Posts

Need I say anything more? :) History of Gadgets

If you were interested in algorithms and interested in some mathematical foundations for algorithm analysis? For example if you are interested in proof techniques, probability, Amortization analysis techniques, Case studies and Asymptotic notions (such as Big-Oh, Big-Omega, Little-oh, little-omega, Big-Theta) then check out these lecture notes (in ppt, 224kb) from California State University.

Next post in the Interesting Find series. [InstEd It](InstEd - Make packaging more productive) - an interesting tool that allows one to edit MSI files - handy when you don’t want to install the full Windows SDK just to get the Orca editor. (you can also just download the SDK samples and use that instead of the full SDK). WHS backup to LAN - If for some reason you don’t want to use WHS’s built-in backup option and prefer to back it up to LAN 10 Beautiful Login screen for Ubuntu - very nice themes to change your login screen....

Forbes rich list is Slim pickings. Only lack of ability, inheritance and money keeps the rest of us off the Forbes list of world’s billionaires. It’s not fair? Here is Guardian's recipe for billionaire success: get born into a rich family, invent something and sell it to Americans. Win. :)

New Paradigm, old habits – brilliant. :) Click on the picture to see the original size. reboot the cloud

Well this is the phone I have maybe some day I will try this - pretty geeky albeit useless. :)

I did not know until today that there is something called gnome-rdp using which one can RDP to Windows machines from Ubuntu (or any other linux flavour I imagine). Installation is simple on Ubuntu, with it available in Synaptic Package Manager. To start it you can type in gnome-rdp in a console or go to Applications -> Internet -> Gnome-RDP. Once it has started, usage is quite simple - though you might want to change the remote desktop size and colours....

If you ever need to find out which version of Ubuntu you are running (if you have a few machines it is quite easy to forget what is running where), the easiest way is to run the following command in a terminal: cat /etc/issue For example here is the output from the machine I am on now: 1 2 amit@xps:~$ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 9.04 \n \l

Wow, this is cool , though a bit too much. I am not sure how many people use this - if its only one person, isn’t that just too much information for one of us to crunch?

If you are on Linux and want to print some code and also make it look pretty then check out a2ps (Any to postscript filter). Of course if you can avoid printing in the first place and saving paper and trees and make it greener that is ideal - however there are times that is not possible. I tried printing from CDT, but the printing options from CDT just looks plain ugly and big fonts and can spread over 10 pages for a simple code file (spanning 293 lines)....

I started a brand new project in CDT where I was using MOOS and I could not get my simple program to link. While everything looked fine on the surface I just could not get the IDE to link to the MOOS libraries. I know the OS and MOOS itself was not a problem as I had other projects in the same workspace which did link correctly. The only difference between those and this was that I setup this project from scratch, whilst the others I had not....

If you are newish to Linux (like me) from Windows, then some of the simple things which come quite naturally to you on Windows is a little embarrassing and challenging. For example, I got a new WHS and wanted to mount the music drive and wanted to create a new host file entry to point to the new WHS. Now on Windows this is quite simple and can be found in YOUR-OS-DRIVE\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts....

The next post in the interesting find series. Top 25 ‘most dangerous’ programming errors for 2009 – interesting read as always. :) The 100 essential websites – from the Guardian. Please Rob Me.com – the dark side of geocoding . SSD Optimisation guide - a must read if anyone is thinking of buying a SSD drive. 37Signals – simple web based apps (instead of bloatware) covering things like managing projects, tracking contacts, organizing your business, etc....

Facebook and my views of it in the context of Privacy and Security are well known. This conversation with one of their (anonymous) employees detailing a few internal processes and tools is actually quite scary. Now, I don’t know if this is true and how much of this is true; but if I was working for Facebook then all of this is quite logical and makes sense. And, technically all the things talked about is very feasible and not too challenging (of course am over simplifying here)....

I came across the Ten commandments of Programming while looking at a question on StackOverflow and I can’t believe I have not seen these before. I think every developer, lead, architect, dba, pm, whoever should print this out! 8-) Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket guidance software at JPL, mistakes are rarely fatal in our industry, so we can, and should, learn, laugh, and move on....

So you would have heard what all the buzz (not Google!) is about. Check out the feature video for Windows Phone 7. I have a Zune HD and the UI is very similar and I cannot wait for it! After a lot of disappointment with WinMo’s and becoming the joke in my friend/nerd/geek/co-worker circle for still have a WinMo phone, would love to see everyone’s faces when I get this. :)...

Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video and stars - very cool. Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.

Awesome photos of Colourful India.

Wow it has been a while since I posted an Interesting find and instead of the usual list I though I will keep this especially for timers. Timers Galore! So I was looking for a simple countdown timer that I can run on my laptop to keep tracking of a few things and I found a few very interesting things. If you prefer to download an app and run it from your desktop (Windows) then check out Timer from Orzeszek....

I am going to start posting the geeky jokes I find as a series. These are more for me to make them easy to find, as I cannot seem to recall any of them when I need to. Here is the first one which I also tweeted: Yo mama’s so slow and dumb that she can be emulated on a 286.

Not sure how many of you know, but I run my WHS on a old Dell Desktop (its about 8ish years old) which ran out of available USB ports sometime back and all my attached drives are also filling up and I am now running low on space. I was thinking of getting a dedicated WHS device/machine (not sure what to call it), such as HP's MediaSmart Server or Acer's easyStore ....

CNR [ via xkcd.com ]

If you ever wanted a Win 3.1 experience in your broswer (why I cannot imagine - despite me running a VM ), then check out michaelv.org . The irony of all of this is that there is a modern browser in that which seems to be compliant with the standards (it pases the ACID2 tests; fails the ACID3). 🤨

Here is a good example on why either you love C++ or hate it with such terse expression oriented code; I think its pretty cool. If you want to copy one string to another, one option can be something like this. 1 2 3 4 5 6 void mycopy(char *p, char *q) { int len = strlen(q); for(int i=0; i<=len; i++) p[i] = q[i]; } However this achieves the same thing as above and is more efficient:...

(: ¿ɥǝ sıɥʇ sı looɔ ʍoɥ