Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Her lovely face now adorns my desktop, where I gaze at it all day — in meetings, during phone calls, while writing code — throughout the day.

I look at her face and think, either I could be the bum she's stuck with for a good part of her life, or I could be the wonderful companion she likes to think I am. The decision is entirely mine.

And thus now there is a source of inspiration that wasn't before.

Hydra is slowly replacing Vim as my preferred choice of text editor. The rate at which that editor is improving is simply amazing.

If you want a good laugh and have a warped sense of humour, go watch Koi Mil Gaya.

Hrithik Roshan's acting is impressive, Preity Zinta is pretty as ever, the locales are absolutely stunning; the rest makes you giggle uncontrollably at the utter ridiculousness.

I arrive in Goa and the first thing I do upon entering my assigned room is attach the Reliance phone to my laptop and get online... before even looking for a power outlet. Or washing my face. Or saying hello to the people around.

Speaks volumes of my priorities.

Update: I'm getting a full 10 kB/s down the line. Better than I've ever had in Bangalore. But I can't get onto IRC. Either the FreeNode network is down or R-Connect in Goa is misconfigured.

I'm moving to Goa tomorrow for three months. Detailed post here. See you all in Bangalore again in a few months.

http://www.google.com/search?q=c
http://www.google.com/search?q=0b100000000000 in decimal

What fun!

Another story from E-Sheep. I'm at a total loss for words to describe it. The best I can muster up is... magnificent!

E-Sheep is the only comic strip I have seen that is specifically designed for the Web. Those comics cannot possibly be reproduced on any other medium.

Picture of anti-SCO protests from SCO's own website. No prices for figuring out what is going on.

Unbelievable but true: I've been up for four and a half hours already and it's only 10:30 AM.

*yawn*

In primary school, they taught us that trees cause rain. No trees means no rain. Lots of trees mean lots of rain.

And that didn't make sense. How could a tree possibly cause the rain to fall? The only thing that made sense to me was that if the tree was on a hill high enough to reach into the clouds, it could burst a passing cloud and cause rain...

...to fall on the hill. Which still doesn't explain how trees cause rain in the valley. Maybe there is a ripple effect and enough clouds burst to cause rain in the valley too?

Conclusion: I learnt that it is a very good idea to plant lots of trees on hills because they burst passing clouds and cause rain.

The dark mass behind my laptop is the cable leading up to the Reliance phone: the cable is bulkier than the phone.

I'm online using a Reliance LG 2030 phone from Mac OS X. Configuration was rather convoluted:

Since I had picked up a serial cable (for maximum compatibility) but my PowerBook doesn't have a serial port, I picked up a Serial-to-USB converter today (Rs. 750), then came home and discovered that it had a driver only for Classic Mac OS, not Mac OS X. The company's web site had the same driver, last updated in 2000.

Seeing no option to make it work in Mac OS X, I fired up Windows XP in Virtual PC and installed the Windows 2000 driver, which identified the source as Prolific Technology. Looked up Google, but found that neither BSNL nor VSNL was letting me access their site or even Google's cached pages. Network problems?

Next, installed Reliance's R Connect dialer, rebooted the VM twice, got online from the virtual machine, headed for Prolific's tech support site, discovered their search engine broken, backtracked, browsed through their catalogue, and found a Mac OS X driver for their "PL-2303 USB to Serial Bridge Controller". Installed the driver, rebooted (why is a reboot necessary with a microkernel architecture?), opened Network configuration, and discovered a new "usbserial" device. Excellent!

Started to configure PPP settings for Reliance based on this excellent Linux how-to, then found that there was no place I could rewrite the modem's initialisation string to the needed "at cta=30". There was only a bunch of modems to choose from, no settings dialog. Used locate on one of the modem names and found a bunch of modem scripts sitting in /Library/Modem Scripts. Their syntax was non-obvious, so consulted Google again and discovered this modem script generator.

Used it to create a new "Reliance LG 2030" script, attempted to connect, and it worked! Now for some well-deserved sleep, I finally have mobile Internet access.

Microsoft has released a bunch of very nice PowerPoint templates. They were designed for PowerPoint X on Mac OS X but should work on Windows too.