There was a talk about folding long planet entries yesterday on planet.debian.org. Erich started it and Daniel came up with a userContent.css hack. You can do the same with the bookmarklet I quickly cooked up and clicking on the bookmarklet again lets you unfold the the entries on the fly too. You can get the bookmarklet from here.

The pdoFoldToggle bookmarlet has a drawback that it does not automatically fold the entries. Another wayout can be another bookmarklet (will the there soon) to be used along with Daniel's userContent.css. The longer entries get folded by themselves and you will be able to unfold them via the new bookmarklet.

Once in a while I have thought of collecting things/pictures from real life which remind me of Linux. Here are a couple:

I wonder if anyone has found debian in real life e.g. the swirl. I did, but don't remember where I put the images. On related note owing to my love for the swirl, I have asked a dear friend of mine to make a quilt/wall-hanging with the swirl on it. I can't wait till she finishes.

Right now I'm in the middle of my vacations and have only dialup link to connect to the virtual world. It is really hard to adjust to an erratic dialup connection after using high speed DSL (80/550kBps). Even accessing the bare minimum of websites likes webmail (my own and yahoo) hasn't been easy. Even google searches give me "Server not found." errors sometimes!

However, there is one good thing that I noticed...Steve must be smiling on reading this. d-a.org loads pretty fast even on the dialup connection! This is due to all the help and encouragement Steve gave me when I pestered him to get a "new" look for the website along with and all CSS design to improve page loading and in turn making the code more semantic. The end result is a fast loading website which is enhanced by some caching mechanism that Steve enabled on the server.

Thanks for all you do Steve.

Is packages.debian.org down like the search on debian.org? I have never seen the search feature to work on debian.org, and it would be a big setback if packages.debian.org also goes down like it. Does anyone know more about this? Is it coming back up again in near future?

Update: packages.debian.org seems to be up. It has a new dedicated server, it is not fully functional yet!

Last Friday we had a snowstorm which resulted in about 40cm (~16") of snow overnight. It hasn't snowed this much in a few hours in decades here! So I went out and got some pics. One is below, while others can be found here.

I hope you like them. Enjoy!

Hi to all. I'm planning to buy a couple of domain names in the coming few days. I don't have much experience with name providing or web hosting companies except godaddy (which sucks big time). I would like to know what to look for in a company when registering a domain name with one. What features should it ideally offer? Which companies in your experience give good service? How good is 1and1?

Also, in regards to web hosting, I noticed two companies dreamhost and bluehost which seem to give good quality hosting. Does anyone have experience dealing with them? Are there better options than the above two? Please advise.

I have worked with Steve for the last couple of weeks on changing the web site's theme. Initially it only involved changing just the colors. Later on with some helpful encouragement by Steve, I suggested some major structural changes, minor cosmetic ones and a few ideas to avoid CSS limitations. There have also been a few changes to produce more semantic code for better dispaly in text based browsers. These changes were applied over the last weekend (again by Steve).

The recent poll showed that only about half of the visitors liked the first stage of changes. It would be interesting to know how and if that opinion has changed with the recent major overhaul of the website theme. This would help us in deciding about future theme enhancements.