I recalled PacMan – one of the most popular classic arcade video games. I used to play PacMan at a video game parlour each day (literally), on my way from school to home. My friends used to consider me an expert at it

I started googling for PacMan for Linux. While searching, I got to know that this game is available as a Google Gadget. That’s it. I decided to install Google Gadgets on my Fedora 9 laptop. Thought it would be fun as well as learning and I will install more than just a game.

Google Gadgets on Fedora 9 Desktop

Installation:

• Login as root
• Configure a new YUM repository for Google Gadgets. Create a file named google-gadgets.repo in the directory /etc/yum.repos.d with the following contents: [google-gadgets]
  name=Google Gadgets
  baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/suzhe/Fedora_9/
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=0

• There is a google-gadgets RPM for an older release in the Fedora Update Repository which conflicts with the google-gadgets-common RPM from the above setup repository. Hence temporarily disable the update repository by editing the file fedora-updates-newkey.repo. Change Enabled=0 from 1 for [updates-newkey]. After the next step you can re-enable it by setting 0 to 1.
• Install Google Gadgets for Fedora as:yum install google-gadgets-gtk. Since I use GNOME on my Fedora 9 desktop I chose to install google-gadgets-gtk. KDE users may opt for “yum install google-gadgets-qt” (untested by me).
• Turn on Desktop Effects (System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects) to see the Gadget sidebar translucent as the Vista sidebar.

Run It
There are two ways to run the Google Gadgets sidebar (which shows your gadgets): manually or automatically, when you log into GNOME. To run it manually, issue the following command in a terminal/console window:

ggl-gtk -bg

Second, to run it automatically when you log into GNOME, click on System>Preferences>Personal>Sessions. Click on the tab “Startup Programs”. Click on the Add button. For Name: type in Google Gadgets and for Command: type in:  ggl-gtk -bg. Next time, when you log into GNOME, the sidebar will appear automatically.

Note that if you click on the show desktop icon (bottom left) on GNOME, the Google Gadget’s sidebar would dissappear. To see it again, click on the Google Gadgets icon on the GNOME panel.

To install Google Gadgets for other Linux distributions browse to http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/

Add the PacMan gadget
To add a gadget like the PacMan game, right click on the Google Gadget’s sidebar and click on “Add Gadgets”. This will popup a window with the gadgets’ category on the left and the gadgets on the right pane. To add PacMan, select “Fun and Games” and then move the mouse over the “Games” gadget. Then click on the Add button. This will add the Games gadget to the sidebar which lists other games like Tetris, Donkey Kong, Sonic, amongst PacMan. Click on a game to start playing it.

All said and done, I happened to install Google Gadgets on my Fedora 9 desktop for PacMan and it is worth it. Played across three stages while downloading a 25 MB file in office . As of this writing I only have 3 gadgets added to the sidebar – Wikipedia search, Games and Analog Clock.

Will update this post when I add something more or as interesting as PacMan to my gadgets sidebar. PacMan rocks

Many may believe that Steve² and Linus are very different personalities and have different agendas in their life and different questions for which they have been trying to find the answers. Surprising (or not so), they all had the same question to ask. Following is what they asked God:

Steve Ballmer: Hey God, seeing you gives me the same excitement as seeing Windows, when I saw it the first time.

God: Steve, this means you are really glad to see me. Im happy with your devotion to Windows, since it is an indirect devotion to me. I’m everywhere, in you, in others and even in MS Windows. Ask for a wish.

Steve Ballmer: Oh God, you have given me everything including the strength to lift and throw chairs at this age. The only answer to the only question that I’m looking for is: when will Windows become the de facto (the standard, the only used) operating system

God: Steve, Windows is dominant and is doing pretty well. Within ten years it will become the de facto, despite your mistakes like Vista.

(Steve Balmer starts crying)

God: Why are u crying my child ?

Steve Ballmer: I’m crying because this will not happen in my lifetime

God: Don’t worry my son, your name will still be remembered with WIndows.

(God disappears leaving Steve Ballmer sad as well as happy)

Next, God appears before Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs asks the same question – when will Mac OS become the de facto operating system.

God: Steve, you are my son and you are as creative as me. You create beautiful things like me. Yet it will take about 20 years for Mac OS to become a de facto OS. Being more open and less self obsessed will lead to it, but will take not less than 20 years

(Steve Jobs starts crying)

God asks: Hey why are you crying my son. I thought I gave you good news.

Steve Jobs: I’m crying because this will not happen in my lifetime.

God consoles Steve Jobs and disappears after blessing him.

Finally God appears before Linux Torvalds and blesses him for his open and free efforts.

Linus Torvalds: God, if my efforts have been so pure and unselfish, my question to you is – “WHEN WILL LINUX BECOME THE DE FACTO OPERATING SYSTEM”

(God starts crying)

Linux Torvalds: God, why r you crying

God: I’M CRYING BECAUSE THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN IN MY LIFETIME

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

DISCLAIMER: This is, as you would have guessed, A JOKE. Request you to not start arguing why God had to cry for Linux and not for Windows. . Also, after writing this post, I felt a little guilty about the “lifetime” point. This post is a joke and I genuinely, wish the longest life to Steve, Steve and Linus.

1. Easy installation
2. Sleek top menu bars give more real estate to the web pages
3. Shows thumbnails of most visited pages as the default page
4. Less configuration options
5. Robust Incognito window (porn mode)

Cons (so far)

1. Not available for Linux
2. No built-in RSS reader
3. Limited configuration options
4. MS Silverlight based applications do not work
5. Cannot leverage the plethora of Firefox plugins

After lots of news and attention since yesterday, Google’s very own web browser called Chrome is finally available for download now, but only for Windows.

To start with, since I’m on Linux (Fedora 9), the download page http://www.google.com/chrome, did not show me a download link but instead prompted me to subscribe (with my E-mail) to get alerted when Chrome is available for Linux.

I subscribed to the alert and then quickly launched Win XP SP2 in VirtualBox (a VMWare or Virtual PC like virtual machine) from my Fedora 9 laptop. Went to the download page and, this time, was greeted by a download link for WinXP/Vista. Downloaded the installer (about 400KB in size). The installer when run, in turn, downloaded the browser (took about 3-4 minutes on a 2Mbps link). Following is the first look of Chrome when it got launched (automatically) after the installation:

The first launch

I should have been in the first or in one the first batches of people to download (started downloading @ 00:55 hrs IST) and run Chrome. I was regularly hitting the site when suddenly the Chrome’s page (earlier was a 404 message page) showed up Writing this line from within Chrome . Will explore and write more about this new kid in town. So do visit back! Okay, Im continuing to write about it now:

Quick Notes

• Installation, no questions asked: During Chrome’s installation, no questions were asked on where to install, what to install, what to import and what not to. The only prompt I got was when Chrome could not import Firefox’s bookmarks because Firefox was open. It imported Internet Explorer 6′s and Firefox 3′s bookmarks.
• No “default browser” nagging: Thankfully (very thankfully indeed) Chrome does not nag to make it a default browser, not even once. If you indeed want to make it the default, you can click on the “Customize and control Google Chrome” icon on the top right and then click on Options. There you will find a button to make it the default.
• Tabs are Windows:Chrome, as a norm these days, has tabbed browsing. But what is interesting is the location bar, back, forward buttons, bookmarks, tools/options menu and everything else is below (or inside the tab), as oppose to being above or outside the tab. The latter is what we see in IE and Firefox. This gave the impression that the tabs are like independent but “placed together” windows. It is a kinda  MDI (Multiple Document Interface  application.
• Non intrusive “remember password” prompt: To continue writing this post from Chrome, I logged into my Blog and Chrome displayed the remember password prompt on the top without stopping the loading of the blog admin page (the page after login). That is, it did not pop-up a box saying “do you want to remember the password or not” and did not wait for me to say yes or no to continue loading the admin page. This feature is already showcased by and present in Firefox 3.
• A Beta with an uninstaller: It was glad to see the beta with an uninstaller. Sometimes beta applications do not ship with an uninstaller but Chrome does. Though I’m in no mood to execute the uninstaller
• Installation Location and size: No, Chrome does not install in Program Files. It installs in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome, where <user> is the Windows login name of the user who is installing the application. This means that Chrome installed by one user will not be available to any other user of that system. I think this is rather a thought of location for a beta application. Perhaps the final version will install in Program FIles(by Administrator) and be available to all users. The installation size (basically the size of the folder) was about 46MB! I’m assuming that it did not install files elsewhere.
• Placement in quick launch menu: This is an interesting one. Chrome’s shortcut was placed on the quick launch bar – the first icon from the Start Menu. As far as I remember new shortcuts are placed towards the end of the quick launch menu (unless you move it) . Hmm has Google done some trick here ? As said above, I installed Chrome on WinXP SP2
• Built-in Spell Check: Chrome has built-in spell checker, just like Firefox. The spell checker underlines (in red) any misspellings in the typed in text in textareas (rectangular text boxes) on any webpage.
• NO RSS ???: Chrome could not detect RSS feeds in websites. Forget that, it could not even display RSS feeds in a formatted way like IE 7 or Firefox 3. It just throws the entire, unformatted text between the RSS tags. There should be a good enough reason for this. I can only think of its beta status.

So after writing this much (as above) I went to sleep (@ 05:00 hrs IST) so that I can browse with Chrome on a fresh new day.

Started my day at around 11:00 IST and started browsing through Chrome while in bed. Now sitting at my office and what I saw and seeing, is what I’m writing:

Chrome’s default page

The default page, when Chome is launched or a new tab/window is opened, is now changed to look as follows:

Default page after some browsing

That is, the default page changed to show me the most visited sites using Chrome. Visiting my favouite website is just one click away! Makes all the sense. One may tend to visit his favourite/most visted site when he launches the browser.

But the issue is, if I want to avoid one or more of my “most visited” site from showing up, I can’t. The only option is to delete the entire browsing history. Take this scenario as an example. I’m amy be giving a presentation, I launch Chrome and everyone sees a porn site as one of my most visited sites on the projector’s screen . I would like to delete just the porn site from the most visited list. While there is a way to avoid the recording of  browsing history (which I will write about a little later), but on a day to day basis one may forget to use it.

Coming back, so the default page is the recently visited sites. But there is an option in the “Customize and control Google Chrome” menu (lets call it the Tools menu hereafter), to enter the URL and make a webpage as default. You can find this at Tools>Options>Basics (tab)>Home Page>Open this page. This webpage then shows up when you launch or re-launch Chrome. But when you open a new tab or window, Chrome still shows the most visited sites. But if you check the checkbox which says “Show home button on the toolbar”. This shows a Home button (like in Firefox). Clicking on this button will open the default page that you have set.

Next as a developer, I thought occured to me. What about all those links on websites which say “make this site your default page”. Will they work ? Went to in.yahoo.com which has the link (on top left) to “Make Yahoo! India your homepage”. Clicking on this link showed!:

When I clicked to make Yahoo my home page

Instructions for Firefox!. It asked me to drag the link to the home button – but the Chrome’s Home button did not accept a drop of a link. This brings us to two questions:

1. Is a JavaScript function or some other method required for Chrome to make a website the default page ?
2. Why is Yahoo detecting Chrome as Firefox ?

Answering the first question, I feel it is not required. It makes sense that your most visited pages compose your default page.This means the websites should detect out Chrome and hide such links to set the default page.

And Yahoo is detecting Chrome as Firefox because Chrome identifies itself (via the useragent string) as a Mozilla browser. Following is the useragent string for Chrome:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Plugins

Installation of Flash plugin is easy and does not require a manual downloading. Once installed, for the first time, the page which demanded Flash plugin automatically refreshes to show the Flash objects or movies

Trying to browse some Silverlight apps at www.silverlight.net prompted to download and install the SilverLight plugin. The plugin installation refused to install at the first go saying that the browser or the operating system (Win XP in my case) may be incompatible. Manually clicking on, to download the Windows version, installed SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2. Henceforth, upon trying to browse SilverLight applications, showed some glimpse of the SilverLight 1.0 and 2.0 applications which were very slow and unresponsive. To summarize MS SilverLight does not seem to work with Chrome. But there should have been a clear alert by Chrome stating the same, rather than users expecting for something to happen, after seeing a glimpse of something happening and waiting for it to happen (forever).

Also just, indeed just, tried my luck by trying to install a Firefox addon (namely Sage-Too) but didn’t work. No complains though, after all Chrome is not based on the Gecko engine (which Firefox uses). Chrome uses WebKit

For Java applets, if you have installed Java Runtime Environment on Windows, Chrome shows the applets.

Porn mode a.k.a. Incognito

Like IE 8′s (Internet Explorer 8)  in-private browsing (also popular as Porn mode), Chrome features Incognito window. It can be launched from the “Control the current page”>New incognito window menu (the icon before the Tools icon).

The Incognito WIndow

It launches a distinct window with an detective wearing goggles icon on the top right – giving you a go ahead to do something goofy. As you can read in the Incognito window, this window will delete any cookies or browsing history. It still stores cookies while you are browsing. So this means it will not hamper a continuous browsing session if Cookies play a role (if any) in it. That is: your browsing experience will be as usual as before. But features like “remember me” against login boxes on websites will be useless because ‘remember me” typically remembers your login and password via Cookies. But these Cookies are destroyed when you close the Incognito window.

Since Chrome claimed that the Cookies etc. gets destroyed when the Incognito window is closed, I tried to trick it as follows. I launched the Incognito window and browsed to a site with login and remember me. Checked “remember me” and then logged in. So at this point, the Cookie would have got stored on the hard disk. Next instead of closing the Incognito window, I just closed my virtual machine, simulating an abnormal shutdown. When I booted in back, and went to the login site in the Incognito window, it did not fill up the username and password. So i could not trick the Incognito window . Chrome must be performaing a clean up on start up too.

The interesting bit is, in the Incognito window, the URLs get auto completed with the URLs you have typed in the non-Incognito window. But if you have used, for example, the remember me on a Website, the password is still not remembered in the Incognito window. So it is kinda, while the Incognito window can pick up the browsing history from the normal window, it does not pick up the Cookies. Is this an unconscious miss out or a deliberate distinction ?

–Will continue to write more, watch out!—-