Category Archives: tech

microUSB cellphone charger becomes EU standard

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

Posted in tech | Leave a comment

Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread

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

Posted in tech | Leave a comment

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

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Evaluating Posterous #review #webapp

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Restart/Shutdown your Linux machine using dbus

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Regular expressions in Python by example

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

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

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

Posted in tech | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quick local DNS caching for your workstation in Ubuntu

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The magical moment that made me a FOSS guy forever

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Quick tip: Merging photos from two different cameras

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

Posted in tech | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment