Chris and I were in several phone meetings across the globe in the last year or so and we frequently chat using emails. Today, While in Newark, CA, USA campus, while introductions are in progress during a meeting, Chris said he recognized me based on the graphic on my weblog. Impressive work by the caricature artist and thanks Chris for remembering those characteristics 
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BOSUG (Bangalore Open Solaris User Group) is conducting an install fest of Solaris. Take your PC/Laptop and get Solaris installed!
Here are the details from Moinak’s email:
Date: Saturday, April 28th
Place: BMS College 100 seater Auditorium
Time: 10AM till 3PMAgenda:
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
A quick demo of the Install Process10:30 AM - 11:15 AM
A demo of the post-install configuration and some Jazzy stuff like
Compiz 3D Desktop on Solaris.11:15 AM onwards
Troubleshooting and Installing machines
Landed in BayArea Saturday evening local time and checked into Homestead Villege Extended Stay, Fremont. 510.353.1664 for switchboard. Had late night dinner at JRR’s place (delayed due to rental car hire and room checkin) and just now back to room. Forcing some sleep to avoid jet lag during next few days…
Sun’s Sparc Enterprise Servers are here. Best run with Solaris!
Over the weekend, we went to the recently opened Cine Planet movie theaters at Kompally village, Hyderabad. As you might know, one of the issues with movie theaters in India is the black market for movie tickets. People procure tickets for movies and sell them at a higher cost once the box office is sold out. This theater has an interesting solution for that.
The box office takes a photo of the purchaser of the ticket using a small webcam. The quality of the picture is not great (may be 1024 x 768 level) but serves the purpose. For each purchase, they issue one single bar coded ticket/receipt, irrespective of the number of patrons. Once you reach the screen, there is a small kiosk there with a bar code scanner and a monitor. The monitor shows which of the seats are already occupied (I love this) based on the tickets scanned so far. Once the ticket is scanned, the monitor also shows the face of the individual who purchased the tickets.
Good work!
I see only a minor glitch with this. Most of us are used to go to movies as a group and different parts of the group arrive to the screen at different times. In the classic ticket selling scheme, where one ticket is issued per person, one of us used to wait for others who are yet to arrive and rest of us proceed to the screens. We don’t have that luxury with this scheme.
With this new approach, bodies like law enforcement agencies can get some clues on on the patrons, just in case there is a need to investigate. That is a plus point. Not sure how long the picture data is mined.
Outside the technology part, the place is very calm and enjoyable. Ample parking, very good food court and reasonable prices. Ticket costs are Rs 60 (less than 1.5 USD) and a visit to food court costed 7 of us (3 adults and 4 children) less than Rs 550 (about 13 USD) for lunch.
Only two screens are open as of now and looking forward to see the other two fully operational.
The libparted now works with OpenSolaris. This is a major milestone in making GParted functionality available with OpenSolaris.
Last week was really hectic. For a couple of days, I had to be in the construction work. My father-in-law has a small piece of land and he is being troubled by neighbors despite having his paperwork clean. Had to take the help of a couple of friends and start the construction of the boundaries within a short notice. So I had to take a couple of days off from the regular work and get the construction work done, because my father-in-law is old now and can’t take the pressure of that work in the mid summer days. Both those days are 14 hour days in the field out there, dealing with construction workers, materials and others. So I was really exhausted.
Moreover, a couple of builds didn’t go well as expected. So had to look into them in greater detail. In the end, I didn’t have enough time to take a look at anything other than my regular work and checking emails.
Brian Lara is very difficult to understand. His delayed declarations in Tests have kept cricket experts wondering for quite some time. Now for one dayers: What is the best time to take the third power play? He started in the 45th over against South Africa today and paid the penalty. 77 runs in those 5 overs!
45th - 18
46th - 07
47th - 17
48th - 09
49th - 26
As one of the commentators noted:
77 runs in this Powerplay, possibly the most ridiculous calculation in Powerplay history.
that too, given that the opponents are 36/1 in first 10 overs!
It rained for about 15 minutes at 5.30pm today. It is a welcome rain in the middle of the hot summer. Temperatures cooled off from 4.00pm this evening. Hope this weather continues for a few days.
Collectively, our family members own a dozen domain names. These domains are originally ordered for multiple reasons:
and so on.
We registered some of these domains way back in late 1990s, at a cost of at least 35 USD per domain per year.
We never bothered to review the need for these domains. For the last few years, domain renewal is so cheap (8.5 USD per annum, with no other obligations) and we kept on renewing some of these domains.
Early this year, I realized that the total number of domains we have increased to more than 10, due to the surge in incubating work related activities. The collective hosting and renewal costs are high. So I decided to review the need for each domain carefully. As of now, one of the domains we owned for about 6-8 years is about to go. We have no plans to renew them.
Also, we may put the other domains to some use or other, rather than keeping them idle. Currently, I use only the spurthi.com site extensively and two other sites to host some opensource related links.