Firefox's awesome bar ...

I have been using Firefox 3 since the very day it was released and one thing I like and hate at the same time is the 'awesome bar'. Below is a list of my like and hates of the awesome bar...

Awesome/Like :

• It just drops you the entire list of possible websites whenever you type something in
• Mostly accurate 'predictions' of what you want to access
  

Poor/Hate :

• It just makes the entire firefox slow because whenever you use the awesomeness, it needs to access a database of records and load them into the awesome bar and plus... you may suddenly decide to 'delete' what you type and add something else... so what happened was whenever I use the awesome bar... firefox would be a bit laggy and slow and eats up quite a bit of memory.

Git , a solution for me

I have tried to search for ways to host a project without needing to apply for this project membership or creating projects in project hosting webs like SF.net , Freshmeat ...etc... but I doubt so. So i thought of hosting a version control server but hey, I need to somehow pay some money or have my own equipments so no... I don't want to fork out money. I thought a client/server way of hosting my codes in it is just not worth it and so I was reading slashdot.com today and there , I saw the word 'git' and decide to watch the video on Youtube about Linus's speech on the 'git' he made. It's what I wanted... serverless system and it's more than serverless..it's sort of p2p and can make branches and merges and joins which is a headache in svn and cvs something simple and make it look so simple to be stupid. The sppech sounds impressive so I'm gonna try out git (I found a window's version of git released by Google since what Linus's released were *nix system's).

i would add more here after my experiments with git...

Makagiga 3.0

Makagiga (A Java platform allowing plugins and widgets to be scripted) version 3.0 is out.

I played around and here are my evaluations.

A03 Look and Feel: I love how simple and clean A03's looks are. It makes Makagiga look very clean and neat. Simple and interactive.

To Do widget: Finally after using Notes widget to type out messy TO DO list , finally, there's a To Do widget where you can put it conveniently on your Makagiga desktop and make your To Do list looks need. It has a very simple and uncomplicated look but it packs quite a few powerful features. You can set the date and time for the task to be completed by double clicking to generate a date then right click on it and it would have a popup with a full calender chooser just to name one.

Plugin window: Looks always improve and so does it. It always gets better and more tidy.

In general, the improvements are not very drastic but they are worth it to make your Makagiga look better.

What I feel is that Makagiga is always growing and since it's a geenral platform , it has many potentials but it also lacks a central goal which is good because a general platform allows it to be very versatile but that bad thing is it has no goal but overall... Makagiga is suppose to be a general platform for others to make use of so it is moving in that direction well.

The manutil plugin would be completed soon for testing... so hopefully it makes it through and be uploaded for use.

If programming languages were religions...

I look through Slashdot.com and noticed that it pointed to a very interesting blog where the post compares different programming languages to different religions in the world. Read and take a good laugh :)

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

Adjusting PATH variable for Java

I was fiddling with the adjustment of the PATH variable in my Win XP for my Java JDK. I pointed the PATH variable to the /bin of my latest JDK and nothing else. So it's "PATH=C:\Program Files\jdk1.6.0_01\bin" if you put it in text form. Next , I tried to do a 'ping' and an 'ipconfig' in my cmd the next day and it says that ping / ipconfig is not recognized as whatever internal command type of error. I noticed that system32 is also using PATH so I set "PATH=C:\Program Files\jdk1.6.0_01\bin;C:\Windows\system32" and now , you have Java's JDK and system32 using PATH ... happy ending. I can do my Java stuff and ping and ipconfig.

Songbird , H2 jarSmall

I was reading through LifeHacker as usual and caught some news on Songbird. I was thinking to test out yet another Mozilla product , Songbird . I was expecting high quality product but when I finished installing Songbird just a while ago, it crashed upon launching up for the first time and I restarted it but again , it crashed everytime it tried to launch. Well... too bad for this Mozilla product... I doubt how ready Songbird is , so I uninstalled it without a second thouht.

I have been looking for media players capable of playing and accessing podcasts but sadly, I haven't found any other than iTunes. I have been avoiding iTunes and WMP for a long time since I think these 'commercial' products aren't of my taste. Another thing of Songbird that put me off when i was viewing it's screenshot was how similar it's GUI was when compared to iTunes.

I have nothing against iTunes or WMP but things that are too 'commercial' and 'Big Boys' who have reputation of not being open or are open just to avoid some lawsuit from some organization just puts me off ... my personal opinion...

Anyway, thanks to Thomas Mueller for helping me with figuring out why I can't build H2, finally got it to work. It seems that Java doesn't automatically set the PATH for you and you have to do it yourself which figures why my Java act weirdly when I tried to build H2 jarSmall.

Finally got myself a H2 jarSmall and now I can proceed with my stuff that requires a jarSmall H2.

Manutil in Makagiga

Lately, I have been working on manutil (Man utility aka Man) for Makagiga whenever time presents itself an opportunity to sit down and do the coding. The development of Man was pretty quick and I have got the basic functions working but they are still not ready for the wild yet. There are other stuff to do, including making Man able to survive in the wild where 'abuses' would be thrown at it.

Just a quick explanation on what Man is... It's simply a manual page like those on Unix OSes (e.g. Linux). Anyway, I got my inspiration while playing with the Man pages on my Linux Fedora OS and thought that it would be interesting and useful to equip Makagiga with one and also, I am a Makagiga user.

Man would not be exactly the same as those Linux Man since it's going to be implemented using Java on a Makagiga platform...not some OS... and plus... I like to give my Man utility a twist and flavouring it with my own style.

I made it a console base since Man is supposed to be a console based app and plus.. it looks geeky :P

Anyway, I scanned through some tech news and there wasn't much thing that is interesting to discuss... so laters...