Mosf of us would be well versed with the Patent system in general. We have patents in every sector - Technology, Agriculture, Pharmacy etc. Most readers in our profession must already be well versed of the Pros/Cons of the Patent system in Software/Technology. Patents in software are more like ammunition. The more you have, the stronger you are. We don’t seem much cat fight in Software/Technology because not one organization own all the patents for a product. An IBM ThinkPad might be using a cool track pad feature which might be a patent of Dell. Since the finished product comprises of many patents from different owners in the same industry, it is better to play good with each other. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
[Read More]VirtualBox
I recently ended up acquiring a Windows 7 Professional license. While I rarely have a need for Windows, that one rare instance is important. Many of the bank’s web interfaces are tightly dependent on IE. I do have a copy of CrossOver but that doesn’t help much. Most times, IE crashes when trying to render pages. Must be having some OLE dependency.
So I convinced myself to install Windows7. For my banking needs and also to catch-up on how that platform has been doing. From my limited usage, my current impression has been that Windows 7 is a great revive. [passwordless] sudo is conceptually implemented into Windows 7. I’m not sure how good that would be given that most users would have the tendency to just click on ‘Yes’ without paying attention to the pop-up. Anyways…..I installed Windows 7 onto one of my spare partitions to get the full experience (than doing it in a VM image).
[Read More]laptop-mode-tools
I just released laptop-mode-tools version 1.56.
This release adds many goodies. We now have a better calling application to rely upon, udev. The linux kernel generates many events based on conditions. udev is a framework that acts on those events and can call-in applications based on conditions. This is something I wanted to do for laptop- mode-tools.
Power State
First was power state. The power_supply subsystem can sense changes and generate events. We simply act on the change action here and call in laptop-mode-tools because we want laptop-mode-tools run on both ON_AC and ON_BAT
[Read More]apt-offline - 1.0
Hello World.
I am very pleased to announce apt-offline , version 1.0.
This release adds a Graphical User Interace to apt-offline.

Big thanks to Abhishek Mishra and Manish Sinha who did all the development work to make this GUI happen.
Help: I was wondering if there is a logo for APT that I could use in the big blank space on the main window.
Apart from the GUI, there are a bunch of bug fixes in this release (which have already been made available for the Squeeze release also).
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