For a terminal application I used to run XTerm, but now I use mrxvt which is another light-weight terminal emulator for X that has a tabbed interface and runs on a wide variant of Unix like operating systems.

Many of my friends use GNOME Terminal or Konsole just because it can use beautiful fonts like “BitStream Vera Sans Mono”.

If you are running XTerm or Rxvt don’t lose heart, XTerm can use these beautiful fonts.

What are the pre-requisites?

Your system needs to have the XRender extension enabled in your X.org. You can verify this by running:

shell>/usr/X11R6/bin/xdpyinfo | grep RENDER
RENDER

You would also need Xft and the fontconfig libraries installed in your system.

How to make XTerm or mrxvt use the TrueType fonts?

If your system does not have some nice and popular TrueType fonts on your Unix-like operating system, you can download them from here.

Once you have the fonts, to use for example, “Andale Mono” with XTerm, you can run:

shell> xterm -fa 'Andale Mono'

or with mrxvt,

shell> mrxvt -xftfm 'Andale Mono' -xft

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Tags: xterm, mrxvt, anti-aliasing, font, truetype

Just when it was the most needed, Yahoo! India Maps has come up with driving directions. It works like a charm. I can now type “bangalore to madikeri” and get the driving directions. Awesome.

But wait, what if I want to visit Mysore on the way. No problem, I can use queries like “bangalore to madikeri via mysore“.

No need to print the directions, just use the “Send this to my Mobile” feature! Now thats kick ass!

Tags: yahoo, india, maps

Following its previous project, YUI, its R3 now.

If you are wondering what R3 is, it is a command line tool designed to help manage templates, localization, and translations across many internationals/countries/projects.

Read more about R3 here.

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Tags: r3, yahoo, open source

Yahoo!’s open hack day is on the 5th and 6th of October in Bangalore. If you’re interested in working with APIs, making mashups and showing them off to an audience of your peers, then you must show up there.

The hack session is by invite only and we’ve got a submission queue for you to put in your geek credentials; so make sure to put all your cool hacks in the list. For inspiration, take a good look at what happened at the previous hack days.

Register online for the event, and list any special requirements that you may need. You can also chat with us on #hackday.

Get your geek friends to attend. You can hack alone or you can hack in a team. There’s no limit to how many hacks you can come up with or how many teams you can be a part of.

Hope to see you there.

Tags: open, hackday, yahoo, bangalore

When perusing through the source code, I found that there are couple of typos in the showTableOfContents() and hideTableOfContents() functions. Dave Raggett was kind to incorporate my patch for fixing the bug.

If you are experiencing a similar erratic behavior, either download the latest version or, apply my patch on your files.

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Tags: w3c, slidy, presentation, powerpoint

If you have installed it in your system, you can see how beautiful this post looks.

Enlightenment DR17 (E17) running GNU Emacs with 6 windows,
originally uploaded by gopalarathnam_v on 25 Apr ‘07, 4.56pm IST PST.

Running GNU Emacs on my patched version of Enlightenment DR17 (E17) on FreeBSD 4.

Having a 24″ monitor helps in perusing lots of source code simultaneously!

Thunderbird 2 has been released today. It has got many new features including message tagging, message history navigation, find as you type (like Firefox), mail alert notification.

For a complete list of features, go to the Thunderbird 2 features page.

BTW, here’s the official announcement.

technorati tags:mozilla, thunderbird, release

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technorati tags:introduction, ajax, web, development, javascript, dhtml

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I consider ASP.Net as one of the easiest to program and develop web sites and hence I’m recommending it for rapid prototyping and doing web development of large scale web sites.

technorati tags:asp.net, april, fools, day

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Go ahead head on to DevMo for desktop wallpapers and more.

technorati tags:mozilla, open, standards, web, development

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Thanks to the folks at Yahoo! who have made this talk available from video.yahoo.com.

You can also download a copy of the talk from their download servers.

technorati tags: f2e, f2esummit07, javascript, performance, webdevelopment, yahoo

The system has all the pre-requisites, and we had GCC 2.95.4 for building.

Compiling Firefox/Thunderbird on FreeBSD requires the LDFLAGS to be set to “-pthread”, and additionally there were suggestions to stick “-lc” to avoid undefined reference to “memcpy”, “fwrite”, etc.

But that proved to be a problem soon, since we had used “-lc” the build process started segfaulting (bus error) with an error message “rcmdsh: unknown user”. Searching for a similar pattern on the web suggested the use of “-lc_r” instead of “-lc”. It worked!

But soon again, the build stopped with “stdint.h” “file not found. But this time, this seems to be a well known error, and I had to patch the gfx/cairo to workaround for FreeBSD 4.x.

The build was finally successful.

If you want to build Firefox or Thunderbird, you can download my patch and apply it before starting the build process.

If you have to build Thunderbird with calendar or lightning support, you’ll have to apply this patch in addition to the above patch.

technorati tags: mozilla, firefox, freebsd, thunderbird, sunbird, lightning

Microsoft has introduced a developer toolbar for IE to help web developers view/navigate the DOM, inspect elements by clicking on them, enable/disable CSS, outline DIVs, TABLEs, positioned elements, etc.

This is exciting

If you need a tool for debugging, peeking AJAX requests, and do a lot more for Firefox, you can grab FireBug, which is a much advanced tool than the IE Developer Toolbar.

technorati tags:internet, explorer, ie, developer, toolbar, firebug

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Thunderbird 2.0 Beta (Account Set up),
originally uploaded by gopalarathnam_v on 10 Jan ‘07, 9.30am IST PST.

The new Thunderbird 2.0 Beta (latest build) has Gmail listed in the Account Set up screen. This is really handy and useful for people since they don’t have to go to Gmail’s help pages to understand how to pop it out and read on their favourite e-mail client.

One of the goals of Thunderbird 2.0 is to allows ISPs to create extensions to make their account set up easier.

More information on this from Scott on MozillaZine.

technorati tags:thunderbird, mozilla

• Login to Mozilla CVS servers
  • cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot login
• Pull the sources
  • cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co -l mozilla/js/src mozilla/js/src/config mozilla/js/src/editline mozilla/js/src/fdlibm
• And start the build
  • cd mozilla/js/src && make -f Makefile.ref

If your distribution has GCC 4.1, then you might hit on this bug (jscpucfg.c:374: internal compiler error: in dwarf2out_finish, at
dwarf2out.c:14116) during compilation.

You have two ways to fix it:

• Upgrade to GCC 4.1.2
• Or, turn on the optimisation flag while compiling
  • CFLAGS=-O2 make -f Makefile.ref

Installation is really simple.

• sudo mkdir /usr/local/spidermonkey
• sudo cp Linux_All_DBG.OBJ/{js,jskwgen,jscpucfg,libjs.so} /usr/local/spidermonkey
• export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/spidermonkey

Once the installation is done, you can invoke the shell by running js.

technorati tags:javascript, mozilla, spidermonkey, ubuntu, linux

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OK, I’ll outline the procedure of my upgrade (apart from downloading and unpacking the kernel sources):

• cp /boot/config-`uname -r` .config
• make silentoldconfig
• make menuconfig
• make clean
• make bzImage
• make modules
• sudo make modules_install
• sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.19.1 2.6.19.1
• sudo cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage-2.6.19.1
• sudo cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.19.1

Ah, at last everything is over, I rebooted the machine only to find the system was hanging with a message “Begin: Waiting for root file system”.

Silly me, I forgot to select SATA from Device Drivers > Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers. I enabled ATA device support, AHCI SATA support, and Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support and followed the above steps and lo! the system booted

I had selected the architecture as Pentium M, CFQ scheduler, and a whole bunch of optimisation options and removal of unwanted modules. The system is faster than before.

technorati tags:linux, 2.6, thinkpad, r60

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Now Spinfox is available as a Firefox extension , no more fiddling of the chrome directory is necessary.

technorati tags:firefox, spinfox

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Perhaps the greatest thing that has changed from the previous years is the “key note” address. This year, the “key note” address was given by Suparna Bhattacharya from IBM. She is a well-known kernel hacker.

This is a real good news that the “key note” address is given by an Indian for the first time at one of the popular free libre/open source conferences.

There were quite a few good talks on the first day, especially Philip’s talk on libyahoo2 was very interesting.

Also this time as expected there was a lot of crowd at the Sun Microsystems stall

Frederick Noronha has put up a very good article on Linuxworld about FOSS.in/2006.

technorati tags:fossin, fossin2006

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There would be a series of talks on PHP and JavaScript.

The (probable) list of the talks on that day:

• Rasmus Lerdorf on PHP
• Philip Tellis on YUI
• Sumeet Mulani on JSON
• I would talk on JavaScript Performance

If you guys are interested, join ydn-bangalore@yahoogroups.com.

technorati tags:yahoo, bangalore, yui, json, javascript

If you would like to meet, please do drop in.

technorati tags:foss.in, foss.in2006, json, javascript

You can either choose to do an easy install by choosing the apt-get method for which you can get the instructions from http://www.get-e.org/. Or, you can choose to compile the latest sources pulled from CVS. I have scripts to do this for you, if you are interested.

Fine, once you have Entrance installed, save your session, logout from X, and stop GDM/KDM, and remove them from the boot sequence.

Now, you can configure Entrance to run at boot using: sudo update-rc.d entrance multiuser

Thats it.

Reboot or use sudo /etc/init.d/entrance start to start Entrance.

technorati tags: e17, enlightenment, entrance, ubuntu

One of the article is by Douglas Crockford that talks about when to use the new operator and avoiding the use of Number, String intrinsic objects when not necessary. The other article is by Mark Wilton on writing efficient JavaScript.

Bookmark the weblogs for updates on more good articles on JavaScript.

technorati tags: javascript

Yesterday night I decided to upgrade my eMac to Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10 LTS). Previously my eMac was running Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

Even though I heard many horror stories about the upgrade, I decided to give it a try since today being a holiday for us I have the entire day to troubleshoot and fix things.

The upgrade process itself is very simple. You either start the update manager through the menu, or run (Alt+F2) gksu "update-manager -c".

After inspecting the installer reported it needs to download software somewhere close to 650Megs, and estimated the process to take close to 6hrs (since I have a moderate speed connection).

Inspite of hearing many horror stories about the installer dying in the middle of the upgrade process, I did not experience this behaviour, infact the upgrade was smooth, like a breeze.

Now that my eMac runs Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), it has Firefox 2.0 (yes, not IceWeasel), features a new boot splash, its faster, better, smoother fonts (even on non GNOME applications like Firefox, Thunderbird).

Don’t wait folks, give it a try, it rocks!

technorati tags: ubuntu, 6.10, edgy eft, powerpc, mac

If you have ever tried E17 (Enlightenment DR17), you would never look back, and don’t worry its under heavy development, because its getting very stable these days.

After a long time, today I updated my local repository and began rebuilding E17, but unfortunately I got strange errors building Evas:

• undefined macro AM_PATH_GTK
• automake does not support module_la_LDFLAGS being defined conditionally

Both the errors being the result of my old Automake (I was using 1.4), they got away when I updated my Automake to 1.9 (note: you need at least Automake 1.7 or higher to build E17).

I started to rebuild the software, but once again got stuck building Evas, this time being severe, it complained the symbol PAGE_MASK is not defined.

I searched the web to only find this being a common problem on GNU/Linux PowerPC (PPC) architecture and there’s a simple work-around for this.

So, I created and applied a patch, and E17 build was successful.

If you are like me, running GNU/Linux on PPC (I run Ubuntu Dapper Drake), you need to apply my patch to compile the software cleanly.

technorati tags: enlightenment, ppc, powerpc, e17

As of this post, there is no fix for it except to avoid using GCC 4.0 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5) for building

Yes, I was able to build the software successfully with GCC 3.4 toolchain (Ubuntu 3.4.6-1ubuntu2).

technorati tags: thunderbird, ppc, ppc, powerpc

My desktop is an eMac (powerpc platform) and hence I’m mostly on my own meaning, my platform is supported by most open source software including Firefox, Thunderbird, or anything. I don’t regret this, but consider this as an opportunity to study these software in detail by building them by hand, often editing files to build the software.

Last week I got my Ubuntu CDs shipped from Canonical (free of charge :D) and wanted to give it a try (even though I was happily running my favourite distribution–Gentoo). I popped in the live CD and rebooted my system. Unfortunately for the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS live CD, it did not detect my display properly, so I had to edit xorg.conf to get the GUI (GNOME) running.

As instructed on the CD, I started the installation program (by double-clicking the “Install” desktop icon). I have to tell here, even though the partioning software in Ubuntu is GUI, it had one of the very confusing interfaces I have ever used. But, I was able to select the partitions for root, swap and Apple bootstrap. The installation started, but to my surprise the installer complained that it could not find the Apple bootstrap partition for installing the boot loader. I tried multiple times repartitioning without success. Later, when I checked this issue on the web, I found it to be a bug in the installer software and the advice was to skip and go ahead (I would admit myself to be an expert, so I thought I could boot to the openfirmware prompt and boot GNU/Linux if the boot loader fails). But the worst thing happened. Before the installation could complete detecting and configuring the hardware, it crashed. I tried many a times, without success, but was firm in getting Ubuntu on my computer. It did not work.

In the release notes, it was mentioned that this problem is only with the live CD and not with the alternate CD. So, I decided to give a try, and I downloaded the alternate CD. I popped in the CD and without hesitation I booted the system to “expert” mode. To my surprise, it gave me a familiar installation screen (yes the Debian-like console installer).

The installation was successful, also, the installer did detect my hardware correctly.

technorati tags: ubuntu, dapper drake, linux, ppc, powerpc

technorati tags: cross domain, xmlhttprequest, ajax

Just add the following lines to userContent.css, and close and open Thunderbird.

/* Turn off sponsored ads, footer, and navigation from Y! Groups mails */
#ygrp-actbar, #ygrp-ft, #ygrp-sponsor, #ygrp-vitnav {
        display: none !important;
}

technorati tags: thunderbird, yahoo, groups

In FreeBSD 4.x, OpenBSD, BeOS operating systems, “stdint.h” does not exist, but, “inttypes.h” does exist.

My patch successfully fixes this problem, and has landed on MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH.

Yay! Sunbird successfully builds on BSDs and BeOS without me running my “unofficial” patches on the sources every time before I build.

Its now official

technorati tags: sunbird, calendar, freebsd, openbsd, beos