Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

Sixth continuous day at work with a formal dress. At least with formal shirts, not one of those T-shirts.  And someone asked me today: “Are you being interviewed some where else?”
At least for the entire last week, I am in formal shirts and jeans. Today, I am with a formal shirt and a business casual trouser. For someone who wears shorts to work, this is too much of an irregularity.

Well, the scoop is, that the home is being repainted. The maid is busy with other things, so no washing of clothes for the last week or so. This made most of my regular dress ware exhaust from the wardrobe.

Now I need to yank out that last piece of clothing from my wardrobe and start using it. Otherwise, too much of a formal dress sequence…

A few years ago, when I first wanted to create a favicon for http://www.spurthi.com/, I had to use the Gimp 1.x on my Linux box to create a .png file and then convert that to a .ico file using png2ico utility. Today, I just wanted to play with this for this blog site. Using the Gimp 2.x on my Solaris x86 laptop, I created a very poor quality (from a user interaction perspective) favicon with just a few strokes. May be I need to get a good theme for a real favicon for this blog.

Today, we participants of a technology conference at work went to Cottage Industries Emporium on Cunningham Road in Bangalore. This is a nice cozy place, with very good food. Also, there is a classic Indian dance program that featured Bharata Natyam and Kathak is presented. The artists danced very well.

Today, I came to know that the Allahabad High Court’s web site features its conent as RSS feeds. Never expected a Government body to be so ahead of others in embracing the latest trends in technology. Also, their prefered documentation format is ODF, the Open Document Format. The technical section of their FAQ is worth reading.

Here is a very informative interview of Jonathan Schwartz, given to The Economic Times, leading financial newspaper in India.

Completed paper work for tax filing, which is due by 31st July. So far, I have been filing Saral form (form 2D.) Starting next year, the Income Tax Department is introducing Form 2F, which needs lot more details. So I may have to keep more paperwork ready. Just now downloaded the form 2F. Need to take a look at it and start preparing for next year.

Installed and tried Opera for the first time. Very impressive, for that size of a product! Saw that there is also a USB version of Opera, which can be run from a pen-drive’s spare space. Blinking favicons looks interesting, need to check out it more. Had some initial hiccups because each tab has its own close icon.

Now the question is, am I going to migrate to Opera from firefox? Not now!

This blog entry is being typed from a Opera browser client though!

I use Thunderbird mail client on a Solaris laptop for connecting to a SMTP mail server. This morning, while playing with the network connections, had a strange issue where thunderbird can no longer fetch my mail. It doesn’t ask for password too, and can’t establish connections to send email. Looked like a dangling cache issue, but couldn’t find how to clean it up. So finally resorted to a silly configuration change. Changed the SMTP server name to a system I know that doesn’t run mail services, got myself kicked out a few times and then connected to the original  SMTP server. Bingo! It worked like magic.

Happily back on Thunderbird again!

This article in Economic Times this morning claims that Govt. of India has blocked a few blog sites by instructing the ISPs. This seems unbelievable. Even though blogs help content to be syndicated effectively, putting the same content on a webpage or a bulletin board is not that rocket science. In essence, if Government is blocking these blog sites to reduce impact of terrorists, then they will find another way anyway. Why target a few blog sites that you know of? If the article’s claim is true, then these blog sites did more good than harm during the Mumbai blasts situation, at least based on what we know.

For the first time, used VPN for an uninterrupted duration of 14+ hours yesterday. Connection is over BSNL’s DataOne, from a Solaris x86 client. Bandwidth choked a couple of times for about 5 minutes each, but overall a very good response.