A friend called me today and happened to mention his biggest gripe about Lotus Notes, that it hangs ever so often (ok that’s acceptable), but the clincher is that if you kill it through the task manager it will not allow you to restart and relogin until you reboot your PC. Now, that is a serious problem and a hit to productivity. But the omniscient angel I am, I had the solution ready (because till a couple of years ago, I was also haunted by this very issue every day). I told him about a small 20 kb application, simply but aptly named “KillNotes.exe”. When run, this utlitiy will properly terminate the process(es) that loaded nnotes.dll and turn you into a happy camper when you watch Lotus notes restart without giving you even an angry stare. I published this here in the hope that it helps someone else out there as well.

FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community rejoices today as google finally lived upto their promise of releasing the android source code. Now, the things that is left to be evaluated is that how much of it is actually true, or whether there are some binary blobs still in there. Moreover, it remains to be seen that how much this converts into a “community” project instead of being ruled by Google with an iron hand. But given the interest that Android has generated so far, and given google’s reputation as a good open source promoter, I am ready to believe that this is going to be one of the biggest landmarks that mobile FOSS industry will see. And maybe, this will finally motivate me as well to get involved in the “bigger picture” finally by contributing to a project that is more than just a few thousand lines of source. What is your opinion and expectation from this development? Let me know.

There is still a day left for the first Android based Device, T-Mobile G1, to come out into the hands of general public but I was in a for a small surprise as I went through my Google Analytics report for the last week. It had a mysterious number of 2 sitting at the bottom of my “Unique Visitors by Operating Systems” filter report. The “mysterious” part coming from the fact that the left most column displayed “Android”.

As some of you know that I’ve taken up the development of the ultra-cool xwinwrap tool that allows you to use movies, screensavers etc as wallpapers for you linux desktops. Here is version 0.02 for you consumption that fixes a bug because of which the generated window was overlapping other windows.
The download file has plain executable binaries as well as deb packages for Ubuntu. Moreover, I’ve included both 32 bit as well as 64 bit versions.

For those who don’t know Shantz-WP-Prefix-Suffix is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add any text and/or HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript code to the top or bottom of your posts (e.g. see my site links at top of each post and the copyright link and permalink at the bottom of each) I’ve updated it to version 1.0.4 which allows you to add PHP code to the top or bottom of your posts now. This is very useful for you especially if you want to display some ads that use php or javascript (I’m using it as well for adsense on this blog)