look in $HOME/.mozilla/firefox folder for hints). You can then let the new Firefox version to use the copy of the default profile instead of creating a new profile for it.

I happened to come across several blogs and websites in the recent times that have started to refer Dreamhost’s web hosting service, some of them offering various promotional offers, but none of them offering the best possible deal. This prompted me to put this post up to offer the best deal that you can ever get at Dreamhost and which applies to all the hosting plans that Dreamhost offers.

(For those who know the drill, the promo code is TAB97, which will get you a discount of $97 on any Dreamhost plan. This promo code will make it $23 for one year of hosting service under the most basic plan, for example.)

Follow these simple steps to recieve maximum discount:

1. First gather some information(”research”) to decide whether Dreamhost is a good hosting service provider for your requirements or not. Continue to the next step only if you think that Dreamhost is for you. (I plan to review a couple of hosting providers in the near future.)
2. Once you decide that you want to go with Dreamhost, go to the the sign-up page and select the plan that suits you the best. When filling out the information, enter “TAB97″(without the quotes) in the “Promo Code or email of who referred you:” text field. Click “Continue to secure payment” button to continue to the next page.
   
3. You should see that $97 are deducted from the total price of the plan that you have selected. For example, if you have selected “L1: Crazy Domain Insane” package, then $97 should be deducted from the price of $120 for one year worth of hosting, making the final payable amount around $23. Doubly make sure that correct amount has been deducted before continuing further.



4. Enter the rest of the information needed to place the order.

Don’t be fooled by any other promotional code that you recieve promising a discount of $25, $50 or something like that. The maximum discount that you can get at Dreamhost from such promotional codes is $97 and that is what you get with my promotional code TAB97(as I didn’t chose to split the discount between me and the referred customer). You can also search for similar promotional codes that give you the maximum discount possible($97) by going to the Dreamhost forums.

Coming to the question of how good Dreamhost’s hosting service is, no one can give a verdict that holds true in everyone’s case, but I believe that it’s definitely worth $23 for hosting with them for an year. I Hope to follow this up with a more detailed review of Dreamhost soon; until then, have a look at their complete feature set.

NOTE:

1. I will try to post an update here as soon as the above promotional code ceases to work, but it should work for a long time to come in my estimation.
2. I am not sure but it is believed that the promotional codes only apply if you place the order with Dreamhost using a credit card. Check with the Dreamhost support staff if you wish to pay through paypal/check/money order.

While there are several ways to cut down the time it takes for a GNU/Linux system to boot up completely, the most popular way is to prevent any unnecessary services from being started at the boot time(if you don’t host web pages from your machine, for example, then disabling the apache server from starting at boot time will save some precious CPU cycles). There are several HOWTOs littered around the internet describing how to identify and disable the services that are not needed by a user. You can go to Desktop -> Administration -> Services in GNOME to have a look at the most important services; the commands ‘rc-status boot’ and ‘rc-status default’ will give you a complete list. Make sure that you understand what a service does before trying to disable them.

Gentoo Wiki has another trick to speed up the boot process of Gentoo OS: start loading GDM at boot time by adding ‘xdm’ to the boot runlevel instead of the default runlevel. I am reproducing the procedure here mainly because the boot time for my Gentoo system got reduced roughly by 40% after I implemented this tip, which by no means is insignificant.

Follow these steps.

1. Using your favourite editor, modify one line of code in the file /etc/init.d/xdm:
   sh# emacs -nw /etc/init.d/xdm

   Substitute the following line:

   /sbin/telinit a &> /dev/null

   with this line:

   /etc/X11/startDM.sh &> /dev/null

   (All the above names are case-sensitive.)

2. Now run the following two commands:
   sh# rc-update del xdm
   sh# rc-update add xdm boot

That’s it. To immediately try it out, you can run ‘/etc/init.d/xdm restart’ command, or preferably, can do a full system reboot. The major gain for me after making this modification has been that the system no more gets stuck at the boot time for more than 10 seconds when it can’t find a DHCP server.

NOTE: This tip is meant only for the desktop machines. It’s not advisable for server machines for obvious reasons.

More information on Gentoo Wiki:

Speed up your boot time
Gnome Desktop for the End-User