Last week, Adam Pash at LifeHacker posted a list of "Top 10 Ubuntu apps" that actually very closely matches the list of stuff that I install right after initial setup on my own Ubuntu box. As you might expect, these apps also work on any other Linux distro.

Ubuntu, in my opinion, already has the best out-of-the-box experience compared to every major Linux distribution that I've tried during the last several years (and my roommate, who was previously using Fedora will agree), but installing some of these apps will almost certainly make your life easier. VLC, for example, plays pretty much any video file you throw at it, and Beagleworks pretty well as a desktop search tool. I had XGL running on my old laptop a few months ago, and while it's very cool stuff, it still isn't quite done yet, so be prepared for occasional crashes and other oddities should you choose to install it.

So yeah, go ahead...check out the list, and play with the apps that you haven't tried out yet.

On Friday, one of my managers at Google gave one of my co-workers and me his Lotus Elise for the weekend.


Yeah, that Lotus Elise; I couldn't believe it when I first heard it either!

And what an amazing work of engineering it is. I don't drive a stick-shift, so I just sat at the side and enjoyed the ride as we sprinted across the city on empty roads, taking off like a bullet at every green light. Before you know it, you're darting along at over 90 mph in a 45 mph zone. :D

On the way back to the Googleplex, we called my roommate, Aaron, and asked him if he wanted to take it for a quick spin. That made his day too. Check out the rest of the pictures.

Wow, what an experience...!

Despite all the usual warnings associated with installing beta software on production machines, staying on the bleeding edge sometimes does have its advantages. Here's a little story to illustrate this point...

Some of you might know that I run the Folding@Home distributed computing client on my main desktop. This machine has been running the monthly Vista builds for a while now. The other day, I accidentally hit the switch on the power strip, and the machine turned off. Since the Folding client was in the middle of writing to the disk when this happened, the checkpoint data file was half-written, and the client had to restart the computation from scratch when the system restarted.

So I went into the Folding@Home directory, and clicked the "Previous Versions" button on the Explorer toolbar. I was presented with a list containing versions of the files as they existed the in the past. I selected the version from the day before, allowed Vista to do its thing, and restarted the Folding client. Now that the checkpoint files were intact, it was simply able to resume from where it had left off the previous day.

Okay, so the Folding data was not really all that critical. But had I accidentally deleted or lost something more important, "Previous Versions" would be the first safety net that I could have fallen back on. And it's always nice to have a safety net... :)

Last week, GoogleWiFi, the free city-wide wireless network, was made publicly available to everyone in Mountain View. All you need is a Google account and you can sign-in to get free WiFi almost everywhere in the city. A coverage map that shows the locations of all the access points is available. Google Secure Access, a simple VPN client, is also provided as an optional download to encrypt data on the channel.

I couldn't blog about this earlier, but I've been using the network for a couple of months now as part of an internal test, and it's been working very well, except for a day or two of downtime. Since the access points are attached to lamp posts all over the city, the signal strength can be quite low indoors. Our solution was to use a pair of Linksys WRT54G routers that we had lying around - one with the official Linksys firmware, and the other with the Sveasoft firmware that enables Client Mode. The router running in client mode is placed near a window, and the antennae pick up the signal from the nearest GoogleWiFi access point. The second router is connected to the first one via an ethernet cable, and runs in regular AP mode to provide wireless access to all the machines in the apartment. :)

This is a great first step from Google, and I'd love to see more companies joining in the effort to make basic internet connectivity ubiquitous.

I was in Redmond last weekend for the Microsoft Student Partners summit, and I came back with the mother of all freebies - a Gateway M285-E Tablet PC. :)


Tablets have come a long way since they first entered the market. Unlike some of the first-generation underpowered machines, this thing actually packs quite a punch. The model I got includes an Intel Core Duo T2400 at 1.83GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB SATA drive, and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400. I'm running a (very recent) build of Vista on it, and it's working great with the full Aero UI and all. The battery life with the 12-cell unit is excellent - Gateway claims 8 hours, and based on what I've seen so far, it can at least do more than 6. Plus, the optical drive bay can hold an additional battery, so it could easily do a transcontinental flight on a single charge.

It was great using the machine on the flight back - I folded the screen back, giving me plenty of room, played Hexic, Inkball, Ink Crossword, and tried some of the other bundled pen-enabled apps. The handwriting recognition engine in Vista is even better than it was in XP (which was pretty good in the first place!), and using the pen actually feels pretty natural. I would have loved to have one of these back when I joined uni. Having handwritten notes that are fully indexed and searchable is so convenient. In any case, I have a couple of more quarters of coursework, so it's not too late. I bet Marc would be pleased; his old blog was one of the things that first got me interested in Tablet PCs. :)