Last week at work

The last week at work has been pretty exciting, I managed to get my hands dirty in:

• Oracle Databases: made me realize that I had forgotten most of SQL. But thanks to Google and Pero it all came back soon .

• J2EE bug fixes: I am starting off with some simple bugs to get comfortable with the system and slowly but surely work on more critical issues.

• Xml parsing: This was interesting as I used two different approaches for solving similar problems. First task was to add custom setting tags to an existing xml file. Because it didn’t involve modifying any existing tags I just wrote a custom xml parser to add tags at a specific location and a flag indicating that the file has already been processed. Second task involved reading from existing tags in a xml file, I could’ve just used readLine and string compare but that would make the parser dependent on newlines and their location, so I used the SAX parser to parse the xml.

• MS Virtual PC & Linux command line: Now this is something I did when I had nothing else on my plate. I have been spoiled by the nice GUI of uBuntu as I had mentioned in my earlier posts, therefore my knowledge of linux bash shell a.k.a. command line is very limited. I didnt want to install Linux at work so instead I installed the MS Virtual PC and downloaded a uBuntu 6.06 ISO. Running uBuntu on the Virtual PC is very easy and is described here. So if anyone wants to try Linux without having to install it and risk screwing up your partitions, this is it !

Ball Hockey

I recently joined the Ball hockey league as a goalie at Carleton University. I signed up for the Recreational league because I have no idea about the level of play there. In preparation I bought new pads, glove, blocker, mask and the all important “cup”. Hopefully I wont embarrass myself at the game on thursday.

Tata’s $2500 car is here

The People’s Car is here. Again.

Its mainly targeted towards developing markets like india, china, indonesia, thailand, where most people still use a two-wheeler. The Nano could be a disruptive innovation in the automobile industry by targeting consumers who previously couldn’t afford a car.

I’ve read some comments from people in NA and Europe saying how unsafe it is, how ridiculous it looks and the lack of amenities. They seem to forget that the fastest you’ll be going on indian city roads is 60 kmph and people wont care how it looks because its still better/safer than a 2 wheeler.

The fact that its so simple and bare means it should be very easy and cheap to fix.

Sub + Amps

I finally got my sub and amp installed in my car this weekend and and boy do I love it !!

I was looking for some extra bass but not insanely loud earth shattering bass because I like to listen to my music and not the loud farts.

For anyone wondering the amp is a MTX Thunder TA-3401 and sub is a Pioneer Champion 12″. I bought these used in great condition and saved a lot of $$$.

Also turns out that the last owner didn’t take out the wiring for his amp, so I saved another $80 on the wiring kit .

I got it installed at SAR Sound and the entire setup cost me $230 including installation.

IT Biggies go on a shopping spree …

$9.5 billion were spent today by IBM and Oracle.

• IBM bought MySQL for $1 billion
• Oracle bought BEA for $8.5 billion

IBM has been the biggest contributor to Open Source Software and this is good news for all ..

BEA will help Oracle with its Middleware efforts named Fusion, which I heard of when I worked as a co-op back in 2005. It has been on a takeover frenzy ever since spending loads of $$$, lets see if it pays off in the future ..

Installing External Hard Drive in uBuntu

The last step was to install an external USB hard disk because my XP partitions were almost full and my Linux partition is only 17GB. It had to be NTFS for compatibility reasons. I already had an enclosure lying around so I bought a Seagate 500GB IDE HDD from NCIX on sale for $120. Just an observation IDE hard drives cost more than SATA now.

For anyone wondering I used the following commands to install it:

• sudo fdisk -l, this will print all the connected drives:

Identify your external hard drive. For me the last entry is my external drive, it showed up as /dev/sdc initially but I took the screenshot after installing it so it had 1 partition, hence /dev/sdc1.

• sudo fdisk /dev/sdc. Use n to create a new partition. Now you’ll have /dev/sdc1

• sudo mkntfs -v -N 3.1 /dev/sdc1. If you are missing mkntfs get it by sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs.

• sudo ntfs-config. Enable support for both external and internal drives.

• Plug out your external drive and plug it back in. It wil be mounted automatically, and show up on your desktop.

After this uBuntu has become my primary OS and I love it !

uBuntu

I’ve been using a dual-boot setup (Linux and XP) for a few years now but I never really used Linux much. The Linux part was purely academic and just me wanting to try new stuff. I thought it took too much time to customize linux and it didn’t look pretty. After trying SuSe, RedHat, Fedora I stumbled onto uBuntu. During this time I was getting frustrated by XP and played very few games if any. This got me thinking of switching over to Linux as my primary OS, but I had my doubts.

I upgraded my uBuntu to version 7.04 Feisty and installed Compiz for better looking themes, windows, OSX like effects and screenlets. It took a bit of reading docs to get it to work but the end result was simply amazing ! Here’s a screenshot of my desktop:

With uBuntu beauty just isnt skin deep, here are some highlights:

• Synaptic Package Manager can help you search for apps and take care of dependencies. Much better than having to use rpms.
• NTFS support built-in, so it automatically mounts your Windows partitions. All my documents, music, movies, videos are on my XP NTFS partitions and I can use them in Linux .
• Deluge as my Bit Torrent client. I was afraid I wouldn’t find a light-weight client like uTorrent (Windows only, unless you run it on Wine) in Linux, but Deluge is like a uTorrent clone for Linux.
• Banshee for my music library. Once again I could just import my music library from the XP partition. It supports album covers, looks slick and pops up pretty notifications.
• VLC which plays almost any video file format out there. And it plays them well.

The last step is installing an external hard drive. I’ll write about it soon .

No iPod for me ..

Its nothing to be sad about. I was looking to buy an iPod shuffle or nano but decided not to. I didn’t like the idea of carrying an additional piece of hardware with me, so instead I turned my Nokia 6300 into my mp3 player. All I needed was a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter, earbud headphones (Panasonic RP-HJE300 for $20 off eBay) and a microSD card ($20 for 2GB here). So for less than $50 I have my mp3 player and its surprisingly good . Granted the audio quality wont be as good as an iPod (I am not an audiophile so it doesn’t matter much), neither can I watch high resolution videos (I don’t plan on watching videos on my phone, besides I think even the nano is too small to watch videos).

Boeing did what ??!!

According to the report published here the new yet to be launched Boeing 787 a.k.a Dreamliner could be vulnerable to hacking by passengers on board. Apparently the in-flight entertainment system and Internet access network is linked to the Controls, Navigation systems which could allow a passenger to do bad things. Now terrorists don’t have to carry any weapons to hijack a plane, except a laptop. I guess they believe that terrorists are not e-ducated.

Winter tires

I am really amazed when people buy $20,000 cars but refuse to spend any money on buying winter tires. Tires are what keep your car on the road, and if you live in Canada you definitely need a set of winters. I applaud the Quebec government for making it mandatory to have winter tires in winters. This not only increases safety for the driver and the other motorists but helps avoid fender-benders at intersections that just delay the traffic during rush hours. I am sure you’ve been late to work because some driver didn’t realize its winter and braked too late only to realize he didn’t have winters on.