Radu Cotescu's blog

I just want to start this article by emphasizing that I am not a fan of Adobe’s new products like Adobe AIR or Flex. They eat two buckets of RAM for some shiny effects that really don’t deserve this kind of resources. The explanation is rather simple: being new products, they are still full of [...]

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Following the post about my laziness and Tudor’s comment from here, I went on to study how fortune works and I have found a way to use it to change your status in Pidgin using posts from your WordPress blog. It’s quite neat if you think and also this trick could bring you more traffic [...]

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Starting to learn about Servlets and JSP from “Head First Servlets and JSP 2nd edition“, I have reached a level where just editing my files from gedit wouldn’t suffice, as typos began to generate frustrations on my side. Although this is the recommended way by the book authors to build your projects while learning, which [...]

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Looking to see if Google Desktop is now available for Linux I have discovered some Google goodies. Not only that they have ported this nice desktop companion software to Linux, they have also included in their repositories Google Gadgets (using both GTK and Qt, but it is a little buggy as some of the widgets [...]

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Recently I became a fan of VirtualBox, the virtualization platform from Sun Microsystems. It’s robust, it has an extremely small memory foot-print comparing it to other similar virtual managers and it has some great features. You can find more about it on its homepage.
Yesterday I have updated VirtualBox from 2.2.4 to 3.1. Unfortunately, the USB [...]

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UPDATE: Please check the solution from here as it represents the correct approach for fixing this problem in Ubuntu (all releases). Also, the patch from this post doesn’t work for the kernel included in Ubuntu 9.10.

Usually I do not use my laptop’s webcam. Not that I use another webcam. But when I made the radical [...]

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Scripts to avoid clicking in three places once they start their computer:

#!/bin/bash
firefox mail.cotescu.com &
thunderbird &
pidgin &
sleep 5s
purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message=http://radu.cotescu.com"
exit 0

This starts those three programs in the background once I log in provided that I add this script in System – Preferences – Startup Applications in Ubuntu.

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This came to me through a colleague at work:
Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.

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Today I got my second iPod, which now is an iPod Touch. It’s an awesome gadget that I can’t get enough of. I have already made it Twitter, write statuses on Facebook, sign into my mail account in Google Apps, on Yahoo Messenger and now I am writing this post on it.
Steve Jobs is truly [...]

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Following a previous unsuccesful try of using Twitter, I am now back on the famous microblogging platform. You can follow me there using this URL: http://twitter.com/raducotescu.
I have also set a WordPress plugin that will tweet my posts there and also the updates I make to posts.

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Since I installed Ubuntu on my laptop (an Asus X55sv with Intel Core 2 Duo T7500) a few months ago, I still faced one bug I was ashamed to write about because I wasn’t sure if it was a bug or just my fingers made the strange thing happen from time to time. I am [...]

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