Uncategorized

Richard Feynman: The messenger series

August 12th, 2009

If you have studied Physics in any of the courses, then you must have heard of Richard Feynman. I used to read the 3 volumes of “Feynman Lectures on Physics” religiously when I was in my engineering. Microsoft’s Project Tuva has now hosts some of the Feynman’s lectures, unmissable if you are physics geek! → [...]

→ Ten things we don't understand about humans

August 8th, 2009

We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation But as science probes deeper into these eccentricities, it is becoming clear that behaviours and attributes that seem frivolous at first glance often go to the heart of what it means to be human. → Ten [...]

→ Let's make the web faster

August 5th, 2009

There are many ways to make websites run faster. In this section, you can discover performance best practices that real web professionals employ in their everyday work. These practices have improved the user experience for millions of users and we hope they are useful for other web developers. → Let’s make web faster

Customizing Hippo CMS – Getting Started

June 19th, 2009

This post is part of a series which will be focusing mainly on Hippo CMS’s extensibility. These posts are more targeted towards the developers who want to customize and enhance the core CMS functionality.

→ Wordnik.com

June 9th, 2009

Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them. Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too! [...]

1969's View of The Internet

May 15th, 2009

→ TED talks now in 40+ languages

May 13th, 2009

Probably you have heard of TED or watched none of the conference videos already. Now the TED conference talks are being translated into many local languages. The TED Open Translation Project brings TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, interactive transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. → [...]

Debugging maven-jetty web application in NetBeans

May 12th, 2009

Setup Jetty to run with Debugging enabled on port 8000 export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,address=8000" Run Jetty using Maven Plugin mvn jetty:run In NetBeans, Goto Debug→ Attach Debugger menu. Select Java Debugger(JPDA) and specify the port as 8000. Now you can debug the webapplication using NetBeans.

→ Afghanistan's has only one pig

May 9th, 2009

Afghanistan’s only known pig has been quarantined because of fears over swine flu, officials from Kabul Zoo say. Acknowledging that being Afghanistan’s only pig is a lonely existence, Mr Saqib says he hopes to find Khanzir a female companion soon. However, he says, because of swine flu, “it is a dangerous and difficult time to get [...]

★ Santorini – Sunset at Firostefani

May 2nd, 2009

★ Santorini – Lunch

April 30th, 2009

★ Santorini – Cruise

April 30th, 2009

★ Santorini

April 30th, 2009

★ Breakfast at Santorini

April 30th, 2009

Trip to Santorini

April 29th, 2009

Today evening we are leaving for Santorini, Greece. I always wanted to goto Santorini ever since I saw the iconic blue dome images everywhere. This is going to be short trip for 4 days, but I’m sure we are gonna have a lot of fun and enjoy the beautiful scenery of volcano/caldera, sea and the [...]

One week with Hippo

April 28th, 2009

Last monday I’ve started with my new job as Product Consultant at Hippo. It has been eventful week. I started working with the JCR API/Content Management and Other Hippo Components. Here are some reflections in my understanding during last week:

★ Fruit Punch

April 24th, 2009

PSD file format

April 24th, 2009

From comment in the code of Xee // At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX [...]

"The Bride Was Beautiful"

April 23rd, 2009

Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, held off cancer to celebrate the happiest day of her life. Katie had chased away cancer once, only to have it return – to clog her lungs and grab hold of her heart. Breathing was difficult now, she had to use oxygen. The pain in her back was so intense it broke [...]

Just Married

April 21st, 2009

After  years of negotiations with our elders and longest drama of my life, I got married with Neha last week during my trip to India. And we have a brand shiny new website about us: www.VijayandNeha.com To keep noise to signal to a minimum, we’ll be uploading our photos, and publish our blog in that [...]

→ Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams

March 14th, 2009

Good design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for [...]

Seam Mail (2.1.1) – Attachment not working when body type is 'plain'

March 7th, 2009

I was working with a Jboss seam application, and found out that I cannot send attachment when the body type is set to ‘plain’. After searching the seam bugs, I found this: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBSEAM-3970 I checked out the code to rebuild the fixed seam-mail.jar. If you are also experiencing the issue, then you can just replace your [...]

named broken on Plesk Server

February 24th, 2009

After I updated one of my Centos Servers, bind/named was broken giving out error : cannot access ‘/var/named/run-root/var/named’: No such file or directory Error in named configuration /etc/named.conf:6: parsing failed Seems like the latest ‘yum update’ broke the named configuration, I had to rebuild the named.conf using the plesk tool dnsmng: 1 2 3 4 [...]

Quotes from Curious Case of Benjamin Button

February 21st, 2009

Some quotes I liked from the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this [...]

Pathé Bolt Gift Packet

February 20th, 2009

I just got my pathé disney bolt gift packet. It is AWESOME!! So here’s the stuff I got from bottom-left to right : Bolt Watch, Bolt USB Splitter, Bolt Flying Disc (Frisbee) and The Bolt Book. Ah, the joy of being lucky and actually winning cool stuff

★ Varanasi

February 19th, 2009

★ Violinist

February 19th, 2009

★ Baby

February 19th, 2009

→ What you should copy

February 18th, 2009

The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in creative commercial endeavors of any kind — is that the creators are building something they themselves love. That’s what you should copy. – John Gruber via Daring Fireball

→Interview with Andrew Stanton

February 15th, 2009

David Poland sits down for a chat with the co-writer and director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo, Andrew Stanton.

WordPress Auto Update error

February 11th, 2009

If you have the WordPress Auto Update plugin enabled, and try to do the automatic upgrade via WordPress Auto update feature, you may get this error: Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction()  To fix this, just disable the plugin and try again.

Doing the "right" thing

February 9th, 2009

In the well thought-out article analyzing why MySQL founders chose to leave Sun: [The hackers] may feel that their work is simply not “right” – either in engineering or moral terms. And whereas concerns about the other annoyances of daily employment can often be largely suppressed, the issue of doing the “right thing” is more [...]

→ Refactor My Code

February 1st, 2009

Wouldn’t it be great to have a site that cares about your code ? That threats it as a piece of art and at the same time, encourage people to make it better and more beautiful ? → RefactorMyCode.com

→ Programmers are Tiny Gods

January 29th, 2009

Programmers are the Gods of their tiny worlds. They create something out of nothing. In their command-line universe, they say when it’s sunny and when it rains. And the tiny universe complies. So if you’re working with a programmer, you have to treat him or her like a God. You have to pray. You cannot [...]

Slumdog Millionaire

January 23rd, 2009

The soundtrack is a noisy pastiche of rap, hip hop and funk Bollywood. AR Rahman fully deserves his Globe – if the film can deserve so many – but Slumdog is obviously not his greatest soundtrack. – Soutik Biswas in ‘Why slumdog fails to moves me’ I haven’t watched the movie yet. But I completely [...]

→ Google AJAX APIs Playground

January 23rd, 2009

The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can edit and run to help you explore what Google’s APIs have to offer. There are also save and export features. The save feature allows you to [...]

→ Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering

January 14th, 2009

Robert L. Glass from IEEE Software vol. 18, no. 3, 2001, pp. 112, 110–111: This month’s column is simply a collection of what I consider to be facts—truths, if you will—about software engineering. I’m presenting this software engineering laundry list because far too many people who call themselves software engineers, or computer scientists, or programmers, [...]

Macworld '09 and the new unibody 17" MacBook Pro

January 7th, 2009

Except for the new unibody 17″ MBP, the other three announcements (iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and iTunes DRM Free Music) were not pleasing the mac fans out there. I still skeptical about the new MacBook Pro, given that I’m very happy with my current one. I don’t want to upgrade at least for the next [...]

★ Stained Glass window, Notre Dame

December 12th, 2008

MacRuby

October 20th, 2008

MacRuby is a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector, and the CoreFoundation framework. While still a work in progress, it is the goal of MacRuby to enable the creation of full-fledged Mac OS X applications which [...]

New Apple Products

September 10th, 2008

iTunes 8 – Genius (Recommendation) Playlist, HD TV Shows. New iPod Nano – 2 inch wide LED screen, new design, accelorometer, new interface. iPod Touch – new design (looks more like iPhone), built-in speaker, volume control. iPhone – 2.1 Firmware to be released on Friday. iPod Classic – No more 160 GB. 

"Pull My Finger" rejected by Apple

September 5th, 2008

Apple rejected Pull My Finger stating: We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store. That was a super lame explanation by Apple. How can Apple decide whether the [...]

Seinfeld-Microsoft Ad

September 5th, 2008

Not bad.

Coming Soon …

August 21st, 2008

The Google black hole

August 14th, 2008

Despite Google’s reputation for fostering new companies, many services that nestle into Mountain View’s welcoming bosom are never heard from again. … more

iPhoneDevCamp.NL

August 14th, 2008

In the format of the BarCamps, the first iPhoneDevCamp.nl, is going to be in Amsterdam on Aug 30th. I’m so not missing this! Because many of us are new to developing for the iPhone, we’re looking to have some experienced mobile developers and a few hardened Cocoa masters train us. I fall somewhere between the [...]

Addictive guess the number iPhone game

August 11th, 2008

Developed in less than 20 mins!

The $999.99 "I am Rich" application walk through

August 9th, 2008

DailyLit.com

August 4th, 2008

DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail or RSS feed. We currently offer over 950 classic and contemporary books available entirely for free or on a Pay-Per-Read basis (with sample installments available for free). You can read your installments wherever you receive e-mail/RSS feeds, including on your Blackberry and iPhone.

iPhone 2.0 unlock

July 20th, 2008

iPhone Dev Team released the Pwnage Tool 2.0. I upgraded my 1G iPhone to 2.0 and unlocked it. Get the pwnage tool from here or here

OpenMoko vs iPhone

July 19th, 2008

FSF says that you should avoid iPhone and suggests OpenMoko Freerunner as alternative iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don’t spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software — like the FreeRunner. And here’s a small review of user [...]

How to Succeed ? Make employees happy

July 6th, 2008

Time Article: The idea is that happy, empowered employees beget happy customers.

SQLite3 Exception: SQL logic error or missing database

June 25th, 2008

So this morning I was trying to update a testing machine with my shiny new Rails app. Remove the sqlite database – CHECK run rake db:migrate – CHECK start the application Now there were no errors anywhere. But I still get: SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database After usual googling around and trying to [...]

Firefox3 download day

June 18th, 2008

Download Firefox Now to get your cerficiate !

iPhone 3G

June 9th, 2008

iPhone 3G 3G GPS 70 Countries including Netherlands 8GB for $199, 16GB for $299 Available on July 11th.

WWDC '08

June 9th, 2008

Apple Stores and iPhone Dev Center down already. In about 1 hour we’ll know answers to these questions: New Macs ? New iPhone … ? AppStore Apps demo ? SnowLeopard ? [[NsMacRumor random] isTrue] ?

280Slides.com – online Keynote.app

June 7th, 2008

Here’s an interesting new online presentation making application. It is called 280slides It looks very similar to Keynote application on Mac. According to the developers the application is built using new a new language/extension to JavaScript, which they call Objective-J. Also the user interface is built using Cappuccino similar to Apple’s Cocoa. I can’t wait [...]

Ruby en Rails – Amsterdam

June 7th, 2008

Ruby On Rails 2008 is in Amsterdam on 10th June. I’ve already reserved my seat. I heard and I hope that most of the conference will be in English. But I don’t want to miss it anyway. The speakers include Zed Shaw and Charles Oliver Nutter (JRuby). More info about the conference is on the [...]

iphone developer program

May 27th, 2008

Just got the certificate! Weekend Project: Update (and possibly Brick) my iphone to 2.0 OS.

open iphone application development

May 22nd, 2008

Today, I started hacking my iphone and built my first application with the help of the book iPhone Open Application Development. The dev environment setup took some 3 hours – copying the frameworks from iPhone, setting up the tool-chain and building it. But finally I was able to build something. With my recent experience of [...]

Holy Smokes .. that's superfast

May 20th, 2008

2.45GB in less than 35 Mins!

Stupid Microsoft Vista Music Video

April 17th, 2008

Persistent storage for Amazon EC2

April 15th, 2008

Now, this is something I’ve been waiting for. Finally persistent storage on EC2, that means I can now run a complete server environment including databases and whatnot on EC2. You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a [...]

"select_rows is an abstract method" during "rake db:migrate"

February 21st, 2008

After successfully building a couple of applications in RoR with SQLite3 and PostgreSQL, I’m now trying to use Oracle as the database for Ruby on Rails application. When I tried db:migrate I ran into an error that said select_rows implementation is not available in oracle_adapter.rb.

After searching for a patch in the RoR Trac, the error is finally resolved. And here the file that fixed the error.

Make sure that you installed activerecord-oracle-adapter gem and replace the oracle_adapter.rb with the file attached with this post.

$RUBY_HOME\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\
activerecord-oracle-adapter-1.0.0\lib\
active_record\connection_adapters

The State of Innovation in India

January 2nd, 2008

“Why does this matter for India? Look at the market cap of Google ($218 billion) vs Infosys ($24 billion). This is not bubble valuation. Both have similar and reasonably valued PEG (Price Earnings Growth ratio, the only rational way I know to compare two valuations) with INFY at 0.81 and GOOG at 1.30. Google has over 9x the value and is about 15 years younger.

When you read the Google story, you won’t see anything created in a Stanford dorm room that could not have been created in an IIT dorm room. What is really wild is that the barriers have come down even further since Google came to market.”

Link : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/india_innovation.php

Worlds Fastest "Clapper"

November 28th, 2007

givegoodfoodtoyourmac promotion

November 26th, 2007

Twenty European developers will start offering their applications to Mac users with price discount ranging from 30 to 70%.
The special offer will start on November 27th, and will include the following applications:

Art Text from Belight
Art Text is an application to create high quality textual graphics, headings, logos, icons, web banners and buttons. The program implements the latest Mac OS X technologies which allow you to easily modify any texts and vector shapes into a fancy graphic. Use the result with iWork, Microsoft Office, BeLight applications and other programs. Create more compelling business presentations, brochures, flyers, postcards, business cards and Web sites with the program.

BannerZest from Aquafadas
BannerZest is Flash presentation software for professional and amateur web designers. Turn your pictures into a flash slideshow with a few simple clicks and share it on your website. BannerZest doesn’t require you to know or even possess Flash!

PixelMator from PixelMator
Pixelmator is a beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

Cheetah3D from Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D is a lean, fast and elegant 3D modeling, rendering and animation package for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from powerful polygon editing over advanced subdivision modeling to HDRI and radiosity renderings.

Contactizer Express & Pro from Objective Decision
Contactizer Express is a new, easy to use, affordable but powerful Contact Manager for Mac OS X. Built from the identical core as Contactizer Pro, Express features the same intuitive user interface and innovative approach that has been universally praised by both users and press alike.

CoverScout 2.3.5 from Equinux
Complete your iTunes collection with authentic album artwork. Check status (complete, incomplete, none) of the artwork already imported in your iTunes collection. Look up various websites (e.g. Amazon, Google, etc.) with CoverScout to find missing artwork. Eventually choose between multiple images or resolutions. Set cover with one click (right click) for complete albums in your iTunes library.

CSSEdit from MacRabbit
CSSEdit makes editing stylesheets easy and intuitive. With features like live inline previewing of styles and a unique grouping system, it offers a lot of punch in a low-cost package. Other features include CSS grabbing from other sites, favorites for often-used styles and font sets, etc.

Feeder from Reinvented Software
Feeder is a fully featured application for creating, editing and publishing RSS and iTunes podcast feeds. Whether it’s a news feed for your site or a podcast, Feeder makes it simple.

Fotomagico Express from Boinx Software Ltd.
Boinx FotoMagico lets you create professional slideshows from your photos and music with just a few, simple mouse clicks. It sports a very clean and intuitive yet powerful user interface. High image quality, fast performance, and user flexibility were some of the design goals for this application.

FreeWay Express and PRO from Softpress Systems Limited
Freeway Express is Softpress’ entry-level product and the successor to Freeway LE. Using Freeway Express, anyone can create a Web site quickly and easily, without needing to learn or edit HTML code.

Geophoto from Ovolab
Geophoto lets you see your pictures from a new perspective. Break the limits of long lists of pictures sorted by date! You can now browse your photo albums by location, easily finding the pictures you’ve taken in a particular place, during a particular trip.

iDive from Aquafadas
iDive is a digital video shoebox…for your DV tapes and now for all your QuickTime movies.It will turn any assortment of disorganised video files into an instantly accessible catalog. Finding a clip hidden amongst hours of footage will never again be a problem.

iStopMotion Home from Boinx software Ltd.
Remember how you watched, fascinated, when King Kong climb the Empire State building? When Luke Skywalker rode the ice beasts? When Wallace and Gromit hunted down the Were-Rabbit? For centuries now, stop motion animation has made the fantasies of film makers come true.

Magnet from Creaceed
Magnet is the easiest way to customize your movies and share them with your friends. With advanced motion tracking, the cat’s head will follow the same path as in the original movie. Using Magnet, you are able attach a picture or animation to a movie, to define a blur zone, or even to emit particles that follow the moving objects.

Merlin 2.5 from ProjectWizard
Merlin is the only native network-based collaborative Project Management solution for Mac OS X.This version offers over one hundred new features and enhancements propelling Merlin to the top of Mac OS X professional project management software.

Money from Jumsoft
Money helps people organize and manage their personal finances quickly and easily. It supports all the features required for personal or small-business accounting needs.

Morphage 3.x from Creaceed
Morph Age is an application for morphing/warping images and movies on Mac OS X, such as faces, and save the result to a QuickTime movie.

Personal Trader from Coladia
Personal Trader is a stock market utility designed for the management of investment portfolio. Intuitive and easy to use, you can track and analyze your investments. Just one click and Personal Trader will get the values from Internet and update your current holdings. It lets you get the values from the Internet and update your current holdings.

PulpMotion from Aquafadas
PulpMotion… Quick is easy and easy is fun! Create fun animations with all your (i)Life: music, photos AND your videos… no one’s left over not even the iSight! From stately to funky, from captivating to comical, choose your style to impress your audience.

RapidWeaver from realmacsoftware
RapidWeaver is a next-generation web design application to help you easily create professional looking web sites in minutes. No knowledge of complex code is required, RapidWeaver will take care of all that for you. RapidWeaver produces valid XHTML & CSS based websites.

Remote Buddy 1.x from Iospirit GmbH
Remote Buddy allows you to remotely control anything on your Mac with your iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple Remote or Wii Remote.

Tables from Daniel Schwill
Tables enables you to organise and present data very simply.With Tables you can not only organise data but also do calculations and comparisons with it. Add, sum or multiply numbers or process data by using various functions.

Together from Reinvented Software
Together lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly.

VideoPier from Aquafadas
VideoPier is the missing link between MPEG2 camcorder and your Mac. It lets you visualize the clips on your camera that Quicktime would otherwise refuse to open. VideoPier lets copy them to disk, and export them to any format for viewing (iPod, AppleTV, iPhone) or editing (iMovie 06/08).

For more information goto Give Good Food To Your Mac website.

13949712720901ForOSX

November 22nd, 2007

Vote for Java 6 on Leopard

Reasons to go Vegetarian

November 18th, 2007

Photos from BarcampRotterdam

November 11th, 2007

Click on the photo to view more. The first ever BarcampRotterdam was pretty cool. I get to meet some nice people, from Rotterdam. More on that later. Check the photos by clicking on the above image.

BarCamp Rotterdam

November 9th, 2007

The first ever BarCamp in Rotterdam is tonight.

The topic, Open Source media, encompasses a lot: open source media
technologies from web design with free content management systems to
audio and video editing on Linux, broadcasting with free software, but
also: open content and open source media activism, music and arts;
whatever is an artistic, technological and philosophical alternative
to proprietary media technology and distribution. If you are working
in this field, please come and tell something about it. WORM and Piet
Zwart people, for example, plan to speak about video editing with
Cinelerra and open source audio/video streaming.

More details at BarCamp Rotterdam Website

Taming the Leopard …

October 30th, 2007

Taming the Leopard.

Another reason not to travel by Nepal Airlines

September 8th, 2007

I was checking the flights from Kathmandu for my return travel, and Wikipedia gave me some good information on Nepal Airlines. They have a very good track record of accidents. So, I chose Indian Airlines.

Now this week, one more reason: Nepal Airlines sacrifices goats to fix Boeing 757.

The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said.

So, whenever you ask for fixing a Boeing, they’ll ship a goat to fix it.

Toggle Bluetooth with QuickSilver

September 6th, 2007

QuickSilver is an extraordinary tool for Mac. I was searching for a quick way to Toggle the bluetooth using the same. But I was unable to find. I was reluctant to search or research for one. So, I wanted to make one for myself.

I wrote a small apple script to get the status of the bluetooth on the menubar, and toggled it using script. Here’s the script:

	on run
		tell application "System Events" to tell the front menu bar of process "SystemUIServer"
			set menuItems to value of attribute "AXDescription" of menu bar items
			repeat with menuItem from 1 to the length of menuItems
				if item menuItem of menuItems is "bluetooth menu extra" then exit repeat
			end repeat

			tell menu bar item menuItem
				click
				tell 2nd menu item of front menu
				 click
				end tell
			end tell

		end tell
	end run

I placed the script in my AppleScript folder, and added the folder to QS Catalog. That’s it, now I can bring up QuickSilver and say Toggle Bluetooth without any problems.

New iPods

September 5th, 2007

iPod 160GB, Nice!

iPod Touch, sweet.

Pretty good options, May be I’ll get a iPod 160 GB, and wait for the iPhone instead of iPod touch. 160GB iPod and Camera connector for my new DSLR, would be a cool combination.

Travel Plans

September 4th, 2007

I’ve been waiting to visit Kailash and Manasarovar for almost 5 years now. Finally the trip is confirmed. I’ll be leaving on 19th of September from Bangalore/Hyderabad and returning to Hyderabad on 5th of October. I was able to get ticket on Air Sahara from Delhi to Katmandu on 19th. But the return journey seems a bit difficult. All the flights are packed.

I was looking for alternate route, and called up Indian Airlines. There’s a flight from Kathmandu to Varanasi at 14:10. What would be the better way to end the Holy Trip, than taking a dip in Holy Ganges and visiting Kaasi Vishwanath

My return flight to normal life would be on 5th of October Varanasi-Delhi-Hyderabad.

19-Sep-07: Hyderabad to Delhi (TBD)
19-Sep-07 : Delhi to Kathmandu
19-Sep-07 to 4-Oct-07: Kathmandu-Manasarovar-Kailash-Kathmandu
4-Oct-07: Kathmandu to Varanasi
5-Oct-07: Varanasi to Delhi
5-Oct-07: Delhi to Hyderabad.

Kailash and Mansarovar Yatra, Confirmed Itinerary

September 4th, 2007

Day 01: Arrival Kathmandu

Upon arrival at Kathmandu, receive assistance from our representative at the Tribhuvan International Airport to transfer to the pre booked hotel. Overnight stay at the hotel.

Day 2: Temple visit in Kathmandu

After breakfast, proceed for a half day sightseeing tour of Pashupatinath Temple and Budhaneelkantha. Enjoy the evening at leisure in Kathmandu. While the Chinese VISA will be obtain in Kathmandu on this day, the travel permit for Tibet would be applied for well in advance by us. Stay overnight at the hotel in Kathmandu.

Day 3: Kathmandu to Nyalam (3700 m)

After breakfast, drive to the frontier town of Nepal at Kodari, enjoying a scenic drive through Dhulikhel. From here, a short walk to the friendship bridge for the drive to Zhangmu, which is the main entrance for Tibet, China at the height of 2,300 m. It is about 145 km from Kathmandu. In Zhangmu, receive assistance from our Tibetan counterpart. After completing the immigration formalities at the check post, continue the journey for another 35 km which could take almost 3 hours through the winding roads to Nyalam. After the scenic drive, enjoy overnight stay at Nyalam (3,700 m). The lodge and guest house here are very simple and basic. Expect the unexpected as tourism in Tibet is slowly picking up since last 10 years. Overnight stay at Hotel Nyalam or similar.

Day 4: In Nyalam for acclimatization

The day is dedicated for acclimatization at Nyalam. Go for a short trek of about three hours in Nyalam itself. Overnight stay at Hotel Nyalam or similar.

Day 5: Nyalam to Saga (4600 m) 240 km / 6 – 7 hours drive

After breakfast, drive through the windswept territory passing many villages and camps of Yak herders with a distant view of snow capped mountains. Go through the first high pass, Lalung La Pass (5000 m) where a superb view of the Himalayas can be enjoyed from Gaurishanker, Shishapangma to Langtang Himal. Drive past Khunmen Tso, Sinling, Karru Ongchen and Peigutso Lake (4400m). Continue the drive, crossing the river “Yarling Tsangpo” known as Bhramaputra, to reach Saga (4600 m; 240 km / 6 -7 hours drive). Overnight stay at local guest house.

Day 6: Saga to Prayang (4750 m) 255 km / 6 – 7 hr drive

After breakfast, drive to Paryang (4750 m) 255 km / 6 – 7 hr drive through windswept territory, passing many villages and camps of Yak herders with distant view of snow capped mountains. On this day the road is quite flat, hence the drive will be comfortable compared to other days. Overnight stay at guest house / Hotel Prayang.

Day 7: Prayang to Hor Quo (4560 m) 223 km / 5 – 6 hr drive

After breakfast, drive to the Mayum River, 112 km away, and have lunch. Thereafter, drive to Hor Quo (4560 m) 223 km / 5 – 6 hr. Cross Mayum La pass (5200 m) on the way and arrive at Hor Quo. Today is the day of your lifetime, as you will have the first sight (darshan) of the holy Mt. Kailash and the holy Mansarovar Lake. Camp on the bank of the Lake. Overnight in Camp.

Day 8: Mansarovar Parikarma (4520 m) 115 km / 4 – 5 hr & drive to Darchen (4620 m)

After breakfast, this is the day for prayers and a dip in the holy Lake. Start with a jeep parikrama of Mansarovar (4520 m) 115 km / 4 – 5 hrs. During this parikarma, we will have a picnic lunch on the bank of Lake Mansarovar. On the way, stop near Trugu Gompa for a dip in the Lake. There will be separate tents for changing. Time Permitting visit Chui Gompa. In the afternoon, drive to Darchen (4620 m). Darchen is located beneath the majestic holy Mount Kailash, a small village with couple of guesthouses. During the auspicious pilgrimage time, this place is flooded with pilgrims with hundreds of tents all around. Darchen is the beginning and end point of the Kora. Overnight at Guest House in Darchen.

Day 9: In Darchen to acclimatise

After breakfast, proceed to the acclimatising exercise with a short trek to Serrlung Monastery and to Nandi Parvat, which offers an excellent view of Mt. Kailash. Overnight stay in Darchen to prepare for Kailash Parikarma. Overnight at Guest House in Darchen.

Day 10: Drive to Tarboche (13 km) and trek to Dirapuk (4860 m) 7 km / 5 – 6 hrs.

After breakfast, drive about 13 km to Tarboche, the starting point of the Kailash Parikrama. Tarboche is also known as the outer ‘Asthapath’. The first day of the Kora is a gradual walk with multitudes of other local pilgrims chanting and praying. The trail will lead you to a few ups and downs till you reach our camp/guest house at Dirapuk (4860 m) 7 km / 5 – 6 hours trek. Camp on the grassy meadows with a view of Mt. Kailash. Those not feeling fit to continue the parikarma will drive back to Darchen and wait for the Parikarma group to return. Overnight in camp.

Day 11: Trek to Zuthulphuk (4760 m) 18 km / 9 – 10 hrs.

Today the circumbulation (Kora) will lead to a much higher elevation of the holy path, just beneath Mt. Kailash. The walk will bring us to one of the highest point at Drolma La, (5,200 m) before gradually descending to the field towards Zuthulphuk for an overnight stay, after 5 – 6 hours of a walk. Zuthulphuk (4760 m) 18 km / 9 – 10 hrs.

After an early breakfast, the group will set off as the sun rays break over the ridges above. After the footbridge the trail rises up a rocky slope. Take this gently but steadily. It soon reaches a level walk. The peak of Mount Kailash rises to the right and can now be seen linked to a long spur, which joins the eastern ridge. This is the top edge of the glacial valley from which the Lhachu (“Divine River”) flows.

This day is the climax of this holy journey and is the most difficult. One has to pass through the Drolma La Pass (5680m), the highest altitude on this tour. Physically it is the most arduous day. At the pass is a large boulder depicting Tara, festooned with prayer flags. Here too the Tibetans leave a memento of themselves such as a tooth, a lock of hair or even a personal snapshot.

After perhaps 30 minutes, descend a steep, rock-strewn path to the valley below. Just below the pass is Lake Tu-je Chenpo Dzingbu (Gauri Kund) i.e. “The Pool of Great Compassion”. Take great care now because it is easy to sprain your ankle or worse. You must negotiate steep staircases down to a snowfield. The only way down is to jump from boulder to boulder across a large rock fall. On the ridge above is a formation known as the Lekyi Ta-ra (“Axe of Karma”), as though one moment can lead to a suffering, an accident, or even death.

A final steep staircase brings you to the valley floor. From here it is still about 5 hours to the day’s destination with no shelter in between. It is vitally important to remain on the right hand side of the river, the West bank. If not, you will get trapped, unable to cross it. The walk now becomes very pleasant and relaxing (as long as the weather is clear and there is no howling gale). The path follows the gentle slope of the valley over grassy fields and clear brooks for several kilometers before it narrows and turns further south to merge with another valley before reaching Zuthulphuk, the “Miracle Cave” of Milarepa. Overnight stay in the second camp.

Day 12: Zuthulphuk to Darchen trek 10 km / 4 – 5 hr and drive to Prayang (4750 m)

The morning can be spent exploring the caves and visiting the temples and the shrine that have been built around Milarepa’s cave. A married elderly couple supervises the temple, which is usually an active residence for over half a dozen Tibetan devotees, helpers, or relatives who continuously busy themselves with the tasks of maintaining the buildings.

One imagines Milarepa’s disciples meditating here. Many of the caves contain meditation platforms, self-contained by dry stonewall which divides them from their cooking partitions and entrance areas. It is well worth the short climb up to these caves before beginning the final stage of the trek. The winding gradual tracks finally ends our holy pilgrimage walk 10 km / 4 – 5 hrs. Once you reach the end point near Darchen, land cruisers will be waiting to take the group back to Prayang. (Those who could not do the parikarma would be waiting to welcome other group members at this point). Overnight stay at Hotel Prayang.

Day 13: Drive from Prayang to Saga (4600 m) 255 km / 6 – 7 hr drive

After breakfast, drive to Saga. Overnight at the local guest house.

Day 14: Drive Saga to Nyalam (3700 m) 240 km / 6 – 7 hours drive

After breakfast, drive to Nyalam. Overnight at Hotel Nyalam or similar.

Day 15: Drive from Zhangmu to Kathmandu

Drive downhill to Zhangmu and the Friendship Bridge where transportation awaits for the final leg of the journey to Kathmandu (150 km) / 8 – 9 hr. After reaching the Friendship Bridge, you will be leaving the Tibet vehicles on the other side of the border and will walk for about 15 minutes towards the Nepal Immigration Post where the coach for Nepal would be waiting for you. The border guide will assist you to shift your belongings towards the Nepal side of the bridge. Overnight at the hotel in Kathmandu.

Day 16: Fly back to your home with memories of Mt. Kailash and the holy Lake Mansarovar.

After breakfast, free for souvenir shopping and other independent activities. In time transfer to International Airport to board your onward flight.

Yahoo Photos to Flickr

August 28th, 2007

Yahoo Photos is closing on September 23rd. I opted to move all my photos to Flickr, and I get a free Flickr Pro account for 3 months. Cool.

Very nice timing, since my trip to Mansarovar and Kailash will start on 19th of September.

A Search in Secret India

August 26th, 2007

An excerpt from Paul Brunton’s book : A Search in Secret India:

Grant that India has nodded and snored for centuries; grant that even to-day there exist millions of peasants in this land who suffer the same illiteracy, share the same outlook blended of puerile superstition and kindergarten religion as did English peasants of the fourteenth century. Grant further that the Brahmin pundits in native centers of learning waste their useless years splitting sacerdotal hairs and drawing metaphysical wire as subtly as our own medieval scholastics ever did. Yet there still remains a small but priceless residue of culture classified under the generic term Yoga, which proffers benefits to mankind as valuable in their own way as any proffered by the Western sciences.

Excellent book about Indian spirituality, told by a Westerner. Seems like, We Indians, need this book more than Westerns and more than ever now.

Photos from Hague

August 24th, 2007

Den Haag, Netherlands

Nice site for learning drawing

August 11th, 2007

http://dev.drawspace.com/

Still Alive

August 9th, 2007

Thanks for asking, I’m still alive. I was terribly busy with trying to fix something very important for Humanity and Justice. I’ll update with some new stuff this weekend. I turned 26 a couple of days ago, if you care

Mac OS X 10.4.10 update crashed Skype, Mail, Safari etc. : Resolved

June 23rd, 2007

I installed 10.4.10 update, and after the update Mail, Safari, iCal and Skype crash whenever I start.

I tried all the solutions provided in the forum, Disk Permissions, Repair Disk via Boot DVD, Hardware Test.

Finally after 10.4.10 intel combo download I was able to start Mail.app but not iCal and Skype.

Just now I checked software update and there’s new security update. After installing the update everything seems fine. No more crashes for the above said applications.

Security Update 2007-006 (Universal) Version 1.0

Hope this helps who are having similar problem.

Longest Domestic Flight by Indian

June 13th, 2007

Indian employees are on strike the very moment after I booked a ticket from Chennai to Bangalore. Now I’m sitting in the airplane for the past 1 and 1/2 hour. Nothing seems to be working. Even cockpit’s window seems to be “gone”. People are trying to fix it. \

Getting Root Canal Treatment

May 19th, 2007

It has been sometime in my life since I’ve visited a doctor. My last visit to a doctor was some time in 2004 for a medical fitness certificate. Seems like its time for fixing a bug in my body.

One of my Molar tooth got infected with cavity, and as usual I ignored it for enough time so that it demanded more attention for itself. So I visited a near by dentist to get it checked, after putting all sorts of metallic instruments in my mouth and taking photos (X-Ray) of my teeth, they finally found out that the cavity is so deep, that it requires a pulpectomy, more commonly known as “The Root Canal Treatment”. So there are supposedly 3 visits and in the first one, the doctor drilled and cleaned up the cavity and filled with a temporary “filling”. It was painful, even with local anasthesia. I got a painkillers to be taken 3 times a day, but being against to taking medicines, I’m trying to cope up.

In the second visit yesterday, I got the “permananent filling” according to the doctor, Also the impression of my teeth are taken so that they can “prepare the crown”. Now, I need a final visit on Tuesday for Crown fixing. It will be ceramic crown I guess. I was under the impression of ignoring it, but seems like crown is an essential part of Root Canal Treatment, and I can’t ignore it.

The cost till now for two visits has been Rs.4,300/- in bangalore. I’m not sure how much the crown fixing costs. The treatment in India costs around Rs.3500-9500 for Root Canal and Crown, according to wikipedia.

Hare Krishna Temple at Juhu, Mumbai

May 17th, 2007

I came to Mumbai today for a one day trip, and here I’m stuck at the Airport with Free Wi-Fi from Airltel and my flight delayed by 1 hour.

Pathetic Indian Airlines

May 17th, 2007

Here’s the photo of Indian Airlines Seat Armrest. One more reason not to travel in Indian Airlines again.

Koosie – From N95

May 12th, 2007

Yanamalakuduru-N95

May 12th, 2007

My New Nokia N95

May 12th, 2007

After waiting for more than 6 months, finally N95 arrived in India, and I got my own brand new N95 last week. N95 is a fully loaded, fun and fast phone. Beautiful and fast interface, excellent features and ligher than my 3230.

N95 has Wi-Fi, 5 Megapixel Autofocus Camera, full featured browser with RSS Feed support, Edge support on GPRS, 162 MB (internal) and 1GB MicroSD memory, Video/Music player and GPS support. It's been a week, and I'm in love with the cool phone.

I took many photos from the phone, which are directly uploaded to my Vox account. A new version of my website is currently under development, and I'll include the gallery of my media soon on vijaykiran.com

Google IG Skins

April 18th, 2007

You can personalize your google personalized home (http://google.com/ig) with one of the supplied skins. Depending on various factors, the skin’s background image will change. So, how exactly it’s been implemented. If I’d to implement the same functionality, I’d just include a JavaScript function that will check the local time, and change the background image css property of the body tag.

But google has XML based skin file.
Here’s the skin XML file for the teahouse skin:


1


3
14
1
/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_3.14am.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_6am.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_8am.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_10am.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_noon.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_2pm.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_4pm.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_6pm.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_8pm.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_10pm.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_midnight.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_2am.css


/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_4am.css




Teahouse is a time based skin .. here are the cute pictures that are selected by the skin according to the time.

6:00




8:00



10:00




Noon




14:00




16:00




18:00




20:00




22:00




Midnight




2:00




4:00

If you see carefully, the fruit offering is disappearing in the morning. And here’s how:

The image’s available for just 1 minute duration, and at 3:14am. Why 3:14 … ? May be value of PI

On the other hand the skin.xml for the busstop skin is of the type weather. Take a look at the code:


/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_sunny.css
2


100
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_windy.css


47
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_cloudy.css


85
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_foggy.css


90
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_icy.css


94
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_rainy.css


137
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_stormy.css


139
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_thunderstorm.css


84
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_flurries.css


86
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_hazy.css


91
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_mostlycloudy.css


117
/ig/skins/busstop/busstop_snowy.css




The busstop skin uses weather type, and the condition seems to be some sort of code provided by the weather forecaster. For example, if you use Yahoo weather XML, the codes are defined for each of the conditions. You can find them at: Yahoo Developer Site

Here are some of the images from the busstop theme :


Sunny

Windy

Icy

Hazy

Flurries

Thunderstrom

Foggy

Cloudy

My first book review for JavaLobby.org

April 9th, 2007

My first book review is now live on JavaLobby.org. The book is AJAX and JavaServer Faces Shortcut. Here’s the final rating for the book:

Although this is not intended to be the complete book on Ajax and JSF, the book is nevertheless an excellent introduction to the topic, and can bring you up to the speed to write your own JSF/Ajax components . With just 64 pages, the book covers the concept well and the flow of the topic is excellent.

You can read the complete review of the book by going to the page "AJAX and JavaServer Faces" Review by Vijay Kiran. This is my first review, so If you have some time to read through, drop me a comment. Also, I received next book for review too. Its about my favorite editor : Text Mate. I'm almost finished half of the book. I need to complete the review in the next couple of weeks.

Yahoo Alpha beta

April 4th, 2007

Yahoo's new search engine/application Yahoo Alpha is available as "beta" today. It looks much better than original yahoo search, also, it's a personalized search page. You can change the layout of the page and personalize the same. There are widgets kind of collapsible blocks on the right side, interestingly, the sponsored links are also hidden at first.

Speaking of search, today I'll be attending Yahoo Bigthinkers at Bangalore. The topic for today is Web Search and Online Communities
by Andrew Tomkins, Director of Search Research, Yahoo! I'll update the blog with details once I return from the event.

Barcamp Bangalore 3.0

March 29th, 2007

The Barcamp Bangalore 3.0 is just around the corner. The venue is IIM bangalore, and the dates : 31st March and 1st April. There are already 300+ registrants for the event. This time I'm not planning any sessions. My contribution to barcamp this time was the logo (idea). And, we are preparing some stained glass paintings for display at barcamp.

Developing a Business Application Framework

March 20th, 2007

Some time back, if you are reading my blog, I wanted to work with some Open Source project and asked if any one was there to work with me. And I got good response from people I know. So, we started thinking about developing a small Business application framework which might make developing small/medium business applications easy.

The aim is not only to develop an application framework, but also to learn more about the technology as well. 

The framework will have provide a visual way to build an entire business application (web application). It will provide interface for creating business objects, pages, rules associated with them etc.  We want to build it using component based approach, first we start off with different components, build prototypes and then, we work towards integrating them.

The entire functionality or design of the framework has not been decided yet, but as a result of the initial discussions we thought the following modules will be there in the framework:

• Core: Execution engine
• Mantle: Business oject layer
• Crust: User Interface layer

The first of the component we are going to build is a schema analyzer. The purpose is to create and identify  business object

Exponential Times

March 19th, 2007

SQL Server madness

March 19th, 2007

So, I got this MDF fie from some one who has MS SQL Server 2005. They created the log file (LDF) and the database file (MDF).

I’ve installed SQL Server 2005 Express edition. I used SQL Server Management studio express to attach the database. The attach went fine, but the it says the Database is Read-Only. I tried ALTER DATABASE to modify the permission. It says can’t read the MDF file, access denied. So I dig down the file, and tried looking at the properties. It has the READ ONLY un-checked! I can’t understand why the hell is the database is read-only.

I used osql command line to attach the database with FOR ATTACH as well as FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOGS, but still it says the database readonly. I googled 10 times searching for how to make this damn thing writable, since I needed that to test my program. It took 2 hours after digging through MSDN that the guy who’s attaching the MDF to the database to the MDF has to have Write permission on the DB. What the #$%@@##?????

I enabled the Windows authentication on the SQL Server Express 2005, and then logged in as the admin guy. And attached the DB to the Server. Voila! It’s a miracle. Now I re-login to the server using the SQL Server authentication. The DB is still writable. For my primitive mind at least this looked like the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You have write permission, and you attach the DB, and any the other can access it with write permission too .. ! May be I’m too dumb to understand MS Software, that’s why I prefer sticking with Mac/Java/Open Source.

Ignorance is Bliss!, especially its MS’s Stuff.

Switched & Hooked to TextMate

March 16th, 2007

After experimenting with BBEdit and TextWrangler and TextMate finally, I settled down for TextMate. Just now I got a new license for TextMate. And I can already see my productivity increased, I just updated my default editor for my websites via FTP in Cyberduck.

Kailash Mansarovar Yatra

March 14th, 2007

Kailash Mansarovar yatra is one of the most sacred piligramages for Hindus. It has been kind of a goal for me for the past 10 years, since I ever heard of Yatra. This year finally, I decided that I've to complete this piligrimage. The yatra is organized and can be done through different routes.

• Via Almora
• Via Jyothir Mutt (Joshi Mutt)
• Via Nepal

Out of these the route via Joshi Mutt is said to be most difficult and easiest is via Nepal. There are many operators who organize the piligrimage via Nepal route. It normally takes 17 days. The Government of India every year ornganizes the tour as well which will take around 28 days. This one is via Almora.

The yatra is said to be very chanllenging physically, because of high altitude trekking. And there will be around 16 batches each batch consisting of 60 people. Today I'm applying for the same, and If I get selected in one of those batches, I plan to go to the piligrimage in July/August. I intend to do the parikrama of Kailash and Mansarovar as well, and spend some quiet time with myself in the Mountains. So that I can re-organize and prioritize my goals and what I intend to do with my life

You can find more about the yatra by going to the yatra website: kmyatra.org (the site seems to be down now).

The indian part of the tour is organized by Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam (kmvn.org ). If you need more information on the application etc, you can contact one of the PRO's listed on the page. Almost every city has a KMVN office. Also the last date for the submission of applications to the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) is 30th March. Here's the link to the Yatra Advertisement . More details are available at the MEA website .

There's so much to hear, indeed!

March 12th, 2007

Last week, I got a new Worldspace subscription with a BPL One World receiver. There's a free gift of Logitech speakers with the same. The antenna of the receiever has to be in the south-east direction with an azimuth of 70 Degrees or More. Luckily one of my house's balconies is in the same direction, so I was able to get it fixed with no extra wires other than the one ( 5 meters)that is supplied with the receiver. 

 Once I got all the channels unlocked, I found out that there's really so much to hear. Especially, the quality of audio is really good, there were ocassional and minute delays  ( May be because of shifting from one LEO satellite to the other). But  the quality of the  audio as well as the programs are quite impressive.  I got rid of the stupid jokes and  ill-accented  RJs. Now I can listen to music all day.

My favorite channels are

• Shruthi – 24 hour Carnatic music channel
• Top 40 – Top 40 hits, Spandana – Telugu songs channel
• Farishta – Hindi classical music channel
• Jhanka – Bollywood songs
• UP country – country music

With the price tag of Rs. 1000 /- per 6 months, WorldSpace is irresisitable for all music lovers.

Barcamp 3.0 Logos

March 12th, 2007

Here're the logos I created for Barcamp bangalore 3.0, click on the logos for full view..

 

 

Techdays Poster 3

March 11th, 2007

Techdays 2007 – Day 1

March 4th, 2007

Sun Tech Days 2007 was really fun and learning experience. There were more than 4000 people attending the keynote. on day One. Some cool conceptual demos were given after the key note. Most boring part was Ramalinga Raju's key note. I really couldn't make out a single word from that "speech". I found most of the people were even sleeping .

The cool demos included F7 language demo (which you might already have seen via Gosling's blog), and Google Maps and AJAX integration (boring !), Sun SPOT demo (Programmable robots). But the most interesting application was the 3D visualization for music. Just like iTunes coverflow but in 3D. Also, it can detect the genres by analyzing the sound file, and suggest/play the next song. It can create a musical journey according to the settings. That was really interesting demo.

Later there as a session on Java Glassfish, usual EJB 3.0 explanations, new JAXB, JAX-WS APIs and etc. But the hilarious part was the question time. People were asking questions like how can I install galssfish into IIS (MS-IIS) ? How can I embed Glassfish in J2ME ?

There was a netbeans contest zone on day one, Simple exercise of J2EE application has to be completed in 30 mins. With the help of the guys at the stall, we were able to finish it  

We got 40 "sun bucks", I bought a cool Duke stress buster for that.  We met geertjan on the contest stall too. 

Later there was a Netbeans introduction session, which had a demo of the collaboration module of Netbeans. Its really useful module, if you are working with developers who are placed "remotely". You can chat with them, share your code, ask questions, share Java Files and projects and even compile their project from your desktop. Everything from inside Netbeans.

 

Leopard Tech Talks – Bangalore

February 20th, 2007

This was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in terms of technology, focus and way of presentation.

Leopard Tech Talks is about the new features to be introduced in the next version of Mac OS X : Leopard (10.5). You can get a sneak-peek about the features at the apple website.

I’ve already decided about switching to Mac OS X as my primary development platform, also I want to build my future software on Mac OS X. The number of features that I’ve seen ‘demoed’ during Tech Talks is simply amazing. And I can already visualize them adding to my software that’s going to give wonderful user experience. I’m not sure if I can write more about the details of the sessions because of NDA. But I’m eagerly waiting for the next version of Mac OS X. What I see is Leopard is not only a wonderful operating system for user, but its equally excellent for a developer as well. And Objective C, here I come !

What's keeping me busy?

February 15th, 2007

Okay, time for the update again!

I’ve been Very busy lately, Here is the scoop of what’s happening in my life.

• Brand new XBOX 360
• Great Server Switch
• Release time for couple of products/projects I’m working on

So last week, I got a brand new XBOX 360 console, the ultimate time/sleep killer. And with that I bought two games:

• N3 : Ninety Nine Nights
• Need For Speed: Carbon

I save the stuff about XBOX for another post

I moved “all” of my domains to a single server, so that I can have better control for them. As you might know, moving data from one server to the other is a pain, especially if you have a site with database. But I managed to move them without a big glitch. I still need to fix up somethings on my site, other than the CMS, but its okay. You shouldn’t find any difference. Upgrade to Drupal 5.1 is also pending.

Also, two of the projects/products I’m working on are nearing completion. I should be having much free time most probably in a couple of weeks now.

And the next week is going to be full of fun:

20 Feb, 2007: Leopard Tech Talk @ Bangalore
21 Feb, 2007: Sun Tech Days : Day One @ Hyderabad
22 Feb, 2007: Sun Tech Days : Day Two @ Hyderabad
23 Feb, 2007: Sun Tech Days : Day Three @ Hyderabad

So watch out for more news to come.

Leopard Tech Talk in Bangalore

January 29th, 2007

Leopard Tech Talk – India is on Feb 20 in Bangalore.

I’ve already registered and eagerly awaiting the event. Just like every other Mac Switcher, I love my mac. I’m so much addicted to it that, coming to office and working on Windoz suddenly makes me feel retarded.

I’ve started learning Objective C and most probably by August, I want to develop/start to develop a serious application for Mac OS X. So this is my first step towards my Mac OS X development learning. I’m pretty sure that Leopard is gonna be “The Best” OS, just like Tiger.

Here are the details of the sessions on the Leopard tech talk in Bangalore:

Mac OS X Leopard Development Overview

Mac OS X Leopard contains dozens of new technologies perfect for building breakthrough products. Learn about the latest technological advances in Leopard and how you can use these to build applications, available only on Mac OS X, that have phenomenal new, differentiating capabilities.

Introducing Core Animation

Core Animation is an exciting new layer-based animation framework that can enhance your application with eye-catching animations, dazzling interactive visualizations and enhanced UI. See how you can use Core Animation to composite and animate 2D, 3D, and even Quartz Composer-based content into dynamic scenes, and how new enhancements to NSView and other Cocoa classes leverage this powerful new facility to bring compelling animations and visual effects to your user interfaces.

64-bit Development in Leopard

Today’s data intensive software applications are pushing the 4GB memory boundaries of 32-bit addressing. Leopard features a full 64-bit application stack for both PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers so your applications can break through the 4GB memory barrier. Learn how to bring the power of 64-bit to your application.

Using Objective-C 2.0 in Leopard

Objective-C is time-tested technology with a dynamic runtime, powerful features, and elegant syntax. Learn about new language features in Objective-C 2.0 like garbage collection, keywords, and language “properties.”

Modern OpenGL

OpenGL is the premier environment for developing high performance 3D graphics applications. Learn how to increase the 3D rendering capabilities and improve the performance of your application. You’ll get all the details of what’s new for OpenGL in Mac OS X Leopard, and several specific optimizations & modernizations to make in your application. This is a must-attend session for anyone who wants to harness the power of the GPU to increase the 3D-rendering capabilities and performance of your graphics code.

Image Processing & Manipulation in Leopard

By harnessing the tremendous pixel processing power of the GPU or the vector execution unit of the CPU, Mac OS X Leopard performs complex per-pixel imaging operations at blistering speeds to create spectacular visual effects and transitions. Learn how to use Image I/O and Image Kit to modernize basic image handling, how to add image processing to your own application using the more than 100 built-in Core Image effects, and how to create your own custom Image Units.

Introducing Xcode 3.0 & Interface Builder 3.0

The Xcode IDE is the center of Apple’s development environment and it’s constantly being refined to give you a more elegant and powerful user experience. Learn about Xcode 3.0 (required for all Leopard development), and more powerful, context-sensitive presentation of information. You’ll also learn how to use other innovations such as refactoring, message bubbles, and data tips which give you more insight into your application and push your code to the next level. See Interface Builder’s completeley overhauled user interface and learn how it’s new capabilities and extensibility let you build exciting new applications for Leopard.

Polyphasic Sleep – Update

January 24th, 2007

It’s been almost a 2 weeks since I started the Polyphasic Sleep. From this monday, I’m slowly finding the benefits. I’m not feeling sleep deprivation. But there are times I overslept. During first week, I’d to force my self to sleep. But recently, I’m able to sleep without much effort. I found the 1:30 and 5:30 phases in the morning to be a bit difficult, with a danger of over sleeping. But other phases, most of the times I’m able to get to a good sleep with vivid and clear dreams. Interesting thing is that, even in dream, I was able to know that it’s being a dream. It’s kind of semi conscious state.

The main hindrance to my schedule seems to be discipline, although I’m able to catch up. First week, I was feeling more fatigue and lazy. But this week, my mind seems to be much clear. I guess I’ll start to see the real use only after a month. that in a couple of weeks.

"Creative Incompetence"

January 15th, 2007

At some point of time, every sane employee prefers to use what’s know as “Creative Incompetence”. Creative Incompetence means deliberately behaving as if you are incompetent. I think this is the best way to avoid bad management and/or managers. You can behave as if you don’t know and leave everything to them. So most of the times you get away with “It’s been designed by you sir” response

I personally used CI (Creative Incompetence, not to be confused with Continuous Integration !), a lot of times. You fight for something, you show/prove that they are wrong. But still your manager wants to go in the way he wants just because he’s up high in the heirarchy. Then the best way is to use CI. And tell him that “Yeah! you are right, how dumb I feel now after knowing and understanding your esteemed nature of clear cut analysis and risk management. Please review the schedule and make sure that you give me enough time keeping my incompetence in mind”.

Using Creative Incompetence, you get more time to a write 3 page document. More time in the trainings to sleep or browse slashdot on your web-enabled GPRS phone, and of course switch off your every vital organ except your eyes and enjoy the transcendental experience.

Here’s one of the fundamental truth of the Software companies which has hierarchies of employees: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. This is know as The Peter’s Principle. When an employee grows/crawls up in the hierarchy, he tend to be more incompetent.

Just in case, you are a “Change the world, NOW!” kind of guy/gal go check this for more about the Peter’s Principle and how to avoid that if you own a company. You can even buy the book.

Fortune 100 best companies to work for

January 8th, 2007

Fortune has published the list of 100 Best Companies To Work For in 2007

Google is the numero uno company. Here are some interesting ranks for the software companies(with the overall rank in the parentheses):

1. Network Appliance (6)
2. Cisco Systems (11)
3. Adobe Systems (31)
4. Intuit (33)
5. Yahoo (44)
6. Microsoft (50)
7. Texas Instruments (87)

I’m surprised to see that Cisco Systems is better than Adobe Systems. Intuit is the company which makes Quicken financial software. And they’ve their office in Bangalore. I happened to meet one of my Quark Colleague who just joined there. As expected Microsoft is way below Google.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment

January 8th, 2007

It’s been long time since I started being a night guy. It all started when I joined as a System Administrator for a web hosting company. During those days, almost for more than a month, I used to be in the “night-shifts”. And I got used to them a lot. Even after leaving that job, my habit continued. That was story during 2003. Till date I prefer working in night, and mostly have become a nocturnal being. I tried a couple of times to be an “early riser”, but failed miserably.

So now I’m starting an experiment with myself as the subject. I’ll be practicing Polyphasic Sleep. I’ll be following a stricter version of Polyphasic Sleep which is called Uberman’s Sleep Schedule. In this I’ll be sleeping for 30 minutes for every four hours. I’ve fixed my timings to be: 1:30, 5:30, 9:30, 13:30, 17:30, 21:30.

In the same context I’d like to mention a wonderful program I got recently from the Mac App A Day promotion. The program is Pzizz!. It’s a program that plays music/suggesions for relaxation and sleep. Yeah, I know you must be thinking about another relaxation audio CDs. No, it is not. The program generates the audio/voice content based on your setting and its different every-time you play. I tried it once for an hour and I certainly felt the program was very useful. If you want to know more about the program goto Pzizz! website. It has windows/mac versions.

And so, I’m gonna sleep “with” Pzizz! during my Polyphasic Sleep experiment. I’ll track my progress in the blog. If you are interested, keep listening

Resetting Windows XP Administrator Password

January 5th, 2007

Did you Ever forget Administrator user password for Windows XP? And if you don’t have any other user in the system who has administrator privileges, then here’s the way to reset your Windows XP Administrator Password :

• Get a Windoes XP Bootable CD and boot from the CD.In some cases, it might ask fro your CD Key. Make sure you have it handy
• When Windows setup starts and asks for Repair or Install, Select Install
• In the next screen you’ll get an option to Repair the existing windows installation. Select the appropriate Installation, and Type R for Repair
• Windows setup will then check your hard disk and copies the files. Let the system Reboot
• When the system reboots, DO NOT press any key to boot from the CD
• Windows Graphical installation will start now. IF the setup asks for CD type it in and click on Next.
• Once you see Installing Devices on the left side, Click on SHIFT + F10
• You’ll get a command prompt, now type: NUSRMGR.CPL and press Enter
• Now you have the User Accounts Manager, you can reset the password for Administrator or any other user

Happy New Year!

January 2nd, 2007

One more year to thank and be grateful for my parents, family, friends, foes, acquaintances and machines. You made my “year”

Happy New Year!

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkenss of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Photoshop on Web

December 22nd, 2006

This is another coolest application I’ve seen in Web 2.0 : Fauxto

The interface is almost like Adobe Photoshop, and I love the smooth interface. It doesn’t have all the pretty tools that are there in the PS yet. But certainly looks good for instant photo editing when you have “good” internet connection. The promised new features include integration with photo sites, So most probably you can edit any photo anytime anywhere (with net connection).

It’s not usual AJAX stuff, seems like its developer using Adobe Flex. I like the idea of building online version of one Adobe product using another Adobe product

Read more about Fauxto on the Fauxto Blog.

Looking for Student Software Developers

December 20th, 2006

I’m looking for enthusiastic and dedicated developers to initiate Open Source Software Development in verticals. For that I want to collaborate with student software engineers in a distributed development environment. The technical guidance or tools for the project will be provided according to the project requirements.

The aim of this project is to develop small software applications for various business domains. During the course of the project, the members will be exposed to various phases of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycles). Necessary technical guidance and mentorship will be provided to make sure that project will be a success. I can provide the tools and the collaboration platform. The project aims at not only providing the members an in-depth software development understanding, but also aims to create simple and usable tools for various domains that will be advertised and made available via website.

The members can keep the copyright on the code but the code should be published under any OSI approved license. The estimated time frame for each project is 3-4 months. Please note that only Open Technologies* should be used.

As per the student’s needs, the project will be endorsed by a registered company. All the necessary documents/endorsements will be provided on no pay no fee basis.

I presume that this would be a good experience for the Final year students who are looking out for projects, so please pass on this message to your friends. They can contact me at projects@vijaykiran.com for any further clarifications.

Java 6 is released

December 11th, 2006

Java SE 6 is released. Many improvements in Desktop side have been made. As I’m working with a swing application now, let me see default Windows Look and Feel looks better in SE 6. Here’s the link for the Desktop improvements.

You can read more about the SE 6 key features here.

Yahoo Username/Password

December 7th, 2006

I’m feeling sleepy now. So I to just kill the time, I started out testing out Yahoo’s sign up process. One of my friend told me that yahoo silently takes up whatever you type in the password box during sign up it only takes 32 characters even you type more than that. I was little puzzled, since I believe that Yahoo and Google must be having rigorous testing process.

I was able to type in the user name :

12345678901234567890123456789012


That makes it 32 characters. Good, its not allowing me to type further.

What about the password:

12345678901234567890123456789012


I was not able to type any more characters. Hmm .. good for the Firefox users with 1024×768 setting. The box is still empty and I could get a feel that I cannot type in more.

But on IE the picture was different, since Windows replaces “*” with dots (on XP Theme), I was not able to know whether there was a new character typed in or not. After every character I’d to type “left arrow” to check whether the new character entered or not. Not that any one would type in a password more than 32 characters, but a small hint might have given a good indication.

So the conclusion is Yahoo is NOT taking the whole string as a password, you are limited to 32 characters. So the password is limited to 32 characters.

Fun & Learning at Bangalore Barcamp 2.0

December 4th, 2006

Here are some photos from the Barcamp Bangalore 2.0. Barcmap Photos
Barcamp Bangalore 2.0 2.0 was conducted on 2nd,3rd December @ Thoughtworks office.

Here is the list of sessions I attended.

• Architecting a web-scale application with Ruby and Amazon S3 – Jonathan Boutelle
• Video Compression Demystified – Intro to MPEG, AVI, WMV, H.264 [Arpit Agarwal]
• Rapid web app development — My experiences while developing Catalyst [Siddharta Govindaraj]
• Sahi – Web Testing Simplified – [Narayan Raman]
• Frankenstien – FIT testing for Swing Apps [Vivek]
• P2P Web Applications development – Demo and Walkthrough a simple P2P web service [Kallol Borah]

It was a fun and learning experience, and I’m eagerly awaiting next barcamp

Eclipse RCP @ BangaloreBarcamp 2.0

December 2nd, 2006

Here’s the presentation I’m gave @ Bangalore Barcamp:

Barcamp Bangalore 2.0 : Update

December 1st, 2006

As you have already seen on my earlier post I’m attending the Barcamp Bangalore 2.0. Now I’m prepared with two sessions:

• Developing Cross Platform Applications using Eclipse RCP
• PSP – A Discipline for Software Engineering.

There are many other interesting talks. I’m sure I’m gonna have lot of learning and fun. Two days of geekery, what else do we want!

Safari Plugin to enhance the browsing experience

November 30th, 2006

Ever since I switched to Mac OS X, Safari has become my primary browser. Yeah, not FireFox, since FireFox is not a full cocoa application. For instance, I cannot use the Ctrl + Cmd + 3 to make FireFox window transparent.

But most annoying thing about safari is when I accidentally type Cmd + Q it just quits, without any warning. When I’m browsing using multiple tabs, its a big pain. There’s no way I can restore my previous browsing session, until now. Here’s the wonderful little plugin for Safari that has helped me in many ways : Safari Stand

It has many wonderful features:

• Sidebar (thumbnail tab)
• ‘Stand Bar’ (Bookmark, History, Side Bar compatible, Simple RSS Reader)
• ‘Quick Search’
• ‘Stand Serach’ – supports Spotlight
• ‘Action Menu’
• ‘Restore Last Workspace’
• ‘Site Alteration’
• intelligent Plug-in blocking
• original bookmark property (color label, category, comment, rate)
• syntax coloring in viewed source
• open “_blank” Link in New Tab
• …and many more

And its free .. download it and enjoy enhanced Safari Experience.

Barcamp Bangalore 2.0

November 26th, 2006

Barcamp Bangalore is on 2,3 December. That’s this weekend. This is my first ever Barcamp. And I’m, as usual, excited. I’ve proposed a session on Eclipse RCP, if you have some time, just drop in. But this is only “no spectators only participants” kind of unconference – come up with any thing you want to talk about. Don’t know what a BarCamp is? goto this page or this Barcamp Bangalore page, edit the page and enter your name.

foss.in/2006 – Day Three

November 26th, 2006

Today, I made no mistake. I took an auto-rikshaw So reached the venue at 11 a.m. I attended only a couple of talks today that interest me, and then interacted with Andrew Cowie and Russel Nelson. First about the talks.

What makes a valuable contributor: social dynamics in F/LOSS , Bernhard Krieger
This was a real good one. Everyone today wants to be a contributor and get the fame and name, But no one thinks about what’s the best way. Writing code is just one type of contribution, what F/LOSS lacks now is lack of various other kind of skilled people required for a software projects: Documentation writers, Usability experts, Translators etc. So Bernhard talked about Dos and Don’ts. Sending mails to mailing lists or participating in flamewars never make any one as a valuable contributor, but there are many possible ways to support the movement. I completely agree with the point. I think we had or have enough of the browsers/mail clients/distributions/editors. We don’t need another developer who wants to re-invent the wheel. Lets make the existing ones better.

And then my mind forked and started thinking about the Open Source business model. I’ll post my thoughts about them in another post.

Ten Tips To Turbocharge The Team: Getting Smaller User-Groups Moving, Frederick FN Noronha
Frederick is an independent journalist who’s trying to make the voices of indian FOSS community heard. He explained how disconnected and diversified current user groups in FOSS india. And he gave ideas on how to start and organize a community. It was interesting to know that there are 163 user groups related to Linux/FOSS in india. Strange

Developing with OpenEmbedded on the Simputer , Harald Welte
I attended this talk, since I admire Harald. In simple words, he stands up to the “gnumonk” status. A real “hacker”. Last time I saw him hacking Smartphones. This time it was Simputer. No demo, but just a know-how.

That’s all about the talks today. I met Andrew Cowie and Russell Nelson and tried to understand their opinion about the Open Source business model. As far as I can tell now all the open source software is “Generic” or “Horizontal”. Nothing much happening in Open Sourcing the verticals. Is it possible? What will be the advantage of it? Why anyone is not acting on it ? What might be a proper business model for “Vertical Open Source” ? What might be the correct licensing model ?

These were the thoughts that were going on my mind, and I’m trying to summarize them. I’ll blog about it in detail. So that ends my 3-day participation in FOSS.in/2006. Better, bigger and more useful than 2005.

foss.in/2006 – Day Two

November 25th, 2006

Another day, I lost in the bangalore traffic maze. Most of the time I avoid driving, Even for work I stay at a safe distance of 10minutes or less drive. So normally I don’t venture, then again, I started and reached the venue just in time at 12pm

Getting Rich with PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Creator
This is one of the best talks, as you can expect from Rasmus. He showed how to get “rich” by making an application and get bought by Yahoo or Google by applying PHP technology He started off with a small web application and the performance refactoring by using data from valgrind (with callgrind). Running apache with no child processes. So first the application required something like 1700+ servers for expected 50,000 users, and the application latency was 284ms. And gradually by optimizing PHP and other applications under the hood, like turning off SSL for DB (PostgreSQL on ubuntu ) he reduced the need to 2 server and latency improved to 3ms. And then he was talked about the PHP’s capabilities for creating Web 2.0 apps .. PHPs XML capabilities and APC library. Pretty interesting talk, and value for time The talk presentation is here. The 17th slide appears to be broken though.

Java EE 5 and Glassfish V2, Some one from Sun Microsystems
Why does sun send “Project Manager” kind of people to a mostly dev-oriented conferences ? May be they want to keep all the good ones for Sun Tech Days! Next February, I’ll be attending sun tech days and find out. But this is not expected. The people who are talking about the slides, don’t know half of the content. They just read it out. Then what’s the point just give us URL, we’ll go ahead and read it.

Again the slides seem to be good, but the speaker screwed up.

Makefiles – Dark Magic in Programming, Sulamita Gracia, LinuxChixs.org.br
I was not really making out any thing in the make files. But I wanted to support Sulamita for her persistent support to the open source. And the bizarre experiences with couple of sun talks, I needed a break.
Apart from monophonic pronunciation and accent the talk was good, and Sulamita touched almost all the corners in the cryptic language from hell (Mak macros and files).

Overview of Open Web Single Sign-On, Vrushali Mahalley, Sun Microsystems

This was from sun again. Kind of boringly designed presentation. The speaker continuously reading from a bunch of papers. But better then previous sun’s presentations. She tried to explain all the types and scenarios of the Single Signon using Open Web SSO. Techinical, but boring.

Which Open Source License?, Russell Nelson, Open Source Initiative
Hmm .. some one from OSI (~esr type !? ). Very interesting talk and informative about the licenses out there and their intricacies, and how to choose a license. Mostly heard and read. But the Russel was good to listen to, made it entertrainingly-informative. The main question was what is the business model for Open Source. I’m some how still not convinced how to pull the Open Source initiatives up to verticals. I’ll post my thoughts after I think little more. Back to conference, this talk helped me recover from the Sun burn.

Highlights and Side notes
Yesterday I got the “they don’t give me the source code” T-shirt. Today, Sun stall has a small t-shirt image on their stall with a very witty message “Want to change the world, here’s the source code : OpenSolaris” – Some one from Sun stall got the idea .. Wow, I was “shocked” !

Another highlight is the BOSS. BOSS is Bharat Operating System Solution. A wonderfully customized linux distro from CDAC. I’d recommend you tie it. It has the real “WOW!” factor, the 3D Desktop is included by default. Unfortunately, it won’t run on my intel laptop or parallels on MacBookPro either. May be I’ll figure that out from the people at the stall. But the GNOME theme was more cool and calm and beautiful. And they have webcam, bluetooth, Wi-Fi support. The distribution is based on Debian. May be once I push in the ATI drivers, I’ll create a full review for it.

That’s all for the day, tomorrow I plan to meet Russel and ask him a couple of questions about Open Source business model.

foss.in/2006 – Day One

November 24th, 2006

foss.in 2006 started off today. I reached the venue at 11a.m after roaming around and hopelessly struck and lost on Bangalore’s spiral roads. I got the registration done, my friends/team members were already there. My company’s management showed a nice gesture of agreeing to sponsor all our four members for the event. And this year, the audience turn-in rate seem to be very high and the facilities are much better than the last year. The lunch was surprisingly good too! The venue for the last year was bangalore palace grounds. Although, we didn’t get any T-shirt this time, there was a cute and nice Foss Mug. Directi gave away nice free T-shirt which said “I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code”, Needless to say, I grabbed one

There are stalls by Google, SpikeSource, Sun and Geodesic and CDAC. I also got Open Solaris Starter kit from Sun stall. But I was unable to install it on parallels on my MacBook pro. Or may be I need some time figure that out. Also, I checked out the simputer by PicoPeta (now part of GeoDesic). The interface was littly clunky, but its a nice device, they are even opensourcing the UI/OS. And the device is very light in terms of weight.

About the talks, I was not able to attend the first two talks, thanks to the confusing roads and the congested traffic in Bangalore.

How we fix the software industry with Open Source by Chirsto Wittig, db4Objects.

db4Objects has a dual-licensed embedded native java/.net database development company. Their model is similar to the MySQL business model. In simple terms, if you want to give the source of your product, you can use ours for free. If not, you pay.
This was a good presentation, and christof was comparing MySQL with Oracle most of the time. The main part was how oracle failed to understand the importance/threat of open source and how they realized and trying to align themselves by embracing the opensource. Personally, I don’t buy the idea of dual licensing. But it was an interesting talk. And stimulated many good questions from audience.

libyahoo2 The ‘other’ messaging library, Philip Tellis

This talk is mostly technical and is about the libyahoo2 c library which provides API for interacting with yahoo messenger servers. Nothing much to talk about, since I was not really interested in it. And the project is now in a “stable and stagnated state”

OpenJDK – Open Source Java, Anupam R, Sun Microsystems

In one word : “disappointing”. I was anticipating this talk to be a very nice and informative, but the speaker was so damn bored and bored us to death. I saw people in the first row almost yawning and trying their best not to sleep. Eventhough the slides of the presentation are made wonderfully, the speaker failed to give an impression that he knows atleast 10% of the what there’s in the presentation. I was very disappointed in this one for sure. May be sun might have sent a “real java” guy.

On the cutting edge: Solving the fundamental structural problem of free software movement, Andrew Cowie.

Another typical cowie’s talk. Lively, involving and technical. Andrew tried to give an overview of the three fundamental problems of Free Software: Version Control, Bug Tracking and Build issues. He classified the version control systems into three generations:

• Centralized (cvs, svn)
• Distributed(darcs, Bazaar-NG, arch)
• Power (git, mercurial, svk)

I don’t know how he missed Aegis version control system.

Then he talked about the bugtracking systems and their inter-operability and having a distributed bug-tracking system. It will be a really nice idea for Linux community since most of the Linux distributions are just packagers and not realy developers. If the bugs we file are “upstreamed” towards the original software project, then it would be of tremendous value.

Finally, it was about buildtool, which Andrew & co have developed. Its a replacement for the geeky-funny-and-sometimes-as-good-as-hell automake, autoconf, make and libtool build tools. I attended the full presentation during foss.in/2005. So, nothing new.

So that was the first day at foss.in/2006. More productive, interesting, enjoyable and fun than last year.

"Women, Know your Limits"!

November 20th, 2006

This is a funny video I came across, not that I fully believe in the “message”.

Women: Know your limits

Java under GPL?

November 13th, 2006

Sun finally releasing Java under GPL ? Seems to be true .. what will be the effects of this on Java community, codebase etc. etc ?

Here’s the link to the news : Sun makes Java Tech. Open Source

Update:

Here’s the link to Sun CEO’s post about releasing Java under GPL. Now my website title can change to simple “Open Source Technologies”

I wonder what happens to Apache Harmony project now.

Increase performance by using SwingWorker

November 13th, 2006

One of the projects I’m currently working on is a Swing application, which contains a login window and a Main Application frame.

I’ve divided the whole application into panels and the panels are pre-constructed during the menu creation. Initially, I thought it will not be a performance issue. But as the panels number grew large to 10 panels, once the login is successful, the MainFrame is taking a whooping 4000s. I profiled using Eclipse profiling tool, and found out that most of the time is spent in Menu creation. Normally it shouldn’t but as I said, I was constructing all the required panels during menu creation. So it was running inside AWT thread/UI Thread, so application frame was not visible until the construction is complete.

The panels are complete set of classes including UI, Presentation Model, Model (and Model Implementation). So that was biggest culprit and contributor for 4000s. Then I used Swing worker and pushed all the panel constructors in to the construct method. And interestingly enough, the loading time is just under 900s. Almost, 40% perfomance gain

So moral of the day, always try to group the time consuming stuff and let the SwingWorker do the work !

foss.in/2006

November 8th, 2006

foss.in/2006 delegate registration is open now. Last year when I attended, I had lot of fun, though some of the talks were not that interesting, the overall impression was good. The list of talks this year seems to be impressive though. Here’s the full list of talks.

I’m planning to attend these talks/workshops:

• Writing Applications With KDE4
• Open Source Portal
• Eclipse plugin development
• Getting Rich with PHP 5
• Building an open source Java EE 5 application server – Project GlassFish

There are some others but this time I see a lot of new speakers. Compared to Linux Asia, this seems to be more developer/programmer oriented. But not much for me. I’m surprised to see that there are no Ruby on Rails talk/workshop. I was interested in submitting a talk regarding Eclipse RCP development, but later realized that my schedule doesn’t give me enough time for preparation. May be next time

Jet Airways' SkyScreen

November 6th, 2006

Jet Airways recently announced Sky Screen in-flight entertainment, partly because of competition with King Fisher. They are extending the same to many other sectors as well. Here is the scoop of what they have :

• Enjoy over 100 hours of award-winning shows from Hollywood and Bollywood
• Eight audio channels and over 70 audio CDs
• Largest video screen in the domestic sector
• Touch screen technology
• 9 multi-level, multi-player games in Business class
• Summaries of over 100 of the finest management books
• iXplor – an innovative moving map that lets you track the flight’s progress

What’s amusing in the list is : 9 multi-level, multi-player games in Businesss Class

I’ve never seen more than a couple of people flying in the business class. I think they should put this on the Economy class for all economic guys like me!

Welcome!

November 4th, 2006

Drupal 5.0-Beta 1

November 2nd, 2006

As the new Drupal(My Favorite Content Management system, used for my site too), version is relased, I’m not able to resist myself from upgrading. So, that’s what you see now, all new shiny Drupal 5.0-Beta 1 based system. This is the default theme for the new drupal. Its cool .. and bluey – my fav color. I’m still in the process of upgrade and migrating my other wicked cool stuff to the updated website, so stay tuned.

1.2 Downloading and Installing JBoss IDE

October 5th, 2006

As I told earlier, JBoss IDE is a bundle of Plug-Ins for Eclipse IDE. So you if you already have your Eclipse (3.2+) Installed you can just download the Plug-Ins and copy them over to your existing Eclipse Installation.


Alternatively, you can download the entire Eclipse + JBoss Plug-Ins bundle.
Option 1: (Eclipse Pre-Installed)

If you have Eclipse (Calisto version/3.2) installed on your machine already you can download the required Plug-In bundle from downloadspage .


Click on the link that says: “JBossIDE-X.Y.Z.Beta1-ALL.zip” – X.Y.Z is the current version number. Once the download is finished, you can unzip the file to some temporary folder.

• Unzip the downloaded file to a temporary directory.
• You’ll find two folders: plugins and features.
• Copy the contents of plugins to your eclipse/plugins folder.
• Copy the contents of features to your eclipse/features folder.

Option 2: (No Eclipse Installed)

Click on the link that says: “JBossIDE-X.Y.Z.-Bundle-[platform].zip” – for example at the time of this writing it is “JBossIDE-2.0.0.Beta1-Bundle-win32.zip” for windows platform. Click on appropriate version you want to download.


If you have Mac OS X, unfortunately for Mac OS X, I don’t see a bundle version now, so you need to go with the option one, by installing eclipse first.

Once you have finished doing that just start the eclipse as you normally do. Eclipse should detect your newly installed plug-ins.

JBoss AS Installation : Step 3

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 11

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 10

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 9

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 8

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 7

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 6

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 5

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 4

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 2

October 5th, 2006

JBoss AS Installation : Step 1

October 5th, 2006

1.1 Downloading and Installing JBoss AS

October 5th, 2006

JBoss Application Server is fullly complaint and certified J2EE application server. It has support for all the J2EE API and includes Tomcat as the webcontainer. It’s Open Source application server and released under LGPL. You can learn more about the JBoss Application Server, and read the documentation at the JBoss AS website here.

You can read the Getting Started With JBoss for more information about JBoss AS.

Downloading JBoss AS

There are two ways of downloading and installing the JBoss. Either you can download the entire package or install it later, or you can use Java Webstart to install JBoss AS. Goto the JBoss AS downloads page and click on your desired link.


If you click on the “Run Installer” option, you’ll be propmted to open the JNLP file to start the remote installation.


If you click on the “Download” option, you can download it either in JAR or ZIP format. JAR file is the installer, I recommend downloading the Installer JAR file.

Once you have downloaded the file open it with Java using following command line:


java -jar [installer-filename].jar



or Open it with Java Platform Runtime.

Installation Screen Shots

Make sure that you select “all” in Step no:5. Other things should be pretty straight forward. Click on any image to view it in full resolution.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

Step 8:

Step 9:

Step 10:

Step 11:

1.Installation & Configuration

October 5th, 2006

In this chapter we’ll see how to install and configure JBoss Application Server and JBoss Eclipse IDE.

JBoss AS and JBoss IDE are freely available for download from jboss.com site. The JBoss AS is licensed under LGPL (GNU Lesser GPL).

JBoss IDE is in fact a set of plug-ins for Eclipse IDE.

Pre-requisites


You need to know the following before you can start off with tutorial.

• Enterprise Java Beans
• Eclipse

You should be familiar with Eclipse and should have the theoritical knowledge of Enterprise Java Beans. You can read the book Head First EJB or Enterprise Java Beans 4th Edition books for learning more about EJBs.


If you are not familiar with Eclipse, go through the Eclipse website for tutorials and help.


Very soon, you can find a simple EJB programming tutorial here on my site, keep checking!

JBoss IDE EJB Tutorial

October 4th, 2006

Welcome to EJB Tutorial using JBoss IDE. JBoss IDE is built on eclipse and is tightly integrated with JBoss. It comes with several plug-ins including xDoclet to make the development of Enterprise applications easy.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to develop various type of EJBs (Session Beans, Entity Beans and Message Driven Beans) and deploy them to JBoss. The beans will be developed using xDoclet. If you are familiar with xDoclet then you’ll find using JBoss Eclipse IDE very easy.

Sourcecode Search Engines

October 4th, 2006

Google Labs came out with CodeSearch : a search engine for public source code.

Since most of the time I work with Java I prefer Javaref which is more Java specific and gives the ability to narrow down the search to different packages and supports favorites etc. And it has a nice cool AJAX interface too.

There also Koders.com which provides language and license selection in the front page, unlike Google Codesearch which hides the options in Advanced Search.

Cross-platform development

October 2nd, 2006

Here’s the snapshot from my Desktop/Laptop/Tabletop/Bedtop

Running three Operating Systems ( Guest: Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP Home, Host: Mac OS X ), this is the ultimate cross platform development experience one can get. I’m in love with Parallels

PS: Image size is quite big .. If you want to see it in full resolution click here

Pro Desktop

October 2nd, 2006

MacBook Pro running Windows XP Home, Ubuntu Linux (Via Parallels) on Mac OS X.

Microsoft designs iPod package

September 29th, 2006

The best thing about the above video is – its created by Microsoft !!

MacBook Pro is Here

September 14th, 2006

Here’s my first post from new Mac Book Pro

It has :

• 17″ Wide Screen
• 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo
• 1 GB RAM
• In-built iSight camera
• Ambient Light Sensor

More about it here

Upgrade to FreeBSD 7.0

September 14th, 2006

After playing and getting frustrated with Microsoft Windows Vista I’m switching “forward” to FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT. The basic installation is complete, and the pkg_add gnome2 is running.

And in a couple of hours, I’m going to switch to all new MacBook Pro 17″

rcp-jrex

September 5th, 2006

Python: Class and Data Attributes

September 4th, 2006

Python has two kinds of attributes for objects: Class and Data. Class attribute is similar or equivalent to static variables in Java. That means they belong to the class rather than an instance of the class. The data attributes are like instance variables, that are bound to an instance rather than the class.

The class and data attributes are declared normally in Python. But the way they are accessed inside the class is different. Here’s the sample code to find how class and data attributes work:

<br /> class TestAttributes:<br /> class_attr = 0<br /> data_attr = 0<br /> def __init__(self):<br /> self.__class__.class_attr += 1<br /> self.data_attr += 1</p> <p>if __name__ ==”__main__”:<br /> a = TestAttributes()<br /> print a.class_attr<br /> print a.data_attr<br /> b = TestAttributes()<br /> print b.class_attr<br /> print b.data_attr</p> <p>

Once the program is run it prints the following output:

1
1
2
1

indicating that class_attr is incremented whenever a new Object is created, whereas data_attr is related to the instance and hence its just “1″ regardless how many objects have been created.

Google Imagelabeler

September 3rd, 2006

Google Imagelabeler is a a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.

Once you login, you’ll be presented a small picture, which will be simultaneously viewed by another participant. You need to give some labels to the picture, just like your partner.If the labels match in 90 seconds, you get a score of 100. Otherwise, another picture will be presented.

So what’s up with this “game”? It’s way of collecting and using people to improve search results, every image in Google’s repository will now be tagged by people like you and me. So next time you search for an image using a keyword, you’ll get a better result. Using people – Web 2.0

This technology has been licensed from Carnegie Mellon university, and simiar to ESP Game

m0n0wall porting competition

August 29th, 2006

m0n0wall is a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software).

Current m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD 4.1.1, and the author of the program wants it to be ported to FreeBSD 6.1. And if you are able port the complete m0n0wall to FreeBSD 6.1, then you might win cool $2000

Windows uptime command

August 26th, 2006

Recently, My laptop battery is not lasting long. So to find out how long its working, I wanted uptime command was veryhandy on FreeBSD/Linux. But on windows, I was not able to find any tool that works like this. One option is to use

Systeminfo | Find "Up Time"

It takes a little time, but works, if want it as a command, save it as a .bat to your WINDOWS directory.

If you want the uptime command from Microsoft – here’s the link for it: uptime.exe

Shiva

August 20th, 2006

Lord Shiva in his symbolic form.

Weekend painting

August 19th, 2006

This weekend, I started painting (again!). It was years since I’ve defaced any piece of paper with any sort of colors. So I went to commercial street to get the stuff to start off. I got Camel artistic colors, three type of brushes and a art book (blank hand made papers). So here comes the first masterpiece …

Trees

August 19th, 2006

My first painting after a long time. Painted on a handmade paper, with water colors.

Learning Python

August 17th, 2006

Learning python was one of my goals. According to pragmatic programmer, one should learn atleast one new programming language every year and should read atleast one technology book a month. So, finally, I started off with Dive into Python online book. And here comes the HelloWorld python program.

</p> <p>#Program to print the name and website<br /> def printName(params):<br /> return “Hello! My name is %s, \<br /> My website URL is : %s” %(params[0], params[1])</p> <p>if __name__ == “__main__”:<br /> myParams = (“Vijay Kiran”, “www.VijayKiran.com”)<br /> print printName(myParams)</p> <p>

Google Code Jam registration is now open, and this time I really want to participate. Let me see even if get through the qualification round. Instead of Java (with which I’m more comfortable) I want to use python. This short term goal should certainly catalyze my python learning.

Trees

August 17th, 2006

Red House

August 17th, 2006

Photo of a house.

Posting from Windows Live Writer!

August 16th, 2006

I must say, Microsoft is improving its tools! this one is posted from Windows Live Writer available for download from here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Windows Vista Beta 2 Free CD

August 15th, 2006

Here’s the quiz to get the Windows Vista Beta 2 CD.

Yesterday, In installed Vista Beta 2 on my laptop. It took about an hour to install, with two times restart. The installation went smooth without any hiccups.

The look and feel and the UI is very much similar to the Mac OS X. Including the transperency, the “gadgets” and even the “save as” dialogue. And there is Windows Calendar similar to Mac iCal. But I must say MS is improving windows on par with Mac OS X. But still some how the default color and theme of mac looks better.

I’ll post the screenshots of Vista later.

Tiddly Wiki

August 3rd, 2006

Tiddlywiki is a one page wonder. It's a wiki in a page. You don't need to install the software, configure the database or even change the settings file like other wikis. Just copy the file. That's it.

TiddlyWiki is written in JavaScript. So its a client side wiki. Just download and start editing right away, and upload the single file to server and your are done. So easy. You can see my TiddlyWiki installation here.  Its just a single file. The wiki has plugins and themes too. There are also customized TiddlyWiki forks like GTD (Getting Things Done) implementation for TiddlyWiki etc. 

If you want to test the TiddlyWiki goto TiddlySpot. TiddlySpot is a free TiddlyWiki hosting service. Find out more about TiddlyWiki at www.TiddlyWiki.com.

Upgrading Ports on FreeBSD

August 3rd, 2006

I was busy working on some Windoze application, Since it needed COM Port access, couldn't work on FreeBSD. Yesterday, I started portupgrade after cvsupping to the latest ports snapshot. And in the middle the laptop went off and the pkgdb got corrupted.Then I tried using pkgdb -uf command. But the pkgdb was not rebuilding. I thought the system got messed up, I need to install all the pkgs, ports again.

I changed to the /var/db/pkg directory. And then a mv pkgdb.db pkgdb.db.old. Did the pkgdb -fu again. Voila! it rebuilt the pkgdb. So today morning I started the portsupdate -a. I'm sure it will take some good time for upgrading all the 561 packages Once the ports are upgraded, I'll switch to FreeBSD 7.0 series next week!

Cycling days are back again

August 2nd, 2006

Update: I see that there’s a lot of interest for cycling in Bangalore, How about a small meeting with fellow bikers and small early morning ride, what do you guys say ?

Last saturday I bought a brand new Hero Octane bicycle. So finally, I'm going to work on my bicycle. The bike is an Aluminium Alloy, 21-gear, Tig-Welded wonder. It has Shimano RevoShift gears, with dual discbrakes.The perfect bike for cycling. And it has all the features and costs just 8K. To see the complete specification of the cycle see the octane page at HeoCycles.com

Initially I went to the commercial street (bangalore) to inquire about the price and availability of the bike. But in one shop I was told that the price was 13K. And then I went to A.S.Chari Street, there the price of the bike was just 7750/- (without taxes). Obviously, I purchased from the dealer at A.S.Chari street. And finally, the cycling days are back again.

Update:

When I bought Octane there was only the Octane 26T model .. now I see that there are two new models .. Octane DTB1 and Octane DTB2.

You can see the tech specifications of Octane 26T here

Octane

August 2nd, 2006

Transparent Console for Windows

June 28th, 2006

If you have used gnome-terminal, you would have noticed that you can set the transparency options for the same. I have to use terminal window most of the times, infact I prefer to use the terminal window for most of my tasks. But I'm really annoyed by the way the windows cmd.exe looks. So I was searching for a Transparent Console for Windows, and found this nice little program called console on sourceforge. It has plenty of options for colors, height, task-bar or tray icon, click-to-drag, etc. Little buggy but extremely useful for your command line console needs. As in the readme I set the size to be max but it was not working. But otherwise a cool utility

Transparent console for windows

June 28th, 2006

console: Transparent console

console

June 28th, 2006

Transparent console

My Desktop(s)

June 20th, 2006

My Desktop(s) at home

site-images

June 19th, 2006

Mac, Market and Marriage

June 19th, 2006

So here’s the scoop from the past, why I’ve been so busy

First .. As one of my friend predicted, It was not my marriage!

My sister’s marraige was on May 18th, so being the only brother(elder), I’ve got some obligations, commitments etc. on me. So, I’d to take care of many things so almost for three weeks or so, I was terribly busy organizing things.

Second, I started looking into stock market, and I was trying to apply my instinctive prediction technology to the mob-psychological play ground a.k.a “Stock Market”. It seems I was able to succeed. I got Rs.900/- realized profit in just 4 days A good achievement … at least for me.

And finally, I got a new Apple Mac Mini. It’s just wonderful, and addictive. So I was busy exploring all the possbilities. And found out that I was living in a cave till now! Once you use a mac(OS X) then no looking back.

What's New in Java 6

June 19th, 2006

Here’s a nice article on java.sun.com about what’s new in Java Standard Edition 6 Mustang.

Version 6 of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), code-named Mustang, is currently in its second beta release – which is right on track for moving along to its Fall general release. So here are the top 10 things you need to know about Mustang, if you’re still hovering hesitantly over that Beta 2 Download Page link. Subsequent articles will provide more in-depth information.

Really aimed at people who create tools for Java development and for frameworks like JavaServer Pages (JSP) or Personal Home Page construction kit (PHP) engines that need to generate a bunch of classes on demand, the compiler API opens up programmatic access to javac for in-process compilation of dynamically generated Java code. The compiler API is not directly intended for the everyday developer, but for those of you deafened by your screaming inner geek, roll up your sleeves and give it a try. And the rest of us will happily benefit from the tools and the improved Java frameworks that use this.

Coming Up!

May 12th, 2006

What’s keeping me too busy to post a blog entry to my beloved website?

• Mac
• Market
• Marriage

Details .. coming soon

desktop.jpg

May 11th, 2006

Java on FreeBSD

April 6th, 2006

Finally, Java binaries for FreeBSD are now available.

I’ve compiled entire JDK on FreeBSD for more than 20 hours! But the performance of the compiled binaries appears to be more, when compared with my own compiled JDK. The most visible performance improvement is with Eclipse. Eclipse starting 4X faster with the new binaries. Thanks to the FreeBSD foundation.

Scheduled Maitenance

March 31st, 2006

I’ve been busy for the past week with a big coding exercise, and my laptop has to undergo scheduled maintanance.

My laptop has FreeBSD 6.0, Windows XP and Open Suse. I cleaned up my laptop – and finally upgraded to GNOME 2.14 on FreeBSD, removed Linux. Also removed many stale software which I never use. I’ve downloaded more than 1.2GB and had to switch to unlimited plan Internet at home is really bad in Bangalore. 64Kbps unlimited cable internet is Rs.500 (Hathway Cable). And it takes forever to just download 12MB file. In gurgaon it was 192Kbps for Rs.700(Iqara).

I was thinking of switching to DSL but, I’m not sure about the support for DSL modem in FreeBSD.

Last week I worked on AJAX toolkits, since I’d to build some AJAX messenger kind of application at work. Its basically a web-based online Jabber Client. I’ve experimented with AJAX toolkits like: Scriptaculous, Plex and RICO. Building AJAX webapplication is sudden change from “traditional” web applications. In normal web-application, the logic is to think interms of Pages and forwards and sessions. But in AJAX, page IS the application. Just like out normal Desktop applications.

So I’ve started working on Plex toolkit, and trying to understand it so that I can start contributing.

Google's New Look

March 26th, 2006

Google has got a new look in the search results:

Here is how to get the new interface in your Firefox Browser:
From ZDNet:

1. Drag this link (Toggle Google Look) to your “Bookmarks Toolbar” (may only work in Firefox).
2. Search for something on Google.
3. Click the bookmark

Windows Live Mail Beta

March 24th, 2006

I got an invitation for Windows Live Mail beta. Here’s what Its looking like:

LiveMail is similar to Outlook Web Access. But with limited functionality.

This is what LiveMail claims to have
• Speed, Speed, Speed. Built on new technology that makes navigating your e-mail much faster
• Easy Inbox Management. Includes drag & drop, plus message previews with reading pane
• Info Bar. A new weapon to help zap junk and “phishing” e-mail
• Expanded storage. Extra space for all your stuff with 2GB of storage

Google acquires Writely

March 9th, 2006

Google acquired Writely – web based word processor. This is the next logical move for Google. And the news comes the same day when I finish drafting my usecases for my top secret project. I’m sure it needs a catchy name

And as already expected, Google will be ready with their web-based productivitiy software just like Microsoft Live.

As a sidenote, I was evaluating a piece of software called gobeProductive. Check out the review by ArsTechnica.com which recommends buying the software.

Personally one thins I was really wondered is the size of the software: 12MB. The product looks good, but I use OpenOffice.org.

Files Synchronizer

March 7th, 2006

Finally, I wrote some program that is really useful to me. A small files synchronization program in Java. I never wrote serious desktop stuff for sometime. So, I started with creating a Front-end for my iPod files synchronizer. Now I consolidate all my work to a single directory, and sync the same with the directory on the iPod. Pretty useful. I created the executable jar. So, connecting iPod and then start the program.

Download the jar file.

Coming soon, automatic file synchronizer!

Web Mashups

February 27th, 2006

Mashup is a web application that uses existing web services to create interesting applications. Now a days many Web sites/applications are exposing API for web services. And many mashups have been created by creative individuals. Here’s one of the best example:
Retrievr. Revrievr lets you use image-search the Flickr photos. Just paint using the left navigation and in seconds you can see the matching photographs in the right side. Truly wonderful “Mashup”!

For other Flickr Mashups check the article on hotwired – Top Ten Flickr Mashups.

Life with iPod

February 26th, 2006

I got an 30GB Video/Photo iPod from soon-to-be-revealed source

Hmmm .. its sleek, sexy and simply addictive. I loaded all my photos, music. And subscribed to French Tutorial Podcast too. Suddely the life has changed, now I synchronize my work at office and home with a smll Java Program and disk-enabled iPod. Learn french when I’m cutting vegetables. Watch Photoshop.TV to know some tips and tricks – all using a tiny handy small iPod. Technology is changing lives .. wow.

Apart from that, I started reading Building RCP applications using Eclipse. Infact, I started learning it to scratch my own itch. I want a small Task timer application that will help me keep track of time I spend on multiple projects. So here I’m starting from the start!

Some interesting things happening at my end, so I could’t update my blog. I was just wondering how interesting is the Internet as a platform to spill out whatever you want. Look at all the stuff that’s posted onto the Internet – just like my blog

So very soon, in a week that is, I’m gonna finish my Tasktimer and use it.

Opinion: Paritrana Party

February 14th, 2006

Here’s one of the comment I received from a Web surfer called Abhishek:

SHUTUP and ACT
Dude, ur “Improve the literacy rate” is a very vague term. I’m sure, with all ur travelling experience, you urself have no idea how to accomplish it.
Paritrana is a great start…India needs more intellectuals in politics…that’s the dirtiest field…and if these guys are taking an initiative to offer the people of India a political party which puts the interest of nation before an individual’s…then I don think there’s anything wrong in it.
It’s quite easy to tour India…comment on the things that need to be done…and critisize and comment on other people’s efforts and actions.
Enough said, I’ll leave u with just one thought…India does not need people to go blah blah about what needs to be done…It needs people who can act and deliver.

At the outset – thanks to google! My website is the second link when you search for “Paritrana“.

Dear Abhishek,

I’d like to know which part of “Improving literacy rate” is vague? I’ve an idea to accomplish it, but not from travelling from the entire world, but from my parents, both of them are in education field – Teachers in a Govt. Schools.

I’m sure you could not understand the tone of my post:

I really feel good about the effort.
and While politics is one of the options where we can influence people’s lives

And I never said in my post that there’s something wrong in starting up a political party.

And with all the ellipsis and statements with no punctuations I feel that its your knee-jerk response. And everyone is entitled to one’s opinion. I’m waiting to meet the Paritrana guys and get inspiration from. I don’t necessarily be one of them if I don’t agree to their motive.

Finally, I’d like to thank you for making me to post a clarification for the post for the un-initiated masses out there

There’s an interview with Paritrana founder at DesiCritics.

Google Desktop 3 Beta

February 9th, 2006

Google released its new Desktop Search. With a lot of new features, including moving the panels outside the sidebar. Also now you can search networked computers. But your files will be copied to the Google Servers.
So now Google has:

• My Search History
• My Email
• My Instant Messasges
• My Shopping Trends [Froogle]
• My Location

And Finally

• My Files!

Read more about the features of Google Desktop beta here. You can download the Google Desktop from this link. I just hope Google sticks to “Don’t be Evil!”.

New theme

February 8th, 2006

Here’s a new theme I just found for Drupa 4.7.x. Its called meta theme. If you are using Drupal then you can download it from here. Seems like an interesting theme, it has tools to change the way the site looks by using some CSS techniques too.

Thanks to Ken!

New Party – Paritrana

February 3rd, 2006

Recently, there was a news about a new party being formed by former IITians. The party is called “Paritrana“. As the news paper claims, the guys seem to be influenced by the movie “Yuva”. I really feel good about the effort. But I seriously doubt whether this is the proper way to change the system?

In my view, I think India is not in need of another party. While politics is one of the options where we can influence people’s lives, especially in a country like India, I still feel there are other fields where everyone can help out.

The mission of the party is:

The objective of the party is to resuscitate and restore the great traditions of Bharatvarsha’s glorious Golden Age based on the eternal values, and to transform Bharatvarsha into a prosperous and powerful nation, and reestablish Bharatvarsha to its rightful place in the world as ‘JagadGuru’.

In a global economy no country can be JagadGuru, and the mission is too much inclined towards the old-traditions and more specifically to one specific religion. Although I cannot jump into conclusions right now because the party has not even fully established. And I’m certainly against the Ideology they are talking about. What we need is not another party, I feel, we need a movement, not exactly political.

I’ve travelled across India, especially in rural india from Uttaranchal to Maharashtra to Tamilnadu, Karnataka and AndhraPradesh. The fundamental problem that the people in India are facing is the illiteracy and lack of knowledge to raise their Value of Life. And one more political entity is not going to solve the problem. Improve the literacy rate, help people understand the morality and rational thinking and the system will cure itself.

No one individual or party can do it, but at the same time its the individuals who should ignite the spirit.

Google in 2084

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 075

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 072

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 069

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 068

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 068

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 067

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 066

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 060

February 1st, 2006

Sringeri-Trip 059

February 1st, 2006