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Showing posts from December, 2012

3G, social networking and work

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

What we are doing for ages need not be the best thing that we are doing

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

Windows 8 and Elementary OS 0.2

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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

Tree Style Tabs add-on for firefox

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A very useful add-on!

Day Counter

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

Awesome Quote

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