FSLog

Javascript trick to edit the page displayed

cnu — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:14:18 +0000

Do you want to quickly edit the text of any webpage that you are browsing? Maybe you wanted to see how the site looks if you change some words. Here is a neat Javascript trick that you can use to edit the text part of the web page.

Do note that you can’t save the changed text onto the server or is this any means to hack a web server. If you refresh the page, all the changes you made will disappear. You can however save the resulting HTML if you goto File -> Save as.

Step 1: Drag this Edit/View bookmarklet into your bookmarks toolbar.

Step 2: Goto the web page which you want to edit and click on the bookmarklet – you will be put into the edit mode. Click the bookmarklet again and you will be put into the normal view mode.

Step 3: ?????

Step 4: Profit.

For those of you who like to know what it does beneath the scenes, it just sets two properties of the document to make it editable.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Ubuntu Studio – A multimedia creation derivative of Ubuntu

cnu — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:30:56 +0000

Ubuntu Studio aims to be a multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment. Their ultimate goal is to build a solid Ubuntu distro based on Ubuntu-Gnome by Feisty Fawn. This distro has various packages for audio, graphics and video editing. Take a look at their wiki for more info.

Ubuntu usability analysis

cnu — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:59:30 +0000

The Open Source Advocate has a thorough usability analysis of Ubuntu and tells us what makes it “ready to use” for us. He takes each step for completing an operation and categorizes them into Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard. He also explains what can be made to improve the user experience.

Drupal 5 released

cnu — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:41:59 +0000

Drupal the most popular open source content management system has moved on to version 5 after almost 8 months of development. The most important feature included in this version is the easy to use web based installer. The UI is also greatly improved and is easy to use. This version also allows themers to develop better themes for Drupal.

Drupal also celebrates its 6th birthday with its release of version 5.

Fedora Core 6 Live CD

cnu — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:57:01 +0000

Fedora Core 6 is now available as a live CD. This is great news to the old fedora fans out there. Fedora is a project that is sponsored by RedHat and is contributed by many developers around the world. These people create high quality open source software which can be used by anyone.

It was a great distro back in those old days. But after Ubuntu came along, it lost its place. I haven’t tried FC for the past 2 years and this live CD would be a nice way to try it.

The live CD is available for i386 architecture only and you can download it from the official website or from torrents. It is about 683mb.

in pictures: Image based tutorial

cnu — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:56:37 +0000

I got mail about a nice website called in pictures from Chris Charuhas. It is a nice site having tutorials about using Office, OpenOffice.org, Dreamweaver, etc.

The interesting part of this is that it is fully based on pictures. All the tutorials have nice explanations with screenshots explaining how to do every step. They are easy to understand and I would like to see more such tutorials for other open source softwares. Their press release says that they would bring in more tutorials for programming languages like PHP, Perl, etc. I would also like to see tutorials for other applications like Gimp, Evolution, etc., for the normal user.

Maybe this mode of teaching will help bring in more people to FOSS world.

Performancing Metrics to go Open Source

cnu — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:15:57 +0000

Performancing is a popular blog network which released Performancing for Firefox – an extension for Firefox for bloggers. It also has various other services for bloggers like Metrics for tracking the visitors of your blog. It also an advertising network called Performancing Partners. Even I use these services and you too can advertise on this blog by clicking on the ad in the sidebar.

There is another good news for the FOSS community as Performancing will be releasing the code for Metrics as Open Source. It is great to see that we get such quality software and hope many developers continue to enhance it.

How to think like a Ruby Computer Scientist

cnu — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:47:56 +0000

How to think like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python is an excellent book for learning Python for the newbies. Here is another book similar to that for those who want to learn Ruby.

How to think like a computer scientist: Learning with Ruby is a book for those newbies who want to learn the basics of Ruby, Objects and how to use them for creating various data structures like linked list, stacks, queues, trees, heaps, maps, etc. It is still under development and will make a good book. Currently there is no downloadable PDF files. But you can wget the html files.

Globulation 2 – Free RTS game for linux

cnu — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 19:07:41 +0000

Globulation 2 is an innovative Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game which reduces micro-management by automatically assigning tasks to units. This means the user just has to assign specific number of units for a task and the units automatically do what is best for that job.

It has nice AIs with varying levels of difficulties
Includes a scripting language for versatile gameplay
Nice set of tutorials which walk through the player with the various tasks
An integrated map editor allowing you to create your own maps
Play in single player, local area network or over the internet with Ysagoon Online Gaming.

One unique thing about this game is that it doesn’t have any humans or other creatures. All the characters in this game are called globs(see pic) and look and move funny. It is a nice game and I am playing it for the past 2 days.

It is available in Synaptic, but it would be better if you could download and install it.

Liferea – News Reader for Linux

cnu — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 18:53:02 +0000

Today I was analyzing my RSS Feeds and saw that there are about 59 subscribers(thanks to Ubuntu Blog) and saw that there was a Reader called Liferea. I have heard of this before, but didnt give a try. So I thought – why don’t I install it and see how it works out. So I just went to Synaptic and did a quick search for Liferea and installed it.

It is cool and works great. It is actually developed for Linux users who want a good Feed Reader. You have easily customizable panes with 2 or 3 pane mode. Also you can set how many items to save under each feed. Overall: a nice and fast reader to try if you are under linux.