Upgraded

After almost more than 6 months, I atlast found the time to go buy a new "Wetern Digital 160 GB Hard disk".

I already have a 80GB HDD. I had to now configure this to be the master drive and add the new HDD as a slave. It was fun doing it myself. Before I went to the vendor, i read this nice blog post and got some information on how the jumpers have to be set for different configurations of the HDD. While purchasing the disk, I asked the vendor to explain me about the jumpers. He was kind enough to explain me that Western Digital comes with 5 possible settings and not 4, as is the case with Seagate. That was some knowledge. The various jumper positions were very clearly written on the Hard Disk itself. So it definately made things a bit easier.

Came home and opened up the computer box, and took around 15 minutes to actually fix the hard disk into a proper slot. Then, I had to just connect 2 chords, one for the bus, and the other probably power [ not quite sure ]. Thats it, 20 minutes, and I had the HDD installed in my machine !!!

Now, I had to format this new hard disk. There, started my search for a disk partitioning tool for windows partitions. I primarily wanted to use the second disk as a back up disk and for my video editing sessions, and so it had to have a primary Windows partition with ofcourse enough spare space for all the various Linux versions i am planning to install and fill up the 160 GB space :D

While "googling" i came across this very well articulated cool solution about partitioning on Linux. Ofcourse, it didnt help me a lot, but was very good information none the less. It struck me that i could perhaps create a windows partition from my Linux partition !!! Well, i tried it and then realised that i could not format it :-( Also, it was recommended to always format the partition with the native OS. So, i didnt venture much into this.

I downloaded a trial demo version of Paritition Magic, and after spending an hour on downloading and installing and configuring my hard disk parittiions with it, when i clicked the option that actually would write the new configuration on the hard disk, it gave me a very innocent popup message which read something like ... "This is only a demo version. Please install a paid version to perform this operation." I was like, oh no, it really said "demo" version ... AAArrrgggghhhh X-(

After some more googling, i found this very good article that taught me to use the disk partitioning tool already present on Windows XP to create partitions on my new HDD. I was contemplating on buying a new software for partitioning and thanks to this article, i saved getting fooled.

Now, my machine is more fatter :-) upgraded and ready to go .......

Merry Christmas to you all !!!

Blog This !

Playing around with digg.com i really found it interesting to just click a single button and say "Blog This", for any digged article that i licked. But, soon digging became monotonous and less interesting for me.

And today, after scrapping off my .mozilla directory [ ofcourse, after taking backups !!! ], and restarting firefox 2, I was able to atlast install the cool, firefox 2 themes, like "MacFox II", and add my google notebook extension , and by the same time came across "Google toolbar". A new release for firefox on Linux has happened recently.

Ofcourse, the common thing between the last 2 paragraphs is "Blog This" :-). Yup, google toolbar now has a "Blog This" button, which you can click, and it opens up your blogger home page [ after having 2 sign in twice because my blog is moved to Beta blogger .. how dumb of these guys to have not taken this into consideration. Hopefully, they should have this fixed soon. ]. And then i need to click on "New Posts" and then enter the story that i want.

Damn, this is so uncool of google to do this. First, they ask you to have a single login account for all their services and then they dont seem to be seamlessly working among themselves :-( ... Guess, size really matters. The earlier slimmer google team had better integration among the products compared to the fat team now. I have started believing on the saying that "Your products are as integrated as your teams". Heard a lot about this in my previous company, but i only seem to be realising it now when i see things not working well integrated from google.

I would have preferred something on the similar lines to "google notebook". You visit a site, select the text you want in your blog, and click "Blog This" and you are taken directly to the composer window of your blog with the selected text including the link to the original article already typed. Hope to see this coming soon ...

Another good thing about this google toolbar in the "Bookmark". Now you can keep your bookmarks centralised with your google login id. Few points to improve on this as well ... Guess, this is a new product from google, and so can be pardoned for now. But, would really like to see an import option. Also, the google toolbar doesnt seem to be having the "bookmark this page" button as is suggested in the toolbar features page.

Integrating diversified teams is really a daunting task :-)

Small Contribution

It felt very nice to read this article today in the papers. I was also part of this program. It was actually through this program that i got an opportunity to give a small lecture at PESIT on socket programming.

I joined this program only as a backup plan and was lucky enough to get a chance to interact with the students and share some gyan with them. I came to know about the enormity of this project only later on when we were all invited for the lunch party. This program has no direct links between the student and company. In the sense that, there is no compulsion on the students to join the company or take internship through this program. Its purely a knowledge sharing activity completely done by volunteers. I was surprised to know that, one of the faculty members on this program was actually a student of this program a couple of years ago and voluntered to contribute just because he knew how helpful this program was for him and wanted to help his college juniors in bridging the gap between the college curriculum and the industry expectation.

Yes, it was a pity to know that these students who have broadband in their college campuses and have access to all the opensource courseware from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and google were not familiar with Socket Prgramming. !!! I had this impression that the curriculum has changed a lot since the days we studied in college and that the students were more knowledgable than us. But, only after visiting the college i figured out that it was only the non-curriculum activities where the knowledge was more, in things like, mobile usage, internet fun surfing, video games. Well, yeah, college days are for having fun, but with the study system that we have in India, colleges just end up being that, "a place for having fun" and nothing much. There is hardly any scope for good technical discussions and innovations.

Hopefully, with more such voluntary activities, we should be able to improve the relationship between the industry and college. I feel that unless the tests conducted in college are not more innovative and practical and more near to the reality, there wont be much improvement in the current situation. It would be really great to live in a day when the colleges would be a place for seeding new ideas, and breaking new grounds for the industry to then jump in and materialise these innovations.

Double Centuries

Wow !! What a wonderful week of cricket.

I was really impressed by the inspired batting of the England team after being beaten up so horribly in the opening test match. The first innings score of 551 was really a great score considering the debacle they had in the first test match. Of particular importance was the beautifully paced double century of Collingwood. I was lucky to watch him play on the second day and was really impressed with the ease with which he played. He was patiently waiting for the bad deliveries and punishing the Aussie bowlers very severely for them. He really showed a lot of character and confidence in his batting. I really liked the way he came forward to Micheal Clark and lofted the ball straight over the bowler's head to score his 200th run with a boundary. He was really pumped up and truly deserved his double century. Well, one bowler who got most of the flak was Brett Lee, and it was so nice to see Brett Lee walk up to Collingwood and congratulate him on his double century. Its very rare to see such sporting spirit. It makes it even more better when such things happen in a bitterly fought battle.

Kevin Peterson had a big contribution to Coolingwood's double century. I saw the highlights of the day and could see how they both shared the responsibility of breaking the backs of the Aussie bowlers, with Glenn McGrath having his worst bowling score ever, 107/0. They took turns in scoring boundaries. When Kevin was on fire, Paul would give him strike and just watch his partner score the runs. And when Kevin was tired, and that was like after scoring 3 to 5 boundaries, Paul would take over the charge and start scoring the boundaries and now it was Kevin's turn to just stand at the non-striker's end and watch. A very good demonstration of how partnerships are built in cricket.

And as England were losing the Ashes yet again to a completely wonderful turn over of a sure shot drawn match to the incredible Aussies, thanks to a fighting century from Micheal Clarke and the magician called Shane Warne, the Pakistani great, Mohammad Yousuf, was breaking records. In their test match against the West Indies, Yousuf, scored another century in the second innings, his 9th century this year !!! He broke the 1970 record set by Vivian Richards of 1710 runs in a calendar year, by scoring 1788 runs this year at 99.33 average. This man is one great stylish batsmen who is in his peak of his form. Wonderful to watch when he starts hitting the ball well, and a very very tough nut to crack when he has his foot dug up well on the crease. Many call him a master strokesman. It certainly was a great week for cricket.