Google Chrome For Linux FAIL!!!!

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I have no idea how this happened. An extension or two crashing when I click on them is quite common as this is still in Beta and extension support is still only enabled for the dev channel users anyway. I was working inside VirtualBox and when I came back to Ubuntu every extension I had installed had crashed. Well done Google! This screams stability.

Tech Highlights of 2009

Hello again… This I should have written a couple of weeks back when the news in here was actually new. But as I’m a lazy ass I didn’t write it. And I should really write this as sevaral posts but as I’m a lazy ass I’m writing this all in one post

Well where to begin? We have had some really cool things announced and released in the past few weeks and as most of this stuff can be found somewhere else I’ll write a basic intro and give links to the related sites so you can read more about it if u want to.

Project Natal

Lets start with Microsoft. At the E3 Gaming convention that was held recently Microsoft dropped a bomb on the game console world with the unveiling of Project Natal. Microsoft has been keeping this under wraps until then and I have to say, I was blown away. Project Natal is a peripheral you can connect to an XBOX 360 to have a completely new gaming experience. In a nutshell the future you will be playing games without a controller only using your body as the controller. Watch the video below and you’ll see for yourself.

When I first saw this I had my doubts. Is this accurate enough for a worldwide commercial release? But some of the worlds leading tech bloggers got their chance to experience Project Natal backstage and based on their reviews Project Natal is definitely ready. Microsoft has taken gaming to a whole new level and Nintendo Wii MotionPlus and Sony’s EyeToy have no chance of keeping in a level playing field with Microsoft (Even though they try to downplay it. ). This is definitely technology we haven’t even dreamed about. You can read some of the reviews of Project Natal in the links below.

Gizmodo – Testing Project Natal : We Touched the Intangible

Kikizo | First-Hand with Natal: Why it’s a Bigger Deal Than Critics Think

Palm Pre

This phone generated a lot of hype when it was first demonstrated saying it was the iPhone killer and whatnot. Even though it didn’t sell half as well as the iPhone it does bring some competition to the table with its new WebOS. The demo of the Palm Pre can be seen below. It’s a bit lengthy though.

This was a pre launch video at MWC 2009. According to most reviews the WebOS is impressive. But the Palm Pre’s construction leaves something to be desired. (I read somewhere that you could cut cheese with the Pre’s bottom edge ). And even though an official SDK hasn’t been released yet homebrew applications are showing up online. Gizmodo has put up a nice review matrix for easy comparison of what everyone is saying about the Pre. You can see it from the below link.

Gizmodo : Palm Pre Review Matrix – What everybody is saying

Google Wave

Now this is the product I’m really excited about. Did you know Email was invented almost 40 years ago? Trust me. It was. Google thought “How would email be if it were invented today?“. And following on that idea they created Google Wave. It’s a rich environment for users to share messages, pictures, videos and more. Google’s demonstration video can be seen below. But I warn you. It’s a hour and 20 minutes long.

For those who do not want to waste the time you could have watched a movie or something the highlights of the show can be found in the below link.

Lifehacker – The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Did I mention this is going to be Open Sourced? Well it is. Google wants everyone to implement this open standard much like email is today. Google is currently giving developers who want to develop extensions and such for Wave access to Wave at www.wavesandbox.com. If you’re interested you can fill out a form and hope for Google to approve your request. FYI its still very buggy and requires refreshes now and then

iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0

Been debating with myself whether to put this here or not. But the hype this announcement created when Apple finally unveiled it at WWDC 2009 was too hard to ignore. Apple is making its way to creating a real phone now. Now it has SMS forwarding, MMS and Video recording too. Amazing huh?!?

Anyway, Apple has improved the hardware somewhat as well. The iPhone 3GS (S stands for speed) comes with a 3.2MP Autofocus camera that can also capture video with VGA resolution @ 30FPS, a faster processor, hardware 3D acceleration and more RAM. Here’s the iPhone 3GS complete feature guide from Gizmodo.

Gizmodo – iPhone 3GS Complete Feature Guide

Despite all the hardware and software improvements the iPhone 3GS is still far from perfect. My main complain is “WHERE THE HELL IS MULTITASKING??”. I mean, come on. Is that too much to ask for? Other phone manufacturers had that like 8 years ago. This is where the Palm Pre really outshines Apple with its multitasking capabilities.

Hmm. I guess that’s it for today. I’m really tired as well. You can thank me for telling you stuff you already knew about in the comments below … Cheers!!!

Google Talk Gadget and Recovering Ubuntu Jaunty

OK. I wasn’t really going to write a post today. But as I was checking my mail suddenly. . . (Well people living in Sri Lanka are very used to this). .  power went out (Courtesy of the C.E.B.). So instead of staring at a “Page not Found” screen I decided this might be a good time to write a new blog post. So here goes.

Well there’s really nothing much to write about here. All of us like the Gmail chat program right? (Well most of us at any rate.). You can just log into your gmail account and just start chatting away.

Google also offers the facility to use the Google Talk Gadget to chat from anywhere. This works in a similar way to Gmail chat. But you might notice some differences here too. And as a bonus you can even add a Google Talk Gadget right to your webpage. I’m just going to add one here. You can login with your ID and start chatting away.

Like most widgets this requires only one line of code. You can customize the border size, color and the size of the widget and Google will generate the code for you to embed on your website. Easy as 1,2,3.

EDIT : Ok… Either WordPress doesn’t like the script or its not easy as 1,2,3. Sorry about that. I was hoping to post the gadget here. But here’s a screenshot for now.

Right.. I’ve finished the post too. So I saved the post as a note and went downstais to have dinner. And I decided to suspend the laptop to conserve power while I’m gone. And after I come back what do I find. The laptop refuses to resume. (Using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) Grrr… Well as there was nothing else to do I held the power button pressed and turned it off.

And after reboot . . . GRUB. . . Ok. Good. . .  Select Ubuntu. . . Now the loading screen displays. . . and. . . . nothing. . . nada. . . Ok now i was getting seriously pissed here. I spent a lot of time today customizing the damn thing and was I going to have to do all that all over again?

Anyway I decided to check out the Ubuntu recovery mode this time (I really had never needed to use it). So I rebooted and selected the Ubuntu Recovery Mode and a menu is displayed. It displays some options to recover your Ubuntu installation. I had absolutely no idea which one to try. Hmmm. . . Recover from graphics problems. . . OK lets give that one a try. It displayed some console output here saying overwriting any graphics settings bla bla bla. Basically it must have reset the xorg.conf file (I think…).

Since I was already here I decided to push some more stuff and see what happens. Next I went for the scan file system. It displayed a progress bar for one of my ext3 partitions (I think that was the root partition) and displayed a warning message saying the scan might do SEVERE damage if it was run while the file system was mounted. So I decided to skip that one. I wasn’t here to do more damage. Just fix the damage that was already done.

OK. Now I look at the options again. Fix broken packages or something like that. That looked interesting . . . I select that one too. It displayed a hell of a lot of gibberish that no sane person would understand. After it finished I selected the option to continue normal resume.

And voila!… The login screen. Everything was just dandy again. . . . I’m glad because if I really don’t have time right now to install all this stuff again. One of the three i did must have worked (or well maybe all three). And here I am finishing another post of considerable size, after recovering an Ubuntu installation and having dinner and still no friggin power. @#$%^&*(. I’ll post this when I get power (If that happens anytime today.) . . . Later then. Cheers!!

P.S – Anyone else had suspend/resume problems on Kernel 2.6.28-11? And sorry for the linux experts about the lack of clarity in the details. I’m still kind of a newbie