Me, my phone and my calendar!

Recently, I got the entry level HTC smartphone for myself. The 3400i is a VFM phone with all the bells and whistles one would need in an entry level smartphone. Whenever I change a phone, the biggest headache is moving around the contacts and the calendar information. I tend to forget and rely a lot on the calendar to remind me about important events like birthdays, marriage annivs and the likes.

I was looking forward to a dreary timespan trying to update my calendar on the phone for all those important events. Its just today that I read about GoogleSync for mobile phones. Via GoogleSync one can sync their googlemail contacts and calendar events immediately with their smartphone! I was sceptical but it was a total breeze. I just had to enter my gmail address details in ActiveSync (yes mine is a Windows Mobile phone - no bricks please :P) and lo-and-behold my gmail contacts plus all calendar events were uploaded wirelessly onto my mobile! Nice, I say :D

What are you waiting for, go get your mobile synced up!

FC10 woes

So my last posting mentioned the reasons why I upgraded my laptop from FC8 to FC10. But the recent events have left me flabbergasted :(

Last week, the automatic update system informed me of the availability of a new kernel (kernel 2.6.27.9-159.fc10) and I dutifully installed the upgrades. The machine stopped booting up since then! It would directly go to the GRUB prompt and nothing else would occur. 

I thought I will just boot up using a CD, mount my drive and edit grub.conf to start using the machine again. I did so and thankfully the Linux partition started booting up again normally. But in this process my Windows Vista partition got totally messed up (again due to the grub manipulations I would think) and goes into a recovery and rescue mode on every bootup :(. Attempts to mount the partition from within Linux also comes out with an error! 

Now darned if I had taken a backup ever!  To summarize, I have lost my windows partition along with all the data on it and am now in the process of a re-install of WinVista. That this laptop is where I do my work on is what makes matters worse. 

Lesson learnt - do not upgrade to a bleeding edge technology unless it has settled down or you BLEED like me. Guess I should have gone to FC9 first... 

FC 10!

So a while ago, I upgraded my laptop from FC8 to FC10. It was a pretty simple process because the upgrade operation identified my existing FC8 partition and smoothly upgraded in roughly an hour and 30 minutes without asking for too much. Simple, nice and easy I say. Anyways, here are some reasons why you should upgrade to FC 10 (or this is what Redhat claims to be the reasons):

#1. Speeding Up the Boot Process
#2. The Excellent Solar Theme
#3. Making Printing Snappy – and Attractive
#4. Better Webcam Support
#5. Improved Virtualization
#6. Live image creation tools
#7. Global community efforts
#8. PackageKit (user-friendly yum!)

Read more details about the above and some more here. And let me close this entry with this quote that I read somewhere today :)

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect. (Linus Torvalds)"

Search Recursion

Something funny happened today. All of us google - ummm to search. Even I was doing it. I was trying to use the "screen" utility on my test machine, so that I could start my test and log out and get back later to it. When I gave the "screen -r" command to reattach, I got the following error:

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check.

Some permission issue I guessed, so I thought I will search for the solution by googling. I searched by entering keywords like "screen, terminal, cannot, open" etc. etc. and clicked on the second link that came in (As as aside, which search link do you open from the search results? Should do a poll I guess :)).

I got on to that specific page and instead of getting the answer I get the following blurb:

"This is a common problem. Googling will help here"

Hmmm, scratch-scratch, I just googled didn't I? But I think instead of giving out solutions, people have actually started to say "google out and get it" nowadays. Will there come a day when all results we get be like the one above :P

Btw, a simple chmodding of the pts entry seems to help here for non-root users above..

Batch Image Resize on Linux

Isn't it the same case always. You go out on a trip somewhere. You become trigger happy and click loads of pictures. You come back and want to share it with friends and need to upload them to either picassa or flickr. Now typically if you use a 6 plus MPixel camera, the pictures generally come out to around 1.7MB in size. Uploading a lot of such pictures is a big pain.

I recently discovered the convert utility on Linux. Using it is pretty simple. Here is a small script that I use to batch resize my pictures before uploading them:

for file in *.JPG;
do echo "Resizing file $file ...";
convert -resize 640x480 $file $file ;
done

Check out some pics (Portland visit for RailsConf) that were uploaded after the conversion above here.

iPhoney!!

Hmmm, if you go to techcrunch, the last 15-20 posts have been about iPhone. The hype, the apps, the wait and the likes. Seems to be some sort of a frenzy out there in the US for the next 3G phone from Apple. I even watched the somewhat funny video at this posting for waiting in line for 5 plus hours without any results.

I was trying to compare this with whats happening back in India. Vodafone did some adverts about launching the iPhone in India and I did contemplate for a second or two about sending them an sms about wanting to be one of the early users. But thats about it, I guess. I think people in America tend to have this ME FIRST mindset a lot. Long lines for the Wii, new star trek movies. Camping out for some new game launch etc. etc. I guess South Indian movie fans do this ;), but generally I do not find such fanatical single mindedness happening for such kind of stuff around in India.

Guess most Indians have more pertinent things to think about..

Fancy this Jam?

Hmm, some people say Google has the potential to be the new evil post M$. But you got to admit, there are some things which they do pretty well. Amongst that list, is the Google Code Jam. I participated in it once 3-4 years back. I would say it is kinda favored to those who are used to heavy API based C++, Java programming. More so for string manipulation based programming. For me, who has been mostly doing do-everything-yourself C language coding, it gets a bit (not very though and this is not to discourage C coders at all!) tough timewise. But nonetheless its a pretty interesting activity to participate in. Click here for this years details. Happy Code Jamming!