pratul dot in /home/lut4rp

I got this e-mail a week ago...

Hi,

My name is Sandeep Soni.I had been to IIT kanpur this year during the
Techkriti Festival where I attended the FOSSkriti seminars.

I distinguishably remember the seminar (or rather an informal
informative session) on Google Summer of Code that you delivered.

Inspired by your own experience about GSoC and open source
development, I applied for GSoC this year and fortunately have cleared
the first hurdle of getting selected. I will be working on the project
titled "Development of GIMPLE FE" under GCC organization mentored by
Diego Novillo for the Summer.

I have to thank you for giving that invaluable talk.I sincerely tried
to follow all the advice that you gave in that talk and am happy to
have been inducted into Summer of Code.I also mentioned your name in
the field about the source from which I first came to know about GSoC.
Although Its been only a week now into the schedule and I have not
even started coding, I have already begun to sense why you have been
so passionate about GSoC and Open source Development.I hope that the
coming days be fruitful and successful for me as they must have been
for you.

Thanks.
--
Cheers
Sandy

Very frankly, I don't remember Sandeep from the crowd. But what this has made him achieve, makes me very very proud. Even though I did not get through GSoC 2010, I consider this as an equivalent success. Best of luck, Sandeep!

A while ago, I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/532633/comme.... That's right, the Ubuntu SABDFL has confirmed that the new OS X style window title bar button placement, is here to stay. In response, the following theory was proposed by nirbheek on #hackers-india (now on irc.oftc.net).

< nirbheek> Step 1: Make incredibly lame decision which is utterly stupid, without reason, and actually backwards
< nirbheek> Step 2: Refuse to listen to people when they tell you so
< nirbheek> Step 3: Retract parts of the lame decision so that what you actually wanted from the start is done, i.e. mac-style button-placement
< nirbheek> Step 4: Everyone goes "Oh thank god"

Canonical, we know what you're doing.

Adobe’s Flash has always had a love-hate relationship with the Internet community. On one end, it allowed web publishers to display beautiful, interactive (and sometimes garish) animated content on their websites. On the other end, it crashed browsers, leaked memory and irritated a lot of people. However, its popularity has still been not shaken by other alternatives, like Microsoft’s Silverlight.

I have personally seen and admired a lot of Drupal websites with Flash powered content. Notable ones have been Mission Metallica (http://www.missionmetallica.com/) and Leadel (http://www.leadel.net/). However, The power and flexibility of the Drupal and Flash combo shouldn’t intimidate you anymore. Travis Tidwell’s “Flash with Drupal” from Packt Publishing is an amazing step by step guide for your journey.

I’m not a very experienced Flash or ActionScript programmer myself. However, just the initial chapters of the book were enough to give me a confidence boost. This isn’t as hard as it seems after all! The book succinctly covers the use of various contributed modules over its 350+ pages. It goes through the trickeries of asynchronous programming and REST. It takes you through the most asked questions around Drupal: Views, CCK, audio and video widgets etc. That said, this is not an introduction to Drupal. In fact, if you’re just starting out with Drupal, this book is not for you. The author assumes you’re comfortable with Drupal and its concepts. You should know your way in and out of Drupal. Not ready? Get hold of Packt’s “Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6”.

Flash seems to be feeling the heat with HTML5, but until that happens and cross-browser support stabilizes, Flash isn’t going anywhere. Now with this book, I expect to see a rise in the Flash and Drupal combination and more powerfully delivered content.

(Note: I was sent a free copy of the book by Packt for a review.)

Here's the Almost Monokai theme (based on the original Monokai) that I recently ported to Xcode. 5 minute job, but I like it already :-)

I'm looking for fellow open source Mac programmers from India. Is there anybody out there?

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook introduced a "lighter, faster alternative" called Facebook Lite. Though initially, it was aimed at users from countries with slow internet connections and marginal broadband penetration (like India :-) they soon realized a lot of people liked the Lite way of working. I agree, Lite is fast and slick, but it doesn't have apps >:) That to me at least was a major switch point.

I was one of those "privileged souls" who had the good fortune to beta test Facebook Lite. So I can switch to Lite if I use the lite.facebook.com URL or use the full thingy if I go to facebook.com. But, ever since Facebook finally rolled out Lite to sections of users across India (dunno if they did so elsewhere as well), the users who accepted the "Try Facebook Lite" message can *NOT* go back.

People (including my sister and hordes from college :-p) have tried to manually change the URL to facebook.com, tried to check account settings, tried flaming the Lite fan page (see below), tried doing everything plainly possible without any avail. Tried logging in again but it just redirects to lite.facebook.com. Oh, and no official word from Facebook on this yet. Are you listening, Facebook?