I recently installed Skype on my work PC. When I tried to exit, I found that I had to jump through hoops to close Skype. It isn’t the most favorable experience. Here is how it went:

In most Windows applications, pressing the large red X button on the top right closes that window. If that window is the last window left of that application, the whole application exits and you don’t see it in the start taskbar or in the notification area. You can assume that Skype on windows should behave the same way. Right?

Wrong! Pressing the X just collapses the window into the taskbar. That is the exact same behavior that is observed when you press the minimize button. I don’t get it. Whey even have the X up there if it does the exact same thing as the minimize button?

At this point, I am tempted to just ctrl+alt+del and kill the process, but instead I give Skype a chance and right click the icon on the taskbar to see if it gives me any options. And there it is! The elusive option to actually quit Skype.

I click the option and guess what! Skype pops up a dialog box asking me if I actually want to exit. Really? You think I right clicked the icon on the taskbar, and then clicked “quit skype” all on accident?

This sort of stuff really bugs me. Why is Skype ignoring already established patterns? Why is Skype making it so annoying to use their product?

It still isn’t sinking in that a man who was such a phenomenal force in the industry has passed away. Steve Jobs was an inspiration to me. His successes stand to show how creative thinking can lead to spectacular results.

Steve, You will be missed.

One of the things that most engineers have to do before graduating is complete a capstone senior design project. EE and CS students can choose their capstone from a list of project based classes. Vinny, David, Jason, and I chose embedded systems and made a motion capture game. The game incorporated custom hardware (VHDL) and custom software (C).

Here is a link to our final report. Here is a gameplay video that we shot early in the morning on the last day of classes.

Last night, I reached for my Audio Technica ATH-ES7 headphones And noticed that the cord was frayed near the 3.5mm connector. I plugged it in to check if it still worked. Low and behold, the right channel no longer worked.

I contemplated what to do. I had already had the cords on these headphones replaced before (these headphones have very weak cords). I didn’t want to call and get them replaced under warranty again since that can take up to 3 weeks.

I then thought about replacing the 3.5mm connector. That isn’t the optimal solution because white connectors are hard to come by. I then realized I still had the original iPhone headphones in the box.

I took them out, and cut the earbuds off. Then, I removed the original cord from the Audio Technicas and replaced it with the iPhone cord. After a bit of soldering and screwing everything back together, the mod was complete.

The headphones with the completed mod:

What should I do with these completely new earbuds?

I took advantage of spring break to test out how powerful the iPhone 4 is for taking photos and editing them. Here are a few photos I took. You can read the photos’ descriptions for details. I used iCameraHDR for HDR photography and Photoshop Express for touch ups,  noise reduction and sharpening.

Madison Square Park

Dorms at UPenn

116 st 1 Train Station

Trains in Philadelphia

A View Low Library from Butler Library

The Sky Above Campus

Since early last year, I have been wanting to make a photo blog just for photos I take out of windows. I have finally done it. My new Tumblr, arunswindow.tumblr.com only contains shots that I have taken from the building I am in at the time. Don’t worry, it won’t be replacing arunhasablog any time soon.

A couple weeks ago, I was perusing the Restaurant Week list when I realized how hard the list made to find a good restaurant that is easy to get to. That is when I came up with the idea for filterable map of restaurants that incorporated Yelp ratings.

I pulled in Vinny for the project. We split the project down the middle. Vinny wrote a Python script to parse the data from the NYCGO.com website. I was in charge of the javascript that would be powering the maps, filters, etc. and also the UI. After a few days of programming and tweaking, we purchased the domain and launch restaurantweekmaps.com. The website is pretty simple. On load you are presented with pins marking all the restaurants available. Just use the slider and dropdowns to filter the list.

All the information is held in a Google Fusion Table. Fusion Tables make it really easy to visualize data that fits into a table. Obviously, the Google maps API is used to map everything. jQuery UI is used for the sliders and dropdowns.

We haven’t had a huge number of people using the site, but we think that might be because we launched towards the end of Restaurant Week. We’ll see if that changes come Restaurant Week Summer 2011.

To celebrate the launch of our website, and to take advantage of Restaurant Week, Vinny and I had lunch at Ai Fiori. Ai Fiori is one of three 4.5 star restaurants that are participating in Restaurant Week.

Vinny had the consommé that I unfortunately forgot the photograph. I had a salad.

For the main course, Vinny had the “Razza” skate wing and I had the “Tortelli” ravioli.

Then for dessert, I had the “Dark Chocolate Crémeux” and Vinny had the “Rosemary Apple.”

Overall the service and food were fabulous. I would highly recommend Ai Fiori to anyone who is interested in contemporary Italian cuisine. You can read what Vinny thought on his post about Ai Fiori.

If you are wondering what happened to my weekly photojournals, don’t worry. One will be coming pretty soon.

After many years of going smartphoneless, I finally got an iPhone 4! Because I love Tron, I made a special iPhone 4 wallpaper. Here it is:

Here is what it looks like on the iPhone:

I already tweeted about this, but I couldn’t help writing a blog post also.

As most of you know, I read Reddit on a regular basis. Last month, I came across this thread where a Redditor made a custom theme for Reddit. A lot of us suggested that someone should turn the original photoshop mockup into real CSS that could be turned into script. A few people took a crack at it. but one person really nailed it.

Below is what the front page looks like without the script. It isn’t exactly aesthetically appealing.

Here is the front page with the custom script enabled.

This is what one of the subreddits looks like before the script.

And after.

As you can see, with the script enabled, Reddit doesn’t look like a relic from the 90′s anymore. One downside to the new look is that fewer articles fit on the page. I can live with that though.

If you are interested in the script, click here. I found it works great in Firefox with Grease Monkey and Chrome.

Around a month ago, I won an MSI Wind U160 netbook on MSI’s Facebook page. I didn’t have much use for a netbook. Therefore, I listed it on eBay as Buy It Now Or Best Offer. After two weeks of being on eBay, no one had bought it and the best offer I received was around 40% of MSRP. I realized that the netbook is probably worth more than that to me and decided  to keep it.

Ever since the release of the First Asus Eee PC that started the netbook craze, I have always wanted a netbook. I think it is because I liked the idea of an inexpensive, ultra-portable laptop that is just powerful enough to perform day to day tasks.  The Wind U160 fits the bill. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom N450 “Pinetrail” processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 250GB of HD and the usual netbook fare like 10″ LED backlit display, Bluetooth, 802.11N, etc. It also came with a large 6 cell battery that protrudes from the back and props it up when set on a desk. This battery is supposed to give this netbook 14 hours of life on one charge. I only got 9 hours while browsing the internet and 6 to 7 while browsing and watching videos.

The form factor is pretty nice. It isn’t too small like the 7inch netbooks, but it is still small enough to be considered ultra-portable. Here it is sitting on my 4 year old MacBook Pro.

This netbook arrived with two partitions and Windows 7 Started pre-installed on one of them. Since, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be using Windows, I resized the partitions and installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Netbook Edition which is the latest LTS release. The installation process was relatively painless. Then, when I booted up, I couldn’t get the wireless to work. After some googling, I found out that 10.04 didn’t come with wireless drivers for the chipset found in my netbook. I had to add a 3rd party repository and download the drivers. I used Lucid Lynx for a week, but found it a little too clunky for my uses.

I downloaded the newly released 1.0 version of Jolicloud, the Ubuntu Jaunty based netbook OS and installed it over Lucid Lynx. immediately, I noticed that Jolicloud started up much quicker and has a slicker interface. As the name suggests, Jolicloud takes advantage of cloud based applications. The whole front end is built on HTML 5 and is very fast. Here is what the home screen looks like after start up and login.

All the applications are presented in an iOS-esque page system with large, beautiful icons. Some of the apps are native Ubuntu apps like Gimp.

Most are webapps. They are basically browser windows with toolbars absent. The Reddit “app” is below. As you can see, it is just the normal desktop version of the Reddit site.

Adding apps is as easy as it is on the iPhone. After clicking the large “+ Add” button on the top left, you are presented with a list of apps that is easy to sort and search through. When you want to install an app, you just click the add button and the OS takes care of the rest. When you go back to the home screen, the newly installed application will be there waiting for you.

The 250GB of storage and 10 inch screen make this a great portable video machine. I have been watching 720p episodes of Firefly and Gundam 00 on it.  As you can see, Gundam looks pretty good at the netbook’s native resolution of 1024×600.

There are a few complaints I have. First, for some reason USB drives did not automatically mount. I had to remedy the problem by editing the file system table. Also all utilities and built in apps are hidden away. I didn’t really care because I usually launch terminal by pressing atl+f1 and launch other apps through terminal. It was only when Caroline called asking me where terminal went (she had the beta version when terminal was easy to find) that I noticed that this may be a problem. For some reason, I cannot find any way to add any of these built in applications to the home screen. That is why you see the folder icon on my menu bar. It is a shortcut to the folder full of built in applications.

Other than these minor problems, the netbook experience has been much better than expected. I was expecting to be constantly frustrated by its small form factor and weak power. It isn’t going to replace my MacBook as my daily use computer anytime soon, but it will probably be my travel computer from now on.