This sucks, I've been extremely busy these past 2 days that I haven't even had the chance to visit Neowin.net, my primary source for industry news. This was mostly attributed to screw ups by one of my subordinates who made some major mistakes in his code which I had to edit as I was auditing it. Then it was an all day cycle of appraisals that I had to perform. I missed out on the news about the free giveaway offer of the DivX create suite. Not that I had an imminent need for a DivX encoder.

A few minutes ago I read about the continuation of the story on faulty iPOD Nanos with screen problems, where it was reported that the screens would get scratches very easily thereby making them hard to read in a very short span of time. People have also reported cracks appearing on the screens. Apple finally admitted that there may have been a problem a batch of nanos. But at the same time denying any problem relating to the iPOD nano being easily scratched. Deleting posts on the Apple forums, or locking existing posts, Apple has taken a new stance to silence any customer who has a complaint with the design/built of their newest iPOD & the media coverage of the emerging issue.

I remember a fairly simple card trick performed by David Copperfield where he used to flip through an entire stack of cards with the front face facing towards the camera. The point of the trick was that he could accurately predict which one you picked. What this meant in a more grandeur fashion is that he made millions of watchers pick a card which he wanted them to choose, in magic speak – “Mind Control”.

The trick was so darn simple yet so accurate that if you saw without reading any further your mind will be controlled by him. The basic idea behind the success of this trick was that David used to flip through the cards at a pace where you could see almost every individual card until he started flipping so fast that you couldn’t read out a single card since the change in pace. So hypothetically speaking say he wanted you to pick 2 of spades he would flip at a fairly slow pace until that card and increase the flipping speed.

Now the basic psychology of a human mind will be to go through all the available choices. So say you first see a “Queen of Hearts” and then see an 8 of clubs and then another card and another until you arrive at the last card you will be seeing until the duration of magic performance. What a person normally tries to do is prepare a mental list of available choices to make a random choice, when suddenly he or she encounters a surprising situation when they’re no longer able to see anymore items in the list. This may not seem such a big deal to them but the shocking change makes them virtually forget about all the items in the mental list except the last one, 2 of spades in this illustration. I could be off a little bit on my explanation, but hey; I’m not a qualified psychologist!

I remember when my school & college friends used to call me "American" due to my sometimes biased opinions about the United States. Ironically I have a truly American disease ... I've had Migraine since late 1996. And mine is predominantly triggered by food as I'm otherwise extremely careful of the other 2 probable triggers viz, bright/flickering lights & sleep deprivation. But food is something that's marvelously deceptive; you can’t tell which food item can cause a migraine. Though I do have a black list which has helped me reduce the average frequency from once per week to one every 3/4 months.
I wish Tom Cruise had migraine, guess he’ll realize in the worst possible manner all about chemical imbalance!
Anyways I’ve had a chance discovery in fall last year, i.e. coffee is a wonderful beverage. It seems it has probably more medicinal value than tea… well atleast in the case of migraine. At the first glimpse of the Aura if I take one tablet of Vasograine and a very strong cup of coffee I’ve had success in escaping from the torturous headache and waste of productive hours. I hope somebody who’s researching into a cure for this awful disease study the affect coffee has! And perhaps come out with a cure.

My yesterday's posting prompted my dear friend Raj Shekhar to lend his precious comments. It was then he noticed that I didn't had Anonymous posts allowed on my blog. And when he told me about it on MSN I thought that it was probably that the default setting was blocking anonymous postings.

Funny thing I spent more than an hour and couldn't find a solution. So I turned to the forums at Community Server, unfortunately I couldn't find anything that helped. Finally I was able to find this post by Sohaib Athar which solved the problem for me. I think I'm gonna make a post into the CS forums for people who are also facing this problem.

The week so far has been quite a ride actually. Got a new Dev. server on Friday which refused to start either in the Ubuntu 'Live CD' or the Fedora Core 4 installation CD, both of which seem to hang when a keyboard input was required. (Keyboard layout selection in case of Ubuntu & CD check prompt in FC4). This initially led me to believe that probably it was because of the USB mouse but despite my replacing it with a classic PS2 mouse it refused to budge. Kinda reminded me of my days in college when there used to be an ISP called Net4India which became pretty popular among my friends as they said it was better than other dialup offerings. But whenever I used to sit in front of a machine with an active connection it simply lay dead or so it seemed as you couldn't even open google's start page, the same was the case with Linux installations if I was asked/forced to install (no matter what flavor) it refused to install. I had never seen a successful installation happen with my own hands. But instead of giving up (there was no choice) I took up the challenge and installed FreeBSD 5.3... The most dreaded of all distributions of Linux! The installation was pretty simple to my surprise, though I couldn't get to successfully enable the X Windows system but the installation was pretty satisfactory, I'd say.

Anyways, I did some research on Sunday evening from home and found that I'm better off installing Fedora Core 4 as it will give me Apache, MySQL, ImageMagick, CVS installed saving me precious time. And from the FAQs on FC4's online installation manual. I found out that my problem could be resolved by disabling either MUX or ACPI.

Monday morning, I installed FC4 by turning off ACPI (finally, success at last!). And despite spending 5 hours on preparing end user's guide for the Admin area of World Press Photo seminars site, I managed to setup 2 virtual hosts as well. Yippee, things are looking promising. But by the evening the rain gods seemed to have taken some pity on Delhi and nearby areas, it rained for almost 12 hours non-stop that day. It might have been good for the crops or perhaps everyone/everything else, but not for me. I waited in the office until 9.30 in the night hoping that the rain would stop or at least slow down a bit but it didn't. So I finally leave for home 36 km away at 10 minutes to 10, knowing I would get drenched completely.

I actually enjoy getting wet in rains, but driving on Delhi streets during the rain is no fun, its rather frustrating  mainly because everybody is racing to reach home and the traffic just stops and even with me being a quite skilled rider on my bike, I got stalled at a number of places. Moreover I didn't want my helmet to get soaked which I had purchased only last week. This further made me restless. So I finally reach home all soaked up at 11.15pm. Thanks go to Daksh, who lent me his bag to put my stuff in, I was able to get my wallet and cellphone back without it getting soaked.

Tuesday, was not that great! Had to struggle with trying to setup MySQL and phpMyAdmin. MySQL was relatively easy but phpMyAdmin got me to a stage where I felt like pulling my hair out, not that I've already lost a lot of it! No thanks to the pollution and water in my area. Anyways something kicked into my brain and I realised that since I used an Application to extract the zip files to the folder I made the root of the phpMyAdmin vHost, perhaps I should make a new folder (as vHost root) and copy files instead of using any app to extract files from a zip file. And voila it worked! But it started to rain again! This time it stopped at around 6 so I race back home only to get all soaked midway. By the time I reached home I got really depressed. Wondering about if I'll ever be able to get in a better situation.

Today it was another battle on the new Linux Box. This time for the FTP server. I don't understand the philosophy behind Unix/Linux permission system. Especially how its translated by various other components and applications. If I set permissions to a folder say /var/www/html to 777 shouldn't a user who is logged into the FTP be able to traverse it?

Anyways, since I already had 2 other major tasks planned for today I left the FTP thing for later and started on the other tasks. Prepared a new Self Installable Windows 2000 CD for Vinay, a fellow Developer, with SP4 Rollup 1 slipstreamed. After that of course I had to set up his box so that when he returns on Thursday he can start work right away, such that his productivity doesn't get hurt in any way. And I'm happy that I was able to restore his machine in a couple of hours.

The other more grueling task was recovering the MySQL table structures (and possibly data) from the crashed hard disk of the old Dev. server machine, though it was my fault in the first place that I didn't take a backup of the databases. I downloaded a tool to help me view EXT3 partitions on Windows and when I was successfully able to export data from the /boot partition which had developed CRC errors with the hopes that somehow maybe the disk will work maybe just as once, gave it a try. Was really delighted to see the machine boot up. woohoo! So I immediately backup all the required DB structures and data. So that this machine can finally rest in peace now. Although it rained in the afternoon, fortunately the clouds scattered by the evening and I was able to reach home with one less worry in my mind.

The week started with a really fast paced and in the past 3 days I have experienced so many emotions, delight, frustration, depression, guilt, success, proud, gaiety, happiness. I know I shouldn't be using both delight and happiness here. But that's really how it was! But the most profound of all the emotions I experienced was hope!

So maybe I am still the lowest earning guy from my graduating class, I don't have a large number of friends (actually they won't be more than half a dozen), I recently lost my best friend in an accident, I have no social life, don't have a girlfriend. I've been wanting to move out and stay away on my own, And I've been struggling to learn .net for more than 1 year now, I still have hope that things will get better. Though its progressing at a snail pace my .net learning is moving ahead. I'm still at least a year away from having a life of my own, but at least I now see that happening for real. Once that happens my social life has a better chance of improving. And its only a matter of time that I'll find a better job offer.

IBM's "Help Desk" has a slew of advertisements that appear on my TV. These commercials cover a wide variety of technologies like RFID, virtual classrooms, webportals presented in a tacky manner as if IBM invented these things, or is the pioneer in these technologies. Almost all the ads are so artificial that anyone who has even the basic understanding of these technologies is left with a feeling of distaste about IBM.

Though I've nothing against IBM in general, I do think that the executive who's responsible with the "Help Desk" campaign has failed to realize that this TV campaign has a fundamental problem in informing its target audience the kind of service they should be expecting from IBM.

Take this ad as an example which I call "The Shepherd". The ad starts with a about half a dozen people arriving at the "Help Desk" in the middle of what appears to be a farm or a sheep ranch surrounding a female "Help Desk" executive who asks them to describe their problem, and everyone starts blabbering all at once. You cannot make out what they're saying. The "Desk Woman", just by looking at them identifies all of them but 1, including a buyer, a shipper, a supplier, and a farmer there could be 1 or 2 more. But I can't recall that right now. Anyways she proposes that what they need is a (now stop laughing will ya?) "Customized Integrated Real Time Web Portal", to keep track of each other. Now she turns to; and asks the one person she couldn't identify who he is. This guy has been holding a shepherd's crook the whole time, so no points to you for guessing who he is! Ironical? I don't think so. Doesn't it make you wonder who's the shepherd of IBM's "Help Desk" TV campaign?

Its probably old news to some. Paul Thurrot made an exclusive report on the latest timelines of Windows Vista, Longhorn Server, WinFS & SQL Server 2005 on the 29th of August. The timelines were a surprise for people mostly because its a very aggressive timeline, Microsoft is now planning to release Vista Beta 2 on Dec.7th far ahead of the last known timeline of March 2006.

But the biggest surprise came from Microsoft when it became known that Microsoft had released Beta 1 of WinFS on Aug. 28th. Forgotten ever since in late August of 2004 when Microsoft revealed that "Longhorn" had been retooled for a 2006 release and that it would not include WinFS (which Microsoft had declared to be one of the 3 pillers of Longhorn in the 2003 PDC) as it became known at that time that WinFS will be available not before Longhorn Server then slated for a 2007 release. This instantly led most people to think that WinFS was, as Paul has put in his preview of WINFS Beta 1; a "Pie in the sky". No one was expecting to hear anything on WinFS in this year when this surprise came in.

Although available only to Windows xp (not even Beta 1 of Vista™), the technology is currently not appealing to the general user. It seems bloated at the moment, obviously because it runs as a system service on top of .NET 2. I still have great expectations from this technology. And I believe by the time it will finally appear our hardwares will make it appear to run without any performance loss.