Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

Yesterday was one of my worst computer days of my life. I had trouble installing debian on a particular area on my hard drive, consistently. I tried reinstalling about 15 times on that area but every time something would fail. And the annoying thing about the debian install is the fact that it does never give error messages like beloved windows. It just stops bang in the middle, no sign of life.

Even naughtier than that was the way windows treated me. I went back to windows after the hundredth unsuccessful debian netinstall. So I decide that windows can have the crappy partition and I?ll give a better area of my hard drive to debian.? So I go to disk management (remember kids, this is stupid, use a decent partition manager) and when I try erasing the partition, Windows gives me a nice little bubble saying that there was a delayed write and my partitions are lost. And that too in a little warning bubble. Hello? Do you fu*ing hear me Mr. Gates? 3 years of music collections, 5698 songs, 29.2GB, all wiped. All my project work, all my downloads, all my server data, visual studio, and everything all GONE and what does it show me? A stupid mofoking bubble which disappears when I click on it and it?s gone.

I almost threw up and felt dizzy. I always felt secure about my data. I never really faced hard drive problems before. So I had to recollect myself and I had a dvd full of diagnostic tools and basically a computer unf***ing kit. I recovered my partitions and got my data back. I knew what was wrong. I had a partition table corruption. This was in a way my worst fear. I had to perform a full low level wipe of my 80gb hard drive. I freed up space on my backup 40 gb hard drive and backed up my most important files and mirrored some of my most precious and rare music on a dvd.

I nearly fainted after I had to confirm the wipe. I used a bootup utility and it asked for four confirmations making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing. It took nearly 20 mins to finish the job.

Once it was done, I pulled my Fedora Core 6 DVD out. Funny really. I got windows XP three years after it released. I?m installing operating systems three days after they release now. The install worked fine with only one minor hitch and the desktop looked great. Then I was greeted by pleasant news that there?ll be a local mirror for fedora core 6 repositories available in a couple of days. There was a happy ending after all.

More on FC6 later.

On an endnote, I might add to my shock and amazement the brilliance of mandriva programmers. Earlier I?d tried installing mandriva on the faulty partition and this is what it told me:

?I?m afraid I can?t read the partition tables on /dev/hdb/ because the partition tables may be corrupt Of course, I can erase the partition tables and rewrite them but I?m afraid you?ll lose all your data and partitions. Or you can configure the filesystem manually with partdrake.

Do you agree to lose all your data??

(o) Yes
( ) No

Whoah, a first person error message. Microsoft should take a word? or two from these guys. It won?t be long before we?ll be seeing.

?oops, my bad?

And yes. There was indeed an emoticon in my error message.

Many people have firefox extensions they can’t live without. And some are incompatible with firefox 2.0. The funny part is that most extensions work with firefox 2.0, here’s how to do it:

Disclaimer: This might not work with all extensions. I use firefox with only one extension(CSS viewer). This did not work with 2.0 but after doing this, it worked. A lot of other extensions worked to.

1. Back up your stuff: Things can go wrong. Though it’s not likely, there is a small chance the extension can mess things up.
2. Find the download page for the extension you want.
3. Right click the install link and click “save link as” and save it somewhere you can find it.
4. Open the file with an archiving utility like winrar/winzip or tar.
5. Extract all the files.
6. Open the install.rdf. and look for a section that looks like this - the (=< and )=>
   (em:minVersion)1.0(/em:minVersion)
   (em:maxVersion)1.5.0.*(/em:maxVersion)
7. Change it to this
   (/em:minVersion)1.0(/em:minVersion)
   (/em:maxVersion)2.0(/em:maxVersion)
   (I can’t use angle brackets as firefox reads it as html)
8. Save it and zip the entire folder again, with the install.rdf and manifest in the root directory. Save the file as .xpi file.
9. Drag and drop this new xpi file into firefox, and install it when the prompt comes.
10. Enjoy, hopefully.

I made quite a bit of progress in my opengl, more on this later. But I was assigned another task for kshitij webteam work.

Material: 250 pages of share prices copy-pasted into a .doc file.
Task: Add all the data into a sql database
Current proposed solution:
Copy paste. Will require an average user about 6-7 hours of work. And prone to be very buggy.

What I tried to do:
Convert the html into unicode and parse it. Strip out all formatting and tags between << and >>. Now look for a repeating pattern and store the appropriate data in a memory buffer from which you make an sql file where all the commands are placed for easy addition into a server via phpmyadmin for web access and php use.

My experience:
I used visual studio for the first time in a non guided project. Since I was a veteran of writing quick easy console programs, I was able to get hello world program running with medium effort. I got up some reference docs about CString in firefox in the background and started the coding. Wrote a little testing function with CStrings to familarize myself with them and things worked fine. I tried printing them with cout, when I had a error. After some typecasting issues, I tried using the GetBuffer function to make some use but it just kept printing the memory address of the variable, and even printf did the same thing. I looked online and realized cout and cstring don’t like each other. So I decided to chuck it and wrote the code in dev-c++ 5beta, and the code compiled. I haven’t used STL much so I resorted to using strings in their most primitive format and wrote a simple, surprisingly efficient code to parse the entire code and ignore anything unless an >> is encountered and until a <<. The code compiled but the compiler kept telling me that the fstream header was deperceated. I didn’t have time to look in the net for updated headers. I ended up uysing them anyway and they worked surprisingly well. So I ran them on the html code generated by word and the results was scary. The size of the file, instead of falling, increased by a factor of four and the text was unreadable. Some tweaking later realized that this is no ordinary html, so had to abandon that. Seems like we’ll have to copy paste. I went to a seniors room and he proposed something that made me want to kick myself.

His solution:
Copy paste the entire document in excel and export in csv after applying delimiters and then adding to the sql database. Too simple to be true, and it dind’t work because there was an inconsistent number of fields.

My final solution:
Make the file into excel and export as a comma seperated values file. This worked but made no sense when viewed raw. So I wrote code to first load a large number of lines into a buffer. Sort it into the four - the three tables and junk lines. Write three seperate files and independently parse them and make loading of files into the sql easy.

The current problem:
I was crippled without cout to display realtime debugging information(I still don’t use all the great debugging features like watches yet, for some reason) i display values of results of critical function for debugging purposes. That and cstring still had some problems. Ultimately rushin solved my problem by telling me that there are inbuilt console printing functions. And that rocks. Now with cfile and cstring in my palm I can fix this up.

But not today. Have to mug and do illu kaam.
will Update when done.

I have a long, yet justified absence and I apologize to all two of you who actually read this stuff.

I’ve been studying. Things look bleak on the academic front and reinforcements are in order.
Linux: Fiddling around with debian and ubuntu on vmware. I’m downloading sabayon.
Coding: Learning Visual C++ gui programming
Illu kaam when I can(I should do a bit more)
Exercise
Going and watching WTMS practice

so I justified my abence ad assure that I’ll write more soon.

This is part 1 of a 2 part article.
Part 2 here

I was bored. Terribly bored. Bored of Five years of the same goddamn desktop. The blue and the green and the supposed eye candy. I had kubuntu installed on another partition and was excited but I did something stupid and destroyed it.

I was pretty sure of not switching to linux because I liked windows, despite all the negative hype, and had hope that vista would have something interesting up it’s sleeve. Then, driven by the lack of things to do, I got a copy of vista rc2, 5744 for 64 bit and installed it, effectively destroying the installation of linux I’d ruined while playing around a few days back.

The installation was more or less straightforward except for the partitioning, which was absolutely terrible. Despite the eye candy, I had difficulty finding the disk/partition options to allow me to format it, which didn’t give me any warning about the data that’s being erased. It didn’t make it clear which hard drive and label of the partition that’s being erased. But five years of installing various operating systems(9 linux distros, win-all and macosx) allowed me to figure out what’s to be done, but… unfortunately might not be for most other people. Now that it was done, before I knew it, installation began. No double triple warning like xp installation. That kindof pissed me off. and it told me the minimum size for a hard drive is 15gb. I had to format my nearby swap partition to just reach 15 gb and let it install.

After what seemed like ages I was at the desktop. ‘Pretty impressive’ I thought to myself. Two completely useless sidebar widgets one for the time and a scratch pad. I had trouble looking for drivers when none of my drivers installed. For some reason all the alpha blending worked and the directX version was 10. Apparently vista used some generic driver and sound and networking worked fine. Though still there seemed to be some problem with the hardware and I downloaded the 88.61 forceware drivers from nvidia but that failed to work. I got my music up and running in media player 11 which is more impressive than meda player 10 but sucks ass compared to amaroK.

Things I liked about vista.
1. Improved File management system. It’s a little easier with favourite links and I like what they did to the address bar which is, in my opinion, shamelessly copied from nautilus.
2. Network Configuration: Hats off to microsoft for a brilliant network and sharing manager, which diagnosed my internet problems as a bad proxy connection(like I didn’t know that) I had to go the same extreme depth to configure the proxy(to think they’d have made it easier)
3. The speed: To my surprise, visa isn’t as slow as I thought it’d be. Mostly because of my comparitively bleeding edge hardware and my supercool super powerful graphics card. But also, yes, it does work faster.
4. Disk caching: I found that my free ram was 2mb. I freaked and was about to shut down and figured out it might be similar to what I used to have in linux, and yes, it was a disk cache, another seemingly liftoff from linux.
5. Indexing and media gathering: The user folder is more accessible. And all media is together, though my 21gb music collection won’t fit in this partition.
6. Media Center: I loved it. It was pathetic and as useless as dead dung beetles, but I loved it nevertheless. IT hogged my whole screen and put all my album artwork in a really neat pile allowing me to search, though using it in daily life is gonna be a big problem.
7. System Benchmarking: Vista assigns a score to your computer which helps you choose software, which is mainly balderdash, but interesting. I’ve never bought software based on a single rating. All games have a low graphics mode and the minimum system requirements are pretty cheap nowadays.

But all of the above(except maybe in the file management, can be done in xp. And definitely allp can be topped in linux)

New features which I found absolutely useless:
1. The themes: I’ve been studying digital asthetics for a few months and I can guess that this is not the bes that can be done and microsoft should’ve shipped atleast 10 more themes.
2. Aero: It’s of obviously good, but what for. I like the windows flipping by but who’d want to pay so much for that. Also, if you do, how many days will you go before it becomes “just another thing”. All the pretty effects and the ui is not important after a while.
3. Shadow system and backing up: Fine, there might be a time when I want to revert back a file that I “accidentally” modified. Now is that worth making previous copies or whatever of every fricking file on the disk.
4. The control panel: While hoping to be more helpful and intuitive, I had to struggle to find slightly more advanced options. All vista does is put ten crappy settings a baby knows how to change and makes it supposedly intuitive. I still haven’t figured out how to disable the file shadow thing.

What you’ll be paying $300(average upgrade=260/fresh=400) for:
1. a new, fine, let’s admit it, pretty theme, where windows fade in and out and fly around when you want them to.
2. A simple photo organizer and video maker and a simple mail application.
3. A simple system benchmarking tool.
4. A better file organizing software.
5. A welcome center which helpfully allows you to buy more microsoft stuff.
6. Windows XP(more or less)

Hope that puts things a bit more in perspective.

PART 2