Amit’s Blog…

27th oh April, 2007… Today, we had the photo shoot for the outgoing students in the evening which was followed by a farewell program later. We thought the photo shoot will be boring and that the farewell dinner would be awesome. Surprisingly, it was the other way round, we had fun during the photo shoot… clicking all sorts of pictures, bashing up people, scribbling and signing friend’s shirts with stupid and funny comments. IT WAS REAL FUN! On the other hand, the farewell dinner full of speeches by the board members of the college and by a few of the students were a real drag. The dinner too wasn’t upto the standard. All of us were indeed disappointed and hence decided to go out for dinner. It was already very late (around 1 AM) so we did not have any choice but to go to a restaurant in the highway. We were there for long until 4 AM. Finally, we decided to leave and come back… reached home and slept. Next morning I came to know, one of our friends was left stranded on the highway as went to the loo when we were leaving… and to add to that, that very day his phone was not working :). .. poor guy!

I had many pictures to be uploaded from this very day but then uploading all these pictures is quite a task. Finally, my dear friend ‘puki’, known here as ‘kalo tara’ sent me a nice collage of some of the nice pictures… making my job much much easier.

The day was indeed important, boring, happy and sad. All of us are going to miss Pune!

Here is the pic… THANX to kalo tara

Its been long since I saw the sunrise in the morning. I have that opportunity today, not because I managed to get up early but because I havent been able to get some sleep yet. I was busy finishing my Final Year project report. Finally managed to finish it all up by 4:30.. I tried sleeping after that…but couldnt. I havent had sound sleep for a week now, sleeping at 4-5 in the morning getting up at 9AM. Now, that I have finally managed to finish the crappy reports which runs into a 100 pages, I thought I could get some sleep. I was wrong… wrong, yet again! My practicals begin on 4th of the next month! Duh! when will I get any rest??!?!?

It has been a real hard, long, busy and tiring day. Just hope that the report I made today (although most of the stuff was done before hand I still had to gather them up.. Index them.. format it.. a lot of work .. boring work!). The UML Diagrams, Software Requirement Specification, Test Scripts, Risk Management, Performance Measurement have now taken a lot out of my brain. Cannot think anymore.. I will try and get some sleep again! Its 6 and I have to meet my project guide at 11.. 4 hours of sleep (ie if I wall asleep right away.)

Phew!!!!

I had Google Analytics to track the visitors to my blog. It worked for the first day and showed zero visitors since then. That was impossible; if not anyone, I visit my blog a couple of times everyday!

Today, when I checked the footer of the template! The google urchin code was missing! I do not know how that happened.. anyways, I have it back and running.. hope it does not disappear again!

Its been a busy day.. got to get some sleep!

For a couple of weeks now, my Vista was responding abnormally to any new device I attached to the notebook. Vista started acting dumb and could not locate the drivers in the c:\windows\system32\driverstore directory. I would have to manually locate the drivers for it.

My bluetooth device was working fine but it would still want to install the driver for it.

After a lot of searching and reading I finally got the solution for it. It is due to a corrupt ‘windows\inf\infcache.1′ file. The easiest fix to this problem is to delete the file. Before you can delete the file, you need to set appropriate user permissions for the file.

There are two things that I cannot live without; those who know me well enough must have easily guessed it by now… the first being my phone and the second my notebook.

I have taken some time out to write a small review about the both.

Nokia N80 Review

A couple of months back, after I was frustrated with the tardiness of Nokia 6708 which came as a replacement to my O2 XDAii Mini I was on a look out for a new phone which was fast and had good connectivity features.

I read reviews of many phones and narrowed down my list to Nokia N73 and N80. Although I was used to touch screens I decided not to go for them because Nokia did not manufacture any good touchscreen phones at the moment and the other manufacturers like O2 and i-mate did not have good customer support… I did not want to repeat the same mistake again (buying O2).

I finally went for N80. N80 has an edge over N73, it is Wi-Fi enabled and I also like the slide form factor over the candy one. If you want a phone for imaging then your obvious choice would be N73 between the two.
Some features of N80.

• Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi… it has all that you could wish for. I use GPRS service provided by Airtel which is EDGE enabled and hence net connectivity is pretty fast… download speed sometimes reaching 10kbps. The best feature of this phone for me is its browsing experience. The web pages are rendered very smartly by the S60 3rd Edition Web Browser which is based on the Safari Browser.
  
   
• Camera: The camera of the N80 is a 3MP camera with 20x optical zoom (which is useless). The picture quality of the phone is excellent in the open. When it comes to taking pictures in the room or in dark, it isn’t that great but good enough to share pictures on the net (by that I mean not good enough for printing). As for the videos, the video quality produced by the camera is pretty bad… I have read that a ROM update would give me better video quality but I am yet to test that.
  
   
• Performance: The phone is very fast although it has its own issues. It does hang sometimes and gets slow. But most of the time a simple reboot is good enough to get it back to normal.
  
   
• Third Party Application: As its based on S60 3rd Edition, there are numerous number of good applications available.
  
   
• Ease of Use: Being used to touchscreen PDAs, it was a bit difficult using this phone in the beginning. But as always Nokia is great with its UI and using this phone was a breeze as well with time. Be it typing msgs or making calls, everything is very easy.
  
   
• Battery Backup: This is only an area where this great phone has disappointed me. It isn’t that great, at max a day. You cant go more than 24hrs without recharging it at any cost and on a busy day you might have to charge it twice.

That’s it for today. It has been a long day, I will continue with the review of HP Pavilion DV6114tx some other day.

P.S. As I write this post, the team I supported has lost yet again! Am I jinxed? West Indies loses yet again.. very sad for Lara’s last match… anyway, at the least the match wasnt boring!

This is one of most beautiful and amazing pictures I have ever seen. It is rare enough to spot a comet in the sky.. but to spot a comet between fireworks and lightning?? What do you think are the chances??

Here is an explanation for the picture above.

On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught continues to move out from the Sun and dim, but should remain visible in southern skies with binoculars through the end of this month. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Source: Astronomy Picture of the Day [Since the picture is from the NASA website, the chances of it being fake are very low..]

I woke up at around 10 today and as soon as I woke up the electricity went off. After 5 mins, I struck me that it would come back today as stated in the new paper the day earlier. I used my laptop for as long as I could. After that, I had nothing to do.

We decided to go for a movie, Shooter. The movie was great.. full of action.. maybe a bit too much but it was good as it kept us away from the heat. On my way back.. I clicked a pic from the bike itself.. and played with it a bit in photoshop.. I like the pic.. here it is..

It has been busy day with project reviews, mock exams and submissions all coming up tomorrow. Anyways, it rained again for a bit today evening and there was no electricity… took a couple of pics before it rained.. Yes! I had nothing better to do.

A couple of weeks back I finally got the Business Edition of Windows Vista. Having read and heard about the features from Subrat of this new much awaited Operating System I was all excited to install it on my notebook (HP Pavilion dv6114tx).

I started off by taking my backup on a couple of DVDs because according to the HP Support Site, the HP Upgrade utility would merge all my partitions for a clean install of the new OS. After taking the backup I started the upgrade which looked easy with the HP Upgrade Utility.

The setup was almost complete into its final step – ‘Completing Installation.’ I was all set to use my new OS but that was not to happen. During this last step, the notebook just turned off without any error or notice and when I Turned On the machine and tried continuing it said it would have to restart the installation process. I tried again and again but with no success. In the end, I had no choice but to turn back to HP Chat Support.

The chat support staff gave me a shock when she told me that the problem could be because the necessary BIOS updates were not applied which are required to run Vista. The HP Upgrade Utility was supposed to upgrade the BIOS and I did see it flashing 44 memory blocks of my BIOS… but it turns out that the BIOS was not updated. So, how do you now update the BIOS? The only way you could update the BIOS is through Windows XP. After 5 hours of troubleshooting I went back to my HP XP Recovery Discs to install XP… and again the DVDs would fail. In the end, I took up an old not-so-licensed copy of Windows XP on my notebook, flashed the BIOS and then started the Vista Installation all over again.

Finally, its done. After 8 hrs - 4 installs of Vista, 2 installs of XP and some troubleshooting I finally got my notebook back to life. I must say, using Vista is so much better. The search facility, the sidebar and the whole UI is just so pleasing and user friendly. Will write more about Vista in another post.