What the Flock! Flock Browser finally Shuts down

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this email sitting in my inbox today. Flock was officially being shut down from April 26th 2011. The social interest in the niche browser had been dropping drastically and when Zynga acquired them for their developers in January, the end was almost sealed.

Personally, Flock was a neat idea. You got a firefox build (later chromium), which came with social features right out of the box. Sidebar access to twitter, facebook etc. Seamless access to your delicious bookmarks, email, blogging platforms..

Why did Flock fail? 

The e-Reader Shootout– Kindle3, Nook Color and the iPad

 As a student, I always missed having a digital reader to browse my notes, books and lecture recordings. I spent most of my time lugging my laptop to classes, seminars and library, and typing in notes on google docs or creating my mindmaps. When coupled with Evernote, iPhone became a great recording device. And I scraped my way out of grad school. I spent a lot of time researching on the perfect student companion, but there is none that satisfies all the requirements. The physical paper and pen are hard to substitute.

When it comes to plain simple reading, it's a lot more straightforward. At present, Kindle and lately iPad dominate in this area, followed by Barnes & Noble Nook and the plethora of cheap digital tables.

Sending a mass email to your facebook friend list, the excel-lent way!

Notes: Export contacts from facebook

Facebook is a great tool to connect with people. However, there are times when it get's really frustrating.

The other day, I wanted to drop a mass mail to all my friends in Singapore. So I went to the messaging system, tried to enter "Singapore", hoping facebook would be smart enough to populate the To-List with all my contacts with current city as Singapore.

Alas, it didn't happen. Perhaps I was expecting a lot. So the next thing I did was create a friend list, manually choosing all the people I knew who still lived in Singapore, into it. The exercise took ~5-10 mins with around 200+ friends.

Enabling Remote Desktop server in Windows 7 Home Premium

I recently got a new pc which came preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. Microsoft has done some strange things to differentiate their suite of Windows 7 Offerings. One really frustrating feature that is disabled in the Home versions is the ability to run a remote desktop host. i.e, You can act as a client and connect to RDP hosts but you cannot let other RDP clients connect to you. To solve this, I stumbled across a really simple solution.

Linux Tip: Splitting and Merging multiple files

Ever so often, when you download large files from internet, you find the file being split into smaller parts. It's easier to upload this way and most file upload sites - rapidshare, hotfile etc. have a max file size limit.

There are many ways to merge these files. Let me show you two popular ways

a) Using cat to merge
cat file.1 file.2 file.3 > file

$ cat sitcom.avi.part1 sitcom.avi.part2 sitcom.avi.part3 > sitcom.avi


Using split to well, split
split [OPTION]... [INPUT [PREFIX]]
$ split -b 100M sitcom.avi sitcom.avi.

-b, stands for binary files

It's easy to write a shell script that takes in filename, chunk size, destination etc as parameters. But why not save the trouble and use the second alternative.

b) Using Gnome split

As the name suggests, you can merge, split files right from Gnome.

It also has some cool features like deleting the chunks after merge is completed etc.



Great. That was easy, wasn't it. I haven't found any KDE alternatives yet. Feel free to share them in the comments. Thanks.

How Apple sets Prices

I was psyched to see an article on Apple being featured in my favorite blog - NYTimes Freakonomics.

This article originally featured in Bloomberg Business Week
which breaks down Apple’s pricing strategy and identifies its key components. “Next time you’re sitting at an airport bar and hear two business people debate whether Apple is a technology or design company, chime in: ‘Nope. What Steve Jobs sells is pricing,’” writes Ben Kunz. “Pricing? You bet. Jobs is a master of using pricing decoys, reference prices, bundling and obscurity to make you think his shiny aluminum toys are a good deal.”"

A Fresh new start

I started writing this blog back in my undergraduate years at the National University of Singapore. I was then single, bored and jobless (perks of a scholarship stipend). And really passionate about technology, the Web and the OpenSource movement.

Life's changed a lot since then. I am currently juggling a full time job and a part-time grad school program. I haven't done serious coding in months and I am already an iteration of Ubuntu behind. Lots to catch up. Let's go.

Linux finally has a stable Chrome release

Year and a half back, I wrote about Google's step behaviour to Linux. Meanwhile, We tried the experimental Chromium build to get a taste of Chrome on Linux. It was slow, buggy and unstable.

Now, the wait is finally over. Chrome for Linux can be downloaded from the Google Chrome website. On first glance, it looks really stable, extensions are working, flash (which used to crash Chromium) works smooth. I need more time to play around and write a complete review. Check back soon and enjoy surfing :)
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And here is the rest of it.