Folder View widget enhancement in upcoming KDE

KDE 4.3's Folder View widget

Just built the development version of KDE that I keep along with 4.3 that comes with Kubuntu. I had been really annoyed by the way I was restricted to the default wallpaper. The reason being that, the Folder View widget didn't have enough white/black shadows below the text under icons to show some clarity, naturally a dark/bluish wallpaper used to fail. This is not going to be same in the upcoming version, which is looking pretty nicely polished. This is how it puts nice white shadows below text in the widget -

Improved widget with shadows for more clarity

Exe files!

2:30 am : Right now I was going through college notes/slides/etc and happened to see a compiled .exe from my visual c++ (hci) class. Guess what was I going to do.... ?

I was rubbing my thumb on trackpad to select it and the the other finger was reaching for the Del key!

I then gained control and realised that it was just a harmless .exe file, why was I doing what I was doing! :D

Twitter Weekly

• lol http://bit.ly/32V6HG 12:28 PM Nov 10th
• I wish gitorious could show that "hardcore archiving action" message like github instead of a plaintext which made me feel like smthng faild 1:13 PM Nov 10th
• I think one/i should actually consider app engine for hosting non-heavy traffic stuff. Who wants to pay these assholes $9/month 2:00 PM Nov 10th f
• @ManishSinha The thing is their offer starts with 4.9/mo unlimited offer, but after 1 year they come to you with double rates for renewal. 2:11 PM Nov 10th
• RT @ srdash RT @tinucherian: IDIOT = I Do It On Twitter. ( via @hg6) 3:54 PM Nov 10th
• You have been programming a lot when you type <string> instead of a <strong>while doing some html. 10:15 PM Nov 10th
• RT @t3rmin4t0r "Just like pornography, a to-do list won't work if you never look at it" #insanity 12:01 AM Nov 11th
• Just finished making a page for PyMos - http://ideamonk.github.com/... github <3> 12:45 AM Nov 11th
• Thanks to project #wine , I can haz comfortable time doing web design on #linux with #photoshop without the sinful thoughts about #win 1:12 AM Nov 11th
• Wow google sent me Free Rs. 2500 coupon on AdWords... so much for using analytics since last 3 years. Thanks Google :) 2:32 PM Nov 11th
• http://twitpic.com/p3cga - KDE 4.3.75 :) 2:38 PM Nov 11th
• http://twitpic.com/p3g2m - @hackfanatic I so jealous, that I dug out this pic again to see the aggregate bandwidth. #sheffield #torrents #j- 3:47 PM Nov 11th
• RT Wah! kya farmaya hai! :D @ManishSinha "Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce." 4:32 PM Nov 11th
• "There's another life, behind that, it's now so-damn-clear that they're just trying to keep a balance with it." 5:19 PM Nov 11th
• Calls for Mega Lulz RT @dkris Epic #FAIL this RT @pavanaja RT @ninaada: Stupidity of Windows Vista....... http://www.twitpic.com/45wsn 6:36 PM Nov 11th from
• Its always been a spy vs spy with me, mom, kitchen, sweets and fridge. 9:37 PM Nov 12th
• Finished darker than black s1's last 5 eps again... found that OST http://is.gd/4U11K thanks to Gabriela Robin http://is.gd/4U11b 2:07 PM Nov 13th
• Going to Nokia Care for a possible heated argument unless they've done something good. Yay my poster's in :) http://foss.in/promote/posters 3:47 PM Nov 13th
• Sweet instead of whatever I was expecting, Nokia gave me back my Rs. 650... but im still phoneless, gona try repairing that 1200 phone nw. 4:37 PM Nov 13th f
• OMG! @Sixrevisions had featured madetokill.com this august! Glad that we repurchased that domain :) http://is.gd/4Unwo madetokill++ 11:45 PM Nov 13th
• RT @Chetan_Gole thanks dude.. RT @manan: remember the game Prince? Yeah that DOS game? Was fun eh? The dev is on twitter - @jmechner :) 12:10 AM Nov 14th
• Remember another DOS game, Was fun for sure, addictive & famous too! Was seen in every school comp lab... The dev is on twitter - @theromero 12:50 AM Nov 14th
• Just can't get my head of from this long talk form this gen z junior to another about life, shortcuts, success and what not... twas epic! 6:02 PM Nov 14th
• @ajaypeter lulz seriously! so how's the record quality ? 8:12 PM Nov 14th
• argh some of those presentations at defcon 17 are so full of FUDs. "Man entangled in its own creations" my thoughts on Viruses and AVs 8:20 PM Nov 14th
• Thank you Def Con 17 for making my day more productive :D 3:46 PM Nov 15th
• @l0nwlf its like surfing from one life to another, with moment of fumes and epic lulz, its awesome! #wanderings #the_network 4:03 PM Nov 15th
• Wow the place where I live in has its own Drupal powered website - http://ngvbangalore.in/ about 13 hours ago f
• double m[]={4300168424721351073858953713021034432154919441700563152011264.000000,494}; main(){m[1]--?m[0]*=2,main():puts(m);} #twitcode 25 minutes ago

PyMos - Creating mosaics of your photos was never easier

PyMos is a Python script/module that helps you generate those fancy photo mosaics wherein a large image is made out of tiny thumbnails of other images. But from a distance, the mosaic looks like original image. Here is an example.
PyMos just started as an random hack which later turned into an impromptu hackathon as Yuvi puts it. Man it was fun to work together with someone for the first time, to learn so many new things, and to get more awesome ideas through discussion. Some of the noteworthy things I came through this project are - argparse, PIL, setuptools, some more git gyaan, that colorspace can be also treated like x-y-z vectors, logging in python, caching things using Pickle to save time, writing re-usable code, checking code against standards using pylint, rounding off corners and adding shadows with css, and what not.
I never wished to put too much in the blog about it. Just finished the project page for PyMos an hour ago - Get to know more about PyMos at its project page.

this is how it should look.

Besides that, while making the page I noticed a few things -

• I happened to find a nice motive for PyMos' existence - these people who sell mosaics as a service. PyMos liberates you financially, intellectually and gives you freedom to mix-n-mash to make your own custom version... for it is a F/OSS
• The project page would look nice in modern browsers only as I've utilized CSS3 @font-face to pull in some nice fonts.
• I've also used CSS to save time doing round corners and shadows, so again you need a good browser that supports it, currently Firefox 3.5+ and webkit based ones.
• By the way, PyMos project page is totally made on Linux, thanks to wine for letting me run Photoshop 7, I no longer have to look towards windows in any case, not even in times of creativity blues.
• Since I'm not an advanced user of Photoshop, I hardly find any differences in cs3 or 7 as far as the way I use.
  

So, have fun making some cool mosaics with PyMos :)

Twitter Weekly

• LOL RT: @vimoh Facebook challenge - Poke sako toh poke lo mujhko!1:59 AM Nov 1st
• One round of Q3 a day, keeps boredom away. #quake3 #wine12:25 PM Nov 1st
• The little hearts they give free with Good Day biscuits are so little. Much of it is air.12:32 PM Nov 1st
• @akramquraishi Yes, it will take a lot of time to penetrate Desktop though. Moreover I find many Linux users switching to a mac later. :o2:30 PM Nov 1st
• RT Now this is awesome! @ashish_0x90 @ideamonk, as i remember it was more like Bhagwan Se bhi Na Lage #BSNL4:51 PM Nov 1st
• Interesting T-shirt Quote for geek Dad's "My 6yr old son switches between XP and Ubuntu :)"9:58 PM Nov 2nd
• QUOTE / yeah man.. Ubuntu is gonna take over the world from Windows and Mac :) /QUOTE10:25 PM Nov 2nd
• http://twitpic.com/o0pjt - Doodh ka doodh, pani ka pani, Evince rendering is superior to Okular when rotated.10:50 PM Nov 2nd
• RT: @yuvipanda I think I finally *get* why an engineer is different. We build new things. Engineers bridge artists and scientists.10:24 PM Nov 3rd
• Just expressed my desire to have echofon renamed back to TwitterFox. How do they expect eveyone to spell it as echofon with an f.10:45 PM Nov 3rd
• It looks like a Death Note scene when Salman and Ajay Devgan talk parallely about their Wimbley plans in London Dreams.2:52 AM Nov 4th
• Got VC++ and nano class test tomorrow, one is outdated, the other is irrelevant. And VC++ on paper is a total fail.6:13 PM Nov 4th
• http://twitpic.com/oczqh - On the way to launch liferea.. i get this! KDE has made it so easy to find the meaning of life :D8:20 PM Nov 5th
• The air is fresh, crystal clear, the sky heavenly purplish blue, I can see each leaf of the tree with a shine of cleanliness #weather #blr5:42 PM Nov 6th
• 2 hrs to catch bus, time for catching up with norwegian wood.5:20 AM Nov 7th
• checking out kdebase and kdelibs... 4 days break before end sem starts and these are the things I feel like doing...8:52 PM Nov 7th
• @l0nwlf Fuck you! we always feel inferior to your Quake 3 skillz9:11 PM Nov 7th
• The Onion Movie - steven seagal is cock puncher! #rofl11:43 PM Nov 7th
• RT @achitnis: Being Proactive: Don't wait, don't ask, just do it. If you're wrong, someone will tell you. If you're right, they'll love you11:45 AM Nov 8th
• Remembers that while building allegro, back on the old win98 time, the script said, go make some coffee while the library compiles :)5:40 PM Nov 8th
• I am so annoyed by Gitorious that I am running fuckitallnight.sh tonight - http://paste.ha.ckers.in/29040about 23 hours ago
• konsole tabs give you more information than gnome-terminal, eg. it indicates if something is running under a tab by color :) #kdeloveabout 16 hours ago
• Just before exams I'm usually able to work 6 hrs programming something / getting new ideas, while when college is ON everything seems 2 suckabout 15 hours ago

QUOTD

An Optimist who fails to see how the circumstances around him helped in his success is a fool. For he sometimes preaches false lessons of blind optimism.

Introducing GTweetBar (alpha)

This is my Xournal entry of April 27th 2009. It clearly speaks of how much time I take in between imagining and creating things. I need to improve a lot on that part, or maybe organize my time well, and hack myself away from that saturday-sunday syndrome where you feel like spending the weekend doing nothing for you've been already been wasting time for college for 12 hrs a day away from your system.
Oh sweet, this snap is when I had just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 :)


Been almost 6 months I guess :o. A couple of months back I was playing around with gtk, glade, etc which gave some confidence to work over making it for real. So here we have - GTweetBar - A GNOME Panel Applet that lets you update your twitter status on the fly. An omnipresent, super-simplified twitter-client for your linux desktop. (which is still in development)
I initially started writing this applet with PyGTK and glade. The tutorials for writing a panel applet on gnome are pretty limited and there is a shortage of simple examples for beginners as far as I think. I found an interesting problem during the development, the Entry box did not respond when the app is run as applet. I found it pretty weird, but that led into a better understanding of how signals and handled, why and when to use an Event box and the use of applet.request_focus(). All this had to be understood by reading a random pastebin entry! :)
There were more issues coming later, I got it tested from a few friends on twitter. It's pretty cool to find the Issues section on github. It lets users of your software communicate and talk about any problems they encounter. Pretty cool to have it along the project page. Github \m/
Testing it on Ubuntu 8.04 on my old PC helped uncover some more compatibility issues. It seems that gtk.gdk.Color("#93E9FF") isn't backward compatible. You can use gtk.gdk.color_parse("#93E9FF") instead to ensure it works.

Here are few snaps -





As of now, I have to fix a lot of bugs (pending after end sems). It's not working on Ubuntu 9.10 under applet mode. Working with YuviPanda on PyMos taught me a lot of things. I also used GConf to store user preferences. Man! Its dead simple to use.. So this calls for an extension of todo list :) -

[ ] alerts for failed tweets...
[ ] loads of exception handling here and there
[ ] new setup using setuptools
[ ] test portability of python_twitter or throw it as dependency in setup()
[ ] add logging
[ ] optparse/argparse
[ ] tool tips to show current status
[ ] beautify the code
[ ] a drop down list of tweets

So go ahead fork it, test it, use it - GTweetBar alpha.

On Death - from 'Norwegian Wood'

Haruki Murakami has an excellent view on Death in his Novel 'Norwegian Wood', here it is -

This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.
When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

Not that I can relate to the death scene in the novel, but there are 100 of other incidents in the novel that I can relate to, and observations that I did not have words to express. Interesting read indeed...