Shubh Diwali !!!

Wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous Diwali !!!

eventful day

India won the second test at Mohali today against Australia with a margin of 320 runs. excellent work !!! ALso a certain political leader was arrested in Mumbai today for indulging in regional politics. I think that the government should have arrested him long time back. Imagine what would happen, if every state in India gave preferential treatment to people from that state. I wonder if Bengaluru would be so popular as the Silicon Valley of Asia, if Chennai would be synonymous as the Detroit of India, etc. What hurts RT, if a Bihari writes the Civil Services examination in Mumbai?? In this case, I wonder what RT would say if a non-Marathi married a Marathi mulgi? Missus's threat to RT: "Tujha Nanachi Taang !!!"

Peace: Listening to Rahman's heavenly compositions from Yuvvraaj specially this one.

Open source goodness for FIL

So dear Missus decided to gift a laptop to her Papa on his 60th birthday. Ok it's his 62nd birthday and Madam decided to gift a laptop now. In all earnestness, I suggested that we gift a laptop loaded with Linux. After 3-4 weeks (actually months) of procrastinations and looking over Best Buy ads, we bought a Dell Inspiron 1525. I was surprised when the BestBuy guy mentioned that they would remove all the adware that came with Dell laptops and that would cost a cool $125. This is one of the reasons, I desist Windoze. So I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04LTS). Installation was easy and I followed the guide here. I installed Google repos for Picasa. The webcam was fixed by installing ekiga and cheese. Skype was chosen as the medium for communicating with 10-month old grand daughter. [:P] BTW Skype worked out of the box. I had some problems with the microphone/speaker and that was fixed using the instructions given here. Last but not least I also got the S-video to work by reading this instruction/post on ubuntuforums.org
I also made a small presentation/manual on how to use the essential features. I hope that this experiment pays off. At least they won't be bothered with viruses, spyware, ad ware, etc. and can use their laptop to chat with their grand daughter here. I deserve a pat on the back for 1. making Linux OS an alternative to Windoze for them, so that they won't miss having Windoze, 2. making Open Source software flourish.

Soldiers deserve better !

This is a very though provoking article, that appeared in Rediff. I agree with the author's point of view. After all, defense personnel should be provided with better pay packages. In today's scenario, nobody would opt to go for the Defense services. A new movie trailer of Heroes (hindi movie no connection to the series on TV) tells the viewers about seeing why the defense services are not good. This alone makes me want to watch the movie.

nostalgia...

I was surprised to find an invitation on LinkedIn from a friend. Apparently another friend/acquaintance/student wanted to send me a message after seeing my profile. Now he works with a very reputed company and his group has positions for a fresh PhD graduate and wanted to contact me wrt that position. Now what's the common link? So this friend was my student or the other way around I was the TA for a VLSI design class he had taken. 6 years back, I dealt with 150 students in the class. Honestly, I cannot remember his face, but it feels nice to be remembered.

Thankfully, this week looks bright atleast due to my Genius playlist featuring songs from Fashion, Welcome to Sajjanpur, Drona, Vaaranam Aayiram..!!! Mundhiram Parthe is my current favourite...!!!!