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Showing posts from January, 2014

Messing with QML

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Just started learning QML and yeah, it's totally new age! It's going to take me some time to get in gear and know the various internals.  So I am just messing around and trying to learn the trade lang for Qt 5.

[Android] Factory/ Hard reset of Karbonn S1 Titanium

Power down the phone. Press Power + Volume Plus button combo for about 5 sec's. You will get to green screen; don't let go of the buttons. After another 5 sec's display will turn red. Let go of buttons, and a menu will be shown with various options for installing update/ reset/ cache wipe / data wipe etc. Move to data wipe option using Vol +/- options. And select the option using power key. Below the options, the result can be seen. Once data wipe is done, select Reboot phone option. After reboot the phone should return to factory condition.

[Android] Boot animation change, subsequent hangup and hard reset thereafter!

[UPDATE ] The hard-reset phone kept with old animation worked for a while but after I installed a s***load of apps, it went keput again! So had to do another hard reset; and this time after the reset I installed BAC (Boot Animation Changer) and restored the stock animation back. Now I have re-installed almost all the apps and it's going okay. Hmmm, maybe no custom boot anim for me.                                                                                --- *** --- Just tried Boot Animation Changer on my Karbonn S1 Titanium. Had to root it first; framaroot took care of that. It's a nice app! Later I installed BAC(Boot animation changer) and put in an animation of Cynogenmod that I got hold of on a site. After rebooting though, the karbon won't get to homescreen. The last three seconds of the animation kept repeating itself. So I had to factory reset it. So after couple of fiddly reboots, it's factory reset (Full factory reset + cache wipe!). And the cynog

[PostgreSQL] Query to check no of tables in a database

Often times we are needed to check if any database we are connected to has any tables or not. In this case following query proves helpful: select count(*) from information_schema.tables where table_schema = 'public'

PostgreSQL script to keep postgreSQL server running

:loop @ECHO OFF set PSQL="C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.1\bin" set DBNAME="template1" set USER="postgres" set PORT="5432" set RES="Not Pinging" %PSQL%\psql -Atq -c "SELECT 'ping'" -p %PORT% -U %USER% %DBNAME% > _Res.txt set /p RES=<_Res.txt IF %RES% EQU ping (echo "Postgres running... ") else (echo "PostgreSQL seems not pinging.. Restarting..." sc start postgreSQL-9.1 > NUL ) ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL goto loop

A sleep starved day

Its the middle of the week. I have stayed up quite a while the previous night. So with about three and half hours sleep on my schedule I have been feeling foggy whole day. But I have slogged on through, moving code from one place to another, building the binaries and fixing whatever build issues I stumble upon. It has been a grueling day spend fighting with messy code and various idiosyncracies anything that's fairly old seem to acquire. And now as I move in the train still about an hour away from home and one full hour into the return commute, my brain wants to shut down. The shuffled playlist has Rihanna singing 'stay'. I know tonight I am gonna sleep like dead. I have pulled such ultra-late nights before. And I have seen too many foggy days. I miss my folks. I miss my cats. I miss the jungle. And its been so many years here, but I can't stop feeling like a refugee in this concrete jungle. And Rihanna sings, 'I want you to stay', but it doesn't feel like t

[Qwt] How to plot discontinuous curves

In the current project we are using Qwt for doing some plotting. There was a problem with data loss and how to represent it on the graphs. While discussing possible solutions and researching on how to implement them, I stumbled upon this thread which was good for a solution. http://www.qtcentre.org/threads/49416-How-to-plot-discontinuous-curves-in-Qwt

[Link] Magic and More Magic

A really interesting story!  http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

A frenzy of realeses

Recently I was required to develop and deploy a feature to all of our clients. At present there are 8 branches of code under maintenance phase in svn. I was required to add the feature in all these branches. Of course that included the actual development of the feature and its deployment at all these clients. The development took four days and unit testing and fixing bugs/ inconsistencies etc took another two days. So I made first release for a client. The feature was demoed and approved with couple of minor changes. I incorporated the changes and moved onto deployment in other branches. The average development and release time was about 8 hrs per branch. I observed a few things. First, the current code base could use some modularization, in that pluggable modules comprise of features. The feature I worked on could just be one such module. And that would have saved almost 6 days of development-release time. Next, the code was easy to replicate since there was almost no dependency on th

Extending plugins - a peculiar case

Link to Code Archive I hit upon a very weird scenario recently and found out that there was no easy way to get the plugin working for this scenario. So after searching a while for the possible solution and understanding that the solution would be indeed difficult to implement, I stumbled upon a post that gave me the solution.  The scenario first: consider that there's some functionality in the Plugin container that you want to access from within the plugin. Lets consider a main thread ( GUI thread) refresh function that updates some part of GUI which the plugin provides the data for. And we want to call this refresh from plugin after certain operations in plugin are completed. Lets say that the plugin updates some values and that need updating the main GUI. So we have seen how interface objects let us access plugin functionality and by creative use of base class pointers and container calls how we can access objects and functionality in the plugin. So here we are going to be mo

[LINK] Windows 8.1 Graphics Driver Availability Status

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn344644.aspx At this page you get latest available driver version via MS windows update. For AMD/NVIDIA  gfx you should of course go to their own websites to get latest drivers but for us poor people stuck with Intel gfx this page has link to the needed drivers. Mind though, you need to open this link in IE as it involves installing MS Software Catalog plugin which lets you download the drivers. Thankfully the provided drivers worked like a charm for me. So many thanks to MS!!!

Trade

Moments for breaths. Dough for moments. Breaths for dough. I remember reading a book. It was about some people that were able to haul off breaths from other dying  people. Then there are other people who could give away their breaths for money. And then there was the hero who was a breath thief. He's dark and clouded in mystery. I don't remember the name of the novel. I remember Belisarius series. I remember another book that was fatally fantastical but ultimately sad in its ending. Books shouldn't end sad. Movies with a rating of 10/10 end up with a sad ending. Unless they are batman movies in which 3 movies end up with a beaten up batman and the fourth does some justice. Ciao

Windows 8.1 Preview on Acer eMachines e727

    So, Windows 8.1 is out. And people are saying it's lot better than Windows 8. There was overall positive feedback on the net about this. So I thought what the heck! Lets install this new thing and see how it works out. Now my eMachines laptop is ancient by current hardware standards. It's a strictly entry level laptop that I bought for INR 24k. That was like $500 back in Nov 2010. It's three years and it has seen all windows from XP to Win 8 (barring Vista of course!) and a shitload of Linux installs.      So first getting the OS. Thanks to so many Pirate friends it was not so difficult. Next task was getting it onto a bootable media. Or try upgrading existing installation. So I started with upgrade path considering the non-availability of drivers etc for my ancient hardware. That promptly failed as the Setup told me that my version of Win 7 was 64 bit and setup itself is 32 bit. I was feeling adventurous, so I popped in my year old Win 7 disk, and let it install Win

Into the new year 2014 and some resolutions

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So 2013 was kind of meh. I was into a new job and a new place and yeah I didn't have much of any agenda. Thankfully that was a good thing. The year was totally hectic, I have been travelling 5 hrs a day and on top of that working on some really messed up codebase. So a year later I can say that on personal level I may have achieved nothing, but I have done some real good work to the code I have been working on. The year saw all my close friends go through job change. Couple of them moved to new places. Few more got married. Couple of the others already married had kids. In short life is moving ahead. My life though felt like stuck at a single point. My hectic daily schedule left no time for extra-curricular activities. I have done no new translation of anything, I have not reviewed any distros, I have stayed close to the Elementary OS installation I have and all through the year, I have updated it only thrice. The only new thing I can proudly say of is I have started Cycling. Bou