Bash Tips - using **

This is a nice bash shell feature which I find handy quite often when editing multiple files.
Say you have the following directory structure

degreethem-lm:bash jithine$ ls *
folder1:
test.txt

folder2:
test.txt

Now if I want to edit both the text files under I can use the ** operator like this.

degreethem-lm:bash jithine$ vim -p **/test.txt

The above command will open both the test.txt for editing in vim.

Long live onemanga

When I first saw warnings on onemanga.com (my favorite online manga reader site) that they are having troubles with publishers regarding the manga scanlations they hosted. I simply ignored it thinking that they will find a way to survive. After all onemanga is not the only manga site hosting  scanlated mangas. 


But today after checking onemanga.com the worst fears of a manga fan came true. There have indeed suspended their online manga reader.


Ever since I got inducted into world of Mangas by Naruto, onemanga.com has been my source for quality manga. Not only Naruto but also Full Metal Alchemist, Fairy Tail, One Piece ... the list goes on. I started reading all these mangas at onemanga.com and now onemanga has succumbed to the pressures of publishers and has decided to suspend their online reader. 


Well I am not sure of the implication if that statement if they are just going to remove the reader interface for mangas  and the manga themselves will be available in some form hosted some where and available to download , I am not sure. News regarding this announcement can be found here at onemanga.com . Like everyone I am also waiting for an update regarding onemanga.com's future. I hope they will survive in some form.


One other line of thought I have is whether I should keep reading mangas online or should I buy them and support the publishers. Well that's thoughts for another blog post ;)


For those who are not familiar with with word scanlation read the wikipedia article on Scanlation .

KDE SC applications I miss in Mac OSX

The one I miss most is Dolphin. I miss the split view mode, which should have done a lot good sense in Mac since it does not allow moving folders in a easy way. (We have to drag folders to move, which would be easy with the split view). Guess I am stuck with finder.

Now for image viewing gwenview the best one I have seen so far. I miss it for sure.
For torrent guess I can settle with transmission, though its not advanced as ktorrent.
I seems to be quite happy with audium for my IM needs.
And finally for mail now I use Entourage though I am thinking of moving to Thunderbird.
And finally for my music needs I guess iTunes will do, as I was getting a little bit frustrated with amarok because of its loading time.

From Linux -> Mac OS X

I guess now I should rename this blog, now that I no longer use KDE SC nor Linux. Last Friday I made the switch, requested the IS of my company for a MacBook Pro in exchange from my good old HP laptop.

While hardware wise this is no doubt better than the one I had previously, in terms if the software I have mixed feelings. One thing I felt while using a Linux Desktop was the components does not fit in quiet often. When something goes wrong, sometimes X, sometimes its kernel sometimes its some other libraries or the desktop environment( say KDE). The feeling that I am using a one OS was missing, sometimes I felt the building blocks are separate ones instead of one single entity which is providing the user a complete experience. Also I am also one of those idiots who has an obsession to run the greatest and latest of available software. There are a lot of distros which follow this principle. And I myself was using Arch Linux, a rolling release distro.

While its great to run all the latest available, to experience the new features which enhances the user experience or fix some bugs which were present in the last stable release available, it can never guarantee stability as I found out the hard way. With the release of kernel 2.6.32 kernel started my frustrations with linux. It was freezing like hell. It freezes if I stay idle, if I reboot/shutdown or if I suspend. I guess it involves all scenario except when normal usage. I did report the bugs upstream and its still getting fixed. Of course it was my problem, as I should not have used the latest ones if I am not upto maintaing all the issues like this, that can crop up.
So before I made my final switch to Mac I installed kubuntu lucid alpha on my laptop to see how things are there. To my surprise the freeze issues I faced was gone. ( Well I did not use it long enough to verify). So I guess the culprit is the usual suspect the Intel xserver driver. And with desktop effects ON system was painfully slow, so was with desktop search enabled in KDE 4.4 rc2. If I am ever to return to Linux again, I am definitely to go with distros like kubuntu / Fedora / Open SUSE. Never again to a rolling release distro.

Now to Mac OS X. I have never felt using such an OS polished for user experience. While it has its on pains, I guess I can live with that for a while.

Mobile broadband and wvdial

I have been using networkmanager applet for managing my network for some time. Reason why I used a gnome app in my kde  (trust me this is the only gnome app I use, err I guess I am forgetting  pidgin and firefox :p) is that this is the only fully fledged network manager available for linux. Yes kde lacks one and it sucks.
Lacks one in the sense the knetworkmanager is not getting enough love from KDE developers it seems. Still it does not support Mobile broad band or vpn connections, though the configurations are there :p . And I guess no ones wants to remember what happened when kubuntu 8.10 shipped this one. At that point even wireless was not working properly. But things are better now.  But still I went back to knetworkmanager recently. And now I am using wvdial for managing the mobile broadband, which is a Reliance connection. ( Getting free from my company :D).

I followed the instructions from here configure wvdial.
But once knetwork manager supports this I am sure I will go back to it.