Invisible users in Gtalk...

With the invisible feature for GTalk (in GMail), its easy to go invisible. Is there a way to findout whether a particular user is online or just invisible to others???

Recently I observed a small thing in GTalk that can easily tell you whether he is actually invisible or offline. Just ping the user that you want to know about his status, if the response doesn't contain anything in red and the response is something similar to the image below then the user is in invisible mode.



If the response is something similar to that of the image shown below(if you get the response in red color) then he is actually Offline.



The messages that you get in turn as response in the above two cases are different, which helps us to know the status of the user. This seems to be a very simple trick to check ... :) I have been using this successfully for a while to check my friends status.

Just for fun...

Wanna chat with my AI BOT ..
here u go..
Talk to Spider Man.

Modifying the Boot loader in Ubuntu !!

Recently I updated Ubuntu from 8.04 to 8.10. This has created one more entry in the Boot loader. I want to delete the unnecessary boot loader entries.

In Windows XP, we have a Boot.ini file where we can directly delete the entries using any Text Editor. But , Windows Vista doesn't have this Boot.ini option. Instead there is a BCDEdit.exe. I was not comfortable editing the Boot Loader file using this Vista tool. So I was looking for alternative solution.

The solution I found was pretty simple using Ubuntu GRUB. GRUB is a Master Boot Record. For example, if you have both Windows and Linux installed on a computer, GRUB would load before either of these and let you choose which one to boot.
Now as I found the exact solution to this problem, I navigated to /boot/grub/menu.lst file, which contains all the Boot Load entries like this ..

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root=UUID=dff991c4-a91a-4fe9-a6a7-a0608361eefd ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=dff991c4-a91a-4fe9-a6a7-a0608361eefd ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=dff991c4-a91a-4fe9-a6a7-a0608361eefd ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
quiet

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Now we have to delete the entries we dont want. I've deleted the unnecessary entries.. Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic and Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic sections.

Now I do have only the Boot entries which I want !!!!