Quick Tweaks » Design

Pimp your Google with GoogleRedesigned

ashokgelal — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:05:47 +0000

Got bored of those dull Google colors and themes? GoogleRedisgned is a Firefox/Flock extension which gives a totally new look to some of the Google products such as Gmail and GCalendar. Check these screenshots:

Gmail progress bar

Gmail login box

Gmail Inbox

Impressed? If yes than you might want to try it out, install Google Redesigned extension from the extension’s homepage.

[via: globexdesigns.com. Thanks to Sash for the link.]

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Welcome a New Theme in Ubuntu 8.10

ashokgelal — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:24:34 +0000

A new theme “Dark Room” has been added to Ubuntu 8.10. Human Theme is still the default so you need a few more clicks to get it. As the name implies, the theme is dark and looks better than the default. Have a look:

: Better than the default

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The wallpapers that should make their ways to Intrepid Ibex

ashokgelal — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:56:47 +0000

[Updated] No more discussion on the new wallpaper that is probably going to be ported with the next version of our favorite OS that is going to be released on 30th October, 2008. Everyone agrees that the default wallpaper sucks! Ubuntu fans were asking for a better theme and a default wallpaper but it seems that the developers worked hard on how to make its apperance even worse. Here are some Intrepid Ibex wallpapers floating around the internet and honestly each of them deserves to be a default wallpaper for the upcoming Ubuntu.

This wallpaper just got updated

If they don’t want to include any of the above for some reasons, than this wallpaper is far better than the current wallpaper:

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Ubuntu 8.10 hits beta; the look lets the fans down again

ashokgelal — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:58:03 +0000

Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid Ibex beta hit the market today but its appearance ONCE AGAIN came as a great disappointment. Since this is a beta version, we can’t expect any change in the features now. All the works, which will be done until the final version hits the market on 30th October, will be only to fix the bugs. So, just keep your finger corssed until Jaunty Jackalope is released. If you are disappointed with the current appearance of your favorite Linux distro, here are some ways to give it a new fancy life again.

Everything is right about Ubuntu expect its look. Changing its appearance is one of the highly requested features by many fans around the world. Fans were expecting a change with Hardy Heron, but it didn’t happen. They had a lot of expectations with Intrepid Ibex but it came with nothing more than small color changes and this non-sense wallpaper:

The ugliest wallpaper ever

If you hate Ubunut’s default appearance, here are some ways to make it look best of the all OSes

Install Emerald Theme manager and download emerald themes from gnome-look.org. I’m using Scaled_Black_Mod
Get rid of the bottom panel and replace it with some beautiful and productive dock. Here is a nice tutorial on how to do this.
Get mails, weather, and system info right on your desktop with conky. After this ‘beauty’ comes as a bonus for you. Read my previous post on how to do this. I’ve included all the required files and fonts so it shoudn’t take you more than 10minutes.
Download Ubuntu wallpapers to show your Ubuntu love. If you love nature and prefer some natural backgrounds instead, you can get them from devian art. Other place to look for the beautiful wallpapers are: InterfaceLIFT, and StudioTwentyEight
If you want to get rid of the top menu, you can replace it with a nice looking cirular application menu.

After a couple of hours your ugly desktop should more beautiful then mine:

Desktop Screenshot with conky, AWN, Scaled Black mod theme, and Gnome-Do

Let’s hope Jackalope comes in a new look.

If you have a beautiful looking desktop, share with us. Shoot an email to admin[at]quickktweaks[dot]com with the screenshot(s) of your desktop. Beautiful ones will get published.

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10 Wallpapers for Ubuntu Lovers

ashokgelal — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:46:04 +0000

Give your desktop a Ubuntuish look! Here is the collection of 10 high quality wallpapers for die-hard Ubuntu fans.

Here is one with calendar for the month of October

There are many more wallpapers flying around the Internet. If you know any, share with us in the comments. If you have designed your own, shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com. We will publish your wallpapers next time with your name on it.

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A day with Digg Effect – when the hosting sucks!

ashokgelal — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:29:20 +0000

Much to my surprise, when I opened Digg’s front page yesterday morning, my post on Gmail+Weather+Beauty+Conky, I wish I was Mac but now I am happy that I am Ubuntu, was on the front page. It had only made 84 Diggs but was sitting right on the first position. A dream came true for a blogger!

But wait! When I clicked the link to see my ‘winner post’ the site was down. I returned back to Digg to read comments. Everybody was complaining about the site being down and asking for a mirror. I checked my Inbox to see if there was anything from my hosting server. There was! This email from my hosting company LunarPages.com

Dear ashokgelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello Your account is utilizing excessive resources, causing a significant degradation of services on the server. This is a shared environment and we can not allow one user to utilize the majority of the resources on a server as it affects all users adversely. Because of this, we have temporarily suspended your script: SCRIPT_FILENAME=/home/…/index.php Bellow you have the usage details for your account netkh0 netkhabar.com 4.17 2.32 0.1 Top Process %CPU 50.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 39.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 32.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php CPU 4.17 MEMORY 2.32 MYSQL 0.1 Please note that the above mentioned resource usage is due to PHP processing.Please upgrade your scripts as soon as possible. Please let us know what changes you will be making to correct this issue and we can re-provide ownership of the script to you. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. Thanks. — Best Regards, Vlad Panainte Junior System Administrator 1 support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada ) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

I replied them saying that this was because one of my posts made to the front page of Digg.com. I was fast enough to set up another site http://backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com (it doesn’t exist anymore), and imported all the posts with comments and attachments from quicktweaks backend. I installed WP Super Cache plugin, enabled it and redirected quicktweaks.com to backup.quicktweaks.com. Everything went right. Aha! What a relief! But wait again! 403 Forbidden! I thought I messed up something because of WP-Cache. Again, to keep Diggers happy, I was quick to setup another site http://qtbackup.quicktweaks.com (it’s still there). As soon as I was done, I got the same error 403 Forbidden message. Fired up Fireftp and checked the permission. All the permissions were taken away from me.

My hosting server couldn’t handle the Digg effect, and it was getting hard for me to handle diggers’ comments. Luckily, only permission for the index.php file was taken away for quicktweaks.com. I decided to create a new file index2.php and setup a redirect to execute index2.php instead of index.php. To do so, I added the following lines in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^index\.php$ index2.php

It worked for about five minutes then immediately I got a new email notification. Who else it could be other than the LunarPages itself:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, Unfortunately, we have been forced to temporary suspend your account, as numerous folders were continuously having excessive apache connections, causing high stability to the server:
~/backuptweaks/ ~qtbackup/ Here is only a small cut from the list of connections that the folders were having at the moment: 2-0 6308 4/14/14 K 0.05 4 4 10.1 0.43 0.43 99.227.220.98 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com GET /wp-content/themes/personal/images/bg-older-posts.gif HTTP/ 3-0 6309 7/19/19 K 0.07 1 6 46.8 0.90 0.90 212.242.190.40 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com
…
…
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

It meant that everything was down, I couldn’t even access my files. Other domains hosted with my same account were also down. I couldn’t access admin backend. Any page was redirected to their page with a notice which asked the webmaster to contact them. Once again I replied them saying this is nothing to do with script file but but because of so called Digg Effect. I asked them when will my site be back. I waited their reply for the whole day and finally got this:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Dear Customer, We really apologize for the inconvenience. You can log into your server here: https://mantus.lunarmania.com:2083 Please, let us know once you have updated your scripts so we can unsuspend your account. If you have any further questions we will gladly assist you. Thank you for your patience. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)

—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —

I replied with this:

Hi,
I’ve updated my scripts. Its not the fault in my script. Its just one of my articles made to the front page of Digg.com (I repeat!!!) and an unexpected huge amount of traffic diverted towards my site. I’ve never expected that LunarPages is only good enough to host a couple of pages and is only able to bear a handful of visitors. I’ve just installed cache mechanism plugins for my blog (based on wordpress) which means now as soon as a visitor visits a page, it will be cached and after that the page will be served as a static page instead of making request to the database. But for this to happen, my site needs to be up and I need to click few pages so that the cached pages are created. Today’s ’site unavailable’ incident really had a bad impact on my site where I lost a good chance of making my site recognized to a community. A hosting is of no use when it doesn’t allow a webmaster to make an opportunity to make his site famous among a certain group of people. Have I crossed the web space limit? No! Have I used all of the available bandwidth? No! So what’s the reason? You should have made clear before that you are not able to handle more than 10 visitors at a time. Why do you boast being so affordable and so stable hosting company? Why do you advertise shouting ‘unlimited webspace and bandwidth’ when you are not even closes to one gig of bandwidth? I do will write a blog on the useless and inability of LunarPages hosting and I hope that will hit the front page of Digg.com too. But before that would you please let my site take a breath? It might have been dying because of suffocation.
An unhappy customer who thinks that LunarPages hosting sucks!
Thank you anyways and I anticipate your prompt reply and action.

Two hours later I received this response:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, I have unsuspended your account, please take necessary steps to lower your usage. If we found that your account is causing high usage then we will permanently suspend your account. If you require a higher usage then allowed on shared servers you might want to try a VPS/dedicated plans. Details on VPS or dedicated plans can be found here: http://www.lpdedicated.com Dedicated servers. http://www.lunarpages.com/virtual-private-server/ vps servers I hope this information is helpful. Please note that the acceptable usage range is 1.0% average %CPU or less, 1.0% average %Memory or less and Top Processes below 20%. Thanks. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

Finally, all the permissions were given back to me. They had put their own .htaccess file and renamed my file to .htacess-suspended. I renamed their .htaccess file to .LunarPagesSucks

As of writing this, the site hasn’t gone down once although I’ve seen an increasing number of traffic most of them from Digg. StumbledUpon and Bookmarks both have sent some traffic too. One thing I don’t understand is that according to one comment from Digg, my site was down before 70 diggs and it was down for the whole day. But the post got dug for the whole day. Before the site was back, it had already received more than 500 Diggs. This made me believe that there are many of those people who blindly Digg a post without bothering to read it.
So what about revenue?
Some of you must be very eager to know about my adsense revenue. One thing I’ve noticed that the Diggers don’t click on any Adwords. The following reports speak themselves:

Lesson learned:

If you submit a post to Digg, get prepared.
Enable caching for your site. After installing WP-Cache I’ve felt that the page is loading much faster.
Never think that you are going to earn lots of money with Adwords. Diggers love reading not clicking your adwords.
Never use cheap hosting. When you want to get a hosting account, don’t look for bandwidth or web space. Ask them if they are able to bear Digg Effect.
I don’t know about others but LunarPages.com sucks. It can’t even handle 60+ diggs. How shame!

Stat:

Time to bring my site back again: About 16 hours

Time to write the blog and post it: 2 hours

Time to make to the front page: About 14 hours

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Manage Fonts In Ubuntu With Fontmatrix

ashokgelal — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:46:46 +0000

Designers know the pain of managing fonts in any OS. Without a font manager, previewing each fonts and than copying them to the fonts folder is very cumbersome. There are no. of font manager available for Windows such as AMP Font Viewer, Fontonizer. Managing fonts in Linux OS is lot more pain. Most of the users don’t know where to copy the fonts. The equivalent of C:\Windows\Fonts in Linux is /user/share/fonts. Now with Fontmatrix the pain of managing fonts are gone.

Fontmatrix is a font manager just like other font managers for Windows but it has some new professional features. One of the very appreciating features is the concept of ‘tagging’. You can tag a font for easy grouping and sub-grouping. Such as you can tag a font with keywords such as magazine, website, book etc. This will allow you to find easily which fonts you are using in a magazine and then export all the fonts tagged as magazine for instance. Besides tagging, fontmatrix can show all glyphs in a font, previews of sample text, variable sizing and also tells what kinds of advanced Open Type features are inside each font. You can import a directory containing fonts for previewing and installing them with an ease. Export font book menu allows you to create a nice PDF catalogue of user’s fonts for printing or reference.

Click here to download/install Fontmatrix from getdeb.net After installing go to Applications>Graphics>Fontmatrix to start managing fonts in Ubuntu.

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