How many files can be opened at one time?

Have you ever wondered? Ever? Exactly how many files can be opened on your computer at any one given time?

 

Well, today's google did not exactly answered my question. #3 kind of states the limit a C program can. #6 almost did, but not in a straight-forward way. An internet user shows an output for ulimit on his system and said that he seems to be hitting the limit at around 590 files. But is the limit hard-set for all computers or is it someone dependent on hardware and therefore not standard? Well, I am too tired to find out tonight. Maybe another day.

What the hell is ShoppyBag?

Yeah, so a couple of friends started sending me invitations to this page called ShoppyBag.

(1) They don't usually these invitation thingies;
(2) We usually share pictures (and tags) on facebook.

Therefore I didn't click on the link or whatever in that e-mail... But, after a few e-mail "reminders" I started feeling annoyed. Hence today's search on Google (note the impolite search term).

Top search result: http://cnnmoneytech.tumblr.com/post/1659806146/what-the-hell-is-shoppybag, quite a nice read, really: Entertaining, while also clearing up any doubt.

The e-mail account hacking/phishing/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is, I am highly convinced, independent of the shopping website www.shoppybag.com (Rank #6), which is a genuine website on which (I quote) "Friends Help You Shop". Until... I read the tweet (Rank #5) which said that ShoppyBag deceived the guy into giving information allowing access to his mail contacts.

This phenomenon apparently annoy enough people to get its own wiki page (Rank #7)... Amaaaaaaazing! And the wiki page also warns people out there to be careful when you sign up to ShoppyBag.

Apparently, the only real safe way to have friends help you shop, is to just ask them out on a shopping date! How simple is that? And absolutely no frills.

Google Chrome

Oh, have I failed to mention that Google Chrome is back in business on my laptop? No, I didn't solve the SCIM problem. The story goes like this:

When I first tried Google Chrome for LINUX, I was unable to have Chinese input in Chrome, and Chrome causes SCIM (the Input Method (IM) that I was using) to entirely crash and not able to load. Then I removed Chrome and SCIM worked OK again. Then I installed Opera, which version 10.52 was supposedly announced, but yet to be available for LINUX. Opera 10.51 did not make SCIM crash, but there's no input in Opera itself. So help was seek from Google, the almighty (yea, I'm a fangirl, so?). Apparently, SCIM does not support well the browsers (or any application, for that fact) that uses QT. Ah, so no wonder I had problems with frozen input on my instant messenger that uses QT.

Then comes more googling and a surprise (ta-daa): Ubuntu Karmic Koala ships with iBus, an IM recommended by net users. I swear if you never poked around in the Administration tab, you will never know of its existance. iBus is apparently a build-in IM for non-ASCII characters! So, I removed SCIM, totally! Yea, well, switching over was a bit hard. The native iBus IM only inputs one character at a time and it does not input Chinese punctuations, so it was a pain. But then, more googling brings me to install the ibus-pinyin packacge, that supports both the function missing in native iBus. Cool! And so, it's proven again that Google can do anything.

Ah, back to Google Chrome... With the IM problem solved, I was happy with Opera for a few weeks, until it starts being weighted down by reasons unknown to me. It started to startup really slooowly and started to load pages slower too. And then, one fine morning I had a lightbulb: if SCIM is out of the way, then Google Chrome should be a breeze, right? Except I have to test if it works with iBus. So I reinstalled Google Chrome, and had aptitute look for an update (and there was one so I installed it), and then viola! Google Chrome is back in action on my laptop and I'm one happy user!

All the apologies to Google for previously damning Chrome. And more to readers (if there were any out there) for an unexpectedly long post on Cookie-googles.

Google Chrome causes SCIM crash

Been using Google Chrome beta for LINUX for a week. I gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed. Before switching to LINUX, I've been using Google Chrome almost exclusively on the old Windows XP box. The browser did deliver well its promise to be faster than other browsers on the market.

The beta version for the open source OS was as promising, but did not deliver as well. Browser launching of the minimal Firefox 3.5 is much faster. Even Google search is faster by centi-seconds on Firefox.

Although, what drove me to the edge and finally decided to uninstall the celebrated browser was actually (written here) that it crashes the SCIM input method. Since installation of google-chrome-beta package, SCIM became unlaunchable and had on various event when I try to force launch as daemon, crashes the most foreground web page in Google Chrome.

After much hassle, I finally got SCIM working again after uninstallation of the browser. I'm not planning to give it another try until they graduate it from beta into a final version. Too bad, it's just too bad google releases several disappointments in a row lately. Maybe that means they should focus more and make things better before launch? My two cents.

Google Chrome

Google finally prompted me to download and install the Google Chrome Beta for Linux. It's expanding its coverage by giving the increasingly popular OS a chance to use one of the best software. So here's a search dedicated to you. OK, I do admit I'm a Google fanatic. But, hey, they do make some of the best software!

Getting Hardware Information in Ubuntu

I am thinking of upgrading my computer, maybe getting extra RAM. For that, I need to know what motherboard I've got, so I can perform the upgrade. #1 through #3 suggested different tools to check this information out on a machine running Ubuntu. So I clicked into each one of the above to take a look. #2, #3A and #3B all requires installation of some software, while #1 is not very suitable for Xubuntu flavour.

I don't believe that I cannot find a solution already available on my Xubuntu box, so I tried apropos. Wa-la~ apropos suggested lshw. It's so cool, it listed not only what I need, but also a lot of other things that i might find interesting if one day I decided to look into it. :) Mission accomplished, though google's help was not entirely neccessary.

Google Buzz

What's the latest Buzz? It's Google Buzz!
Like it's name, it haunts you like a bee. Personal top non-favourite: Spams your inbox with the stuff you "follow"! What's the deal? Man, you already have a "Buzz" tab that I can click into so I can read all the Buzzes. WTH?! Quoting a friend: "Hamik lai eh?"... Dude, you are going to get A LOT of spamming in your inbox putting that up to be followed. LOL~
Anyway, check out what Molly Wood has to say there... http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html the link, so you don't have to GOOGLE for it.
Sometimes, the awesome Google disappoints. There, I've said it. So, Apple fanboys, stop denying that your idol can absolutely fail you!

When was internet & facebook invented?

Answer to Question 1: 1989

It took about a year for internet to get graphical...

And then it took the internet about 15 years to get sociable. LOL~~ Just a figure of speech.

Photoshop Alternative Freeware

Oooh, my favourite software is running up as 3rd top result in GIMP for this category. Though I personally take that to be #1 because the top 2 were compilations/recommendations, which doesn't really count (to me anyway). Hurrah for GIMP!