Techs @ Random

Tune your bittorrent

2007-05-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

A few of my friends talking about tuning their bit torrent clients led me to google for it and this is what I ended up with. It's a good collection of useful information about bit torrenting in general and the most interesting discovery for me - if your downloads are slow no matter what you do, your ISP may be throttling you !!

Performancing !

2007-02-22T13:34:00.001-08:00

Don't let the name fool you :) It's a firefox addon that features a blog manager and its coooool!

Send pics to 911 !

2007-01-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

Here is an intersting news after a while :) NYC plans to accept cell phone pictures for 911 calls. Very good and timely decision I would say. It would give police a first hand look at the incident and since todays cellphones are built with quite good cameras, it may even be used as evidence in court :)

Open source everywhere

2007-01-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

An interesting entry in the O'reilly radar made me look at campware . It's an Opensource media management system (a complete one) , from news casting to radio station management. What is intersting for me is the fact that there are well built opensource alternatives even for specialized tasks such as radio station management. Amazing !

When does law prohibit the use of free software ?

2006-12-31T13:08:00.001-08:00

I can't believe it. France just prohibited the use of mplayer to play DVD's (Specifically the ones that have CSS)
For me this is a two sided blade. One one side it violates the right of the users (to use the free software that is out there). But at the same time it supports the notion of secure content. To tell the truth , I am not at all a fan of all the DRM and the rest. However I believe that certain works of art deserve to be paid (say movies) because good works of art just do not come out of the blue. As for movies It takes a considerable amount of money and effort to make one and these movie makers deserve something in return (they have to make a living out of it). There is no notion of advertisement supported content as far as movies are considered (Show advertisements along with the movie ??) so either you pay or you don't get to see the movie !

WebOS - Are you for real ???

2006-12-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

I found this review about different Web Operationg Systems (or Web OS's) pretty interesting . I know I know , this is where you say "A Web what ??" :) A WebOS is simply a set of applications running in a web browser that together mimic, replace or largely supplement a desktop OS environment [Its in the article anyway]
Anyway I'm impressed that there are about 15 of them around already.

More archiving the web

2006-12-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

I always thought that archiving the web is a ridiculous if not impossible task but the way back machine proved I was wrong ! Now they've got a significant grant to do more archiving and I can't imagine what they'll do now :)

Queen takes on podcasting!

2006-12-22T14:55:00.000-08:00

When I heard that the queen is taking on podcasting (and yeah, she does own an ipod!) I was amazed. Not because the queen actually took on podcasting but because of the pace the technology is becoming ubiquitous.
It's amazing how things change, for example I was reminded that 'Google came into real existance about 7 years ago' recently and its hard to believe that since I live off Google everyday (my search stats lurk around 20 to 40 per day and I primarily use gmail - BTW I found an intersting article about the birth of Google during my search). So its not surprising that Ipods came into existance about 2 years ago and it has already transformed the world :)

This is what I call 'news'

2006-11-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

I have faith in PHP but I never thought it will come to this!
It is quite interesting to see how Micosoft felt the power of opensource :)

Want ASCII Art ?

2006-10-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

t.y.p.o.r.g.a.n.i.s.m : ASCII-O-Matic is an online ASCII art generator! Very cool :)

Ipods with Viruses

2006-10-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is an appropriate place say ooops !

Google to take over YouTube ?

2006-10-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

What I found intersting about Google talking with YouTube is that all major companies are realizing the power of social networking!

Boomerang Reconnaissance Robot - How cool is that!

2006-09-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

It's more like imagination gone wild! The Boomerang Reconnaissance Robot is mentioned to be 'invisible' !

Industrial espionage

2006-09-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

This is what you call industrial espionage!

A blog from space

2006-09-24T20:25:00.000-07:00

Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist and the first person of Iranian descent is writing her Space Blog as promised. The page took ages to load up, probably due to the load of comments it has.
The good thing is the motivation she provides to other people to pursue their dreams :)

Crashed with its creators ?

2006-09-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

It is quite unfortunate to hear this news. I've actually travelled in German trains and they are fantastic! So I can imagine how this magnetically levitated train would have performed. The sad news is that many of the passengers were engineers - the creators themselves!

Going once, going twice ...

2006-09-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Lets see how long facebook can last until its gone!

Dell battery explodes at Yahoo HQ

2006-09-21T00:53:00.000-07:00

Here we go once again. As the post says, they should've memos in these big companies.
BTW this proves that exploding batteries is no hoax and no joke !

US Software Patents Hit Record High !!

2006-09-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid this is not gonna be very good news to the open source world :(

Laser links at last

2006-09-21T00:29:00.000-07:00

I guess this was speculated much earlier but they managed to do it at the end. Well done Intel :)
Lets see where we get with this ;)

Toshiba joins the party

2006-09-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Toshiba recalls 340,000 Satellite, Dynabook batteries.
I wonder who will be the next ;)

Wish I had one of these!

2006-09-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

Now this is cool ! It seems to be a really cool idea and lets see how it gets around :)

One lucky lady

2006-09-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

The first female space tourist is about to blast off tomorrow. Now that's one lucky (and very rich!) lady :)

Note also that she is Iranian (well,born in Iran) and the first person of Iranian descent to go to space!

IE in trouble again ?

2006-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Seems IE is still in trouble. This report that popped up today reminds me how good firefox is :)

Thinkpads also blowing up ?

2006-09-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've had various models of IBM Thinkpads for the past 3 years, A T30, R50 and a T42. None of them had problems and gave impressive performance under rough use. However the latest buzz is ThinkPad exploding in LAX. Given both Dell and Apple recalled batteries, perhaps thinkpads are also in the vulnerable group with faulty batteries ?

Leveling the play ground

2006-09-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

Microsoft announced the Open Specification Promise a few days back. Folks may be a bit skeptical about this as usual (Well some are justifiable!) but a company like Microsoft making such a promise is important indeed. It levels the play ground for all the players and hopefully will fuel some healthy competition.
Things are too early to predict but lets see what happens ;)

Name change + how good can it be ?

2006-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

I guess there are lots of techy things that interest me so I'm devoting this blog for all the interesting techy things I come up with :) Hence the name changed from tech tips to techs @ random and so did the URL !
Anyway here is the first entry. Remember the neat 2 wheel human transporter , the segway ? I've infact had a ride in one of them while visiting Apachecon US last year. However it seems that a software fault was detected and almost all the segways were recalled couple of days back ! What this reminds me is that even though we aspire to have come a long way with software, still it takes a lot of human effort to get it just right !

Ubuntu Fever - part 1

2006-08-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

As promised, I installed the new Ubuntu release (6.06 - Dapper Drake!) into my laptop. When you boot up (well actually even at the point of the downloading the ISO) you realize that the there is no live CD / install CD nonsense anymore. All is one CD and it is quite convenient.
As I booted off the CD into Linux (Quite fast too for a live CD) it gives me a nice 'install me' icon in the desktop. But when I moved on to installing I was in for two surprises

1. My first play with ntfsresize had partial effects on the disk. Ubuntu still sees a big fat NTFS partition but Windows didn't think so. However Ubuntu has a really good GUI based partitioner which does the job nicely.
2. It never asked me about installing the boot loader - GRUB. I wanted to change the boot loader later but it never asked and installed the thing starightaway. Well - its not a problem but I've lost the recovery option at startup !

However the installtion worked great , like a charm. I am still to install JDK and other stuff I need into the Linux system. All in all it tells you how far the linux systems have come from the geeks tool to laymans OS.

First tech tip - Modifying NTFS partition sizes

2006-08-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Here comes my first tech tip. I've got this wonderful Gateway platinum laptop with 2GB RAM (?!) and a 120GB disk but to my dismay it comes with one hugh partition (Well two of them but the other is one is a recovery partition and is of no use). Throwing away the original Windows setup is a waste (Afterall you paid for it and even though I am the opensource nut, Windows sometimes is just easier to handle. Also there are so many opensource software tools available for Windows (with their Linux counterparts ofcourse) that one can completely live off with). But naturally I want the computer to be a dual boot and how do I resize this big fat NTFS partition without messing up the already installed Windows system ?
Here comes Linux to the rescue!! There is a Linux tool (a bunch of them to be exact) that allows handling NTFS partitions. ntfsresize is the tool of my choice and guess what ? The wonderful Knoppix Live CD comes with the whole bunch of ntfs* tools.

So here is what I did

Downloaded the Knoppix Live CD ISO
Burned it into a CD
Booted off the new Live CD. And it picks up the existing partitions nicely
Ran ntfsresize with 50G as the preferred size

Wola - that worked like a charm. Stay tuned and the next post will take you in another tech adventure when I install Ubuntu in a dual boot configuration :)

Why Tech tips

2006-08-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some computer setting up these days and intersetingly came up with a lot of techy things I would love to share with the world. I felt like blogging them but hey, that makes my original blog a mess ! So here it is - my tech tips to the world - in a seperate blog :)
I would write techy things here and occasionaly a post that is in the grey area would make its way to both the blogs :)