My World

Heading back to Austin

Sathya — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:15:43 +0000

Well, I’m heading back to Austin for a second stint. Had an amazing time the last time I was there – was there for almost a year. Learnt a lot – technically & otherwise. Unlike last time when I had a flight from Chennai to Mumbai and then a direct Mumbai to New Jersey flight ( with a Mumbai International Airport to boot) – this time, the flight will be from Chennai.

The route would be Chennai – Doha – Washington – Austin. Worst part about this journey is that flight takes off at 04:45, and I would have to reach there by atleast 2AM – which means – Goodbye sleep. Will be reaching Doha by 06:45 for a 2 hour stopover. The connecting flight leaves Doha at 09:00 and would reach Washington at 16:00. The final flight to Austin is set to depart at 18:50. I’m a little worried about this difference – I’m not sure if this difference is enough for me to finish off the formalities – especially the immigration part. Lets see how it goes. Hope it will not be anything like the last trip!

Cisco VPN Client for Windows Vista / Windows 7 64-bit

Sathya — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 05:19:55 +0000

I’ve been looking for a reliable VPN client, one which works well on Windows Vista / Windows 7 and especially one which can connect to a IPsec’d Cisco VPN.

Of course there’s Cisco’s default VPN client but the one given to me is a crappy old 4.6 version, and works only on Windows XP. Tried to get the AnyConnect version, but after PITA registration and deep digging into a hopelessly unnavigable site, found that I cannot download it using a “standard” registration account

Anyhow, I’ve been using ShrewSoft’s VPN Client for now, its pretty neat, user friendly(well, unless you’re trying to create a new connection anyway) , works great and can import Cisco’s pcf profile files as well, saving you the trouble of having break your head in configuring one.

So, go grab it now!

Windows Download Link | Linux Download Link

(PS: Haven’t yet tested the Linux version, will post on my Linux blog after trying it out)

Update: Swaroop just informed me about Cisco’s WebVPN. Neat stuff, but requires additional config from Net Admins.

The Getaway – Part 1 – Coming together of The Plan(tm)

Sathya — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:07:08 +0000

If you’ve been reading my blog or know me, you probably know that I have a rather regular set of vacation times – ie, a week’s break once every three months or so. This time, however it was slightly different, and it had been about 5 months since I had taken a break. Let’s go back in time for a bit, however.

This getaway, was supposed to be a short 1 day trip to Guruvayur to attend wedding of fellow Rubyite. Since the wedding day was a mid-weekday ( ie Wednesday), Jay proposed an extension to this trip, and suggested a weekend getaway to Trivandrum and Varkala ( … I think). All the planning and tickets were done well over two months ago, thanks to Steve’s quick execution. Unfortunately, as always, nothing went according to plan. Come last week, I called up Jay to confirm about the trip and he hesitated slightly about the Guruvayur plan, let alone the Varkala/TVM plan. Then I hear that of the 6 people who were supposed to come to Guruvayur, 4 cancelled owing to their work and other personal commitments *sigh*. Which left Steve and me as confirmed for the Gurvayur trip. Since it had been quite some time since I took a break, I decided to utilize this opportunity and convert this into an extended getaway & make it into a Mangalore trip. Deepti then suggests coming down to Cochin from Guruvayur for the weekend. Since I more or less had decided to take the long break, thought to myself Cochin trip would be a good idea and nice departure from the traditional Mangalore trip. Dev, Ashmi & Ankit also said that they would be available for the trip, and The Plan(tm) was on. With a slight glitch.

You see, the original time table was like –

Wednesday – Leave for Guruvayur from Chennai

Thursday – Wedding. Leave for Cochin.

Friday, Saturday – Cochin, leave for Mangalore.

Deepti then reminded me that Ankit & the rest of the gang would be coming on Saturday morning, and me leaving on Saturday night would mean that I would miss a lot of The Plan(tm). *facepalm*. So I proceeded to cancel the Saturday tickets and booked a ticket from Kochi to Mangalore for Sunday night. (In hindsight, if I had gone with the original timetable, I’d have missed pretty much everything. More on that later).

Fast forward to Wednesday. I stepped out of my room to go for some shopping, and the mood was ominous, dark clouds everywhere. I booked a call taxi to the railway station, since I didn’t want to take any chances of me/my bag/laptop getting wet en route to the train station. Our train was supposed to depart at 19:45, and I reached at the train station at 18:30. Was waiting for Steve at the waiting room, and this bugger was nowhere to be seen. I grab a burger and some ice tea to spend some time, wait till 19:15, and call up Steve, and he says he’s on his way and asks me to go ahead with boarding the train. 15 minutes later, Steve calls and asks which platform, is the train on? I reply back its on No 5, and ask him where’s he, and he replies – “on my way”. WITH 15 minutes to go!

Finally, with just under 5 minutes for the scheduled departure, Steve finally gets on the train and we were off to Thrissur.

/cont.

Of comatose blogs & vacations

Sathya — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:00:48 +0000

Its been a very busy, hectic past few months. Besides my ~~day~~ night job( I work at US timings, PITA), I’ve also started contributing to techie-buzz, though my ~~day~~ night job takes a whole lot of my time, and I’ve not been able to contribute much. My Linux blog and as well as this blog has been lying almost in a coma state. I plan to start posting some articles now and then, got it in shipshape with a new theme, so watch out! I’m still pretty active on twitter ( again, not as active as I used to be – even with my “low” activity I keep getting requests not to spam the timeline :p. I’ve been fairly active on posterous though.

I started using tumblr as my tumblelog, but switched over to posterous. The primary reason for switching over was at that time, tumblr was incapable of handling multiple attachments – it’d post the first attachment and discard the rest. Started looking for alternatives, and posterous caught my eye. Its unbelievably amazing how simple posterous is. Just send an email to post@posterous.com, and you’re done. That’s it. That floored me over.

I’ve been actively involved in Web communities for quite some time, and now time constraints mean that current my involvement is at Chip forums where I’m the Super Moderator and at SuperUser( with rep of 7.1k ) – The StackOverflow for Power Users. I also lurk around in Meta – there are some good discussions over there. When I get some time, just drop by Reddit, Hacker News and TED.

Coming back to real life, as mentioned I’ve been pretty deeply involved in work, and come this Wednesday, I’ll be taking a break for about 10 days ( after a span of about 5 months, I believe). Initially, the break was meant just for the weekend – the plan was to head to Thrissur, Kerala and then hop back to Chennai. I decided to extend the plan, and head over to Mangalore to take a break. Deepti, Ankit & the rest proposed that we meet up at Cochin for the weekend,and so it was settled. So, currently the plan looks like:

Jun 23rd: Chennai to Thrissur

Jun 24/25: Thrissur to Cochin

Jun 25 – Jun 27: Cochin

Jun 27 – Cochin to Mangalore

Jun 28 - July 4th: Mangalore

Will be good to take a nice break. Hope I don’t calls regarding work, my experience says I will get it :/

Got nothing planned in Mangalore, lets see how it works

Golden Rules for Developers

Sathya — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:27:56 +0000

Steven Feuerstein has a nice little presentation on some golden rules for developers. They aren’t anything new, yet not many people read/follow them

Download the PDF from here, or just read it via the embedded doc

How many Justin Biebers could you take in a fight?

Sathya — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 03:33:10 +0000

I know this quiz is old,but wth.

Hit The Oatmeal for more such quizzes, and some fantastic comics. Like 8 Websites you need to stop building. Or How A Webdesign Goes Straight to Hell. Or Why I’d Rather Be Punched in The Testicles Than Call Customer Support. Or Why Its better to Pretend That You Don’t Know Anything About Computers.

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Download Toad for Oracle for Free

Sathya — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:47:56 +0000

Toad (acronym for Tool for Oracle Application Developers) is arguably one of the most popular and best known tools used by most people dabbling in Oracle databases ( or for that matter, most relational databases anyway). Toad’s reputation is so good, I’ve known few people swear by it and don’t even bother looking at other software, no matter how good.

Toad’s got more features than your average SQL/ PL/SQL developer would use,and hence got a bit of a steep learning curve. Not to mention an even steeper price tag ( the base edition starts at $957, and goes all the way upto $4709 if you include the Code Tester and DB Admin module). Given these prices, Toad is pretty heavily pirated.

However, most people are unaware that Toad also comes in a freeware edition, and until recently was severely crippled. Few days ago, there was an update to Toad freeware – and the updates are pretty good. The freeware edition is now based on 10.5 codebase, rather than previous 8.5 codebase. Now before you start jumping up and down, the restrictions on the freeware edition are still in place, but noticeably lesser than the previous update. Some of the restrictions include you being limited to only one concurrent database connection (which btw – would severely hamper me, I generally maintain 2-3 connections). Another major irritation is that the freeware edition will expire every 90 days, and you will need to uninstall, re-download and reinstall it. Ugh.

Here’s comparison chart between the commercial edition and freeware.

If you’re OK with the restrictions imposed by freeware edition or a Toad fan, then you can go ahead with getting it. If you ask me, Oracle’s SQL Developer is a perfectly acceptable alternative tool.

(In case you’re wondering my preferred tool, its Allround Automations’ PL/SQL Developer. Yes, yes, I know, the UI is butt ugly – I didn’t want to touch it at all just because of the UI – but believe me, once you get over the UI, you’ll love it – its fantastically fast, consumes very little memory and got boat load of features for the price its available at. I’ll probably do a review of the tool soon.)

Do let me know if you have a preferred /alternative tool that I could look at.

Download Links:

1. Toad Freeware edition

2. Oracle SQL Developer

3. Allround Automations PL/SQL Developer

Brush up your PL/SQL knowledge with PL/SQL Challenge

Sathya — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:14:31 +0000

If you’re looking to brush up on your PL/SQL knowledge, PL/SQL challenge is pretty nice. It’s a daily challenge quiz, where you are presented with multiple choice or true/false questions. It’s an initiative by Steven Feuerstein , who’s pretty well known. I just joined in, first few questions were not too tough Join in, there’s some great prizes to be won .

If you know of any more such websites, do drop in a comment and let me know.

(PS: If you’re wondering what’s with the weird URL structure, well its built on Oracle Apex. Long, clumsy URLs are a pain, and Apex does nothing to banish them).

PL/SQL Procedure To Reset A Sequence To A Predefined Number in Oracle

A Snapshot of Me From The Past

Sathya — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:49:32 +0000

Picture from 10th standard yearbook, circa 2001. Somethings are priceless

Thanks, Kevin.

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Upgrading to iPhone 3G to iPhone OS 3.1.2, with keeping the baseband at 04.26

Sathya — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:33:28 +0000

I think this is my first post on iPhone ( barring the rant). o_O. Surprising, since I purchased the iPhone from eBay close to a year ago. Anyhow, being the computer freak enthusiast that I am, I keep a track of most of the latest software that appears on the tech scene. I generally have a zero-day update policy – any new version/update that arrives for a software I generally update it. I’m probably amongst the few folks who also read the release notes and change logs prior to upgrading, to find out if there’s some new functionality or enhancement that has been added to the software which isn’t so obvious. (Of course, some say if the new feature isn’t obvious in the UI, it is unlikely to get noticed, to which I agree. That said, do read the release notes. It will contain some good information). With the iPhone purchased, however I had to break this habit.

The core reason being – the iPhone’s carrier lockdown. Its pretty known that the iPhone is carrier locked – which would mean that you cannot just pop in any random SIM and it would start working. There are, of course, ways around this thanks to some amazing efforts by bunch of zomg-awesome folks.

The little side effects of this meant that I have to be extra careful whenever I use iTunes for fear of updating the iPhone firmware to the latest version – instantly losing the unlocks achieved and turning my iPhone into an iPod Touch with a mobile phone antenna that cannot be used

There’s a saying which goes with folks who use unlocked iPhones – if it works fine DO NOT UPGRADE! So then, why did I take the plunge and upgrade to the newer version ?

Couple of reasons:

Some of the newer apps – eg, the Digg app, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and some more that I purchased ( can’t recall the names) require iPhone OS 3.1.2 atleast. This wasn’t the primary reason, however.
My iPhone had become tremendously slow and unresponsive. So much so that 4 of the 10 calls that I receive would result in the iPhone freezing up, not responding to “Answer” for about 10-15 seconds. 10-15 seconds may not seem a lot but when it comes to phone calls, a delay of even 5 seconds would indicate that the person is not available would result in missed calls, and considering my calls to my iPhone are most when I’m at work, and I get incoming ISD calls that I cannot call back from my phone – this was the most concerning part.

There’s no doubt that the random lockups and freezes were due to the various software that I had installed from Cydia – these often run in the background( example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ) causing resource starvation and lockups.

Taking into consideration the above factors, I decided to take a backup, wipe my iPhone clean, upgrade to 3.1.2, jailbreak & get it unlocked again. However, I could not just grab the 3.1.2 firmware and upgrade it right away – reason being – baseband updates.

Baseband is the part of the iPhone which controls the telephony and other communication functions, and is an independent system from the iPhone OS which controls the apps. When I purchased the iPhone, the baseband was at 04.26.08 (“04.26″) version, and I had no intention for the baseband to get updated with the newer version – reason being the 04.26 baseband has the most number of options of carrier unlocks. I wanted to upgrade the iPhone OS to 3.1.2, without touching the baseband. This was possible by getting my hands on the custom firmware created using Pwnage tool ( more details at RedmondPie ). Now with the firmware ready with me, I proceeded with updating my iPhone. Before starting the update, I took a final backup, noted down some important stuff ( read: office mail settings). Next, I hit shift, and clicked on the restore button, pointed to the custom .ipsw file and had my fingers crossed. The update went fine, but the RedmondPie article had me confused and a little concerned, since the article mentions

After the installation is done, iPhone will restart automatically and you should now have a fully jailbroken iPhone running on firmware 3.1.2.

which was not true in my case. The iPhone screen was showing the connect to iTunes icon.

I was uncertain at this point, then realized, the phone was not jailbroken. So next went over to download redsn0w. Once downloaded, launched it, pointed it to the ipsw file and it did its thingamijig and *ta-dah* the iPhone came alive, jailbroken, and confirmed it was still on 04.26

Next step was to install ultrasn0w – which was pretty easy, just went over to Cydia and installed it. Rebooted, and my carrier was recognised. Finally, all that remained was restoring my backup. That was even easier, since the moment I launched iTunes, it prompted me, asking if I wanted to restore from my previous backup. Gave the affirmative choice and – about half hour later, my iPhone was ready – with all settings intact ( heh, including the battery percentage meter on the status bar and my office mail settings!).

The whole process took about 2 hours, but it was worth it, as now my iPhone is noticeably faster!