Sharma Family Journal

If you’re trying to switch from Sonic to AT&T Uverse, you’ve probably figured out that you need to switch to AT&T DSL first (so they take your order) and then to Uverse a couple of weeks later.

The problem is that the guys who write firmware for these modems stink. They make them intentionally hard to reconfigure, so its harder to switch. Here are the things that worked for me. Sonic tells you how to access the web UI. But they won’t tell you how to switch it to bridged mode. The config is in a hidden page: 10.0.0.1/brgmode.htm

A Chinese official today said:

“effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information”

I think this quote has the potential to be remembered for a long time to come.

My 1080p capable LCD monitor was not playing nicely with a netbook (Acer 1410) HDMI output when running Ubuntu 9.10.

Turns out that I had to run

xrandr --prop

Apart from telling me what X thinks about the hardware, it also gets my monitor to start working properly. Thought I’d blog it, before I forget about these useful little things.

If only I can teach my macbook to do this via the monoprice mini display port to HDMI adapter.

It’s been a couple of weeks since ISRO’s Bhuvan was announced. While it seems to have crappy accessibility and usability (I didn’t install it because of the accessibility issue) – it got a lot of PR in the India press. As usual, none of them include a URL! This also meant that none of the search engines can find it and some guy with an Ad sense account is profiting from the queries.

So search engines take note: Bhuvan by ISRO

Have you ever tried to lookup a train between two stations? Indian Railways website is the run away leader (not!) in terms of usability. You need to enter station codes (not city name) to use it and the interface to look it up is totally unusable.

You’re much better off searching for “indian railways station codes” in your favorite search engine.

These guys (and other Indian travel websites) seriously need some AJAX programmers.

Linus Torvalds on realworldtech. You may disagree with the man, but you have to appreciate his sense of humor.

Didn’t understand what it’s all about? Never mind.

There’s been a bunch of noise about carbon footprint and electronic equipment in the press lately. As I was trying to catch up, my laptop reminded me that something was taking up a bunch of CPU. Now that I don’t use a desktop anymore, I can literally “feel the heat” when it’s not happy.

Invariably, it’s some anti-virus thing trying to download some “update” or “scanning” my computer for files to “quarantine”. Got me thinking – if you count the zillions of computers and the compute cycles used by these programs, the carbon footprint might beat a lot of web 2.0 companies handily.

I was trying to dump some UTF-8 data from a mysql database and import it on another machine. Getting it right took almost a day for me.

It was hard to figure out who was screwing up. Was it mysql, php, php-mysql, server or the client, dumping program or something else?

After having solved the problem, I still don’t totally understand what went wrong. But blogging it here in the hope that someone will find it someday and find it useful.

Machine which was exporting had:

mysql> show variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                            |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                           |
| character_set_connection | latin1                           |
| character_set_database   | utf8                             |
| character_set_results    | latin1                           |
| character_set_server     | latin1                           |
| character_set_system     | utf8                             |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+

Machine which was importing had:

mysql> show variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                            |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                             |
| character_set_connection | utf8                             |
| character_set_database   | utf8                             |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                           |
| character_set_results    | utf8                             |
| character_set_server     | utf8                             |
| character_set_system     | utf8                             |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The exporting machine had wordpress running and was displaying utf8 data just fine, although the client was defaulting to latin1. I suspect that mysql was doing some type of weird escaping.

mysqldump --default-character-set=utf8 ... > dump.sql
mysql --default-character-set=utf8 < dump.sql

didn't work at all. What worked was:

mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 ... > dump.sql
sed 's/latin1/utf8/g' dump.sql > dump1.sql
mysql --default-character-set=utf8 < dump1.sql

Hope someone can explain what was going on here.

The headline in today’s economic times screams – some IIT guy got a $100k offer and quotes another guy as saying “IIMs are for second rate IITians”. I can’t seem to find a better example of the vulgarity I was alluding to in my earlier posts and the extent to which Indian media stoops to cater to the starry eyed kids who want a decent life and ready to pay Rs 10 to read this kind of crap.

Somewhere down on line 43 you’ll find that the average salary is only around Rs 600k ($13k). I tend to think that the guys who are trained in computer science are doing a big disservice to their profession and education by throwing away their skills and doing unrelated work for some oil drilling company or a stock broker.

Economic realities of today’s India can’t be ignored and one can’t be a hermit and work on a theoretical computer science problem at Rs 4000 per month. But a better compromise is possible and I think the media needs to highlight better role models – people who take good care of themselves, create job opportunities for others as well and do something for the advancement of technology.

I’m sure most reasonable people will see that it’s the advancement of technology that holds the key to true economic success – not low cost IT outsourcing or financial engineering.

While Mocking MIT’s $100 laptop project, Bill Gates said

Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Someone at MS seems to be feeding him misinformation about BRIC. Here are some stats from India:

Whether the commodity OS is a Linux/BSD or pirated Windows depends on the seller and the buyer.