Lunch :o)

Yesterday, I went to meet my friend over at lunch (......yeah a late lunch as I had woken up at 13:00hrs). We met at Eggspectation, and it took us about 45minutes to decide what we wanted to order as both of us were not feeling that hungry and the dishes they offer are HUGE.

I finally ordered a gilled chicken sandwich on baguette(which looked more like ciabatta bread) with fries, and as my friend wanted a small dessert she ordered a banana crepe. When the waiter finally brought us the dishes, I had a long sandwich with HUGE chicken breast stripes and veggies in it and the rest of the plate was full of fries. My friend's plate had 2 banana crepes in it and the waiter gave her a bottle of maple syrup :o).

It took us more than 2hrs to finish and still leave about 2 mouth-fulls of the banana crepes. I haven't eaten anything since then as it still feels like I just ate. I will probably only eat something at dinner time tonight.

PS: BTW, the grilled chicken sandwich was great.

Gmail & Konqueror

Yesterday, I had to boot a system with a Knoppix 3.8 Live CD for salvaging some data(more on that later...). While waiting for the data copying process, I thought about checking my e-mail. Logged into Gmail, and noticed that something was amiss.

Then I realised that it wasn't the normal interface. Gmail was being rendered in the HTML mode as opposed to the javascript hungry default mode. Apparently, Gmail does not support Konqueror and hence falls back on the HTML interface. Knoppix uses KDE as their default desktop and fires-up a Konqueror welcome page after loading the desktop.

I wonder why they wouldn't suppport Knoqueror. Afterall, it is a modern browser with close to full CSS 2.1 support!

PS: I still have several gmail invites rotting in my account. If you still don't have an account and would want one, leave a comment with your email address.

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!

Wierd webserver stats!

Of the last few months I have been running the webserver on my machine, the stats have been more or less acceptable. Either they jumped because of my own testing or something I put there. But today I noticed that browser stats for the webserver are totally gone crazy and I don't know how to explain the behaviour!

	Dec 2004	Jan 2005	Feb 2005	1-24 Mar 2005
Firefox	72.7%	61.1%	72.5%	48.9%
Internet Explorer	6.5%	8.6%	12%	13%
Mozilla	8.3%	26%	7.4%	4%
Netscape	0%	0.3%	0.3%	26.9%

Notice the jump in the hits by users using a Netscape client in the month of March2005! That is phenomenal. Although there was jump in Jan2005 for Mozilla too, but that was due to something I was testing and forgot to turn off logging my own hits :(.

The only plausible reason that I can think of for the Netscape browser hits surge is Netscape 8.0Beta. Such a huge increase in the number of hits would be most probably due to old Netscape users upgrading to the latest offering. I can't figure out anything else which can explain the behaviour. Can anyone suggest some?

Whatever be the reason, the ultimate result is that there are more number of users using Mozilla based browsers than 4months ago. And that number is rising pretty fast.

PS: All the stuff on my webserver is related to Mozilla development or Firefox Intro, hence number of IE hits are so low.

Debian GNU/Linux and Webcams

I had heard bad experiences about getting USB webcams to work on Linux. However, my own experience wasn't that bad. I had recently got an old machine from a friend who was going to throwing it away. It had a lot of paraphernalia along with it, e.g. microphone, a 1-to-4 USB hub, wireless keyboard and mouse (sans the reciever!), and a cheap USB camera.

The machine my friend game me is now happily running Debian Sarge. And while going through the other things before throwing them away, I noticed the webcam. Out of curiosity I sat down last night to see if I could make it work or not. After about a couple of hours of searching/reading on how to make USB webcams work on Linux I started compiling the qc-usb-source package which would give me the module for the logitech webcam, installed xawtv and loaded up the videodev module. And after a little bit of additional chnages, I was running the webcam on my Debian Sid box.

The most helpful web pages in making the webcam work in Linux were:

• http://www.crazysquirrel.com/debian/webcam.php
• http://www.aboutdebian.com/webcam.htm

In the first link, the author advises to chown the qc-usb-source directory. I instead added myself to the src group and did the compilation of the module.

The first link is more helpful for Debian users like me. After getting the webcam working on my Sid box (tested with xawtv), I installed the packages webcam. The webcam packages allows one to take pictures every n seconds and send them to a pre-defined directory of your webserver which can be either local or remote (via FTP).

Once again, I can say: Linux Rocks!^TM

A "Bugs" Life

Bugs are a part and parcel of software development. They are there for us to remind that we need to improve the software all the time. Theoretically, critical and security bugs should be taken care of as soon as possible. Other bugs e.g. normal and feature requests are resolved as the developers get round finding time for them. But there are some bugs which live for a long long time. By long I mean really long! Check out the brief details of the top three (age wise) bugs for the Debian GNU/Linux system on this page. The oldest one is going to be 10 in a few days!

I wonder if there are bugs older than those!!

Gmail's ongoing improvement

I just noticed that Gmail reverts to basic HTML for older browsers rather than the normal heavy JS stuff. This makes a few of the features unavailable, but could be really helpful at times. Users can also use Picasa to send images directly to friends. The next big feature I'm waiting for is IMAP access. That would allow me to use a client or web seemlessly without having to remember if an email is already read or not (POP).

:)

I finally LANDED!!

Cell Phone rates!

Today, I talked to a friend of mine after a long long time. Actually, it was after 2years and 2months. I asked him questions about other batchmates and he refreshed my information about all the ones he had been in contact with.

Then he gave me his cellphone number and asked for mine. In this world of ever enhancing technology, I still do not own a cell phone. I told him that it was too expensive for me. He said that his cellphone plan is such that if he just wants to stay connected and receive calls he would be only charged Rs. 54 (i.e. about CAD 1.54 or US$1.28) for a month. And all SMS, sending and receiving, is FREE. He can send SMS to anywhere in the world for free.

I'm sure if someone does a survey about cell phone plans and their costs, the cheapest ones would be the ones in India.

PS: I do not own a cell phone but this is for another friend :

Fido Sucks!

Query about religion

Last weekend, I was visiting my relatives and a close friend. It was a lot of fun and good eating except for one occurence.I was amazed by the architecture of St. Peter's Cathedral Basilica and was just attracted by it to go inside. There were beautiful stained glass windows and looked perfect with the Sun shinning outside. There was also a place near the entrance which had pictures of all the Pope's since 33A.D. right to Pope John Paul II!

I stayed there for about half an hour amazed by the artwork and the design of the building. The feeling inside the basilica was the same that one gets when one is sitting in a Gurdwara. It was really peaceful and calm inside.

On my way out, a person stopped me and asked me if I got good pictures. He is also asked me about my religion and about any conditions necessary to go and visit "your Gurdwara"(thats not correct, but we can give him the the benefit of ignorance!). I said all that was needed was to cover your head and take off your shoes. Then he said that to enter a Catholic church it was mandatory for the males to take off their "caps". And as I was a visitor and didn't know about that fact (I was wearing my turban as always), I apologized and thanked him for the information, but doubts still remained.

Does Catholicism not distinguish between a cap/hat and a Sikh wearing a turban? It seemed odd that nobody had said anything to us when me and my friends go to St. Josephs's Oratory where other officials were present everytime we went there (the person at St. Peter's was an usher).