File sharing, collaboration and sending big e-mail attachments?

Often, it seems to be the case that the sharing and sending files with others, not to mention colloborating with others on a large project, is often difficult. And due to the fact that most e-mail providers have a limit on their attachment, it's even more hard to send large attachments through e-mail. For example, the attachment size limit for Gmail and Yahoo is only 20 MB. If you have 11 pictures of 2 MB each, you're going to have to send another email just for one photo.

Well, if you're ever confronted with a similar problem, there are actually several things you can do. In this article I'll mention only a few of the free services that I've used or know a little bit about.

Dropbox: By far one of the coolest things on the internet right now. The main purpose of dropbox is to allow you to save your files (up to 2 GB of total space, size of individual files don't matter) on the internet so that you can access them wherever you want to. But, since it allows you to save files in the internet, you can use if for back up purposes as well. Finally since it allows you to "share" files and folders with others (with the whole world or with a select group of friends that you can invite) you can also share files that would otherwise make for some very large attachments. Definitely the first thing you should check out.

Windows Live SkyDrive: This free service from Microsoft allows you to store files on their servers so that you can share it with others. It provides 25 GB of space, specifically for this purpose but upload size for each file is limited to 50 MB. Certainly worth checking out, especially for photos, since it also provides a great gallery feature and integrates nicely with other Windows services such an Windows Live Photogallery.

Yousendit: Like some of the other free webhosting services, yousendit allows you to upload your file, and sends that link to your friend so that they can download it via yousendit. While yousendit only stores the file for some days, it might be worth it since no actual sign up is necessary.

Office Live Workspace: While not strictly a file sharing service, office live workspace works great for sharing documents with others, and allows up to 5 GB of storage space. While it does requrie you to have an office live addin for some features, it is great for colloboration. It allows you to allow multiple users to edit a document, add comments and has features like todo lists and so on.

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Locking Your Mac Instead of Logging Out

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to lock your Mac as easily as one can lock their Windows computer (by pressing the Windows Key + L key) by default. It takes a little bit of setting up, but once you set it up, you can lock your computer with a flick of the mouse (really).


The way to lock your computer on a Mac is a rather long winded one in theory. What you need to do is put your display to sleep, and then through the security section of the system preferences window, set your Mac to ask you for a password by after the screen saver begins.

To do so, it'll be convenient to create an active corner for a putting your display to sleep first. Follow this tutorial if you need help on how to do so, and set the option for "Put display to sleep" to a particular corner of your choice. Then open system preferences again, and click on Security. Check the box that says "Require a password ______ after sleep or screen saver begins". For the time option, I usually use five seconds, in case I accidentally trigger the active screen corner, putting my display to sleep and locking my computer.

And you're done. When you need to lock your computer, just move your mouse to the screen corner that you set and walk away from your computer (only for a short time I hope) knowing that it is safe from prying eyes. Plus, you are saving energy, as insignificant as it may seem, and helping the environment.

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Sending Scheduled Emails through Apple Mail

One nice feature missing in most email providers' web interfaces is the ability to schedule your email and send it at a later time. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't even have a labs feature yet that will allow you to automatically send a scheduled email at a later date.

Of course, you can use your favourite calendar system to send the email, but what if you aren't actually going to be at your computer? It makes much more sense to allow your computer to send the email for you automatically.

To do so, you'll often need the help of an external utility or script on your computer to do the job for you. Apple Mail is great candidate for sending out automatic scheduled emails on a Mac. But Mail.app can't do this alone, it needs the help of some scripts, namely the Schedule Delivery script available in Mail Scripts, and iCal.

How to set up automatic delivery of email with Mail Scripts

First, get the Mail Scripts download for your version of Mail (at the time of writing, the latest version available was 2.10.2) from Andreas Amann's website. After you download it, double click on the .dmg file and let the installer install the necessary scripts.

Then open up AppleScript Editor (found in Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor.app) and click on Preferences in the menubar. Then in the General tab, check the box beside "Show script menu in menubar" to see a partially opened scroll icon on the menubar.

You'll have to use the Scroll to access the scripts.

Now, open up Apple mail, and write up a draft of the message you'd like to send (or may be you have a draft of the message already). Click on the scripts icon, and under "Mail Scripts" select Schedule Delivery. Fill in the desired time and date for the delivery of the mail and choose the draft that you'd like to send. And click Update.

You're set! At the right time, mail scripts will do its job (provided your computer is turned on) and save the day.

Of course, a couple of caveats: this method depends on your computer being turned on. A power outage/dead battery/accidental file corruptions/bad wifi connection/bad internet connection would mean that the message will not be sent, so choose the messages you'd like to schedule wisely.

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10 Things to do after a Fresh Ubuntu Install

Often, there are certain things that people do after a fresh install of their operating. I often install my operating systems once a while (and find such re-installs painfully horrible) because I manage to screw something up with an application or tweaking some setting results in an improperly functioning operating system.

However, I also manage to install Ubuntu (or nubuntu for me) every 6 months because there's always a newer version of it. And it keeps getting better every time, forcing me to upgrade to the latest version. Of course, I could always just upgrade through the software update tool, but I find that a clean install often works out better.

So for my own notes and for everyone else here's what I do (or end up doing) after every fresh Ubuntu install. Sadly, most of these things involve installing proprietary drivers, which seem to be necessary for the functioning of the system.

1. Get some Microsoft fonts. While not necessary, most of the documents I deal with use Microsoft related fonts (and sometimes I end up using these fonts due to document style requirements).

2. Install the Gstreamer plugins - I seem to have a lot of stuff

3. Install Adobe Flash/Moonlight (Silverlight)

4. Tweak my font appearance. Often helpful to make fonts look good, although I must say that the present Ubuntu version (10.04) seems like it doesn't need this tweak.

5. Set-up Email - I seem to be leaning towards Evolution, since it seems to integrate nicely with the OS. Thunderbird is good too.

6. Set-up IM - Empathy plays nice with my MSN passport account, which is good. Although I almost always end up using email over IM.

7. Get the Simple Compiz Config Settings Manager so that I can enable the Scale feature and set active screen corners like on a mac

8. Set-up Xmarks in Firefox - One of the best tools out there for me since it helps me sync all my bookmarks.

9. Install other interesting apps, or apps that I think I might need... this list varies from time to time but may include:

• Chromium
• Thunderbird (with its other extensions)
• CodeBlocks (for C and other such development)
• Bluefish
• Google Earth
• Apache, MySQL and PHP for web development
• Emacs for org mode and its other features
• Other productivity applications...

10. Install Dropbox to make sure I backup any important work I do.

Finally: Check for updates - sometimes by the time the OS is out, there are already some updates for the system. And thankfully, installing those updates through the update manger app is really easy too.

Feel free to share your own way of doing things / the apps you cannot live without in the comments below!

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Efficient Cursor Navigation while Coding

One of the reasons why most people like the trackpoint on those little IBM/lenovo notebooks is probably because you don't have to remove your hand from the "keyboard" area when you are typing something (or perhaps editing something too). Naturally, not having to move your hands from the keyboard area to the trackpad or mouse will save you a few seconds or may be minutes if you tend to sit at your computer for hours together.

However, recently after watching a talk by Richard Stallman about freedom (related to computer software that is) I remember his talk about the Church of Emacs. And finally, I decided to give emacs a try. I had never used it before (didn't really have to write all too much code), but after playing around with it for a several hours or so, I realized something really great: using the key combos to move your cursor around does increase your efficiency.

Here are some key combinations that will make your life a lot easier while using emacs or a mac (note, all of these combinations may not always work on a mac...)

Control + p = previous line
Control + n = next line
Control + f = forward one character
Control + b = back one character
Control + a = front of a line
Control + e = end of a line
Control + d = delete forward (because on most laptops/keyboards the delete button is usually further away from the backspace key)

While some people say that it might induce carpal tunnel syndrome, I for one think that pressing key combinations to move your cursor around, especially when you are coding can greatly improve your speed (until voice recognition becomes mainstream that is).

Try it, you'll be surprised how much you'll what to use these key combos elsewhere. Too bad on Windows some of these combinations are mapped to printing a file (which I don't do that often) or opening a new file.

What's more: These key combinations don't work only in emacs, they also work on macs! So now, whenever I am doing something, and need to go to the previous line or the next line, it just use the key combinations!

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Flickering Monitor in Ubuntu 10.04 for ATI Cards

While Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx really runs like a Lucid Dream, the one thing that I found problematic is not being able to run dual monitors. While dual monitors worked great in Windows and even Ubuntu 9/8 for some reason whenever I tried to set up the second external monitor, it would always flicker and wiggle.

However, thanks to the great people at the Ubuntu forums, it seems like I have found a fix that works. Special thanks to clhsharky for this tip. You can read the full post here.

But here's the gist of it (I've tried this on an ATI x1400 Video card, and it stops the external monitor from flickering):

Update (August 20, 2010): Seems like the rc7 release is available. You might want to download that instead... (see the comments section for more information)
Update (August 21, 2010): As Ryan suggests in his comment below, the rc6/rc7 candidates may contain a security flaw, so you may want to read that first before proceeding...

Go to http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.34-rc6-lucid/ 
and download the following files and install them in this order (depending on which processor you have)

For Intel (x86/64) based processors download and install (installing as in double click the .deb files after downloading it and click install..) the following in this order:
linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc6_2.6.34-020634rc6_all.deb
linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc6-generic_2.6.34-020634rc6_i386.deb
linux-image-2.6.34-020634rc6-generic_2.6.34-020634rc6_i386.deb

For AMD processors download and install the following .deb packages in this order:
linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc6_2.6.34-020634rc6_all.deb
linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc6-generic_2.6.34-020634rc6_amd64.deb
linux-image-2.6.34-020634rc6-generic_2.6.34-020634rc6_amd64.deb

Finally, after you restart, you'll be able to choose the rc6 kernel while you boot, which should fix the problems.

Again, this may not work for all ATI cards, but it seems to work for mine!

And boy is Ubuntu fast... it loads in ~ 35 seconds on a 4 year old laptop. Impressive... and now I also use dual monitors if I want to!

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Making PHP-mode on Emacs 23 Work Properly

So, recently I've been experimenting with emacs (I'm used the usual old propreitary stuff), and much to my surprise, it seems to be working just great! Except with some problems here and there.

One of the problems I've been having is to get PHP-mode to work properly in Emacs 23. Apparently, it used to work properly in previous versions, but then the usual instructions on the net for installing php mode don't work properly.

As per the usual instructions, you should add the following code to the .emacs file in your home directory:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/to/the/el/file/")
(require 'php-mode)


But turns out that Emacs 23 doesn't like that anymore and gives you an error:

Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading `~/rishi/.emacs':
error: `c-lang-defconst' must be used in a file
To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the
cause of the error in your initialization file. Start Emacs with
the `--debug-init' option to view a complete error backtrace.


To fix that, you're going to need to follow the instructions on this post.

Which essentially states that instead of putting the (require 'php-mode) line you should put this instead:

(autoload 'php-mode "php-mode" "Major mode for editing php code." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.php$" . php-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.inc$" . php-mode))

Works for me!

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