My thoughts in e-text

Ever since I posted the cTunes video on youtube ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=coV06ChYWJo ), I have been getting a few requests for the app to download and the source code. I have blogged a little about it here and the download link for the app can be found here , here , here and probably a lot more places too. It is wonderful to see an application that I wrote over a few weekends get such wide audience. Forums are still active on this half baked media player. But people have been asking for the source code and since I moved to a new job and had to shuffle my computers around, I don't remember where the code lives anymore. But the good news is I always have backups as my trusty little cronjob on my ever running PC takes care of backing up all the important files to a 1 TB drive every weekend so I never loose anything. Just hard to find that is all. Wish I had a google search on my .tar.bz2 files ;-). Anyway I took time today to search for the code because a student emailed me aski...

The most usable (for me anyway) VirtualBox release for mac is out. I just downloaded 1.6.0 from VirtualBox.org . I was finally able to load the virtualbox additions. Check out my previous blog to read about the issues I faced. Here is a quick recap of the issues: I could not use my full screen real estate which was 1440x900. The max resolution I could get was 1152x864. Unable to mount my shared folder. Cannot ssh from master OS (mac OS). First I am glad that VBox for mac has finally come out of beta. Just the fact that there is a release lifts the spirits a bit. Coming to my first issue, I am now able to make full use of my screen. It did not work out of the box, but the tweaks I had to do were small enough to not make me grumpy. I installed 1.6.0 on my macbook pro. Started my Gentoo guest OS. Loaded the virtualbox additions iso to the virtual cdrom by doing Devices > Install Guest Additions... Mounted the cdrom from Gentoo by doing mount /mnt/cdrom as root. Executed /mnt/cdrom...

I was finally able to clean up the code and add some comments to my pet project YAGTD which stands for Yet another getting things done. See my previous blog for more details. The code is available here if anyone is interested to modify for their specific needs. To try out the application go to http://yagtd.appspot.com/

The short version If you are having problems with elisa not playing your local media files (see https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/957 and https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/961 ) then you can fix it by editing ~/.elisa/elisa.conf and changing gstreamer:gst_metadata_client to gstreamer:gst_metadata . That is all and it works! The long version Ever since I heard about elisa , I have been trying to get it to work as my media center. It was well designed and the vector graphics are awesome. It plays music, videos and displays pictures, and has several plug-ins to play online music and youtube videos etc. You can even get cover arts from amazon from with in the software. But there is just one problem. It could never play my local media. Neither movies, nor music and not even photos. I gave v0.3.3 of elisa a try. It did not play my personal media. I thought, well it is still in development, so why not wait for the next release. I did not even take a look at the logs. Then...

Why is it so funny. Let's go over it one more time. Who do you think is better, the mac or PC (with windows vista)? Let the games begin, but before we start I am neither a mac fan nor a windows fan, I am all for linux ;) Mac: 1 PC: 0 Well mac does not need to get all excited. Seems like mac was having problems showing the above video on a mac. You might want to stop the video after a while, otherwise you might want to kill someone Mac:1 PC:1 Moving along, we have a series of pro-mac videos Mac: 2 PC:1 Mac:3 PC:1 Mac:4 PC:1 Mac:5 PC:1 Mac:6 PC:1 Let's even out the odds a little bit. This is hilarious and I have to minus 5 for mac for the following video and cannot raise anything for PC since nothing good has been said about it. Mac:1 PC:1 Finally the winner is Mac:0 PC:0 Neither...

I was finally able to complete the project that I described in my previous blog :). Having been back from vacation for a couple of weeks now, I used up every single minute I had available to finish it up. It is hosted at http://chandan7.myhosting247.com/yagtd/ChandanGtd.html as usual. Now you can see that as you add tasks for projects that has a specific tag and as you complete each task, you can observe the progress at both project level and tag level. All is well so far, but the only problem is that you cannot save what you enter into the application. As I previously mentioned, I had plans on running my own local server and being able to save all my tasks on my personal computer. But that did not make any sense to me. I wrote this neat application and am I the only one to be able to use it? Google App Engine to the rescue Just my luck, that Google App Engine was released while on my vacation. It is still in alpha stage, but it quite usable as it is. It has built-in data store where ...

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 ...