Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Railsconf 2007 videos
I have been waiting for these videos for long. Now that Railsconf 2008 registrations are open, the Railsconf 2007 videos are available. Though I have not yet had time to view all of them, I have noticed that the slides are not visible in the videos which is unfortunate.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Web 2.0 workplaces
The workplaces in any startup are bare of any extravagant furnitures and cabin rooms. The mantra is to keep working towards the issues at hand and leave everything else behind. Here are couple of snapshots of some web 2.0 startups. There is a lot that the corporate setups (rather people working for them) can learn from these folks. As a programmer, it's so inspiring to see another programmer working with full intensity, ignorant of everything else that's happening around in a rather frugal setup.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Upgrading sandbox
I have been busy for the past couple of weeks trying to breathe some life into an old PC/desktop. This system was not with me for the last 3 years. And it has been an exciting and tiring journey since then. It didn't have a network adapter card (I had assembled this one almost 6 years back and in those days the motherboards didn't come with built-in network adapter and sound card). I got an Intex RTL 8139D LAN card from SP road for Rs150. I chose this one just because this was the cheapest of the lot (DLink was double the price) and the WLAN wireless USB one were more than 1000 bucks. The card did get detected on Win98 after some effort.
However, getting the card working on linux has been horrible experience. Not sure if it was worth the bucks I was trying to save by not buying the DLink or any other known card. This Intex card has the sc92031 chipset from Silan Technologies, a chinese company (not Realtek as I had thought). I had fedora linux with a 2.6 kernel. And the drivers that came with the card worked only with 2.4 and 2.5 kernel. Found on the net that some guys had fixed the driver code for 2.6 kernel. And so I compiled the same and loaded the module. But the card didn't work, and I don't know why. Finally found that this chipset has been supported (experimental) in 2.6.21 kernel. I was planning to download the kernel sources and build the image with the card support. However, the latest ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) had the newer kernel (2.6.22) and supported the card and upgraded to ubuntu. Hence I now have the Gutsy Gibbon up and running quite well and the network adapter seems to be working fine though I have not tried to do any highly data intensive activities. So far so good...
Forgot to mention that the system initially had 128 MB RAM and had to upgrade the same. Again off I went to SP Road and found that this version of RAM is no longer being used by anyone and is not a running item. Which for anyone familiar with the SP Road terminology literally meant that the same was available for a price. The 128MB RAM that I had was DDR1 233 MHz module. The 1 GB RAM was priced around Rs2300 and 512 MB was around Rs.1100. I finally opted for 512 MB and brought the same. And the machine horse power is now good enough for light applications though no where near the dual core 1GB RAM systems that one sees around now a days. However I am quite happy with the end result.
As I said earlier, it's been an exciting time...opening up the cabinet, fiddling around with the motherboard, bending the cabinet to fit in the cards, installation and re-installation and so on. It had been a while I had done something like this.
However, getting the card working on linux has been horrible experience. Not sure if it was worth the bucks I was trying to save by not buying the DLink or any other known card. This Intex card has the sc92031 chipset from Silan Technologies, a chinese company (not Realtek as I had thought). I had fedora linux with a 2.6 kernel. And the drivers that came with the card worked only with 2.4 and 2.5 kernel. Found on the net that some guys had fixed the driver code for 2.6 kernel. And so I compiled the same and loaded the module. But the card didn't work, and I don't know why. Finally found that this chipset has been supported (experimental) in 2.6.21 kernel. I was planning to download the kernel sources and build the image with the card support. However, the latest ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) had the newer kernel (2.6.22) and supported the card and upgraded to ubuntu. Hence I now have the Gutsy Gibbon up and running quite well and the network adapter seems to be working fine though I have not tried to do any highly data intensive activities. So far so good...
Forgot to mention that the system initially had 128 MB RAM and had to upgrade the same. Again off I went to SP Road and found that this version of RAM is no longer being used by anyone and is not a running item. Which for anyone familiar with the SP Road terminology literally meant that the same was available for a price. The 128MB RAM that I had was DDR1 233 MHz module. The 1 GB RAM was priced around Rs2300 and 512 MB was around Rs.1100. I finally opted for 512 MB and brought the same. And the machine horse power is now good enough for light applications though no where near the dual core 1GB RAM systems that one sees around now a days. However I am quite happy with the end result.
As I said earlier, it's been an exciting time...opening up the cabinet, fiddling around with the motherboard, bending the cabinet to fit in the cards, installation and re-installation and so on. It had been a while I had done something like this.
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