Category Archives: Web

Web

Nostalgia with Winamp

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Today I came across a hacker news post – winamp2-js

It has taken me back to my early years of computers, music and start of programming. It was 1998, when Winamp came up and was instantly viral. I had endless songs churned through that software and was in first-sight love with it for its ease of use, features, simplicity and its light weight nature. Back then there used to be heavy-weight player called Windows Media Player which on 3rd world country desktops was too much to ask. Winamp had answered all the questions, ticked all the boxes.

A few years on … It was Winamp that had urged me to make my first contribution to the open web (github and opensource perhaps wasn’t as popular then). I had taken up a task to design a Winamp skin. I think I decided it had to be my then heart-throb Elizabeth Hurley. It turned out to be a big effort initially but post its approval on Winamp’s website and seeing the usage counters grow up by the day, I got that high that the new-age developers get looking at the green boxes glow up on github’s profile page.

This awesome find of nodejs based winamp player gave another time-travel. फुक्टे / फुकरे as we were, I had learnt HTML, some JS (which now is my bread-winner). I needed a site to display my skills, I took up to the best available then (free that is) – geocities. New age guys reading this post wouldn’t smile reading that name, however for some… “Aaah good ol’ days of geocities.com”. I had created a website on geocities with a page dedicated to all the winamp skins I manged to craft. The list had grown to 5. You’ll find them available for download at the bottom.

Sometime back I tried to find my geocities website in hope of some crawler had crawled it and hosted, and I hit oocities.org. Today I manged to find the page dedicated to Winamp, download the skins and even see them working here.

A big thanks to https://github.com/captbaritone for his project and hacker news!

Winamp Skins

Yasmin Bleeth Winamp Skin
Yasmin Bleeth Winamp Skin
Barbara Schett Winamp Skin
Barbara Schett Winamp Skin
Martina Hingis Winamp Skin
Martina Hingis Winamp Skin
Elizabeth Hurley Winamp Skin
Elizabeth Hurley Winamp Skin
Priyanka Chopra Winamp Skin
Priyanka Chopra Winamp Skin
Linux, Web

Popcorn Time is back!

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Popcorn time the one which got banned, barred, you name it. Is Back ! This time with a new website – http://www.time4popcorn.eu/

For Fedora users like me they’ll get an error

$ ./Popcorn-Time
./Popcorn-Time: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

They can simply fix it by installing yum install libgudev1. If the package is already present, just make a sym link.


# ln -s /usr/lib64/libgudev-1.0.so.0 /usr/lib64/libudev.so.0

This will work like charm.

Further you can create a desktop file so that the app reflects in your Super key search (GNOME, Unity, etc)

Here is my popcorntime.desktop file

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Popcorn Time
GenericName=Popcorn Time
Comment=Watch movies online
Exec=/home/rutu/apps/Popcorn/Popcorn-Time %U
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Icon=/home/rutu/apps/Popcorn/Popcorn-time-logo.jpg
Keywords=Videos;Movies;Torrents;HD;Streaming;

Create the file in ~/.local/share/applications.

I’ve also created / cropped a logo.
Popcorn-time-logo

Web

Flipkart Bug ?

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I was searching for some headphones, I got a link where flipkart was promoting a costlier Seller as opposed to cheaper ones..

Flipkart Bug ?
Flipkart Bug ?

My colleague Aamir Khan, yes you read it right, did an extensive research but too couldn’t find a valid reason. Perhaps he could post his detailed study as well.

Linux, Web

Ubuntu 12.10 Verdict

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A Saturday, new Ubuntu in the Downloads folder. What is it that you expect a linux user to do?

I installed Ubuntu 12.10 on Lenovo X201. I had 10.10 installed previously. I decided not to upgrade, but to clean install. It didn’t give me upgrade options anyways.

Post installation, here are some of the things I faced / enjoyed

Bootup time almost 25 seconds, it was around 15-20s for 10.10. A BIG downside for this release!

The Dash feels much quicker. However the gnome-shell still feels snappy as opposed to dash

I fuckin love the WebApps concept in Unity – That has actually made me stick to Unity.

Search in Unity still makes you click – as opposed to gnome-shell – Search the right string and hit Enter. That doesn’t work in Unity

I hated the original Alt+Tab utility in Unity, so installed Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (originally ccsm – so don’t search for that in apt). I replaced it with Static Window Switcher. It worked but then strangely started showing bugs of ghost windows moving in and out of the gray bar – little distracting, but didn’t break anything. (I was too careless to resolve conflicts 😛 – Was that the reason ?)

I adore the complete integration of Social World into the top-right corner of Ubuntu. You name it, Gmail (the Web App of that one is “क्या बात !क्या बात !” It shows the unread mails in Inbox, TagX, TagY, all in that top-right corner dropdown). O… continuing with integration – Facebook, Twitter, Chat, etc. However I’m an old time user of Pidgin, and have tonnes of logs in Pidgin which I don’t want to lose. I have no idea how to make Pidgin as the default integrated chat client into GNOME3 and Unity alike. – Help would do. Thunderbird too integrated nicely since the last release.

Ubuntu – Amazon Nexus – Naaah ! Disabled the “Online Search Results” from the “Privacy” application

I’m not a big fan of the Dark Ambiance theme, but with the other themes support in terms of UI elements, logos, etc.. I’ve got to stick with Ambiance atleast for now. I would’ve preferred the old GTK2 based Clearlooks theme.

Score: 7/10 – All the marks getting lost for the tacky compiz and inability to change defaults easily without installing other apps.

Web

Search targeting might take a hit with Firefox’s search over SSL

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Adnetworks like Chitika who rely a lot on search engines and search queries to target their ads will have to rethink on their strategies.

With the merge of the current Aurora branch of Firefox into release, all search traffic to Google would go via SSL. Which means adnetworks doing search targeting could lose about 20% of their search traffic, as Google might stop sending search referrer URLs.

Enabling HTTPS for these searches shields our users from network infrastructure that may be gathering data about the users or modifying/censoring their search results. Additionally, using HTTPS helps providers like Google remove information from the referrer string. While Google users may expect Google to know what they are searching for, Firefox users may not be aware these search terms are often transmitted to sites they visit when they click on items in the search results; enabling HTTPS search helps sites like Google strip this infortmation from the HTTP referrer string, putting the user better in control of when and to whom their interests are shared.

 

via Rolling Out HTTPS Google search | Mozilla Privacy Blog.

 

Linux, Web

git merge specific files from another branch or revision

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You have a perfect git branch model, neatly dividing code between the release and the development or trunk branch. Now suddenly you realise that you need to use the file from the other branch. But you can’t merge the branch for that sake !! WTF !

git checkout !! help !

  1. Make sure the file that you want to pull is clean (ie. that file shouldn’t be shown as modified in git status)
  2. $ git checkout <other-branch-name>/<commit-hash> -- path/to/the/file

You can now checkout the branch’s HEAD or that hash’s state of the file into your current working directory. You can now play with your file, add, commit. Done !

Web

Javascript Docs – Here we come

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A new campaign has started – Promoting JavaScript Documentation, Promote JS.

One of the things that echoed my thoughts about JavaScript were these

This is the first impression of JS by the general masses who are coming to this language and once you see this, you can see why people consider it a “toy language” and understand how so much bad code and disdain can exist for JS. We have hidden the better tutorials, learnings, and documentations away from ourselves AND more to the point, those trying to learn this language. New entrants struggle to learn JS, but eventually just adopt what they know from PHP, Java, Perl, Python and Ruby to a close approximation of runnable code that suffices. They then publish it back out, proud of what they have done, and continue to perpetuate this plague of improper JS coding.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/10/promotejs-a-worldwide-call-for-improving-js-documentation-visibility/

The aim of the campaign is

  • Improve JavaScript Documentation
  • Add more back links to current MDN / MDC documentation. So that a search terms like “JavaScript” gets MDN’s link as #1 reference instead of Wikipedia