Experiments with Technology

Each day, I get up, get ready and leave to the office with my ~5 kg laptop bag. This is the drill and I am not unique in this. Every time, when I pick up my bag I wonder to myself why I am carrying this? The biggest reason is, of course, the laptop. And then we have the charger, accessories,  diary and  a book perhaps, adding to the overall weight. While, book, diary etc. are all personal preferences for carry-ons, I hate it when I need to do this - just because of the laptop. I keep asking why? why?.   Add to that the fact that its also a data security risk - whether thats because you forgot it at the airport check-in or someone stole it from you. True in some of the cities in India (and perhaps elsewhere), you also need to carry your bag to the restaurant or shopping mall because you just can not leave it in the parking lot. So, frankly, I find it a big big pain and an unnecessary hassle. Look around you and you can easily say that this not short of a small menace ...

Today, I came across an interesting issue with cloud. Its called LFN aka E l e ph a n t. LFN refers to a TCP/IP issue called Long Fat Network . You can google for it and get the interesting technical details on this subject. What this means for a cloud user is simply that he or she is going to have to wait for ages before his or her fat file gets uploaded to the cloud server. It does not really matter if you have 2 Mbps or 20 Mbps. The latency in the network prevents the TCP from being able to transfer the files at the maximum available bandwidth.  And this is serious issue for all cloud users! I tested it across many cloud service providers -  Amazon, Rackspace and Opsource. Over my 4 Mbps, I could not get more than  100 kbps while transferring over scp.  This file has the relevant test info for copying speeds on various cloud operators. So, whats the Solution? Solution#1: Simple and Quick Split the files into smaller chunks. I used hjsplit - it has sof...

Learnt about Google's initiative to penetrate the Indian market named "India, Get Your Business Online",  over the FM radio. Its a wonderful move by Google to make it deep into the Indian SMB market. The proposition is simply compelling for the market space and it wont take Google long to win hearts - given the reliability and uptime offered.  See more @  http://www.indiagetonline.in/ Just to elaborate on this service, it gives SMB's a headstart to build their website and content to it. There are a host of tools available to promote and enhance your website. The domain and website hosting is free for first year. The service is hosted by HostGator.in and seems like it runs its servers out of Madhya Pradesh, India.   Overall, great move by Google. Good luck!

This is how i solved my wireless card issue with the brand new HP laptop. This card support abgn specifications and is fairly new so I guess the driver is missing. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1645716

For quite sometime, I had been trying to make my ubuntu desktop more and more cool. First I stumbled upon macubuntu script. This is single no-hassle script that will make a Mac blush. And now, I found something more interesting - Conky. I was aware of conky earlier but not in the same incarnation. See the attached screenshot of my desktop. Isn't cool? In case you are wondering, conky provides the nice looking sidebar on the desktop. This sidebar is heavily customizable in terms of what you fit in there. The desktop is inspired by this link . I did some customizations of my own and made a few things working. In doing so, I realized how easy it is build upon this nifty utility called conky. Here is How: Install the programs  sudo apt-get install co nky hddtemp lm-sensors python-feedparser Download Scripts Download the scripts that I used from here . Extract these files into ~/bin/conky directory. I generally keep my programs in ~/bin but feel free to customize the location....

What: Virtualbox is a nice desktop virtualization software from erstwhile Sun Inc.  I used the personal use as well as open edition of it for quite sometime. However, could not resist the temptation to migrate to KVM, given its increasing roars in the virtualization space - both for desktop as well as server side. Not having a good tool to manage the VMs was a shortcoming of KVM for sometime. However, with Virt-Manger, this seems to have changed quite a lot. And so I started to migrate my windows image to KVM based. Source: Host OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Virtualization tool: VirtualBox Guest OS: Windows XP Sp3 Target:  Host OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Virtualization tool: KVM Guest OS: Windows XP Sp3 objective is migrate this guest image to KVM so that the migration is seemless. How: Pre-planning: Shut off windows XP gracefully. It probably might make a difference. But in anycase, will be a good idea rather than land up in surprise You need reasonable space. nearly 3 times of ...