I got my HTC Radar phone last Sunday and I am loving it. The OS is really very smooth and responsive. The are lots of apps also available in the marketplace.

In my home I have a HD Media Play (Philips) connected to my Panasonic plasma TV via HDMI. From the TV I have connected my Creative speakers. I listen to music by playing it via my HD media player.

When playing music the TV shows the list of songs. This screen is displayed constantly for quite some time  (5 mins) till the screen saver starts. Couple of weeks ago I noticed that the songs screen had been burnt in on the TV screen. After this incident I had stopped playing music via my HD media player.

Today I found out an option in the TV where the display can be turned off (menu –> picture –> Screen Display) while the audio is still playing. This is the perfect option for me to listen to music while the TV display is switched off.

In some recent American TV serials and Movies I have been noticing the way India and Indians are portrayed. Some examples:

1. Big Bang Theory Season 5 Episode 6 or 7 : The Indian character of Rajesh is shown as not being scared of snakes ‘because’ he is an Indian and presumably because India is a country of snake charmers.

2. Eurotrip (2004) : In one of the jokes it is mentioned that a person had to get his leg amputated because he took a piss in a public toilet in New Delhi, India.

There are numerous such mentions in other movies as well.

I wonder how such an image of India being projected in the West? One reason I can think of is of the Indians which stay in West and never plan to come back stating that India is a ‘shit’ country. I can just say that I pity those people on their pea sized brains. India is a great and amazing country where every day is a new and fresh experience. It is also a land of billion opportunities.

I love my country.

It is about learning the small things while doing the big things

Using the OpenCV 2.3.1 binaries (as mentioned in my previous post) did not give me the expected result as the CascadeClassifier class was always returning <incomplete type> and the application was crashing.

First uninstall any existsting versions of Open CV (it caused problem for me as I had older version installed).

The upgrade was not smooth… on restart after upgrade the system got stuck at the ‘ubuntu’ spalsh screen. It turned out that the Nvidia driver had to be recompiled with the new 3.0.0.12 Linux kernel.rn

– Boot in recovery mode and come to the console.

– Remove the existing nvidia driver:  sudo apt-get remove –purge nvidia-current

– Install the kernel source : sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux-image-$(uname -r)

– Install the new nvidia drivers: sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

– Setup: sudo nvidia-xconfig

– Reboot : reboot 

I have a laptop with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit edition installed. With my regular office work I end up consuming around 3.9 GB of system memory (because I run a virtual machine), and at this point I used to get a very bad performance because the hard disk used be continuously accessed. Couple of weeks ago I got frustrated and ordered for 8 GB RAM for my laptop, think that that was the only solution. And guess what, the amount quoted by the dealer for the RAM was 5 times the market rate, so my request was rejected (quite obvious).

Then I started tweaking my OS settings so as to reduce the memory footprint. I started with disabling aero, disabling unwanted services, uninstalling programs etc.. But this did not reduce the memory consumption or improve the performance with the RAM consumption was around 3.9 GB. So as an experiment I disabled Superfetch service, and voila the performance at 3.9 GB RAM consumption became much better. I guess Superfetch is designed to keep the RAM filled with data which it thinks might be used by the user in the coming future, and as the available RAM was very less, it was not doing a very good job and resulted in lot of prefetching and hence high disk activity.

Disabling Superfetch reduced the disk activity drastically

This is cool!!! Jetpack has transformed my website completely..

Today I changed my web hosting provider from ZNet India to GoDaddy. The reason: My website got hacked by Bangladeshi hackers, and this happened not due to my negligence, but due to the poor security at the my hosting providers server. This was not infact the only reason to switch, in the past there have been numerous instances where my website was not accessible, only to find out that it has got corrupted at the server side.

All this happening on free hosting servers is understandable, but the same happening on paid servers is unacceptable.