DC's World

Communication remains one of the most important things for us all. With "Web 2.0" we find a lot of social networks through which we can keep in touch with old friends and make a new ones. But these networks are passive in nature. Just like twitter vs Instant Messaging, you can hardly expect someone to respond to you immediately. Chat on the other hand is realtime and boundaries are reduced. For eg, you cannot see a persons's profile on facebook if (s)he belongs to another country.

There are many chat services but Yahoo is the most popular. I find that even with the new captcha, Yahoo has made chatting more difficult and yet there is a lot of SPAM. Searching for "India Chat" for eg. lists some of the other services.

The first one, indiachat.co.in is actually just a Java frontend to DALNet IRC using the #India channel.

ICQ India was another result. This too is a IRC frontend for irc.icq.com which uses the #icq_india channel.

Now instead of using all these frontends, it makes more sense to setup a dedicated IRC client and personalise it. Some of the most popular free IRC clients are listed below:

• X-Chat: One truely crossplatform IRC client which has a rich feature set.
• ChatZilla: A really nice firefox extension to enable firfox to become an IRC client.
• Opera: Arguably, the best browser behind firefox has email and IRC inbuilt.

There is a huge list of IRC clients which include mIRC(non-free, arguably the best), KVIRC, etc. But it is hardly possible to write about so many.

Shown above is X-Chat running on ARCH Linux. It looks similar on Windows.

To chat on IRC, you need to:

1. Connect to a server: The network list provides a list of servers. Popular servers include freenode.net (many open source projects use it), DALNet, etc.
2. Join a channel: Every channel starts with the '#' symbol. So if you want to chant on the India channel, you have to join #India. If you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, just type "/join #India" for example.
3. Chat away.

Some things you need to know:

• A nick or nickname is the name you use on the server. You can change it by typing "/nick nick-you-want" If the nickname is registered, you have to use another nickname. Registering a nickname may be a different process for diferent servers.
• Every channel has one or more operators. He/She/It(it can be a bot) can kick you from a channel, ban you and your IP address, etc. Registering a channel is as easy as typing the command "/chanserv register channel-name password description". You need to register your nick before you can register a channel.

Why you should bother with IRC?

• If you are bored, you may find someone to chat to.
• If you want to discuss something, you can create a channel and group chat.
• You could even use IRC to chat with your colleagues or classmates.

Happy Chatting.

P.S. For a comparison and further information on IRC clients check Comparison of IRC clients. For a comprehensive list of IRC commands check this.

The iso of Mac OSX 10.5.6(iPC) is around 4.3GiB, similar to iDeneb.(Hint: if you need to search, use those keywords). These custom "builds" strip out some stuff to make it fit on a single layer DVD. X-Code, the developer suite for osx is one of the components which can be downloaded from the Mac developer site.(around 950Mb)

The installation process is as simple as any other. On the machine I used, I had Windows already installed. I created one more primary partition before starting the OSX install. I used the drive or was it disk utilities to erase the newly created partition with the mac(extended, journaled) filesystem.

Later in the installation process, I selected this partition(the only one visible) and customized my setup. I had to select the PS/2 keyboard fix to make the keyboard useful. After that the process was too simple to mention.

What I was amazed by is the applications were very responsive. It really makes Vixta look like bullcrap. It had python and perl pre-installed but since X-Code was stripped out, there was no C Compiler. All the PC's connected on the windows network were directly listed in the finder's left bar. Why I mention this is because many Windows installations require selection of workgroup and some home network wizard.

A very simple bootloader give the option of OS X(Default) or Windows. I havn't figure how the order can be changed.

All in all a pleasant experience. Although I think Mac OS X is impressive, I'm quite happy with Linux as I don't use many commercial apps. I also think that Apple should be more open to those who want to get OS-X running on generic hardware --- Spend a bit more on apple hardware and avoid any headaches of apple updates screwing your setup and completely forget that Windows existed... ever.

It takes quite a bit of time just selecting the necessary functionality for a website. This is without even modifying a bit of code. Drupal has a large number of modules to extend the core functionality but the number of modules are so large, it becomes difficult to find what you are looking for.

It is easy to get tempted by so many interesting modules that can make your site look like some other site you love. But it all depends on your needs. Another thing to note is that there may not always be a smooth upgrade path or you may have to wait a long time to upgrade to drupal's next version.

These are the modules I have installed in no particular order:

As I posted earlier, I am not very regular in posting to my blog. So I decided to move away from Wordpress to have a website instead of a blog. I also wish to write on topics other than technology.
My Old posts are available on my old blog