Month: September 2007

Installation Update

30 Sep
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Solaris/Unix, Technical

Installed OpenSolaris build-72 on my new system. A 100GB partition is used for this. Installation is very smooth. No issues with network cards, graphics, etc. Also works fine with my 19″ LCD monitor. I haven’t installed any build after Build65 in the past, but the new build 72 is much smoother than any of the previous releases. BTW, used BlastWave to install xine.

Tried installing CentOS 5.0 on one of the linux partitions, but somehow that one doesn’t go through. The installation itself is not as smooth as the latest OpenSolaris build. It goes till the phase it creates partitions within the primary linux partition, but keeps failing at few stages. It says it doesn’t have enough space to keep packages and then reports another unrecoverable error. I may give it one more try later in the week.

Got a new system

30 Sep
Raju Alluri Personal & Family, Technical

Got a new system for my home use last night. I went to the hardware vendor and handpicked a few components and got it assembled. The priorities are to have good amount of RAM, diskspace and an nVidia graphics card. Here are the final specifications I ended up with:

  • AMD 64 X2 4000+ Dual Core processor
  • HT 2000 GeForce 6150LE motherboard with built-in nVidia card, LAN, Audio etc.
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 250 GB Hard disk
  • DVD Writer
  • CD Writer and DVD ROM combo drive
  • Microsoft Spill-proof keyboard and Optical mouse (Interestingly, this is the best in the market right now and the vendor strongly recommended this. 🙂 So a system that may not feature Microsoft software ended up with Microsoft accessories.)

This combination is the best bang for the buck I could get. Haven’t bought a monitor yet, because I am planning to share my other monitor(s) with this system. My work area is already cramped and I don’t want new monitors here.
Got this system assembled last night and planning to install this later today. Once installed, this will keep me online going forward.

Cholesterol levels down

29 Sep
Raju Alluri Food, Personal & Family

Just compared my last week’s medical records with those in January 2006. In these 20 months, most of the readings remained the same, but the cholesterol levels came down from 148 mg/dL to 128 mg/dL. This is a good sign. Now I need to put some efforts on reducing my weight.

Back online, partly.

29 Sep
Raju Alluri Personal & Family, Technical

Well, this happened faster than I thought. Didn’t want to touch kids’ game system (Intel Dual Core, runs with Windows) for my activities, so I thought I need to wait till I purchase a system next week. This morning, I remembered this system I assembled myself in 2001: An AMD Athlon 900MHz system which is eventually upgraded to a 30GB harddisk (swappable) and 128MB RAM. It was running Linux and I used it in the past as a Unix/C/Java learning platform for students who did projects with me.

Connected it, booted it up and downloaded Firefox 2.0.0.7 and installed it. The machine is painfully slow when I switch between applications, but does great when I stick to one single application (no prizes for guessing it, the browser.) Quickly logged into yahoo mail, gmail, FaceBook and LinkedIn. The browser is working fabulous even on a 6 year old system. I love the minimum requirements of Firefox!

Meanwhile, got a couple of quotes from vendors for the systems and evaluating the configurations.

So, back online partially but I will leave it that way for a couple of weeks.

Separating with Sun

27 Sep
Raju Alluri Personal & Family, Sun

This news may surprise many of you who know about my passion for the company and its technologies. I joined Sun as a consultant in 1995 and took a full time position in 1997. Relocated to India in 2001, but stayed with Sun. It is not easy leaving a company where I learned a lot from the individuals and the infrastructure.

This separation potentially gets me more family time and I will look forward to doing more activities centered in Hyderabad rather than sticking to Bangalore. I miss the great minds at Sun, but strongly feel that with the current global economies and the trend towards open source technologies, that can be bridged easily.

Today I am handing over my laptop and other infrastructure back to Sun. I need to procure some systems to be online “securely.” Until then, I may be out of touch with emails and blogs. I can be reached by email at spurthi at gmail dot com.

I am also planning to take 1-2 weeks of complete time off, before talking to potential associations and affiliations. This break is very much due after more than a decade here.
Will be back online soon.

Medical Evaluations

27 Sep
Raju Alluri Personal & Family, Sun

Sun is conducting medical evaluations for all the employees in India, in collaboration with the insurance company and Sagar Hospitals. I am glad to see lot of employees are taking this opportunity and sparing time to get themselves evaluated.

I went thru these tests on Monday and the reports came on Wednesday. All the reports came up with very normal readings and the doctor pronounced that I am in good health. The only issue is my weight, which can reduce by higher single digits in kilos, to qualify me to be in a much better health condition. (Sorry if the last sentence confuses you. I intentionally made it that way 🙂 )

I should put some serious efforts in that direction. Few years ago, my triglycerides are approaching the suggested maximum, so in the span of 2 years, I got them to a very reasonable level. Now I have to work on the weight factor.

India wins Twenty20 World Cup!

24 Sep
Raju Alluri Entertainment, Sports

What a thrilling finale it is! India won a final match after a long time, that too against a relatively friendly Pak. The victory oscillated between the teams with increasing amplitude closer to the end of the game. India, after a considerable time, bowled out opposition to win a match. I think the last few overs, except the last ball, took the match to Pak but the last wicket made a difference.

In fact, India almost gave the match away by

  • Not scoring 170+ on a batting-friendly wicket
  • Over agression of Sreesanth leading to a couple of costly overs
  • These couple of overs from Harbhajan et al costing too many runs
  • Not experimenting with part-time slow/spin bowlers

However, the last wicket mattered.

Good game teams, worth spending 3 hours!

Corrected a few blog entries

24 Sep
Raju Alluri Blogging, Technical

Last week, some of my readers complained that they couldn’t see my blog entries in full. Some entries are truncated right after the entry title. So I started debugging the issue. I booted up Windows Vista and started Firefox 2, Safari and IE7. The first two browsers showed every entry fine, but IE7 has problems rendering some of the posts. My first suspicion was the embedded links to google albums, because it is lot of HTML code. I made a couple of quick webpages to check the same and found that google albums are not the root cause. Then I started looking at the HTML tags of the blog entries that are not rendering well. I found that those entries contained some meta tags that are pasted while transferring content from OpenOffice text to by blog editor. These metatags are interpreted fine by both Firefox (both and Solaris and Windows) and Safari, but IE seems to give up (not just the post, but rest of the page and other columns of the blog page.)

Once I know the root cause, I could easily strip off the meta tags from a handful of entries and tested the rendering on all the three browsers.

Life is back to normal on blogosphere!

Cricket: First Twenty20 match

24 Sep
Raju Alluri Entertainment, Sports

Watched first ever twenty20 match played by India on Saturday. I was in US while the other matches are played, so couldn’t watch any of the previous matches. Couldn’t watch most of the Australian innings though, due to bursts of sleep after the journey. Good to see India win, lot better to see the aggression of the players. Yuvraj, Pathan, Srisanth, etc. displayed great amount of aggression and zeal to win. It is okay even if they loose matches while playing like that.

Now, twenty20 seems to steal the limelight from its ancestral roots like Tests and Oneday matches. However, I have a feeling that the statistics in twenty20 are lot about the chances and choices than about the talent. I have seen more talented bowlers succumb to good batting, less talented bowlers getting prize wickets due to choice of bad shots or choice of fielding locations. So the wins seem to be a reflection of the choices the individuals and captains made, not a pure reflection of the talents of the players involved. Talent matters here too, but not the only factor.

This week, it is time to watch the grand finale between the arch rivals from subcontinent in cricket, India and Pak. Hope they play an enjoyable match.