General

PC World’s Humorous Piece On Microsoft, Google, Yahoo’s Beta Services

2148 days

by tabrez in General

I have fond memories of reading magazines like PC Plus(my favourite) and PC World from the local British Library which helped me gain a good proportion of my technical knowledge during my initial days with the personal computer. Hence I am glad that PC World magazine is now available in my country starting from the month of July. I bought the first issue of it yesterday and found an interesting article at the end of the magazine: a humorous take on the spate of beta services unleashed upon the computer users by big companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Here are some excerpts from the article written by Stephen Manes; go grab the magazine for the complete article.

“In keeping with the perpetually-in-beta services of companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, we hereby extend to you a warm welcome to Full Disclosure, Beta version! [...]

Emulating products such as Google Groups and Windows Defender, we intend to keep this column in beta for as long as possible. This will help us continually improve the product by passing the testing work over to you. [...]

Being beta, we can compete more aggressively with other news sources, so we are now unafraid to report – months before its release – that the final version of Windows Vista will be entirely free of security bugs. [...] And if not? Beta means never having to say you’re sorry. [...] Besides, the difference between ‘beta’ and ‘shipping’ products at Microsoft has been barely distringuishable for years.”

Moreover, the trend has also been a source of many jokes within my own circle of friends. The main reason behind such a trend, especially followed and made popular by Google, in my opinion, is the competition from the small players: you delay releasing a cutting edge service(or its updates) due to the time it takes for intensive testing of the product and some other smaller company will by then have released a “use-at-your-own-risk” version of the similar service free of cost and established a firm hold in the market. The big companies have their reputation at stake to follow the same path; so they have found an easy way out by releasing the services early but labelled as ‘beta’ so that some of the rough edges found in them do not affect the brand name of the company as these services are not the final versions; and users don’t ask any questions as they are made available free of cost. Even for the big companies, releasing stable versions of the services in the fastest possible time and keeping them free doesn’t seem to be a viable option currently.

Why I Switched to Google’s GMail Hosted Domain Service

2155 days

by tabrez in General, Web

When I got the invitation to test the beta version of Google’s GMail Hosted Domain Service(HDS), I couldn’t make an immediate decision whether I should switch to it or not. Agreed I should have made such a decision before requesting for an invite from Google but initially I was of the thinking that I can manually control where the MX records for my domain point to, so it will be an easy switch between Google and my hosting provider’s service. I checked it out when I actually got the invitation from Google and found to my utter surprise that customers are given direct access only to some of the DNS records and MX records are not one of them. Going through a quick comparision between the services provided by my hosting provider and by Google, I finally decided to go with Google. Here are the reasons why.

There is no doubt that Google Mail provides a fast and easy to use interface which in my opinion is better than any other email interface available today. [Converstation Stacks + Labels + Filters] has become an essential feature set for my day-to-day email management activities and I could now hope to get the same interface for my domain email accounts too. One thing that I was sorely missing from my hosting provider’s email services is the mailing lists: they didn’t support mailing lists at all(which would have overloaded their servers in their opinion). Google’s HDS makes creation of mailing lists easier than creating a google group. This feature infact was what finally prompted me to switch to Google. One drawback of this feature in its current form is that all the members of such a mailing list must have their email accounts at my domain – I can’t add someone with a usual GMail or Yahoo account. This forces me to maintain two different mailing lists – one at my domain for those who have email accounts at my domain and a Google Group for the rest.

When I first learnt about Google’s HDS, I was under the impression that it doesn’t support a ‘Catch-all’ address that will catch all the emails that are sent to non-existent email account ids under my domain name. I guess this was the case when the service was initially launched but now a ‘Catch-all’ email account can be easily created. Some people also reported that HDS is curiously hosted on Google servers and not on GMail servers, hence there may be considerable downtime on these servers when it gets started to be used on a larger scale. Don’t ask me to explain the logic behind this claim, its not mine.

Google Calendar, Google Chat and data storage space independent of the hosting provider were the other reasons why I switched to Google’s service. Below are some screenshots of Google’s HDS:

Administration Interface for Google Hosted Domain Email Service

The service cannot be used until you point your MX records to Google’s servers.

MX Records should point to these Google Servers

The Inbox looks the same as that of GMail’s interface.

Google Earth For GNU/Linux

2165 days

by tabrez in General, GNU/Linux

Being one of the people who kept sending intermittent emails to Google about why there is no GNU/Linux version of their popular Google Earth client, I was overjoyed when finally a GNU/Linux version of it was released by Google several days ago. Now I won’t feel lost when ‘Windows guys’ keep talking about what they have found with Google Earth.

It is a 16MB binary download(native binary executable, unlike Picasa For Linux which needs Wine software to execute it) and installs in any directory specified by the user. I was wondering if it will ask for the root privileges and will mess up with my Gentoo install system but thankfully it installed everything within ‘google-earth’ directory in my home directory. Download the binary file from Google Earth website and run it:

sh# chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin
sh# ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

A GUI window will popup and ask for the directory in which the client should be installed.

After clicking the ‘Begin Install’ button, the application is installed in the specified directory.

Upon completion, the installer will offer to start the application.

You can start the application any time by running the ‘googleearth’ executable from the shell:

sh# $HOME/google-earth/googleearth &

(The warning is about the emulation of OpenGL in software. If you use a good graphics card then you can consider updating the current drivers so that googleearth can run more efficiently. More information in Google Help Center.)

Add ‘google-earth’ directory(or wherever you installed it) to the path in the profile file to use a simple command to run it. Add this to .bash_profile in your home directory:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/google-earth

Now you can start Google Earth client by running:

sh# googleearth &

Hoping for more and more Google services being accessible from GNU/Linux operating system.

A Visual Tour Of Windows Vista Beta 2 (50+ Screenshots!)

2167 days

by tabrez in General

Not being in the habit of playing a lot with the Windows beta products, I have been giving a miss to the different, incomplete versions of Windows Vista that were being released regularly(for MSDN subscribers and the members of Vista Beta Program). My experience with testing a very early version of Longhorn weren’t very enjoyable either. But yesterday I decided to give the public release of the Beta 2 of Windows Vista operating system a go – and I am not regretting the decision at all!

We have been reading the major technical differences between ‘soon to be released’ Windows Vista and the earlier Windows operating systems for some time now. Many of the interesting new features though have been removed from Windows Vista in an attempt to release it as early as possible. But I won’t be discussing the real meat behind the new Vista operating system in this post; rather, I would just concentrate on showing what an eye candy of an interface Windows Vista is, even in a Beta 2 form, and it should only be improving from here. This doesn’t need too much of talking though, just a handful of screenshots would do the trick :) . If you have already installed Windows Vista then this post is not for you. If you have not, browse through the screenshots to decide if it is worth to test out this beta or not. And once it is released, whether to consider buying it or not.

If you would rather browse all the screenshots without having to jump through pages, the following link provides a tour that is spread over a single page.
A Visual Tour of Windows Vista Beta 2 (Single Page)

You can also download all the screenshots as a compressed file using the following link.
Download Screenshots

Or browse through them by going here:
Browse the screenshots using the worst interface in the world

If you prefer to browse through the thumbnails and then decide which pictures to view in ther enlarged versions, then drop me a message and I will try to setup a separate like that.

Windows Vista – A Visual Tour

This is how Windows Vista looks like when you first boot into it.

Let us start with my favourite application in Windows Vista: Windows Media Player 11. It looks gorgeous in the black theme to match the default theme of Windows Vista and provides many improvements over the earlier version of the Media Player. I loved the support it provides to the Media Players that use MTP protocol(like Creative MP3 players).

The main window now looks attractive with Album art nicely organised providing a good visual interface for the users to select their favourite albums to play.

If you try to minimize the player, you are offered to minimize it and keep playing the music in the taskbar. Nothing new really. This is how it looks in the toolbar. Cuter than before.

Burning audio cds is easier with a noob-friendly drag-n-drop right-pane.

Windows Vista detects my iPod as a USB device…

…though it prompts to open the files in the file browser giving a hint that the operating system does identify it as a storage device(iPods are just FAT formatted USB devices on Microsoft Windows)…

…but shows no music files/folders or plays anything. Just lets browsing the ‘Contact’, ‘Notes’ etc folders in it; for the rest, install and use iTunes :)

But the support for the Creative MP3 players is excellent. I am more than happy for it as I possess two Creative Media Players(Creative Zen Sleek which you can see in the screenshot below and the Creative Portable Media Center) that are MTP devices.

Vista Detects Creative Zen Sleek MP3 Player(Single Page)->
Vista Detects Creative Zen Sleek MP3 Player(Read Page2)->

Killer Looks of KDE in Kubuntu Entices a Long Time GNOME User!

2170 days

by tabrez in General, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu

I had been a KDE user for more than 3 years at one time and those were my early days with GNU/Linux operating system. Once I felt comfortable enough with GNU/Linux to start trying different window managers, I evaluated a few and finally settled down with the GNOME desktop environment as my primary desktop manager, mainly for its simplicity and ease of use. It was less cluttered than KDE and more featureful than XFCE. Above all, I personally preferred the sleek look of GNOME to that of KDE. I tried my best to stay clear of all the KDE vs GNOME flame wars but got really frustrated my the insolent remark made by Linus that GNOME developers treat the users like noobs. Incidents like these might have converted me from being ‘just another fan’ of GNOME desktop to a loyal user of it, but that was not to be. Enter the newly released Dapper Drake version of Kubuntu.

amaroK: Media Player for the KDE Desktop. Strongly recommended to give it a try.

The look and feel of the Kubuntu operating system totally blew me away! For the first time I have understood that no other distribution had put enough effort in customising the look of KDE targetting the casual users, barring Kubuntu and SuSE. Perhaps the fact that Kubuntu(all Ubuntu family of distributions) ships with minimal set of essential applications(only one application for any given job) did the trick for me. I hated to see multiple text editors, web browsers, media players, and even terminal emulators, being installed for KDE by most of the popular distributions. It was abused in GNOME too, but only to a limited extent. The main menu of KDE always used to contain many more items present than the GNOME menu for the same distribution. Its different with the Ubuntu family of distributions.

Hold the mouse over a file and it will display all the information related to that file in a nice popup window.

Using Kubuntu for less than 3 days was compelling enough to convert a long time GNOME user to a KDE fan! Though I have become used to a lot of GNOME applications over time and can’t imagine living without any of them, or having to always install them separately on the KDE desktop, I will surely be using the KDE environment more regularly from now. The fact that a lot of KDE applications in Kubuntu are crash-prone isn’t helping me if I want to consider a complete shift to the KDE environment – its only good for fun as of now. (This is a Kubuntu specific issue, not related to KDE, that too only on my hardware; I haven’t seen too many Kubuntu users complaining about the stability issues that I am experiencing.)

Edit programs in MS Windows-like Kate editor or in the powerful emacs editor.

So shall I take this as a sign of more fierce competition between KDE and GNOME desktops in the Ubuntu family of operating systems in the coming months or will the GNOME desktop remain the undisputed king for still a very long time to come?

Below are some screenshots of KDE desktop on Kubuntu operating system.

Akregator: RSS Feed Aggregator for the KDE Desktop