Chandrayaan 1 – Pictures and Videos

Yes, this post has come a few days late but this is something to be proud about. The spacecraft called Chandrayaan 1 has reached the moon and even released an “impact” probe. Here are some pics and a video showing the surface of the moon as seen from 100 KM above its surface from the orbiting craft.

Video

http://ishare.rediff.com/filevideo.php?id=515335

Pictures:

Moon Surface - Terrain Mapping Camera - 15 Nov 2008

Image taken by the Moon Impact Probe - 14 Nov 2008

Image taken by the Moon Impact Probe - 14 Nov 2008

Earth as viewed by Chandrayaan-1 on 29 Oct 2008 Distance ~ 70000 Km. from Earth

More pictures are available on ISRO’s website here

Disks from a bygone era

While I was shifting my house, I remembered that I had some CDs from the days when the Internet was starting to boom. Here is a photo. Pardon the photo quality as I had to use a cell phone camera.

Disks from a bygone era

I saw a CD for the first time in my life in 1995 when I was in Class 7. It took me three more years to actually pop it in, into a friends PC and see what it contained.

The photo below contains three CDs one each from 1995, 1996 and 1997. These are from the Indian IT magazine PC Quest which started distributing CDs every quarter at the time when little was known about computers or CDs in the country.

1. The earliest one is from 1995. It contained fully functional demos of OS/2 Warp and PC DOS 7 neither of which I could try. OS/2 required 30, 1.44 MB, 3.5″ floppy disks or a fresh hard drive to install and I could afford neither at that time. Compare that to the multiple DVDs that pack a single software or a game today.

2. The one in yellow and black is from 1996. It contained Netscape Navigator 3 as the star product along with demos of AutoCAD and 3DS Max and some localized software from India’s CDAC

3. The last one is from 1997. Though I don’t remember what multimedia and graphics it contained, the star attraction is MSIE 4. In about 10 years, IE has only increased by 3 versions (leaving out the IE8 beta)

We have come a long way since then. But nostalgia strikes hard when I look at stuff like this. I even have a couple of 5.25″ floppy disks, but could not get a chance to click a photo of them.

Firefox 3 Beta 1

As promised earlier, here is a quick review of Firefox 3 Beta aka Minefield. I am running the Linux version on Ubuntu 7.10 on a T5300 processor at 1.73 GHz and 1 GB RAM.

    The Beta did not find a suitable upgrade to a few themes and del.icio.us toolbar. But that     is not a major cocncern now since most of the developers would be working on it. At least I     hope they are on it

At first glance, the beta version is faster than the previous version. It also consumes less         memory. And the default theme integrates well into the desktop theme. Not only the toolbars and dialogs but also the buttons and text boxes on the web pages. Below are a few statistics.

Memory consumption on launching with a single blank tab – 23.7 MB of RAM

Launching Facebook on a single tab – 8% of CPU Max and 24 MB of RAM

Gmail on single tab – 24% of CPU Max and 40.6 MB of RAM

Ten tabs loaded with an assortment of Web 1.0 and 2.0 websites – 55 MB of RAM

There is a new Places folder which contains recently starred items, recently visited pages, recently visited starred pages, most visited pages and the like. This definitely helps in visiting pages that you are interested in. What remains to be seen is how differently can this be used when compared to Bookmarks.

A new website identification system is in place too. And this sits right where the favicon of websites appear. Clicking on it says if the site is secured or not.

And one more significant change is there is an Applications tab where one can customize which type of file should be opened using what application. I have been reading that the rendering is similar to Opera’s progressive rendering. But I still see that the entire page is rendered at one go.

So far everything looks good and it should only get better as we go through various betas and the release candidate.

1. Minefield

2.  Places

3. Preferences

KDE 4 RC 1

Just when I was about to pop in the KDE 4 Beta 4 for another close look, the KDE guys let loose the RC1. This is available for download here and this is the OpenSUSE distro. The release announcement is here.

I grabbed a copy of the disk image and got started. Keep in mind that this is a live CD. The RC1 is a minor change in the version. Well looks like the version has been rounded to 3.96.00. But the text next to it still says KDE 4 Beta 4. Shows work in a hurry. At first look I was really surprised. But on another look, I observed the KDE 4 Beta 4 was version 3.95.2.

At first glance, not many changes are apparent.

The desktop screen shot is right below the About KDE screen shot to your left.

The font for the clock on the task-bar had been changed and rightly so. Just refer to my previous post and you can see how bad the clock looks. Now things seem to be in order. Well, they just seem. I am still not able to right click on the clock and change its properties.

No major changes were visible on the other fronts too. As an example some of the icons for common applications like Kate were missing. For a desktop that is touted as which will be the best, this cannot be considered acceptable.

One major problem I still have is that the Configure Network Card application does not work. As I have mentioned earlier, my ISP provided me a static IP and I have no way to set this and so I could not get online. Shouldn’t that be ready by RC1?

More work is still left. The guys have done a really great job and they should just not loose steam during this crucial period. Even if it KDE 4 goes for 10 RCs I think its fine, but when released, the fanboys from the other side should not have such easy targets to point out.

There are a few things that I had left out in my previous post. Let me tell you about them. Plasma has got a lot of attention. I can see a few improvements there. Just as it was mentioned in the release note, the bits are falling into place and I can see that widgets have options to configure, close and drag them around. The hard disk info widget blanked my screen and I had to restart X.

Dolphin, now shows the previews of images. I have not checked with PDF files though. So there too the final fixes are coming in. Good sign again.

I tried to play an ogg file Amarok and it was good. I did not try the mp3 format since I was using OpenSUSE and mp3 by default is not supported.

The next thing I tried was Konsole and it worked pretty well too. I have a bunch of screenshots below for applications such as Konsole, Kontact, Ocular, Klondike and Sudoku.

For those who are not aware, Konsole is the terminal application aka command line. Kontact is the all in one Personal Information Manager. Ocular is the PDF reader for KDE. Klondike is Solitaire and Sudoku needs no explanation I guess ( I myself was interested in Sudoku, but, never became a fan )

Konsole

Kontact

Ocular

Klondike

Sudoku

KDE 4 Beta 4 – First Impressions

I finally got time to try out the KDE 4 Beta 4 that was floating around for a while. I downloaded the Debian Live CD. It was around 420 MB in size. I burnt the iso to a CD and booted. I took a while before I was presented with the login screen. Well, there was no clue what to use for the User Name and Password. After a bit of googling I found that the User Name was user and the Password was live.

After logging in, I should say I was disappointed. There were not many apps and those that were available did not even open. So after some reading, I decided to download the openSUSE version. I downloaded it from here, burnt a CD and booted with the openSUSE live CD.

This was more or less a complete CD of about 590 MB containing most of the KDE Applications if not everything. There was a lot of applications that did not come up. I could not get to configuring my network card. My ISP provides me a static IP and I could not set it up and so no internet. Amarok did not work. The new KDE menu system is in place. I personally feel it is a pain. The older one was far better. Why should so many clicks be required just to open a program. But the Search bar on the top was a saviour and I ended up typing the names of applications in that instead of using the menu.

Whichever application worked, worked well. I was really impressed to see the Column mode in Dolphin file manager which brings a new level of usability. It is very very similar to Finder on OSX. I was only disappointed to see that Column mode was not available in the Dolphin I installed on my Ubuntu Gutsy. My USB thumb drive was recognised on plugging in and Dolphin showed the drive contents. I was able to open the files and save files into it. No issues there. But there was no icon on the Desktop. Neither was I able to directly open my thumb drive from the KDE Menu. Always had to go through the /home folder.

Now lets look at eye candy. Oxygen is the default there for icons and controls. I feel a distinction between the title bar and the menu bar would have been better in terms of usability. If I have several windows overlapping each other, it becomes quite difficult to figure out which one is where. The controls and the icons definitely look great though. Plasma allows user to add widgets to desktop. I tried to add a few. Again, a few worked perfectly and others did not. The hard drive monitor widget showed that I had 777.296 TiB free on all my four partitions. But it showed that I had 1.1 GiB free on my removable device which was correct. I have not testd Wi-Fi.
Those are the first impressions. This is for sure a Beta product and requires a lot of work to get things in place. I have touched only places where a normal user would play around. If you like me to cover some other area/application please let me know.

And for those who love screen shots, below are a few, 14 to be exact

1. KDE4 Desktop

2. About KDE

3. Menu – Favorites

4. Menu – Applications

5. Menu – My Computer

6. Menu – Recently Used

7. Menu – Leave

8. KWrite

9. Gwenview

10. Dolphin Preview Mode (did not work)

11. Dolphin Column Mode

12. Dolphin Removable Device

13. Open Dialog

14. Properties Dialog

Blog action day

Here are my tips for the Blog action day:

1. Optimize power usage – switch off computers when not in use

2. Optimize paper usage – use electronic documents wherever possible

3. Optimize fuel oil usage – use alternate energy where possible.

Easy. Isn’t it

My Blog Statistics

Well, I had been thinking about this for a long time. Today I had the time and the patience to do it. What was that? Consolidate the statistics of this blog.

I have prepared a rough document and put it here for all of you to see

Some cool graphs to summarize. I had taken all the data right out of my sitemeter.com account. All the graphs were created with OpenOffice.org 2.3.0

Primary Information

Total Unique Visitors: 7397
Lifetime of Blog: 15 months
Posts: 70
Comments: 74
Top Post: 1600 hits to this day : Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

OS % Share

No prizes for guessing this one. Win XP wins hands down

Browser % Share

Well, again, no prizes here. Firefox turned out to be the most widely used browser by the readers of my blog.

Traffic Distribution

The real surprise was here. Until a few days ago, it was North America, from where most of the traffic to this site came from. Well, Europe just snatched the first place as of today

I dont pay for sitemeter, so no display resolution, Javascript and such details. Well, that would have been nice but I am satisfied with what I have got so far.

And, I have the satisfaction of completing a long due post