I had been tweeting more than blogging these days. But anyway, I had been publishing what I want to say quite regularly.
Frustrated of getting tonnes of spam on the Granular Package Archive everyday, I finally fixed the issue today, once and for all. This had been a long time pending task. I did this by integrating reCaptcha.
Saw Toy Story last week. Loved it! My favorite dialog? – “To infinity and beyond”.
India’s Cricket tour of West Indies starts just three days from now.
I am missing Granular development a lot; hopefully I’ll be able to continue development within a week or so. Meanwhile, the artwork team (Granuminati) had been doing some great stuff.
Still reading The Fountainhead (by Ayn Rand) since months now. I am a sloooow reader when it comes to philosophy novels. Anyway, I have started with the part 3 of novel based on Gail Wynand.
Finally did the dreaded Drupal update for granularproject.org.
Power cuts here, in Punjab, are getting worse day-by-day. 7 hour cuts are a norm these days.
Anurag Bhandari Blogging, updates cricket, granular linux, recaptcha, toy story, twitter
As was hinted in a post at Team Granular blog, Granular will now be a part of the Unity Project. Unity is in it’s beginning stages, but development is already on full swing. The enthusiasm of developers and members can be seen clearly on Unity’s devel mailing list and its public forum. At this point of time, I’ll refrain myself from giving full details about the association of Granular with Unity, but detailed announcements will come out at a later stage. What all I can tell you right now is I am pretty happy with the progress that’s been going on at Unity and Granular.
One more thing. You see only the Granular logo at the left and no logo of Unity as it’s still being finalized. But I am sure the creative artwork guys there will come up with something interesting pretty soon.
Anurag Bhandari Announcement, Granular, unity Granular, linux, pclinuxos, project, unity
Tom (aka Kurakroma and cbar2 on Granular Community Forum) was a very active member of the forum and one of the global mods there too. He used to be the live wire of the forum, and had a very keen mind which he utilized in discovering new things and putting forward questions, and sometimes trying to help people facing problems using Granular (or Linux in general). But under some circumstances not known to the Team Granular members, he left the forums quietly; not leaving even a single message of this sudden action of his.
Just recently, some one at the Granular forum put forward a question asking whether we owned the .co.uk domain of Granular Linux, perhaps the British community of Granular (no, we don’t own any such domain)? On checking which link he was referring to, we were quite surprised to find out there indeed existed a .co.uk domain of Granular.
Check it out for yourself. Rest is self-explanatory. Boy, what a way of expressing his regret. Let me assure you Tom, all your apologies are accepted. And all our doors are still open for you. 
Anurag Bhandari Blogging, Granular Granular, linux
Continuing my Java learning stint, I started experimenting on RPM packages in the Granular 2008 repository by extracting meta data from them using various Java classes I had written for my on-going college major project. To give a shape (end-user interface) to these leisurely done Java programs, I used my existing project MyBlog to create a website that could display information (extracted by the Java programs) about every RPM package in the repository. In other words, the Java programs store information about each RPM package in a central database which in turn is used by a PHP-based website to display that information, and much more.
In the introduction to Granular Package Archive post I wrote on the Team Granular blog, I explained the various features it has to offer. My personal favorite is the ability to leave comments on individual RPM pages. Other than that, I am quite satisfied with the overall look-and-feel too. In another of my Team Granular blog post, I explained the working of this package archive system, and the way to use it with any other repository of RPM packages.
Some guys at the Unity Project are also contemplating the idea of using this package archive system with their repository too.
Anurag Bhandari Announcement, Granular, programming archive, Granular, java, package, php, programming, rpm, unity, website
In a bid to help save Tasmanian Devils from extinction, Linus Torvalds decided to release the latest Linux kernel with the “Tuz” logo as the console image at the LCA 2009 conference. Tuz is a name perhaps derived from the popular Linux mascot Tux, plus Tasmanian Devil (Taz – as it was known as a Looney Toones cartoon character). So Tuz replaces Tux as the console boot image for the kernel release 2.6.29.
So 2.6.29 isn’t quite out yet, but I’ve merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.
- Linus Torvalds
In another news, GMail gets support for writing emails in Indian languages. The Google Transliteration technology had been around for some time now (through Google Labs), and this support for Indian languages in GMail was built using Transliteration.
We currently support five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.
- Google Blog
Anurag Bhandari Blogging gmail, hindi, linux, tasmanian devil, torvalds