Category Archives: tech

microUSB cellphone charger becomes EU standard

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Sandip Bhattacharya

The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular microUSB format. via blogtechnical.com Finally. It took over a decade (in Indian market) to get … Continue reading →

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Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Theodore Ts’o reports that … Starting with Gingerbread, newer Android phones (starting with the Nexus S) will be using the ext4 file system. Android Arena mentions one of the main advantages: YAFFS is single-threaded, which would have been a bottleneck … Continue reading →

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Indian Open Standards policy finalized, with a major victory for the FOSS community

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Amazing work by all the people involved! Venkatesh Hariharan reported on the Linux Delhi mailing list today: The open standards policy has been finalized and it incorporates many of the suggestions made by the FOSS community in India. In the … Continue reading →

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Evaluating Posterous #review #webapp

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

I am trying out this post aggregator called Posterous. It allows you to use email for posting to many other sites where you post content, like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It has a neat idea of specific email addresses like … Continue reading →

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Restart/Shutdown your Linux machine using dbus

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Ok. This is fairly trivial stuff for many of you, but what I found interesting is that the SystemBus lets you shutdown/restart/suspend/hibernate as an ordinary user. Of course, if you think of a desktop, that is a pretty basic expectation … Continue reading →

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Regular expressions in Python by example

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

Every time I come back to Python from the land of Perl here at work, I need to re-learn how to use regular expressions in Python, as it is, IMHO, quite a bit different from Perl. Rather than trawling through … Continue reading →

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The constant conflict between the Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

This is something that has bothered me always for the past several years, especially in the period when I was working on my own. Paul Graham has managed to put this so eloquently into words: … There are two types … Continue reading →

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Quick local DNS caching for your workstation in Ubuntu

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

The latest Ubuntu releases makes it real easy to set up a local DNS cache for your workstation using dnscache from the well-known djbdns software by D. J. Bernstein. For those who have historically installed djbdns/ucspi-tcp/daemontools from source because of … Continue reading →

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The magical moment that made me a FOSS guy forever

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

11 years back, I was just yet another guy out of college with a background of Turbo C/C++ and Pascal as most other batchmates of mine. My software career could have gone anywhere. PC Quest Linux was just a toy … Continue reading →

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Quick tip: Merging photos from two different cameras

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Sandip Bhattacharya

This time when we went to Pondicherry on the year end, we took two cameras – I took my Rebel XTi and my wife the LX3. While uploading our photos to Flickr, we had a problem. We wanted to merge … Continue reading →

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