Desinerd

Dipankar's random musings

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Geeksphone Keon unboxing

I have the using the Geeksphone Keon over the last couple of weeks and its been an interesting experience till now. Just to start things of here is the unboxing of the packed unit. The box is really beautiful and really reminds you of a great mozilla experience!

[caption id="attachment_604" align="aligncenter" width="225"] The top side of the box![/caption] [caption id="attachment_605" align="aligncenter" width="225"] The bottom of the box![/caption] [caption id="attachment_601" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Neatly arranged battery, and handsfree![/caption] [caption id="attachment_602" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Cool firefoxOS sticker[/caption] [caption id="attachment_603" align="aligncenter" width="225"] And, finally the phone[/caption] The phone has fantastic battery life, for at least 3 days normal usage. The internet seems to be a little flaky, and the OS has crashed a couple of time though. Hope to put up more about firefox OS.

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SpaceX's Autonomous 'Grasshopper' Rocket Makes Milestone Flight | Autopia | Wired.com

Show off ;) ... great stuff @ SpaceX.

  Musk’s visit to SXSW was his second stop in Texas. The entrepreneur spent time talking to lawmakers about developing a space launch facility in the Lone Star State. SpaceX currently has two launch facilities for its NASA missions and commercial satellite launch customers. The current mission to the ISS was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX is putting the final touches on a facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Both sites are operated by the government, and SpaceXleases the launch pad. SpaceX's Autonomous 'Grasshopper' Rocket Makes Milestone Flight | Autopia | Wired.com.

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Bijan Sabet - Who took a chance on you?

Bijan Sabet on who took a chance of you

Many folks get to experience some of their goals because someone, somewhere along the way, gave them a shot. They took a real chance based on something they felt or saw (vs historical evidence per se).  Bijan Sabet - Who took a chance on you?.

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Ten things about being a founder I wish I knew two years ago. // Speaker Deck

Ten tips and concepts that I personally value very much about being a startup founder, managing a team and a product. The white slides represent my speaker's notes. Ten things about being a founder I wish I knew two years ago. // Speaker Deck.

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RFC 6455 - The WebSocket Protocol

The WebSocket Protocol enables two-way communication between a client running untrusted code in a controlled environment to a remote host that has opted-in to communications from that code. The security model used for this is the origin-based security model commonly used by web browsers. The protocol consists of an opening handshake followed by basic message framing, layered over TCP. The goal of this technology is to provide a mechanism for browser-based applications that need two-way communication with servers that does not rely on opening multiple HTTP connections (e.g., using XMLHttpRequest or <iframe>s and long polling).

RFC 6455 - The WebSocket Protocol.

Very interesting RFC, say in comparison to BOSH. Should be a fun read for most engineers.

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Career Advice From LinkedIn's Billionaire Founder - Business Insider

Reid Hoffman started his professional life with the intention of becoming an academic.

But then he realized: "in order to be a professional scholar, you have to dedicate a vast majority of your career to writing esoteric books that only 50 people will understand."

So instead, he got into the technology industry with a job at Apple, where he helped build eWorld, Apple's version of America Online.

Next, he started a company called SocialNet. It failed. 

Career Advice From LinkedIn's Billionaire Founder - Business Insider.

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Zombie Startups | Danielle Morrill

My greatest fear as a startup founder isn’t to fail, it is to become a zombie startup. Kind of like in the 6th Sense when Bruce Willis doesn’t realize he is dead and tries to have a nice dinner with his wife, there are startups out there who are still “operating” but might as well not be. Zombie Startups | Danielle Morrill.    

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Firefox operating system released!

One of the first things that i wanted to implement in my university [~2006] was a operating system with only the Firefox browser as the core application. Turns out that is a popular reality now with the Chromebook and well to some extent the Firefox OS which is being released. I at that point had no idea that mobile would become that big, with the exposure that I had. Its all coming together! The new Firefox OS is something that I was waiting for, and I believe a true iOS challenger. We should definitely keep in mind that Steve Jobs had seen the future and pushed for all iOS applications to be web applications in a mobile webkit browser [before the whole app store came about]. So we finally have Steve Job's dream working out in style. All the core applications[Dialers, Contact book, Messaging]  need to be web applications, unlike say in iOS which is such a partial approach. One must appreciate the ideas that iOS has introduced, and well android has copied religiously. However, it seems some others may take a lead soon. I look forward to making this work on the desktop as well. Three cheers to the mozilla team for this achievement!!    

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bye bye kaspersky, welcome avast

Well not a marketing post, I recently bought KAV or Kaspersky anti-virus for all the windows machines that I run. Lately it has become extremely bloated and well it brought all my machines down to their knees. The goal of running lean and mean, while giving me optimal online *protection* seems to be lost on them. Being the engineer that I am, my response was to find out the leanest one around [for free]. Turns out Avast does a pretty decent job of staying out of my way and finding out about most of the common bugs around. One must admit, the cottage industry of Anti-virus makers must get a cut from Intel/Microsoft for building these beasts which run in the background consuming most of your memory. So Avast it is for the rest of the house as well! That too the free version, until of course KAV fixes its bloat. Get it here - http://www.avast.com/en-in/index

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Rooting your Samsung galaxy ace

So have been playing around with ROMing and modding phone for most of the weekend. Here are the important posts to read to mod your Galaxy Ace. http://theunlockr.com/2012/11/22/how-to-root-the-samsung-galaxy-ace-s5830/ You will need to download the root file from the following link http://www.droidforums.net/forum/android-forum/210957-universal-gingerbread-root-unroot-2-3-3-2-3-7-a.html#post2130907 Successfull done on my wife's phone!

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Best Samsung i9103 ROM android

I have been using the Samsung i9103 for quite a while and have tried out most of the available experimental ROM out there. Most of today was spent trying to find out the right combination to make the phone usable again. Here are the steps to having a really good setup on this phone 1. First follow the guide below and install the XXKPE ROM following the guide below. You will need to use Odin to flash this ROM onto your device. I used the ROM link below the guide Guide : http://androidadvices.com/making-galaxy-sl-i9003-xxkpe-update/4/#.UA0w8aCeaSx ROM : http://hotfile.com/dl/145780524/f7d1f45/I9003XXKPE.zip.html 2. Now you need to root the device and can use the following guide and image to do the same. It worked out pretty well for me. Guide : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1191623 ROM : http://coveringandroid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/I9003XXKPE_RootingPackage.zip  3. Open the Tweaks application and apply the various optimizations. In addition to that install AWD launcher! Its an absolutely phenomenal launcher imho, Other tuneups you can do are Shift to Ext4, read the post below on XDA developers. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1331253

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Loyal to airtel, not the other way around

Mine is a dual connection household, I use one Airtel connection as the primary and the secondary MTNL one for backup. However, it seems I will need to change the order of those soon. Lately, airtel seems to have very odd bandwidth counters which always seem to never match up with my router connection monthly counters. The difference is more than 20-30% month on month [adding both up and down counters!], which means that this is deliberate. So a consumer like me pays for 75, gets 50 and well is forced to buy these Smartbytes packs to fill up the deficit for nearly one third of the month! So Airtel in my opinion is stealing my bandwidth which after many many complaints has been not taken care of! I can only view this as a systematic accounting corruption on their end. In any case, I have come to the conclusion that MTNL is far better in these matters for the NCR region and see no use of using Airtel as the primary in my case. Have you experienced the same? Do let me know?

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The shift!

Looks like life something needs to be thought about in new color, one of those time when I can see it happen. I do read what I wrote earlier, and yet again I can see this is a point I will come back to. On to the next.

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Gotcha with exporting MySQL tables for windows

I encountered some interesting issues when pulling out CSV from my MySQL databases. The core issue was the csv generated was not seemingly compatible with the various spreadsheet readers in Windows. After having a closer look at the file, it turns out to be an encoding issue clearly. As the database was Latin1 encoded, the carriage return was handled as r [shows up as ^M on VI] in some text blobs. That basically resulted in an additional carriage return in the reader and it would break the csv. Here was the way I solved this issue. perl -pie 's/r//g' *.csv This will basically remove all the r  and thus ensure that your reader is able to accept and read the file. You should be able to see the difference when you export the file into the reader.

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Exporting MySQL tables and databases

Here are the ways you can export tables and databases, each of them have their advantages and disadvantages depending on the task at hand. We will list out each with examples and discuss them. We will assume that the database name is D and table name is T.

1.  Going native with SQL and generating an csv from the MySQL console Assuming that you are already logged into your mysql console using say mysql -u <user> -p <database>

replace <user> with your username replace <database> with your database

You can use the following command to generate an csv of pretty much any SQL. select * from T into outfile '' fields enclosed by '"' fields terminated by ',' lines terminated by 'n' where id=1;

One of the limitation is that you cannot get the column names in the csv using this.

2. You can use the mysqldump utility provided, to actually take an output of complete databases/tables or partial tables.

mysqldump -u <user> -p -t -T<location directory> --databases D --tables T --where="id=1" --fields-enclosed-by=" --fields-terminated-by=,

The above query will take the output of the Table T from Database D and generate a clean CSV in the location provided with the filename T.csv The clear limitation as compared to 1 is that you cannot get output of joins and you do not get the column names in the csv.

3. You can now use the mysql commandline to output csv as well

mysql -u root -p D -e "select * from T where id=1" > T.csv The above query will output the query results with the column names in row 0. The limitation is that you cannot control the fields enclosed, fields terminated like 1 and 2.

No approach is better than others! For me 3 worked really well as I needed the column names and did not need a lot of control over the column attributes. You may find the other approaches work as well for you.

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Lessons in perception management

One of my recent experiments with myself has lead me to the conclusion that actual objective work done is not as important as perception management. On the contrary, people who do perception management get some work done sometimes. This recent run had enough data points for me to validate my own skills, but taught me that work has no co-relation with the final perceived result. Some clear pointers when perception management drives your organization 1. You are busy trying to cut corners 2. Your senior management is busy saving their own jobs 3. You get told consistently by inferior higher-ups to increase efficiency, while they are busy not showing any 4. Loyalty is not a metric within the company 5. Objectivity and logic takes a backseat, everything becomes personal 6. Being outspoken is seen as being rebellious, not towing the party line. No interest in fixing the core issues 7. Hindsight becomes ever so important, that you mess up your future goals If you notice, all of this revolves around how neat/efficient an upper management guy can look. In this experiment, I felt a gamut of human emotions like betrayal, loyalty, etc which are irrelevant. The objectives however of validating my own skills worked out fairly well. Onto the next experiment!

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Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen strikes

Just finished watching a fantastic Woody Allen movie "midnight in paris" , it is very clear that he still knows his shit! I was not expecting a lot from the movie, but ended up enjoying it with quite a few loud laughs thrown in. You had Owen Wilson, who was his usual calm self throughout and the rest really did a great job as well. The story line is about how people keep thinking the past was a better fit for them, and well it looks like people in the past also kept thinking the same. Irrespective of the great depression and the many other wars, people in the past looked into their past with the assumption that the golden age has ended. Woody Allen takes this opportunity to make you see that the reality you exist is the golden age and must be made use in the best way possible. Its a good watch!