I recently re-heard this joke about the panda during a presentation on the importance of punctuation in my company.
Just in case you are not familiar, it is about this panda, who can talk, who goes to the restaurant, has food, fires a few shots in the air and leaves without paying. On being questioned, it throws a WWF manual at him. It has this section about the panda - among other things, "eats, shoots and leaves".
Imagine my surprise when I found a book by the same title in our company library! I decided to take a chance with this book, especially since my colleague, Srini endorsed it.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves is an interesting book by Lynne Truss, a British writer, who is popular for her BBC programs . The author laments the incorrect, if not abuse of punctuations. The book traces the origin of various punctuations and talks about the ways to use them. It also highlights the nuances of use in American English vs British English. I, for one, learnt the difference between hyphen and dash!
The book is an interesting read, due to the presence various anecdotes and quotes. The author has an easy writing style and one never gets the feeling that it is a book on English grammar (focussed on punctuation).
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Angels and Demons
I usually read the book before seeing movies based on the book. Angels and Demons was different. I happened to see this movie with my brother-in-law a few weeks back. The movie is based on the novel by Dan Brown. I had read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, as well as seen the movie. The movie was a pale imitation of the book.
The movie was quite confusing, especially since the print was not great. It was more interesting than the movie "The Da Vinci Code" though. This meant, the book must be even better.
It has been ages since I last read a book - it was "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga. Though I have been reading, "The Pragmatic Programmer - from Journeyman to Master", since it is an e-book, I have not completed it yet.
When a cousin of mine, dropped in last Sunday, we hit Crossword, Indira Nagar 12th Main. Though the shop advertised, sale and discount, I was kind of disappointed with their choices. Imagine my surprise when I saw no visible copies of Angels and Demons. There was another DanBrown book, The Lost Symbol, which was available for pre-order.
After an exhaustive search, during which I also discovered most of the books I was looking for, wre not visibly available, I asked the shopkeeper for Angels and Demons. After a few minutes of searching, the shopkeeper managed to find "the last copy".
Angels and Demons is written actually before "The Da Vinci Code", though the latter movie came first. The plot is quite revolutionary, and can be ruffle a few Christian sentiments. It was not surprising to find the book, much better than the movie. There are quite a few deviations between the movie and the book, which is already captured here.
The plot revolves around the selection of the next pope after the demise of the current one. Four cardinals who are the frontrunners for the post are missing. On an apparently unrelated front, a CERN scientist is murdered and a canister containing deadly antimatter canister is missing.
The protagonist, Robert Langdon from Harward is called by CERN to help unravel the mystery, following the presence of a symbol branded in the late scientist's chest.
Well, the rest of the sordid details are available elsewhere. While the bulk of the book is a good read, I felt, there were a little too many twists and turns.
In any case, thanks, Dan Brown for reviving my reading habit - hopefully it is not ephemeral.
The movie was quite confusing, especially since the print was not great. It was more interesting than the movie "The Da Vinci Code" though. This meant, the book must be even better.
It has been ages since I last read a book - it was "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga. Though I have been reading, "The Pragmatic Programmer - from Journeyman to Master", since it is an e-book, I have not completed it yet.
When a cousin of mine, dropped in last Sunday, we hit Crossword, Indira Nagar 12th Main. Though the shop advertised, sale and discount, I was kind of disappointed with their choices. Imagine my surprise when I saw no visible copies of Angels and Demons. There was another DanBrown book, The Lost Symbol, which was available for pre-order.
After an exhaustive search, during which I also discovered most of the books I was looking for, wre not visibly available, I asked the shopkeeper for Angels and Demons. After a few minutes of searching, the shopkeeper managed to find "the last copy".
Angels and Demons is written actually before "The Da Vinci Code", though the latter movie came first. The plot is quite revolutionary, and can be ruffle a few Christian sentiments. It was not surprising to find the book, much better than the movie. There are quite a few deviations between the movie and the book, which is already captured here.
The plot revolves around the selection of the next pope after the demise of the current one. Four cardinals who are the frontrunners for the post are missing. On an apparently unrelated front, a CERN scientist is murdered and a canister containing deadly antimatter canister is missing.
The protagonist, Robert Langdon from Harward is called by CERN to help unravel the mystery, following the presence of a symbol branded in the late scientist's chest.
Well, the rest of the sordid details are available elsewhere. While the bulk of the book is a good read, I felt, there were a little too many twists and turns.
In any case, thanks, Dan Brown for reviving my reading habit - hopefully it is not ephemeral.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Income Tax Retrurns e-filing
One of the best things to happen in the area of Indian taxation is e-tax and e-filing.
I have been e-filing my tax returns for the last 3-4 years. Until last year, the Acknowlegement (ITR-V) needed to be submitted in person (or by proxy) to the IT Department. This has been simplified this year - just send the ITR-V by Ordinary Post in A-4 envelope (so as not to fold the ITR-V). Within a week, an email acknowledgement of receipt of ITR-V is received from IT Department.
There are multiple portal/websites advertising for IT e-filing. Beware these sites charge you to file your returns. The official Income Tax e-filing is free.
Happy e-filing.
I have been e-filing my tax returns for the last 3-4 years. Until last year, the Acknowlegement (ITR-V) needed to be submitted in person (or by proxy) to the IT Department. This has been simplified this year - just send the ITR-V by Ordinary Post in A-4 envelope (so as not to fold the ITR-V). Within a week, an email acknowledgement of receipt of ITR-V is received from IT Department.
There are multiple portal/websites advertising for IT e-filing. Beware these sites charge you to file your returns. The official Income Tax e-filing is free.
- Assuming you are a salaried employee with no other source of income, all you need handy is your PAN card number and the Form 16 from your employer.
- Visit the above link
- Register as new user (if you do not have an account yet).
- Download the appropriate ITR form - in the above case, ITR-1 is what you need. You would need to download the Excel utility.
- There is also the help file, which would be useful in filling the form.
- These are available as .zip file, which needs to be extracted using winzip or a similar utility
- Do not forget to enable the macro in the Excel sheet, since this helps in validation, auto-population of data, etc.
- There are few personal details to be filled. Then appropriate entries from Form 16 needs to be updated in the Excel sheet.
- Once filled, the sheet should be "validated" by click on the "Validate" buttton
- Then, choose the "XML Export" to generate an XML file
- Save the XML file
- Visit the website and choose - Submit Return, FY 2009-2010.
- Follow instructions and you are done.
- You can print the ITR-V which gets generated, as also sent to your email-id.
Happy e-filing.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
My dad and K R Market
We had arranged for bhagavathiseva at home this evening. This puja needs a lot of flowers. What better place to get it than K R Market.
Off we set off at 6.20 AM by car. The 13 km journey was covered in 20 min, the only speed reducers being the road humps. Finding a parking was a challenge, preceded by the small stretch where we had to manoeuvre the car through a motley crowd of sellers and buyers.
We had been to KR Market's "flower market" the last time we did this puja, a year or two back. It was nice to be back here. My dad, who lives in Cochin, never ceases to be amazed by the sheer volume of various flowers available here. It was not a question of what to buy, but what not to buy. Flowers of all kinds were being sold by weight. Not easy to get anything less than half a kilogram.
We explored the market and picked up flowers from various vendors. Language was a bit of a problem, since I don't speak good Kannada. I could understand the price quoted though, and most of the vendors could decipher my requirements. Many of them could understand tamil as well.
It was a good 45 min of shopping and we picked up flowers worth about Rs.350/- My dad felt this market was much larger than the Chennai flower market. He also remarked that with this quantity of flowers, they would do three such pujas in Cochin!
We reached home and spread out our wares and were keen to give a narrative of our visit to the not-so-interested better-halves.
Off we set off at 6.20 AM by car. The 13 km journey was covered in 20 min, the only speed reducers being the road humps. Finding a parking was a challenge, preceded by the small stretch where we had to manoeuvre the car through a motley crowd of sellers and buyers.
We had been to KR Market's "flower market" the last time we did this puja, a year or two back. It was nice to be back here. My dad, who lives in Cochin, never ceases to be amazed by the sheer volume of various flowers available here. It was not a question of what to buy, but what not to buy. Flowers of all kinds were being sold by weight. Not easy to get anything less than half a kilogram.
We explored the market and picked up flowers from various vendors. Language was a bit of a problem, since I don't speak good Kannada. I could understand the price quoted though, and most of the vendors could decipher my requirements. Many of them could understand tamil as well.
It was a good 45 min of shopping and we picked up flowers worth about Rs.350/- My dad felt this market was much larger than the Chennai flower market. He also remarked that with this quantity of flowers, they would do three such pujas in Cochin!
We reached home and spread out our wares and were keen to give a narrative of our visit to the not-so-interested better-halves.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
BSNL broadband and DNS servers
My BSNL broadband adventures seem never ending. Last Friday evening, I tried to connect to internet through BSNL broadband at home. The modem flashed the right colors and the modem web console showed everything was A-OK.
But nslookup to any hostname (yahoo, google, gmail) failed with a timeout.
I looked at my modem configuration and got the DNS IP addresses. I could ping to them. I tried to query them and either got time-out or "query rejected"
I waited till Saturday morning. No change in status.
I called up 1504, the customer service number in Bangalore. After the usual wait and retries, got connected to a service personnel. He asked me to do the usual - restart modem, check various entries. I interjected when I had the chance, to tell him that the DNS servers were down.
He asked me for the DNS server entries and when I told him, said no, they were incorrect. He gave me two other IP (which differed from mine in the last digit). I asked how it changed from the morning, when it had worked.
In any case, I tried with these DNS servers, to no avail. The engineer was clueless and after keeping me on hold for a few minutes, said there "could be some problem in Marathahalli or Jayanagar" and try after an hour.
No change after one hour. I called the customer service again. This time I could not get through at all.
The next day I woke up with a brainwave. Would I be able to connect to any site if I knew the IP - the problem was only the lookup. For sample, I had my company VPN server, which luckily was an IP address (rather than a hostname). To my joy, I could successfully get connected to the VPN. Thereafter the VPN DNS server took over and I could browse the internet.
I then searched for free DNS servers and found this one. I configured my modem to use this.
Thereafter I did not need to use the VPN. One more dependency on BSNL was gone.
But nslookup to any hostname (yahoo, google, gmail) failed with a timeout.
I looked at my modem configuration and got the DNS IP addresses. I could ping to them. I tried to query them and either got time-out or "query rejected"
I waited till Saturday morning. No change in status.
I called up 1504, the customer service number in Bangalore. After the usual wait and retries, got connected to a service personnel. He asked me to do the usual - restart modem, check various entries. I interjected when I had the chance, to tell him that the DNS servers were down.
He asked me for the DNS server entries and when I told him, said no, they were incorrect. He gave me two other IP (which differed from mine in the last digit). I asked how it changed from the morning, when it had worked.
In any case, I tried with these DNS servers, to no avail. The engineer was clueless and after keeping me on hold for a few minutes, said there "could be some problem in Marathahalli or Jayanagar" and try after an hour.
No change after one hour. I called the customer service again. This time I could not get through at all.
The next day I woke up with a brainwave. Would I be able to connect to any site if I knew the IP - the problem was only the lookup. For sample, I had my company VPN server, which luckily was an IP address (rather than a hostname). To my joy, I could successfully get connected to the VPN. Thereafter the VPN DNS server took over and I could browse the internet.
I then searched for free DNS servers and found this one. I configured my modem to use this.
Thereafter I did not need to use the VPN. One more dependency on BSNL was gone.
Upgrading to Fedora 11 from behind the proxy
Fedora 11 was released on June 9 and it was time to upgrade the linux PC at work. This PC had started with Fedora Core 6 (as the installation was called at that time) and I had kept upgrading it, each time Redhat released a newer version. I had written about one such upgrade.
I did not have an install CD, nor did I want to go that way. I wanted to upgrade using yum if that was possible. The official page had this tentative instructions. It appeared that things may not be so rosy.
This and this suggested it was better to go the "preupgrade" way. Earlier preupgrades did not work since the new OS did not show up in the list of OS available for upgrades.
I did the following as instructed.
yum -y update
yum clean all
yum install preupgrade
I switched to run level 3, as one of the instructions said and ran
preupgrade-cli
To my joy, it listed Fedora 11 (Leonidas). So the next step was
preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)"
After downloading about 2GB worth of updates, the system decided to reboot.
One of the grub boot options was "Upgrade to Fedora 11(Leonidas)". I chose this.
And then came the fun. It showed the message
Cannot connect to http://some.linux.mirror/os/fedora/11/.../install.img
The install image had not been downloaded and it was now trying to do this.
In normal cases, this would have been a non-event, except here, my office PC is behind a proxy server.
I had no clues how to specify the proxy server in the grub.conf to enable this download.
So I decided to manually download and put it in the file system and specify the path in grub.conf.
I rebooted and now it asks me, choose the device where the image is. It could read the boot partition alright, but I would need to specify UUID or some such information for it to read from other locations.
The boot partition did not have enough space for install.img - this was a 110 MB file and the boot partition itself was only about 100 MB.
I then put the image on a web server on my intranet and specified this URL to grub.conf.
This was good enough. The image got downloaded and the upgrade began.
This went off uneventfully and after the reboot I was on Fedora 11.
yum update hung though, as this blog said. Replacing https with http did the trick.
I did not have an install CD, nor did I want to go that way. I wanted to upgrade using yum if that was possible. The official page had this tentative instructions. It appeared that things may not be so rosy.
This and this suggested it was better to go the "preupgrade" way. Earlier preupgrades did not work since the new OS did not show up in the list of OS available for upgrades.
I did the following as instructed.
yum -y update
yum clean all
yum install preupgrade
I switched to run level 3, as one of the instructions said and ran
preupgrade-cli
To my joy, it listed Fedora 11 (Leonidas). So the next step was
preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)"
After downloading about 2GB worth of updates, the system decided to reboot.
One of the grub boot options was "Upgrade to Fedora 11(Leonidas)". I chose this.
And then came the fun. It showed the message
Cannot connect to http://some.linux.mirror/os/fedora/11/.../install.img
The install image had not been downloaded and it was now trying to do this.
In normal cases, this would have been a non-event, except here, my office PC is behind a proxy server.
I had no clues how to specify the proxy server in the grub.conf to enable this download.
So I decided to manually download and put it in the file system and specify the path in grub.conf.
I rebooted and now it asks me, choose the device where the image is. It could read the boot partition alright, but I would need to specify UUID or some such information for it to read from other locations.
The boot partition did not have enough space for install.img - this was a 110 MB file and the boot partition itself was only about 100 MB.
I then put the image on a web server on my intranet and specified this URL to grub.conf.
This was good enough. The image got downloaded and the upgrade began.
This went off uneventfully and after the reboot I was on Fedora 11.
yum update hung though, as this blog said. Replacing https with http did the trick.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Yammer
We use Yammer as a collaboration tool at work.
From wikipedia, Like Twitter, it allows users to post updates of their activities, follow others' updates, tag content, and create memes. Unlike Twitter, Yammer focuses on businesses, and only individuals with the same email domain can join a given network
It works faster and better than emails and less annoying too! Try it out!
From wikipedia, Like Twitter, it allows users to post updates of their activities, follow others' updates, tag content, and create memes. Unlike Twitter, Yammer focuses on businesses, and only individuals with the same email domain can join a given network
It works faster and better than emails and less annoying too! Try it out!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
