Saturday, December 19, 2009

Worst Experience

I'm currently staying at Renaissance Orlando Airport Hotel in Orlando, Florida. This is by far the worst hotel (value -for-money wise) that I have ever stayed in. They charge $9.95 per day (+ tax) for Internet!!! Majority of hotels give Internet for free and few have nominal charges. This is exorbitant for something that should have been free to start with. Being a 4-star, the rates aren't cheap, breakfast is not included and this is extortion. Amenities in room are basic, nothing great, in fact they are not even 4-star grade as many 3-star have better room layout and amenities. Unfortunately, I'm stuck here for next 3 days. Never again.

Holiday Inn Express at Des Moines, Iowa was a much better hotel that this. And that's just 2.5-star.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Lovely Monsoon Rain... Finally in Noida

Finally, we had rain the way we wanted... full wrath of monsoon...

I enjoyed getting all soaked up and so did my family... getting wet in rain combined with dance music and Chivas Regal on the rocks is a damn good combination... so liberating... it made me forget the enormous loss I had in day today in margin trading on NSE...

Getting sober again now after all the fun... and it is still raining though the fury has subsided considerably.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Trying to Fix Broken Fedora 11 Install

My tryst with Fedora 11 started on a bad note. First, preupgrade from Fedora 10 couldn't resume where it left off earlier, due to some python errors. Tried couple of times to resume, but didn't succeed. Perhaps, some patch release fixed and preupgrade finally worked.

After downloading all required packages, I hit that button to reboot and continue install. Mid way thru the install, the screen goes blank.. no error but just to save power... but my hitting shift key to wake it up, fired keysym package errors and resulted in broken install. bad omen!!! never before I have seen a linux crib about key press...

Anyway, the system boots up back to fedora 10 but look at it... the keyboard no longer works!!!

My attempts to fix the broken install failed. the rpm repository is perhaps damaged beyond repair.Somehow I managed to boot the machine with same install image from preupgrade. Not much help. Didn't go well at all...

So I have a broken F-10 that won't work due to no keyboard (and thus I can't login). Finally, I decided to download fresh F-11 images...

Booting F-11 live from USB is the only thing that has worked since...

F-11 DVD download resulted in bigger problem. My other laptop doesn't have DVD burner. So somehow using that damaged laptop remotely to burn the DVD image from other laptop, I got a F-11 DVD. Directly mounting image is not working as it is on LVM and F11 not able to recognize that during installation.

Now, latest is that F-11 complains that DVD I burned remotely is not good... test is failing after 85%... I'm running low of patience on this...

Thursday, July 02, 2009

N97 Maps?

The post at guardian claims that maps from Nokia don't work. I have an E90 and have been using maps for quite some time. They keep getting better with every new upgrade to phone OS. Though, I miss a couple of features from good old initial days in maps (easiness to mark a landmark on map is no longer there) but the quality and accuracy of these maps is awesome, even in India. Perhaps the author didn't know how to load maps using Nokia Map Loader...

I have use the maps, GPS navigation and voice guidance in USA as well as India on E90 and it has worked extremely well. The fact that maps are stored on phone memory (or in SD card, in my case) means that it is much faster to load (about 1 sec). GPS has worked very well and latest release has added location positioning from telcos towers while GPS signal is still being acquired to give a better initial experience.

Not to say that there isn't room for improvement, but I find it much better than various other options I have seen for its size.

I wish there was a video out on E90...

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Fairytale...

Kamran Khan story is very interesting and shows that if you have got dedication, you can overcome the odds. It shows that there are always opportunities, even in a country like India, for a dedicated sportsman. Wish him further rise and would like to see him play in national team.

I also think, apart from auction of players, there should be a performance linked pay which is same for all players. It was disheartening to see Kamran getting 16,000 GBP while Flintoff went for 1.5 million USD.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Videsh: Heaven on Earth: Torture

This is one movie that I regret watching... pure waste of time... It is not in imdb yet otherwise I would have voted it 1/10.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Fedora 10 Basic Up and Running

I was able to install Fedora 10 using USB boot and it has been successfully update to include latest updates as well as openoffice... next step, testing out hardware compatibilities for my use...

Saturday, February 21, 2009

My Tryst with Windows Vista

Well, today, my tryst with windows vista ends, for now...

Finally, I have managed to corrupt the partition table of my HP laptop's hard disk (that's what it looks like to me). The recovery option on boot up (F11) is not working. HP does not give recovery CDs so that means that I have reached the point of no return...

It all started with I bought this laptop about 10 months back. Vista didn't impress me at all. Given that I had successfully managed to install x86_64 on my earlier laptop that was perhaps first to be shipped with Anthlon-64 way back in 2004, I decided to give this laptop dual boot the day I bought it :). I like linux enough to start on this route... anyway, that meant shrinking windows partition and as someone who tried shinking partitions on vista would know already, windows does not give up space as easily. It kept occupying huge space unreasonably that could otherwise be freed. Anyway, I managed a near perfect install of Fedora 9 and got everything working including my TV and my Music System from it... but it was too good to last...

Vista never worked without problems, occasional freezing issues that became too frequent and its refusal to upgrade to SP1. Finally I upgraded to SP1 that lasted for few good days and problems came back... Today, I decided, enough is enough and decided to delete vista partition from hard disk and recreated a smaller one and thought that HP recovery partition would reinstall in that... but that was not to be...

So, today, I'm downloading Fedora 10 now and with a complete reformat of HDD, going one way... I have forgetten some tweaks so I thought let's use blog to keep track... so here is an effort...

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Belated Happy New Year!

Well, after long time, I get to post a happy new year greeting to all my blog readers... enjoy where you are.

I have been busy these times, with a course that I'm doing as well as customer engagements and traveling to US... haven't found breathing space yet but I need to start some anyway.