Hell Oh World!

Apparently some banks in India are moving/have moved their IT infrastructure to Windows Vista. Due to that we have to test whether our trading applications work on Vista and, probably, work regularly on Vista if all goes well. CCIL will then have to upgrade all of their computers to make them 'Vista Capable'. Also, as is always the case with Windows, their SP2 (and later) releases are often more stable, so it's best to wait for those if you're obsessed with MS products. Better still, get [KX]?Ubuntu :)

But really, why would these banks want Vista so bad? Either their IT guys just don't get it or they have too much money to throw around on broken backward compatibility, Treacherous Computing, DRM, memory hogs and irritating UAC.

And guess what, the first thing our support guy did when setting up Vista was to turn off all security features. Way to go! :)

I recently got both Sify and MTNL broadband connections working at home and contrary to what many have been saying, I've found Sify to be slightly faster and more importantly, consistent compared to MTNL. I've put together a little script that will make it easier for my mother to switch between mtnl and sify when I'm not around. It's basically simply upping one interface and downing the other along with copying resolv.conf for sify.

One issue with MTNL is that if the modem reboots, the interface gets disabled and does not get enabled automatically. I'm using USB (with DHCP, probably this is why) since I've already used up the two eth ports on my system (one for sify and one for my Celeron dabba). Hopefully I'll get this sorted out by this weekend.

The tooltips for status window are done and I'm wondering why nobody's written the widget and published it yet. If someone has and I haven't found it then I must really suck at searching. Anyways, I've now learnt how to write custom widgets in GTK, so all is good :)

Philip suggested I look at Gaim's method but those guys had written the tooltip code along with the status window code. So we have a more modular approach in that case. The outcome is not very different looking for now -- I want it to look even better though.

I had thought that it would not be possible to pirate Vista but I guess I was wrong as expected. I just saw a copy of Vista ultimate on the stands at Andheri for 150 INR and a Norton antivirus 2007 for 50 INR

Just imagine, a copy of Norton 2007 for 2000 INR + Windows Vista starting at 22,000 INR and Office at 6000 INR (from www.pcworld.in) and that's not the end of it. So software would cost us more than 30,000 INR if there was no piracy.

And my computer cost me only 26,000 INR last year. The OS cost me 10 INR (cost of a CD) which was all I needed for my Debian Netinst ;-)

Transparency on Smileys and icons is finally working correctly for ayttm. I feel stupid for missing out on a very obvious solution. Thanks to a post on gnomesupport.org for the solution.

Also, I forgot to mention in my previous post that I got the mouse movement and click concept for the anchor tag from koders.com. It is originally from the gtk-demo application that comes with gtk+.

Yes, it finally has a new HTML parser. The gtk_eb_html.c/extgtktext.c combo had to go out because of the immense difference between gtk1 and gtk2. There's a lot still to go before ayttm-gtk2 becomes official I guess.

There are still a few chinks in the chat windows as of now that haven't been resolved yet. For one, the smileys and icons look awful since I haven't got the transparencies right at all. I'm still working on them.

One thing's for sure, I'm learning a lot from this :-)

I've now got the html parser bit working in ayttm. I've re-written the entire thing since the entire approach to styling is different here. I wrote styling of only the bold tag today and will weed out all the GTK warnings before I put in the rest of the tags. I'll commit when I'm through with everything that used the old gtk_eb_html stuff.

My back's killing me.

Last two days went with me setting up Linux based systems up for a night school in Kandivali. This was with Yuj, an initiative by college ex-students of Fr. Agnel to first enable and then connect all NGOs, schools and universities to form a strong collaboration platform.

We managed to get one computer running yesterday. That was already set up by Abhilash, he was only stuck with the X configuration which I helped him out with. The other two are still stuck. One of them doesn't have a hard disk. The other has the stuff but strangely, it locks up while loading packages from the CD. All these are ancient run-down computers with barely 2 BG to 4 GB HDDs so Ubuntu barely fits in. Hopefully more power is on the way with more funding expected from some corporates.

I'm back after a long sabbatical (only 3 days actually ;) ) since kite flying took its toll on my LAN cable.

I was going through my company portal today and I found that we have a product that helps people to think and companies to develop Thinking Organizations. It is based on Edward deBono's Six Thinking Hats theory wherein a person must take on a complete mindset that is suitable for a particular situation and then think of a solution to that situation. The software apparently aids this mindset transition and helps keep tab of what they call Thinking Sessions. A lot of management speak, but honestly it's got me a bit curious at least, if not interested.

Basically it says, "To catch a serial killer, think like one" in a hundred or so pages to earn the author a few million :) No offense to Edward deBono, just that the message was that obvious, or so it seems to the uninformed non-reader (me). But yes, I guess most times we miss such obvious things such as aligning ourselves to the situation we face.

LiveJournal seems like a decent place to write except that it has very limited features and is cluttered with ads. I've finally managed to get a style I like, so now I can get on with the business of writing.

I'm Siddhesh Poyarekar from Mumbai, India. I'm a programmer and I work on FOSS projects. I'm currently working on ayttm, a multi-protocol instant messenger.

My Pages:

• My website
• Our Blog -- I share it with my fiancee