My thoughts in e-text

So I have used a few "Getting Things Done" (see my previous blog ) softwares / applications / services or what ever you want to call them. They are generally pretty good at what they are supposed to do. I liked some of them for their simple design and ease of use and liked a few others for their control. But overall none of the ones I tested met my specific needs. Basically I want an extremely simple tasks > projects > tags hierarchy. The tags are like the big pieces of the pie. I have a few tags like "Personal", "Work" and "Fun". So all my work related projects should have the "work" tag, similarly all personal projects like buy groceries or clean house or free up space on hard drives should go into the "personal" bin, and so on for other tags. Well you get the picture. Then projects are high level tasks. You know you have to do several smaller tasks to get it done. But overall you just want to track projects. How much ...

So what more can I do with my adsense account? How about video ads? Why not. What are they? How do they work? Here is my first experiment with video ads. The setup was pretty simple. You click on Google AdSense Video units link and you are connected to your youtube account. Once you log in to youtube and verify your information you can start off with creating a player with the contect you want to show based on keywords or channels or category. Simple :-). The videos can also be generated based on the performance and characteristics of the website they are placed in. You get a piece of code that you embedded in your blog/webpage. Here is the piece of code that I got for keywords "phone". Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com Update 1: Hmm for some reason that did not work. I will give it a try again later. Update 2: I found out the problem. It seems for some reason when I copy paste the code somehow double quotes get added at the wrong places. And so the link did not work. ...

Working in Google and not having an AdSense account is not cool. So I created an account and added the AdSense page element. Looks good. Although I did not like the layout. May be I should move to a new template that will have 3 columns. One on the left with profile, one on the right with ads and middle with the blog. May be I will write one. Anyway with the ads in place I can track how many page impressions I got on my blog ;-). Actually I should find out how to track traffic to my blog. Let me add that to my list of To Dos. Talking of To Dos I was also researching for some "Getting Things Done" (GTD) applications that will make me more organized. Lucky for me an article got published in Toms Hardware about the very topic . In it the author writes his views on various Getting Things Done With Software . After reading through the article quickly I found HiveMinder to be the most useful for me. I tried Personal Tracks too, but I guess HiveMinder is easier to work with. It ha...

I have a rather busy schedule like most people and from time to time I wish I had more time. Well I lied. I don't wish from time to time, I actually always wish there was more time. There is always something more to be done. Yet here we are constrained only by time. The list of things to do is ever growing. 1. I have to finish reading several of my magazines that appear at my doorstep every month. I subscribe to Dr. Dobbs, Wired and Electronics for you. But I did not have time in 2007 to complete any of the magazines in 2007. So now I am reading all the old backlogs. I have to come up to speed to open my new Feb 2008 issues. I am now at March 2007 issue. I have exactly 1 year's worth of 3 magazines, bringing the total to a hefty 36 magazines. 2. Then I have to work on that media player using Freevo or Pigment or what ever I decide. And then there is the matter of figuring out which one to use. Huh, will I ever be able to decide and start getting my hands dirty? 3. I still have...

After thinking about the pros and cons of using kaa.canvas I am just now thinking may be I should simply go with pigment. The reason is I am looking for a way to scale a screen of information (graphically) and I guess kaa.canvas may not be able to do that. I did not yet discover all the available features in it, but that is what my initial impressions are. I will go over the kaa code base and see if I can scale screens with images and text on the fly (as in animation). If not then perhaps pigment has some tricks in the bag.

If you are ever configuring an app and see the message "gtkdocize not found" in Gentoo, then you need to emerge gtk-doc. I had some hard time figuring this out so I am writing it in my blog for the next time. When I saw that error message I did an "emerge -s gtkdocize". Usually it is that simple in Gentoo. But not this time. The emerge command returned no results at all. Then I searched for gtkdoc and still no luck. After searching in Google, I still did not have a solution. After thinking for a while I decided to try to search for gtk-doc. Bingo! That worked! Interestingly, this is my first post from my Virtual machine :-)

I got everything working from with in virtual box, except for the additions. I was able to run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run (from the Guest additions iso) and it ran to completion without producing any errors. It compiled some modules and modified my xorg.conf file. But there were several problems with the additions. First the script changed the video device driver from vesa to vboxvideo which gets me a maximum resolution of 1024x768. All other higher resolutions complained about "vrefresh out of range" or "hsync out of range". I do not understand how that can be given that I gave a wide range of hsync and vrefresh for my monitor. Finding little help from /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I decided to go back to my old vesa driver which at least gives be a slightly higher resolution of 1152x864. I was wishing the vbox driver could give me 1440x900 but that did not happen. Setting modelines also did not help so I gave up pretty quickly. My next issue is that I am not able to mount my s...