Saturday, February 17, 2007
I’ve mentioned before that I use wget as my download manager. By default, it’s a simple command-line downloader, but if you dig deep into man wget, you’ll find a wealth of options.
Here’s what I have in my .profile (for bash):
#wget and resume any file
wgett()
{
wget --timeout=40 -t inf -c "${1}" }
Yup, and so that’s why the title is not a typo. I’ve aliased wgett to this cute little function that waits for a timeout of 40s before retrying (but does it indefinitely) and then picks up where it left off. It’s invaluable, and it’s how I survive the Indian Internet.
Tags: software
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Saturday, June 3, 2006
(P.S. In the picture above, the triangle to the left of the icons means that the application is currently running.)
From top to bottom:
- Finder, the ubiquitous Mac equivalent to Windows explorer, it’s not as nice or flexible, but it’s slick enough.
- Transmission, the sweet little Bittorrent client that’s easy on a Mac. I used it’s equivalent uTorrent on Windows since the one thing I hate most is bloated software. It works well enough, but it still chokes on some torrents, and it’s not as compatible as I’d like.
- Download Wizard; after searching high and low for a Flashget replacement and coming by the way of Speed Download, which appears to be the most advertized, I liked the small footprint of Download Wizard. It’s still not a Universal application, which means it feels sluggish and takes ages to load, but it does it job real fine.
- Firefox, the ubiquitous browser. Having said that, replacements for the Mac are amazingly good, and the only thing stopping me from using Safari (or better yet, Shiira or Camino) is the extensibilty that’s built into the fox. Minor annoyances: no spell-check as in most native Mac applications, no support for the built-in password management tool.
- Terminal, an adequate Unix Terminal (but not the best I’ve used), it launches instantly and stays out of the way. No tabs, and no support for Pg-down/Pg-up in man pages (which I think can be fixed by some hacking) and no color codes.
- Textmate. The single greatest editor I’ve used on any platform. This makes editing my PHP (and now, Rails) projects fast and a no-brainer. It really stays out of your face and allows you to think in code. Emacs + OSX nirvana!
- Netnewswire Lite, the fix for the news junkie. It fetches RSS feeds from any number of sources and displays them intuitively and with minimum of fuss. There’s a pro version, but the lite is more than enough for my needs.
- Itunes, the Mac audio player. I still haven’t got used to its “convention over configuration” arrangement, but it’s surprisingly easy to get started, and arranges all my music pretty well on the disc. I use it mostly for accessing my Ipod nowadays since I’ve not yet selected the tracks I want on my mini. When it plays music, it stays out of the way.
- Preview, the default Mac application for “opening everything”. It serves as a really good PDF reader, image viewer, etc. (No automatic viewing in directories, view the next file, etc. but it suffices).
- Quicksilver, this isn’t shown here, because I’ve disabled the dock icon, but Quicksilver is the GUI application for console lovers :-). An oxymoronic description, I know, but it’s true. It’s a text-launcher on steroids.
Note that I run all these simultaneously on my Mac mini with 512M ram. Aye, I badly need more like when I’m in the process of designing something I’ve got Photoshop+Omnigraffle+Dreamweaver open, or when Netbeans+Tomcat chokes up my Java development, but for the most part, it runs fine. The spinwheel is my friend.
Tags: software
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Saturday, December 17, 2005
Microsoft’s MSDN Academic Alliance seems a pretty good way to get back at Free/Opensource software, especially in India. The $800 price tag (which has since been heavily slashed, it’s rumoured) gets an academic institution and it’s students, free access to almost the entire Microsoft stable of products for development. Including Windows XP. Legally. Even at $800, it’s affordable enough for our college, even though I fear, the general malaise of myopia will prevent any sudden adoption. Nevertheless, even if you root for Opensource software, having an easy and legal way to play with the stuff your competition churns out is not a bad thing to have. There’s nothing in the EULA - even though the FSF hints there is - that prevents schools from having a simultaneous Nix awareness program as well.
Here’s a good article to read.
Tags: development • software
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Wednesday, July 6, 2005
I received them Ubuntu CDs in the mail yesterday. The package was frayed and a sorry sight to look at, but just the fact that it arrived amazes me. For a completely free service, the delivery alone is a benchmark.
I have twenty x86 and five x86-64 CDs to give away. Leave a comment if you’d like one (and if we can meet somehow).
Tags: software
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
For those of you using Firefox, this could be a nice feature to know about.
Right click on any search box (on say Google, or Answers) and you’ll have a context menu option called “Add a Keyword for this Search…”
Click on it, and you’ll be presented with the Add Bookmarks dialog-box. Make sure to fill in the keyword text box - make it something distinctive and easy to remember (like dict for a dictionary) and save the bookmark to the folder conveniently provided by Firefox (called Quick Searches).
Now you can type in “<keyword> search term” on your Firefox address-bar and it’ll jump directly to your search result. Enjoy 
I’ve bookmarked Answers.com this way (to a keyword ‘a’). The advantages of this are pretty obvious; I want a sure-fire answer to anything, I just type in “a <topic>” in the address-bar and zoom… I’m informed 
Tags: software
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Wednesday, April 6, 2005
No More Free BitKeeper is a great read, and one that succintly illustrates how commercial software finds it hard to thrive in the Linux world. The Linux business model (if there is somesuch) is something that I’ve tried hard to understand, but from what I can figure out, every Linux guru frowns upon software that is not Free and Open… and that kind of limits its commercial viability, to put it mildly.
BitKeeper makes a nice story because here is a commercial entity offering use of their superior product to the Linux kernel team expecting compliance with just one condition: No Reverse Engineering. My first thought was that they should’ve expected it… kernel hackers and compliance don’t exactly go together.
On an unfunny note though, there is a simple word that people should learn more - Respect; in this case, respecting the rights of a person who gave you something essentially for free. It’s not that hard a concept to grasp methinks.
Tags: development • software
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Wednesday, April 6, 2005
In praise of Windows 2003 SP1, The Register is actually praising somebody, please take note.
Tags: software
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