It's end of July; Half the year is gone. I just looked at my blog and realized, I have only posted on one single day for this entire year so far! (3 articles on the same day). I am a software engineer passionate about computers and technology; Lots of technology related ideas and thoughts cross my mind on a daily basis. Why then is my blog so empty? I do know that I have the craving to blog them.. but it just doesn't happen. Why?
I badly needed to figure out the reasons and try to overcome them.
My first problem is that it takes quite a lot of effort for me to organize all the different points I have in mind into a meaningful flow of thoughts. This exhausts me halfway down an article which I then end up scrapping off. Worse, this creates friction for starting a new article next time.
My second problem is the "writers block", caused by the exact reasons as mentioned by William Stafford:
"I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance ...one should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing . . . . I can imagine a person beginning to feel he's not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now...You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it."
(William Stafford)
My final problem is lack of time. This, in reality, should not be a problem since however busy I may be, I'm sure I should be able to find 15-30 minutes a week to blog my ideas on technology.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Windows 7: First Impressions
Today I tried the latest Windows 7 beta on my old Athlon XP 3000+ (1GB RAM) desktop, and I have to say it was a very pleasant experience. I hated Vista so much and never did anything more than install and evaluate it for a while; but Windows 7 was much much better.
Installation was quick (~25 mins), and the system was up and running in less than 45 mins. The OS felt very responsive and fast and it was taking only about 500mb of my RAM which was pretty good.. Boot speed, login speed and shutdown speeds were all good. IE 8 beta felt very slugish compared to Chrome and Firefox, but everything else was nice and fast.
However I did have several issue with it. My XP partition was missing in Windows Explorer, but got it sorted soon. My SoundMAX onboard sound is still not working. I'm still struggling to get the disk shared so that I can access it from my Ubuntu laptop, but I think I'll figure that soon too.
In conclusion, MS seem to have nailed it this time. They have managed to make a good looking, but (relatively) light weight OS with good performance, that will appeal to a lot of people.
Installation was quick (~25 mins), and the system was up and running in less than 45 mins. The OS felt very responsive and fast and it was taking only about 500mb of my RAM which was pretty good.. Boot speed, login speed and shutdown speeds were all good. IE 8 beta felt very slugish compared to Chrome and Firefox, but everything else was nice and fast.
However I did have several issue with it. My XP partition was missing in Windows Explorer, but got it sorted soon. My SoundMAX onboard sound is still not working. I'm still struggling to get the disk shared so that I can access it from my Ubuntu laptop, but I think I'll figure that soon too.
In conclusion, MS seem to have nailed it this time. They have managed to make a good looking, but (relatively) light weight OS with good performance, that will appeal to a lot of people.
Windows 7: How to edit the boot menu
There's no built in tool in Windows 7 to change the boot menu. However if you need to change the default boot OS to be XP instead of windows 7 or you need to change that ugly "Earlier operating system" line to a nice "Windows XP", or any other boot menu related task, you can use a small free tool called EasyBCD.
IMPORTANT:
If you need to rename the "Earlier.." to "Windows XP" or something, first make sure the XP partition is visible in Windows Explorer. If not follow the instructions in How to add the missing XP partition, and then do any changes.
(When I installed Windows 7, I had my XP in the boot menu but it was not visible in Windows Explorer; using EasyBCD then made my XP not bootable. Adding the partition to exporer and then running EasyBCD fixed the issue).
IMPORTANT:
If you need to rename the "Earlier.." to "Windows XP" or something, first make sure the XP partition is visible in Windows Explorer. If not follow the instructions in How to add the missing XP partition, and then do any changes.
(When I installed Windows 7, I had my XP in the boot menu but it was not visible in Windows Explorer; using EasyBCD then made my XP not bootable. Adding the partition to exporer and then running EasyBCD fixed the issue).
Windows 7: How to add back the missing XP partition
If you find that your Windows XP partition is not shown in Windows 7 (beta), you can add it as follows:
* search for "computer management" in the program search box and launch it.
(or via Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Computer Management)
* under Storage> Disk Management you should be able to see the missing XP partition (without a drive letter)
* now right click> "Change Drive Letter and Paths", and specify a drive letter.
now you should be able to see the XP partition in Windows Explorer.
* search for "computer management" in the program search box and launch it.
(or via Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Computer Management)
* under Storage> Disk Management you should be able to see the missing XP partition (without a drive letter)
* now right click> "Change Drive Letter and Paths", and specify a drive letter.
now you should be able to see the XP partition in Windows Explorer.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
A quick look at Google Chrome browser
Today morning I downloaded the chrome browser for windows and gave it a quick spin. Since I run linux, I had to try it in a virtual machine - VirtualBox running Windows XP.
It was a small download in two parts: First the installer, which then downloads the actual application. Installation was smooth and fast. I was up and running in 5 mins.
The very first impression on looks - Wow!. very sleek, clean, and simple. Minimum space taken for the frame and other non-viewing areas. I really liked it. +1 for the looks.
Next I tried the address bar to see if it was as good as firefox's "awesome bar".
Nop, not that good. I tried training it for gmail, which I use a lot. In firefox, aftergoing to gmail about 2,3 times, it 'learns' the page, and next time when I start typing 'gmail', the first entry in the dropdown is the gmail url. But in chrome, it's always the third entry. The first entry is always 'search for gmail'. Takes more key presses for me to select the url. Not very smart. -1 for the address bar.
Next I tried facebook, to test the 'super fast' V8 javascript engine. Chrome claims it to be very advanced, very fast and very responsive.
So I went to facebook, and tried to view an image. Chrome just froze for about 4 seconds taking 99% CPU!!.
However Chrome was specially designed to handle this kind of scenarios where a page misbehaves, and has a built-in 'Task Manager' where we can see which page is misbahaving and kill it. So I tried it. Alas! It wasn't a specific page but 'chrome' itself that was misbehaving and taking 99% CPU; and it couldn't be killed from chromes task manager. Chrome simply failed at one of it's primary goals!. Anyway what was chrome doing taking 99 CPU? maybe it was doing some advanced calculus to figure out the most optimum path to be 'super responsive'!. -9 for overall performance.
(maybe this had something to do with me running it in a VM; but I don't see how)
Next, the 'Most Visited Pages' available on a new tab. Very much like Opera's speed dial. Not a feature I really liked, but it was ok. However it had this glitch where it would show me gmail twice; Not very smart.
I'll wait for the linux version of chrome, and try it out. I really hope google irons out the theses wrinckles before they do.
It was a small download in two parts: First the installer, which then downloads the actual application. Installation was smooth and fast. I was up and running in 5 mins.
The very first impression on looks - Wow!. very sleek, clean, and simple. Minimum space taken for the frame and other non-viewing areas. I really liked it. +1 for the looks.
Next I tried the address bar to see if it was as good as firefox's "awesome bar".
Nop, not that good. I tried training it for gmail, which I use a lot. In firefox, aftergoing to gmail about 2,3 times, it 'learns' the page, and next time when I start typing 'gmail', the first entry in the dropdown is the gmail url. But in chrome, it's always the third entry. The first entry is always 'search for gmail'. Takes more key presses for me to select the url. Not very smart. -1 for the address bar.
Next I tried facebook, to test the 'super fast' V8 javascript engine. Chrome claims it to be very advanced, very fast and very responsive.
So I went to facebook, and tried to view an image. Chrome just froze for about 4 seconds taking 99% CPU!!.
However Chrome was specially designed to handle this kind of scenarios where a page misbehaves, and has a built-in 'Task Manager' where we can see which page is misbahaving and kill it. So I tried it. Alas! It wasn't a specific page but 'chrome' itself that was misbehaving and taking 99% CPU; and it couldn't be killed from chromes task manager. Chrome simply failed at one of it's primary goals!. Anyway what was chrome doing taking 99 CPU? maybe it was doing some advanced calculus to figure out the most optimum path to be 'super responsive'!. -9 for overall performance.
(maybe this had something to do with me running it in a VM; but I don't see how)
Next, the 'Most Visited Pages' available on a new tab. Very much like Opera's speed dial. Not a feature I really liked, but it was ok. However it had this glitch where it would show me gmail twice; Not very smart.
I'll wait for the linux version of chrome, and try it out. I really hope google irons out the theses wrinckles before they do.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Trying OpenSolaris 2008.05
I needed to do some performance analysis on some applications for my MSc project. So I wanted to try the latest SunStudio12 with D-Trace. I downloaded the OpenSolaris 2008.05 image, burned on disk and tried to install on my Athlon64 3000+.
Unfortunately I couldn't even get to the first screen of the installation. OpenSolaris just failed on me giving some weired errors. After doing a lot of googling, I figured that OpenSolaris just couldn't work on my SATA drive!
I have installed XP, Vista, Fedora, and Ubuntu on this machine without any hickups and OpenSolaris was the first modern OS to fail on it!.
Next I tried to install it on my laptop but alas! it couldn't recognize logical partitions on an extended partition. So much for OpenSolaris.
I have to get this done somehow, so my next attempt will be to borrow an old IDE disk from a friend and try again. I'm sure there'll still be 101 problems before I actually see the first performance graph on SunStudio.
Unfortunately I couldn't even get to the first screen of the installation. OpenSolaris just failed on me giving some weired errors. After doing a lot of googling, I figured that OpenSolaris just couldn't work on my SATA drive!
I have installed XP, Vista, Fedora, and Ubuntu on this machine without any hickups and OpenSolaris was the first modern OS to fail on it!.
Next I tried to install it on my laptop but alas! it couldn't recognize logical partitions on an extended partition. So much for OpenSolaris.
I have to get this done somehow, so my next attempt will be to borrow an old IDE disk from a friend and try again. I'm sure there'll still be 101 problems before I actually see the first performance graph on SunStudio.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
getting ADSL USB modem working on Ubuntu Linux
Here are the steps I took to get my ADSL USB modem to work on Ubuntu.
Details:
Country = Sri Lanka (ISP = SLT; uses PPPoE)
Modem = Aztech ADSL USB Modem (DSL206U) (chipset = ADI Eagle II)
OS = Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy)
Steps:
* first have a terminal open and tail the syslog. (to see whats going on)
$ tail -f /var/log/syslog
* using synaptic package manager install br2684ctl (required since my ISP uses PPPoE)
(search for br2684)
* find and download the firmware for the modem chipset (Eagle-II in my case)
--- deprecated; use the .deb below instead ---
(firmware => ueagle-data-1.1.tar.gz)
(http://eagle-usb.org/ueagle-atm/non-free/ueagle-data-1.1.tar.gz )
* install firmware:
$ tar -xvzf ueagle-data-1.1.tar.gz
$ sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/ueagle-atm
$ cd ueagle-data-1.1/
$ sudo cp -a * /lib/firmware/ueagle-atm
--- update(17-Nov-08) ---:
Now there's a .deb which can be directly installed.
http://eagle-usb.org/ueagle-atm/non-free/ueagle-data_1.1-2_all.deb
* plug-in the modem; check if the firmware loads (in the syslog tail output).
* edit the connection file:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/ueagle-atm
type in the following:
user "myusername"
password "mypassword"
plugin rp-pppoe.so
nas0
noipdefault
usepeerdns
defaultroute
persist
noauth
* edit chap:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets
add this line:
myusername * mypassword *
* edit pap:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
add this line (same as for chap):
myusername * mypassword *
* now create dial script to dial the modem.
$ gedit dialSLT
type in the following:
#!/bin/bash
sudo modprobe ppp_generic
sudo modprobe pppoatm
sudo modprobe br2684
sudo br2684ctl -b -c 0 -a 8.35
sleep 3
sudo ifconfig nas0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
sleep 5
sudo pon ueagle-atm
* set exec permisions for the dial script and we're done!
$ chmod u+x dialSLT
* now to dial the modem just type:
$ ./dialSLT
// -----------------------------------------
important:
* in case the connection drops, do the following before redialing:
$ sudo poff ueagle-atm
$ sudo ifconfig nas0 down
$ sudo killall br2684ctl
Details:
Country = Sri Lanka (ISP = SLT; uses PPPoE)
Modem = Aztech ADSL USB Modem (DSL206U) (chipset = ADI Eagle II)
OS = Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy)
Steps:
* first have a terminal open and tail the syslog. (to see whats going on)
$ tail -f /var/log/syslog
* using synaptic package manager install br2684ctl (required since my ISP uses PPPoE)
(search for br2684)
* find and download the firmware for the modem chipset (Eagle-II in my case)
--- deprecated; use the .deb below instead ---
(firmware => ueagle-data-1.1.tar.gz)
(http://eagle-usb.org/ueagle
* install firmware:
$ tar -xvzf ueagle-data-1.1.tar.gz
$ sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/ueagle-atm
$ cd ueagle-data-1.1/
$ sudo cp -a * /lib/firmware/ueagle-atm
--- update(17-Nov-08) ---:
Now there's a .deb which can be directly installed.
http://eagle-usb.org/ueagle-
* plug-in the modem; check if the firmware loads (in the syslog tail output).
* edit the connection file:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/ueagle-atm
type in the following:
user "myusername"
password "mypassword"
plugin rp-pppoe.so
nas0
noipdefault
usepeerdns
defaultroute
persist
noauth
* edit chap:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets
add this line:
myusername * mypassword *
* edit pap:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
add this line (same as for chap):
myusername * mypassword *
* now create dial script to dial the modem.
$ gedit dialSLT
type in the following:
#!/bin/bash
sudo modprobe ppp_generic
sudo modprobe pppoatm
sudo modprobe br2684
sudo br2684ctl -b -c 0 -a 8.35
sleep 3
sudo ifconfig nas0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
sleep 5
sudo pon ueagle-atm
* set exec permisions for the dial script and we're done!
$ chmod u+x dialSLT
* now to dial the modem just type:
$ ./dialSLT
// -----------------------------------------
important:
* in case the connection drops, do the following before redialing:
$ sudo poff ueagle-atm
$ sudo ifconfig nas0 down
$ sudo killall br2684ctl
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)