What I was trying to do: I had only Ubuntu Linux installed on my laptop, no dual-boot with Windows. The DVD drive stopped working, so I contacted Dell support. They asked me to upgrade the drivers, I said I couldn’t because I wasn’t on Windows. And I couldn’t install Windows because, duh, the DVD drive is not working. Finally, it turned out that the drive had to be replaced, and within 24 hours, a Dell repair guy came to my home, swapped the drive for a new one and everything was working.

I was so happy with the Dell support, and the way they looked forward to saying yes. They solved a hardware problem within 24 hours of sending an email. Wow. That is unexpected because for most big companies, good customer service is an accident.

After this incident, I decided to install Vista so that I could do the BIOS or driver updates or any other similar situation that might arise in future.

Big mistake.

Situation One. Windows Update.

I popped in the Vista reinstallation CD given by Dell, it was installed in half an hour. I opened Windows update, showed some 71 security updates that has to be installed. Phew. It took a few hours to install. Waited for it to reboot. CRASH.

It asked me if I wanted to try normal booting or go to safe mode. I click on safe mode. CRASH.

I was puzzled, I thought this was a freak accident. So I redid the whole cycle and same result.

The irony is that I hadn’t installed a single third-party software, that is, if you don’t count the Dell WiFi drivers. All I did was run Windows update and it totally trashed the system.

The third time I reinstalled Vista, and then clicked on Disable Windows Updates. At this point, I didn’t care about Vista wanting to secure itself. I’d rather have a working ‘unsecure’ OS, rather than a OS that is secure and dead. In any case, I had bought a license to Norton Internet Security 2009 and put the responsibility of security to Norton.

Situation Two. External Hard Disk.

I connected my external hard disk so that I could copy back all my files, code and music back to the laptop. This disk is corrupted. Would you like to format? Whaaa??

I connected the external hard disk to the desktop running good old Windows XP. It worked flawlessly.

Another fail.

So I had to make the external hard disk connected to the desktop as a shared folder and access it on my laptop over the wireless network.

Situation Three. DVD drive.

The last two reinstalls, I installed the various drivers, etc. via the DVDs provided by Dell.

This third time, I suddenly realized, Vista doesn’t recognize the DVD drive any more.

FAIL.

Salvation. Ubuntu.

Worst of all, it seems Vista was working well for the past 8 months purely because it was a factory install. There is no stable reproducible method of reinstalling and running a Vista system.

Rebooted, popped in the Ubuntu CD, installation done. Everything is working. Including the DVD drive, the external hard disk, and I didn’t have to click on multiple ‘Next’ dialogs each for 5-6 different driver installations.

This was a good reminder for me on why Linux distros, especially Ubuntu, rock.

Side note. Lock-in.

I used to have a Mac PowerBook a long time ago. One of the reasons I wasn’t keen on continuing to use it was that most of the software was Apple-only and it felt like a lock-in.

I thought I was clever in switching to a normal laptop with a dual-boot of Windows and Linux. Yeah, freedom, baby.

BUT.

Dell provides support only for Vista, not even Windows XP! I’ve become so frustrated with Vista, but I have absolutely no other option. I mean, sure, I could use a different OS, but then all the cool features like fingerprint recognition hardware, the webcams, etc. most likely won’t work. If this isn’t a lock-in, I don’t know what is.

Of course, things have changed now with Dell selling Linux laptops. And also Macs now run on Intel CPUs, which means that we can run Windows and Linux on Mac hardware. My next laptop would certainly be one of these options.

But, then again, I might end up with just a Android-based netbook, coding on Mozilla Bespin, storing files in the cloud, and hooking it up to a big display whenever I am doing serious work (like Jace does with his MSI Wind).

In either case, I will look forward to not having Vista.

Update : The day after I wrote this, Vista has a new way of messing with me – it now shows the DVD drive, but now refuses to show the D drive where I’ve stored all my files. Sigh.

DOS computers, made by I.B.M., Compaq, Tandy and about a million other companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans will note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not connote a higher life form. There is strength in numbers, however. The White House uses DOS computers.

Gupshup seems to hit the sweet spot in the Indian context because its all about sms and mobile phones and combines it with the web. For example, you can start your own group and update your microblog via sms, and it’ll be automatically forwarded (as sms) to all those who subscribe to your channel. The posts are also available on a webpage. The added viral/social features are the ability to conduct your own polls or quizzes and even ratings.

I signed up for Gupshup and created my own microblog located at http://sms.webaroo.com/channels/Swaroop.

This got me thinking how people actually promote their microblog, and it turns out that one of the important things is a widget on their blog that points to the microblog, especially the Twitter badge.

So, I was looking for a widget for Gupshup as well but couldn’t find one. Why not write one myself?

It seemed pretty easy to create it using Flex because Gupshup now has RSS feeds. And just a hour and half of tinkering got me to create this:

I’ve put up the source MXML file for those interested. The tough work is handled by the <mx:HTTPService> tag which fetches the feed and outputs an XML which is easy to handle thanks to E4X. The rest is just housekeeping code.

Note that you’ll need your own proxy php script because of the security restrictions of the Flash player.

Somewhat relatedly, I got an invite to Popfly, thanks to Sriram, which helps anybody to create exactly these kind of widgets.

It turned out to be even easier to achieve it using Popfly:

1. Create a mashup
2. Click RSS block to add it to the main area
3. Edit to add the address of the RSS feed of your choice
4. Click News Reader block to add it to the main area
5. Connect the RSS block to the News Reader block
6. Click Save

You’re done. Here’s what you get:

Note that you might need Microsoft Silverlight installed to view this.

The upside is that it is ridiculously easy to create your own such mashups/widgets. The downside is that it is not easy to achieve the look and feel that you specifically want, it tends to all look the same (like the omnipresent Kubrick theme for WordPress). For example, on my computer, the Popfly widget appears with scrollbars, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of the scrollbars.

About microblogging itself, I am not sure how long I’ll be into it, I’m just trying it out to see what’s all the fuss about.

So, I switched on my desktop (which has only Kubuntu installed and no Windows), ran apt-get install evolution and apt-get install evolution-exchange commands, started Evolution, added a new Microsoft Exchange account and it started downloading all the messages.

It’s ironic that I have to use a Linux machine to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Maybe now I can get my laptop fixed by our IS. The last time I reported the same problem, they deleted my profile and added it again and I had to spend an entire day customizing my setup again, and the original problem still wasn’t fixed. I don’t want to go through that trouble again…

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Beryl makes using Linux so much more fun. The Expose-like preview of windows (F8 key) is very useful.

Update: It’s not over til it’s over.

Update 2: Well, Evolution is locally caching the mail, all I have to do is to leave it on overnight , well that mitigates my email reading issues a lot, assuming it keeps working that way.

Update 3 on 2007-06-13 Wed 04:07 PM: Finally solved the mystery of Outlook not working… it was because of the Sify Broadband software installed! Renaming all the Sify-related exes to some other extension fixed the issue. Go figure!

According to Boslet, Placek cited several other reasons for zeroing in on “Zune”:

• It’s a short word, reflecting the gadget’s small size.
• It has a familiar sound. “‘From tune to zune’ was the expression some inside Lexicon used,” the Journal reports.
• The letter “U” has “a full sound” and “makes one think there is a lot packed into a little word– and product.”

So I searched for the Lexicon Branding company that came up with this name:

“The Lexicon Research Network of 60 Ph.D. linguists in 39 countries was tapped to provide insights into the latest brands in music and video entertainment and to give us suggestions as to words, word parts, sounds and metaphors that might be applied to a ‘next generation entertainment system” — from an SFGate article

It seemed strange to me that they get paid so much for just coming up with a name. But guess what other names they have come up with in the past:

• Pentium
• Powerbook
• Blackberry

Heh, so naming does matter… recently there was an internal call for suggestion of code names for the next version of Flex, and one of the names I had suggested was finally voted as the official code name! I guess you will hear this name in the press articles on Adobe Flex soon.

What’s the first thing I saw? People playing cricket in Microsoft’s own cricket ground in their campus.

Apparently, this is the latest craze following a recent football fever.

I was very impressed with the Microsoft campus – the design emphasized “fun” and “relax” a lot. There was a sofa or lounge at every turn and the walls had pleasant bright colors. The campus itself is set in a good location, away from the city, and surrounded by greenery. Back inside, each person gets their own cubicle and managers get their own room. The place was huge, it had to be to accommodate a thousand people but somehow the place doesn’t have a “big company” feel to it.

I met Sriram and Aarthi for lunch in their spacious and pleasant cafeteria. Sriram showed me around their floor including a special room dedicated to playing the XBox, and showed me a sneak preview of the latest build of Vista. I was surprised to know about Microsoft sponsoring to make PHP work better on Windows, got to know a little about Zune… but I did complain that Vista no longer held interest for me ever since I came to know that WinFS and PowerShell would no longer be in it.

Later in the evening, Kiran and I went to Lumbini Gardens, got to see an amazing 3D multimedia water display. Then, visited the bustling Hyderabad Central to grab some food – Central does many things well, I think. For one, the open display of wares makes it open and inviting as opposed to separate shops in other malls.

Then, it was time to get back to Bangalore. All in all, a simple day, nothing special, but I caught up with an old friend, met some new ones, had a few tech discussions, had ample time to think about a lot of things, and most of all the feeling of travelling (after a long time) rejuvenated me.

Btw, Sriram joined Microsoft last month (in Hyderabad) as a PM in the DevTools team.

To Sriram : blogs.msdn.com/sriramk doesn’t seem to be taken yet

I recently came across Anders Hejlsberg’s interview on Channel 9 regarding programming data in C# 3.0 and it looks like C-Omega is going to be ‘merged’ into 3.0. Its amazing that MS has taken this concept (which seemed totally radical to me when I first read about it) to production quality and is actually going to make this a core part of their platform.

Let us consider an example of using C-Omega. Suppose you want to handle books in a program used to manage libraries. Then you could write a book class using C-Omega as

[code] public class book { sequence { string title; choice { sequence{ editor editor; }+; sequence{ author author; }+; } string publisher; int price; } attribute int year; }
[/code]

The cool part is that the above same class can be used to store the data either as XML or in a relational database. You can also instantiate an object using XML syntax:

[code] book b = SwaroopC H www.byteofpython.info 250 ; [/code]

Note that this syntax is still static typing. Needless to say, the C-Omega compiler must be one heck of a monster.

The Python connection is that the C-Omega-ish method of access will probably be included into IronPython at some stage. Even if that doesn’t happen, we already have Pythonic ways of doing XML as pointed out long ago by wspace.

If you have ever written a program that uses databases, I highly recommend reading the Circles, Triangles and Rectangles paper. It just might change the way you think about databases and SQL, or even XML for that matter.

You can also download that old presentation of mine on Xen.

Yes, I’m talking about IronPython and in this case, the company happens to be MS.

Read what Edd Dumbill has to say about it, especially this part:

Third-party patches won’t be considered until after the 1.0 release. Hugunin encourages people to be involved, but only in filing good bug reports and feature requests. And when doing this involves a .NET passport, and using the GotDotNet web forums rather than good old mailing lists, it’s a bit of a disincentive. Added to that, there’s some uncertainty about the freeness of IronPython’s license. While it looks free, it’s got the same name, “Shared Source”, as several Microsoft licenses that definitely are not free.

I have nothing more to say except that such an awesome ‘open source’ project has been effectively killed off – IronPython may go on to become 1.0 but it is now reduced to a one-man show when so many people could have contributed to it.