Saturday, October 27, 2007

Busy!? BreakAway.

Well... After a long time.... thought will write and post something.
Past two months were pretty busy. Decided to move on to new house.
Shifting was hectic. Yet settling down.
Getting internet connection established took 2 weeks. Had to run around to change the postal address for services availed.

Workwise, hectic weeks.

A look back into past.
A pic from Singapore:



An evening in Karwar:


So long... Will be back soon.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

BOINC and SETI@HOME

Unused idle time of my computer made me think of contributing something to community. There are lot of projects from cluster to desktop grid computing, which can utilize your personal computer's idle time. SETI@HOME is the one which attracted me first, then there is Rosetta@home. Around one month back I downloaded BOINC and started contributing to SETI@HOME project.
Why BOINC? Easily available for Ubuntu Feisty running on my HPL2000 amd64 laptop. By the way, it also supports Windows, MAC and Solaris. As it is opensource, you can build your own flavour also.
A Fair warning: BOINC once starts running a task, utilizes your cpu to 100%, so don't panic.

What is in it or me? Satisfaction of contribution to community!

At the end of this page I have posted my BOINCStats
Refer to the links above to know more about the projects and how you can contribute.

Put in your comments and findings on such different projects.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Being Parents

Yesterday (26JUL2007) is one memorable day in our life. We became parents!!! (first time in life!) . The birth of baby boy happened at 12:19PM(IST) and baby weighed 3.26Kg. The feeling is difficult to explain in words, so below link for pics...

First photos of my son.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

ಕನ್ನಡ, Ruby ಮತ್ತು Watir

Well this week I had a look at Firefox and kannada issue. The interesting thing is I could see the kannada fonts flawlessly in firefox/feisty combination after following through the steps at http://sampada.net/fonthelp. Only thing I did extra is pull fonts from Optional step from http://dev.sampada.net/wiki/Kannada-on-Ubuntu-Edgy and put it in $HOME/.fonts, then did below steps:
$ cd $HOME/.fonts
$ touch *
$ fc-cache -fv

Restarted the FF, viola! I am able to see the kannada sites pretty well.

Now, coming to Ruby, a new language... Really nice. Has lot of potential as far as my day today scripting. Watir a test automation framework for UI. Hope it picks up the speed, and gives a best OpenSource alternative. Right now it supports only IE, I was expecting a support for Firefox or any OpenSource browser.

Put in your thoughts on this change...

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Traffic Jam everywhere!

Travelling a mere 30 KMs in Bengaluru taking up 2 hours 30 Minutes!(let me agree it usually takes 1 hour 15 minuts). This was the situation yesterday night here in Bengaluru.
Top it up with travelling a mere 10 kilomenters for 3 minutes over 1 hour!!! ( from electronic city to bommanahalli). Oh! did I mention, I travelled with company provided bus service, if it would have been me driving my small car, its unthinkable.
The cause, initial mansoon rain(and I am not talking anything about heavy rains). Its not just blaming, I appreciate the things happening, when it was non-rainy season, the expansion of Hosur road really helped to lessen the travel time... But, a small look at the kind of work done, reducing the drainage size, and not cleaning them properly and you will foresee the impact, which I feel caused lot of water to stay on the roads (actually I mean to say here the water content is so much that, you can call it a small pond), results .... problems to the pedestrains as well the vehicle drivers, now who want to line up on the single lane where stay water is less. Over this the traffic signals not working. Considering the vehicle flow on the roads, the traffic jam is bound to happen.
All appreciation goes to the traffic police who stood by late night to make sure the vehicles are moving.
The traffic Jam which i mentioned was on one route, on Hosur road, BTM 21st main, Outer ring road near JP Nagar 15th main. As of now, i am not really aware if similar situations would have been observed on Mysore road, Airport road, Richmond road etc.

I think its high time, government takes a notice on kind of work done for expanding the road. The drainage system whether during planning/implementing phase or sustaining phase should be more well planned. I feel this could solve these kind of situations. Now, if the necessary action is not taken, bengalureans have to live with it.

Hope there is already a lesson learnt in October 2005 rains, water overflow caused so many problems in HSR layout and Madiwala. This would be our chance to standup and take notice and foresee the situation.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Moving from Knoppix to Ubuntu.

Well... its very late to reveal this. I am using Ubuntu from long time, say from the time of release of edgy eft.(Ubuntu 6.10). The main reason to move to Ubuntu; is very vast distribution, and streamlined forums, where i get answers to most of the problems i face. Of course it is trying to be the best Desktop OS. Beryl is awesome. Following are some of snapshots...



Now, waiting for feisty fawn. Have lot of expectations too...

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Typing made easy with DSK!

Yesterday, i was thinking about the amount of typing i do, whether it is Documentation/Coding, and the impact on hands. That is when i stumbled upon this Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

There are 2 ways to use it, one go for new Dvorak Keyboards, (where the keys are arranged in the Dvorak layout). Second one is free, software implementation.
Most of the Operating Systems (Windows, MAC or *nix) support Dvorák Layout.

So its just a matter of changing the input layout to US-Dvorak!.
You get good amount of information here and here.

I have just started to learn it. Will post my finding after some days, when i will really start using it.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Music and Musings.

Today, when i am traveling to office, i took my brother's handy music set (Sony NetMD along with Bose headsets). The travel takes approximately 1.5 hours.

I am amazed with the quality of sound and song on a MiniDisc, when compared to new Age Memory based MP3 players! I am not crazy about music and sound, but surely i love to listen good music. Well i can tell the impedence and power impacts on a speaker output quality. But, if you ask my brother, he will tell all about, how 2.1 is different from 5.1, and if you need a reciever to listen 5.1 encoded DVD, how to improve quality of sound of normal FM stations or Satellite Radio etc. etc.

My brother has done really good job in bringing in this combination of NetMD and Bose headsets.

Thanks Harsha! You have really nice collection of songs.

Monday, February 12, 2007

ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್...


ಬರೆಯಲು ಇದು ನನ್ನ ಮೊದಲ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ. ನಾನು ಊಪಯೊಗಿಸುವದು ಉಬುಂಟು ಲಿನಕ್ಸ. ಇಂದಿನವರೆಗೆ ಲಿನಕ್ಸನಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬರೆಯುವದು ಬಹು ಕಷ್ಟವೆಂದು ಪರಿಗಣಿಸಲಾಗುತ್ತಿತ್ತು, ಆದರೆ ಇಂದು OpenOffice.org ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬರೆಯುವದನ್ನು ಬಹಳ ಸುಲಭ ಮಾಡಿದೆ.