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...