Blogger and Google Plus integration

I am not an avid Blogger user. But have been using it pretty regularly for the last few months and am very much impressed by it. I also happen to be a Google plus user who usually posts pictures on his profile but no so much of good posts. These posts are something I reserve for my Blogger account. But, so it seems, I have a big enough audience on Google plus as well. So I was wondering why isn’t blogger and google plus thoroughly integrated.

Google Plus and Blogger are both Google products, though one was bought by Google and the other was created in-house. The kind of integration that I am expecting is that I want my blogger posts to be immediately posted on my Google plus page as well. I know, I can just copy the link of the blog and paste it on my timeline, or click the share button on the blog and share it here, or just copy the text from the blog post, right before I post it and put it on Google Plus. Well, I don’t mind doing all that but then when I want to post pictures, how do I exactly do that? Because posting picture on Blogger isn’t as easy as it is on Google plus. I know this is something that only a lazy person would want but it doesn’t make sense that something like this isn’t already there.

I love all the Google products and very much have all my internet history in them, somewhere or the other, so I would love the tight integration that most of them currently experience with each other to be present in Blogger, because it is such an awesome blogging service/tool. Just my 50 cents.

Linux Mint 12 - Lisa

Is photoshop available for Linux? Because if it is, I might as well move whole heartedly to Linux Mint, have completely fallen in love with the OS. It brings all the cool factors of the Gnome 3 desktop but keeps some of the saner things from the Gnome 2.4. This is probably the reason why I will stick to it rather than Fedora or Ubuntu as they just went a little gung ho with their presentations of the new Gnome desktop.

So far, I think that my laptop looks and performs a lot better under the new system. Even chromium looks and feels better, makes the perfect use of the full HD resolution screen. That is probably one of the reasons why I feel so comfortable with the OS. Anyways, I'll add some more later, now have to go play with the OS a bit.

Sunday Fixing

That would be the best and shortest way to describe my day. Right from 12:00 am in the morning, I have been fixing various issues with the devices I own. These include the new Dell Laptop, the Xoom tablet and the Galaxy S2. The galaxy S2 didn’t have any issues as such, but I was just trying out various different ROMS on the device and then pretty much lost it with the MIUI. Very very annoying and ugly interface for me, thankfully I had done a nandroid backup of the CM7.1 nightly I was running. So that was that. The SGS issues were at 4:00am.

Now coming to the windows installation on my machine, that is the new dell laptop, I had blown up the MBR. What happened was that I wanted to try out the MAC OSx on my laptop. But do go ahead with it, I first had to remove the linux installation on the machine and reclaim the drive space. Once that was done, it was all easy, atleast supposed to be easy to just boot into windows recovery using the Windows Home Premium boot disk that I had. But somehow it just wouldn’t boot into windows. I was quick to give up on it and downloaded an image from the web which could be made out to a Windows boot disk. Turns out, that image was only for installation of windows 7 and not for any recovery activities. Annoyed me a lot, but then, I had to go back to the earlier disk and it finally worked. So when all this was done, it was already 3:00am and so started playing with the Galaxy S2.

And finally, the Xoom. This was in the late afternoon today. I was using this tiamati Rom on it, which pretty much labelled the tablet as a Verizon Xoom and any update that Google pushed to it would brick it. So I just went back, i.e. tried to go back to the earlier stock build of Xoom which I had nandroided. I was in for a surprise when I did this, the wifi wouldn’t just start, let alone scan and connect. So I again went online to look for a stock rom. Found a rooted one, downloaded it but sadly, this one had another issue. Again it was with wifi, the drivers installed or something about the wifi module was so wrong that it would scan the networks but never accept any DHCP ip addresses and also wouldn’t let me set any on the tablet. So downloaded the retail copy of the ROM from the Motorola Dev site and then had to manually flash the system, boot and other images onto the Xoom using fastboot. Fortunately it worked alright.

So till the internet from plusnet is properly installed here, have to stick to the 3 unlimited internet plan. Bad weekend, but on the plus side, 28 more work days till I finally get to back HOME!

Installing Mac OSX 10.8 Lion on my PC

These are not the instructions needed to install, but actually something that I wanted to do. Turns out, all the instructions which I read online were for installing the Mac OSX Snow Leopard on a PC. This was for dual booting the machine into Windows 7 (the existing installation) and Mac OSX. Turns out, since the Lion version of Mac is pretty new, the guys at Hackintosh are looking for ways to directly install from the thumb drive provided by Apple. Till then, we have to install Snow Leopard and then update to Lion as per the instructions given on the various site dedicated to this topic.

So to go ahead with this, I was facing a lot of issues. The main ones were that I already have Linux installed on a partition, which I wanted OSX to replace. But I have also managed to somehow install the Grub bootloader on the MBR rather than the linux drive itself and then use EasyBCD. So to fix this, I first had to fix the Master Boot records. But then again, couldn’t do that, because I needed a Windows boot drive for the same, something which I thought I had, only to realise that the installation drive had indeed gone corrupt. So now, I am downloading the Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit boot disk, using which I will fix my boot drive.

After that is done, I have to a lot of time installing Mac OSX snow leopard on the laptop, also probably increase the size of the partition to 60GB from 40 and then finally move on to installing Lion from the official media that I have bought. The wait is killing me…..

Saturation of the Mind

I have been planning to code and create a bittorrent client purely written in C# and .NET 4.0. I’ve pretty much set up machine as I it should be. All the required software has been downloaded and installed and all the updates too have been installed. The only trouble is that, for the last few days of this week, I have been super busy. This is due to the day job, the job that pays for all the gadget addictions.

There is this User Requirements that my one teammate was supposed to work on. Supposed to work on would be the wrong thing to say actually. He had completed the UR as per his understanding and as per the explanations met out to him by the tester who had written the user requirement. But, sadly, when the development was delivered, it was tested on some useless junk of data which we didn’t know so and now there have been a ton of defects. Now, usually it happens that whoever has done the development handles the defects and if needed guides the other members of the team in solving the defects. But as luck would have it, he is now in India, his assignment ended in the UK and now the people fixing the bugs are the ones who initially had no clue what the requirement was about. Its not like these other devs (which includes me) were sitting idle while he worked on this, they did have their own set of tasks to do and they did complete all of them. So all that’s left now is this one requirement, and its one of the most complex and vast requirements that have been delivered in a long time.

So the crux of the thing is that, every day, for the last 3 days, I’ve been coming home mentally exhausted! Its just that, I haven’t been that challenged at work recently and thus was starting this mini project of mine so as to keep me mentally active. But then, work is getting tedious. The trouble is that its not something that’s technically challenging. If it was, then it would’ve been fun. Its nothing but the functional bit which is draining me. So I was hoping it to be over by the end of the week but alas, that was not going to happen. Still have a few defects pending and to fix them, will have to spend most of my friggin weekend in the office. Also the testers are coming in to test their outstanding work and sadly we have to be there to help them technically as and when they need any help. Talk about baby-sitting, we’re doing some tester sitting.

So till the defects are all cleared out, I might as well get some light reading done about the bittorrent protocol. I need to understand it all first and then maybe I could start right from scratch. Its about time I got back to my roots!

Porting applications...

Regardless of what the open source community thinks about Microsoft, they do make some really awesome IDEs for software development for their platform. Granted, in the previous years, these IDEs were a costly affairs but lately, Microsoft have made many amends to their earlier offensive stand against the Open Source community. They have the website spark programme and the express editions of the development tools which are available for download free of cost. Also these IDEs are very intuitive in helping the developer with the development, he can now find references easily, even while debugging the code, just hovering over the object can tell you from which class its being inherited from. This was something very much evident in the recent porting of the application that I have been performing for my own understanding.

I found this application online which is a bit torrent client (as I had mentioned in a few of my earlier posts, btpeer is what I am talking about) made solely in VC++. So since I don’t have Visual Studio 6 (the project for which was made available), I just opened that project up in Visual Studio 2010 which I happen to have, and lo behold, the project was just converted to the new standards. I have to say that the OpenSSL errors were present but that was simply because it couldn’t resolve the dependencies. This, I solved by just downloading and installing OpenSSL, downloading the source code, adding the directories to the include and lib paths for Visual Studio and the program just compiles as it should.

Anyways, I’ll go off to work on it..

Popping sounds in XPS

I have recently blogged about how I wanted a new laptop, a laptop refresh if you will. I finally bought a Dell XPS 15, decently spec’d, got enough juice to last at least 5 hours and runs graphics and everything very well. Is a tad heavy but no build issues otherwise. So, I was surprised to find this laptop have some very awesome sounding laptop speakers, actually the most awesome speakers that I have seen in a laptop ever! I was very glad that the laptop had brought with it a very good surprise. But there was an underlying issue with this.

The woofer located at the bottom of the laptop would stutter while playing some music or even while doing some simple gaming. This soon became very annoying. So instead of calling up the Dell customer support, I started browsing their forums. Turns out, this is a very widespread issue. But I soon found out that this was a software issue and not a hardware one as most of the people on the site had fixed their popping issues by either removing some unwanted drivers, some Dell crapware and some other unwanted software. Some had a few cores disabled, enabling which fixed the issue. Some even suggested to stop/unisntall the Mcafee installation available with the laptop.

So obviously, I tried it all, apart from disabling the antivirus. I had all the latest drivers as listed on the Dell support site. But turns out, the best way ahead was to go to websites of the respective vendors and update the drivers from them directly rather than via Dell. This wasn’t something suggested on the forums. So the first site I checked was nVidia and boy was I lucky to find an update for the graphics card on my system – GT-540. After downloading and installing the app, things are looking great, its sounding great, even somehow better. Maybe its because of the HD audio driver that was installed along with the Nvidia driver update. Here is the link I found for the driver, its on the Nvidia servers.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/confirmation.php?url=/Windows/285.62/285.62-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe&lang=us&type=GeForce%20M

Edit: Turns out, the issue with the popping sound was not to blame on the drivers. After a few days, the issue had arisen yet again. And this time I was at loss as to what to do. Again the search for the possible solution began and on one of the threads on the dell support forums, I found a suggested solution. This was with removing the bundled Mcafee anti-virus solution. I was initially a little sceptical but common sense kicked in, I did it, installed the Microsoft Software Essentials and now… no more cracking of the sound. The sub-woofer had never sounded better. Glad this is finally fixed now…

Yet Another Bittorent Client

So, I want to learn C#. I have access to the Visual Studio IDE for writing the code in C#. So I though, the best way to go about it is to start writing your own application, a windows installer, which will obviously be open source. Now I wasn’t sure what kind of an application should I create. Then I thought of using the most widely used application on my machine after iTunes. This would be the Bit Torrent client. This is the official client; which obviously follows the latest protocols and all. This isn’t open sourced. They stopped open sourcing their app after version 5 or so it seems. This I've read from Wikipedia.

So, to make my bit torrent client (which for now I would like to call Yet Another Bit torrent Client - YABC), I needed to first understand the architecture that is usually used by these apps, and most important of all, understand the bit torrent protocol. This wouldn’t be easy. So I had a better idea, I thought, rather than investing time in understand the protocol as of now, I might as well borrow the code for the protocol from some other app which is under FOSS. But then again I had a problem.

All the apps which are currently popular and available are all written in python. The trouble is that python is a language I am totally not familiar with as of now. Also, I was planning to make an app through and through in C# and .NET. So I just Googled the best I could and lo behold – I found this - http://www.alhem.net/project/btpeer/index.html. This is the btPeer client which is solely written in C++. Now the thing is, I work in C++ full time and know the language well enough to be able to port an application from it to C#. Another plus is that there is already a project readily available for Visual Studio, thus I will only have to port the application directly to VS2010; using which, when I build the project, I should have to project ready.

I will register the project at SourceForge or Google Code and also maybe github so that the configuration part of the project is handled well. More on this as things progress. Later.

The Indian Tech Journalist

I have been following the technology space for the last few years now. Mostly since I started working. The iPhone wasn't something I looked forward to, but was a fan of the major camera totting phones of the yesteryears. These were dumb phones (the Sony Ericsson ones), but then there were the Symbian handset from Nokia which always used to freezing at some point in their lives.

The blogs and tech news websites that I followed in those days were engadget and some other blogs from amteur Indian bloggers who mainly mimmicked the American blogs. At that moment in time, ZDNet was another well set up website. So I also started following them, but they mainly seemed to write about the Silicon Valley happenings, which was a good read, but I rarely knew what was happening around me, as in, in India. Soon I found out that techtree.in (then it was techtree.com) is a good site for such activities. This was mainly because my knowledge about the world technological happenings wasn't that great and thus I kept on following techtree and this other site - tech2.com which later became tech2.in. At this time, Joshua Topolsky was the editor at engadget.com and had a very good team of technology journalists as well, with the likes of Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern. So I could say, I pretty much grew my already bubbling interest in the world of gadgets reading to their articles. They all moved out of engadget and set up shop at theverge.com, which is now my goto site for all the tech information that i need.

My point being that India does not have any good tech websites/blogs that cater to the geeks of the country. The big two which i mentioned arent anywhere as good as engadget or theverge, even techcrunch for that matter. They still think that symbian phones are cool. That one statement pretty much digs a hole for them.

Just writing about this is a bit frustrating for me, because reading the pathetic articles on these sites makes my blood boil. Its not like India doesnt have any good technology observers. Its just that it hasnt been thought out as a very good idea yet. Techtree and Tech2 have had some really good articles on games and other things but the look and feel of their sites and the content otherwise is just disastrous. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement in the technology journalism space for this country.

Whom do I discuss phones with?

So I told a friend in India that the Samsung Galaxy S2 has the most amazing screen ever with the Super AMOLED plus working its magic and showing the colours as they should be seen.

He told me that his Nexus S, which as a SCLCD (i9023) has a better screen than the S2. He said that he would be sending a mail to me proving it to me that the SCLCD was better than the SAMOLED Plus. Being the bigger person that I am, I stopped arguing and said that I was looking forward to the "proof" he was presenting to back up his claims.

A few days later, I got a mail which had two screenshots of what looked like the same home screen. It was running launcher pro, same wallpaper, same set of widgets and shortcuts on the screen. To any eye, they were screenshots of the homescreen of the same device. The subject line of the mail just mentioned - see for yourself.

On questioning my friend as to what am I supposed to see in those two images, I was told that the one named 1.jpeg was the SAMOLED Plus and the 2.jpeg was the SCLCD and the SCLCD was the best one.

Don't expect everyone to get the joke.

Time for a Laptop Refresh?

I was and always have been fond of screen with high resolutions. So last year, when I spent about £611 on a Thinkpad Edge which I thought I had pimped out, I was somehow expecting a larger resolution screen. This wasn't because of any misinformation on the part of Lenovo, but it was due to my ignorance. I just assumed that the thinkpad will have a higher resolution that the HP laptop that I previously owned. The thinkpad edge laptops, regardless of the size of the screen, max out at 1366 X 768 pixels. Not my cup of tea. So after using the laptop for exactly a year, I am giving up on it. The thinkpad will be gone. Selling the damn thing off!

Thus, I need a new laptop, or maybe I tweaked the machine I had in India when I get back but till then use the existing thinkpad. I gave up on it. I thought, I'd rather use a new laptop than some old low resolution thinkpad, which, to be fair could handle a fair deal. CS5 ran very smooth on it. So now for the new laptop, my budget was teetering on £1200. It was a pretty string budget and many good laptops fell into this category.

I have always been fascinated by the MacBooks. I loved their sleek designs and the aesthetically pleasing looks and the always talked about fast performance on them. So I checked a few out, and on eBay, I found a few good deals. One of them was the latest 15incher with the 500GB HDD, i7 et all, for a reasonable £1299. It did overshoot my budget by a £99 but then I was very much for it. But then, I began thinking about the future prospects of owning a MacBook. I am a PC, through and through, and also the occasional Linux user, but never a Mac user. So, it was obvious that I would be bootcamping the MBP as soon as I got it. To do this, I would have to shell out a few more quid on the Windows DVD. Along with this, I would this I would also have to install the Visual Studio 2008 and loads of other software I need for my extra-curricular educational needs. Another factor in my waning interest in the MBP was the screen resolution. For a full HD resolution, I would have to pay a bomb and also buy via the Apple Store online, which is the costliest of the lot when buying MBPs. So I was very much in two minds about it all.

So I now started looking at the line from Dell. There were quite a few laptops available on the dell line which were well under my budget. I was exited by the Alienware series and almost bought one, but stopped short when I realised that the 14x doesn't have a 1080p screen nor does it have it as an upgrade. I also checked the line by Asus, the G53SW which looks really pretty to be fair, also the Dell Precision series but none were much  of any interest to me. So again I landed on the Dell website, and struck jackpot with the XPS 15 series. This is not the 15z, which was recently released but the XPS 15 which I literally pimped out as and then forgot to add the backlit keyboard but was finally able to get the laptop for £1089. I got a £405 discount on the laptop. The configuration of this new machine is as follows:


XPS 502x : 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up
to 3.10 GHz
Display : 15.6" FHD B+RGLED True-Life (1920x1080) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera 1 S
LCD Back Cover : Metalloid Aluminum (WLAN) L501X 1 S
Memory : 8192MB (2x4096) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 750GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) 1 S
Optical Drive : 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive 1 S
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION 1 S
Graphics : 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Graphics card

I'd say pretty sweet for £1089. Should be here with me by 16th of November.

The new Nigerian Scam - Bidding on eBay

This may not actually be a new thing, but it surely was the first time I experienced or even heard about it. It all happened to me when I listed my Nexus S for sale on eBay. My phone was "bought" in about 5 minutes after listing it. Immediately after, I got an eBay message asking for more pictures of my used Nexus S so as the buyer is sure that the device is actually in "pristine" condition as mentioned on the eBay listing.
So I, being overly involved in getting rid of the phone for the seemingly good selling price of £200, was very prompt in sending the pics. The mistake I did here was to mail them from the same email address as the one I use on eBay and PayPal. And I was happy to get another mail from the buyer telling me that she was happy with the condition of the device. So the next morning, I was dead surprised to get 3 mails telling me that I had been transferred £250 into my PayPal account but before it was to be credited to my account, I had to put in a shipping reference. This was the first time that I was selling anything in eBay and didn't know the exact procedure, so didn't make any effort to read the mails. Also got a personal mail from the buyer that i should send the device to Nigeria since she was buying it for her pastor son there. Also the buyer said that she was working in Syria ay the moment. I was touched by her deed of having a pastor son, So I was now in a hurry to ship the device asap,and get the amount credited to my account.
So that very day, I went ahead and posted it via DHL, spent £41 for it, with the to address in Nigeria. Only when I got back to my desk did I notice something fishy. The PayPal mail that I usually get from device@PayPal.co.uk was in reality from some mail address on the domain Europe.com. Sadly, till I realised that, I had already updated the eBay item with the shipping number thinking that it would finally have the amount credited to my account. And finally when I realised it, I immediately called the DHL center and asked them to return the device to the senders address. Sadly, the amount spent for sending the device is already gone, but a very good lesson learnt!.