In the Club

So as I just sit around in the club, not even trying to enjoy myself, I can't help but wonder, why did I even cone here. The way the holiday season has panned out, this is probably the last weekend I get to go out with my colleagues. And after the multitudes of parties that I have attended over the last few days, I gotta say, I'm making the most of this last weekend. And by last weekend, I mean the last weekend in UK as I head back to India. So on the coming weekend, the Christmas weekend, I'll be busy packing my bags and clearing my stuff from the apartment.
It also is a testament to my time spent here in the UK, all this while I have been alone, roaming around uk, all alone, mostly by choice though. So now finally coming back to my question to myself, I guess I just wanted to see for one last time THE club scene in UK...  and as another Rihanna songs bellows from the speakers, I sign off. Hope my friends are as bored as I am.

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..