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?

The Samsung 3D PS50C680 is a very good TV but misses on some features of being a fully smart TV though it is a Series 6 TV. I have searched quite a few websites for information on how to change the FW and get it upgraded with a similar model C700 or something but haven’t found confirmed results. Again, there is a huge risk of bricking the TV so I am a bit hesitant at this point in time to take such a risk. So the next move was to get a small smart media player or IPTV box which provides me with the smart capabilities. After going through a lot of dilemma on whether buying a Boxee box or IOMega TV, I settled on Prodigy 3D black because of only 3 reasons:

Delegate is a very simple and nice proxy which can be configured into many different kind of proxies depending on the use-case you are trying to implement. Best of all, it is open source i.e. free and works across various operating systems including our most hated Microsoft Windows platforms. But before I start to write out on the solution, I will write a bit about the problem I was trying to solve.

I decided to go to India after 2 years and landed in India on 2nd December 2011. A lot of things have changed since I last visited India in 2009. The first things I noticed was the people, lots and lots of them. Even my baby was a bit upset and frightened to see so many people going along their own business and the constant hustling with a steady noise stream. The good part was that things were moving quickly. Of course all the paper work to be done when landing in India is a pain in the a**. I filled up all the forms with a green colored gel pen. When I reached the immigration counter, I was asked to fill up the forms again using either a black or blue pen. And nowhere was it written that green ink was not accepted. Anyways, I had to waste another 20 minutes filling up those stupid forms.

This post is a bit of marketing for the applications that I have been doing since the last couple of weeks. I have now release three applications on the Android Market. The first one is a re-write of my open source application Conference Manager (GPLv2) for Maemo. This application is also available in the Maemo Extra repository. I was hoping to port it to MeeGo but Mr. Elop had other plans. So I have stopped contributing to MeeGo all-together. And the best thing that happened was that I got an Android device (HTC Desire HD) about 3 months ago. The first thing I did was root it and then load some custom ROMs.