Update time.

What is Hob currently reading?
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This has been the most gripping non-fiction book I have read in a while. Recommended reading by everybody!

What is Hob currently doing?
Playing around with Ubuntu 7.04 on Microsoft VirtualPC 2007. Oh, the irony!

What is Hob excited about?
Cousin Q's friend's D is getting married on Saturday and Hob's gonna go!

What is Hob really super-excited about?
Flying out to Amsterdam on Sunday! And spending two days in London with T and aunt S! And the rest of the time in Amsterdam! Amsterdam! Lalalalalalalalala! Amsterdam!

Phir milenge, break ke baad!

After installing Firefox 1.5, I was upset to notice that the minimize-to-free-memory trick from version 1.0.7 stopped working. Here's how to get the old behavior back.

• Type in about:config in the address bar.
• Right click on the list and select New -> Boolean.
• Type in config.trim_on_minimize as the preference name.
• Set the value to be true.
• Restart Firefox and tada!

Now, if Firefox memory usage rises too much (if you open too many tabs etc.), simply minimize Firefox and the memory usage will drop dramatically (usually to around 5-10 MB.)

Now that we finished trying out Performancing, let's try Deepest Sender. It's actually been designed for Livejournal exclusively but the latest version supports posting to Blogger. The first thing I notice is that I cannot pull up an older post. I guess this is something which will change in the future. Other wise the interface is pretty much the same. Update: Well, I reviewed this just a few days too soon! The latest version (0.7.3) does support editing posts which is great. Code generation also works better than Performancing.

Most of my complaints with Performancing seem to hold true for this extension too. No fixed width font in the source tab, no easy way to use a <code> tag etc. Also, the default text editor font is too small.

So this is a test post using the Performancing Firefox extension. It's a blog managing mini-application that runs inside Firefox. You can add, edit and delete posts. I guess it would be especially helpful if you have multiple blogs with multiple blogging services.

Looks like I already found a few bugs! If you select a post to edit from your existing posts, it seems to wrap paragraphs in a <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> and add additional line breaks.

Also, the html editor is not syntax highlighted, and doesn't use a fixed width font. No easy way to wrap chunks of code in <code> or <pre> tags. More importantly no spell checker. I'm probably going to stick to using the rich text editor built into blogger.com until they fix all this stuff.

More bugs! If the connection to blogger.com fails when you are editing a post, the post as edit button disappears. I have to restart performancing to get back normal behavior.

Another Tuesday.

I realized something about myself today. Things break around me. Watches, cell-phones, the little rubber legs on laptops, shoes, shoelaces, slippers, zippers and a lot else. Somehow molecules seem to lose adhesive and cohesive properties when I'm near. Sometimes structural integrity itself decides that it doesn't prefer my company. And magnetic and electric fields generally find me annoying and leave. This is not a happy realization. I like things, pay good money for them and I don't like them breaking.

Things that annoyed me today:
1. My reliance on numbered and bulleted lists.

2. The absence of a good Gimp port on Windows. Ideally one that doesn't cost money. Because, if I had the money to spare now, I might have bought Photoshop.

3. Finally accepting the fact that I'll never get a computer fast enough.

4. The death of good music.

5. Feigned political neutrality.

Another Wednesday awaits tomorrow.

Everyone's got a gimmick and it's about time I got one too, hence:

Things that annoyed me today:
1. Brain dead line wrapping behavior in Thunderbird 0.5. Lines seem to be neatly wrapped at 72 characters. Then you send what seems to be a neatly formatted email, and lines aren't wrapped at all at the receiver. The situation is worse if you're composing from a template. The template itself seems to have line wraps. Unfortunately, any edit you make that involves deleting a newline (basically pressing backspace at column 0, and going to column 72 on the previous line) makes it seem that that particular line is wrapped when it's not. So the receiver gets an email, which has some sentences wrapped at column 72, others not wrapped at all. Receiver then doubts your IQ.

There is a rewrap function in the edit menu, but we need an option to automatically rewrap all outgoing emails.

Better yet, we need Thunderbird developer's to look at the jEdit project, and take inspiration from their concepts of soft and hard line-wrapping.

2. On again, off again, on again, off again-right-in-the-middle-of-a-transaction-with-the-bank wireless internet connections.

3. Self censorship again.

Its 2am and I'm waiting for Windows XP SP2.

This post was actually going to be about a fairly controversial topic, but then I realized that this blog is publicly viewable, and I'm not really ready to wear my opinions on my sleeve. Yet.

Another interesting phenomenon of the liberating weblog subculture. Self censorship.

Or maybe it's just me and my paranoia acting up again.

It's hard to write. And mostly when it's hard to write I simply rant, which while being simpler, is never as interesting, nor can be used to maintain a torrent of words and ideas. After all, how much can one person complain?

So it comes to this then, an unsteady ramble, almost forced, with no clear direction. No story to tell or idea to dissect.

After a quick trip to the library, I returned with large stack of graphic novels, including Alan Moore's classic Watchmen, and his recently-converted-into-a-movie-which-got-mixed-reviews From Hell. I've read Watchmen before, but it's a compelling read. (For those who don't know much about Alan Moore, he's a British writer who's recently announced his retirement from comic books, and who's written stuff like Swamp Thing, a compelling horror comic about a man who's killed in a swamp, only to wake up as a muck-encrusted monstrosity, and after finally coming to terms with his loss of humanity, finds out that he's not the man who died, but rather just a bunch of plants who have evolved into him, and gained his memories. Mr. Moore's other famous works include, the aforementioned Watchmen, probably the first and certainly one of the most disturbing studies in super-hero deconstructionism, examining how a world would be, if it really had men who could fly and masked vigilantes meting out rough justice, and the recently-also-converted-into-a-movie-but-the-movie-sucked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) I skimmed through Watchmen, and couldn't find the patience to read From Hell. I suppose something must be wrong if I'm getting impatient with mere comic books.

Here I shall segue to what seems to be the problem with my mind lately. I seem to be on a short fuse of sorts. Not in terms of temper but rather in terms of attention. I seem to be suffering from a sudden bout of attention deficit disorder, wherein I can't stick to a train of thought long enough to follow it to its logical conclusion. Rather, I simply wander all over. And I suppose having easy access to the internet simply aggravates this problem.

Most of my time these days seems to be spent at sites like Slashdot, or Ananova, reading about the next nerdy (or quirky) news item. I should probably just bite the bullet, and install a RDF aggregator. Then again, that's probably courting further loss in productivity. I can't believe I'm saying this so early in my career, but I seem to be suffering from work addiction, and these are just the withdrawal symptoms.

I shall end with more recommendations from off my reading list (most from my former reading list):

1. Supreme Power: Another superhero deconstructionist tale, only this one is still going on, and new issues come out every month. It's by J. Michael Straczynski, for whom comics are a second job, his first one being a writer/producer of television and film. A preview of Supreme power #1: http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazines/wizard/WZ20030815-sp_1.cfm

2. Preacher: A weird, violent, and iconoclastic tale about a Texas preacher who loses his faith and gets to play host to an entity as powerful as God, his ex-girlfriend who's now a hitman, and his new best friend, an Irish vampire. After he finds out that the Devil is dead, and God has abandoned Heaven, the preacher goes out to find and confront God and make Him pay for His actions.

3. Ghost World: This has nothing to do with ghosts. It's an immensely funny story about a pair of teenage girls, who decide to wreak havoc with the lives of people around them by playing practical jokes. This became an excellent movie starring Thora Birch.

Nothing more to say. It's bloody 3am and I need the sleep.