A quick blow-by-blow:

1. Internal hard-drive crash; managed to back up an image to my external hard-drive: May 19, 2011
2. External hard-drive crash; no, I didn’t back this up: June 16, 2011
3. Firefox crash; cleared my history, and didn’t restore the 23 tabs I had open: July 6, 2011

I’m now staring at a bare Firefox window; I’ve already tried restarting it twice, hallucinating about my tabs magically reappearing. Just two tabs now: one for this post, and another on The Four Noble Truths:

1. Life means suffering
2. The origin of suffering is attachment
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable
4. There is a path to the cessation of suffering

Staring at my screen, with flashes of my hard-drives’ last days resonating with the radiation off my chipped spectacles, I can’t help but wonder if Buddha had his share of digital loss.

A tiny but significant moment of joy to Rijul and I: a Graphy creation published and live in an international journal, it’s nice to see someone finding Graphy useful enough for the tiny but essential task of drawing a complex graph to embed in a research paper.

It’s probably only a matter of time before we have some vicious Graphy creations taking over the traditional hand-drawn networks on graph theory exams; sorry, fellow students.

To give you the big picture: Graphy was conceived to help teach and learn graph theoretical algorithms by visualising them step by step. While further research led me to realise that the concept is not new (and that made me sad and give up hope),  it was eventually seen as a nice tool to draw graphs and export them as JPEG or EPS files to embed in research papers, test papers and the likes.

It’s important that credit be given where it’s due, and we must hence credit Microsoft: the blue blobs and their attached arrows are not by the then-very-alpha Graphy. This goes to show that not many really care about the hard work that goes into good software; why add complex, one-hit-wonder functionality when a quick job with MS Paint keeps everyone happy?

1. System → Preferences → Keyboard Shortcuts → Add
2. • Name: Snipe
   • Command: gnome-screenshot -ai
3. Apply; then click on your new entry to configure a shortcut key

This binds your shortcut-key to the Gnome Screenshot tool, being started in the -a(rea) and -i(nteractive) mode. If you prefer seeing the sniping crosshairs directly instead of an interactive dialog, use gnome-screenshot -a as the command instead.

1. Get rid of unity-window-decorator:
   

   sudo killall unity-window-decorator

   If you get a message saying unity-window-decorator: no process found, it means the decorator isn’t running, move on.

2. Get back gtk-window-decorator:
   • Start CompizConfig Settings Manager: ccsm
   • Open up the Window Decoration settings
   • Change Command to: gtk-window-decorator --replace
   • Close CompizConfig Settings Manager

   You can configure your old frills and see them in action now. All that’s left is making sure everything remains frilly after the next reboot.

3. Set up fusion-icon:
   • Install:
     

     sudo apt-get install fusion-icon

   • Start:
     

     fusion-icon

     You’ll see a cool icon in your notification area; right click on it and ensure the Select Window Manager setting is Compiz and the Select Window Decorator setting is GTK Window Decorator.

   • Set fusion-icon as a startup application:

     System → Preferences → Startup Applications → Add; then enter the values:

     • Name: fusion
     • Command: fusion-icon --sleep 5
     • Comment: Start fusion-icon with a delay of 5 seconds after startup

Test the setup on the next reboot: you’ll notice a slight flash in the first few seconds; this is fusion-icon starting the Compiz window manager, pretend you didn’t notice. I guess this quick fix should hold up until we get some real ones from the Compiz/Unity guys.

Update: This is a bad idea if you’re counting on reliability. Free hosting is, after all, free. So expect frequent downtime of whatever you’re hosting!

Thank’s Rohit, for directing me to x10hosting; I know have unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, and it’s, would you believe it, for free! Plus I’m running on a free .co.cc domain. Though there are the more than occasional account suspensions for stepping over the line (which includes trying to back up your entire WordPress blog), it’s the perfect way to try out setting up a server and your own domain before getting looted by some hosting provider. Give it a try yourself, or watch me play around at eyeshalfclosed.co.cc!

A screenshot gallery; click on a picture to enlarge it.

Graphy is a teaching and learning tool that let’s you visualize graph theoretic algorithms on graphs you can construct yourself. The image above shows one of the graphs we tested Graphy’s step-by-step visualization expertise on; I never thought a depth first search would look that cool. Get Graphy!

The main motivation for doing this is to pay for my degree studies, because I don’t like the idea of graduating with a huge student debt. I know people who are paying off student loans 15-20 years after they graduated. Not a nice thought! – Alex Tew

“The company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment.”

It probably won’t be long before you find yourself looking at something similar in the corporate contract of that big company you’re looking forward to joining. What this implies is:

1. If you end up contributing to an open source initiative in your spare time, you’re violating the contract; and you’ll end up in the same soup as Tilly.
2. If you think up some brilliant new invention in the shower and decide to build and patent it sometime, your big company will sue you, win, and claim the invention too.

What you need to do is:

“The company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment code written during working hours and in direct furtherance of any tasks assigned by the company.”

If they don’t buy the change, and you really want them, charge them for it. If they’ve offered you an 8 hour work day, it’s only fair to charge them triple for claiming ownership over ideas you may conceive over the entire 24 hours.

Or you could, like many, have a genius of a grandmom donating generously to the open source community.

I know this is nine years late, but I feel this is a lesson learned hard that’s really relevant now. The original source for this is at Slashdot.

Take Graphy for a little walk!

And we mean alpha; which is a polite way of telling you that if you’re nice to Graphy, Graphy might be nice to you. Hey, it’s not going to fry your computer, so give it a try! Post in whatever you’d like to say, ask or complain about in the comments to this post; we’ll compile the frequent questions and complaints into our wiki as soon as we get the time.