Facebook posts get upgraded to support over 60,000 characters

         yes, you have read it right. Now Facebook ups the character limit to above 60000 !!

    This is really Hugh. You can now post long stories and even a novel in nine posts. I rarely write the blog post of this length. Now I am thinking to shift my blog to Facebook(just joking!!). But can you guess why this 63,206 has been chosen. Take a try. Got? Don't worry I tell you.

           Facebook = Face Boo K => hex(FACE) – K => 64206 – 1000 = 6320.

         This is not first time when Facebook has raised its bar over its post length. For your information I must tell you that once Facebook had just 160 characters for the users to offer.

Then in march 2009, it upgraded to 420 characters. Again in July this year Facebook raised the character limit to 500 which again exploded to get 5000 characters two months later in September 2011. And now it crosses over 60,000, as announced yesterday.

         Facebook is trying to add all sorts of possible features to keep users engage and can refrain then to go for Google+. After the launch of Google+, Facebook has added video chat, revamped its interface, improved friend list, added In-line privacy control and expanded the post's boundary.

        But do you know where is Google+ in the race of providing better word count limit for the posts ? Its still far ahead of Facebook. Google+ claims to provide no limit on the word count for the posts. The interesting battle is going on. No matter who wins, but the profit will come to the users. Lets wait and watch for the new offering from the two beasts of Social Networking and keep enjoying the products coming out of their battle....

Apps for your Linux Machine

Testing newly released operating systems gives me pleasure and thus I am jumping to many of the OSs right from the day I have got my new laptop. I started the year 2011 with ubuntu 10.10 and windows vista as the dual boot. Soon I jumped to windows 7 and after the release of Natty Narwhal, I switched to it keeping the windows 7 with me. During my summer vacation I installed Opensuse 11.4. whatever Linux distribution I may install I always kept windows with me. But this September I made up my mind to keep the windows out of my box for always and my machine had only ubuntu. After the release of Oneiric Ocelot, I upgraded to it. I have virtual box but windows has no place in it also. Arch linux has got that throne to rule the virtual box's world.

I have installed a plethora of apps in ubuntu and tested them. I am posting my experience so that you may get some help in choosing the best app for the particular job.

I have chromium, chrome, opera, firefox and conqueror installed to crunch my browsing desires. I mostly use google chrome for browsing purpose. Chrome and chromium work similar since they have got the same soul with different body. Chromium is the open source project of google for its browser. I think chrome is best for browsing however opera also works nice. I use mozilla firefox for downloading the stuffs. The reason behind using the firefox is the presence of 'downthemall' a firefox add-on which accelerates the downloading speed by 400%.

I am doing a lot of chatting for last few weeks. My earlier weapon for chatting was empathy. It has nice look, support almost all popular protocols and has nice theme. Last week I shifted to pidgin and I'm in love with it. The power of pidgin lies on its plugins. Its buddy pounces and ability to add custom smileys out of your image, rocks! I welcome my friends over chat by hitting them with my smiley made of my own image. I have 'Kopete' also but I never use it. For irc, Xchat IRC works great for me and I think it is best in its category. With ubuntu 11.10, I have got Thunderbird as my default email client which is really good move by cannonical. I like it more than the Evolution. But Evolution have got the calender with it which makes it to compete with Thunderbird. But don't worry if you love Thunderbird, just install the Sunbird plugin for it using Ubuntu Software Center.

For watching videos, playing songs and other media playback, VLC works great for me. It opens up to play media much faster than banshee media player. VLC can play almost anything you throw in it. Banshee sometimes hangs but never the vlc. I have 'gmusicbrowser' also but I have used it rarely. Similarly I rarely throw a look at totem and parole. For video editing 'Pitivi' is best out there. For handling the plethora of photographs which I have clicked; 'Picasa' is there to help me.

Like applications I teated most of the prominent desktop environment available for linux based operating system. I started with unity which was the default one. Then I gave a shot to Kde. It was eye catching but it kept my machine's fan running always. Most of the time I found the cpu uses more than 60% which used to jump over 90% in case of running any application. Gnome looked nice for me however, many find gnome 3.2 a crap including the Linux creator, Linus Torvald. Only irritating thing I found in it is the absence of minimize and maximize button however I liked it at all its corners. I also tested xfce, lxde and enlightenment 17. I was amazed by the look and feel of enlightenment 17. It is light on resources but great on look. I found lxde better than xfce. I will suggest you to go for lxde, if you want less resource hog and better interface both. You decide yourself for the best apt environment for your linux machine.

Similarly I have got extremely large number of apps of other purposes and I think to discuss them all is not a healthy choice so I am telling the best working app( at least they work best for me)

email client                                              Thunderbird

web browser                                             google chrome & mozilla firefox

office application                                     LibreOffice

clipboard manager                                    Glipper

screenshot app                                           Shutter

searching app                                            Gnome Do

photos manager                                         Picasa

offline dictionary                                      Artha

internet messenger                                    Pidgin

Tex file editor                                            Kile

media player                                               vlc

text editor                                                   emacs, vim, gedit

irc client                                                     xchat

IDE                                                             Eclipse, Qt creator

Terminal emulator                                      yakuake

virtual machine                                           virtual box

Image editor                                                Gimp

2D modeling app                                         Blender

Audio editor                                                 Audacity

video editor                                                  Pitivi

File sharing                                                  LinuxDC++ ( a DC++ port for linux)

Nerwork protocol analyser                          Wireshark, traceroute

Python web framework                                Django

typing tutor                                                   tux typing

File searching                                               CatfFish

compression tool                                          Archive manager, 7zip

calculator                                                      Gcalculator

virus scanner                                                ClamTk ( amazed !!!!)

JRE                                                               OpenJdk

ebook library management                          calibre

chm reader                                                    xCHM

sniffer                                                           ettercap

Download manager                                      kGet

Internet Telephony                                       Skype

other apps : window manager tweaks, CompzConfig setting manager, ubuntu restricted extras.

If you are among those who don't fascinated by the 'ease of use' provided by the operating system or the desktop environment but look for the power and terminal is your best friend then I will suggest you to go for the Arch Linux. I assure you that you will get enough knowledge and insight of Linux from the first meet with it.

_________________________________________________________________

libreprogramming growing like crazy

In the last post I had talked about the new project getting out there in the web world. I had made the last post last week and at that time it was just getting started but now it has got five chapters adorned to it and it is growing at a great speed. With each passing day its popularity is going up like wild fire.

Shiv S. Dayal, the creator of this project has arrived on the blogging sphere at http://blog.libreprogramming.org/ . He will be now interacting with the world using his blog. You can interact with him, ask questions, give suggestion and can be part of the project.

He has put the blog some hour ago and he is now working on making his blog more helpful for the readers. He is working to create his own chatting app ideal for his blog to directly interact with the reader and can resolve their problem.

As I have stated earlier that libreprogramming is in its nascent stage hence the wordpress has been used for the blog however development of content management system has been kicked off as the child project. Due to lack of volunteers and capital in the project, Shiv S Dayal has to work for much elongated period of time after returning from his usual office work.

You can follow him at http://twitter.com/shivsdayal. 

Best place to learn programming

There are plethora of C programming books available in the market and tonnes of resources available on the web but I have found none of the book complete enough to crunch my all programming desires and queries. I have spent a lot of time just searching the basics of programming.
  Then one day I landed on a site which made my eyes to open wide. It is http://www.libreprogramming.org/  It helped me to go and grab the roots of the C language.  However this project is in nascent stage and still evolving  with each passing jiffy.
 The project libreprogramming.org has been started by Shiv S. Dayal, an ex-student of IIT Kharagpur. He is an open source loving guy and hence providing the fruits of his hard labour for free to the world. He    has explained every bits and byes of C programming language, however only few chapters have been posted. The project is building up on the back of a single person, hence bear with some typing errors which will be surely removed within a couple of days. The project aims at providing the high quality books on programming languages like C, C++, Python including data structures and algorithm.
Even if you have completed the C and happy with your knowledge, I will suggest you to have a look at this book and believe me you will be more happier. I strongly recommend it for the newbie of programming. It not only teaches you the C language but the art of programming in the *nix environment.

 Well, now I should return to the libreprogramming.org to see if a new chapter has been added!!

HTML5 : An evolution which branded as a revolution

If you have any minor connection with web development then you must be engulfed by the brightness of HTML5 which is now taking a shape of a brand. It is being treated as a revolution in web development field but I tell you that its an evolution. Evolution of HTML4. But no one can deny the importance of HTML5 in the future. However it is still evolving and thus getting more strength with each passing day.
     I am starting here a series of HTML5 tutorial posts which will not just include the technical aspects but I will also provide the complete exposure of HTML5.

    The contents provided here may be scattered and not organised at the best. You may find several materials posted later than they require. Since the specifications of HTML5 is still evolving and thus the final specification may be with more elements or few elements may be discarded. Many of the features may not be supported by all the browsers but they may get support in the future.

  My next post will be the first post for this series, which is : "Evolution of HTML5". In this post I am going to talk about the development of HTML5, what is it and what not, why we need to learn it etc.
          I am coming soon.....

    

Trivia Pot : 2

 Trivia pot : 2

Here’s I am back with some more facts and Trivia….

 

Ø  A study by Dell some time ago claimed that 12,000 laptops go lost, missing or are stolen each week in the US!

 

Ø  Although the iPod started selling in 2001 it wasn’t until 1.5 years later that Apple sold a Windows compatible iPod – the second generation iPod

Ø  The worst MS-DOS virus ever, Michelangelo (1991) was so named because it activated itself on March 6, the birth day of the famous renaissance painter. The virus attacked the boot sector of hard drives and any floppy drive inserted into a computer. Upon activation it destroyed data.

Ø  The DVORAK keyboard is said to be at least 70% more efficient than a QWERTY keyboard.

Ø  Apple too had some flop launches in its time. Their famous Lisa line which preceded Macintosh, didn’t sell very well. In 1989, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.

Ø  The QWERTY keyboard was designed to prevent jams on a keyboard. The early typewriters used arms to impress a letter on paper. If neighbouring keys were used in rapid succession, then the arms were likely to jam, which was a serious issue. The keyboard was designed to prevent commonly used key combinations from being next to each other. It is widely believed that the keyboard was designed to slow down typists, which is not true.

Ø  The name ‘worm’ appeared in the 1970 movie ‘Shockwave Rider’ to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.  Apple based their Lisa (later Macintosh) operating system on work done on graphical user interfaces at PARC which was run by Xerox. It was here that the idea of the desktop and the mouse as we have it today was created.

Ø  ICQ was the first instant messenger program, and that’s notable because it’s still running, although it’s been bought by AOL.

Ø  Sony’s VAIO stands for ‘Video Audio Integrated Operation’

Ø  The Japanese version of MS Office has a character you can’t find in any other version. The ‘Offi ce Lady’ is a virtual assistant that bows and serves tea.

 

Ø  David Bradley wrote the code for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] key sequence.

Ø  A typical fiber-optic cable five thousandths of an inch thick can carry up to 2.5 billion bits of data per second, or 32,000 simultaneous telephone calls

Ø  In the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple Computer developed a high-speed method of transferring data to and from the hard drives in Macintosh desktops while simplifying the internal cabling. They called it FireWire.

Facts and Trivia Pot : 1

Here are some Facts and Trivia collected by me since last few months

     

    Named after the McIntosh variety of Apples, the first Macintosh was released in 1984. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to have a graphical user interface and a mouse.

    IBM holds the record for the most number of patents held by any company or individual in the world. An astounding 29,021 patents in the last 12 years!

     

    Lenovo stands for “new legend”. It’s an amalgamation of the words “Le” for legend and “novo” for new.

     

    According to a study paper on ResourceSaver.org,

One metric ton of electronic scrap from personal computers could get you more gold than that recovered from 17 tons of gold ore!

     

    Grace Hopper, a woman Admiral in the navy, was the inventor of COBOL. Admiral Hopper wrote COBOL to be a programming language for general business use. It was supposed to be easier to understand than either Fortran or assembly language.

     

    Estimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the power used in desktop PCs is wasted as heat and expelled through fans on the power supply.

     

    The world’s most widely used operating system, Windows,  was originally named interface manager.

     

    Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be “Ahoy” but Thomas Edison voted for “Hello,” a word he coined in 1877.

     

    A ‘blue-bomb’ is a technique for causing the Windows operating system of someone you are communicating with to crash.

   

    Most intercontinental Internet traffic passes through underwater fibre optic cables. The first such layout was across the Atlantic, in 1988.

     

    The idea of Bluetooth technology was born in 1994. The name Bluetooth is derived from a Danish Viking King, Harald Blatand - translated as Bluetooth in English - who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Blatand united and controlled Denmark and Norway, hence the inspiration for the name, as in ‘uniting devices through Bluetooth’.

     

    Programs that are small and un-useful, but demonstrate a point, are called ‘Noddy’ programs. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is the “hello world” program, which is simply a program that outputs the phrase. In North America, this might be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ program.

     

    Stinger was the codename Microsoft used for its smart phone platform that was unveiled in 2001, now called Windows Mobile.

     

    The Palm OS fits in less than 100K, which is less than one per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.

     

    LISP is a programming language written in LISP itself. When you define functions in LISP, the entire language gets modified.