Another blog

Vent at your employer, give advice to your CEO, Rate your CEO

2008-08-22T14:44:04Z

Have you ever felt the need for more openness about your company and being able to comment on your compay,companies culture , or share your grievances of your company or say that your company at good at various things.
Do you want to rate your CEO ?
Wanna know what others make in your company.
If the answer to any of the above is yes then there is a website which might interest you.
It is appropriately named as http://www.glassdoor.com

Creating Virtual Drives in Linux without VMware

2008-08-17T23:03:35Z

Have you ever found the need to keep all the thousands of files which you use in a single file.
On Linux there is a way to do that.So essentailly you can have a virtual drive in a file which has an entire filesystem.
And to Linux it does not appear any different then an ext3 on a actual physical hard drive or a partition.
The implications of this are very huge, so for example you want to share some data with any one which has hundreds of files etc or you want to just backup your entire filesystem.
Here is how to achieve this

dd if=/dev/zero of=mydatafile bs=1 count=1 seek=1M

Will create a file of one megabyte in size, but with only one byte 
actually stored on disk.

The convert that file into a ext3 partition by issuing the following command

mkfs.ext3 mydatafile

It will give a warning,say yes and let it proceed.
 
mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
sparse-file is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y

Then you can just mount the file as a filesystem/partition anywhere with the following command

mount -t ext3 -o loop mnt/mnt_point  mydatafile

Now you can just do anything in the /mnt/mnt_point and then you can even move it to another machine 1 single file and you have all your data there.

Prevent Spam : Solve a captcha and hide your email address from Spam

2008-08-16T00:41:59Z

We all want to avoid being spammed but at the same time we want to reveal our email address to people who need to contact us.recaptch solves that problem very easily and just by adding about 4 lines of code you can hide your email address from spammers and reveal it.
Another cool benefit of recaptcha is that you are helping "reading" books that is when some books have faded and are being scanned , you are helping solve the faded text.Read more about it on their website.

College saves money and boosts morale with 4-day week

2008-08-14T03:45:05Z

There is an article on Yahoo @ http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=Atm.KMBqoZ2JlyDnF3OMn2Z72PAI;_ylu=X3oDMTBiZ3MwbHJsBHBvcwM0BHRhYgMw/SIG=12koilksg/**http%3A//us.lrd.yahoo.com/SIG=118bjsg14/**http%253A//gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/9240050 which talks about 4 day workweek of 10 hours.
I strongly disagree with the benefits of this because I feel that it might work in the case of hourly paid workers but it is dangerous for software professionals(who are not paid by the hour) working in high-tech industry because i feel that this is just an invitation for employers to ask employees to work 40 hours in 4 days and then the weekends.

Donate your bandwidth for legal content

2008-08-10T05:03:51Z

There are various ways in which you can help the various free/open source communities by donating your free unused internet bandwidth for perfectly legal content which can use some help in distribution and reducing the charges for the mirrors who provide free services in the spirit of free beer/freedom.

Run a search portal by running the Yacy client more details @ http://www.yacy.net/
Download a bittorrent client like Vuze/Azureus and then help distribute legal content from various websites like

Debian ISO images
Knoppix
List of Legal Torrents website @ http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Legal_torrent_sites
Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents

Download emule client from Emule Project and you can download and help distribute lot of legal content from the following websites

Legal Content from emule-project.net
Free/Open source software @ http://bitzi.com/society/FLOSS_Free_Libre_Open_Source_Software

Yacy Setup

2008-08-10T04:35:14Z

I have finished Yacy setup on my home computer and it is functional at http://bhavesh.gotdns.org:9000
Here are the live stats of my search portal

Yacy a P2P search engine

2008-07-20T16:28:14Z

Yacy is a P2P search engine where in you can participate in crawling the web and create a local repository of index.You can also use it as your proxy server.
disabled remote accept/reject
One big flaw is that it does not have any parameters to control disk space usage.So it will eat up all the hard drive space that it can.
From a privacy standpoint since all the websites which has your private/personal information , they don't get indexed because as per Yacy these pages are detected and not crawled.
Also if you want to filter some unwanted websites, you can look at this thread http://www.yacy-forum.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=78
If you are using Yacy I will highly recommend that you use the FoxyProxy Extension for Firefox as that will allow you to browse with the Yacy proxy and then switch to not using it.You can also create a blacklist/whitelist of URL's and the proxy server will be used dynamically.
You can also customize the your yacy home page by modifying /htroot/index.html

Ditching the landline

2008-07-19T20:36:34Z

I have finally said good-byes to my phone landline and have moved to exclusively to mobile phone .
I hated paying almost $20 for a landline with no features and just local calling.
I have moved to Virgin Mobile as my preferred mobile carrier(have been using them for almost 2-3 yrs) because it is the most flexible service that is it allows you to switch between a pay-as you go model to a monthly service anytime without **any** annual contracts etc.You can also switch plans like say for example in the next month you anticipate that you will need a phone more then usual , then you can increase the monthly amount, and then say the month after next you are going out of country and wont be using the phone at all you can , reduce your monthly charges.
It seems that the mobile phone industry pretty much has a price war going on right now and I would not like to lock myself into a contract when I could have more choices in near future.In general I just don't like contracts, I prefer freedom for consumers which seems to be hard to get these days especially with the telecom industry.
Here is a nice site that provides a good comparison of pre-paid wireless plans/carriers.
Time to time there are good deals on Target or at Calling Mart where you can get Virgin Mobile Top-Up cards at a significant discount , sometimes upto 10%.

First visitor Insurance to cover Pre-existing conditions for Visitors

2008-07-16T04:36:18Z

I recently came to know that there is finally a health insurance which can cover pre-existing medical conditions for folks on visitor visas especially for visitors from countries like India.
You can check out this website for more details.

Web apps: the next battleground for FOSS?

2008-07-16T04:30:32Z

I have been thinking about the same topic for a couple of weeks now and then I recently read an article at Linux.com , Web apps: the next battleground for FOSS?. But it is good that more people are thinking about this and I'm sure the FOSS community will come out with something intelligent to solve this issue.