XPERIA Arc S - Thermal Image

A good friend of mine took this with a thermal camera. This is XPERIA Arc S after been online for 5 minutes! The picture says it all.

Unlocked a Samsung Galxy Ace through ADB

Just finished un-locking a Samsung Galaxy Ace - S5830, that was locked on the 3 network - UK. We don't get to see lots of locked phones in Egypt, and the last time I unlocked a phone, it was through a paid service.

I didn't do much, rooted the phone and then followed the procedure in this xda thread to unlock it via ADB. It worked like a charm. Now my English friend can enjoy using his phone freely with an Egyptian SIM card.

Note: The method for temporary rooting the phone, mentioned in the thread above, didn't work with me, so I rooted the phone permanently.

An Icon Pack

Here is a work-in-progress icons I'm working on. I'm not so sure if I'll ever the time to complete these to what I imagine, but they're fine as they is now!. Royalty Free! Enjoy!

 

Any.DO vs. Taskos

First time I saw these two apps, I was under the impression that they were made by two competing friends, or probably one of them has taken the idea from the other, and created a new app. They have almost the exact same functionality, down to the small details, like shaking the list of tasks to clear completed ones, and of course their icons. The icons of both apps is a white tick mark on a sky-blue background.

But that was the first impression.

Now, having used them both for quite some time, alternating between them, I see myself drawn more towards Any.DO, as it provides the sleeker interface, and some smart functions, though sometimes intervening.

Any.DO is almost a 6MB download, while Taskos is 750kB, which is really inviting, given that it provides almost the same functionality.

Both apps sync with your Google account tasks, but Taskos does a better job at that. I actually had several occasions when I needed to go to my Google account and clean things a little bit, before doing the sync with any.DO.

On the other hand, any.DO has a very well accomplished user interface, nice graphics, option to choose between two themes (white vs. black).

Functionality-wise, any.DO catches the missed calls and set customizable reminders to call back. It also catches your meetings, on any of your calendars, and interactively generates any to-do's that might have resulted from the meetings. I had some problems with the meeting follow-up function in a previous version of Any.DO, but they're gone now.


Bottom line here, in my opinion, is that if you're looking for a nicer looking tasks app that acts smart, though sometimes intruding, Any.DO is the choice. If you have concerns regarding the size, don't want the intervention or looking for a better syncing, then Taskos is the one for you.

	Any.DO	Taskos
Size (MB)	0.75	5.8
Interface
Widget	YES	YES
Missed Call Reminders	YES	NO
Meeting Follow Up	YES	NO
Shake to Clear	YES	YES
Categories	YES	YES
Sorting
Sorting in Widget	NO	YES
Different Widget Sizes	YES	YES
Swipe to Mark as Done	YES	YES
Sync with Google	YES	YES
Automatic Syncing	Buggy	YES
Forced/Manual Syncing	YES	YES
Customizable Reminders	YES	YES
Snooz Reminders	YES	YES

Basic4android .. Clever!

I can't deny it. I'm addicted to BASIC.

Although through the years I've used several programming and scripting languages, the BASIC programming language, being my first love, is the nearest and closest to my heart. I've done complete working applications with MSX BASIC, MS-Basic, GW-Basic, QBasic, Visual Basic, RealBASIC and even ones like Gambas.

Few days ago, I found something called "Basic4android", and immediately downloaded the free trial version from their website, and currently playing with it a little. So far, it seems good enough.

One thing that actually got my attention was that they use the emulator, or an actual phone, as a visual GUI designer. Clever, isn't it? Instead of coding their own visual designer, which is the reason some similar projects have ended badly, they're just using the actual device.

The only drawback I see so far is that it is only released for Windows.

From what I can see, so far, the produced apps are small in size and performs really nice. I haven't done any benchmarking, not yet anyway, but they seem quit equivalent to those written in Eclipse/ADK.

Another Reason to Burn Down Windows!

I'm already annoyed for using Windows on my notebook, and not being able to get the full potential of it under Linux. This said, it seems like Windows doesn't want to leave it that. I used my work computer to log on to WLM, only to find a message on my next login telling me that my account has been hacked. OK, might happen, although I thought it was a mistake from Microsoft's Live.com. But two days later, after changing my password, I'm faced with the same message and required to change my password again.

This time, after finishing all the identification process and changed the password, I went to check my SENT folder. Right to the point, it was full of spam. About 50 messages that I haven't sent. What stupid hacker sends emails from my account, and forgets to delete them from my sent folder?

Investigating the problem, it seems that it was caused by me logging to WLM from my work computer. This one has Windows XP on it, and is managed by the Company's IT team. I can't even do a proper scan on it, as I don't have the proper privileges.

So, until I get Linus properly setup on my notebook, I'm sticking to my Android phone for online services!

Nokia's new Windows Phones

October 2011 was when Microsoft announced they're working with Nokia to develop a series of Windows mobile based smart phones. These days it's all over the tech scene news, with leaked news, specs, photos, etc., which promises the phone is about to hit the market.

The question I'm asking now is: will Microsoft-Nokia's phone survive the smart phone war and have a piece o of the Plus pie?

I'll look the Arabic/ middle east market. Here, people who but Nokia phones can be divided into two main categories: the ones buying cheap feature phones, and those who are buying Nokia because they feel they're more familiar with the phone's GUI. Despite the fact that most modern phones have GUI's that don't resemble the old ones.

Both of these categories don't actually care about the "smartness" of the phone, they want to either buy cheap phones that does voice calls, or buy modern phones, despite the price, that would have a familiar interface to what they're used to. I have personally had many discussions with Nokia phones owners about switching to iPhone or android-based and their answer was that they don't need all the features nor do they ready to try new things.

Hence, Nokia shall face a great challenge in marketing their Windows phones. They're not cheap low end phones, nor have the same "familiar" software. If Nokia fails promoting for their new devices, they will be in a bad situation that might bring down three whole company!

On the other hand, back in the days before iPhones and android phones, Windows phones were not so popular. Blackberry's were the mark for smart phones. Windows phones were something that geeks would buy just to check out or experiment with. Something like showing off to your friends today by having an 8.5" diskette. This doesn't contribute well to marketing the phone.

Facebook's FlashCache: a Linux ExpressCache?

In a previous post I was trying to get the best of my Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook, with Linux. One of the points that I intended to research is how to implement the ExpressCache in a Linux environment.

ExpressCache, in Condusiv's own words, is an innovative technology developed by Condusiv Technologies to improve system speeds by incorporating SSD technology advances into Windows 7 systems.

In plain English, ExpressCache is a way to utilize the SSD storage as a caching layer to speed up reads and writes during applications runtime, among other things.

Now, in my search for how to implement such technology in a Linux environment, I came upon what I might call a shocking discovery, namely FlashCache. FlashCache is a, shockingly, facebook open source project that introduces the same concept and which was released on April 27, 2010. It seems that facebook, in sake of speeding up their data extraction, for obvious reasons, have developed this technique. It is open source, and it works greatly with Linux (actually, I believe it was developed for Unix/Linux).

Now, Implementing the flashcache is not hard. There are a couple of tutorials online, some of them are specifically for Ubuntu, and a nice Wiki on the Arch Linux Wiki page, but since I crave learning I'm planning on understanding the Block Cache on Linux, first, then implement that on my installation. I'll be fully documenting and blogging about it at a later time.

eType for Android -- First Impression

I'm working, or trying to start working, on a full "PC Suite"-like application to deal with Android phones. One of my intentions is to have a feature that allows the user of the application to type on his/her PC physical keyboard and see the output on their phone, whether the phone is connected via USB cable, Bluetooth, or WiFi; a feature I used to intensely use with MyPhoneExplorer for Sony Ericsson phones.

This led me to do a quick search about the subject, and I stumbled upon an app in the Play store called eType, from DoMobile. So, I downloaded the free version to my phone, and started playing around for a few minutes.

Here's what I found.

The app's idea is actually impressive, on the creativity side, that is. It ba sically sets a web server on the phone, that you open via your browser and type. Whatever you type in your web browser, on your PC, is then transferred to a med-app in form of keyboard, or input method, that is identified by the phone's OS.

Unfortunately, it works only via WiFi, meaning that there should always a WiFi network that both the PC and the phone are connected to, in order to utilize this app.

Now, if the idea was really creative, the implementation was very poor, in my opinion. Yes, the app works, and the text does appear on the phone's text container, but I couldn't not notice that the app doesn't actually work in real-time; instead it refreshes the text container every half a second, according to my estimation. And when I said "refreshes" I really mean that the app deletes and retypes all the text in the text container each time, about twice a second. This causes two annoyances: first, if you type fast on the computer's keyboard, you'll really feel the lag of the text appearing on the phone. This would even be worse if you decided to look into the phone's screen and type, instead of looking into your PC's monitor. Second, refreshing the whole amount of text in a relatively large document, I'm talking two paragraphs, for instance, results in blinking. With the refresh rate being about twice a second, one feels the phone really flickering.

I still insist on that the idea is nice, probably DoMobile would work more on it to overcome the negative sides.

Recovering the ExpressCache on Windows

OK. I did the thing that I'm best at. Formatted my new Samsung Series 5 14" notebook (or ultrabook, though I'm totally convinced). I'm not talking about a normal system partition format, I'm actually talking about a full hard drive and solid disk drive format. To be frank, I thought I was covered, having the Recovery DVD at hand. It turned out that the Recovery DVD is merely a copy of Windows 7 Home Edition, and it didn't even recognize my network card driver!

Unfortunately, I destroyed the Recovery Partition in the process, and hence the recovery option [F4 on booting] wouldn't work, anymore.

Well, it was surprising to me that the Recovery DVD didn't have the drivers embedded, or slip-streamed, into the Windows installation, and I found myself in a very disappointing situation: no drivers and no way to connect to the internet. I tried plugging in my USB modem, but it was like dead. I looked around, and knew that the drivers for the USB 3 ports were also missing. (Later, I realized that the port on the right side of the device is a USB 2).

But to tell the truth, the Samsung web site had all the drivers and utilities needed, although in very large file sizes, which enabled me to download them and install them one by one. As tedious as it was, and feeling those bad feeling of someone working with Windows after being on Linux for quit sometime, I could revive the system to a state very similar to that it was on.

The only thing that was missing now was the instant on feature, or as I knew later, the ExpressCache. I know that this relates to the SSD installed, but I couldn't get it to work. I installed all the drivers, including the intel ExpressCache driver, and the intel ExpressCache application, among the Easy Settings and the Easy Software Manager, but nothing changed. I still don't have that feature.

The feature I'm talking about is the ability to "SLEEP" Windows, with the device going almost on no power. The normal Sleep will keep the power led blinking slowly, but with the express cache thing, it was like an instant hibernate. With setting it to turn on with the lid opening, I also had an instant-on, sort of thing.

I googled around a little, and found this article on NoteBook Review, which pointed to something I found very weird, to say the least. It turned out that for the Intel ExpressCache to work, the SSD must be in Mac Disk format!

I did just that and had the ExpressCache back on.

My next thing to do is try to simulate the same behavior on Ubuntu!

Samsung Series 5 14 inch Ultrabook -- First Impressions

Just got a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook, the 14 inch, one. The device comes configured with a 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM (DDR3), a Core i5 processor and a Radeon display card.

These are my first impressions on the device, but before I start this, I must say that I was actually trying to get the 13.3”, with an SSD instead of the HDD. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it anywhere in the Egyptian market, and all my trials to contact Samsung Egypt were unsucessful.

The first thing I liked about it was it's keyboard. I like the US layout over the British layout (the one with the big “ENTER” key). It's been a while since I had a keyboard to my liking which is nice.

The big touchpad is also a plus, and it feels really nice and smooth with nice “click” to its buttons.

The full VGA and HDMI ports (vs. mini and micro VGA and HDMI ports) are another plus, since the device is thick enough to accommodate them with ease. This spares me the trouble of carrying converting cables all the time, as I do lots of presentations.

Another thing I liked, although might be considered unorthodox in these devices is that it has both the mic and phones jack combined together in one. To be frank, I haven't tested it, yet, but my guess is that a headset compatible with Android phones would be recognized by the device. Another save on the cables side!

Now to the things I didn't like.

The things that I hate the most is the heat! The device does get over-heated and high on temperature to an annoying level. In fact, I couldn't keep it on my legs for more than 20 minutes, and it was starting to feel real hot.

The second annoyance is the monitor. The vertical viewing angle is very small, leading to a distorted display whenever I raise or lower my body. I had to re-adjust the monitor angle every time I shifted in my seating position.

The third thing, which I consider a disappointment, is the battery life. Fully charged, the battery lasted around 3hrs 20minutes, with the brightness set to about 70% and no USB devices connected neither a CD-ROM used. Moreover, I was connected via an Ethernet cable and disabling the WiFi!! To be frank, I don't know if this is the normal trend of the battery, or is it just my unit, but I recall reading somewhere online that this device's battery lasts for 6+hrs. (Might do a recheck that). (UPDATE: [2012-07-31]: I was able to get a battery life a little over 5 hours, today. It is probably because I installed all the drivers and used the Easy Settings Application to Optimize the Power Usage. The problem is: all this is done under Windows. Under Linux, things can't get that good, unfortunately)

The device utilized a 16GB SSD for hibernating and fast booting, which is a plus, in my opinion.

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 was a breeze, and it detected everything correctly. Now I'm planning to re-install it with partition setup that would allow for fast booting and hibernate/wakeup, utilizing the 16GB SSD as boot and root partitions, but that will be the talk of another day!

Windows Azure -- Thoughts

Reading about Microsoft creating a Linux client for its web platform Windows Azure produced mixed feelings inside my brain. For once, Microsoft is actually writing software for Linux, which is a confession of the existence and popularity of such marvelous operating system. On the other hand, though, I wondered if this is an attempt from Microsoft to invade the Linux community? You see, when Gates published his book "The Road Ahead", back in the mid-90's, he had this vision that in "the future" all well have on our desks is a terminal, a minimal computing unit that is capable of only connecting to the internet, where all our files are stored and where we can rent times on the software applications we use.

Windows Azure is actually, IMHO, the realization of this idea or vision. Thinking in Microsoft's shoes, I would say that the best strategy for controlling the emerging market of the cloud would simply be by providing access to such service from all possible terminals. This will bring customers from allover, and in the same time turn all computers around, including those running rival operating systems into merely access points for my services.

I might be over-thinking this, but knowing the history of Microsoft, I can't stop myself thinking this way.

On a third hand, I recalled Linus Torvalds' famous words: If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux, it means I've won.

Windows RT Closed for Third Party Browsers

Microsoft, announcing the new Windows RT, or Windows on ARM, as it was known during the development phase, is repeating the 90's browser mistake once again.

The new Windows RT, reportedly is not going to allow any third party browsers, other than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. Will it be history repeating itself?

Mozilla, the makers of the open source browser FireFox, have expressed their concerns regarding this issue, highlighting their vision of the ARM processors as the future.

It is worth mentioning here that Microsoft is a very minor player in the market of the ARM-driven devices, such as smart mobile phones and tablets, but as the market share of these devices is increasing, their seeking a bigger share.

Personally, I know I wouldn't by a tablet with Windows on it, not with all the Android and potentially other linux-based OS's, like Ubuntu making their way into that market.

The Effect of a Beautiful UI

I blog from my Android device, sometimes. Because of that, I've tried several blogging clients over the time. Currently, I'm trying BlogPost, which seems very promising and is rich in features.

But, while surfing through different apps in the Play Store (I don't like the new name, btw), I came across the newly updated WordPress app, with its newly designed interface. To be frank, the new interface is stunning, to the extent that I was evaluating my options for moving my blog from blogsopt/blogger to WordPress!!

This idea, in itself, got me wondering: could a beautifully designed user interface be enough to push the user from one service provider to another? to sacrifice some of the features, and the comfort of being "used to" something? Would a user be willing to actually abandon a service he trust to, at least, try a new service?

The idea in itself feels both very possible, and scary. Very possible, because I've experienced the effect of the user interface design in the mentioned example, and was really (and still am) evaluating my options now. But it is also scary, for the programmer-side of me, as this means a nicely designed interface could take my users away (I'm not a very good UI designer).

Another example struck me, also from the Android world, as I recall how I found two brilliant pieces of software: AnyDo and Taskos. Both apps do almost exactly the same thing, they both have almost the same icon, a white "check" mark on a light blue background and they almost have the same screens.

At 750KB, Taskos seemed to be the better choice, vs. over 5MB for AnyDo. It gets the job done, in the same mechanism as its competitor, with the same features. But on my phone now, resides an installed copy of AnyDo, not Taskos. AnyDo, despite being larger in size and a resources-hungry app, has a much beautifully designed UI than Taskos. I'm serious. The difference is huge. To be frank here, I doubted that AnyDo developer used Taskos source code, and polished the UI a bit, judging by how almost identical the apps are.

The bottom line is ... I need to start making friends UI designers!

Sozi

A little over a year ago, I met Prezi, for the first time. For those not familiar with it, Prezi is an online tool for creating non-linear presentations. Although, the term non-linear doesn't accurately describe what Prezi has to offer, Prezi is a very good tool to produce these Flash-based presentations.

Time passed, and I didn't really use Prezi for more than two or three presentations. Probably this is because we still have the "Slides" culture, but every now and then, when I need to initiate a new presentation or renew an existing one, Prezi comes back to the front of my head. Every time Prezi pops up in front of me, I try to find some desktop tool to produce similar results, preferably Open Source (Well, I'm a Linux-only user now).

Well, today I came across this Inkscape extension called "Sozi". Sozi is an extension for Inkscape that produces animated svg's with resulting Posters or "canvas" similar to those produced by Prezi. It is pretty simple, and straight forward once you get grip of the basic concepts. A nice introductory tutorial can be found here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOuf7w_Qesk].

Sozi official website [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php]

Installation Instructions [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:install]

OMG! Ubuntu! Conducts an Interesting Survey

An interesting survey results published to OMG!Ubunto! indicated that 51% of the Ubuntu users use Android devices. The survey also shows, among other interesting facts, that age of Ubuntu users ranges between 25 to 35 years old.

Although the survey shows that 75% of Ubuntu users also use Windows, it doesn't show for what applications they use it for (nor what applications they use Ubuntu for, for that matter), nor what percentage of that group uses both Windows and Ubuntu in a dual-boot setup.

All in all, the survey is interesting and very useful.

Never Liked TouchWiz

Having had several Android phones over the past two years, I got to develop a taste when it comes to the vendor's default launcher. Between phones from acer, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and SonyEricsson, I would say that the most annoying and less comfortable default launcher is Samsung's TouchWiz.

TouchWiz, developed to imitate the interface on older Samsung touch-screen mobiles' interface, is, in my opinion, the worst thing on good phones such as the Galaxy S2. I'm not really talking about performance. I'm talking about how things look and feel. The TouchWiz feels rigid, out-fashioned and doesn't give you the Android feel that you might get from the Sense interface, though originally designed for Windows phones, or get from the XPERIA interface, for example.

From my point of view, TouchWiz, being designed for feature phones, cannot be used for smart phones. It is a different animal, all together.

That said, I must admit that the TouchWiz on my Galaxy 551 was the main motivation for me to root and install a custom ROM on the phone, only 10 days after purchase -- and it was my first rooting.

LibreOffice - IBM Symphone: Take Two!

In a previous post, I chose to use IBM Symphony as my office package, basically because it seemed to offer more features than LibreOffice. Today, I removed IBM Symphony after finding, statistically, that I use LibreOffice more often. It's been almost a month since I last open an application of the Symphony package. I'm not claiming that the LibreOffice is better, not in this stage, anyway, but I've came to the conclusion that anything in symphony is there somewhere in LibreOffice. To be frank, I'm starting to think that the Symphony implements pieces of the OpenOffice.org's code, if not the whole deal! (No, I'm not saying that I dived in the code and found anything, I'm just under such impression, given what I see on the surface).

So, today I removed the symphony, and happily got rid of the system tray icon for it.

Nevernote

I use evernote. For those who don't know what evernote is, it's a note taking "cloud", supported by a Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and plugins for the most of the popular web browsers. It is really useful, and I haven't stopped using it ever since I found about it.

And, yes, you guessed right. There is no version for Linux. The developers, though, at evernote.com give a nice statement about how they don't have the sufficient resources to support an OS with as small share in the desktop market as Linux.

True, or false, that statement is, an open source project called Nevernote fills the gap there. The software is very good that people at evernote.com list it as a replacement or equivalent to their application in the linux environment.

You can get Nevernote from here. It is available in both deb and rpm, for x86 and x64 computers.

One thing left to say, that the application name has  changed from Nevernote to NixNote.

MDI - Microsoft Document Imaging Format

If you have used the Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI), like me, when it was introduced in Office 2003, then you must have been looking around for solutions to enable you to open the .mdi files today.

I have more than few documents on my hard drive that I produced in MDI format, which was promoted to be the new PDF format from Microsoft. It was portable, and it was in that time when you needed third party software to produce PDF's from Microsoft Office documents, which gave it all the importance. The ability to produce PDF-like documents with ease and directly from within the Microsoft Office was neat.

But .. Just as everything that is Microsoft, they take decisions for you, and put them to execution, leaving you struggling behind, trying to solve issues you have no hand in, except for adopting the Microsoft way, off-course. 

I'm not going to be talking about opening .mdi files in other operating systems than Microsoft's, neither about opening them without an installation of Microsoft Office, on the contrary, I will assume a loyal Microsoft customer, who upgrades his Office suite regularly, and now has Microsoft Office 2010 installed on his W7-machine.

According to Microsoft's support website, mdi format is now obsolete. This does not only mean you can't produce mdi files anymore, but also you can't open them! Although, the format was originally Microsoft's way for PDF-like documents, Microsoft doesn't provide a stand-alone reader for the format, nor a converter to other formats. Those of us who have .mdi documents laying around, have to follow one of two solutions, according to this post by Microsoft. Either download and install a free version of the SharedPoint Designer 2007, which is a 300MB download, for it has an mdi viewer, or use the Office 2007 installation medium (I don't remember where mine is now, but probably wrecked and thrown away) to install the optional Microsoft Office Document Imaging component.

This is B.S., if you ask me. Any decent programmer working in a garage, let alone a huge company such as Microsoft, knows well that in such situation, the least one can do is to provide a stand-alone reader/conversion tool to your obsolete formats.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this product, MDI2PDF, which is supposed to be able to convert MDI files to the more solid and usable PDF format. In its free edition, the only thing I could do, besides viewing the mdi files and answering annoying messages, is to convert the first page of each mdi to a bmp or jpeg file. If your mdi's are more-than-one-page, then you have to go with the Microsoft Solution.

Enabling RTL in Symphony and Libre Office

This one took awhile to figure out, and it was easy. I write in Arabic, my native language. Arabic is an RTL (Right-To-Left) language, which requires RTL support in my word processor.

By default, word processors do not show support for RTL directly, as their default language/languages are mostly LTR ones (English and Latin languages).

I use Ubuntu now, with both Libre Office and Symphony as my Office Packages (still trying to chose one of them permanently, and wishing it would Libre Office, since it is an Open Source Project). Again, by default, both Symphony and Libre Office Writer do not show support for RTL by default, and I had to look around a little bit to know that they include this in the CTL (Complex Text Layout) support.

Moving to Ubuntu Linux - pt.02

Being a technical editor, by day, means I do intensive document editing. I like to believe that I use the MS-Word features to the max. Even the buggy ones, like the Master Document. 

Sparing so much details, and although I tend to like the open source solutions, I couldn't find any of the available packages fully satisfying my editing needs. The closest was IBM's Lotus Symphony. It's a shame that there's not open source solution with such capabilities, but Lotus Symphony is freeware, anyway.

IBM doesn't provide a 64bit package for Symphony, but googling around brought up links to 64bit deb packaged by Dylan, in OMGUbuntu.

Symphony works just fine. It is true that it lacks some of the features, but having a macro mode helps. Personally, I would rate the experience a good 80% satisfaction for the word processor.

Moving to Ubuntu Linux - pt.01

Entirely abandoning the Microsoft Windows operating system to another platform has always seemed inapplicable. Someone like me, for instance, has been working with Windows ever since Windows 3.0. With loads of accumulated documents, software and experiences, it's really hard to start all over.

But with the Linux distributions growing more mature, I thought to give it a try and see if one can really abandon the Windows. It's been three months now, and I'm spending more than 95% of my computer time on Ubuntu, so I'm willing to say/pretend that it's a very close to entirely abandoning Windows.

Note: this experiment does not cover gaming, as I'm not a gamer, myself.

Planning

Creating a list of all the critical items in one's computer use is crucial before the starting of this process. For me, the following was the list of critical items of concern:

1. Editing MS-Office 2007/2010 documents: From my past experiences with the various Linux distros, it was never a problem dealing with the old MS-Office document formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt). Dealing with the new (.docx, .xlsx and .pptx) formats was something I must experiment with and be confident about.
2. Accessing my corporate email server (MS-Exchange Server): My company works with Exchange server [period].
3. Installing Eclipse with the Android SDK: As I'm experimenting with the Android platform these days, having my familiar IDE (eclipse with the ADK) is something I'm concerned about.
4. Accessing MS-SQL database (which resides on another server): In my work, I prepare lots of reports, mostly excel-based, that read from MS-SQL server database. It's very important for me to be able to read and modify an MS-SQL database from within my computer to produce such reports.
5. Accessing the company's VPN.

Up to the time of writing these lines, I've succeeded in the first 3 items, with various degrees, still working on the 4th item and haven't started yet on the 5th.

Eclipse IDE and the ADT: Missing requirement: Error

Setting up my laptop for developing Android applications under Ubuntu, I was faced with the error message:

  Missing requirement: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) requires 'org.maven.ide.eclipse [1.0.0.20110607-2117]' but it could not be found

This was during the installation of the Android Development Tools (ADT) under eclipse. When I googled the problem, it turned out to be something related to "administrative" privileges (under Windows platform), and seems to be related to Indigo version of eclipse.

Anyway, I figured that if it's something related to "administrative privileges", then I might solve this by launching the eclipse in su mode. Alt+F2 got me the command dialog, where:

gksudo eclipse

Setting up the ADT using the google repository https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ as described in the official document was a matter of waiting for the download to complete, after that.