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It’s been quite sometime that I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on Dell Inspiron 1520. My experience with this Ubuntu installation has been good and I have got Compiz Fusion working this time (something I could not do before). Installation was slightly problematic with Feisty, since the Live CD did not boot at all. It failed after I pressed “Enter to Install” and I had to search for available solutions for this problem. I solved the problem by following the steps provided here . The workaround provided helped me out and I could boot using Live CD and installed Ubuntu Feisty subsequently. No problems after the boot process. Installation was simple and straightforward and completed in 18-20 minutes. Now, since many essential features were missing, so first thing I had to do was to install those missing packages. So, I needed to update the packages list or apt-get should I say. But I did not choose apt-get, instead I selected Smart Package Manager this time. I have had a very good exp...

Yes! I bought a laptop for myself, the Dell Inspiron 1520 (Black). Must say, it’s quite a beauty with the matte finish. Though delivery time was a bit long (13 days), I got it finally with all the accessories as mentioned in the order, so no surprises. I bought the following configuration : Intel(R) Core(TM)2Duo Processor T5250 1.5Ghz 2MB Cache, 667Mhz FSB 1 GB (2×512MB) DDR2 SDRAM 15.4 Widescreen WXGA+ Display 160 GB SATA HDD (5400 RPM) Nvidia(R) Geforce(TM) 8400M GS - 128MB GDDR2 Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy Advanced HD Audio Software Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module Intel Pro Wireless 3945 Dual Band 802.11a/g Wirless Mini Card Camera Dell (TM) Remote Control Internal 8X DVD+/-RW combination drive with dual layer write capabilities 6-cell 53 WHr Lithium Ion Primary Battery Windows Vista (with Aero) runs fine, although I don’t see much difference between Vista and XP. There are some unrequired features that you may want to turn off. See this link for some help. All the har...

Recently, I came across this problem, someone faced while casting a decimal datatype to varchar data type in DB2. Here’s the link to the whole thread : db2– Decimal to Varchar without leading zeros So, the idea is to replace the 0’s with spaces and convert them back to 0 with second replace. I’ve already explained the reason for this double-do for both replace and rtrim/ltrim functions instead of a single trim , strip functions.

After a period of 18 months approximately, I made first job switch of my career. I separated from my previous company - a IT Company (probably the biggest) to another big company, although in a different industry (Retail). Last working day was quite eventful. At office, I spent the whole day managing the separation process & said good-bye to everyone. At home, all 3 of us (my 2 room-mates and myself) wished each other Good Luck . One of my room-mates got a job, other one was going abroad. Next day, I left Pune for my home at Delhi and stayed there for a week before taking up my new job at Bangalore. I did nothing at home except relaxing and partying, that was the objective anyways. Next week I went to Bangalore and joined my new company. My job change was actually a Career Shift. I've changed my role from pure technical to that of a mixed one. My current role requires both technical skills as well as functional knowledge. It was a personal choice for me, so I took this decision...

Yes, I am feeling exactly this at the moment. As I mentioned already in my last post, work pressure is not much these days at office so I started feeling a little too idle to spend time when you’re all alone in a new city. Moreover, there is not much to discover in and around Pune, or maybe I’m just not interested. I’ve already visited the city landmarks. Then it came to my mind, let’s watch movies & spend some quality time. Let me confess in advance that I’ve very little knowledge & exposure to movies. I know that doesn’t make me a lesser audience but I mentioned it just to make sure you’re not surprised about my selection, pick of movies. Actually, I was thinking how to get information about a movie relating to its cast, plot, ratings, reviews & other credentials. I stumbled upon these 4 major resources : IMDB Rotten Tomatoes MetaCritic.com Hollywood.com Usually, I watch one movie in say 1-2 months, but now as I’ve got enough time; I watched a little more during this...

Being idle for quite a long time in my organization, I was offered my next assignment in Pune. Though I didn’t want to, but still I had to go. So on Jan 8th, 2007, I came back to Pune. Last time when I was here, I had a brief and not so nice time in Pune. Anyways, I reached the official guest house after arriving in Pune and rushed back to the office immediately. I met the contact person in the office. By the grace of God, I got a desk here unlike my previous project where I worked for around 8-9 months without a desk. But then, it was still a minor issue there. After some initial frequent changes, I was finally assigned to a project. For the rest of week there was nothing to be done, as everyone was new to this project. During the first weekend, I went out and looked for accommodation and other things, I needed to arrange. I couldn’t find much options near the Office. I moved around the city to re-discover the landmarks (according to me). Prabhat Lodge on J M Road, Garware Chowk, Kam...

After a long time, due to sincere efforts of few enlightened a.k.a connected people (people in touch with old pals), Reunion of Batch 1999, Ramjas School - Pusa Road happened. Time & Venue : Dec 17th, 2006 11 A.M. @ Cafe Coffee Day, Connaught Place - New Delhi Well, I reached the venue quite late. Reason being, I was searching my wardrobe specifically for a Yellow pullover, which took me sometime. Although, experts from textile industry didn’t appreciate really; I guess they’re learning about the fashion trends Anyways, when I reached the venue I welcomed other late comers. Another surprise was the strength of this reunion, must say. Big round of applause for friends who organized this affair. I believe the attendance achieved was worth the ordeal for them. People from all streams (Science, Commerce, Arts) were present. Since, not everyone knew everyone else, we all introduced ourselves. We discovered people coming mainly from IT industry (quite obvious), Textiles & Ban...

I installed ubuntu 6.10 using net-install method, and it was a no-problem installation. After the initial installation, I’d to install several small packages for essential features like MP3 support, jre & flash-plugin for firefox, mplayer. I followed the instructions at the link : http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy The link provides all the information required to do all such configuration/setup tasks. But I had 2 problem relating to keyboard and sound card. The keyboard was not working properly, as in some of the keys like ” and ‘ did not work properly. I’d to use the following command : sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and change the keyboard configuration. I removed all the customizations displayed by the configuration script. The other problem was that of sound card. I could access the sound card as root; but not as a non-root user. I resolved the problem by changing the permissions of the non-root user as explained below : Go to : System->Administration-...

Indexes are optional data structures associated with Database tables. Indexes are logically & physically independent of the data in the associated table. They are independent database objects created to reduce disk I/O & speed up execution of SQL statements on a table. We can create many indexes on a table given that each index points to different column (in case of a single column) or unique combination of columns from a table. All Indexes offer complementary performance functionalities based on their structure: B-Tree indexes : B-Tree Indexes are stored as a conventional binary data structure in the database. Each branch node contains a key prefix to make a direction between two keys. Each Leaf Node is at same depth from the branch node and contain complete key value for each row & ROWID. Features : All leaf blocks of the tree are at same depth, resulting same performance for retrieval of any record from the indexed table. B-Trees are stay balanced automatically. Exc...

PL/SQL Collections Index-by tables (Associative Arrays) : They are arrays with the only difference that we can use numbers, string literals for subscript values. Associative Arrays are sets of key-value pairs, where key can be an integer or a string. There is no limitation on the size of Associative Arrays. Syntax: TYPE type_name IS TABLE OF element_type [NOT NULL] INDEX BY [BINARY_INTEGER | PLS_INTEGER | VARCHAR2 (size_limit)] ; Nested Tables : They are single dimensional, array-like tables, that can hold any number of elements inside another database table and can be manipulated by SQL as other database objects. Syntax: TYPE type_name IS TABLE OF element_type [NOT NULL]; Varying Arrays : As the name suggests, varrays (Varying Arrays) are fixed length arrays that use sequential numbers as subscripts. varrays need to be dense and we cannot remove/delete individual elements from the array. Length is defined at design time and can be manipulated at runtime subject to maximum ...

Recently, I came across the Time.com ’s list of 25 sites, We Can’t Live Without . I read it till the end to discover the new websites, I might be unaware of. I thought so because being a software professional, I spend much of my time daily browsing Internet. Not to my surprise, I came across quite a few websites, I had not heard of. More so, may be because I don’t need the services offered by them like one that’s selling shoes and accessories. But there were some websites, I was happy to browse. One of them is Craiglist , it’s more like Yellow Pages cum Free Advertisements that are bundled for free alongwith the Newspapers. I was surprised to see a separate section for Bangalore and that too quite an active one. Others in the list were mainly News-Related Websites or portals like Yahoo , MSN & AOL . Though they are not exactly comparable in terms of size and content, but that’s a broad category I’m putting them into. Drudge Report , Factcheck.org , National Public Radio and ...

Lyceum is an extension of the popular Wordpress blogging software. While Wordpress is a single user blogging software, Lyceum is a multiple users blogging software. Under early development, read about it here I tried installing it on my Windows XP system, running Apache 2.0.59, PHP 4.4.3 & MySQL 3.23.42 and faced quite some problems, so thought to blog about it. Installation Steps Download, Install and configure Apache, MySQL and PHP on your Windows Machine. Download and Installation should not be a problem. For configuration, you may follow these links: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/php4install.shtml http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=6452 After you’ve configured all the above 3 components, download Lyceum source from here Extract the source and place it under your DocumentRoot ( ). You should have the following directory structure. /lyceum + /dev | /doc | /src | + /bin | | /config | | /installation | | /lib | + /lyceum + /tests Befo...

Recently, I read this article, where in the Author has imagined interoperability of all files some way; where all possible file formats could be represented in a standard/single format, so as to ease the process of file editing/creating and parsing. Read it here

Definition / Concept If we need to retrieve data from more than one table we use JOINs. A join is a query, used to retrieve data from more than one table based on JOIN condition (Note: Same table can referenced more than once). Conditions In SQL terms, Join occurs when we specify more than one table in the FROM clause of the SELECT statement. Additionally, we also specify a condition in the WHERE clause to specify JOIN condition in the SELECT statement. Now, JOINs are conditions to join/compare two tables’ data retrieved from the selected tables’ columns based on JOIN Condition. Oracle combines the rows’ data to compare with other tables’ rows and evaulate the JOIN condition for TRUE/FALSE. We need to qualify columns having same name with table names/aliases to avoid ambiguity errors, for joins can be extended to multiple tables. In case of multiple joins extending to more than 2 tables, let’s say 3 for example, we create a recordset based on 1st join between 1st two tables & j...

Google is launching web-based spreadsheet application called Google Spreadsheets . Still under beta test, requiring invites to try out this new application; nothing much can be said about the application & its future as of now. But, as I was going through various news articles, people are already claiming that Google is seriously competing with Microsoft by launching this spreadsheet program. In my opinion, it’s just small view of a bigger vision. For, I believe it’s not just about Google taking on Microsoft or any other XYZ Co., but what Google is trying to achieve is reducing the dependance of the users on an operating system largely. When we observe the recent moves made by Google, we observe that Google launched Email , Instant Messaging , Calendar etc and now Google Spreadsheets, a spreadsheet application. The straight & obvious advantage of all such applications is availability on the web, so no matter where you are, you’ve access to your information everytime; no more d...

A group of four full-time political activists have developed a portal to encourage Internet Explorer users to adopt Firefox Web Browser. They’ve launched their website: ExplorerDestroyer.com as an aggressive strategy to promote Firefox amongst Internet Explorer Users, as Internet Explorer is still the most popular Web Browser. The group states : “Firefox is one of the most important software applications in the world because it can play a big part in determining the future of the web. It is crucial that an open-source, standards-based web browser becomes the most popular browser, and Firefox has a shot at being that. It’s the best product, and its popularity is climbing, thanks to amazing efforts by the Mozilla Foundation , the SpreadFirefox.org juggernaut, and many others.” Apart from talking about the advantages of Firefox, they are promoting the use of Firefox, by advertising the Google Adsense program that pays $1 for each new Firefox user you refer. Also, they are offering ready...

Microsoft released a new test release of Internet Explorer, the market leadingWeb browser facing stiff competition from smaller players like Firefox & Opera lately. The new beta, available Tuesday for free download to English-language customers, includes fixes for problems that were causing Internet Explorer 7 to stop working.With the previous test version, the most common problems reported involved banking and news sites, in part because of security changes. The new beta release is targeted at technology enthusiasts, after earlier versions of the browser primarily catered towards developers of websites and online applications. Improving security can be tricky since any changes can cause legitimate Web sites to stop working, frustrating users. “We want to get them to start using the product and get us some feedback,” Margaret Cobb, group product manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft told vnunet.com. “We still have a few months before we release publicly and we want to make thi...

Xie, a researcher for the Web Search and Mining group within Microsoft Research Asia , is working on technology called Photo2Search, which is designed to provide information on the go for users of camera phones. “As the old saying goes,” Xie says, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe more, actually. Photo2Search gives users a way to search a Web-based database by using nothing more than an image captured by a cellphone equipped with a digital camera. “This technology,” Xie says, “aims to solve the problem of mapping a physical-world object to a digital-world object. You see an object in the physical world, and you want to know the corresponding information in the digital world - for example, its price on the Web, user comments, or Web sites. There are many different solutions. You can use a bar code or radio-frequency identification. But using a picture of the object is very convenient and very easy to deploy.” The easy part is the key. Camera phones are simple to use, but...

Dymeta Inc., a small security firm based in Bettendorf, in Iowa says it has discovered why Yahoo’s email is sometimes slow.An analysis of Yahoo Inc. mail servers found that they were only able to accept email about half the time on average, making it likely that email was taking longer than normal to deliver. “We’re not saying that mail isn’t going to get through, but it’s likely to take longer than normal,” Gillette said. “Normally, when you send email from one account to another, you can expect it to be delivered in minutes. With the problems they’ve got, it could take hours or even days to get through, or it could be bounced back entirely.” In testing 16 Yahoo mail servers found on average that the servers were unable to accept email 45 percent of the time, and the number of available servers ranged from as low as four to as high as 12, Aaron Gillette, chief technician for the company, said. Yahoo, among the largest Web mail providers in the world, sending more messages per qua...

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. will buy Flextronics Software Systems for around $900 million. Flextronics International Ltd. is world’s largest producer of electronics for other companies. KKR is buying 85% of the Bangalore-based India unit of Flextronics and marks its presence in the region after it opened its office in Tokyo & Hong Kong last year. Flextronics said it would retain a 15% stake in the business that would operate as an independent software and solutions company. KKR last year bought Agilent Technologies Inc.’s semiconductor unit, whose operations are mainly in Singapore. Palo Alto, California-based Agilent is the world’s biggest maker of scientific-testing equipment. “ Our investment in Flextronics’ software development and solutions business is an outstanding opportunity to create value in a high-growth sector, ‘’ Adam H. Clammer, a KKR executive said in the statement. The Indian unit was formerly Hughes Software Systems, based in New Delhi, before Flextronics...