Vinay's Tech Stuff

I've been a long time Vim (not vi) user and occasionally I find people around me questioning my choice and comparing it to tools like Visual Studio. I agree Visual Studio is a great IDE. But Vim is a great editor. I would love Visual Studio editor with Vim key bindings. I came across this Vi Emulator http://www.viemu.com/ that does exactly that. Personally I have not had the opportunity to use it (as I've moved to Mac and development mostly on Linux). But I found a very useful Vim cheat sheet on the author's website. Take a look. It's worth printing and hanging it near your workspace.

For quite sometime now I've been facing space crunch on my laptop and have been using various external storage devices. I'm reluctant to put any important piece of information on these devices due to security and privacy concerns. Unlike my laptop (and the disk within it), these devices will not be in my sight all the time and hence my reluctance to trust any confidential data with them. I've thought about using some software based encryption solutions. But I need them to work seamlessly on multiple operating systems as these portable storage devices will be connected to different machines running different OSs. I've been wishing for a crypto device that would sit between the computer and the portable disk and provide transparent encryption/decryption functionality. Such a device would have to be small. It can be powered from the computer over USB. It should have a biometric identification device embedded on it for authentication. One such device could be used to interf...

Recently someone sent me a link to splashtop , in context of some work I was doing on Asus Eeepc. Splashtop is a OEM installed OS that boots off a embedded flash/hidden-partition device on your PC. It uses Bootsplash , SquashFS , Blackbox , SCIM and Linux kernel . Splashtop's raison d'etre is to provide instant-on/off experience to PC. Since PC boot times are slow, most people don't even turn off their machines. Splashtop takes about a second to show it's splashscreen right after BIOS on a Asus notebook. From this screen, you can launch virtual appliance'cified Firefox or Skype or boot Windows etc. One thing to note is that each of these operations in turn may take 5 to 25 seconds. I wonder if this is a feasible approach to solve this problem. Boot process which involves hardware initialization, OS initializtion, startup application initialization - all of these operations have to take "some" amount time. And we know that most of these are IO bound due to...

Finally, the Guinness World Record results are out. Here's what is said on Download Day page. Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web. I even got a certificate for participating in the event!

Today www.linkedin.com HTTPS certificate expired. Seems they have forgotten to renew it. Quite shameful for a company that promises privacy and security of user’s information. Here’s what Firefox 3 told me when I visited the website and tried to sign-in. Logging in bypassing this cert security error is not an option for me. So, for all practical purposes, linkedin is down for me.

The release date for Firefox 3 has been announced. It is also the " Download Day " when Mozilla community will attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. You can pledge for the same here . Firefox 3 has some very good new features that makes it a compelling upgrade. Here's a field guide to FF3. Enjoy!

This test was done with Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on the latest versions of Firefox 3 and Safari available as of today. It overall the test results indicate Safari is faster. But the individual results need to be looked at and decided which tests really matter in real world and how they affect our daily browsing speed. TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS ============================================================================= ** TOTAL **: 1.07x as fast 3216.0ms +/- 1.8% 3003.4ms +/- 1.1% significant ============================================================================= 3d: - 393.0ms +/- 5.0% 377.8ms +/- 1.3% cube: ?? 131.4ms +/- 14.2% 140.0ms +/- 2.1% not conclusive: might be *1.07x as slow* morph: 1.19x as fast 136.8ms +/- 1.5% 115.4ms +/- 2.5% significant raytrace: 1.02x a...