tools

Everyone loves Quicksilver. If you don't know what it is, shame on you and you can't call your self a geek. In either case, you should check out this Google Tech Talk on Quicksilver by its creator.

While Quicksilver rules supreme as the king of universal access and action applications, what are Linux users supposed to do? Sit back and watch in painful agony as Mac users the world over gloat smugly with their shiny little toys? Hell no! I'm going to tell you about some Quicksilver alternatives (probably not as good though) for Linux. There do exist some alternatives for Windows as well, but that's not the focus of this article.

GNOME Do

GNOME Do is a fairly recent entry in this already crowded space. Here is a screencast that shows Do in action. It is being actively developed (and hopefully that continues!) by David Siegel, a CS student at UPenn. The interface and features seem to highly inspired by Quicksilver, which I think is a great thing. Now if only it wasn't so tied into GNOME. See my wish list later in the post.

From the website:

GNOME Launchbox

GNOME Launchbox is a slightly older effort (and one of the inspirations for GNOME Do). It was started by some developers at Imendio but seems to have fizzled out after an initial burst of activity. The interface is again very Quicksilver-ish.

From the website:

Katapult

Katapult started it's life as an application on
KDE Apps around an year back. Since then it has
shifted it's home a few times, finally landing up on kde.org as an “official”
project.

From the KDE-Apps page:

Of all the applications mentioned thus far, I really only have used Katapult
and that too not a whole lot. But over all my experience has not been that
great. I mean it's nice as an application launcher (and even then it is
sometimes quite slow), but I didn't find much use for anything else
(calculator?!). Also, it didn't play (and I don't think it still does) well
with Compiz and friends (read ugly display).

Deskbar Applet

This is another GNOME centric application, probably the least inspired by
Quicksilver in terms of design and interface. I guess you could say it is more
like Spotlight in some respects.

From the website:

A new kid on the block, the “KRunner” application in the upcoming KDE4 release promises to be a better replacement for Katapult and the current KDE Run dialog. Unfortunately there is no single web page I can point to, and screenshots are spread all over the place. Besides, it is still very much in development and while I have toyed with it a little bit in my KDE 4 session, I really haven't used it seriously.

WISH LIST

So finally, here is my wish list:

• As with most applications in Linux, there is an initial outburst of applications to satisfy similar needs and user requirements. This confounds a lot of new users. Eventually, over time, one or two applications emerge victorious (there are exceptions, of course) but this is a gradual process of absorption, refinement and elimination. I would really love to see a single (or may be two at most) application combining the best technologies at hand (say GNOME Do, and KDE4 Krunner)
• Imitation is the best form of flattery: Quicksilver has gotten to where it is only with extensive community feedback. The model, plugins and user interface it has is PROVEN to work. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Steal concepts where possible and relevant! I can't wait for the day when I will be able to brag about my increase in productivity because of this! Or be able to operate my entire work flow using a single interface: universal access and control baby!

I use Google Calendar to manage my day, and Remember the Milk (henceforth RTM) to manage my todo list(s). Google calendar has effectively killed off all competition (like 30 Boxes), and its really becoming a joy to use as they improve integration with GMail and other services. Meanwhile RTM is probably the only other web app that I use on a daily basis – its fast, I love the keyboard shortcuts, the notifications work great and it basically stays out of my way. The only problem was having to use two different tools (Google and RTM) for such closely related tasks (calendar and todo lists).

So yesterday when I read about the new RTM integration with Google calendar, I was elated! Take a look at the screenshots, this is wickedly cool. This was definitely one of my happiest moments over Christmas, so thanks a ton to the RTM team. And if you're about to suggest that I use the so-called TODO list provided by Google Calendar or one of the Google widgets, forget about it. They don't even come close to RTM in terms of ease of use or functionality. And with this integration, they've just nailed it.

Here's an overview of the features (from the post linked above):

Happy holidays!

Qalculate's tagline says “the ultimate desktop calculator”. Might sound a little obnoxious, but it really is and I'll show some of the really neat features that make it so. Do give it a try and you'll plenty more!

So what is qalculate? First and foremost, its a calculator. Which means that it can do what you typically expect a calculator to do, no surprises there. Here's a screenshot of the main window. There's a convinient history window as well, and a handy keypad if you should need it.

But I've never had to use the keypad because the one truly great thing about qalculate is the input mechanism – its extremely smart, context sensitive and natural language oriented. So converting 50 kgs to lbs is as simple as typing “50 kgs to lbs”! And if you don't know how to represent a unit (pounds or lbs), not to worry, qalculate will provide completion options as you go along:

And then qalculate can be used to do a lot of other things: simplify algebraic expression, solve equations (I believe it can do some calculus as well), a plethora of banking related functions (compute accrued interest etc), lots and lots of geometry related stuff.

Check out the full feature list, and also take a look at some of the screenshots. I love this thing!

A long time back I bought a large hard drive (well, it doesn't look so large any more, its only 160GB. But it did seem very large then). My primary motivation behind buying the drive was to backup my data. So I started looking around for backup solution. I had the following requirements:

• easy to setup and configure: defaults should largely work out of the box.
• support for incremental backups: don't make a full copy of the file system every time I change a single file.
• support for multiple backups: I want daily backups going back one week, backups from the 1st of each month for the past year, and backups for 1st Jan on every year for the past 5 years. You get the idea – exponentially decreasing density of the snapshots.
• regular file systems for backup: I don't want to use a special interface to browse the backup. I don't want to untar/unzip/whatever to look at my backup. I want to be able to cd into 2006-01-03 and look at the backup for that date.

The first problem I ran into was the number of solutions available. I think there are easily upwards of 50 decent open source backup solutions out there. To name a few: there are some fairly simple ones such as konserve; some of average complexity such as dirvish, rdiff-backup, and duplicity; and finally some complex behemoths like amanda, bacula and backuppc.

After some experimentation, I settled on dirvish. To be fair, I did nothing close to an exhaustive evaluation. All systems did not get a fair chance, and dirvish might just have gotten lucky in that it was the first system I seriously tried. But its been working fairly well for me so far.

dirvish meets all of the requirements that I've stated above. Its written in Perl, which is unfortunate since I don't appreciate perl all that much. But so long as I don't have to look at the code, I don't really care. It can do incremental backups to local or remote devices. Its extremely configurable in terms of the backup density thing I mentioned earlier. You can browse backups like normal filesystems. It makes efficient use of space, hard-linking common files where possible. It can take care of deleting old backups etc. It works well over rsync or ssh.

I tried backuppc, but it requires a web browser to look through and retrieve files from the backup. rdiff-backup and duplicity just build on top of rsync and didn't seem to provide the kind of flexible configuration I was looking for. Amanda and bacula just seemed too much of an overkill for my modest needs. As always, YMMV, but I recommend dirvish for laptop backup kind of needs.

This is largely a rip-off of my original article. I figured I should repost it for posterity and it fits in line with my tools theme.

Being a grad student (for that matter, in almost any profession these days), I frequently need to give talks or present some material. I have finally settled on Latex Beamer as my preferred presentation tool, and this article describes why.

Introduction

Things I dislike about other presentation tools

Things I like about beamer?

But nothing is perfect