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Nano - small car... big dreams !!!

Launch of "Nano" - (new 1 lac car) by Ratan Tata was a frontpage news on almost all newspapers. Ratan Tata mentioned it was a promise made by Tatas to the people of India. Moment Nano was launched there was lot of controversy surrounding it, which made it even bigger event.

Some people said it should we banned in Mumbai, since all Rickshaw owners might replace their rickshaws with Nano. There is hardly 10-15k difference in price. Question is are you ready for Nano as a replacement to rickshaw. IMO, it would be interesting.

I definitely think this car will fulfill the dream of many lower middle class of owing a car. There were some speculations regarding safety of Nano. But i guess any car that satisfies Euro safety norms should be considered safe.

Only concern about Nano, since is offered at very much afforded price, lot of people buying this vehicle will lead to increase in traffic levels. It is just going to worsen the current bad traffic condition.

Everything thing has some good / bad side, Nano is not an exception. So i guess some people will like to have this car and for those who don't should stay away. In my opinion Nano will be a good city vehicle, being small in size easy to park :)

To end i would say only future will tell if this car will be successful or end up like other small cars like Matiz.

NO HORN PLEASE !!!

My house is very close to a famous school. There is a clear Traffic Sign for "No horn", but in spite of that every morning I wake up with loud noise of car / rickshaw horns. On a narrow road when there is complete block everyone just loves to honk. I can't understand this. You can clearly see vehicle next to you can't move a inch, but still people keep honking impatiently.

Another such case is at Traffic Signals. When you can see Red Signal, vehicle drivers just love to honk. I can't understand what pleasure one gets by this. I know everyone is in a hurry, but one also needs to obey basic traffic rules. I usually commute by bus and I can't tell you how irritating it is at traffic signals. Traveling in crowded buses, you have conductor shouting to move forward and the honk is just perfect to spoil the beginning of the day.

Why can't we be more responsible. I think while driving we should be careful when to honk and most important when not to. We don't understand the amount of noise pollution caused by our careless attitude or should I say our ignorance.

I just plea to people who drive/ride, No Horn Please !!!!!!

CodeCamp Mumbai Nov 17/18

CodeCampMumbai was officially sponsored by CiviCRM.

And it all begins like normal barcamp. As we all know most of the developers are nocturnal, yet again this CodeCamp will start off schedule.

I am here with one of my colleague to work on Facebook plugin for CiviCRM. Other projects include lighting up bulb using web interface(PHP), mapping and adding events on Google Map and many more....

At around 12.00 pm we kicked off with the event. We will try to do some magic in next 20 hours or so.

I had several problems with net connectivity, which slowed down my progress. After lunch we had a good coding session and we were able get most of the data from Facebook in CiviCRM.

At around 6.00 we were able get most the CiviCRM related stuff working like Facebook tab in Contact Summary and were also able to generate permanent session key for facebook so that everytime user need not login to their Facebook account.

Since everyone was busy with their projects, we had late dinner along with a good all topic discussion as a dessert :)

At around 1.30 am we were able to get Contact Summary with Facebook profile and also Contact Dashboard with Friend list. We are hoping to do more work done in next few hours.

Complete how to on this feature will be posted on CiviCRM blog.

After trying for around 2 hours we gave up on CiviCRM plugin for Wordpress. It was fun working with Akshay on this.

At around 6.30 am we were almost done with Facebook stuff. We were able to get data from Facebook and display it in CiviCRM.

Finally at around 7.00 am we headed for our homes. It was fun working together with everyone @ CodeCamp.


For more photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkha/sets/72157603221321385/

OSSCampDelhi Sept 9, 2007

Day 2:

Click To Play

OSSCampDelhi Sept 8, 2007

Day 1:

I traveled all the way to Delhi to attend OSSCampDelhi, Non-Conference (Bar Camp), my first Open Source Camp in India. It started well with a good presentation on "HIGH Performance Websites".
Speaker shared few tricks how to make you front-end load faster.

• Use of expire headers for javascript, css
• Use of compressor to remove spaces in javascript using tools like (Dojo Shrink safe, YUI Compressor, JSMin, Dean Edwards Packer)
• use of mod_gzip/ mod deflate for apache
  
• not to use @import use "link" tags
  
• load script at last (although i am don't agree)
  

Another interesting presentation was on "MySQL Performance Tuning" from a OSS guys. We had a good discuss after the session which helped me to learn few new things. Few do's listed by the Presenter(for specific to InnoDB)

• use varchar instead of char
• avoid using count (*) with InnoDB, ( You can use it for MyISAM since it stores row count)
• avoid use of autocommit, use transaction mechanism for multiple statements
• configure to use larger data pools.
• disable non required engines
• use auto increment for unique identification rather than primary keys (lot of thing to argue on this)
  
• make NOT NULL columns if possible
• enable log-slow-query (this helps to track slow queries so that you can optimize it

Some other useful command for MySQL

• SHOW PROCESSLIST
• SHOW GLOBAL status like 'slow_queries'
• SHOW LOCAL status like 'slow_queries'

Mir Nazim, gave a good intro to Drupal. Some of new members in Open Source world were very much thrilled by its powerful nature as CMS.

To end the day Noel Hidalgo, expressed his view on use of Media in Social Sector. I was very much impressed with way and his thinking about the use of internet, technology, social networking etc, in Social Sector. We had good laugh at some of his jokes and enjoyed his story on "Scooter Group".

I conducted a session on CiviCRM, it was good to see few enthusiasts from the crowd.

To summarize the day, i would say besides few sessions other stuff was not for me :(. It was much of a training session or i should say engineering student presenting for some contest.

Xserver crashes on Dell - Ubuntu (Feisty )

My laptop is Dell Inspiron 1505, with ATI Mobility Card

When i installed Ubuntu Feisty X-Server was not starting. Instructions to fix:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a

After that reconfigure X Server

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Select fglx driver, keep remaining all default settings(for keyboard etc). Do not auto detect monitor (this hangs on my system)

After you done with reconfiguring restart your xserver or just reboot your machine.

To fix resolution problem:

Fix Resolution