Don't let the SUN go down on MySQL

There is a posting on /. about Sun deciding to close source some parts of MySQL. Hmmm, after paying 1 Billion Dollars in cold hard cash, its expected that Sun will try out some experiments to try and generate a revenue stream. But guess this will rub existing free users off the wrong way atleast initially as a knee-jerk reaction. Guess it will be good for PostgreSQL though :).

But to be fair, its good to see Marten Mickos (previously CEO of MySQL and now SVP at Sun) try and put out reasons for this latest move. All in all, this bodes well for my favourite DB - PostgreSQL :)

Note: The views expressed above are entirely my own personal views.

USb and ME

I have a 42" LCD television which has a USB input to it. It has a pretty decent USB media player, so I can just plug in a USB device and watch images, movies and listen to music too from the same. I think its pretty neat and cool to have this feature in my LCD, much better than a clunky DVD player any day. But my current 80GB external USB hard drive is rapidly running out of space and I have to upgrade it.

But the problem is with the current state-of-the-art, 200 GB plus external drives require an external AC power source too. So its still plug and play, but with an additional plug in for the power source. I have narrowed down on a MAXTOR 500 GB external drive for about 120 odd US dollars (4740 INR). I think it is a pretty decent deal. Anyone got better suggestions? Are external power source less drives coming up on the horizon? Let know!

IndiZeitGeist

ZeitGeist is originally a German Expression that means "time spirit" or in other words the spirit of the current times or age. Google captures the online version of it by tracking the most oftly used search phrases. It thus reflects the current online mood or the pulse of the online world.

I thought to seek out what is on the minds of more and more Indians who are getting online and hence was looking around for Google India ZeitGeist. Sadly they don't seem to have country specific ZeitGeists (you listening Google?), but it seems they recently compiled and released a list specifically for India. Here it is. Seems like Orkut, Deepika Padukone, Sania Mirza, Mahatma Gandhi (yes he is on the list!) are the flavor of the times :)

FC8 and PulseAudio woes

So, I got a new laptop (Lenovo R61i) some time back and decided to install FC8 on it. Linux installations are a breeze nowadays, but still some wrinkles remain post-installation. My current woe is to get PulseAudio working seamlessly across all of my regular applications viz. mplayer, kde, flash websites etc.

First of all, it seems PulseAudio was not designed with KDE in mind, but thankfully this can be resolved by doing a:
"yum install kde-settings-pulseaudio"

This got mplayer working, but was still not able to get the audio working from flash based sites like youtube. I tried the usual remove, reinstall, sometimes-reboot trick but couldn't get audio working at all much to my chagrin.
Eventually, I got it to work by adding my current user login to proper groups (via Administration->Users And Groups). I added my current user "nikhils" to Avahi, Pulse, Pulse-* groups in the properties section.

The audio works fine via flash or mplayer for some time, but regularly comes back with an intermittent error like:
[AO OSS] audio_setup: Can't open audio device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused

Looks like this will need more time and tinkering. Will post back with my solution whenever I get it.

Google Reader at Cross Purposes with Google Adsense

Only recently I discovered about Google Reader. Like all things Google, the Reader is easy to use and nicely aggregates all your favorite websites, blogs and rss feeds under one location. Any updates to any of these sites are updated automatically, so you no longer have to wait and wonder about whether your favorite site or blogger has added some latest content or not. Here is my shared reader links.

My first thought was great - now I don't even need to keep my firefox tabs open all the time. But then I was like wait a minute! I wondered if this is actually good news for people who have Google Adsense on their websites. If a lot of subscribers just check out their Reader feeds and decide not to visit your homepage what do you do? Is Google Reader actually in some ways at cross-purposes with Google Adsense which would thrive on people visiting lots of sites and clicking through google ads eventually?

Ahem!

Ok, so a while back I bravely took the step forward to start off my own personal blog here. I am doing ok there, adding my personal raves and rants. But a while back I wanted to post something technical (don't be surprised, I pretend to be technical once in a while :)) and that did not seem like a good place. So here I am at my new tech blog in all technikkhils - err technicolor :)