I am so tired of Unity

I am an avid Ubuntu user. It has been my primary OS since 2008 i.e for almost six years now. But I am now getting tired of Unity, not Ubuntu, just Unity. For those not familiar with the term, Unity is the desktop environment of Ubuntu. Ubuntu switched to Unity from GNOME a while ago when GNOME 3 was about to be released. I have read that Canonical did not agree with the direction GNOME was heading in and when they were not able to sort their differences with GNOME they decided to create their own desktop environment for Ubuntu and so Unity was created. But this is what I have read on internet and considering how reliable internet is, I am not sure what really happened but the fact remains that Ubuntu switched to Unity.

Unity has its own merits but it has made it difficult for me to perform day to day operations. For example whenever I have to run an app for which I don't have a launcher icon I have to click the home button and then type the app name for it to appear in the app list and then click on it. I don't like that. I also do not like that there is not button to minimize all windows. I also do not like the fact that every program has its menu in the top panel. When I have two windows open side by side and I need to use their menu, I have to first select the window and then move my pointer miles away to top panel to get to the menu. Similarly I like the close button for a window to be in the top left or top right corner of the screen when they are maximized. This makes closing them easy. But with Unity this is no longer possible. There are a lot of other similar issues which are not a big deal them self but together they make it really difficult for me to perform everyday operations.

But this does not mean I am giving up on Ubuntu, I am not ready to go back to Windows, but I have decided to give Kubuntu a try as well and see how I feel about KDE. No matter whom I end up with, KDE or Unity, I will still be using Ubuntu.

WebOS and Nokia - I wish

A mobile phone's hardware specifications are important but in today's world its the software (the Operating System) that dictates the user experience. Most high end phones today, from HTC, Motorolla, Samsung, Apple, Nokia and others, have almost the same hardware specs, with little or no differences. What distinguishes them from each other is the software on top of the hardware. And because of that Motorola, Samsung and HTC are no different for me. They try to give an illusion of uniqueness by making their own UI on top of Android but it does not effect most parts of my user experience.

Because of this, I have always been against Nokia making an Android handset. I have always thought that Nokia would be better off maintaining their unique identity. If they started making Android handsets they would be just another handset manufacturer in a long list of companies including Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, Huawei and many other Chinese and Korean and other handset manufacturers. But that would be a disgrace, I mean its Nokia which was once synonymous with mobile phone.

WebOS was the operating system on Palm Pre hand sets. I never got a chance to use WebOS but I have seen a lot of screen shots and read a lot of reviews when it came out and I was very excited about Palm Pre but unfortunately it never came to my country. The reviews for Palm Pre were good but what all the reviewers really liked and were talking about was its operating system i.e WebOS. So when HP bought Palm and later closed it altogether, I wished that Nokia would buy all the rights to WebOS and use it as the main operating system for their handsets. This way they would get a really great mobile operating system which would complement their existing handsets like Lumia nicely and could easily compete with the likes of Android and iOS.

I still wish Nokia would do this but I do not think this is going to happen now, with Nokia now being part of Microsoft and all, but the heart wants what the heart wants :)

Endianity conversion for a 24bit Integer

Recently while working on SSL protocol I came across 24-bit (3 byte) integers. I never thought any one would ever use a 24-bit integer. There are no default types or any type in stdint.h to create such a variable. So the best one could do is use 3 byte arrays and keep typecasting them to int - ignoring most significant byte on read and not writing the most significant byte on write.
The problem I faced was that I had to change the endianity of these 24-bit integers as the data is written to and read from network. I did not want to use a function call so I came up with following macros. They dont seem right to me i.e they are more weird looking and complicated than I wanted to so if someone has a simple solution, please share.

The following macro takes a pointer to 3 bytes containing 24 bit unsigned integer, converts the endianity of the integer value and returns it as int with most significant byte always 0

#define GET_NO_UINT24(src)  ((((*(uint32_t*)src)<<16)|((*(uint32_t*)src) & 0xFF00)|(((*(uint32_t*)src)>>16) & 0xFF)) & 0xFFFFFF)

The next macro takes 2 arguments. The first one is a pointer to 3 byte array for storing 24-bit integer and the second argument is the value to be stored.

#define PUT_NO_UINT24(dst,src) ((((unsigned char*)dst)[2]=(unsigned char)((src))), (((unsigned char*)dst)[1]=(unsigned char)((src)>>8)), (((unsigned char*)dst)[0]=(unsigned char)((src)>>16)))

Deploying a Spree application on Heroku

Heroku is a no-hassle hosting solution for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. It helps the developers to focus on the most important thing i.e creating the most amazing web app ever and forget about servers. Your application can be up and running in minutes. All you need to do is create an app on their servers and then push your code to it using git. They provide a handy utility to create and manage applications from command line and it can be installed from www.toolbelt.heroku.com.

Spree is an open source e-commerce platform that is available as a ruby gem for Ruby on Rails framework. It is intended as a foundation over which developers can build their own e-commerce sites.

Running a Spree application on Heroku is easy and can be done using the steps below.

Prerequisites

1. A working spree application. If you want to know how to create one, read my previous post about creating a spree application.
2. Working Heroku Account. If you don't already have one, sign up here.
3. git client. On Ubuntu this can be easily installed using aptitude.

Steps

1. Install Heroku Toolbelt.
   The toolbelt is a very handy utility for working with Heroku. The most important part of this toolbelt is a command line interface for creating and managing applications on Heroku server. For details and installation instructions please visit the Heroku Toolbelt website.
2. Add your application to git version control.
   If not already done, add your app to git as this is required for pushing to Herokus servers. This is easily done using following commands:
   $ git init
   $ git add .
   $ git commit -m “initial commit”
3. Next login to heroku from command line, add your SSH security keys to Heroku and create a new application
   $ heroku login
   $ heroku keys:add
   $ heroku apps:create myapp
4. Push your changes to heroku
   $ git push heroku master
5. Initialize your database
   $ heroku run bundle exec rake db:migrate
   $ heroku run bundle exec rake db:seed

And that is it. Your app should now be live at myapp.herokuapps.com. Head over to Heroku developer center for more details about this amazing platform or you can read this amazing book.