Pic of the Month - Apr

This time as i was wondering what should i put up as the pic of the Month....DNA helped me...










With this statement " noted kannada actor", they have put Ms. Kotwal in a identity crisis. Maybe Jennifer is as unlucky as i was in this case....

Dare to Copy?

In one of our all employee meets, also called "Townhall" meetings for reasons oblivious to me , Our top brass discussed about piracy of almost anything in China. He specifically was mentioning the blatant copying of vehicles designs by Chinese vehicle manufacturers. These vehicles definitely cannot match the quality of their original counterparts but in some cases come close in terms of looks and appeal. They are much cheaper because a lot less is spent on RnD of the vehicle. Most of the things are just copied verbatim without too much indepth understanding of the underlying systems. However, I can proudly tell that there is one car which the chinese cannot dare to copy. That is because the car is already the cheapest. If anyone can make it any cheaper then it would be a miracle.

Yeah, I am talking about the Tata Nano. The Nano which is offered in three variants will cost less than the cheapest car in India ( i.e. Maruthi 800) for the Lx version which is equipped with power windows, AC and body colored bumpers. I had never believed that Tata would really pull this one off but as a matter of fact the Tata's have done it. So have the Tatas done a Chinese act....or will the car really deliver to the Indian needs....Only time will tell....

Mantriji was once heard quoting on the issue of plagiarism

"If you copy from one person then we call it plagiarism, if you copy from many then it is research"

Why should we Ubuntu

The say Love is blind.....And i am in love with Ubuntu....so maybe that is why this post.

So what are the reasons one should start using Ubuntu..

• It is free and for once i can do a hell lot of things using a completely legal system
• There is almost every software equivalent in Ubuntu for the software's present in Windows.
• If you do not mess-up with installations and do not posses extremely non-standard hardware then there is nothing to worry about. Ubuntu works like a breeze.
• If you do mess up anything there are a lot of ways by which you can restore back your system, You got a live CD and with an internet connection you can fix almost anything.
• It comes PRE-INSTALLED ( in windows terminology) with everything needed for web-browsing, chatting, listening to music, file unzipper, dvd-writing software, chat-client etc etc. Note that some of these are not available pre installed in windows ( ex. a office suite!!)
  

And finally if you do not want to give up windows applications, there is something called WINE. This can run your windows applications on Ubuntu as well.

Why not other disto's of tux? Ok i do not have a very technical answer to that. However, Ubuntu live cd was the first thing that really made me confident that i too can probably own an LINUX system. I know that even today LINUX is considered exclusively designed for geeks. I am sure the people will change their view if they have a look at UBUNTU.

Infact, a lot of organisations ( colleages, cyber-cafes) are moving over to open-souce OSes. I hope the trend continues....





 

Slow paced Indian Law

Funny but true. This article from DNA shows the extremely nonsensical nature of how law works in India. I am not a lawyer, but i do understand that that it does not show any common sense to drag a trivial case ( Which according to me doesn't make much sense) for almost a decade.

How, can the actors do anything if people gather around to see them. If that were the case, I would blame every political party that holds a rally for my delay in returning back home due to clogged roads.  Anyway, I know that if i file a petition today, by the time the judge decides upon something it would be 2020 ( if i am lucky).

Jokes apart, what this brings into light is the fact that our judiciary functions at snail pace. This often leads to justice being "so" delayed that it loses its meaning. Hope we realise this issue which is some day going to blow into such proportions that it would make asking for justice a stupid joke.

Bal Bal back gaye

"Thank god" , I gasped after i read this item on bbc website. Had the ban gone through, we would have had a new fashion of showing off body hair :-o. "Bal bal bach gaye", if i were to put it in Hindi.

Nano is coming.....-

This article in rediff triggered my thinking to the extremes of getting me write this post.

The TATA nano is really going to bring some changes in the perception of the four-wheeler in India. The Four-Wheeler in India for a long time has been something that shows a person's economic status. It reminds me of something that had happened about 8-10 years back, when Reliance changed the way the we lookup at mobile phones. Almost everyone had a mobile and it no more remained a status symbol.

There are many different perceptions as to what will happen after Nano is launched....Some of them are here.

>> It will be a common mans car and people will discard their bikes and think about owning a four-wheeler
>> Auto- Rickshaws will transform into a TATA Nano.
>> A lot of new business avenues and new business models will emerge.

What i see is something which is perhaps at the back of everyone's mind but no one wants to accept it.

1. More bigger vehicles on our roads will only add to the crowd on the streets. Already there are sufficient traffic jams in Bangalore.
2. More pollution and added burden on fuel supplies.

Does that mean i am against Nano...Definitely not. However, i feel growth should always be controlled and well governed. So what are my views on this

1. Let Nano be introduced in towns against Auto-Rickshaws, but provide ensure that the 3-wheelers are either pushed to village area's or remote area's where there is no service. Allowing Nano and the 3-wheeler would definitly choke our roads.
2. Control registration of cheaper vehicles so that we do not proliferate them. This doesn't mean that a comman man cannot own a Nano. It only means that it will take more time maybe.
   
3. Ban 3-Wheelers in places where Nano Taxis are allowed and visa-versa.
4. Have very strict pollution control norms for all kinds of public vehicle. This is because they spend more time on the road than personal vehicles. 

Well I am sure in this recession when everyone is thinking about conserving cash, People will blindly put their money on this car!!

Mozilla shared b/w Windows and Ubuntu

I like Ubuntu as i have already stated in my earlier posts. However, I am not a Linux geek and I am quite dependent on Windows for everything which is more difficult than 2+2.

However, a fast internet connection and loads of info available on the internet is making my life easier on my attempt to go the open-source way.

Recently, I wanted to import all my settings for Mozilla including plugins, bookmarks etc from Windows partition to Ubuntu. This is how a achieved it.

Step 1. Create a symbolic link from Ubuntu partition to the windows partition where the Mozilla settings exist.
In windows it exists in the following path by default c:/Documents and Settings/{USER_PROFILE}/Application Data/Mozilla where USER_PROFILE is your profile name.
In Ubuntu it exists in the following path /home/{USER_PROFILE}/.mozilla

To create a symlink use the following command
ln -s /media/WinHome/Documents and Settings/USER_PROFILE/Application Data/Mozilla" /home/deepak/.mozilla
Step 2. This happens typically because in Linux folder names are case sensitive. i.e home is not same as Home. So you will have to rename the folders in the .mozilla link to all lower case. i.e extensions and firefox. That's it, Just close the firefox browser and reopen it. You should be able to see all your plugins enabled and the bookmarks loaded properly. Ubuntu Rocks :-)

Lotus Notes - Creating an Agent

Personally I hate lotus notes. But then again, i do not like to live without tinkering with stuff to supposedly automate things. Hence, recently i tried to do something which i had done earlier with OUTLOOK

This is basically an automation which will keep changing the quote in your email. So each time i send an email a new quote gets attached to it. The logic is pretty much simple. Here are the steps that i followed to do this in lotus.

1. First create a list of quotes; that is the basic ingredient
2. Create A html file with the quote place in the appropriate place. Like in my case the quote appears in bold at the end of the email signature in the email.
3. Third, add this signature to your email. This can be easily done by just going to preferences, and selected the appropriate HTML file as you
4. Now starts the real fun. Create a new "Agent". As per lotus notes help, agents are the means by which we can automate small time tasks. We shall use this to do our signature_upadater as i call it.
5. Give the agent a name and then select private.Note that in Lotus the menu keeps changing based on what you are looking at. So to be able to get the create menu you should have your inbox opened.Next what you need to do is write some code.
6. I have a schedule based signal changer.My agent runs every 1 hour and updates the signature. This means every hour I have a new quote in the signature.
7. You can start with a few declarations like i have here. I assign values to these globals in the init routine.

Dim G_fileNum As Integer Dim C_filePath As String Dim C_signatureFilePath As String Dim C_maxFileLines As Integer

7. Now the idea is that every time the agent runs it will go an update the html file, so that next time you read a memo is
created it will automatically have a new quote. To do this i have created a function that look like this

This function searches a random quote ( i call it quips) from the file whose name is stored in C_FilePath and returns it.
I am a lousy coder...so i have got this to run...but i am sure there are a 100 better ways of doing this.


8. The GetQuip function is invoked from the main routine. It updates the HTML. Since, this is also similar to the previous code, i will not bore you by posting it.


At the end make sure that you choose where this agent runs. I have chosen it to run on local so that it is not really all that slow. I am not sure if i can get it running on server due to security polices and also because this is not a shared agent. Thus, I have been successfully replicated the behavior i used to get from Outlook with my signature changer macro :-).

The intention of this post was to just bring awareness about agents and what they can do for you, especially if lotus is killing you :-) ( Like it is doing me!!)