In the end I ended up with the following choice (all are 19inch):

• Viewsonic VX922 Though my fav on the list was VP930 which had pivot etc … but was not available locally nor in Singapore
• Dell 1907FP
• Samsung 940W

Though there were few 20inch monitors available at the slightly higher price band, I was already feeling my purse string stretch at the present price bands. How I wish, I could earn in $$’s as that would have entailed an upgrade to my display card.
Though Dell had a better ergonomics and pivot mode I decided to go for Viewsonic just because of the faster screen.

Yesterday the Viewsonic VX922 LCD monitor was collected by me.

After setting it up and getting my system up, this is what I noticed about the LCD:

• The monitor is too bright with the factory setting. I ended up reducing the contrast/brightness by half. Default Colors lean towards blue. You need to manually configure things.
• For this the OSD of the monitor is not that intitutive, nor the buttons work that great. There is a second delay between your button press and the actual action in the OSD. That’s baad.
• There is no easy way to callibrate

On the LCD panel performance:

• The colors are nice and bright. The screen has a good contrast for viewing even with a tubelight above and behind me.
• Playing games was a pleasure just because it was a bigger screen.
• Movies, weell, this is a problem area. In linux I could see the pixels very clearly (though this might be due to driver issues). In windows the DVD viewing was initially dissapointing as I could see the pixels and flickers whenever I was close to the monitor, but they were not visible once I shifted to a distance of a meter or so. Unfortunately the vertical view of the monitor is low (140 or so) which creates a problem when you are sitting in a surface which is slightly offcenter. Also in the sunset/sunrise shots, whenever there was a red spectrum spread, you could see the pixalation initially. But later on I couldn’t feel them (maybe because I got used to the image?)
• Fonts! Uggg… Surprisingly fonts look much better now in Linux (with Anti-Aliasing enabled) then in WinXP (even with Cleartype enabled). I installed the MS fonts on the linux and the screens looked much better then WinXP does. Go figure …

As my box has both DVI and D-sub output available, I was able to get my X-Server to work on Dual monitor mode with a single display card! Unfortunately this is not possible in WinXP. I need another card on this machine for that to work. Yuck!
After working on this screen the whole day: I like this monitor. I just which it would have been better in playing DVD’s though. Oh well P-MVA was out of my reach.

Anyways, I had Win3.1 and Slackware dual booting on my home machine back then. Once Win95 came into the picture, I ended up upgrading the 486 box to Pentium and 1GB hdd!
I still remmeber spending 45-50 minutes on the kernel compiles during those days! Maan were they slow.

Then work took over all my time and never really worked on linux for some time, till I changed jobs. In the new job, we were unix all over. We had a Solaris ultra Sparc-III boxes with Solaris 8 (later I ended upgrading it to Solaris 9). Few of our servers (mail, firewall etc were on Redhat linux). I had one test machine on Redhat, another on FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x. I still remmeber cross compiling the source on all these machines and maan was it a pain. If my memory serves me right we were using 2.9.x gcc compiler to all our work in these machines. Except for WinNT where we were using MS Visual Studio 6.a. I just can’t remmeber the compiler version though

Anyways, I left my job again and was out of linux world for past couple of years. And I have left job (again!) and started a new team. Well as of now we are a small team based in Bangalore, Geneva and Sweden (really distributed). To save costs we are all working from home and I am currently hosting the development servers from my home. (We are truly a garage operation as of now).

I just bought a AMD Athlon 64 based machine and I am planning to host gForge on this machine. Also as this will be our mail, SVN and project daily build machine for now, I was wondering what linux distribution to use. All of them seem to have some pros and cons and I am not sure what is good for me.
Anyways, the basic requirement:

• Should be light on hardware. Is that possible?
• Should allow me to load the server with all the services we need as a small dev team.
• Should be easy to maintain, update and configure. We don’t have any dedicated IT team here, and I don’t want to end up spending large amount of time maintaing it.
• It will be nice and geeky if it supports pure 64bit environment. I want to avoid doing chroot all the time.

Unfortunately there are no good recommendations out there. Looks like no one wants to stick there neck out and start a flame war. Well, I am currently trying out few of these distributions …

These passion toward music lead me to try understanding the underlying technology and resulted in lots of DIY projects in electronics. It also caused me to taking up electronics as one of my subjects in college.

Though I cannot lay a claim to be able to play any instruments I still love listening. At one time I had more then 400 CD’s in my personal collection and it has been my dream from when I can remember to own one of those audiophile systems.

Every time I came close to buying a music system always some other expense used to kill this one Imagine for past 10 years I had no music system on which I could really listen from. Other then my PC/Car stereo I was banished from music.

I had been planning to setup a system for my new flat from the moment I bought the flat and y’day at last my dreams materialized

A good friend of mine (Kriplani – thx from bottom of my false heart) y’day brought my system from Singapore and I haven’t been that excited for such a long time.

He was expected to land in Bangalore around 3:00AM, and to my surprise I was up by 4:00AM plainly excited about the whole thingi. I tried sleeping but just couldn’t. I couldn’t wait more longer and SMS’sed him around 4:30ish.

He was surprised and so we ended up having the systems in my house by 7:00 AM.

I managed to setup the amplifier/speaker/CD player in the morning.

By evening I had the whole thingi up and running. Sweet. I slept around 12 in the night! Maan was I excited.

My setup:

• NAD C372 Stereo Integrated Amp. (I just cannot afford a Power amp – pre-amp combo)
• NAD C521 BEE CD Player.
• NAD C422 Stereo AM/FM Tuner.
• Squeezebox 2 Network Music Player. (All my CD’s are already/will be ripped to FLAC)
• Mission M35i speakers.
  

I have hooked up my Linksys WRT54G wireless router and my PC to stream music from the PC to this Squeezebox.(I ended up setting up my wireless network and the rest of music system y’day night)

The whole shing-bang costed me around 1lakh (~$2200) and maan are my pockets clean. Sigh. But still a good feeling.

Music never felt so good …

After conducting so many interviews, especially past 6 months, I have kinda developed an interview model which works for me:
- Ask about the project they have worked in the past year (Kinda Ice breaker).
- Ask about the architecture of the application or what they found to be most interesting in that project.
- Move on to the platform specific questions, where the questions are more on the framework then any thing else.
- Maybe even drill down to certain important API’s.
- Give some problem for solving on an implementation level.
- A generic scenario from which a class diagram needs to be generated. I like this one as it tells me if the candidate has an innate knowledge of design or not. You will be surprised by how people think of a hierarchy. Seems to be a simple “as-is” relationship, but reasons for justifying a base class! Even what base classes people can come up with (Whew).

Anyways, everytime what gets my goat is when we discuss Polymorphic behavour, especially in C++ or C# or Java, I hear about overloading being polymorphic. I still haven’t figured our how this term has come into being: static polymorphism?

In math we define Morphism as something which can retain the same structure but the underlying mathematical structure (functions for e.g.) can change. This basically means in our modern OOPS language polymorphism is alwyas be the usage of virtual functions (overriding).

Well, unfortunately all the new texts in India use this term liberally with overloading go figure.

Refrencing Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism

Like a song, mark it. Over a given period of time the software is able to provide enough good suggestion that we have an online radio which plays what I really like.

Over the last few weeks only few songs I really hated. And enough time I stopped to see who is playing. Really kewl

I plan to keep this blog as a bookmark for intresting links for … (see title
expect this log to be updated as and when i discover more of these!

• Resources for entrepreneur
• Essays by Philip Chu, these are more of general advice for any software development team, not just startups. As my thoughts run on the same line, I have it here as a gentle reminder
• Free Management Lib, Lets call it Wikipedia for dummies.
• Practical advice?
• Blogger for entrep

I like Vaishali’s(the woman running the show) approach. I am not sure if she heard of the cluetrain manifesto, but it is heartning to see people here in Bangalore are also thinking on the same line.

She has got one thing right. Users are important. Listen to them dammit!

Go read her blog

I guess she might grow into an indian version of gapingvoid or even creating passionate users!

Can I recommend her? Un-fortunately she does not cover the area I live in. Will try her out next time I go visiting my family.

As you can see from the results, yahoo relevance hits have gone up while we were not watching.

Thx to my bro for this link.

One more place for MSN vs Google
http://www.addysanto.com/dualsearch.htm

Fear.

Fear is one of the prevalent feeling around us.

Fear of failure.

Fear of rejection.

Fear of being left behind.

Name it, and every action of modern people does have a sense of fear behind it.

A great lesson to be yet learned by people of India.
Un-fortunate, but people of India seem to have either dietified him (Mahatma, 8th avatar of Vishnu, etc …)
or deride him and his non-violence movement as a weak man’s reaction to oppression.

Just y’day a relation of mine said he did not support Gandhiji’s values on non-violence as that was a weak persons reaction. Strength has to be answered with strength.

A 55 year old man still does not understand that non-violence is a position of strength! I was appalled.
What did Gandhiji teach? What lessons did he leave behind? I needed a reason to read his autobiography (Story on experiments with truth) and looks like I have it now ( I should read it at least within this year ).

A thought comes to ones mind, isn’t overcoming authority by non-violence a position of strength?
Doesn’t overcoming our fear and replacing it with resolve to overcome our obstacles a position of strength?
Being honest to self whatever be the situation, isn’t that one of most difficult things to achieve?
Shaking a stick menacingly at someone, but hands shivering with fear on the outcome, or ruling with fear, when
does these become a position of fear?

Come may any storm, I will face it. Come may any fear, I will face it. What I feel is right, I will do it.
That’s what I feel are the teachings from the great teacher. Overcome your fear and let a steely resolve overcome you to do good.
That’s what he thought.

• Being fearless.
• Being honest.
• Fight in-justice.

If all three are not present then they haven’t imbibed Gandhiji’s lessons.
You need all these three attributes in equal measure to say it follows “Non-violence”/Gandhiji’s movement.

A friend asked me how do I keep in touch with the latest and greatest? The answer was “/.”
But seriously if I am looking for something specific, the following bookmark is what I use for my searches, i.e. when I want more then then what google can give me(!).

Other links
Dictionary of Algorithms
An open directory

Caller: Hello, Am I speaking to Satish?

hangs up.

What’s wrong with the above call? Something was not right.

First, someone calls me up and asks for my email ID without explaining to
me why they want it. Second, no indication of the privacy policy and if they
are going to use it for further marketting or sell it to spam people!

Is this marketting gimmick or email harvesting?

What got my goat was the subtle way of ensuring that they get your email ID. If
you notice, the first step is to ask for the emailID. It’s your responsibility
to ask the right questions before divulging the answers.

How different is this from phising?

What saddend me in the whole process?

Am I getting a cynical view of the world? Do I see schemes under everything?
Have I started to read too much in my day to day setup?

My natural reaction on the call was very paranoid and defensive. Moment I heard
Hutch, I was on A-Alert mode.

I am not sure if I like progress/capitalism anymore . This guy sums up my feeling to perfection!

My first attempt
Another shot at it

You too can try it here.

If you are in India, you can write a checque/DD to:
Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund
Address: Prime Minister’s Office, South Block, New Delhi-110001.

You can make a difference

Donate here:
Oxfarm
Sarvodaya, NGO in Sri Lanka
Prime Minister Of India’s Relief Fund
Aid India

Other links

SEA-EAT blog
Google page
Amateur Seismic Centre in Pune
More Links
Wikipedia
Report on damages

On a site serving static content or content that are read only, generally does
not generate large data to be consumed by the client. Even in case of large
documents/articles/content most of the sites split the content across multiple
pages to ease the amount of data to be downloaded. In case of applications with
web interfaces this can be different. Generally the users of the system have
been used to a client-server based applications with UI interface with many
smart tricks on the client side. A typical user expects the same behaviour on
the web solution. A clever UI designer can design an interface which works well
even in the web based mode.

But there are many cases where a small thin interface is difficult to design.
Standard examples are dashboard, reporting page or cases where filters are
removed, etc …

For these cases it is a good idea to enable stream compression at the web server
level. This can drastically reduce the bandwidth requirement and hence download
speeds for a site.

Few gotchas:

• Enabling compression will increase the server CPU load. But in a cluster
  enviroment, I definetly recommend this. As a general thumb rule if the server
  machine is running at the max load of 80% enable the compression, otherwise add
  another machine to your cluster environment before enabling them.

• There are browser quirks where these can create problem. Most notable Netscape
  4.xx (these can be safely ignored) or IE 5.5 (yikes, baad browser. If your
  users have this browser, recommend IE 5.5 SP2) or IE 6.0 Japanese version (similar to IE
  5.5 in bugs!)

• Compressing streams smaller then 1K will create unnecessary load on the server.
  If possible disable compression for streams smaller then ~500-1000 bytes.

There is a decent article covering the same here. I will not cover the same points already discussed out there, but these are my take:

• Set compression for both static and dynamic files.

• Disable compression for those aspx or server script files where we serve
  already compressed files. e.g. jpeg, mpeg, dwf, jpg, jpe, gif, zip, cab, mpg,
  mpe, mp3, png, amp, ptp, dwp, pnp, and zgl.

• Understand the following variables of IIS:
  HcDoDynamicCompression,
  HcNoCompressionForRange, In fact readup on
  IIsCompressionSchemes.

• To disable compression for certain files or nodes, set the DoDynamicCompression
  to false.

e.g. scripts:
[code]
C:/Inetpub/AdminScripts/adsutil.vbs set w3svc/{siteID}/root/DoStaticCompression True

cscript C:/Inetpub/AdminScripts/adsutil.vbs set w3svc/{siteID}/root/DoDynamicCompression True

cscript C:/Inetpub/AdminScripts/adsutil.vbs set
W3SVC/{siteID}/root/{subfolder}/{page.aspx}/DoDynamicCompression False
[/code]

Otherwise you can use the Metabase Explorer to do this.

Apache web server

There are two modules available, namely “deflate” and “gzip”.

As the following thread explains if you have Apache 2, use mod_deflate otherwise depending upon your configuration requirements go for either.

The apache site contains information for deflate (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html)
and mod_gzip is explained at http://www.schroepl.net/projekte/mod_gzip/config.htm

A sample configuration
[code]
mod_gzip_on Yes

mod_gzip_on Yes
#mod_gzip_send_vary Yes
mod_gzip_add_header_count Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes

mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz

mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 300
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 2000000
mod_gzip_temp_dir /tmp
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No

## minimal included set of items to compress to avoid sending Vary * header
## This is very conservative and cooperates superbly with mod_expires
## caching headers. (Netscape 4.0[678] will still have problems, but it
## only affects a fraction of a percent of hits (about 0.00015 == 0.015%)
## on our site with the settings below)
mod_gzip_item_include uri .s?html?$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/
mod_gzip_item_include file .php$
mod_gzip_item_include file .js$
mod_gzip_item_include file .css$

mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/

[/code]

I knew I was forgetting something but was not sure what. Only when I tried to restore the previous blogs to this site, thats when I realised I had forgotten to backup the database from the previous hosting service. As I did not have a backup of the system I am screwed