Shades of Grey

Classic Observatons

2010-08-21T22:58:00.000-07:00

Scary; realizing that most of the music you like is now played on the VH1, 2 hour classics segment on Sunday mornings.

Kam

Goodbye Logitech MX500

2010-08-20T05:35:00.001-07:00

My faithful Logitech MX500 mouse (which cost me 50 quid in 1999) has just bitten the dust. Despite some serious abuse the mouse itself is in perfect working condition, but the cable seems to have a dodgy segment somewhere and is it bends it disconnects randomly. I'm not sure how easy it is to replace the cable, but I don't mind trying :-) Even if I totally screw it up, after 10 years of service, a new mouse won't be an unreasonable investment.

Kam

ICICI Charges for reissuing a debit card PIN

2010-08-17T02:41:00.000-07:00

Personally, I think it's appalling. Even though it's only 25 Rs + Tax, surely something as simple as reissuing a PIN shouldn't be chargeable ? Don't banks make enough money without squeezing every last penny out of the little guy ?!

Kam

Starcraft2 Region Change Insanity

2010-08-09T03:29:00.000-07:00

I'm still enjoying playing Starcraft 2 single player. It's a bit crap that I can't play with any of my friends in the UK, so I wrote to Blizzard and asked what I need to do. To be honest I didn't find the reply very helpful, in summary they said:

There's nothing you can do, you can't chat or play with people outside of the Asia server
Region changes aren't possible
The solution is, we will refund you in 14 days, buy a copy of the game again, but this time from EU
When you get a refund, your single player campaign will be destroyed, you'll have to start again

Blizzard, I am not amused.
Actually, I'm pretty disappointed and somewhat disgusted.
Fortunately, we can all still play Starcraft 1 via the old battle.net

Kam

Starcraft 2

2010-08-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

There's no question., the game is excellent. Not just because of it's history, but in it's own right. It has a great mix of the old game, keeping plenty of what made it great - with some new twists that make it quite fun.

As an added advantage for those with older, less cutting edge systems, Starcraft 2 plays OK my old laptop (with all the settings on lowest/off). It's a 1.6Ghz (single core pentium), with 2Gb RAM and an ATI Radeon 9500 -- from 2005.

That isn't to say that it's without it's own share of problems, specifically:

1. No Lan play - You bought the game, your friend bought the game and you're in the same room; but you can't play together because your internet connection is either crap or you don't have one. This is a major blow for people that like to play at LAN parties, and for people that like to play games from places with bad internet connections (where I live).

2. Battlenet - You bought the game, your friends bought the game, but you live in different countries (UK, US, Asia) and you can't play together. Why ? Blizzard doesn't think you should have friends abroad, they're not used to the concept of friends. This particular aspect is really pissing me off, because most of my gamer friends live elsewhere.

Happy yet sad,
Kam

More WiFi Shennanigans (Ubuntu Server)

2010-07-02T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm using a (Linksys Q87-WUSB54GC) USB Wireless dongle for my (Dell Dimension) Ubuntu Server, for whatever reason Ubuntu couldn't auto configure it during the setup process. After yet more messing around I've discovered the following:

1. Ubuntu does automatically recognise the usb device and accepts it as a usb wifi card
2. You can manually connect to whatever WiFi access point you wish using the iwconfig command from the console
3. You can automatically connect during system boot using the following code in your "/etc/network/interfaces" file

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-mode managed

4. If you want to forcibly select the WiFi AP at startup add this line beneath the code mentioned above:

wireless-essid ap-name-goes-here

5. Use the command "/etc/init.d/networking restart" to test that it works without problems

Kam

WiFi DHCP on Ubuntu Server

2010-07-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

After alot of messing around, I've discovered that the command "sudo dhclient" is genius if you need to force your wireless adapter to do the whole DHCP-get-an-ip-for-the-love-of-god-thing :-)

Kam

iPhones

2010-06-16T22:09:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, except for battery life and the constant fear that I'm going to break it the iPhone is a pretty neat phone. The apps make it considerably more useful that it would otherwise be - though 99% of everything I'm doing from it can also be done from my iTouch.

I'm not impressed by the iPhone 4G, it doesn't appear to be anything spectacular vs. it's predecessors - this comic seemed quite apt for the 4G.

Kam

Dell Retail : The horrible truth

2010-05-05T00:49:00.001-07:00

Despite being a big fan of Dell computers, principally for their outstanding support, it was very disappointing to understand how Dell works when you buy a computer from a retail outlet.

Simply put:

1. You'll pay a higher price for the laptop than buying online
2. You won't get any upgrade or option to change
3. Any warranty extensions or changes you request AFTER purchasing (even if made on the day of purchase) will be treated as separate sales & you will be charged approximately 4 times more than ordering via the website (ie: it's approx 1000 Rs for upgrading a 1 year complete cover to 2 years from the website, but 4000 Rs if you purchase from a retail outlet and request for the upgrade)

On the upside:

1. You get your computer immediately, you don't have to wait for a week

Conclusion:

Unless you're in a pickle, plan your purchase in advance and get what you want at a reduced rate. I'd still buy Dell, the build quality is high and the support is good. I just won't bother buying it retail.

If you have to purchase a computer immediately, try another brand such as Lenovo, they'll provide a high build quality, decent support and plenty of extra's that you won't get from Dell (like a very nice laptop-case, external dvd-writers, etc.).

Kam

Some days

2010-04-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Some days you're genuinely better off in bed. Everything from the morning onwards seems to go a little off, by the end of the day you're nothing short of miserable. I suppose it's life's way of waking you up and reminding you that you're always going to be dealing with one thing or another. Stop sulking, get over it and move on. We've all got too much going on in our lives to waste time or mental effort being in a grump about things that shoulda/woulda/coulda been...

Kam

Backups of your Backups

2010-04-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

Bah! I just backed up my laptop to an external USB disk so that I can reformat (and install Windows 7). Having completed those shennanigans, I've just reconnect my external drive and I'm painfully listening to the thunk-thunk-noise-of-drive-doom. I am unhappy. It's way too early in my day for me to be suffering from this type of misery. There's nothing vital that I haven't got backed up elsewhere, but 30 Gb worth of slowly collected stuff has just perished. My RAID5 NAS is full, and I'm investing in another RAID array this weekend. Bah.

Kam

Windows 7 Networking

2010-03-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Before I turn this whole blog into a giant Windows 7 rant, I'll make this the last Win 7 post of the week. Simply put, whilst considerably better than previous implementations of a network manager the Windows 7 networking console is utter crap compared to the console available in Ubuntu (since 9.04). The ability to quickly create, manage and switch between network profiles is excellent in Ubuntu and is alot less intuitive (if at all possible) in Windows.

Kam

p.s. - the new taskbar is nice

Moving to Windows 7 from Ubuntu

2010-03-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

I know Windows is supposed to be easier than Ubuntu, and I have to admit Windows 7 does a reasonable job, but it's so weird getting used to looking for applications to do some of the most common things! I'd forgotten there's no built in PDF reader support, no selection of default mail readers... It's the variety of little things. Not hard, just strangely unfamiliar given how long I've been glued to Ubuntu.

One thing that's really stuck out, the new version of Firefox rocks. Some of the add-ons are incredible, especially a few of the social media ones. They almost make using social media meaningfull - he says writing a blog.

Kam

Windows 7 Starter & Desktop Backgrounds

2010-03-24T02:30:00.000-07:00

I know Windows 7 Starter isn't the edition of choice for most people, but it's what comes with my mum's shiny new netbook. One of the very few features that both my mum & my wife use is the famous change-my-desktop-background-to-this-very-cute-photo. Which according to Windows 7 Starter isn't possible!

Confused, I rummaged around the Help Menus and found this:

"Windows 7 Starter edition comes with one desktop background, which can't be changed or customized. You can use Windows Anytime Upgrade to upgrade to another edition of Windows 7 that will allow you to change your desktop background (and get more features and functionality)."

Sorry, but this is kinda ludicrous for an OS released in 2010. Even if it is the most basic non-premium version they sell.

Kam

Delicious support on xyle.net

2010-03-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! I've added delicious support to http://xyle.net ! You can now get your latest bookmarks directly onto your website & blog :-)

Kam

OCC Meeting with Sharad Sharma

2010-03-21T01:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've been to an OCC meet, but I'm glad I attended this mornings meet. It was held at Jaaga, a strange community built building, in itself an experience. Sharad's talk was nothing short of excellently delivered. He touched on a few points which I found valuable:

Look at all the life changing technology around you, cloud computing, social media, renewable energy, mobile computing - which one fascinates you? What expertise or specialist knowledge do you have in it? Be aware of what's going on, stay on-top of something.
Steve Jobs was a hobbyist, some of the best businesses have evolved from hobbies.
If you have a niche, stay narrowly focused. Whilst you don't know if it's Plan B thats the real winner, most of today's successful businesses have grown in concentric circles from their original niche.
Who are your buyers? Are your buyers early adopters or pragmatic buyers? In todays economic climate are there any early adopters left? Go with Guy Kawasaki's theory of focusing on paying customers immediately.
Low cost does not mean low quality. Better to go the way Indigo Airlines has gone than that of Deccan.

Kam

Linux : Getting your hardware list

2010-03-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

Whilst rummaging around online I found this very nifty command:

sudo lshw -html > hardware

It creates a comprehensive list of your hardware and writes it to the file hardware (as html) in your home directory. It's really very detailed and a great way of getting a thorough assessment of your machine.

Kam

p.s. - the blogger "create post" is very badly supported in mobile browsers, my last -blank- post being the perfect example of quite how bad

xyle.net now supports flickr!

2010-03-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

\o/ You can now get your latest flickr posts (photos) directly onto your website or blog! It took a while to figure out, but it finally works :-D More than anything it's a great way to keep photo-blogging & to provide live updates to what's going on.

I'm still searching for a decent tool to push my flickr posts onto facebook. The inbuilt facebook connectivity is appauling at best. Recommendations appreciated.

Kam

Acer Aspire One : Useless Support

2010-03-15T02:28:00.000-07:00

My dad bought an Acer Aspire One netbook yesterday in Singapore. He brought it to Bangalore, un-boxed it, charged it and then hit the power button. The button lit up and... nothing else happened. No POST, nothing. As it turns out this isn't an unusual problem.

The next step, was of course to take it to the service center, where they informed us it would be at least 48 hours till they had diagnosed the problem, at which point they would advise us how long it would take to repair the system. The engineers estimate was about 3 weeks, because the parts would need to come from Singapore. They flatly refused to replace it.

Not checking the piece when we bought it was probably our second mistake, the first being choosing Acer as a brand. This is why I prefer to stick to Dell & Lenovo. I can confidently say that if something goes wrong that they won't give me a run around.

Kam

Tron Nerd Post

2010-03-13T20:29:00.001-08:00

After watching Justice League (Crisis Earths) and the new Tron 2.0 trailer, I'm left thinking two things (only two):

1. Justice League animations are always fun, but the soundtracks are unbelievably brilliant
2. Tron 2.0 OMG OMR OMG O-M-G !! Woot !!!

Yes, irrational geek-fan=love for a movie I've only seen a 30 second trailer of is ridiculous. Especially considering the original was only a success because of it's "cutting-edge" use of graphics. The sequel doesn't have much story line to build from, what hope does it really have? No idea, but it's gonna be fun :-D

Kam

dmg2iso (Apple Images to Anything-else Images)

2009-09-19T03:52:00.000-07:00

After spending bloody ages trying to figure out what to do with my dmg files, I've finally found a great little Javascript dmg2iso tool. It seems to have worked brilliantly (run from within ubuntu linux 9.04 with Sun Java 6 Runtime). Ofcourse it'd all have been easier if I'd known there was a windows dmg2iso easily available - but then I'd also have to have a windows box :-p

Kam

PHP Email Script

2009-09-13T03:41:00.000-07:00

Below is a php html/plain (mixed type) email script that I've shamelessly taken from webcheatsheet.com. It's a good sample to start building your own emails from.

Kam

//define the receiver of the email
$to = 'youraddress@example.com';
//define the subject of the email
$subject = 'Test HTML email';
//create a boundary string. It must be unique
//so we use the MD5 algorithm to generate a random hash
$random_hash = md5(date('r', time()));
//define the headers we want passed. Note that they are separated with \r\n
$headers = "From: webmaster@example.com\r\nReply-To: webmaster@example.com";
//add boundary string and mime type specification
$headers .= "\r\nContent-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=\"PHP-alt-".$random_hash."\"";
//define the body of the message.
ob_start(); //Turn on output buffering
?>
--PHP-alt-
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello World!!!
This is simple text email message.

--PHP-alt-
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello World!

This is something with HTML formatting.

--PHP-alt---
//copy current buffer contents into $message variable and delete current output buffer
$message = ob_get_clean();
//send the email
$mail_sent = @mail( $to, $subject, $message, $headers );
//if the message is sent successfully print "Mail sent". Otherwise print "Mail failed"
echo $mail_sent ? "Mail sent" : "Mail failed";

Amarok on Ubuntu 9.04

2009-09-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

I *finally* got amarok working on ubutnu 9.04, it wasn't easier than downgrading to a previous version, but I'm glad it works. I actually used three solutions, so I'm not sure which actually fixed the problem, or if they all contributed a little. I'd try one at a time, they have no side effects:

(Solution 1)
0. kill amarok
1. sudo apt-get install libxine1-all-plugins
2. run amarok & test

(Solution 2)
0. kill amarok
1. sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-xine.
2. sudo apt-get remove phonon-backend-gstreamer.
3. run amarok & test

(Solution 3)
0. kill amarok
1. open a terminal window
2. mkdir ~/.config/kde.org/
3. cd ~/.config/kde.org/
4. wget http://www.fileupyours.com/view/77985/libphonon.conf
5. run amarok & test

Hopefully it'll start working after 1 :)
Kam

Printers in Ubuntu 9.04

2009-08-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

So there's some more good news, ok so it's not all due to 9.04 but it's nice that I've found it all at the same time. Coincidence, kismet, both are fine by me :) In short, check out this url for a simple mechanism to get Ricoh Aficio printing even if you're using usercodes. The HP LaserJet 1018 works out of the box (autodetected). If it doesn't print after it's just been installed, don't panic, simply unplug the usb cable and reconnect after a moment. It'll start working after that - no idea why. If you're not on 9.04 and you can't get your HP printer working, try typing hp-setup at a prompt. If that doesn't work, check out this url - but most likely it's time for a newer version of linux.

Kam

Bulk Updates

2009-08-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

There are a few things for me to bitch... ahem... er blog about, so I'm just going to list them out:

1) I needed a simple report from my optician for my insurance company. I tried calling him but the receptionist insisted that I visit. So I took an appointment and turned up dot on 10am to visit him. He was ofcourse late and overbooked, so I didn't end up seeing him till 11am. At which point, he looks at me and without so much as a Hello, simple asks "What do you want?". I appreciate he's a good doctor, but a few pleasentries/manners would go a long way.

2) I visited the new Forum Value Mall in Whitefield last weekend and I'm really surprised at how poorly designed the whole thing is. At first glance it looks huge and shiny, that is ofcourse till you realise that it only has 30ish shops, the ceiling leaks because it's a temporary canvas structure with holes, and there's only one escalator & two lifts. The worst things though are the traffic management. The car park is bi-directional, meaning you have to watch out for on-coming traffic - which would be easier if you could see round corners, they certainly haven't provided any mirrors to help you. That is ofcourse if you can find your way out of the car park, several strategic signs, like "Way Out" are missing, which makes the act of leaving somewhat tougher than it really should be. To compound this awfulness, the whole structure is built on a tiny two lane road, which really can't handle the enormous volume of traffic that the mall generates - turning the immediate area into a giant parking lot. The only good thing about the place is the fact that there's a cinema within walking distance! Yay! The McDonalds ?KFC are fattening but nice too :)

3) Ubuntu 9.04 is really damn slick ! Seriously, all the minor Intel video chipset issues aside, it's really really neat. It boots in about 10 seconds and shuts down in half that time. The WiFi manager is just brilliant, far far better than the one in 8.04 and definately alot better than the Windows manager. Most cruicially though, the new display management system is everything I've ever wanted ! No joke. I can finally plug in any monitor and have it do *exactly* what I want it to. Without having to traverse a million windows menu or any brain-surgery-like xorg-editing. Just a simple click on a very intuitive display manager. My advice ? Upgrade. Even though I'll bitch about the Avant Window Manager not working for another month or so.

Kam

Being Different

2009-07-20T01:57:00.000-07:00

I watched the new Harry Potter movie last night, frankly, it was rubbish. Really. Not just in a "compared to the book" way, it was just boring - nothing really happened. There are TV Soaps with more tension & intensity.

We also attened the AGM for Round Table 7 & 172 (our table) this weekend - both of which were excellent. It's always good hanging out with Tablers, these are people that know how to party.

Kam

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary" -- Sir Cecil Beaton.

The Big Move (Part 1)

2009-07-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

We've just finished moving into our apartment in Whitefield. This episode began at 8am on Thursday (9th Jul 09) with the whole family making a quick trip over to light a diya and to kick the process off with the first piece of luggage. The rest of the day went to heavy lifting (getting heavy furniture upto the 6th floor - not to mention past security who were an ordeal unto themselves). There's still plenty more to go. We've ordered the sofa, rugs, coffee tables, standing lamps, etc. are all yet to come. I'll probably rework the lighting in several places too. Important things like the Playstation, the broadband connection and my study are all in place though :-D I'll load some pics of the place shortly.

Kam

Not so cool

2009-07-05T05:28:00.000-07:00

Transformers 2 was, well... kinda poor. The first half was at best interesting (far from riveting) and the second half was awful. It was full or enormous plot holes, mistakes and nonsensical Treasure-Hunter-esque sequences. Even the comedy elements felt forced and half hearted. On the whole it was a far cry from the original and reminded me more of that awful Cindy Crawford movie Fair Game.

Kam