History is a wonderful way to keep track of what we did or where we went. Sometimes, we aren’t interested in having the history logged so that we can maintain some sort of secret activity. But trust me, at times it is very very useful.

But what use is history without the time when the activity took place! Time and Place play very important role. In bash history, the Time can be of great use to know, when a particular command was run.

This get extremely handy, when on a server and you need to find out when a particular command was run.

I guess you have figured out what I am getting to! Yes, time stamps in Bash History.

In shell set this environment variable

$ HISTTIMEFORMAT=”$d-%m-%y %T “

and then run history!

$ history

You will get the time stamp of when the command in your history was run!

Cool huh?

Technorati Tags: history, Linux, time stamp

First, let me tell you what let me to find this out. About what this is, you’ll soon know.

My friend borrowed my laptop, to try out OS codes for her OS lab examination. When she returned the laptop after a couple of days, I noticed that, my Desktop had moved! Yes, instead of the normal /home/jithinkr/Desktop/ it was now pointing to /home/jithinkr/Codes/Desktop/!

I tried moving the Desktop back to where it was supposed to be, but in my attempts, I ended up deleting all the files I had on my Desktop! Well, that indeed was a big loss, because I had forgotten what all files were there on my desktop. (Though the shell and the locate command came in handy to remind me what those files where. Wish I knew some way to recover them.  ).

Now my Desktop was pointing to /home/jithinkr and hence all the Documents, Pictures and Videos folders were being displayed on the Desktop.

This was something I never expected to happen .

After some surfing, I came to know of the file, where all these paths are configured. It’s here :

/home/<username>/.config/user-dirs.dirs

The content of this files was :

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update

# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you’re

# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run

# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR=”$HOME/yyy”, where yyy is a shell-escaped

# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR=”/yyy”, where /yyy is an

# absolute path. No other format is supported.

#

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=”$HOME”

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR=”$HOME/Downloads”

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR=”$HOME/Templates”

XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR=”$HOME/Public”

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR=”$HOME/Documents”

XDG_MUSIC_DIR=”$HOME/Music”

XDG_PICTURES_DIR=”$HOME/Pictures”

XDG_VIDEOS_DIR=”$HOME/Videos”

Technorati Tags: config, desktop, home, Linux

2009 saw lot of new, useful and innovative products that resulted out of simple human dreams. The creators saw what the present [and the future] generation needed the most and put their ideas on the design table. We saw the release of several OSes by computing giants this year. Includes Windows 7, Google Chrome OS and Mac Snow Leopard. I am not including Ubuntu 9.10, because I believe that the October 2010 release  of Ubuntu shall defy all standards.

Because Google has been foraying into several new fields and many of my friends are Google fanatics, they asked me if it is OK to switch to Google Chrome OS.

My answer, “It ain’t the time”.

What the cloud has to offer as is software and even hardware as a service and over the internet. It offers to provide software and hardware as a pay by use model rather than permanently investing on it.

Yes, for people in countries like India it is not the right time to move onto Google Chrome OS. The most important reason for this belief of mine is the fact that Chrome OS is dependent on the cloud.

Cloud computing is the new talk of the town. Everyone wants to know about it and wants to use it.

Google Trends for "Cloud Computing"

See how people have searched for cloud computing on google? It started somewhere around October 2007, and kept rising with occasional peaks and falls. But I can observe a fall by the end of 2009. We will have to wait and see if the term continues to generate interest in 2010. Also, the largest number of searches were from India, especially from Bangalore [source: Google Trends]

From what I have understood, Chrome stores your data on the cloud. Your computers hard disk, stores the Operating System alone. Every other thing from software to storage space is provided over the internet. (Google Services cater to the softwares of the cloud and your data will be stored in your Google Account Space).

Though the term generated so much of interest in India, yet it is dependent on Internet speeds in India to become a feasible facility in Indian households. Till then we will have to buy our own Hardware, and Software (if you aren’t exactly an open source fan).

So we will have to wait for internet speeds to catch up for Google Chrome OS to become a plausible replacement. Even then the existing drawbacks of Cloud Computing (later on this), might just leave people with the option to use non cloud Operating Systems.

Technorati Tags: 2010, chrome, cloud, google, os, trends

The final few months of 2009 wasn’t good for my blog. Readership and Viewer-ship simply fell. The last week, nobody visited my blog. Yes zero visitors.

I would love to add the statistics graph to show you, but at the moment I am short of photo manipulating images (or I don’t know what to use on this computer I am using.)

And I came to know of all this because I installed WordPress Stats. Yeah, it wasn’t there by default, had to install it manually.

But because I installed it I came to know of several other fancy stuffs.

One was this blog’s birth. I had totally forgotten that, I started blogging in this domain in April 2009. I have been active in the blog-o-sphere for quite some time. I used to blog at Novice Investigator.

I visited my old blog’s dashboard. Startled to see, that blog got greater number of viewers than this current one.  Content indeed is king.

Another thing I noticed was the “Busiest Day”. 316 viewers and it was on my Birthday! Surprise Surprise!

I had viewership between 1000 and 1500 during July, August and September. The time when I was blogging actively. Should have stuck to it.

Enough of what has passed. It will soon be a new year. With the new year comes new resolutions!

My first resolution for 2010 is that I will manage my time well and use it productively. I have returned, with a determination, to blog.

Happy Holidays!

Technorati Tags: 2010, blog, resolution, Web

Lately so much of exciting and eye candy stuffs have come up on Ubuntu. Ubuntu Karmic Koala had improvements and a whole lot of software that let you customise your desktop OS. And from whatever I have heard as of now, the next Ubuntu edition, Lucid Lynx will have lots to look forward to.

This post on the other hand will be all about recent Google releases that have made web surfing and image browsing easier.

You must have definitely heard about and used Google Chrome and Picasa, if you have used Windows ever.

Google officially released Chrome beta for Linux, and it works without crashing for me. I have loaded it up with extensions, and I am pretty happy with the results. [I had installed Chromium from the developers channel before, I still have it. More about it later.]

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux&hl=en

Visit the link above, and download the beta (Yes, beta. It’s safe to download. Google has kept Linux users in dark for long)

Run the deb/rpm file and yo! you are ready to Chrome!

Google Picasa and Image Viewer(deb file only [for Ubuntu like distros])

Google Picasa Image Viewer is something really handy and something way ahead of other image viewers. For this we need Picasa 3 pre installed. Head over to the link below and download to install Picasa 3.

http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html

Remember, Picasa 3 (Beta) and not Picasa 2.7.

http://www.caiacoa.de/Transfer/PicasaPhotoViewer-1.0.3.deb

Download the deb from the above link and install it. Now you can view a photo/image by right click, open with > custom command > PicasaPhotoViewer.

To set it as default, right click an image, Properties > Open With > PicasaPhotoViewer.

I am happy to have found these, especially Picasa Photo Viewer on Linux. Thanks to OMGUbuntu, for this. Many a thanks to Irakli Gozalishvili and Caiacoa to have made it possible!

P.S. Did you notice that, Google did a short cut with Picasa? It ain’t actually made for Linux, it’s just the Windows version running on Wine. Thank God we have Wine.

Technorati Tags: chrome, google, Linux, picasa, ubuntu