Wishing the Best

This is for my friend Amit. Its his birthday on 28th. How can I forget that ;).

I wish you all the best. I hope the party you are planning is the best one. But do remember to keep my share ;). Hope to see you soon, its been a looooooooong time.

First to call.

My dearest friend called just a few mintes ago. Yeah it is the day according to the IST. He was still awake at 0400hrs in the morning!

Thanks Amit

Choose your PR Manager wisely

Starting a new company or Hiring a new PR Manager? Think twice when you hire the PR Manager. Chances are that (s)he might almost cost you your company!

CEO, Jon S von Tetzchner of Opera Software ended up saving his own PR Manager during his much publicised swim from Norway to the US. Aparently, the PR Manager didn't know how to swim or how to read maps and was accompanying Tetzchner in a rubber raft.

Mozilla v/s Konqueror

Lately I have been trying out Konqueror along with my normal use of Mozilla Suite. Being accustomed to Mozilla it is a bit difficult to get myself at speed with Konqueror's shortcuts. But setting that aside, I found a neat feature in Konqueror: Split Pane.

One can split a pane either horizontally(Ctrl+Shift+T) or vertically(Ctrl+Shift+L). These individual panes can be further split up and most of the time this further splitting makes this feature useless! However, for a person who is working on two webpages and wants to compare the new one with the original, this feature will come in very handy.

Above is a thumbnail showing two webpages side-by-side. I was comparing mozilla.org's main page to itself about an year ago. Wow! That is a huge change in design ;) I just can't wait to get KDE 3.4 on my Debian box. KHTML(Konqueror rendering engine) is said to be complete CSS2.1 complaint.

Flowers Flowers everywhere.....

To those flower lovers and photographers: The Tulip festival is coming up soon. Schedule your visits and buy bigger memory cards well in time.

Hope everyone has a good time there

Debian - Unstable

I learnt the meaning of Debian Sid's status of "Unstable" in the last two days. I have never had a problem with using Sid on my system except small hicupps for which I just had to hold some packages for a few days. But day before yesterday, after doing an update I saw an error for the package exim4-daemon-light. It didn't seem like a big problem as I just completed the update process and started using my machine.

Later that night, I had to reboot the machine to do some updates on WindowsXP. Little did I know what was in store for me! After doing the windows updates, I rebooted in Debian. And before it could get X running, I got the same error for exim4-daemon-light. I couldn't do anything at that time. Even CTRL+C wouldn't work! I tried to reboot again and in a different kernel, but luck wasn't on my side.

On further search I found out that exim4 was a mail-transport-agent and upon my repeated tried couldn't finish the configuration and boot my machine. I worked on it even yesterday and didn't get a step ahead of where I was a day earlier.

Finally, I removed some packages and then removed exim4-daemon-light. So as my mail-transport-agent (exim4) was removed, I had to install another one - exim. Its not even supported now, but I thought why not, it will be just for a while till I can get the error with exim4-daemon-light sorted out.

So right now, my machine has booted into the GUI mode after almost two days! Phew...now I understand why they call Debian Sid as unstable.

PS: Sorry to those who were accessing the webserver I run. The above problem was the cause of the downtime. Its up and running now.

Je me souviens

I'm very happy that I still remember how to use the soldering iron. The last time I used it was in year 2000. Yesterday, I noticed that my headphones were not working well as the sound in the right side was erratic. I opened them up and tried to locate where the fault was. After about an hour of testing, I noticed that there was something wrong right where the wires enter one side of the headphones. I could hear the sound on both sides if the wire was bent at a particular angle.

I decided to remove the defective part of the wire and make new connections. I cut the extra part and used the soldering iron to connect the wires to the speakers and tested the phones which worked perfectly. The headphones are now as good as new, I saved around $50(cost for new) and refreshed my skills of using the soldering iron*.

* - Using the soldering iron is a skill, without it you end up with dry solder connections most of the time.

Google Satellite Imagery

While searching an address on maps.google.com, I noticed a link on the top-right of the web page saying "Satellite". Clicking on it made the map actually come live with satellite images of that exact area. Depending on which part of North America* you are looking, you can see images with a resolution to upto 1m/pixel! One can easily distinguish houses in densely populated areas like Detroit. I was also able to find the Twin Towers site in less than a minute.

This is a part of Google's aquisition of Keyhole, the satellite imaging company. The take over also included an imaging satellite, which has been rechristined as "gSat". Another big thing from Google(TM).

*-Unfortunately, Google still thinks that Earth has only one landmass, i.e. North America. The easiest way for them to learn is a Google Search.

The Vatican

I read Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope's Vicar for Rome's comment on Times of India article "Pope serious, given Last Rites". He said "I prayed with him only for a moment which moved me profoundly. The pope is completely abandoned to the will of God."

Surprising that this comment came from the Vatican. I'm sure all the major religions of the world believe that everything is in the hands of God. So whatever is happening is His wish and we are not the ones who can control it.

That said: May he rest in peace.

Best Wishes

Happy B'day Shally. I hope you are doing fine and wish you the best of luck.

2 Gig and still counting

Today morning, I saw GMail's counter pass the 2GB (=2048MB) mark and it didn't stop. It is still going strong at around 2050MB. Who knows where they intend to stop the quota !!

I'm sure this will have an effect on Yahoo's plans to increase the email quota limit to 1GB by mid April. Does Yahoo plan to do a 2GB or 4GB now? Its all a game!