I have been using XFCE for around a month. Yesterday I tried installing gnome-do. The installation was successful but on running gnome-do I kept getting an ‘Unable to open the session message bus.’ error on my terminal. Today, after installing Banshee I faced the same problem.
Googling did not help – possibly because XFCE users do [...]

This month in Dehradoon I rekindled an old flame. Coffee.
The truth is that I find it difficult to get decent coffee inside the campus of IIT Kharagpur (at least when you live in the Madan Mohan Malviya Hall of Residence). You are either stuck with some weird synthetic high-sugar stuff handed to you by the [...]

I finally did it! Now my root partition is, instead of a boring old ext3 a shiny new JFS parition.
The very first thing I did was build a new kernel with JFS support compiled into it. While configuring the kernel I also selected the deadline IO scheduler as the default scheduler since it tends to [...]

The i915 driver for the Intel GM965 is broken in kernel 2.6.30 – instead of getting 1280×800 framebuffer console you end up getting up getting 1024×768. Please note that the (overall) resolution is perfectly fine – only the text will appear to remain constrained in an imaginary 1024×768 box. This happens at least in Acer [...]

I just discovered a new companion (no, not an iPod), but the MPD – Music Player Daemon. This is the probably the first time I am feeling truly satisfied about my music player.
The MPD runs as a service. It binds to a port on your computer (6600 by default). Once you have the MPD up [...]

Recently I came across this very interesting utility – CurlFtpFS (curlftpfs.sourceforge.net/). It allows users to mount FTP sites as local folders. I had an inkling that something like this could be done but I never imagined that it would be this easy!
To mount ftp.subdomain.domain.org to /home/me/random_folder all you need to do is execute curlftpfs [...]

I just claimed my blog on Technorati.com – and they want me to put up a link to my profile on their website on my blog.
So here it is Technorati Profile

During my recent clean-my-hard-drive-of-all-obsolete-files spree I discovered a small article I had written about RTTI (Run Time Type Identification) in Java. Instead of pasting everything on the blog (and risk destroying the formatting) I decided to export it as a PDF file so that you can download it here.
Despite me not having edited the file [...]

Some time back I faced a problem in a (Java based) project on which I am still working on – I needed a swing component which would have a suitable interface allowing me to set the color of individual pixels. Since I could not find anything which had a similar functionality I extended javax.swing.JPanel and [...]

I recently discovered a really nice package in Java – java.util.logging. Classes inside this package make adding logging functionality to your application both intuitively simple and fun. Here what I would like to think to be a short guide to using the package.
The very first thing you need to understand that there may be [...]