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 plugin writers). What I found initially looked to be a gross and basic error by pidgin developers, but later found that it is indeed a good design and thought that I’ll make a post about it for the benefit of fellow pidgin plugin/app developers.

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 must know something about the EULA (End Users’ LIcense Agreement). Yes, the one that you clicked “I Agree” on, without even reading one word of. Basically, you need to know the following lines:

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 data backup service, with its major strengths being truly cross paltform (Mac/Linux/Windows – 32 bit as well as 64 bit), easy interface, rsync like differential backups to save time and disk space, versioned file history, web as well as client interface, unlimited number of devices, unlimited bandwidth, etc etc.

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 closing the window. Well, true but nothing is non-rectificable :). So this is a post about a method that one can use to go “really” undercover with firefox. But before we begin, please make sure you have read Part 1 of my post, because here I’ll start from the point where we left off in the earlier post.

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 mode has always been there in Mozilla firefox as well. You just need to devote less than one minute (yes, you read that right, less than one minute) to set it up. Well, actions are better than words, so here it goes: