Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Kuchh Baat Hai Ke Hasti Mit’ti Nahin Hamari

Yunan-o-Misr-o-Roma Sab Mit Gaye Jahan Se
Ab Tak Magar Hai Baki Naam-o-Nishan Hamara
Kuchh Baat Hai Ke Hasti Mit’ti Nahin Hamari
Sadiyon Raha Hai Dushman Daur-e-Zaman Hamara.
- Allama Iqbal

Saluting 150 years of First Great Indian Revolution in May 1857. I went through so many articles and so manythings.

Actually I feel that British did a good things to us - they united us, they made us stand like one country, till 1857 it was struggle to get free from them but individually, finally we made it after 90 years in 1947.

I salute all the martyrs. What all pain they have gone through to get the freedom and what all things they did! the sacrifice. If they would have not done that we would have not been here and taking breath in Free India.

BBCHindi has very good coverage on the whole subject.

Same goes with out existing Army! they are there thats why we are good. And what do we for country? we do not do any good for country.. I wasted my 30 years and so did others, we encourage corruption because we end up paying less, we encourage bribe because we want our work to get done illegaly and fast, we do not want to stand in queues and pay more money for that.. what will happen to those who can not pay? we are cheating them! we are cheating everyone! STOP, even if we try to fight it, its big thing now.. I really do not know what to do and what should we do?

Read this if you can -> Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Backups with LVM

Some time back I came across this link -> apps that make linux users powerful! « Jag! and came to know about many applications which exists for Linux but we do not know about them.

Why do we not know about them, its just only one reason, because we do not pay enough attention. But some one is doing it.

Recently we came across a problem that we had to take backup of Linux Open files. Our current solution could not take backup just because we purchase stupid software without thinking about it. I was not INVOLVED in that decision, but some how now I have manage that.

Next upgrade of backup software, which can take open files backup was $90K away. And I was NO way interested in purchasing that. We came up with an idea of using Linux snapshots, but since our systems were RHEL 3.0 Kernel 2.4, Linux snap shot was not an easy go. We came up with an error of not able to allocate memory while creating snapshot logical volume.

So error was lvcreate -- ERROR "Cannot allocate memory" creating VGDA and any time I search for something on Google I am point to this mail thread with no answers from any one. All forums would point to it and some suggested to upgrade to LVM2 with Kernel 2.6, which was not the answer I was looking for. I had to fix this some how!

I got hold of some patches, started looking through code, patching and booting kernel did not get me any where! the error was causing because of himem allocation error or something like that. While going through plain C code for like 9 hours, I found the solution but on the same time I realized that I can pass it to kernel as mem boot option. But I changed the code compiled the kernel, increased the default memory! And voila it worked, but this was not manageable, because everytime kernel sources gets updated I need to recompile the kernel, I tried to pass this as boot option (mem=4000m) and it worked again.

So to fix this error, most probably you need to add this boot option in grub.conf and you are most probably sorted. (fingers crossed)

So after that it was just so smooth to do backups with LVM Snapshot!

I really do not know, why people are still afraid of using Linux?

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Open Solaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu

I have been thinking about these three Operating systems, I know very good committers from these three communities who can go in-depth about praising their operating system.

So I am writing something similar to network sniffer. When I talked to three gurus seperately they told me how to take advantage of their system and not the other ones. Now I am totally confused with what to use.

I do not have patience or time to checkout which network stack is more mature.. I think I will just start with Linux, apparently Linux has bigger community with network stack but immature network stack. Really do not know what to do..

Updates in few more days! I need to choose one of these three.. btw I was almost chose RTLinux or Ubuntu.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Ubuntu.... more tweaks

So... after I installed ubuntu, I had only two issues - I did not like anti-aliasing, and it was not rendering text properly for hindi website.

Basically, I was kind of pissed, but it was okay, because I was still able to do many more things compared to what I was able to do in Windows. I finally fixed Hindi rendering issue by installing complex language support and tweaked anti-aliasing settings, inside font dialogue.

Btw - Bit stream fonts are better rendered compared to default sans font and if you change anti-aliasing settings (goto fonts -> details) then you get better results compared to earlier results. Now things are much better.

So one more thing ubuntu should do is to ask - do you have LCD/TFT/CRT monitor and should adjust anti-aliasing by default.

more comfortable reading...

Friday, April 27, 2007

Finally ubuntu

1 year back, I moved to FreeBSD. I was not that hardcore programmer/user as I should be. People may argue that FreeBSD is really cool (as I said in that post) and sometimes it was really really cool. But on the other hand most of the time I had to run programs in Linux Compatibility mode, which was okay! but soon I started hitting road where, I had steep learning curve.

Which kind of forced me to get down to one thing.. think! I did not want to go vista way, I wanted windows only for prorgamming C# or Microsoft specific stuff and nothing more than that. We were already doing lots of stuff on platform independent languages, eg - ruby and java.

So basically, either I can use power of *nix without ease or get into useless world of Windows (which still earns me money). I got some what in between with ubuntu.

here are few things which worked out of box. I have dell d620

  • detected everything on my laptop
  • I copied my notes directory to Linux and ran "wine notes.exe" I got one glitch that it could not find the e:\ directory, I mappy notes directory to e:\ using winecfg
  • I connected to my VPN using vpnc instead of Cisco Secure VPN client, some how I could not get feisty fawn and Cisco Secure VPN client live together.
  • Wireless worked out of the box
  • It detects and mounts my USB drive automatically.
  • VirtualBox does virtualization for me.

Till now I am pretty happy with what I have! what all I can think of, I have it enabled.. the only thing - which I am not very sad about is - that my Hindi Font rendering does not work. So I can not read http://bbc.co.uk/hindi website properly! and I miss Dainik Jagran a lot.

Kudos to Ubuntu! Just bit more eyecandy! I do not know what I am missing, but it needs to beautiful also, although this is the most amazing experience of Linux! it just works out of box!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

JNDI and Active Directory

So, I wrote Active Directory Self Servicing application for my company. My good collegue (Barrow) always insisted that I should write in Java using jLDAP, but I always thought that its good to have MS Technology to access Microsoft Active Directory.

Things went perfectly fine and I enjoyed writing application in ASP.NET 2.0 with C#. But my good collegue still did not want to use it, just because we have to manage one app in .NET and rest all apps in Java. He insisted on porting this App to Java.

I tried to use Novell jLDAP, but that did not work at all for functions like reset password for user and getting multivalue attributes. I might be wrong, but at least I did not find any examples for that.

So finally we came across forums as http://forums.java.sun.com and started looking at JNDI examples. I have completed the rewrite of the app. (It was not port). But I faced lots of issues to write things in plain JSP compared to plain ASP. I must accept that Microsoft Visual Studio.NET + ASP.NET 2.0 is kind of much more advanced compared to plain JSP. But when I look at JSP, and I started wondering that Sun wrote this technology at least 6 years ago and MS is still catching up on that.

Finally today, I have two versions on Same app on is on C# and another is on Java. A good satisfying experience.

Thank you Barrow!

Monday, February 12, 2007

chickens!

If I look back 20 years in my life, I have 5 people.. who some how some day stopped talking to me and never revealed the cause. So what did I do? I talked to few people who were our common friend and tried to figure out what happened actually? But that all went in to vein and It was much of waste of effort. But today.. I am angry with these idiots.. because if they would have told me why they are not talking to me then I would have been very happy and would have stopped thinking about them.

Lets step back.... so while cooking food (I had daal, roti and mango pickle), this combination some how reminded of my best childhood friend - Vivek Dwivedi, Vivek and I use to be together almost 75% of day time. From 1st Standard to 9th Standard, suddenly one day, he stopped talking.. and then he did not talk to me for next 5 years. (that was too much for friendship to go away, it bothered me a lot of those 5 years) I kept continuing going to his place and he will not talk. It was awkward that his parents would call me and I would go there but this guy would not talk to me. Last year I went to my hometown for 2 days, and I was walking with my nephews (Amey and Himanshu) and suddenly I see Vivek walking towards me on Road. I saw him, he waived hand, I was so pissed.. and then he came talked to me. I asked him.. so tell me why are you not talking to me since last 18 years! and he did not have answer. And I told him - that if you can not tell me then please do not bother me after 18 years and I just left him there.

Second person was my collegue at work - We were friends, use to do so many things together - and our company let him go... and he stopped talking to me. I never got to know why did he do that. Some how after thinking about Vivek - I am bit relieved about him too.

Third person - She was very good friend of mine, 12 years ago I met her in Allahabad, we were very good friends. And one day - she calls and tells me that she won't talk to me, and I asked her why, she gave me most confusing answer - ask yourself. If I knew that why she won't talk to me why would I ask her? Then she never talked to me again - But yesterday I got a mail from her after 10 years. And I asked same question, and she said that its too late for the answer. She told me that she will tell me some day, when she will feel okay. (she is still counted as half chicken)

Fourth and Fifth - These are my good friends, I know them since long, they knew me through some friends even before they met me. These two have the similar characteristics, they arey trying to ignore.. which is OKAY! but I would love to hear from them why would they ignore me.

So.. why did I think about it today? Because its stupid chicago weather and I can not go out! and Literally I do not have any work. But anyway.

I think that people think differently, some people are not open and I have strange experiences that people talk some thing bad about some one, and those two are really good friends, I have one of my collegue, who I think was one of the reasons for something bad for other collegue, but it seemed that they both were good friends.

I keep thinking about myself, I have huge feeling that people get irritated with me and they do not tell me! But I really do not know how to deal with this... may be the best idea is to leave everyone on their own and go on your own!

Most probably, I am chicken too because I have not revealed some names, I think I will do that soon.. but at least I am not chicken to tell some one that I do not want to talk to you because of these reasons.