I have in my previous articles written about denial and reasons for denial. I have also written about people who live in constant denial either because of their overtly optimistic outlook or downright stubbornness to accept the facts. Most of these people have strong beliefs in one thing or the other. Religious people have the most “weird” views in my opinion and they also have no logical alternatives to switch or re-consider their views (especially the monotheistic ones). I do respect those views as long as they don’t hurt anybody else but such people also have a tendency to exert their views on others which lead to death and destruction. The 2000 year history and ongoing occurrences all around the world is all that one needs to go through to look at the destructive tendencies of these religious people. However it does not mean that religion/religious people have done no good. Most of the world, I would say is still a relatively good place to live because of these people and the moral values that a religion builds its frameworks on.

It was quite some time ago, I think in the beginning of this year when I had to pass through my corporate proxy which used a Basic HTTP Authentication scheme. In short, it means that all my HTTP requests will need to have a parameter Proxy-Authorization : Base64_Encoded_Username:Password. But before going further, I needed to use a local proxy since my passwords generally have a lot of @ symbols to make it more secure. In Linux, one can use proxy authentication using export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy:port. As you guessed, my password would break this simple mechanism of defining proxy tunnels with authentication. The easiest solution would be to change my password but then I am not an engineer who goes for such simple workarounds.

There has been times in our lives when we try to seek support, commitment, satisfaction, love, peace and all kinds of good feelings. There are times when life seems utterly hopeless, negative, not-worth-living, throw-away, wasted and all kinds of depressive ideas and feelings over power us. I have also suffered from/in such times and at times it is hard to relax and/or do anything useful/simulating which can have a positive effect to get oneself out of that particular mood. At times like those, I listen to my favorite Sri Ram Bhajan. It does not matter what you are and what you believe in. It is the tune and the words and the meaning behind them which makes the Bhajan so special. Listening to it will be very helpful and reciting it will be awesome. I am happy to share it with you. You can find it at:

A post after a long time now! The last I wrote for my blog was in April. And it is August now. Probably one of the longest breaks in my blog writing career. But I was busy with work as usual. Then with my vacation and then with my new passion in Maemo. In case you are not aware, Maemo is the OS running on Nokia’s tablets namely the N800s, N810s and N900s. I recently purchased an N900 and am a lot involved with the upcoming MeeGo platform. MeeGo is a conglomeration between Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin (as well as Linux Foundation of course). Intel had given away Moblin to Linux Foundation by the beginning of this year. Maemo was not able to lure application developers and did not contribute that much to Nokia’s app store (OVI) plans. So I think it was a good move to get together with Intel and create MeeGo isntead. I personally though would have loved if they didn’t create a new distribution and instead optimized something already existing (Linaro definitely was announced a bit late though). Some decisions of MeeGo running an RPM based packaging policy also puts a kind of hurdle for Debian loyalists like me. But anyways, for the moment it is Maemo 5 (also known as Fremantle) running on my N900 which has a deb packaging policy and which is what I am really familiar with.

It has been quite some time since I last blogged. Of course I can blame Al Qaeda for that or better still write about stuff that is really useful for the reader! Now now, I don’t say that one should never blame Al Qaeda ;)

The title of the blog says a lot on what I am going to write about today. It is all about business baby. A good successful business always generates money (otherwise it is termed as charity, I will touch that topic in some other post). After working for around 8+ years with technology companies, I am pretty sure that one doesn’t need to be a geek to have a successful business. One can be a successful packing box provider if they adhere to the basic values of doing business. Business as we all know is a symbiotic relationship between various entities that creates and maintains an ecosystem. The thriving, survival and prosperity of the ecosystem is pretty much characterized by the level of trust, maturity, quality, reliability and expectation fulfillment on part of the producer entities with respect to consumer entities. Beware that I am including the consumer entities as active and highly volatile members of an ecosystem.

I have downloaded and installed the latest Visual Studio 2010 and my fingers were not staying away from the keyboard to start it up and do something. As discussed in my post Forum Post - Activity App - Takes Screenshot and sends to an FTP server, I was browsing some freelancing sites and found a project which someone would like to be done for network user monitoring purposes. The idea is that an invisible app takes screenshots at specified intervals and sends it off to an FTP server / remote storage location for later analysis.

This is for all my friends who want to try out the new VS2010 from Microsoft. It is available for download from Microsoft’s site at: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2. You can also download team elements and other stuff. Start coding and testing early. The Beta will expire on 30th June 2010. So it is a lot of time to do some serious coding with this package. This definitely is one of the good things that Microsoft is doing. Of course the final version might be incompatible with this Beta but hey, I can’t rant in this case :).

I received my free upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. Of course the free upgrade was free (as in beer) where I had to pay for the shipping charges, etc. which were more then standard shipping charges (around 17 USD). The other thing was that since I am living/working in Sweden, I got my upgrade in the Swedish language. The stupid thing about packaging for Windows 7 Home Premium (W7HP) was that one cannot change the language of installation. Now that was something which was available in Windows Vista Home Premium (WVHP) edition. No idea why it was removed from Windows 7. Maybe UI language elements were hard coded! I searched the net to find out that Microsoft only allows for language changes in Professional and Ultimate editions. That is not very nice to you Mr. Microsoft. It is stupidity to believe that all users in a particular region would want their OS base language of that particular region. But you may ask me as to why I did not order the English version of W7HP when I was ordering the upgrade? Well because I bought the desktop in Sweden and so it came loaded with a Swedish version of WVHP. Hence it automatically selected the Swedish version of W7HP because of Microsoft’s stupid policy to provide upgrade to Windows 7 in the same language as was in Windows Vista.