Well, on a serious note, I have been doing some homework, and apparently I’m not the only one who is totally intimidated by her. There are communities on Neytiri fans who love her for reasons similar to mine. Thanks to those, I now have a bunch of HQ wallpapers of her. But every time I look at my desktop, I am saddened by the fact that she isn’t real. But I really do hope to find someone like her, or well, a little less blue

Neytiri the princess

1. In your google account, goto Contacts.
2. Click on the “Export” link on the top right side of the box.
3. Export it in “Outlook CSV” format and save the file to a desirable location.
4. Open Microsoft Outlook (2007 in my case) and goto File -> Import and Export.
5. Make sure “Import  from another program or file” is highlighted and click “Next”
6. Select “Comma separated values (Windows)” and click “Next”
7. Select the downloaded file and click “Next”
8. In the “Select destination folder” area, highlight the “Contacts” entry and click “Next”
9. Click the “Finish button”. Outlook will import all contact, please wait while it does that.
10. Once finished, close Outlook and launch Thunderbird.
11. In the Thunderbird window, goto Tools -> Import
12. Select “Address Books” option and click “Next”
13. Select “Outlook” from the menu and click “Next”
14. Click the “Finish” button and you’re done!

That should be all. This is just a 10 minute procedure that will import all your Google mail contacts to Thunderbird. Enjoy!

To begin with, download the trial reset program from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?moiy0wnzywz

Please turn off the Kaspersky auto protect when you do this, as KIS/KAV would detect this as a Trojan (yea, spicy huh?).

Anyway, once you have the file, you would need to disable the  ”Self Defense” option from the Kaspersky Settings > Options. You should also disable the auto protect feature by using “Pause protection” from the Kaspersky context menu. Once done, execute this program and click the “Trial reset” button. This will give you a 30 day trial license, whenever you run it. So execute it once every 30 days and enjoy using Kaspersky forever!

PS: Don’t forget to add this to your exclusions list as you don’t want KIS to delete this file, do you?

1. The taskbar text doesn’t have a dark border or a dark colored cloud. So in cases where the background becomes white, the text is almost unreadable:

Taskbar

Start Menu

I feel that the text should have a dark color with a white cloud around it, or vice versa.

2. The control panel window when maximized lacks a much needed left panel. I wonder why the left panel has been removed.

3. Small icon mode isn’t very pretty for the taskbar. The taskbar overall lacks a 3D view and looks somehow – broken..

4. Windows Media Player 12 lacks the glass background at the controls area. As you can see in the following picture, the WMP window at the front doesn’t have the glass controls like the Windows photo viewer window at the background.

Media Player

I wonder if there’s a way I can convey these to Microsoft.

PS: I’ve become a fan of the Aero peek functions. Also, loving the new taskbar thumbnails!

• Training date: Starts from 27th Jan ‘10
• Training location: Infosys Mysore
• Field(s) of work: Devel, Testing, Mainframe, Webserver etc.
  
• Joining date: Immediately after training

Infosys offers this world class training at Mysore. My college will be dispersing the students off on or before 27th Jan and we’ll be ported to Mysore. I am yet to receive any details on what the training will have and what are the DO’s and DONT’s for that. But I am confident that whatever it is, I am ready to take up. I’ve heard that the trainees are so busy that they end up having a daily cycle of 08:00 to 00:30 at night, but this doesn’t scare me in any way. In fact, I am mentally prepared to be burnt out, yet have fun.

I am so looking forwards to the Mysore training. For all those who have got a chance to go for this, I suggest that you shouldn’t think again and go for Infy. It’s an amazing company and a great platform. And of course, the training is the best you can get in this part of the globe. It feels pretty damn good to be an Infoscion!!

1. To begin with, you’d need to install the “grub2-splashimages” package. Please make sure that you’re running Grub2 and not an older version before you continue.

   $ sudo apt-get install grub2-splashimages

2. Once you do that, you should have a bunch of images under the folder: /usr/share/images/grub/
3. By default, Grub should offer you a 640×480 resolution. In most cases, the graphics card supports a higher resolution. You can check the highest available resolution by entering into the Grub command mode (press ‘c’ at the boot menu) and typing vbeinfo. Let us assume that your graphics card can support upto 1024×768 resolution at a 32-bit color depth.
4. Once you know the resolution, you can scale your own image to that size and save it as a TarGA (tga) image (use an image editor like Gimp) within the /usr/share/images/grub/ folder.
5. Now we edit the theme script. To do that, enter the following in your terminal:

   $ sudo kate /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme

   Where you can use your favourite text editor where I used kate. In that file, find the following line:

   for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base}/moreblue-orbit-grub.{png,tga} ; do

   … and change it to:

   for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base,/usr/share/images/grub}/splashimage.{png,tga} ; do

   Note: Replace the splashimage part with the filename. For example, you are using “tulips.png” as your image, replace “splashimage” with “tulips”.

6. Now to set the resolution, edit the /etc/default/grub file and change GRUB_GFXMODE to 1024×768 (or whatever your supported resolution is).
7. Once you are done with everything, run:

   $ sudo update-grub

   Once you execute the above, look for the following line in the output:

   Found Debian background: splashimage.tga

   And that should be all!

If you wish to change the text color, you may change the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to edit the menu_color_normal and menu_color_highlight values (those are written as foreground/background format).

Anyway, of all the features, I can brag about:

1. The preview slider: I can set the slider to take up posts from a fixed category, “featured posts” in my case. Once I attach a “custom field” called ‘preview’, the slider picks up the image and scales it accordingly to use it as a thumbnail.
2. A nice homepage: It gives me a nice homepage. Hence now, I have completely removed the “blog” subdomain from my server and I am left with only one wordpress install in contrast to the two independent installs on different domains.
3. Wordpress 2.8.5: Just upgraded from 2.7 to 2.8.5, and I hope that things get a bit more stable now :p Apparently 2.8.5 has some much needed security fixes, which IMHO was worth the pain incurred from upgrading.

Honestly, I did have a bunch of points in my mind, but I can’t remember what they were

Anyway, I’m just happy that this went well. If you decide to give the theme a shot, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I am.

Through the tunnel

Camera: Nikon D90 SLR
Exposure time: 6 seconds
Mode: Bright Light

Strawberry and whip cream

Camera: Nikon D90 SLR
Mode: Normal

The beauty of acoustic is that you can listen to it at any time: when having a headache, when sleepy, when angry, when tired. Especially strings which sound amazing on my sound system. I love the sound of each string coming individually, sounds beautiful. Personally I never happened to truly fall in love with saxophone despite of living with a Kenny G. fanboy. Although flute, guitar and piano have always fantasized me.

Among the best I’ve heard from the top of my head, I can remember Crazy for this girl (Evan and Jaron),  Gone to the dogs (K.T. Tunstall), Iris (Goo goo dolls), Name (Goo goo dolls), Heart shaped box (Evanescence), Knocking on heaven’s door (Avril Lavigne), Your Song (Elton John), Saturate (Breaking Benjamin), Rain (Breaking Benjamin).
Evan & Jaron have a really fresh voice and a very pleasant tune.  ”The distance” was also a nice one from them.

I have played the sitar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitar) during  my school days, but I never got into playing guitar. I hope I get some time once I get a job so that I can probably take out some time to learn guitar.