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I have been on a lookout for a good LCD monitor for sometime. The biggest problem was on the cost None of the monitors were below Rs.16K, except for Samsung and Acer. Unfortunately few monitors which had some good reviews on the net where not available locally.

In the end I ended up with the following choice (all are 19inch):

• Viewsonic VX922 Though my fav on the list was VP930 which had pivot etc … but was not available locally nor in Singapore
• Dell 1907FP
• Samsung 940W

Though there were few 20inch monitors available at the slightly higher price band, I was already feeling my purse string stretch at the present price bands. How I wish, I could earn in $$’s as that would have entailed an upgrade to my display card.
Though Dell had a better ergonomics and pivot mode I decided to go for Viewsonic just because of the faster screen.

Yesterday the Viewsonic VX922 LCD monitor was collected by me.

After setting it up and getting my system up, this is what I noticed about the LCD:

• The monitor is too bright with the factory setting. I ended up reducing the contrast/brightness by half. Default Colors lean towards blue. You need to manually configure things.
• For this the OSD of the monitor is not that intitutive, nor the buttons work that great. There is a second delay between your button press and the actual action in the OSD. That’s baad.
• There is no easy way to callibrate

On the LCD panel performance:

• The colors are nice and bright. The screen has a good contrast for viewing even with a tubelight above and behind me.
• Playing games was a pleasure just because it was a bigger screen.
• Movies, weell, this is a problem area. In linux I could see the pixels very clearly (though this might be due to driver issues). In windows the DVD viewing was initially dissapointing as I could see the pixels and flickers whenever I was close to the monitor, but they were not visible once I shifted to a distance of a meter or so. Unfortunately the vertical view of the monitor is low (140 or so) which creates a problem when you are sitting in a surface which is slightly offcenter. Also in the sunset/sunrise shots, whenever there was a red spectrum spread, you could see the pixalation initially. But later on I couldn’t feel them (maybe because I got used to the image?)
• Fonts! Uggg… Surprisingly fonts look much better now in Linux (with Anti-Aliasing enabled) then in WinXP (even with Cleartype enabled). I installed the MS fonts on the linux and the screens looked much better then WinXP does. Go figure …

As my box has both DVI and D-sub output available, I was able to get my X-Server to work on Dual monitor mode with a single display card! Unfortunately this is not possible in WinXP. I need another card on this machine for that to work. Yuck!
After working on this screen the whole day: I like this monitor. I just which it would have been better in playing DVD’s though. Oh well P-MVA was out of my reach.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been a user of Linux for past 10-11 years. I started of with one of the Slackware editions during late ’95. And I was one of the early guys in Bangalore who had SVGA version of X running. I don’t know why, but many of the people here (at least I knew of, were struggling to get that running

Anyways, I had Win3.1 and Slackware dual booting on my home machine back then. Once Win95 came into the picture, I ended up upgrading the 486 box to Pentium and 1GB hdd!
I still remmeber spending 45-50 minutes on the kernel compiles during those days! Maan were they slow.

Then work took over all my time and never really worked on linux for some time, till I changed jobs. In the new job, we were unix all over. We had a Solaris ultra Sparc-III boxes with Solaris 8 (later I ended upgrading it to Solaris 9). Few of our servers (mail, firewall etc were on Redhat linux). I had one test machine on Redhat, another on FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x. I still remmeber cross compiling the source on all these machines and maan was it a pain. If my memory serves me right we were using 2.9.x gcc compiler to all our work in these machines. Except for WinNT where we were using MS Visual Studio 6.a. I just can’t remmeber the compiler version though

Anyways, I left my job again and was out of linux world for past couple of years. And I have left job (again!) and started a new team. Well as of now we are a small team based in Bangalore, Geneva and Sweden (really distributed). To save costs we are all working from home and I am currently hosting the development servers from my home. (We are truly a garage operation as of now).

I just bought a AMD Athlon 64 based machine and I am planning to host gForge on this machine. Also as this will be our mail, SVN and project daily build machine for now, I was wondering what linux distribution to use. All of them seem to have some pros and cons and I am not sure what is good for me.
Anyways, the basic requirement:

• Should be light on hardware. Is that possible?
• Should allow me to load the server with all the services we need as a small dev team.
• Should be easy to maintain, update and configure. We don’t have any dedicated IT team here, and I don’t want to end up spending large amount of time maintaing it.
• It will be nice and geeky if it supports pure 64bit environment. I want to avoid doing chroot all the time.

Unfortunately there are no good recommendations out there. Looks like no one wants to stick there neck out and start a flame war. Well, I am currently trying out few of these distributions …

I got my broadband connection today. Yooo hooo.

Long long time ago, when I was a kid my father had bought a Telefunken music system. That had been captured by me for my own use and that started my journey onwards on music.

These passion toward music lead me to try understanding the underlying technology and resulted in lots of DIY projects in electronics. It also caused me to taking up electronics as one of my subjects in college.

Though I cannot lay a claim to be able to play any instruments I still love listening. At one time I had more then 400 CD’s in my personal collection and it has been my dream from when I can remember to own one of those audiophile systems.

Every time I came close to buying a music system always some other expense used to kill this one Imagine for past 10 years I had no music system on which I could really listen from. Other then my PC/Car stereo I was banished from music.

I had been planning to setup a system for my new flat from the moment I bought the flat and y’day at last my dreams materialized

A good friend of mine (Kriplani – thx from bottom of my false heart) y’day brought my system from Singapore and I haven’t been that excited for such a long time.

He was expected to land in Bangalore around 3:00AM, and to my surprise I was up by 4:00AM plainly excited about the whole thingi. I tried sleeping but just couldn’t. I couldn’t wait more longer and SMS’sed him around 4:30ish.

He was surprised and so we ended up having the systems in my house by 7:00 AM.

I managed to setup the amplifier/speaker/CD player in the morning.

By evening I had the whole thingi up and running. Sweet. I slept around 12 in the night! Maan was I excited.

My setup:

• NAD C372 Stereo Integrated Amp. (I just cannot afford a Power amp – pre-amp combo)
• NAD C521 BEE CD Player.
• NAD C422 Stereo AM/FM Tuner.
• Squeezebox 2 Network Music Player. (All my CD’s are already/will be ripped to FLAC)
• Mission M35i speakers.
  

I have hooked up my Linksys WRT54G wireless router and my PC to stream music from the PC to this Squeezebox.(I ended up setting up my wireless network and the rest of music system y’day night)

The whole shing-bang costed me around 1lakh (~$2200) and maan are my pockets clean. Sigh. But still a good feeling.

Music never felt so good …

I own one of these babies Just a bookmark for me to investigate
Linksys hacks

Just went through another interview process today (I am averaging 3-4 a day for past few weeks!).

After conducting so many interviews, especially past 6 months, I have kinda developed an interview model which works for me:
- Ask about the project they have worked in the past year (Kinda Ice breaker).
- Ask about the architecture of the application or what they found to be most interesting in that project.
- Move on to the platform specific questions, where the questions are more on the framework then any thing else.
- Maybe even drill down to certain important API’s.
- Give some problem for solving on an implementation level.
- A generic scenario from which a class diagram needs to be generated. I like this one as it tells me if the candidate has an innate knowledge of design or not. You will be surprised by how people think of a hierarchy. Seems to be a simple “as-is” relationship, but reasons for justifying a base class! Even what base classes people can come up with (Whew).

Anyways, everytime what gets my goat is when we discuss Polymorphic behavour, especially in C++ or C# or Java, I hear about overloading being polymorphic. I still haven’t figured our how this term has come into being: static polymorphism?

In math we define Morphism as something which can retain the same structure but the underlying mathematical structure (functions for e.g.) can change. This basically means in our modern OOPS language polymorphism is alwyas be the usage of virtual functions (overriding).

Well, unfortunately all the new texts in India use this term liberally with overloading go figure.

Refrencing Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism