I’ve been planning to do this for a while now, and its finally happened. SharadWare is now powered by WordPress. For a little over two years, I’d been using Movable Type. I’ve got nothing against MT - it’s a great product and my heartfelt thanks to it’s creators.

So why did I shift? Well, multiple reasons…

MT is written in Perl, WP in PHP. Personally speaking, I favor PHP for web applications and I’m more comfortable with it. Although my weblog is a little over two years old now, my writing has been sporadic, at best. So the backend didn’t matter as much as earlier. Now however, I hope to be more regular over here. And therefore I’d like to be able to tinker under the hood, if required. That’s the personal bias bit.

More objectively, WordPress has been making strides in it’s capabilities and good things are being said about it for a while now. There also seem to be loads of plugins available and I’m looking forward to trying some of the anti-comment-spam utilites. To tell you the truth, comment spam had become an increasingly irritating pain on my MT installation.

Finally, I like the interface and feel pretty good about the usability of the whole thing, which I think is very important. Although I should mention that in this respect, I didn’t really have any complaints with MT either.

I’ll probably post a few more thoughts as I explore and use this tool some more. In the meanwhile… thank you Movable Type; WordPress, let’s write… :)

Early this morning I received an email from Peter Theobald of IT Secure, a client of ours. Here is a part of what he wrote:

It felt wonderful as I read that. I’m sure my team is going to be thrilled too. For the creator of a product or a service, there are few things (besides lots of sales :)), that give immense satisfaction. End user appreciation such as this, possibly tops the list.

Thank you Peter, for a great start to my day.

Please read my earlier post Installing Linux on the IBM ThinkPad T43 for background information.

The setup so far: Windows XP Pro & SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 (with GRUB installed in the MBR). Although I had a perfectly functioning dual-boot system at this point in time, the fact that the Access IBM button did not work irritated me.

After a few unsuccessful attemtps at getting it to work, I decided to restore the MBR to it’s original state, to check if that would get the Access IM button working. When GRUB was installed, SUSE kept a backup copy of the MBR. I booted into Linux, invoked YaST2 and followed the instructions. The system told me that the MBR was restored successfully. However, after rebooting, there was no operating system found. No Linux, no Windows. And… the Access IBM key still didn’t work. Okay, it is possible that something may have gotten messed up during the experimenting and so the restore original MBR did not fix it. But I can’t say for sure.

Back to Linux. I rebooted using the SUSE DVD into rescue mode, and reinstalled GRUB. Came back to square one - a perfectly functioning dual boot system, minus the Access IBM functionality.

Since it looked like I would have to get into possibly more “destructive” experimentation, I decided to make me a set of system rescue and recovery disks, which would enable me to restore WinXP as well as the factory installed software provided by IBM. (You can do this within WinXP from: Start -> All Programs -> Access IBM -> Create Recovery Disks) It took six CDs.

Next, I did a cursory search on the web to see if anyone else had faced the issues on hand, but the results were not encouraging. So, I decided to take the easy way out and call IBM. Calling the IBM helpline didn’t help because their lines were always busy. I sent them an email describing the problem. Their response was to ask me for the serial number on my machine, which I sent and then waited… (Tip: If you have to ever communicate with IBM regarding your laptop, always include its serial number. It’ll save you the time of an email roundtrip.)

Getting impatient, the next day I sent them a reminder and about an hour later got a call from one of their Support Executives. After describing the problem to him, his response was: “If you want to install Linux and have a dual boot system, the Access IBM funtionality will be lost. Sorry sir…” I wanted to discuss in a little more technical detail stuff about the MBR, boot partitions, etc., but he couldn’t help and that clearly was getting nowhere. It was then that I decided I wanted to move back to square zero. To get the machine back into factory shipped state and start afresh. The executive was not at all confident that the rescue disks I had made would restore the system to the factory state and said that if it didn’t work, I’d need to take the notebook to their tech center. He promised to call me back in half an hour (and he did) to tell me what settings I should keep for the IBM Predesktop area in the BIOS. FYI, while restoring I kept the setting at “Normal”. The restore process obviously destroyed my Linux installation, but two and ahalf hours later I had the system in the state in which it was shipped to me… with the Access IBM button working.

Okay… it was time to get to work. My fundamentals were rusty and if I wanted to refresh my knowledge of how things work under the hood (which I very much did), I knew I would need to brush them up. So back it was to the web and good old Google. Seek and you shall find. I covered up disk architecture, partitioning, the boot process, MBR and boot sectors, boot loaders, Microsoft’s way of dealing with booting, the rest of the world’s way of dealing with booting, etc., etc.

It was fun, but I couldn’t do as much justice to the knowledge revision process as I’d have liked to, given the constraints of running a company and having to do everyday “real” work. The research and the experimentation resulted in some eye-opening, a lot of memory jogging and even a couple of tips and tricks - stuff that I’ll present in other postings.

To come down to it, there is more than one way to address the current challenge. This is what I did. It’s childishly simple - I almost felt cheated ;)

Important: Set the IBM Predesktop Area (in the BIOS) to “Secure”.

Boot using the SUSE DVD. Shrink the Windows partition as required. Follow the instructions and go through the regular installation process. Create a primary partition for /boot (the other stuff can go into the extended partitions) and when the time comes to install GRUB (you do prefer GRUB to LILO, don’t you?), make sure you install it into the boot sector of the boot partition. Set this partition as active. Leave the MBR alone.

That’s it.

Continue and complete the install. Reboot. If all has gone well, the system starts up and you have a choice of booting into SUSE (the default) or WinXP. They both startup fine.

Finally, try the Access IBM button when the machine is starting up. It works just fine… :)

A short while ago, I received an email from the folks at BlogStreet India, informing me that SharadWare has been featured as “Blog of The Day”… :)

Recently I acquired an IBM ThinkPad T43. It’s quite a beauty. The machine came preinstalled with Microsoft Windows XP (Pro) and a few addon applications. Almost all of the space on the disk was taken up for use by WinXP and designated as C: by the OS. There is another smaller, “hidden” area of about 4GB, which is used by IBM to provide rescue and recovery services to the user. It is called the Predesktop Area and is supposed to be OS independent. It contains (amongst other stuff) a dump of all the preinstalled software. If unfortunately, the need should arise, this can be used to revert the machine to the original state as when shipped from the factory. (As a rule, IBM doesn’t ship a copy of WinXP, nor separate rescue disks when you purchase a laptop from them.)

For me, most of the time Linux is my preferred OS. I definitely wanted to install it on the laptop, and at the same time retain the preinstalled WinXP. Basically make the machine multi-boot capable. The next question was, which distribution of Linux to use?

Most of my experience has been with Slackware initially, then Redhat and finally Fedora, although I haven’t really used these on laptops. But now, I wanted to try something different. I was first inclined to take a look at Debian, but some very rudimentary R&D on the web and I ended up trying SUSE instead.

I procured an evaluation copy of a trimmed down, remastered version of SUSE Linux Professional from Novell India, courtesy Prakash Advani, an old friend. We had a fun chat about Linux and he kind of revalidated my choice of the distribution - we’ll ignore the fact that he currently works with Novell ;)

Time for action… I popped in the DVD, rebooted and was presented with SUSE installation screen. To cut a not too long story short, in less than two hours I had a functioning dual boot system. The installation process was smooth, professional and well thought out. It even handled the resizing of the single NTFS partion (occupied by WinXP) to make space for Linux. Painlessly.

My immediate reaction: SUSE rocks!

After I’ve had a chance to use this for a while, I will write more about the ThinkPad T43 as well as my experiences of running SUSE on it.

Warning:
There was one undesired side effect of this exercise though. The ThinkPad has an “Access IBM” button, which when pressed during startup provides the user with a rescue and recovery utility and makes use of the above mentioned Predesktop Area. This no longer worked. (It lets me access the BIOS and change my boot device, but thats all - all the fancy troubleshooting & diagnostic stuff doesn’t come on.)

For the impatient:
If you are going to install Linux on your T4x, and if the above bothers you, keep two points in mind, before the installation:
1. In the BIOS settings, go to Security -> IBM Predeskop and change the value from the default “Normal” to “Secure”.
2. When the time comes, do not install GRUB/LILO in the MBR.

More details later.

I’m going to do some experimenting and will write about those in another post. Feel free to ask any questions you may have or share some of your own suggestions.

[Update (July 11, 2005): Also look at SUSE Linux, WinXP & Access IBM on the ThinkPad T43 for more information]

I’m back. From a twenty-day trip, up north into the Himalayas. To Kailash Mansarovar and back. It was awesome!

Having said that, I’ve lost weight, gotten tanned and sort of feel the need for a vacation - after the vacation. Yup, some parts were pretty tough and tiring.

I got back a couple of days ago and dived into work right away. The expected flood of email, an operational crisis at an important client location, getting debriefed on the status of the beta test cycle of PostMaster, planning the launch, figuring out sales & marketing plans for the next few months… whoever said that work lacks excitement? Well, so much for my vacation, after a vacation!

I plan to write more about the trip later, as well as post some pictures. Not necessarily in that order. Additionally, I’m also going to put up some older pictures that I’ve wanted to share, but haven’t been able to overcome my inertia. May as well make the most of my current motivation… :)

A while ago, I was out for lunch with a few colleagues, when one of them received a call on his mobile. It was a tele-marketing call, promoting a rival mobile services brand. It seemed obvious that the marketing agency was calling a sequence of phone numbers selected randomly.

Irritating, disturbing and intrusive. I’m sure you agree. Much to my surprise however, my friend Cyrus proceeded to engage the caller in conversation. He spoke calmly and even agreeably, asked questions and expressed an interest in exploring a corporate deal. A few minutes of talk and he said that he would place an order - as long as they offered it to him at price “x” (x being a ridiculously low number). So ridiculous, that one would be completely embarassed or simply laugh out loud. Needless to say, the conversation came to an abrupt end.

Amidst the laughter and chatter that followed, Cyrus explained that he’d heard, if you wasted the caller’s time often enough, your number got “black listed”, and since most of these marketing lists sooner or later get shared with others, the chances of you being called like this, minimize. Sounds wonderful! :)

The technology biased part of my mind immediately recognized this principle as tarpitting. In the world of email, we’ve all experienced the ill effects receiving spam. A major reason that spammers spam is that they find the process extremely cost & time effective. I mean spammers send mass email to a whole lot of people, very quickly, very easily and at very low costs.

Using tarpitting, we could make this process a little less attractive for the spammers. The principle is the same as in my little story above.

Lets assume that a mailserver has determined (via other methods) that it is receiving spam from some machines. One way to respond would be to reject connections from these hosts. Effective and often done. But that would simply result in the spammers ignoring you and continuing to target someone else (besides it won’t help my example :)).

If our mailserver uses tarpitting however, it will continue to accept connections from the spammers, but it will treat these connections different from good ones. How? Email transfer between machines happens using standard protocols. If our server responds slowly and sluggishly to the spammers, then we have tied up their connections, wasted some of their resources and made their operations more expensive, in terms of time and eventually money.

Of course the whole process is not as simple as it sounds, but my intention was to share the principle.

So the next time you get an annoying call on your phone, don’t just hang up. Try some tarpitting instead… :)

My first post here was exactly two years ago. To the day. Two years ago! Wow. How time flies. It’s very obvious that I haven’t been regular. And that’s an understatement. Well what can I say?

How about… Happy Valentine’s Day folks! :)

Ever since “google for it” became a phrase in day to day net lingo, the business of searching has taken on a different tone. Besides Google, which for obvious reasons comes to mind first, Yahoo seems to have worked on its searching act and Microsoft, the latest kid on the “search the web” block offers us search at MSN.

So which of these is the best search engine? Lets ask the the engines themselves. I ran two queries: “best search engine” and a more question-like, “which is the best search engine”.

For your information and amusement, my observations follow:

Query 1: best search engine

Google
Results 1 - 10 of about 18,500,000 for best search engine. (0.34 seconds)

The regular clean look, that we’ve all come to know and love. Two sponsored links on the right hand side.

The first six links were to sites which seemingly help choose a relevant search engine - I didn’t click through any - and the last four pointed to other search engines or search engine aggregation services.

Nowhere on the result page did Google, Yahoo or MSN figure.

Yahoo
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,000,000 for best search engine - 0.17 sec.

The page looks even more minimalistic than Google, if thats possible. No sponsored links.

Ten links, each to a search engine, with (hold your breath) Yahoo topping the list, followed by Google in second place. MSN was not amongst these and I didn’t look further.

MSN
1-8 of 10,922,549 containing best search engine (0.16 seconds)

Compared to Google and Yahoo, the result page looks a little heavy.

Eight results, surrounded by sponsored links (three on the top, three at the bottom and five along the right side).

The results were like Google’s, mostly to sites which purportedly help one with a search engine selection. There were two links to actual search engines, one of which was Google.

What I found amusing was that the first sponsored link on the top (which incidentally happens to be the first link on the page under the Web Results heading) was a link to MSN itself. And… the first of the three sponsored links at the bottom was once again, MSN Search itself.

Query 2: which is the best search engine

Google: Practically the same result set as the first one. No sponsored links this time.

Yahoo: Similar to previous result set, with the difference that Google is now the first link, with another at sixth position (to Google UK) and the last link on the page is Yahoo.

MSN Search: Similar results to it’s first run. Sponsored sites dropped to two, neither being MSN. Google still figures about half way down.

Note:
Don’t take these tests too seriously. I did them on impulse, more for fun and out of curiosity. I haven’t analyzed size, validity & accuracy; or checked for similarity of result links across the engines; and have treated a reference to yahoo.com the same as search.yahoo.com and so on.

The question remains. Which is the best search engine? What do you use for your web searching? And why? :)

Travelling to and from work, by road in Mumbai takes up quite a bit of time. The state of the roads and the ever increasing traffic add to the frustration. Especially if you happen to be driving yourself.

To cope with this, I sometimes surf the FM radio channels listening to the music, the chatter of the RJ’s and the views of the occasional caller on air. Besides entertainment, it is often a source of news and local events.

At other times I work on a mind exercise, the objective being to consciously try and stay in a calm state of mind. Trust me when I say that it is easier said than done. It means having to risk your vehicles suspensions over bad roads or slowing down to a crawl. It means restraining yourself from yelling at the next driver, who is squeezing you onto the pavement, because he just woke up and is now making a desparate left turn. It means accepting that auto-rickshaws don’t follow most laws of physics, and that might is right, when a bus decides to simply cut you and enter into the flow of traffic. And so on… If I manage to arrive at my destination in a reasonalbly calm state of mind, its an achievement to be proud of :)

Sometime ago, I chanced upon another option: talking on the cell phone. A friend called while I was driving back. We’d been out of touch and ended up chatting for quite a while. I used a handsfree earpiece. Before I realised it, most of the journey was over. Quite pleasantly. Now this seems great. It would probably allow me to stay in touch with people (which is always a challenge in city-life) and I would no longer need to wrestle with the state of my mind.

And then, yesterday I read this: Cell Phone Use Ages Young Drivers. It advises against the use of a cell phone while driving, even handsfree phones. The story is poorly titled IMHO, but worth a read.

Now what?