Working at the Application Support Center (ASC) at the University of Florida, I have come across a number of Mac users. One thing that has always surprised me about them is that no matter what, they always vehemently swear by the Mac. I have, till date, never met even one disgruntled Mac user. And its for this reason that even though I love the Windows Operating Systems (including Vista), I have made up my mind to buy a Mac for myself one of these times, and see what the fuss is all about.

I have to give Apple one thing for sure. They somehow get animations, whether on computers or iPhones, super fluid. One such animation that put me in awe of the Macs was the one they have used for their feature Exposé. I saw this for the first time around two years back (the Vista era), and my client at the ASC (another Mac user) explained me what it was. He said it made switching between opened applications a cake-walk, and I could see what he meant. This person just dragged his mouse to the top left corner of his screen which flooded his screen with beautiful clear thumbnails for all opened applications on his screen. Clicking on any thumbnail closed the remaining thumbnails and opened the relevant application. This feature excited me! It was beautiful, and truly seemed to improve productivity. The moment I reached home that day, I searched for windows applications that promised the same feature.

To my surprise, the internet was full of such software. After trying out a bunch of software, some free, others trials, I finally zoned in on a free application, “Switcher” that seemed to do the job most efficiently. The thing I liked most about this application was that it was fast, had great customization options, and did a good job at making thumbnails out of applications. Other applications on the other hand were either buggy, or paused for a half second to create and display thumbnails. I must admit however, that while Switcher was the best of the lot, it was still not as fluid or fast as Exposé (for the Mac) was.

Recently when I switched to Windows 7, I found that Switcher was giving me a few problems – after some random period of usage, it would simply refuse to create the thumbnails for my applications and nothing would happen on my screen. My guess is that this was because as opposed to Vista, all corners in Windows 7 are reserved for one purpose or another- the top left and right corners are used for snapping windows; the bottom right corner is reserved for aero peek and show desktop; and the bottom left corner is for the start button. Thus, there is no exclusive corners left for Switcher to function in – which leads to conflicts with Switcher. So I decided to look for alternatives, hoping to find applications that offered other hotspots (areas on the screen that respond with a predefined function once you move your mouse there, or carry out some activity there) other than corners on the screen. Most noticeably, I tried dExpose2 again – I remembered the name from last time, and it was free too.

Even though it was fast, what irked me about dExpose2 was that it did not create thumbnails for applications properly. It created two thumbnails each for every Google Talk conversation that I had open. It also thought that Windows Media Player was not one but three different applications, and had three thumbnails for it. Even though I might’ve put up with such quirks, worst of all, dExpose2 had the same problem as switcher, only worse – dExpose2 would also stop working in the middle of nowhere. I finally concluded that these softwares were acting up because they were made for Vista, not Windows 7, and apparently that did effect how they worked.

For the moment, I have switched back to Switcher, and am trying it out one last time – after all, it did work perfectly on Vista. Bao Nguyen, the creator of Switcher, seems to have got most of the things right in this application of his, and it doesn’t come as a surprise then that he was working for Microsoft at the time of writing this application. Unfortunately though, it’s been three years since he last updated this software, and I won’t bet my money on a new version of Switcher coming out anytime soon.

But still, try Switcher. Google it, install it and use it. It’s beautiful. And you might just find a new way to spoil yourself.

Begin each day as if it were on purpose.

- Alex Hitchins/Will Smith (Hitch)

I was watching Hitch recently, and even though the movie had me totally engrossed, this line from the movie shook me out of the mushy-dream-world I had slipped into. I immediately paused the movie, and took a moment to write this quote on a sticky note.

In life, it’s easy to slip into a rhythm and treat your daily activities as chores – not questioning them, and maybe not even appreciating them. I think its worthwhile reminding ourselves every now and then, “There is a purpose.” :)

And the day shall not come, but if ever we think that we have no purpose left to fulfill in life, we must still begin the day as if it were on purpose. And I’m sure we’ll do something great we’d never thought of doing before :)

We at the University of Florida have a bi-annual Career Fair/Career Showcase where students can meet hiring managers from different companies. Most of these companies give away various kind of tchotchkes at this event, I guess, to help students remember the company or maybe just to keep with the norm that started some time ago. These momentos are most often pens, Rubik’s cubes, bottle holders, caps, shirts etc. While these are what you would normally expect, Microsoft had a very interesting giveaway this time. They gave away some circular sticker (part plastic, part cloth), woven on which were some letters.

I didn’t know what to make out of this. Was it some kind of code? Or something really obvious that I was missing? When nothing hit me, I simply tried typing “DVORAK” in Google (you can say, I was feeling lucky!). And sure enough, this did pull up a lot of relevant stuff. It happens that there is a different type of layout than the QWERTY one that we have now come to take for granted. Typing on a QWERTY keyboard may come naturally to us, even though it was originally intended to be a method that prevented typebar clashes (remember the typewriter days?). The QWERTY layout became popular around 1878 and has held its own since. And this is despite a number of alternatives having been proposed. One of these famous alternatives was proposed by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist, in 1936. While the QWERTY layout was designed with a purpose that is no longer even relevant, Dvorak’s layout called Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) was based on an efficiency related criteria. The idea was to have minimal movement of fingers while typing out words (and punctuation marks) in the English language. Efficiency aside, it is even know to help prevent the carpal tunnel syndrome! :)

Want to try out the Dvorak layout? Hmm. Apart from the obvious pros, it does have a few obvious cons. Most importantly, the lack of these keyboards around us. But if you’re good at picking up things, you might just figure out a way around this problem too. Thankfully, in this layout the relative position of the keys is exactly the same as to how it is on our regular QWERTY keyboards. Also, major operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux include this layout, essentially letting you change the layout with the mere click of a button. Meaning, if you can type without seeing (and you should learn that if you can’t), then not having a DVORAK specific keyboard should be the least of your problems. It will take some practice and patience, but hey, that’s the least you can do for the median nerve under your wrist.

And just in case you’re wondering, no, the letters DVORAK aren’t layed out the way you see them on Microsoft’s tchotchke. They are far apart. One thing’s for sure. DVORAK didn’t have any biases while laying out this keyboard :)

I love Windows 7 and its awesome new taskbar. However, as intuitive as many of the things on this new taskbar appear, I think missing the feature of letting include separators between pinned items on the taskbar is a big oversight. It is quite obvious that to exploit the Windows 7 taskbar and its purposefulness, one must pin as many of their most commonly used applications onto it. However, what that leads to is a whole list of seemingly unorganized icons in your taskbar.

With this clutter, it is only natural for someone who likes an organized desktop (pun intended) to be able to categorize the things he lays on it. I, not being any different tried to do the same but only drew up a naught. There is no such feature in Windows 7.

Here is my take on what the taskbar could have looked like -

Note, how the browsers are now in a separate group, and also applications for common documents (eg. word documents, excel documents and PDFs) in a separate one. Photo editing applications earn their own special spot too. As you can clearly see, this helps remove the clunky look to an overpinned taskbar. Considering that Windows generally lets you separate toolbars on the desktop already, it appears to me that adding separators for pinned items would not have been a big ask.

Another extraordinary feature would have been the ability to categorize applications. Meaning, that even if you didn’t have an application pinned to the taskbar, you could categorize it to be associated with a specific section in the pinned items on the taskbar. Thus, even though it was not pinned there, whenever that application would have been opened, its icon would have popped up in that particular section of the pinned items where you categorized it. For example, let us say that my most commonly used applications are Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. Since, both these applications are used with documents in general, I pin them on the taskbar in their own section “Document Editing Suite” (separated from other sections by separators). Since I do not use Microsoft Excel as often, I would not like to pin it. However, for ease of access, I want that every time I do use this application, its icon shows up in the section “Document Editing Suite” and not at the very end of all my pinned items. For this, I categorize this application to that section, and next time when I use it I know where to look for this item in my otherwise cluttered taskbar.

This feature does have a small drawback though. It pushes the other pinned items further to the right, thus never “fixing” their location. This can lead to some confusion, although, I think a user survey might lead to an interesting contest between the present version and the proposed one. Leave your comments and let know how you feel about it!

Alright, I’ll be honest. The only reason I came up with this post in the first place was because I myself had a hard time figuring out how to do it. As cool as the idea of having an image pop-up from your blog, graying out everything behind it seems, its easy to feel like you’re chasing a distant dream when there are multiple ways to do it wrong, and make it complicated.

Before you begin reading further, I must tell you that this technique will be relevant only to certain people. This post is primarily for those people hosting their wordpress blog themselves. If you have a wordpress.com blog, this post will not help you as it is not possible to edit theme files in your blog unless you use wordpress.org. Any other person using something else might also find this post useful in terms of weeding out the good options from the bad ones when you are trying to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. Ok! Now that that is cleared up we can get into the real stuff!!!

When I googled for ways to get pop-up images working, the first solution I came across was Highslide JS. This is a very convenient tool to work with, and best of all, it allows you to customize the way you want your images to pop-up. If you’re looking for an easily customizable solution, this is where you want to tinker around. It even lets you open up multiple pop-ups at the same time. I did have some troubles with it, but this would definitely rate as my best fall-back option. The problem with Highslide is that it is difficult to integrate into wordpress. Some plugins don’t work at all (dismal installation guides), and the ones that do are buggy. I tried my way around the plugin, manually integrating the highslide code into wordpress but where I fell short was getting pop-ups to work in urls specific to posts. The pop-ups worked beautifully on the blog’s homepage, but when I would click on the post, and go to it’s specific url, the code would fail. Within a few days, I decided to switch.

The second solution I came across was Lightbox 2. This is not customizable at all. All it is, is a fixed piece of code that you download and use. If you are intent on customizing, go ahead and tinker with the CSS; but unless you’re planning to write a lot of code, this doesn’t even come close to the customization that Highslide offers. The good thing however, is that its wordpress plugin has seamless integration. I got started with the required pop-ups in no time. But within two minutes I stumbled onto this software’s Achilles’ heel. Though my thumbnail was very small, the actual image it linked to was huge (wider than 1280 px). And Lightbox 2’s popup didn’t resize it for me. I had this huge pop-up, almost twice the width my poor laptop could handle right in the middle of my screen! I thought of playing around with the CSS and fixing it, but then soon enough thought of taking another path. Lightbox 2 just didn’t look super impressive to me. And the plugin that I was using had been last updated 3 years back. Using it, to me, seemed more like dragging the past along.

Third time lucky. While rummaging through some forum, I found someone talking about pop-up videos. And I thought to myself, why not go for a takes-care-of-it-all solution? And thus I started looking for a software solution that could pop-up and play videos. Within two minutes I ran into Thickbox 3.1. I tried searching for a wordpress plugin for this, but even before I could find one, I read elsewhere that wordpress itself used thickbox! After this, getting things to work was a walk in the park.

Here’s what you do!

You enter your theme directory, and start editing the file header.php (winSCP has a built-in editor, and you can use an external editor to edit files in fileZilla). In this file, right before < ? php wp_head(); ? >, go ahead and add the following three lines of code.

<? php wp_enqueue_style('thickbox'); ?> <!-- line 1: includes Thickbox's CSS   -->
<? php wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); ?> <!--  line 2: includes jquery. -->
<? php wp_enqueue_script('thickbox'); ?> <!-- line 3: includes Thickbox's js -->

<? php wp_head(); ?>  <!-- This line would already be present in your file-->

Save the file, and you’re all set with integrating thickbox in your posts!

Next time whenever you want to get a pop-up going, you do the following. You add class=”thickbox” in the “a href” tag, so that you’ve got your code looking like this.

<a href="actual-image.jpg" class="thickbox"  title="Demo">
<img src="thumb.jpg"/>
</a>

As you can see above, it’s perfectly OK to use titles too. These titles appear below the pop-up images.

If you have a bunch of pictures, then you can also group them together so that you see links to “prev” and “next” in the pop-up window. For that you need to add rel=”type-in-anything-you-want” in the same href tag. Thus your code will look like –

<!-- first image -->
<a href="actual-image1.jpg" class="thickbox" rel="mobiles">  <!-- you can replace "mobiles" with any text -->
<img src="thumb1.jpg"/>
</a>

<!-- second image -->
<a href="actual-image2.jpg" class="thickbox" rel="mobiles">  <!-- you can replace "mobiles" with any text. Make sure it's the same as it is for the one above -->
<img src="thumb2.jpg"/>
</a>

That is pretty much it to get the core functionality of the pop-ups working. There’s one tiny thing though. You’ll notice that when you’re on post specific-URLs, the close button doesn’t appear and the link to that image is broken. To fix this, navigate to /wp-includes/js/thickbox/ in your online web directory and open the file thickbox.js for editing. Now, look for the following lines in that file.

if ( typeof tb_pathToImage != 'string' ) {
	var tb_pathToImage = "../wp-includes/js/thickbox/loadingAnimation.gif";
}
if ( typeof tb_closeImage != 'string' ) {
	var tb_closeImage = "../wp-includes/js/thickbox/tb-close.png";
}

All you need to do is replace the relative URLs to loadingAnimation.gif and tb-close.png, with the absolute URLs for these images. And that will be it!

Hopefully, you’ll get things right and working. Good luck! :)

If you’re not using wordpress, just make sure you download the Thickbox code (it’s a folder) and upload it in your web directory. Once done, link your webpages to the files from that folder. And then, you can tag your images in the same way above.

Way back in February of 2002, when I was in India, the CNG (compressed natural gas) drive craze in New Delhi had begun to show its face. The Govt. was emphasizing the use of CNG over regular gas for automobiles, for a healthier environment around us. No matter where you stood, even in the tiniest of lanes in the ever crowded city, you could confidently bet a hundred rupees that you’d see CNG written on an automobile somewhere. Black and yellow auto-rickshaws (three wheelers) were now colored in gaudy-green and yellow, with the letters CNG painted on the back. DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) buses too proudly flaunted CNG on both sides and even they had begun to don green – in reference to the green revolution. Though this drive wasn’t meant to include cars, a bunch of Maruti Suzuki Vans and Tata Indicas also went the CNG way and sported the letters and colors with pride. The front pages of all newspapers always had something to say about the drive – good or bad.

The CNG craze had engulfed the entire capital. In this environment, it was only natural for me to come up with a joke on this. Click on the cartoon to see it in better resolution.

The creamy pink color in the cartoon is actually the color of the paper. I photoshop-ed the cartoon to get rid of that color in the borders, and also touched up the text to account for my childish handwriting and a few strikeouts :)

Microsoft doesn’t want you to use the vertical taskbar in Windows, or so it seems.

As the number of widescreens in the computer market increases, more and more people have begun experimenting with ways to make most of their screen estate. The easiest method to accomplish this is to drag your taskbar such that it lines up vertically along the left/right edge of the screen. This simple trick helps the purpose because most websites (including this one) have a limited width and thus fit on one’s screen perfectly despite the taskbar taking some extra space. At the same time, it gives your document some extra “height” providing more readability. Elegant and effective. If you haven’t tried it yet, you must (if you can put up with some annoyances; read further).

Now, even though the widescreen trend is no secret, Microsoft refuses to give its vertical taskbar the same importance it gives to the horizontal one. Let me begin with Vista. The Vista taskbar aligned sideways was enough reason for one to bang his head against the wall. The text next to the program icons was cropped off, so that you’d only see “Gm..” for Gmail (opened in firefox), “No…” for Notepad and so on. The cropped text was so useless, one would figure why it was even there. Searching for relevant windows amongst multiple ones was quite painful to say the least. But this was not the only problem, there were bugs. Every now and then, a program that was designed to slide notifications out of the taskbar would screw Vista and I’d get that annoying “Program stopped working” window. Even worse, if I got enough windows open to fill the entire taskbar, my programs in the taskbar would just flip out, literally. They’d start randomly swapping with pre-existing windows and what not. I would have loved to talk about ways to reproduce that error, but heavens be praised, I have Windows 7 now.

Windows 7 came with a whiff of fresh air. And the first thing I noticed about it was the new taskbar. Coup de Foudre. The Quick Launch toolbar and the taskbar had been combined, and there were large beautiful icons in the taskbar. It’s resemblance to the Mac’s dock could not be discounted, but well, it was still very beautiful. The die-hard fanatic of utilizing screen estate that I was, I switched to the vertical taskbar in no time. And this time, it was working beautifully. No more cropped texts, no more searching for windows. There were large beautiful icons telling me where I had every window open. And notifications slid out and in, like a sword from a sheath. It all looked as if it was meant to be.

But then, new operating systems generally look perfect. As I installed and pinned more programs to the taskbar on my new operating system, my taskbar started running out of space. And then, one fine day, I sadly realized that Microsoft had again chosen to neglect the vertical taskbar. :(

Here’s a quick showdown of what I’m talking about. Click any image to see it in bigger resolution, if you feel the need to do so.

In Windows 7, here’s a horizontal taskbar that is on the verge of getting full.

Now, when you pin a few more programs, the taskbar adjusts the space allotted to each pinned item, and squeezes in the extra icons. Neat! (At 1280 x 800, maximum programs that can be pinned are 20)

If however, you choose to further stress the taskbar, it gives way to 2 small buttons at the end of the pinned programs, that help you switch between rows of pinned items. It is very irritating to switch between rows using these tiny buttons, but then I must add that I was running out of programs to pin when trying to stress my horizontal taskbar. In short, you’ll probably never see the face of those tiny buttons unless you try and pin everything!

So like I said, clicking on such a tiny button so far to the right to switch between active programs can be quite frustrating, and it would make perfect sense to make your taskbar bigger. When you do that, as expected, the extra icons wrap around in the extra space that you just created. Problem solved!

Now, here’s the deal (no deal rather) with the vertical taskbar. In Image A below, you see a screenshot of the vertical taskbar in Windows 7 about to get full.

However, this time when you add an extra icon, the taskbar makes no attempt to accommodate it and conveniently fits this new icon into a second column, which as expected, is accessible only by pressing a small button at the end of all these pinned items. (Image B)

I can live with that too, but what happens next is absolutely shocking. Expanding the taskbar, to let a second column open up doesn’t work. (Image C) Expanding the taskbar stretches the icons without creating space for a second column, forcing you to depend upon the two tiny buttons to switch columns. On a 1280 x 800 screen, where I would clearly not mind giving up enough screen space to the taskbar to be working at 1050×800, Microsoft gives me no helping hand. At my resolution, I’m stuck to pinning at most 13 (how about 666 next time, Microsoft?) icons vertically, which is quite a shame considering that the very way to exploit this taskbar is by pinning items. If you use your computer fairly enough, this space is going to fill up sooner than you realize.

It seems to me that Microsoft is not doing some basic things right which it is very easily capable of. Not that this thing is going to hurt them, but it’s just the kind of thing that makes the difference between someone finding a product just right and another left asking for that little bit more.

Didn’t find what you were looking for? Leave a comment and I’ll try getting back to you on that.

A few months back I had discussed how to use keywords in firefox, and make your browsing experience better. Well, if you’ve begun using keywords, you might as well use them for grooveshark to play almost any song in the world.

The stumbling block however, is that grooveshark’s keyword can not be made in the same way as we had described earlier. And the reason for that is, that the current grooveshark website is made entirely in flash. Right clicking on the search bar, doesn’t give you the regular options you expect! So what do you do? Don’t despair. I have a nice piece of nugget for you :)

In firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+B to open up the bookmarks library. Then click on “Organize”, followed by “New Bookmark”.

A new window should come up. Fill in the empty fields with the following:

Name: Grooveshark
Location: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/search/songs/?query=%s
Keyword: gs

Now, click on “Add” and you’re all set! Go to the address bar (ctrl + l(el)), type in “gs I’m yours”, and press enter. The screen that will load up will have the song “I’m yours” dangling right in front of you waiting to be played!

Of all keywords, I think this keyword makes a lot of sense as it helps one skip the heavy flash on grooveshark’s homepage. Cheers for keywords!

If you are using Wordpress to write your blog on your domain name, your wordpress database might be growing beyond your wildest imaginations!

When writing posts in the Wordpress Admin page, for reasons of security, Wordpress keeps autosaving your posts as you write them. It is a very handy feature especially if your internet is intent on sabotaging your hard work. For example, after thirty minutes of hard work, when you finally press the “Publish” button, your otherwise faithful browser might run into an error page thanks to that intermittent internet connection. Numerous thoughts flood your mind – “Is my work lost? Would pressing the back button recover my stuff? Would hitting refresh help? Do I have a backup!?.” Don’t worry, Wordpress’ autosave feature has it figured out for you.

But then, there is a catch. All these autosaves, multiple copies of them at that, get stored in your account’s database (remember, someone’s hosting your webpage?). They don’t even get deleted once you publish your post, and keep lurking around in your database even though you’ll probably never need them again. Now, if you are paying for your hosting, a few kilobytes lost here and there wouldn’t really affect you. Or if you don’t mind filthy databases, you wouldn’t care either. But if somehow, it aggravates you (like it does me), that despite having published only x posts, there are around 5x revision posts stuck in your database, I’m sure you would want to delete them.

And delete them, we shall!

I found this great SQL query online, and it works like a charm.

DELETE a,b,c FROM wp_posts a LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID=b.object_id) LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID=c.post_id) WHERE a.post_type=’revision’;

Don’t know what to do with this query? Just log into your webhosting site, go to phpMyAdmin (or equivalent) and then run this query on your Wordpress database. All your revision posts should get deleted and you’ll be a happy man. Disclaimer: It worked for me, it might not work for you. I last tested it on Wordpress 2.9.1 successfully.

Not finished yet? Want to get rid of these revisions forever!? Not a problem. You can add the following line to your wp-config.php file (already uploaded online).

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to turn off revisions. I’d rather just run that query above every now and then to get rid of the revision posts, but then hey, the quote “Each man to himself” wasn’t coined for nothing.

Why is a “hopeless romantic” a wonderful lover, and yet a “hopeless friend” a friend whom you can never trust?
- Tarun Aggrawal

Just a random thought that crossed my mind. Comments?