An interesting view into how students live today. I’m thinking that it depends what degree you study on how much work and classes you have to do – 3 hours of class + 2 hours work a day is much less than I did, and I only graduated last year!
Also, noone brought laptops to lectures – we didn’t use Facebook all through lectures, the material was much to complex to do that and still pass!
Image via Wikipedia
Having talked to some university students who had taken computer science/IT degrees, I was amazed by how little they seemed to know about making anything that’s secure or even remotely logical. The group I met with primarily had been taught PHP. Having looked at some sites they were designing I realised 5 things that they had no idea they had done incorrectly, here’s a run down:
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Really interestingly made video, definitely worth watching!
Covers the history of the internet in a really creative way.
The new semantic search tool for wikipedia, Powerset, have just announced a competition challenging users to find interesting “Factz” using their search tool.
So far, I’ve found:
What eats humans?
We have the usual: zombies, monsters and sharks, but the list also includes Catholics, foxes, streets and pigs…
What do chickens like?
Only three things, potatoes, ham and tandoori. That’s good to know…
Image via Wikipedia
Google have released a section in the settings tab of Gmail called labs. This was predicted by a few blogs recently, and it seems to have come true today.
The new labs section includes:
These features are all rather random, but it will be interesting to see if anything more interesting appears in here.
With the release of Microsoft’s Invite2Messenger, we can now get all our Facebook friends out of Facebook, and into our address books. Useful for finding your friends on other sites, as well as for emailing them!
1. Go to: https://www.invite2messenger.net. If you get a warning about the security certificate, just allow it.
2. Choose Facebook (other sites are to come, including Hotmail, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged…)
3. Stick in your email, and click “Find Friends”
4. Once you have the list of all your friends and their emails, select the text on the page, and copy it into a text editor.
5. You now have the information, use find and replace to get it into this form:
name1,emailaddress1
name2,emailaddress2
etc…
6. To import into gmail, make the first line of the file:
Name,E-mail
and save the file as a .csv.
7. Go to gmail, then choose contacts. Choose import at the bottom of the page, and choose your file. Gmail automatically checks for duplicates before it adds the new addresses, and merges them when there are duplicates.
For other email providers, check their help on the file format needed. Gmail can export in some different formats, so perhaps it’s a good idea to put it through Gmail to get the others.
8. Go to twitter, last.fm, digg, friendfeed etc etc and use their friend finders to find out which of your friends are on those sites!
Hope this is helpful!
Much easier than trying to screenscrape the page…
Icons exist for the following programs that are no included on the Eee – perhaps these were planned for inclusion at one point.
Find these at /opt/xandros/AsusLauncher. Use ls | grep iptv in that folder to find the filename for iptv for instance.
Xterm is available by pressing ctrl – alt – T, but the others are not installed. We have seen evidence of Splashtop at CEE – perhaps the others will be used as well at some point…
Weirdly the xterm icon shows a prompt at C:\_ – not very linux like!
Taking a deeper look at the file located at /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc we can see that the programs that provide iptv and the music store are Miro and a unusual application called ezpeer respectively.
There isn’t an easy way to tell what the web storage icon would be for, but an educated guess would be a gui to configure mount.gmailfs, a program that comes preinstalled on the eee that allows you to mount a gmail account as a file system. This isn’t officially allowed by gmail, so perhaps this is why it was not included in the final version.
Openarena is a open source program based on the source released for Quake 3 – again, this would be pretty cool!
More digging around shows that the themes are named accessibility (blue), business (silver), student (green), home (orange), perhaps these were originally meant to be more than just colour changes.
If you want, you can change the wallpaper by modifying the files with wallpaper in their filenames in the same folder. It should be possible to make a new theme, rather than replacing an old one – we will have to see!
AppJet bills itself as allowing “instant web programming”. As a relatively competent programmer, I had a look to see whether this tool would be useful to me.
The key feature of AppJet is that it allows you to write code and publish it without having to host it yourself. Any application that you make has a link when using it so that other users can view its source – this means that anything made is by default open source. This makes it pretty easy to learn, as you can check to see how other people are doing things very quickly.
AppJet uses javascript, both for client and server side – pretty unusual. It also includes its own libraries, meaning that you can quickly create Facebook applications, among others.
The demo application is a shoutbox, where users can write messages that persist. It’s viewable here. The source is here. As you can see, it has imported an AppJet library with the line import("storage"); at the top. This allows databases to be used effortlessly.
As mentioned above, there is a library that interfaces with the Facebook API, allowing easy creation of facebook apps – this may well be it’s killer feature in the long term. An example app is shown at http://appjet.com/app/537137228/source. The facebook library speeds up much of the fbml and fql that needs to be used otherwise
AppJet has developed it’s own virtualisation solution to allow users programs to run securely and without affecting each other – pretty interesting stuff!
Made anything neat with AppJet? Let me know in the comments!
If you’ve been following the development of KDE 4, then you are likely aware that the most recent release candidate was released a few days ago.
To install on Ubuntu or Kubuntu:
Remove any previous version of KDE 4.
sudo apt-get remove kdelibs5 kde4base-data kde4libs-data
Install KDE 4 RC 2:
sudo apt-get install kdebase-bin kdebase-workspace kdebase-kde4 kdebase-runtime
When originally writing this, packages didn’t seem to be in backports, but you now should be able to get these packages from the gutsy-backports repository – if the last command threw some errors and the packages weren’t found, then add this repository:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main to /etc/apt/sources.list
I’d use nano, but that’s just me, remember to use sudo to edit it as it’s not writable by any old user!
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
After this, reload your apt data:
sudo apt-get update
Again, you only need to add the repository if it doesn’t download normally.
Log out, then at the login window, choose the KDE 4 session. (If a menu isn’t obvious to you, press F10 when you are typing in your username and choose from the menu that appears.)
You should be greeted with the KDE splash screen, which currently shows the team members who have created KDE 4.
Once you are logged in, you get the same flower background as was in RC 1, but now the taskbar is actually usable. The K menu is docked, as well as the clock but you cannot currently adjust it in anyway, or add new plasmoids to it.
Just a shot showing what it looks like when a few windows are open – there isn’t much contrast between windows, or between widgets and windows – its quite hard to tell the difference between active and inactive anything at the moment. The spanner in the top right will not be in the final release.
A close up of Dolphin, the new file manager. It’s much more streamlined that Konqueror, which is still used as the default web browser. Konqueror does still pop up from time to time when opening things, doesn’t seem that Dolphin has totally replaced it in this version. Dolphin shows previews of files, and has a way to tag and rate files.
Right clicking on the desktop allows you to add widgets – this screenshot shows most of the widgets available. There are lots of icons missing throughout this version of KDE 4.
You can chose to have a single image or a slideshow for your desktop background.
You can add new art using the Add Hot New Stuff interface – guess this gets it from kde-look?
The new run dialog, obtained by pressing alt-f2. It seems much more streamlined than before and autosuggests what you want.
This release is a definite improvement from RC 1, and would now be feasible for day to day use. Although I have concentrated on the visual changes, most of the most important changes from KDE 3 are under the hood. These include moving from Qt 3 to Qt 4 and DCOP to D-Bus, as well as all the new platforms such as Phonon, Solid etc.
Overall, I am looking forward to the final release to see how this all gets pulled together!
