Now now, don’t get me wrong. I am not recommending and writing about installation of Windows 8 over Linux. Infact, I am not recommending you guys to install Windows 8 (W8) at all except if you like me are developers and creators at heart and would like to do some applications for Windows Phone 8 (WP8). Microsoft being the good guys (deeply sarcastic if you don’t get me) have released a 1.5GB download for tools related to WP8 development. It also includes a gratis version of Visual Studio 2012 Express edition!

After a couple of philosophy articles, I am back to my usual self writing about technology and related rants. This time, I will write about a heated discussion that happened between me and my fellow colleague. And that was on 2 points. So let the rant begin. Now before I begin, let me write that these days I am doing a lot of coding in C. So assume C in the below discussions.

I got a lot of positive feedback on my previous article and I have been asked to write more and share my views on philosophy in general and on Sanatana Dharma in particular. And it is my duty to do so and spread what I have learned from all the books that I have read and my personal experience. I will keep using the same style of writing i.e. define certain words so that all of us get on the same page and similar line of thinking before I start writing anything. Of course parts of it will be controversial and there will be a lot of readers who will disagree and outright disapprove but thats the good thing about Sanatana Dharma. You don’t have to agree to neither everything nor anything. And still the whole world can leave in peace and harmony. Lets point out some important words here.

The below rant contains some very strong words and is not for the faint hearted! Lets start by clearing the definitions of certain words that I am going to use in my article.

- Xenophobe: Xenophobia is a dislike or fear of people from other countries or of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia). Xenophobes are the people suffering from Xenophobia.

- Pseudo-Seculars: Pseudo-secularism is the state of implicit non-secular trends in the face of pledged secularism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-secularism). Pseudo-seculars are the people who either implicitly or explicitly support pseudo-secularism.

Disclaimer: The following information is to be used for educational purposes only. I am not responsible if you do something weird with your encrypted drive and it fails to boot! And doing this stuff on other’s computers (i.e. computers, HDD, etc. which are not owned by you) might land you into legal troubles and no pointing fingers to me.

Now with all that bla bla out of the way, we can start with the real meat. Running Linux on your local machine is fun. Running Linux on a machine connected to the network is more fun (and not funnier!). And getting Linux installed on your work machine and doing everything with it (and not looking back to WinBlows anymore) is much more fun (and not funniest!). Anyways, after having such loads of fun, of course we run into people known as system admins. And these people are real bottlenecks for productivity. If you are a sysadmin reading this, then yes it is you who is hampering productivity and utility on our Linux systems because of your stupid decisions and mis-configurations.

Okay, I know what you guys will tell me now. That there are tons of tutorials on the internet on various sites on how to install Ubuntu on an external HDD. The knowledge level will vary between using UNetBoot to burning a CD and booting from it. As with all my articles, I will write my experiences here so that I can refer to the same in future if needed and also spread the information on various aspects of upgrades of Ubuntu on external HDD. And by external HDD, I mean the external HDD with rotating platters. Not a huge USB stick or any other MMC but an external HDD.

If you are a regular reader of my site, you will know the problems I had been facing with HTTP Authentication and related problems associated with it that I was facing. I solved it using a local forwarding proxy named Delegate. I also have put the script to get Delegate to work properly. All and more you can read in my previous articles. Everything is working fine. But at times, I need to change from my local proxy to the office proxy since some of the internal websites require the connections to be forwarded from the office proxy. So I had to go to IE settings and turn off local proxy and turn on office proxy and vice-versa. Now IE being the most optimal browser (sarcasm) and my disdain for clicking made me write the below script. All it does is change the IE settings like I intend to. But you as a vivid reader can do a lot more with IE/System settings as you would like to (you know what I mean!).

I was reading the article “Destructors Considered Harmful” on DrDobbs by Andrew Koenig. Generally I agree with Andrew’s views on various programming topics but I thought I should just write down my thoughts on this particular article. I have a number of agreements and disagreements on certain points. One point that specifically sticks out especially with the new generation of dumb-down languages is that it looses the traditional power of kind of raw functionality that you can churn out from a piece of code. Of course we can all be happy with a walled garden approach if we are only implementing some business logic which does not need to actually utilize the full power of the underlying HW but instead rely on language/OS supported runtimes to do the required optimizations for them. But what happens when we start arguing against a programming concept/construct just because it requires some basic programming discipline and understanding of basic principles before one actually needs to start using it?