Shahid Hussain

Category: Tech

  • Mozilla Labs Concept Series: Pie Assisted Gestures

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    A few days ago, Mozilla Labs invited students to answer the question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.” I thought I’d take a crack at it myself, even though I’m clearly going to get my ass kicked by the engineering…

  • Restoring your Linux partition in rEFIt

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    If your lovely Linux icon has, for whatever reason, disappeared from rEFIt to be replaced by the generic icon (or just vanished completely), here’s how to fix it. rEFIt, a wonderful boot manager for Mac, peers at all of your partitions when it boots, takes a guess at what OS is on there and shows…

  • Dual Booting Ubuntu 8.10 with Tiger on a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    This weekend was taken up by one huge discovery: it is possible to use Gparted on Ubuntu Ibex to resize an HFS+ partition non-destructively. This one fact made it incredibly easy to dual boot my MacBook Pro with Linux. Here’s how: Backup everything you might want to keep from your Mac just in case. Resizing…

  • Comcast HSI troubleshooting

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    I recently solved a problem that’s been bugging with me on Comcast HSI (High Speed Internet), and just in case this helps anyone else, I wanted to document it. In my case, I’d first plugged in the cable modem, then my Macbook, and gotten zero. The Mac had been issued a DHCP address that looked…

  • Outsourcing Trust

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    Are you familiar with the UAC prompt in Vista? Or the “%Application would like to use your current location” prompt on the iPhone? We – the nerds – can make fairly accurate decisions about the security of a product. My mum probably can’t. Strangely, she’s being asked all the same questions as I am. This…

  • Office 2007 Picture Transparency

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    A very small hack. In Office 2003, once you have inserted a picture you can make it transparent. If you love transparency, you’ll have been disappointed to discover that this function has been removed in Office 2007. However, there is a way around. It’s a little bit ugly. Insert a regular vector object like a…

  • Kellogg Directory Search Plugin (Bar Edition)

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    I have been given a more common use case for my OpenSearch plugin, which is: Go to The Keg / Nevins / Prarie Moon of an evening Meet someone new Introduce yourselves to each other by your first name … Wake up the next morning and try to remember who it was you were talking…

  • Kellogg Directory Search Plugin

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in ,

    For those of us at Kellogg, we search for people in our online photo directory a LOT. So, I’ve found a way to create a search plugin for those of us using Firefox 2+. Here’s how to do it: Click this link This will generate a plugin on the searchplugins.net site. In the middle of…

  • Optimize video for Youtube on Linux with FFMPEG

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    On observing a colleague at work with a Macintosh, I was impressed with the FFMPEGX tool, and disappointed that there was no equivalent on Linux. Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more wrong – it’s built around the FFMPEG tool, which is originally for the Unix / Linux platform. You will have to prepare yourself for…

  • Restoring GRUB on Ubuntu

    —

    by

    Shahid Hussain
    in

    Possibly the only useful article on the previous incarnation of this blog was this on, detailing how to pull GRUB back up under Ubuntu. This was written with reference to Ubuntu 4, which I was hooked on like a turbot. There are many standard ways of reinstalling GRUB – most involve using a Linux rescue…