Blogs

Hmm.. So I’ve updated my blog to WordPress v2.8.4, in light of the recent attacks.. Have been negleting this blog a lot lately.. Let’s see if i can be regular here! To be honest, twitter killed my blog 😛

The members of India Broadband Forum have come up with an online petition against Airtel’s Fair usage policy. I urge all to sign it! It doesnt matter if you use Airtel or not! http://afup.broadbandforum.in/

Last night i was following this discussion over at Broadbandforum.in. And it seems Airtel has put download caps on their supposedly unlimited connections. After you are finished with your quota, they throttle your speeds 😐 This is absolutely ridiculous! And before poeple try to defend by saying that speed caps are there internationally too, i say first match the kind of speeds they provide at the rates they provide it at, then talk about caps. Anyway, taken from a post from that thread: ...

We use IBM’s Lotus Sametime as our IM client at work. And i like to be signed in all the time even on my Arch machine at home. Pidgin does support sametime protocol, but through an external library called meanwhile. Although most popular distributions have meanwhile in their main repos, Arch does not. It has the meanwhile library in AUR. And due to this, the pidgin in Arch has meanwhile support disabled. But even so, the latest stable meanwhile library (1.0.2) has a nasty bug which does not report the correct online status of buddies. Most online buddies are shown as being offline. The problem has been fixed in the SVN version, but unfortunately ALL distributions carry the buggy version of meanwhile. It took me around 5-6 months to get to the root cause of this bug, and yes, i have managed to fix it in Arch. I’m providing here a compiled version of the fixed meanwhile library (64 bit). I’m also providing a complete tutorial on how to compile pidgin with meanwhile support on Arch. ...

Love it? Hate it? Let me know!

So.. A few days back, Kernel 2.6.28 was released. And amongst the many new features, the thing that attracted me most was stable EXT4 support. For those of you who dont know, EXT4 is the successor to the most widely used linux filesystem, EXT3. EXT4 boasts of being a hell lot faster than EXT3, and ofcourse with added features. Archlinux just released Kernel 2.6.28 into it’s [core] repo a few days back, and since then im in a dillema whether i should switch to EXT4, or be content with my current filesystem, JFS. Switching to EXT4 means that I will have to re-install Arch, once the new installer CD with EXT4 support comes in (which should be soon). And configuring Arch _exactly_ the same way as it is right now will be almost impossible! I mean with all the small tweaks and configuration changes i’ve done over one year now! Will be a HUGE task! And nowdays, i really dont have time to mess with something that’s working absolutely the way i want it to work. ...

Well, i know its kinda old news, but still im pretty excited that Adobe has released an alpha version of a native 64 bit Flash plugin for Linux! The best part is that Linux is the first platform that gets the alpha version, though Adobe says that it will ship the final version for Linux, Mac and Windows together. Thankyou Adobe for showering some of your love to us Linux users 😀 ...

Google conducted a workshop on their AppEngine and OpenSocial on 5th September at the Taj Palace, New Delhi. Im sorry i couldn’t blog about it earlier, to let all the Delhi readers know 😛 I myself was an unconfirmed guest at this event, but the people from Google were friendly enough to confirm my seat once i reached there 🙂 The event started with Rajdeep, Anash and Seshu going into the depths of the OpenSocial API and what it stands for. Anirudh, on the other hand, took us for a deep dive on the AppEngine. Their presentations covered everything from introduction to even code snippets. We also had presentations from Google’s partners for OpenSocial: Impetus and Satyam. They gave an insight on what they are doing with OpenSocial. I’m afraid, i still haven’t received any of the presentations from any of the presenters, although with a quick search on SlideShare, i was able to find some similar presentations. I’m embedding two of them here: ...

Ok, this just in! Google’s planning on an open source browser based on the WebKit engine. Via Googlesystem blog, Google Chrome has been built in a time when browsers no longer render mostly web pages, but full-blown web applications. That’s why browsers need to be more powerful, more stable and more secure. One of the problems of the existing browsers is that a web page can lock the browser and there’s no way to isolate that tab and close it. Google Chrome uses a new process for each tab. “We’re applying the same isolation you find in modern operating systems,” says Arnaud Weber. Each process is sandboxed to prevent malware from affecting your computer. ...

Hmm.. So i’ve been out of the blogging scene for quite sometime now. Mostly, i’ve been busy with work, and yeah, i’ve been spending all my free time watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S, just like Nidhi 🙂 Now that i’m finished with all 10 seasons, i think ill get some time to post here 🙂 So lets see.. What all is new.. On the linux front, i’ve migrated from Ubuntu to Arch Linux, which according to me, is the BEST distro out there! I love the fact how everything “just works” and how i have the latest software all the time. The best part is that its a rolling release, meaning no more waiting for updates or adding third party repos for new stuff. I evaluated Debian and Gentoo, before moving to Arch. Debian always had some or the other problem. It wasnt just stable enough for me. And Gentoo on the other hand was too time consuming and crude. Arch is gonna stay on my PC for a long, long time! 🙂 ...