Tux Adda

I won't be able to attend FOSS.in 2007. I'm going to Houston, TX for office work and am tentatively flying out on 8th December. There are a lot of things that I need to clear up at office and a lot of formalities to complete during the first week of December. Meanwhile, someone from the Ubuntu-In team is requested to pick up my talk on Bug Filing and Triaging for the Debian-Ubuntu Project Day.

Blogging after quite a while. I've been looking around for a cheap, functional laptop (ok I admit it, my idea of a functional laptop might be overkill for a lot of people). Today, while checking out the Vostro range from Dell, I came across an N-series Vostro. It seems Dell is offering DOS (or in other words no OS) on all its Vostro laptops (1000, 1400 and 1500). According to the Dell online configurator, you can now buy laptops without an OS, which is good news for people wishing to run Linux on their laptops. While people might say that Dell ought to have shipped Ubuntu on these laptops, I'd say that installing Ubuntu is a fairly painless process, and any decent LUG would be able to help anyone who didn't know how to install Ubuntu.

Caveat: It seems Dell doesn't want to ship a Bluetooth module with the N-series, so you might have to look for a BT USB dongle

After much consideration, and on the advice of my parents, I have decided to get married. However, I have no clue how to go about it. Can you please help ?

Please send your comments, suggestions and advice here wanttogetmarried@gmail.com

Attended a Cabal meeting with Santanu, IDG and PowerPork at Oly today (porkie will post meeting minutes). Among other things, what really cracked me up was that PowerPork had trouble with the bacon in Oly's Mixed Grill.

First, a Happy New Year to all of you.

I recived the EFIKA board from Genesi on 1st January. Pictures are up on my Flickr account. Haven't had a chance to play with it yet, because I hardly have any time right now, and I have to manage a PCI or a 3.3V AGP graphics card from somewhere. Me thinks that an embedded board should have come with onboard video.

Thanks a ton Genesi and bbrv

The latest Linux kernel now includes a new virtualization technology named (unimaginatively) KVM. (don’t mistake this for Keyboard, Video, Mouse) and utilises the Vanderpool and Pacifica extensions added to Intel and AMD chips respectively.

KVM consists of a loadable kernel module (kvm.ko) that provides some interfaces to user-land tools to perform virtualization. It claims to support Linux in both 32 and 64 bit modes as well as Microsoft Windows in 32 bit mode. (No you can’t run 64-bit Linux on 32-bit machines).

While Xen and OpenVZ were considered to be the most promising virtualization technologies for Linux, KVM has stolen a march over them by being the first to be included in the stock kernel. Moshe Bar, famous for his work on OpenMosix, is a prominent developer of KVM, which probably means that in the near future, we’ll see KVM work with OpenMosix to have a distributed farm for hosting KVM virtual machines.

More news here : http://linuxvirtualization.com

I am a little disoriented, so this post may not be cohesive, and may ramble on.

I had emailed the people at ICICI Direct about my interest in managing my investments through their portal. Today they sent a "Customer Support Executive" to come to my office and fill up the forms.

When the ICICI representative handed me the booklet for me to sign, I was astonished (although I hope I managed to conceal it) to see that the poor gentleman had very stunted fingers, even missing a couple. I certainly value my fingers, since a keyboard is vital for my survival and I was imagining all the problems I'd have if my fingers were so stunted. Imagine trying to grasp the overhead support rods in a crowded Kolkata bus, with fingers that reach only upto the first joint of most normal human beings. Even something as mundane as turning the page of a booklet is difficult, as I saw happen to the gentleman.

While all the political parties fall over themselves to extend quotas to the so-called "disadvantaged sections of the society", I wonder whether the Government will ever extend its support to that section of the society that truly is disadvantaged and needs our support.

I wish ICICIDirect all the best for supporting people with disabilities. I hope all Indian corporates act in the same way, extending support (though I'm against extending merely blank sympathy) to people with disabilities. And I hope that by supporting people with disabilities. I also hope that they reject all Government efforts to impose quotas in private enterprise, and help to show the Government where the support and quotas are actually required.

I hope that the assistive technology tools in Linux are good enough to help people with disabilities use computers productively.

Recently Sun announced that they are releasing much of Java source code (including J2ME and J2EE) under the Gnu General Public License and the libraries under GPL with Classpath exception. Here is my (belated) take on the issue :

GPL'ed Java has major implications in a number of areas, with a lot of potential benefit to Linux. Probably, the major impact would be in the J2ME market, although most people are still focusing on the potential benefit to the desktop market.

20 years is a long time in these days of instant results expected from coaches, but I'm sure glad you're still around. Enjoy the three point lead atop the Premiership on the twentieth anniversary of you joining ManU. Oh and while you're at it, please make sure there is adequate cover for Giggsy on the left.

... after a really long time. Last time I blogged was way back in July.

I joined Cognizant in August, and endured a two-month training in .Net (don't snicker... and don't tell me to switch companies, it is not feasible right now). Right now I'm waiting for the project I've been allocated to to start up.