Shantanu’s Technophilic Musings

Recently I wrote a small autoreply-answering-machine app for pidgin with a simple premise. Send custom automatic replies to different people when they message you and came across a strange bug. It never sent the reply when you received the first message from someone. I was using the “ReceivedImMessage” signal over d-bus (or “received-im-message” for the [...]

Update: In a thread about this post at Dropbox forums, it was brought to my notice that Dropbox has now changed its terms to remove the objectionable clause.
If you use dropbox (A popular online storage service with free 2 GB space), and use (or intend to use) its public or shared folders feature, then you [...]

Just a small shout out to let you guys know that you can use the discount coupon code “linkup” while signing up the excellent online backup service SpiderOak to get a major bump to 10 GB from the 2 GB that they give to normal accounts.
For those who don’t know SpiderOak is a great online [...]

A few people (e.g. Varun) told me my previous post differed from the way how google chrome / Microsoft IE8 handle Incognito (Private Browsing) mode. The main consideration was that while chrome/IE8 don’t write anything to disk at all, the firefox method is an after-effect, i.e., writing to disk and then clearing it up while [...]

Update: Part 2 of this post is now up here to allay some of the drawbacks that were pointed out.
There has been so much hype over the “Incognito” (or Private Browsing) mode of Google Chrome / Microsoft IE8, with many internet users screeming Hallelujiah. But I don’t understand what the hoopla is all about. This [...]

I recently wrote a simple answering machine program/plugin for pidgin and someone asked me to port it to 32 bit. So I fired up pidgin within my virtual box installation at work (as I have only a 64 bit machine at home) but couldn't get it to connect. Tried all sorts of methods found over [...]