Anurag Bhandari

jQuery is a very powerful JavaScript framework, and to put in their own terms, is The Write Less, Do More JavaScript library. jQuery’s slogan indeed holds true to its claim, as you’ll discover as soon as you start coding using jQuery. Although jQuery has an extensive set of API and a collection of many functions in its arsenal, I would be concentrating more on the AJAX capabilities of jQuery in this tutorial.

Most of the modern websites, irrespective of whether they offer a simple or a complex interface, usually use AJAX for some task or the other. While designing in order to cater to today’s needs, it becomes almost indispensable to use AJAX to make the end-user experience faster and more pleasant. So, if you had been deferring the use of AJAX till now owing to it’s complexity in raw JavaScript, here is your chance to start using it with utmost ease.

It is really amazing to see how much simplified AJAX is with jQuery. The developers have seemingly (and painstakingly) done a lot of hard work behind the scenes to make it easy for the web developer to implement even the most complex JavaScript concepts, including AJAX.

For the purpose of demostrating AJAX, I’ll be making use of a simple web application (that I designed using HTML, PHP, jQuery, CSS and MySQL). I call it the Albums Database.

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KDE 4 comes with it’s own set of cool 3D effects built-in, but disabled by default. In order to enjoy these effects, you need to enable them manually through the Desktop section of System Settings. But in some cases, enabling 3D can get painfully difficult, as was in my case.

3D can be enabled through one of two options – XRender and OpenGL. Effects using XRender are quite slow and inferior to what is offered by OpenGL.

Enabling 3D with XRender normally works well on almost all machines, but problems start when you try to enable 3D using OpenGL. The most common error that pops us when trying to do so is:

Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values

Here are some simple steps to make sure you can enable OpenGL 3D effects without errors and problems.

To start with, make sure you have:

• Proper video drivers installed (proprietary drivers in case of NVIDIA and ATI) and 3D acceleration enabled.
• The xorg.conf file setup properly.

In most situations, these sections are usually missing from the file xorg.conf (found in /etc/X11):

Section "Files"
    ModulePath     "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
    ModulePath     "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions"
    ModulePath     "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Option       "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

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I had been tweeting more than blogging these days. But anyway, I had been publishing what I want to say quite regularly.

Frustrated of getting tonnes of spam on the Granular Package Archive everyday, I finally fixed the issue today, once and for all. This had been a long time pending task. I did this by integrating reCaptcha.

Saw Toy Story last week. Loved it! My favorite dialog? – “To infinity and beyond”.

India’s Cricket tour of West Indies starts just three days from now.

I am missing Granular development a lot; hopefully I’ll be able to continue development within a week or so. Meanwhile, the artwork team (Granuminati) had been doing some great stuff.

Still reading The Fountainhead (by Ayn Rand) since months now. I am a sloooow reader when it comes to philosophy novels. Anyway, I have started with the part 3 of novel based on Gail Wynand.

Finally did the dreaded Drupal update for granularproject.org.

Power cuts here, in Punjab, are getting worse day-by-day. 7 hour cuts are a norm these days.

As was hinted in a post at Team Granular blog, Granular will now be a part of the Unity Project. Unity is in it’s beginning stages, but development is already on full swing. The enthusiasm of developers and members can be seen clearly on Unity’s devel mailing list and its public forum. At this point of time, I’ll refrain myself from giving full details about the association of Granular with Unity, but detailed announcements will come out at a later stage. What all I can tell you right now is I am pretty happy with the progress that’s been going on at Unity and Granular.

One more thing. You see only the Granular logo at the left and no logo of Unity as it’s still being finalized. But I am sure the creative artwork guys there will come up with something interesting pretty soon.

Tom (aka Kurakroma and cbar2 on Granular Community Forum) was a very active member of the forum and one of the global mods there too. He used to be the live wire of the forum, and had a very keen mind which he utilized in discovering new things and putting forward questions, and sometimes trying to help people facing problems using Granular (or Linux in general). But under some circumstances not known to the Team Granular members, he left the forums quietly; not leaving even a single message of this sudden action of his.

Just recently, some one at the Granular forum put forward a question asking whether we owned the .co.uk domain of Granular Linux, perhaps the British community of Granular (no, we don’t own any such domain)? On checking which link he was referring to, we were quite surprised to find out there indeed existed a .co.uk domain of Granular.

Check it out for yourself. Rest is self-explanatory. Boy, what a way of expressing his regret. Let me assure you Tom, all your apologies are accepted. And all our doors are still open for you.