Point Element

I recently and grudgingly upgraded my cellular internet to 3G. Actually 2G sufficed for most of my needs which was basic document editing and emails. Add a bit of web browsing and Facebook, Twitter. All that was doable on 2G and if I used my cellphone - should say smartphone, but it's WP7.5, and I like calling phones as cellphones - as a hotspot then with some patience I can even get some work done. What I can't do is access online banking. By the time the applets load the session expires. So back to 3G, the first thing I noticed was the speed. I'm not a speed junkie but the speed made me find a speed test app and check it out. And by God, I got 5 freaking mbps down and 1.6mbps up. I have never browsed web at such speeds. Things snap up like lightening and coupled with IE the whole browsing experience felt like turbocharged. Another area was the Facebook and twitter integration. The info in people hub, updates on posts and communications would load spontaneously. It has b...

Original Source: http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/barr-code/4215934/What-belongs-in-a-header-file What sorts of things should you (or should you not) put in a C language .h header file? When should you create a header file? And why? When I talk to embedded programmers about writing device drivers or using real-time operating systems or my Embedded C Coding Standard book, I often come to see that many lack basic skills and information about the C programming language. This is probably because we are mostly a gang of electrical engineers who turned to programming and are self-taught in C (and C++ and the myriad other programming languages we make use of). Dos and don'ts In the interest of promoting the general welfare, I'd like to use this month's column to discuss one of those basic skills that is too often lacking: building proper header files. Here's my list of Do's and Don'ts for embedded C programmers to follow when creating .h header files. DO cre...

Three months ago my current workstation was a slow hulking monster. It was taking forever to boot and literally crawling in between reboots. I was frustrated with Ubuntu. Unity was the synonym for awkward desktop that tires you just using it. It was like my $4 Blues headset that was a pain over the ears despite its above average sound. Startup of over 1 minute and shutdown of another minute. Add to that I wasn't able to use sleep with Ubuntu - mostly it would screw up WiFi and sound. On a bad day it did hung my lappy into permanent sleep. Had to remove the battery to revive it. So no trusting it. Lots of wishing that someone would fix it, but even after 4-5 iterations and the sleep remained just the same deadly. ScaryBuntu!!! Windows 7 has also aged quite some and it was also acting up like an old crone that has all the youth sucked out of it. Truth is Windows 7 was the best of all windows. It was stable, it worked, didn't ask you for crap that you don't giv...

A very useful add-on!

I wanted to code something small to count days to a particular date from today. So I coded a small app in .net and found it very useful. It's done in about an hour so doesn't have much in terms of functionality. It has the target date hardcoded. But then again considering it's limited scope I didn't go to any more trouble for adding more functionality. Later I tried to do similar things in Qt and succeeded somewhat. There are couple of differences in both apps in that Qt version has colours used for numbers and text. And I have also included past targetted date display functionality in Qt version too. In this case before target date it shows Remaining Days while after target date it shows Past Days. The links are as follows: .Net Project Qt Project

Redundancy, which is what having a full PC on every desk is!

I like to argue when it comes to decisions. Although most of the time it's just me alone evaluating things. But I had some opportunity in office to debate a few things.  Lately though there's not much discussion going on, rather we have loads of work and the small pockets of discussion that happen when one of juniors gets stuck somewhere.  Anyway, lets put that aside and concentrate on our own ward. So I'm facing some quite radical change in coming quarter or so. In lieu of this I have decided to cut off the amount of various activities I have been spending time on. So there go the TV Serials. And also decreased stats for movies - maybe 2 per week or so. And almost no e-books. Add in some compulsory study that I'm going to need and more free time for other tasks.  So there is lot of debate going on. What to be prioritized and what to be altogether dropped. What to be gracefully closed and what to be discarded like trash.  One example is I discarded about 50 GB of TV...

Update 2012-11-23: I have just updated the dev build to alpha using apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade; and the system is feeling more stable. The added blue checks wallpaper really shines What's new       Terminal         We have a new terminal emulator which replaces gnome-terminal and it's looking slick.     Plank         Plank is the dock at the bottom. I have covered it below.     Pantheon Files         Merlin was the file manager used in Elementary Jupiter. Now they have forked it into Pantheon Files.     GALA: Elementary's libmutter based window manager         Gala was introduced only couple of months ago. And I think it was a big step for elementary. Having their own widow manager lets them have greater control as well as customization.     Noise         Noise is the music player provi...

I have seen a good amount of change. I've seen change for the sake of it. I've seen change out of necessity but unwillingness. I think I've seen all the ways change can be. So I wonder when I'm going to have so much change what kind it is. Is it opportunistic? Is it out of necessity and desperation or is it enforced? Would you call necessity a desperation? Would you call frustration just an expression of inability? What is it? Life is going to change in big way. Maybe I've some unfinished business that I might end up taking care of. Or I might make an even bigger mess of things than what it already is. A new city. Goodbye to the present one. Is it going to be difficult? I don't know. I was scared of this change when I decided to do this. So I think everything will be alright. Or I keep telling myself just not to panic. And boy, I know I can panic. I know what it is being panicked. Its like a deer caught in the headlights. Except as a deer you can't decid...

Yes! Its ready! Penned and all and I'll post it here  as soon as I can get back to my place.

I'm just reformatted my external HDD. The thing was I had kept two different partitions hoping that I would be able to separate the data better this way. But to my dismay I got bogged down with shifting files from here to there and vice versa. So after six months or so of such pain, I have wiped out both the volumes and got one single partition now. Actually I need to get one more HDD. The current one - a western digital 320GB has served me well for last 3 years. It's taken its share of falls and has acquired some bad sectors. But I don't think I can splurge anything on some more electronics any soon. So I guess with this drive's 300GB and my laptops 200 odd GB's I'll be making my meal so as to speak. Well, actually I can just wipe out the 200GB or so of movies and tv serials. But them I'll have to get at least 20 DVD's of my most favorite movies. And dream about the tv serials. And the other STUFF! What has life come to! Says the guy who had an affa...

What is this localc? ( I thought it as local-c) I wondered for a lot of time. Launching it would open office. So $ whereis localc; gives /usr/bin/localc Ok what kind of file is this $ file /usr/bin/localc; gives POSIX shell script, ASCII text executable. OK cat it; $cat /usr/bin/localc ; gives #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/libreoffice/program/soffice --calc "$@" OK why would a script with name local-c open libreoffice calc? Hmmm, this is weird. 5 minutes of deep thinking reveals the problem with my associative thinking. Its lo-calc idiot, not local-c! I end up telling myself!

Problems with 64-bit build's installation, couple of personal problems and overall busier nature of last few days have caused delay in the review. I'm starting on it. But I don't know when I'll really be able to get through it. On the side note I'm moving around a lot and the work pressure is also mounting. Things have become tougher. And I think by end of this month they will get tougher. But yeah, I want to do this review. I'm using elementary for last one month or so and I'm impressed by the amount of work that has gone into it. So the review is going to be here. Just its going to take some time.

Hmmm. This one has been on the stove for a long time. But I just didn't have the time. Finally though this week I got some free time to perform some much needed system maintenance and so I downloaded Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64-bit ISO, used Usb-creator to create a bootable USB and installed it on a partition holding 10.04.1 Ubuntu. Right now I'm installing all the required programs, servers and what not. I think it will be a week by the time I fully shift to this 64-bit Ubuntu. Update 21 10 2012: I have ended up with a botched install of Elementary Daily Build; small relief is that the desktop is working but remastersys is unable to create proper ISO's. I think the nvidia driver is to blame, but I'll try to work through this. If it works then fine else I'll have to restart with a stock daily build. (Groans!!!!) Update 2 23 10 2012: Okay, finally I have readied the new system last night. And I think it's running beautifully. So I'll test it for a week or s...

Sync has become a popular word these days. oh, yeah. I have not forgotten about the elementary Luna review. Just working on that. Sent from my Windows Phone

I have been using Elementary OS Luna for about a fortnight and I think elementary has reached a stage where I can safely review it. I had refrained from this because like they say "it ain't done yet and sou should wait for the pickle to get ready or it won't taste the best." So with elementary the pickle is yet to get prime, but whatever stage I have in my hands is good enough that I'm going to be telling you about it. On a side note, this is going to be a OS review from me in quite some time. The reason being I am quite exhausted these days thanks to the Six Day week I have to bear at my current organization. Well, that as it may be, still I find elementary enough exciting that I'll be putting aside some energy for this task. Adios! Update 23 10 2012: Due to some problems persisting with 64-bit Luna Live CD and partly my stupidity I have managed to lose the screen caps and half the review I had written. Luckily the system is up now. So I think I'l...

Recently I was working on some maintenance stuff for some crystal reports. And I stumbled upon a peculiar problem. The report had 4 sub reports in it and it was running out of available login sessions in about 10 runs. The problem was I'm at average level when it comes to .net and a newbie to crystal reports. So I'm just discovering things and half the time I don't know where I'm going. That of course sucks but I can't help it. The workload is more than enough that every day I go to my rented place completely exhausted and badly in need of sleep. Anyway that's beside the point. The thing is that I didn't even know what is causing the "no more login sessions available" error. So after some discovering on the internet I learned some things about Oracle logins and login sessions. The solution seemed very simple - increase maximum number of login sessions in oracle. But I knew I have to fix the root cause of this. And the root cause is in the repo...

Link to Original Article: http://blog.launchpad.net/general/burning-down-critical-bugs I have copied the article instead of just providing the link because just in case the article is lost (maybe deleted from original source or link changed... ) it's still available here. I have been analysing Launchpad's critical bugs to track the Purple squad's progress while on Launchpad maintenance duty. In January of 2011, the Cloud Engineering team né Launchpad Engineering team was reorganised into squads, where one or more squads would maintain Launchpad while other squads work on features. This change also aligned with a new found effort to enforce the zero-oops policy. The two maintenance squads had more than 332 critical bugs to close before we could consider adding features that the stakeholders and community wanted. By July 2011, the count dropped to its lowest point, 250 known critical bugs. Why did the count stop falling for fifteen months? Why is the cou...

For last one week I have been plagued with intermittent cellular connection issues. I have switched to Uninor 2G and the plan is 6 GB data for 90 INR ( that's about $1.7 ) Its really cheap when considered to Airtel which gave only 1GB 2G data for INR 98. Anyway tye problem is that the connection has not been consistent. Sometimes it would work great giving me a speed of 15-20KBps which is commendable for 2G. But then sometimes I start losing data packets and so everything starts crawling. The drop is sometimes as high as 50%. This I found out using ping. So I'm going to see for next couple of weeks if they get their S••• Together or I'll have to find another provider. I wish I had a 500 - 700 INR budget for internet but I don't have much use for internet beyond mails and some news. Everything else comes under pastime. So I don't want to spend so much money on pastime. I would rather go to a walk when I'm bored. Or go to a nearby temple for that matter. :) ...

Recently I purchased a Lenovo G580. It cost me INR 25000 after INR 1000 discount. The configuration is as follows: Pentium B950 @2.1GHz. Its a Sandy Bridge core which translates to cooler temps. We have 2GB RAM here. Added to it is a 500GB Seagate HDD, A DVD Burner, 3 USB ports out of which one is USB3.0. We have Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, 1.3M webcam, Synaptics touchpad which is embedded in the body. We have both VGA Out as well as HDMI Out and I think that's a neat feature since finding HDMI projector around is still kind of difficult. Sure you can use an adapter but that's another piece of hardware you need with yourself. The chassis is solid, the display has barely any flex. The hinges are not as stiff as I would like - my emachines e727 has really stiff hinges, you feel like trying to pry a ball from a German Mastiff's mouth, but maybe that's why it's still alive and kicking some major dust. On sound front it has stereo speakers which sound a bit better than a...

The problem with newbies is that they haven't the experience. Okay, sounds a but lame but the thing is they haven't seen as much crap as an experienced guy and for my 2 and half years I've seen some interesting crap. Anyway, to the story the task was to send a mail from PHP. The guy was a newbie. The problem was the guy wasn't familiar with PHP. He didn't track the changes and effects that change brought. There is a way to solve any problem. If you know the root cause of any problem you hit that and then you solve it. But when you don't know the exact cause you got to research on the internet. And usually you end up with a number of things that comprise of a potential solution. And in these situations you have to keep track of every change you are doing to the system. Because unless you track everything and didn't check if every small change then you end up missing the solution. I'm watching a lot of Dr House these days so I'll compare it to a di...

Its almost a fortnight since the first wow post. I don't remember the exact date and I don't have net access right now. Its 2 am right now. It may have something to do with the fact that the cellular network is showing full signal strength yet no internet. I'll bet 5 bucks that even for the full signal the call won't go through if I tried someone. Well, cellular peculiarities aside, I have come to announce that I had to abandon my quest of mastery of C language because the Brian Hall book I was referring to was an alpha quality book and it was never finished. Which meant that I should take up the task of finishing it. I would have but before starting that I found something better to do and that didn't have anything to do with C language. Anyway failed quests aside, I'm enjoying life by writing code for living and watching lots of movies and lots of dr house episodes for entertainment. Well the only problem - I'm mentioning only one because in a normal si...

*** Well, not for the first time but I missed the point I wanted to say in this post. So I'm just putting it up here. I really regret missing this opportunity to work with the amazing guys. I feel bad because the people did expect something from me and I have failed them. I have also failed myself. Well, even though I was a failure, it was touching to be contacted and asked about it. Well, getting back to rebuilding now. First program to go under axe is Kernel Programming... Sucks! But every failure has it's price and I have never hesitated from the payment if the price was right. Next will be my laptop hours. And after that maybe my Sundays!!! (Well if I get to that point the world may end since my current organization is eating my Saturdays as it is. ) I'm hoping to get to that point!!! I must not be feeling like wow right now. After such a fiasco, I should be sitting in a dark corner and crying my heart out. Actually I almost cried, but when the fault is yours the t...

Its the discovery of the decade. Apparently I've found out that I'm too good for this world and so my life sucks! Well the thing is that I'm a jack of all trades and my parents were too good for me. Which led to them teaching me to be accepting and patient and lots of other such non-interesting things. And so right now in my two and half year of career I've ended up working on following things: 1. Windows administration - system assembly, setup and is installation and troubleshooting. In fact my windows skills are almost power user level. 2 Same power user level with Linux: yeah I started with slackware but that was when I was 16. Its 9 yrs now and i have seen and uses a number of Linux distros. I can handle basic troubleshooting and almost all tweaking of a new installation. 3 .net development: Right after my engineering in 2k8 I did a course in .net, so I can code in both C# as well as VB.NET . Also I have done couple of projects in ASP.net. 4 Oracle: It was my ...

Open import_database.dat and change the path to dmp file. Save it and run it! C:\import_database.bat sqlplus sys/sys as sysdba @C:\SqlRefresh.sql imp m1/m1@m1 fromuser=m1 touser=m1 ignore=y file=c:\cat.DMP C:\SqlRefresh.sql connect sys/sys as sysdba; drop user m1 cascade; create user m1 identified by m1; grant dba to m1; exit; Working: import_database.bat logs user in as sys and deletes user m1 so that his database is deleted along with him. Then it creates the same user and grants him dba privileges. All this is done in file SqlRefresh.sql. Next we import the new dump with the help of imp command.

When your KRA* is not defined, you had to suffer a lot of things like Documentation, testing and training the users on field (Why would a dev would want and need to go to field??? God knows!!! ). Well, unfortunately when your 90% of time is spent in these activities you actually can't complain!!! *KRA: KRA means Key Responsibility Area, these are the responsibilities that form the core of your work and define your role in the organization.

So another week past and another period of time is committed to history. I have learnt a few things. First is however prepared you may be sometimes you just fall on your face and you can't do anything about it. Second thing was you can try your best and still you may not be able to stop yourself from falling on your face when the situation is just so. I was on field enjoying a paid vacation in the middle of nowhere and things crapped a bit to conspire the falling on the face. There was only one positive thing about this, the screw up was not at my end and whatever didn't work, I didn't have anything to do with it. Some people would call it saving own skin but I don't think so. In fact because of this thing only I was able to enjoy the time. Thankfully I had internet access via the trusty old GPRS. It wasn't fantastic but it did crawl along. And the ample amount of songs on this phone and my adorable Zen Mozaic kept me entertained. The games on this phone also ...

Having a smartphone and using it regularly as a Smart phone for about a month now, I have come to some conclusions. 1. A smart phone needs Internet. Without Internet it's maybe only 30% smart. 2. Also we each have our specified tasks and we need Apps for that. Without appropriate Apps the smart phone loses its usability. 3. Ease of use is another parameter which determines the usability of a smart phone. If all functions are easily accessible and easily manipulated then the user can exploit it fully. 4. The UI performance is also another important factor and it influences the usability greatly. Fluid animations and clear interface contribute to greater user experience.

1. Chart necessities     When you start with existing code then usually it's well bloated. There are half formed, half-implemented ideas, constructs remaining from discarded ideas as well as code that's lying in comments. We need to remove all of this and add new code so that the new software ends up being slicker and easier to manage than old software. Code management is a complex job, and it's almost akin to file management on your personal computer or Laptop. Often you horde up files and what not together and when you start on cleaning you come to understad that half of the stuff is junk. So is with code. In any application which doesn't have quality people looking after it, there's a lot of junk code lying around. It's often in the form of unimplemented ideas coded partially which end up in comments. Or structures that are not used anywhere. Or header files that are not included anywhere. 2. Start with barebone infracture     We start with an empty project...

I really wish every Sunday was like this. Actually I have taken a break from the Internet, just visit the net to check out the mails on Gmail and check out the 2-3 websites that I frequent for news. Well anyway as for the Sunday, I woke up at right time in the morning, had my favorite breakfast then some work followed by lunch with my favorite veggies. After couple hours of sleep and an evening stroll ending with a glass of cold coffee. Then some more work and now dinner - that was probably the best egg biryani I've eaten till date. Just wish I had someone to share this with, but no worry. That problem will be solved in due time. Anyway so here ends the Sunday and maybe it wasn't that interesting for you but the good part is the one coming below. So windows phone! For a guy who's been messing with Linux since his late teens, ending up with windows phone is a surprise. Well how I did end up with the Samsung Omnia W is not what I'm going to talk about now. We are g...

LM13 was released a few days ago and me being a mint fan aptly downloaded and installed the 64-bit variant with Cinnamon Desktop. I also went through a number of reviews to see what others have noticed. The overall tone was Cinnamon Mint has come up together as a really good distro though there are many small corners that need polish. After using Mint 13 for last couple of weeks I can see that it's true. Mint 13 is an excellent distro and the mix of applications, the usability and the character as an Desktop OS are it's main features. And no other Linux distro can beat it right now. In fact as of now I don't find myself going back to Windows or my tried and trusted Ubuntu 10.10 installation anymore. The things that need polishing are few enough that they shouldn't prove to be a deal breaker. One thing I noticed is that we need a better interface for appearance customization. The colors and themes are good enough but we need something splashy and vibrant looking. Ma...

1. Drop All Views BEGIN FOR i IN (SELECT view_name FROM user_views) LOOP EXECUTE IMMEDIATE('DROP VIEW ' || user || '.' || i.view_name); END LOOP; END; 2. Drop All Triggers BEGIN FOR i IN (SELECT trigger_name FROM user_triggers) LOOP EXECUTE IMMEDIATE('DROP TRIGGER ' || user || '.' || i.trigger_name); END LOOP; END; 3. Drop All Sequences BEGIN FOR i IN (SELECT sequence_name FROM user_sequences) LOOP EXECUTE IMMEDIATE('DROP SEQUENCE ' || user || '.' || i.sequence_name); END LOOP; END; 4. Drop All Tables BEGIN FOR i IN (SELECT table_name FROM user_tables) LOOP EXECUTE IMMEDIATE('DROP TABLE ' || user || '.' || i._table_name); END LOOP; END;

SchemaSpy is a very useful tool for database Administrators and Developers. The basic purpose of SchemaSpy is to auto-generate schema for any database. But it's evolved in a great tool that can give us so much valuable information about any database. The case in question is that of a complex database consisting of more than 30 tables with some tables having fields in excess of 50 and complex links. I won't go into details of everything here but rather I'll outline major points. After successfully running SchemaSpy on a database you are presented with an output of number of HTML files in the designated folder on your PC. The index.html file is the starting point for this output. After opening it you can see following tabs.   And that's a lot of information that you get about the database. The first tab - tables - lists all the tables, next one displays a relationship diagram, next lists Utility tables and details for them, the next one does constraints, after that ...