26 Dec 2008
Cool meal
Are you thinking what I am thinking?
8 Dec 2008
Migrating from Textpattern to WordPress
So, I finally switched to WordPress. This has been on my mind for a long time. Yet, I have always delayed this decision, mostly because I liked the way Textpattern handled publishing elegantly and intuitively. I particularly like the way Txp used tags instead of raw PHP for template-ing. And there was also Textile, which simplifies writing so much, without having to manually type out html tags for links, images etc. At one point some two years back, Txp was looking highly promising. It was free and the community was friendly and helpful.
However, things have since been moving too slowly. I started missing features such as tagging, auto save and good spam control, all of which WordPress had, and more. With Textile being available on WordPress also as a plugin, I decided to make the switch.
Transition was fairly smooth. It could have been bad, but my only basic requirement was that my old posts and comments were imported. This was handled pretty well by the WordPress import option. Typically, it’s the change in URLs that pose most problems when switching to WordPress. For me, that wasn’t really an issue as I hardly have any inbound links to specific posts.
So, here I am. In WordPress. Of course, this doesn’t mean I am going to stop using Txp. It’s very handy as a CMS, but sadly, it doesn’t quite work for me. Not anymore.
22 Oct 2008
Ping Pong
So, we can now use a new feature just released by Google to set up custom auto responses ( “canned responses”, to quote Google).
What’s more interesting to me is what Techcrunch has decided to do with this new feature!
So of course we’ll be testing this by using two gmail accounts with filtered canned responses, each based on incoming emails from the other account. Theoretically emails should bounce back and forth between the accounts quickly and permanently, until one of the accounts runs out of storage.
10 Sep 2008
GCC on Ubuntu
A friend recently ran into a problem while trying to get GCC working on Ubuntu. Ubuntu does not install GCC by default and therefore, to get it working, you have to put back your installation CD and type the following on the terminal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
In most cases that should do the trick, but sometimes (like in my friend’s case), one might get an error stating “build-essential could not be found”.
I am not really sure why this occurs, but after some googling, I found a solution. To fix the problem, run the Synaptic Package Manager and press the refresh button. Then run the above command from the terminal again. It should work. 
Just wanted to document this, so that it might be of use to someone.
10 Sep 2008
Overlooked
Jet Airways has a really decent site. It is aesthetically pleasing to look at, informative and surprisingly well organized.
It beats me however, why they don’t have a search form. Recently, I was looking for baggage related information on their site and I was totally lost. I had no idea where it would be found, and in such a case, a search would have been really handy. Instead I had to resort to Google to find the required information.
A case of overlooking an obvious and critical functionality. But then again, when Google crawls, indexes our sites faster and better, why bother?