My thoughts in e-text

I am very excited to join Google! This is perhaps the best career move for me. It has been my dream to work at Google ever since I graduated. Then why have I not been working in Google from the start of my career? Why join Motorola? Here is a timeline to put everything in perspective. Summer of 2001: My GRE exam is on August 1, 2001. Preparations are underway with one target in mind - "I have to join MIT". But no amount of hard work could prepare me for the dooms day. I wrote the exam and the scores were not as good as I anticipated. I was totally dejected. I knew then that I lost any chance of getting into MIT. And from that day to this day I kept complaining that "I could not join MIT". Only a few handful of people knew how depressed I was during that time. Fast forward 3 years. August 2004: I joined University of Arizona in 2002 and I was close to completing my Masters. I had no plans of doing PhD. I lost all hope to join MIT. But I knew one thing I could do that...

It has been a long time since I blogged, mostly because I have been very very busy both with my work and also with several "week-end projects". But all is not to be blamed on the work, I have been quite lazy too! Anyway a long time ago, perhaps over 6 months ago, I wanted to write a small application that looks like iTunes but would run on J2ME enabled phones (MIDP 2.0). I started out all excited and wrote this small application called cTunes that kind of mimics iTunes. I recently made a video from it and posted in youtube (follow this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coV06ChYWJo or see below) I also demonstrated this application at the Phoenix Java User Group on 07/12/2006 (go to this link http://www.phxjug.org/meetings.html and search Chandan Pitta). The excitement died soon after I was able to prove that phones can be as good as iTunes and yet allow you to make calls. So I did not do anything more to the application and jumped to other "week-end projects". Re...

Soon after Internet Explorer 7.0 was release, Firefox 2.0 was also released. Now both these browsers have tabbed browsing with ability to close tabs without actually activating the tab since they have the little close button on each tab. Firefox has an excellent feature to re-open previous session if it was not closed properly. I discovered how useful and perhaps risky this feature is. At work I use a windows laptop (yeah I know, it is unlike me, but the tools I need are available only in windows). So I installed firefox 2.0 and liked it a lot. Ever since I used eclipse (the java IDE) with its close button on each tab, I have hoped firefox would do it one day. At that finally happened. Anyway, after installing a certain patch to the windows machine (forced down the throat by corporate update system), the windows machine wanted to restart (so what is new). It gave me 1 min to close all windows. I frantically saved all my work (I usually have a minimum of 10 windows landscaping on my tw...

After a long time... Dell E1705 Dell 9300 This is the continuation of the previous post. Just a couple more images to show the difference between Pentium M and core 2 duo and computing power. And again Core 2 Duo is almost 2 times faster than the equally clocked Pentium M. Awesome, just awesome. I am able to play Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Age of Empires III, with full visual effects and they still keep up a very good FPS. Finally I am able to play with bloom effects in AoE III. That said, I guess I spent way too much time with my new laptop, so this will be the last post about it ;-).

Dell E1705 configuration * Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz * 1 GB @ 667 MHz * NVIDIA 7900 GS Dell 9300 configuration * Pentium 2.0 GHz * 1 GB @ 533 MHz * NVIDIA 6800 3DMark results This is Dell 9300 stock GPU (290 MHz / 590 MHz) Dell E1705 stock GPU (375 MHz / 507 MHz) Dell 9300 overclocked GPU (375 MHz / 761 MHz) I did not try overclocking E1705 for 2 reasons. First the clock is locked, and the only way to override it is to flash a new BIOS into the GPU. The second reason is that the GPU is already running hot and I did not have faith in Dell's cooling. In any case all the games that I have run very well even with high settings. From the snapshots above we can see that the overclocked NVIDIA 6800 is still slower than NVIDIA 7900 stock.

So I got my new Dell E1705 (again). And this time everything was perfect. As usual instinctively I decided to install Gentoo after wiping all the partitions. However I did not purchase the windows backup cd from dell, which hindered my intense desire to wipe out everything. I carefully repartitioned around winXP partition and was able to cut out 25 GB for my Gentoo. After going through the normal process of compiling everything with CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe", I decided to install Xgl. A very good tutorial to follow is available at http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL . I already used it on my old laptop, so getting Xgl to work is not all that exciting. Xgl brings all the super cool effects to Linux. My Gentoo looks better than Mac OS X! With the Beryl window manager, I can get the cool looking transparent window frames or a frame that looks like Windows Vista theme. Here are some screen shots Next I installed Xen following the HowTo from http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xe...

I received my Dell E1705 laptop and as I said in my previous post. One of the first things I wanted to do was to swap the LCD screens. Well I started out with confidence, but ended in a futile result. The whole ordeal lasted less than 15 minutes and left me devastated (well I really didn't need such a strong word just because it didn't work). Anyone who has experience in opening dell laptops already know all this but just a picture story goes here. I opened the plastic covering and then the keyboard, its connection and the LCD controller connection. Since the WiFi antenna resides inside the LCD display I also had to remove the connections from WiFi at the back of the laptop. I proceeded with the same steps for my Dell 9300 laptop too, and swapped the displays. Now is the time to know the truth! After I switched on my E1705 with it's UXGA screen from my older 9300, I saw the screen go all white, then BIOS messages appeared as normal, no indication of any errors or anything. ...