It has been a long time that I did any batch programming in Windows (almost 10-12 years). Didn’t find a need for it. But with Windows Vista, I wanted to toggle my power schemes based on whether my baby was watching some videos in youtube or not. I generally want my monitor to turn off in a minute if nothing is happening. At the same time if youtube, etc. is running then the monitor should stay on. I created a power scheme for both these functionalities. Only problem was that I had to follow a long procedure to toggle between them. Right click on my desktop, click Personalize, select Screen Saver, click on Power settings and then the schemes would be visible. And Windows Vista is so good that it hides your most recently used power schemes. So you have to click on the down arrow and select the scheme that you want. Of course you need to close all the windows as well.

Euclids algo is a nice one to find out the lowest common divisor for 2 given positive integers. I am once again going through Donald Knuth just for fun. Enjoy talking about it and posting your own suggestions / code on the following URL. You can also find my intial code on that link.

http://www.naresh.se/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5

Will keep posting and give you more of this useless (in terms that it does not help me in my daily work and probably will not help you as well, unless you are mathemacian but then you probably have more advanced libraries to carry out such stuff hence I am convinced that it is totally useless) albeit fun stuff.

I was trying to upload some photos to picasaweb and thought of doing it via google chrome this time. They would definitely have tested that site with Chrome and would make it better then the one in IE. Guess what, I can upload only 5 files at a time using Google Chrome. i.e. Chrome does not have support for extra addons / BHOs (browser helper objects) that IE or other browser has. So one gets reduced functionality with a reduced browser interface as well.

Referring to my article External hard drives not working in Vista! I did some more research and invested a lot of time googling and binging and finally found some reasons as to why the external hard drives were not working in Vista. One of the reasons was Vista itself. Well, I had to download and install the SP1 update to get some better configured USB drivers for Vista. I also had to apply the Cummulative update for USB core devices on Vista.

All of us engineers / nerds ;) have learned and studied a lot about Software Development Processes in our schools and colleges. Fresh out of the college, we are confident enough to believe that the processes detailed out in the books will make our life easy and allow us to develop better functional and non-buggy software. But guess what, practical cases are far away from such an outcome. Reason being people and at times tools. But mostly its people. I had seen a nice picture of how a customer narates the requirements and how it gets implemented. All because of simple miscommunication. And believe me, miscommunication happens a lot in the global world mainly because of ill-conceptualized ideas as well as thoughts on how a particular thing should work. In one of my projects, I had a very deep and emotional discussions with my project manager for the module designs. I wanted to implement asynchronous callback mechanisms making the UI independent & not waiting for the core to do the job/recover whereas my manager thought that should not be a problem since execution in core should take only a little time. He totally forgot that the core makes calls to system which might take time because of resource accesses. Anyways, he was stubborn enough to not listen to me. And in the final product we had UI freeze problems and we had to implement workarounds to get around those problems.

I had an ASUS 6000VM laptop and had partitioned and installed XP on the 80 GB Fujitsu 2.5" hard drive. I had created a root partition (C:) of 20 GB and 60 GB worth of data partition (D:). My computer charging circuit burned because of a problem with my charger and I am now trying to get a replacement board for that computer. In the meantime, I bought a 2.5" external hard drive casing which exposes a USB interface. Internally it features a PCB which hosts a IDE/ATA-100 interface for my hard drive and converts to a USB 2.0 interface outside. Everything worked out fine and my fingers were twingling to connect it to my office laptop and recover some of my important data.

Online criminals can use sophisticated technology to try to gain access to your computer, or they can use something simpler and more insidious: social engineering.

Social engineering is a way for criminals to gain access to your computer. The purpose of social engineering is usually to secretly install spyware or other malicious software or to trick you into handing over your passwords or other sensitive financial or personal information.

Some online criminals find it easier to exploit human nature than to exploit holes in your software.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html Google announces the Google chrome OS which is pretty much a web-based OS. I guess would be much like Palm Pre in that sense. I was wondering when Android will start fragmentation. Looks like 2nd half 2010 or 1st half 2011 as of now ;)

But exciting as it is, lets see how Google jumps into the already competitive desktop OS market. It would definitely be a blow to MS Windows but would it be able to nudge *nix based distros? Lets see if it just remains another of the 300+ distribution or comes above/below ubuntu. (http://www.distrowatch.com/) Wait & Watch and see how it turns up and if Google will canibalize Android for Chrome or vice-versa. Interesting times to come…