don't be nice to me!

I don't know why; but I get really pissed off when I find that people are "being nice" to me. No. I don't want anyone to be nice to me; I want people to be true to me. If I say something stupid, tell me in my face that I am stupid. I might be offended at certain times; but it's sure far better than the pain I experience when I find that you were just nice to me. I know it's very easy to be nice than being true. I know I ask for too much from the people I relate to. But that's me. Please don't be nice to me!

A bad web site

Have you ever seen a web site that is designed by technically illiterate programmers/designers who have a bad taste? If not, try http://www.pizzahut.co.in/. No, don't go to this site when you need some information about Pizza Hut. That site is designed to frustrate people who know what web sites are for. (I've warned you ;-)

Does Firefox use all your CPU?

Is your computer very slow because Firefox uses a lot of CPU even if it's not actively doing anything? For the past few days my computer was slow in general, and Firefox was horribly slow. The reason was that Firefox was using more than 70% of CPU all the time -- even when Firefox was idle. A quick Google search took me to the solution:

If you encounter problems with sites do not just complain that FF is not working but post the site address here for other people to check. No one doubts that you have problems but to decide if it is a FF problem or something with your system we must be able to check these sites.

I closed a few tabs (which I had open for the past few days), and my machine was back to normal :-)

Renaming files in a jiffy

Want to rename a bunch of files in a directory? If you are using a *nix operating system, it can be done with a single command. A set of files I downloaded from a website had filenames of this pattern: sitename.com_someprefix_filename.txt. If at all I had been using a Windows box, that would have been a nightmare -- I could not do it without writing a Python program. Fortunately, I am using a Kubuntu Linux box; so I can rename all the files with a single command:

for i in *.txt
do
   mv $i "`echo $i | sed 's/TheWebSite.com_[^_][^_]*_//'`"
done 

If I put this in a shell script, I won't even have to type this long command again and again. Now I realise why Windows is not for power users (like me).

Now I can create my blog posts from Google Docs! Google guys are awesome. Slowly, I am starting to like Google Docs. It didn't interest me much when Google Docs was introduced originally. Since I use many features of Microsoft Word, Google Docs feels like using Notepad with formatting abilities. Yes, I still miss a lot of features I am used to using. But I like Google Docs for at least these reasons:

• I don't have to save my documents. It's done automatically.
• Collaborating is really very easy. Multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously. To let someone view my document, all I have to give them is a link. Whenever I update the document, I don't have to send the new version to them; they always get the latest document.
• I don't have to carry around my files. It's always there in Google servers (with enough backups :-).

Google Docs is in its infancy now. After a few years, I guess, I won't miss Microsoft Word!

PS: I used Google Docs to write this post.