SMS Calendar Events

Google Calendar offers free SMS notification service to your mobile phone about the events you save as calendar events. This facility is currently available for Dialog & Celltel connections only. Mmm... neat facility if you have a volatile memory. But there are limitations, only 20 notifications per day and 150 per month.

Pics update...

My kid is 3 months old. His name is 'Mevinu Dinsath'. Now he recognizes me and happy whenever I'm around. Most of the days he sees me only in the morning and I think he knows it. So he wakes up early in the morning and he wants me to speak with him. Sometimes I fell sleep while talking to him but he kicks me or shouts loudly to wake me up.
My MBA exam for the 3rd semester is going to start on 30th December and I'm thinking of stay at home for 3-4 days to study. But don't know how long I can do it with the little one.



Mevinu with his mother




with his grandma

New Look

I transfered my blog to blogger beta... Mmmm... Looks nice to me...

Life Upgrade!

I rarely post about myself and this is no exception. I became a father on September 18. The little one is a boy and the above picture was taken after 2 hours of birth. (more photos will come soon...)
My friends and colleagues ask how's the life now? My answer is now I feel that I'm living :-) Well, there is no need to mention that I'm busy. Didn't sleep continuously more than two hours since the little one wakes up every two hours. It was very hard during the first two weeks but now I'm used to it. To make the things worse, MBA work load in this semester is like hell. So much of work compared to the previous semester. That's why I couldn't post a single blog during the last three months. I couldn't see any difference in the future also.

mmmm....

My Office PC is dual boot; having Windows 2003 server and Ubuntu 6.06. I have been in windows for a long time therefore all of my work related files, developments and mail are in windows partitions (ntfs). Ever since I changed to Ubuntu, I was searching ways & means of full access to ntfs partitions. It only gave me read-only access. But today I found this great link on how to get access to ntfs partitions under linux. I immediately implemeted it but due to some reason, it couldn't mount both partitions instead it mounted only one. At least, I have one partition which I have full access.

Well, what more I need? EMail. Yes, I love OutLook. It's a great program. Couldn't believe its from M$. I'm using Thunderbird from mozilla in Linux. The pain is, I cannot use two mail clients in different OSs. Its not only wasting my precious space but also finding a particular mail drives me to nuts. Sometimes I cannot remember which mail is in which mail client. But the beauty of a cross platform mail client like Thunderbird is, it works in both OSs. I found this great article on how to configure Thunderbird to have a single mailbox (profile) no matter in which OS you work. Now I've lost one reason to goto Windows.

wiki

I thought of starting a corporate knowledge base in our company to share views and thoughts of employees mainly on technical topics. I had previous experience of wiki based engines since 'trac' uses a wiki engine to maintain its knowledge base. I googled for wiki engines and came across so many but only two of them impressed me, Twiki & MediaWiki. After installing both, MediaWiki came to the top of the list because of the features it has and the easiness to install. Now it is up and running successfuly. Later I came to konow that wikipedia, the best knowledge base in the world, is also running using MediaWiki. Cool...

The Move

Now I am on the verge of moving to Ubuntu from Windows. I spend 90% of my time on Ubuntu in my dual boot system. Still I'm testing the OS and so far it has being great. I can do most of the things I did in windows without any problem and sometimes better than in windows. Browse using FireFox, Email via Thunderbird, Chat using Gaim, Documentation using OpenOffice etc. And I managed to get most of the third party software to burn CDs, media players, mp3 players and popular codecs to watch dvds and divx movies. Printing, File sharing, SSH, connecting to Remote Desktops and vmware clients are also possible without any glitch. What I missed was .Net & Delphi. I don't do much development work these days and I keep my windows partition for that type of work.

Two days back, I received Ubuntu & Kubuntu CDs which I ordered from Ubuntu web site. They are shipping 3 types of Ubuntu variants for the lates release 6.06 Dapper Drake.
1. Ubuntu - The normal distribution wiht Gnome desktop
2. Kubuntu - Ubuntu with KDE (K-Desktop Environment)
3. Edubuntu - Ubuntu for the entire Family - This has lot of educational programmes for kids.

(I forgot to order Edubuntu but I managed to download it from the site.)

P.S.
I downloaded Ubuntu from a mirror site even before they officially release it :-) I did a kernel upgrade to suit my PIV Hyper Threading PC. Now it recognises two CPUs. Actually there aren't two CPUs but Hyper Threading simulates two CPUs. I installed a customised version of Firefox called SwiftFox which is optimised for PIVs. It loads and runs faster than the normal FireFox.

Camera Mouse...!

Yeah.. no kidding... there is a camera inside the optical mouse. This is not a very comprehensive one. It is just a CMOS sensor (CMOS sensors are actually being used in inexpensive(?) cameras) which sends images to digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. This DSP then analyses the image and identifies the patterns in the image to compare it with previous images. Based on the change in patterns, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer. Pretty cool huh...

UPDATE!!!!

I'm back after about more than three months! My studies kept me away from most of my enthusiastic activities including blogging. (but I always managed to read other's blogs) I post this, not because it is over, still I'm in the middle of it, to tell you that I'm still alive :-)

Apart from my studies (its a two year MBA), following things kept me busy all the time. I'll post separate entries for each one when I take my mind out of the busy schedule.

1. We were asked to statndardise our software development process introducing version controlling, process tracking, project management, code tesing etc. We thought of trying open source products rather than pumping money on commecial products. I saw CVS has been used by many people to keep the different versions of codes in a repositary. When I was meddling with it, I found a better one called subversion (SVN). I tested it in the windows environment but the results were poor. Then I turned towards Ubuntu (my personal preference) Linux and it was very successfull. Installing and confuguring (i'll post a separate blog entry on this later) svn was really enjoying and it bahave as it is intended to be.

2. Then we wanted to have a project management system and immediately we found that "trac" is a good option. Not only it integrate with svn but also it has other advantages like fully web based, has wiki facility and bug ticket issuing feature. It also get installed without much trouble. (I'll post the steps later)

3. All these (svn and trac) were installed in a temporary machine which was the only one I could find. The specs of the machine are not that appealing, it's a PIII 500MHz, 128MB machine but thanks to Ubuntu, everything went smoothly. All of a sudden we got new PCs, PIV 3GHz with HT, 1GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HD and luckily, I could reserve one PC as a permanent server. We've got one server but got so many requirements. We should have a SQL Server, Apache Tomcat, svn, trac, and many more to come. SQL Server must be running on windows platform and svn & trac must be run on linux. We've got one PC. The only solution I had was to go for PC virtualization. I installed Vmware on top of windows 2003 Server host and installed Ubuntu as a guest. I managed to transfer all the repositories from the previous PC to the new server. (I hope to post a blog entry on this as well). Installation of guest OSs didn't stop there. I installed XP with office 2007 beta, Ubuntu Dapper Drake (ver 6.06) RC. When all these guest OSs are running, the performance degraded a liitle bit but thanks to Hyper Threading, processor managed to keep it in acceptable level.

Father & Son

I copied the following conversation from a blog which I used to read. The person who writes the blog has a six year old son living with his ex-wife. He sees his son once per week. This time, they met in a restaurant;


"Are you eating healthy today, dad?"

"Yeah."

"Do you like eating healthy?"

"Not really. I like hot dogs most."

"Yeah, and you eat a LOT of them."

"I love taking you to lunch. Someday you'll have a little boy that you can take to lunch too."

"Yep. And if you eat healthy you'll get to meet him."

iPod shuffle

The latest addition to my gadget collection, the iPod shuffle, arrived yesterday. Its a cool device in every aspect; size, design, quality,... everything is perfect. It may hold more than 100 songs I assume (its a 512MB) and the battery may last 12 hours according to the manual. Re-charging is possible only when it is connected to a PC via the USB. It supports a wide variety of music formats including mp3, aac, wav etc. Sound quality is good but lacking Bass Power. Its really light weight, not even an ounce. I am braining these days to find a method to connect it to my car audio.