Info Zone

It amazes me anytime Google brings out a product, they just do a wow and impressive stuff. Today I got notified by a colleague of mine at the office if I know about Google Translate , my hungry for new products from Google, I quickly loaded the page before he could finish with his sentences, I was on the site already.

As traditional of Google, it was in beta. I played around with it to translate from English to French to test my lousy French. The most amazing of it all is that, it translates website too to all the languages available. It translated my site from English to French and it worked like a charm.

Now I feel, most translators will be heading for a new profession as this really works almost perfect. It amazes me how it just works and the most fascinating thing about it is, it is beta but so intelligent that, it just works. What I’m hoping for in the future is for it to have almost all the major local languages. I miss my Twi, Ga, Ewe, Hausa, Swahili etc and I know others too have missed theirs. Google you rock!!

For many years now, Bill Gates has top the world richest list but as of yesterday as reported by Techdirt and BBC, Bill Gates is no more the worlds richest man, he has been overthrown by Mogul Carlos Slim a Mexican’s Telecom tycoon. Slim’s fortune worth about $67.8bn (£33.6bn) and above, as against Bill Gates whose fortune comfortably remains at $59.2 billion. Slim is specifically into wireless telephones and this tells you that, the phone industry is about to dominate the world, as most people are fancy about getting a new feature rich mobile phones all the time.

This also shows that Microsoft’s dominant days of the desktop are numbered and gradually counting down.

BTW, that is the photo of Mr Slim.

Today I decided to upgrade my system from Feisty to Gutsy the next release of Ubuntu.

The normal way to do an Ubuntu upgrade from an old release to a new release is to edit the “/etc/apt/sources.list” then replace all old release name to the new release name in the file. Quiet tedious if you ask me, because if you’ve a long list in your sources.list file, then it means you are going to sit for quiet long to effect the changes.

For me if I’m using vim to edit the file, I do this :%s /search_text/replace_text/g to quickly do the find and replacement. After, I save the file and do the normal “apt-get upgrade” and “apt-get dist-upgrade”, then get some coffee, watch it as it upgrades.Seems shorter eh?

Now I suffer no more long and tedious process, all I have to do, is just type these at the shell prompt.

  sudo sed -e 's/\ssearch_text/ replace_text/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade

As I’m blogging now, the upgrade is in progress.It is just sweet.I’m hoping nothing goes breaks though. Thanks to this post

I did a “man sed” to find about the “sed” command. sed is a stream editor for filtering and transforming text. It is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream. Notes taken from the man page. If you need more info about sed, then “man sed”. If you know of any quicker way too, please include them as comment.