Sunday, February 25, 2007

OSXlook for Debian

Stumbled upon this link http://www.taimila.com/ubuntuosx.php in the ilugc mailing list. That site describes about how to make ubuntu look like Mac OS. Suggests a few themes which will give the feel of Mac to your desktop and the steps to be followed. Followed the steps there and made my GNOME desktop look something similar to the Mac desktop. But the T-ish theme suggested by that link was not so impressive in Debian. Later came across a theme called MacOS-X in gnome-look.org. A cool theme that makes your desktop look exactly similar to that of the Mac desktop. Installed the theme and the icon set suggested in the theme download page. Everything is perfect except for the bottom panel that needs to be configured like the OSX docker. Except for that the desktop looks exactly like the mac one and is pretty cool..

Monday, February 19, 2007

Something about vista...

Though vista was released few weeks back there is very little noise about it in this part of the state. I am yet to catch a glimpse of the operating system. Not many are talking about vista here and still college has not purchased one i think. Except for the reviews posted by some users in the internet, nothing is known about its performance. Some called vista a memory bloat and it requires around 2 GB of memory for good performance. A post in slashdot claimed vista suffers from serious UAC bugs. Heard that vista has failed to clear some antivirus security certificate the name of which i dont remember, so it may still require a third party antivirus to protect it. Looks like what i have read till now seems to be against the operating system.

M$ is heavily advertising the operating system and the advertisement in tv focusses mainly on the GUI aspects. Looks like the cafe coffee day shop has gone into some sort of agreement with M$. Their menu card is designed with windows logo and looks more like a vista advertisement card than a menu card. You will have to open the windows logo to get the list of items. There is also a new cool drink named after vista. Dont remember the name now but it went on like "windows wow ...." and costs around Rs.50. Cafe coffee day created some noise before by using gnu/linux for their billing system. Now they are doing it with vista.Should wait to see how far these advertisements are effective. After entry into the college windows has not attracted me at all and still it continues to be the same.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Visit to god's own country

After the spicy trip to trivandrum last year this time we were off to kerala once again for the final year industrial visit. This time it was cochin, the queen of the arabian sea. The trip turned out to be a thrilling experience. As usual we started late from the college and  reached cochin late. Cochin is a beautiful city with wide roads and the buildings illustrated the architectural excellence of the people. After the short stay at the room it was time to visit TCS. In the evening we went to the cochin harbour and it was great to see large ships moving in and out of the port. We spent around one hour there watching the various war ships of Indian navy. The guide also pointed us to the war ship that destroyed the karachi port. Managed to take a lot of snaps there. After dinner it was time for some game play. We started playing cards at around 9 pm and kept going till 4 am. We were playing the game of ass and it was quite interesting. Subramani and Musi took turns and lost the game 6 and 5 times respectively. They were closely followed by prabakaran with 4 and nirmal with 3. I lost the pen ultimate game ending the successfull run of 18 games withoug loses. Ramji remained undefeated that night but lost many times the next day. This game of cards turned out to be the most interesting part of the IV.

The next day we were off to Athirapally falls where the film "Punnagai Mannan" was shot. The view of the falls was splendid and it was interesting to see that the area has escaped from the human beings as it was clean and well maintained. We spent the whole day there enjoying the beauty of the falls and the cool breeze. Finally we departed from cochin and returned to madurai. The return journey in the bus was dramatic, thrilling and funny. Though we spent a lot of time in bus than in visiting places, lot of funny incidents would  linger in mind for a lot many days to come. Will upload the photos soon, keep in touch with http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003.