Dare to Dream?

Pickup any pixel you want! Checkout the sidebar!

What do you get?

• 16×16 pixels logo space
• A link-back to your product/website
• A popup description
• 60 days campaign period on a page with Google Page Rank of 6
• Premier spot on the blog - visible to every user, on every page!

What do you pay?

• $10 flat!

Other conditions

• Logo spanning multiple spots is allowed (you pay for those many spots)
• No adult/pharmacy advertisements allowed
• Your logo would be removed automatically after 60 days
• Money transfer is via PayPal

Interested?

Get in touch at maku at makuchaku.info

Resources : 16×16 pixel logo creator

I was back on the joggin track today evening and to my surprise - each and everyone was running/walking again in clockwise direction… why did no one even bothered to switch directions? Time and again I’ve seen this strange habit amongst pupil to just follow - cant anyone think different? It isnt written anwwhere that everyone has to move clockwise lol - And when I started running anti-clockwise, people who were getting onto the track started joining my direction???

On top of that, when I was walking around the track for a warm up, the lights suddenly went out. We though its a power cut again. But then suddenly I saw a fire on the ground, picking up flares on the dry grass. It was a short circuit. What’s weird was that people were least bothered - leave alone the short circuit, the fire even didn’t bothered them. Everyone just continued walking around that area - whats happening to everyone? Not bothered atall?

I managed to get hold of a care-taker, who killed the fire with sand.

Sometimes, the general public attitude is soo strange and ugghh…

Just to end the post on a light thought, a great shot I found in my archives - way back from the good time in Atlanta

The ISS Gang at Norcross Jain Temple.

Makuchaku can dance as well…

Checkout the video… don’t concentrate too much on me as you’ll miss the best part - lol

Only one person was dancing on this stage, rest others were just doing aerobics
– ISS Foot Lose Dance Auditions, IBM, 2007

If anyone has ever played any kind of FPS or a TPS, they know how much fun this can be!
Oh man - I cannot wait for the next weekend to come!!! Playing an FPS in real life! WOW!!!

Chris is organizing this as a team event at Classic Paintball during the next weekend! Thanks a ton to him

Notes are here

…gotta run!

Stay in Delhi was some rocking 12 days - meeting family again was an awesome experience.
This would be my last access to Delhi’s bandwidth
Cyu in Pune!

Finally found a good XMLRPC based blogging app Check out Kablog at www.kablog.org

Whomsoever IRCTC gave the contract to maintain their front-ends for ticket reservation - is doing one hulluva job! Kudos to them!

While booking tickets, I saw an option of getting IRCTC’s services on my mobile - IRCTC Mobile - I registered for the push SMS just for kicks - to see how good is the app & trust me, I was blown away by the way it works. It does has some rough edges - like the booking systems requires you to enter the station names (instead it should show you a list) & other such small things… but overall - the app really works! I was able to fetch the PNR status of tickets in just first go! Wow!

Here are some screenshots to ponder upon…

  

& guess what? It even lets you refer itself to friends… the transport used for the referal is server side - ie. you dont send the SMS, you just enter the details, the server sends the invite on your behalf! Super nice!

So - IRCTC Mobile makes it to my list of some well designed mobile B2C apps

Being on the day’s Page 3 brings a different feeling all together!

Check out the Reader’s Speak coloumn!

Direct link to access the Epaper & this is what I had said - I had thought that everyone would have a same thinking - but oddly enough, the others had a different opinion to sound. Hmm!

Just installed a Captcha plugin for the blog - from now on, my _human_ visitors would have to enter a random string - which will be displayed when they are entering comments. This is to buzz off wordpress comment harvesting bots! …from past few days, I was doing more of comments moderation than writing blogs… thanks to Akismet though

This dude is a sure shot upgrade from my E61

Check out the video at E-series.org

I’ve got very scarce access to www once I’m at home - its just good enought o keep me online to yahoo/msn - which these days is surprising many - why is Maku online all day & night long? lol

My dear old PC (well, just the CPU as of now) would soon be making the journey from Delhi to Pune. I plan to get it set up by this weekend - would have to incur some expenditure - would need to get a monitor (my old one’s gone bust!), would invest in Airtel’s 0.5 megs fat pipe :D, 256 megs SD RAM and… in long term - a dvd writer maybe!

So lets hope that folks back home understand the need of the CPU here & just send it across asap… Sameer ji, bhej dijiye hamara PC lol

Its 6:50 am in the morning & i’m still in the office… updating one’s website is one tough task! Even though the templates are available in abundance, modifying them to your taste takes a lot of time.

Anyways, I’ve finally settled the UI which is in place - check out http://www.makuchaku.info

For the lazy bums - screenshots as usual!

This time, clear distinction between techy & non techy users!

If you consider yourself techy then this will be your screen…

Otherwise, navigate through a much graphical screen…

As one can easily guess, my stress is on simplicity

& yes, many pages still give a 404 - Not Found. Reason being, i’m now feeling very sleepy! So today’s task was completed - the UI design is all settled, now just information has to be filled in. Good god! Thats _the_ biggest task!!!

I’ve got a habit of asking my blog first & then google!

Gnome 2.14 - Desktop system admin guide

Interesting section is The Lockdown Guide

Have fun!

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Doh! I’m so sorry, I mistook 2.4.6 as 2.6 version. 2.4.x series had no support for Indic languages. I’ll update my testing again for version 2.5.1 (devel) and blog again about my findings. This post should aint be of any good use. Sorry again.

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Some days ago, I had responded on one of the Abiword blogs (msevior) that I was interetsed in testing the new Abiword release - 2.6.0 for Indic i18n. And today, after almost two weeks, I managed to get 2 free hours, after having a turbo charged “Exotica” pizza from Pizza Hut [Who says caffiene stimulates your nervous system! Pizza does it equally well - probably better!]

Abiword seems pretty nicely designed, but had some issues with rendering. I tested Abiword on following three aspects

• Rendering
• Inputting text
• Printing

Though printing & inputting Indic text worked as expected, rendering Indic text was my major concern. The first & most critical problem I found was that for indic text to be visible, the text had to be marked with the corresponding Indic font, otherwise the text would appear as circles! & the reverse was also equally frightening - if you type text with a hindi font (say Lohit Hindi) and SCIM is not activated, ie - the input is in plain english, the text is rendered as square boxes instead of plain english text. I think there’s some serious problem with the way Abiword uses fallback font or does font selection.

Other issues included ability to add more vovels to an existing vovel, giving something like this…

Another screenshot of interest - http://bugzilla.abisource.com/attachment.cgi?id=4113

Here is a complete bug list
10812 - Abiword does not selects font automatically according to …
10813 - Unable to render complex indic characters
10814 - Typing english text when indic font is selected, gives sq…
10815 - Unable to render ZWNJ properly
10816 - Vovels are not rendered properly for indic scripts.
10817 - Preedit window is randomply placed on the screen
10818 - Abiword cannot print when indic text is written, but corr…

Apart from this, I also found two very interesting things in Abiword.

1. The right click menu in text area gives an option to select the Input Method Engine (IME)- which is very very nice as compared to OO.writer - for which if the IME does not works, you cannot tell if it started or not or was there any other problem or that is GTK_IM_MODULE variable is set or not!
2. Abiword uses a preedit window to display the preedit text - as compared to the underlined text which is displayed by GTK+ apps.

With this, they have managed to escape preedit replication problems like Bug 166231 and Bug 199551, but got caught in a problem of preedit window placement - which currently seemed very random (unlike at the bottom of preedit string everytime in Gedit).

But all this being said, Abiword seems to be a very nice app, had very fast responses & has the ability to be ported to embedded devics like N800 maybe [wink]

…looking forward to use Abiword on my N800