Vacation Slip

As I was thinking of what to write under “Reason for Leave” I wondered whether “Desperate need of free Internet” qualifies as a legit one.
In retrospect, maybe it does.

PS: read free as in free speech not free beer :-)

PPS: This post was made through the “free” Internet.

How important is your computer’s screen?

Answer: Very.

Off the shelf notebooks never have any kind of decent screen configuration. Laptop giants are too busy focusing their buyers’ attention to the unnecessarily huge HDDs or the unnecessarily huge RAMs.
Most laptops these days have gloss finish screens. No matter how bright these screens are, they turn into mirrors with the introduction of even minimal ambient light.
Some things about the screen that most buyers don’t know till they see their laptops, [or maybe even after that :)] are:
LED vs CCFL:
LED: Light Emitting Diode
CCFL: Cold Cathode Fluorescent Tube
These are the two kinds of LCD lighting features. According to me, LED is much better as it gives crisper colours, has lower power consumption (meaning more battery life), higher brightness range, and lower dimming over time.

Gloss vs Matte:
This is the type of the finish of the screen. As I said gloss screens have this problem of turning into mirrors. Matte screens are better in ambient light but need to be kept very clean (from personal experience).

Making these two choices and getting my computer configured for this did cost me a few bucks more, but it has given its sweet rewards as I can now enjoy working on my computer without straining my eyes at any random place.
Note: I also use my computer with a blank white document opened at full brightness as a table lamp sometimes :)

back to linux

I refuse to give up my right of choosing my OS in lieu of a few hours of battery life.

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008

Help set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours for firefox 3. It’s gonna be awesome \m/

click here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Internship

Well, it turns out that somebody found my CV interesting enough to read and give me a call for a interview on the phone. The interview was held long ago, just before the first day of my comprees! It was decent, I mean that I really did not expect to clear the interview as I was told that there were a lot of applicants for the internships at Oneirix Labs , but then I got a mail on 5th may saying:

Hi Eeshan,

Congratulations! You are selected for an internship at Oneirix Labs. Please
intimate your acceptance of the offer and tell us when you will be able to
begin working for the internship project.

That was the happiest day I had in quite some time, as my exams were causing my slow and painful death… Well, then after I came home, I started on the internship on last Monday, and today I have completed one week of the internship.
The amount of knowledge I have gained(read as:knowledge not information*) in this one week of internship has been astounding.
I got introduced to:

• Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
• Octave (Open Source equivalent of MATLAB)
• How Open Source Softwares are actually coded.(And their architecture)
• Working of Parsers(Lex+YACC)
• And well, editing all the above things, except Ubuntu

The most important thing that the internship did, is to tell me that no task is impossible to attack, its just a matter of patience and strong will to actually make in rodes into any problem out there. I would have laughed at anyone who told me a month ago that I was going to read, understand and edit a 4153 line C++ code in the next month…

*->There is a subtle difference, I shall write upon that in future posts.

Switching to WordPress

For those who don’t know, I had a blog on blogspot once upon a time. There are various reasons why I switched to WordPress:

• Well, my college has blocked blogspot, for no logical reason as far as I can see, (but then again, if it actually went on logic, would it be my college?)
• WordPress is better, is what I had heard, and now I find it to be true.
• I am a bit disappointed though, because my blog on blogspot had finally reached recognition, as in it was featured on google search when I searched for my name.

The reason that I did not retain the earlier posts were that basically the posts on the earlier blog were very crowd specific, and half the people who read my blog did not understand a thing of it, because it was not aimed at them. Also, the blog was more of philosophy, than nonsense, which I had set out to actually have.

This new blog is another attempt at blogging (the first time not being exactly a success) This time around, I have decided that I will write more regularly, although I cannot be sure that I will actually do that. The good thing is that this blog will not contain the philosophical shit that was there in the earlier blog, this one will have quite some amount of nonsense in it.