Entries from August 2006 ↓

The new office preparations are on the way. A lot of problems from the contractors, the builder and suppliers, but we are moving forward. The rains have delayed the schedules a lot - the PoP work did not dry quickly, water leakage started from the floor above ours and workers do not turn up on time. We have had to put two full time people from our side on the development site to keep track of things. Ashok has to visit the site twice every day to ensure things are going fine. Despite all this, there have been a lot of troubles.

The systems setup is moving slowly as well. The LG LCDs and VXL Thin Clients are lying at my home these days as we don’t have a place to keep them in either offices right now. We have made a move to Ubuntu as a standard platform for desktops and servers. Got the new LDAP server working yesterday. Kartik and Ali are working on SMB-LDAP and Windows integration right now. We have decided to use Webmin to manage all the internal servers. The Asterisk work is in a fix since the guy who was working on it quit the organization abruptly. Kartik is also looking into SVN setup and I am wondering if we can have multiple levels in that setup. So people first check in to their team server, and then it automatically goes to the cenral file server.

The new office is going to be pretty exciting

I wrote earlier that we tried Corel Draw X3’s trace feature earlier and were very happy. We used it to create the wall poster for our new office. The poster is now ready and I have uploaded a low res version here.

It’s taken a lot of work to make this poster! We learnt a lot about Corel Draw, tracing images, some great features that helped shorten the work and flex printing. It was also a good experience to collect so much of content for the poster. The idea was that if somebody goes to the poster, s/he should be able to find something or the other interesting. And that the content should not loose value over time. We have done almost all the graphic work in vector format and hopefully the print will come out crisp now!

Moving the focus to the computer system now

Note: Content copyrights with respective owners.

Alright, as promised, here’s the video from CNBC Young Turks interview.

I am getting a lot more spam comments these days. There are pretty interesting comments nowadays. Looks like either people have written intelligent bots or there are actual human beings posting spam comments. The comments would refer to some of the content and then make an opinion or ask a question. Would look like a legitimate comment, but if you check out the IP address / Email - they are spammers.

I’ve got WP HashCash setup on this WordPress installation. This comment spam protection plugin basically generates a hash key and compares it when the comment is posted. If it’s valid, the comment will be allowed. I am thinking how am I getting so many spam comments evenn with HashCash installed. Is it broken? Or is it the usual “cracker is one step ahead of the hacker” thingie?

When I reviewed the Mac OS Leopard announcements yesterday, the first reaction was - “oh, ok. Nothing ground breaking. But it looks good.”

I liked the style of Time Machine but am not sure if I would find much use of it. I think it would be a waste of my hard disk space. Spaces (virtual desktops) has been there for years on Linux so that was not new either. The other additions are progressive. Moving forward in good direction.

And then I recalled that Apple had released Tiger just a while ago! So it is a good strategy to keep releasing your software every two years - or even more frequently. Adobe / Macromedia does the same, and I think this gives a very good edge over the competitors. The users are willing to experiment and provide feedback, so you are essentialy moving in the right direction.

Lifehacker has a comparison of the features promised in Leopard and Vista. It’s a good read.

And while I was reading all that - I was just thinking what’s coming up on Ubuntu? Or Fedora? And why is it that Linux is just “catching up” with the other OSes? Why can’t we bring some innovative solutions on the desktop user experience? I am thinking what I can do on this… hmm…