ThoughtfulChaos

This is why I love Slashdot. Do you have any other site with these kind of comments? I don't think so.

I finally received my Dapper Drake Ubuntu CDs today! I had diligently kept a track of when shipit.ubuntu.com started accepting requests for Dapper and had put in a request as soon as I knew it was open... yeah yeah I could have downloaded the ISO (and I did) but original Ubuntu CDs are way cooler and anyways I do not have easy access to a burner if office.

My office PC still runs Breezy and I will be shifting to Dapper as soon as I get some time to do the shifting. Of course I could not wait to check out Dapper and I tried out the 'Live' version and what can I say... it was way too cool. A little too much eye candy for my tastes but very very polished.

Continue reading "Dapper Drake aa gaya"...

There is one thing that all bloggers like to do, apart from blogging that is. Can you guess what that thing is?

All bloggers love to keep a tab on the metrics for their blog. How many visitors read my latest post? How many people have subscribed to my blog feeds? How many readers are regular readers? From which sites were my readers referred to me? And many more similar fundas. Why? I guess for me the main reason is ego... I just want to know how 'interesting' my blog/posts are perceived to be. If you are a professional blogger or a blogger who plays to the gallery you could also use this info to tailor your posts to better suit the audience you are trying to target.

I just installed the latest kid on the metrics blog, Performancing metrics, on this blog. It is specifically targeted towards blogs... stats for my blog are yet to trickle in so I do not know what exactly that means but it will be interesting to see what stats are thrown up tomorrow. Most web stats packages are geared for use in general sites not necessarily blogs. They consequently do not have a number of metrics that make a lot of sense for blogs. Performancing metrics aims to fill in this gap.

Continue reading "Performancing Metrics are a go!"...

Warning: This post is full of gory technical details about the changes I have made to the blog. Read this only if you are interested in the internals of this blog. If you are in a hurry you can just read the stuff in strong/bold.

I recently upgraded my blog from Drupal 4.6.2 to Drupal 4.6.5. I have also made a number of small and big changes that I had been planning to implement since some time. Here I am posting various details about my Drupal setup as well as hacks I have implemented.

Since my blog is a single person blog it does not have all the bells and whistles Drupal is capable off. It is relatively simple setup as far as Drupal capabilities go. My goals were to have a simple but feature-rich blog. Please keep this in mind when reading the following stuff.

1. Your feedback regarding any aspect of my blog would be appreciated. I want to know what I could have done better or in a different way. Feel free to comment on any aspect of the blog.
2. This post might help people who want to use Drupal primarily for blogging. I consider my blog to be a reasonably decent setup for a blog powered by Drupal.

Continue reading "Blog reloaded"...

Since yesterday I have been reading Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Its been some time since I learned a new language. So I decided to pick up Ruby for the heck of it. Ruby on Rails is also 1 of the 2 supposedly hot web technologies to debut in recent times, the other being AJAX, so I wanted to see what the buzz was all about.

What do I say about this popular newbies book for Ruby. The author is obviously crazy, creative and quite brilliant. His writing style is totally whacky and unpredictable. I don't know whether to love it or loathe it. It doesn't feel like a technical book at all. Sometimes he gets the point across very succintly, sometimes he just blabs on and I am confused about what he is trying to say. The book is a very whacky crash course on the language that is Ruby.

Continue reading "A little poignancy with Ruby"...