Sunday, October 22, 2006

The end of an era!

Schumi's retiring today :( His last race in less than an hour's time... Ah, well, the racing world's never gonna be the same again, is it?

I've loved seeing him race since I can remember watching and following F1.

Will certainly be missing him next year - hope he wins today ;)

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

10/09/2006 - A very sad day indeed!

A teary eyed Schumi announced he's retiring from F1 racing at the end of this year :(

Having watched him race since years and break almost all the records in the book was a wonderful experience. I knew it was going to happen this year (as everyone did) but was secretly hoping for him to stay on for another year! Anyways, it's always good to go on a high rather than pass away on a low!

It would be very different next year. Yes, Kimi would be winning more races and my money's on him rather than Alonso who's joining Mercedes McLaren next year. Not because of their abilities but because of the cars they'd be driving. The Merc-McLaren is a great car; it's just that its not reliable enough for Alonso to exploit it to the limit without breaking it!

Kimi and Alonso both have a very different style of driving. I find Alonso pushing the car just a bit more harder than Kimi does and it would be interesting to see him drive in the Merc next year. He'd certainly have more reliability issues than Kimi did if they don't do something major to their car to be able to sustain Alonso's pace; and only then would 2007 get interesting.

Anyway, here's one to the great (est?) racing drivers of all time!

and yes, he's winning the drivers championship this year! hehehe

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Aaagh! RSS, Atom, Blogger ..... and me

Aaagh! Would have pulled out my hair if I couldn't get this sorted!!!!

Want: I wanted to my blog entries to be updated dynamically on my homepage.

Process: Add the RSS feed for my blog onto the page.

But how could I?

Blogger does publish rss but it's got numerous errors.

I could get the feeds on the page but not the first feed. So, the only solution was to convert my atom feed into rss and get that feed to be displayed on the page.

I used feedburner for conversion but that had the same issues for days. Support did try to help but it was taking too much time for me to get this resolved.

So, I deleted the original feed and restarted the process and then tried to run both (atom and rss) feeds on the same page and figured out what was causing the problem.

Due to errors in the rss feed validation my aggregator kept on publishing the entries from Number 2 onwards and I just couldn't get the first entry to be displayed on the page.

I am now using the atom feed converted to rss and it's working fine.


Try validating your feed at http://feedvalidator.org/
Feedburner url: http://www.feedburner.com/
My feed on feedburner: Impressions

Sunday, July 23, 2006

The mood at Dorchester Court on July 22, 2006



The day was right; the mood was good and the fun began at 1900 hrs. nah! 7pm IST ;) on clocks set at BST.

We started at 01:00 am! with preliminary preperations which carried on to late afternoon after a brief period of rest overnite.

The first guest was Hardik Mehta followed and the rest soon followed.

The party started on a mellow mood with everybody greeting and mingling, starting with a swig of juice, doritos and Snacky snakes.. I mean snacks.

Went in to full swing when we opened the bottles and the very pricey! ;) (Hardik, Prince and Rajesh) DJ's chipped in with full BASS.

Free flowing Bacardis and Teachers following the Champagne helped the ocassion. Dance sessions saw the very best of Desi talent come to fore... all evidence captured in pictures.

Dinner was quickly devoured with very delicious desi home made delicacies; Gujju Dhokla, Bulchandani family special Shahi paneer, Punjabbi Cholle, Sindi special Sai-bhaji, Pulav and loads of garam garam puris.

The departures started with Vikas (yeah, I'm gonna quote you on this!!!!) excuse of not bringing the medication that had to be given to her daughter, the rest didn't have as imaginative excuses so had to stay on until the dates changed.


All in all, a great great evening with friends and family, looking forward to another one coming up soon as we couldn't fit all our friends in the first.

Guest list - one absentee that didn't make it!

Akash's family minus him
Hardik
Manoj - you've got some excuses mate!!!!
Mukesh with family (Prince)
Prince's family (Mukesh)
Rajesh & family
Shailendra's family
Sunil's family
Vikas' family
and since we couldn't fathom an excuse to get out of home, we were present too :0)


Click here for the fun fun photographs

Smashing party!!!! - Thanks to all who took the trouble to come around :))))))))))))))))

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Update from the Indian Meteorological Department on the earthquake

Date of Occurrence: 07/03/2006
Time: 23:50:44.1 HRS(IST)
Intensity: MODERATE
Magnitude: 5.2
Epicentre: Lat. 23.8°N Long. 70.7°E
Region: KACHCHH, GUJARAT

Gujarat earthquake - 07/03/20006

Nothing in the news yet (BBC or Sky) but Reuters come up with a few lines. Not much detail but seems that the quake wasn't too intense, links below:

Earthquake shakes buildings in India's Gujarat state

Earthquake shakes buildings in Gujarat

Earthquake shakes buildings in India's Gujarat state

There's no official confirmation on the epicentre or the intensity of the quake from Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi

Oracle's lower TCO's reported against SAP

my slashdot post on SAP vs. Oracle, Battle Royale
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle's lower TCO's reported against SAP on an Oracle affiliated site! Oh, it's very transparent and connects to well document studies, doesn't it?

No?

Anyways, we'll just take their word and say SAP's TCO is almost double that of Oracle's similiar offerings!?
Similiar?

Does anything from Oracle even stack up close to SAP's offerings?
Nope! is the one word answer, no matter which camp you belong to, you cannot bring up a product that seamlessly brings together all aspects of a business as SAP does.

All the modules can be individually customized and presented to the customer for their choosing whenever they want to use that part of the package.

No, it's not a battle royale, Fusion, never was and will never come close to where SAP is in the market today.

High Costs!?!

What's that, do you say a piece of code is costly just because it initially costs higher!?

Have you ever worked in a company where SAP was implemented, do some costing for such a company and then come back and post on the cost savings they've had in their departments after implementing SAP, yes a few implementations do go pear shaped but this is generally not the case.

I don't know about Zoellner's previous jobs but certainly can't find anything on google relating him to know anything that he claims to know about SAP.

(Disclaimer: I'm an SAP Tech. Consultant)
(home: http://alternateplanet.net/ [alternateplanet.net] )
(blog: http://alternateplanet.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] )
--
i live on an alternate planet [alternateplanet.net]

Monday, March 06, 2006

Formula 1 - 2006

6 Days to go !!! :)
I can't wait now.

I can still vividly remember last year's first grand prix - It was Australia and Michael Schumacher did not finish!

It was a sign of things to come for him and his team for the entire year! one of the worst year's Schumi's had racing.

Will this year be better for him? with smaller engines and tyre changes allowed a lot will change this year.

Keep your eyes on the telly this Sunday! Don't go anywhere!

If you don't have a telly , the official website of formula 1 is http://www.formula1.com
The link here will show show live timings (registration required)

Sunday, March 05, 2006

VoiFi Voi fi anyone?

No, Not me, thanks anyway.

The website's slow to boot for a start (too many pageloads!?)
The screenshots show up as a kid's attempt at a school project (mine were better!)
It doesn't do PC-to-Phone calls (not yet)
The site doesn't have a proper download page or install instructions! No troubleshooting steps (Oh! wait, I forgot, all the people in this world are techies and will not have any problems installing this)

What's the idea of creating another p2p chat/voice chat client in an already over-crowded market with nothing extra to offer except a few games, oh, wait. I bet I can't do that on my yahoo messenger! (or can I?)

And yeah, I presume Mr. Bhatia's betting on me to call/txt/instant message/email all my 'buddies' and ask them to download/install/register on a new site/IM tool to play 'teen patti'!?

And I don't like that fact that the website looks very very shabby in Firefox!

As I said earlier: No, Not me, thanks anyway.

Anyone got a better look at the voifi (voifi or voi fi what ever it's called ) download? Please post reviews / comments.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Fog in a Delhi December

This is a copy of an extract (that I found on the IndiaUncut blog) - The original piece that it further links to is a written by Annie Zaidi

A very brave piece of writing I'd say... Go on, read it. Will certainly set those Brain Cells and Heart beats working...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a moving post, "Streets, stories, strategies," that's part of the Blank Noise Project Blog-a-thon, Annie Zaidi writes:

Some things, you learn to expect, growing up a girl.

You expect to confront harrassment as surely as the sun in May and the fog in a Delhi December.

When you leave the house, an invisible snake of alert suspicion will wind down from your shoulders down your back and become a clenched fist in all public spaces, through all journeys.

How optimistic you're feeling about man-kind, on any given day, determines whether you take a bus home, or just hop into an auto, or a cab, knowing you cannot really afford it. If you really cannot afford an auto some day, you will not take the bus at rush-hour.

You'll let bus after bus after bus go past. Waiting is tiresome. But waiting is easier than bristling.

You didn't always expect to do this, of course. One learns these things, by and by. [Bold and itals in original.]

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

This is worth writing about...

One of my mates called today, weird problem, he said.

He had an excellent network connection but wasn't able to pass data onto his internet connection! translated to english: Internet not working!!! code red!


Made him type the following and voila! Google comes up in a split second - follow the following, i mean, type the following if you're on windows (xp) and having the same problem!

Well, you wouldn't be reading this if you didnt have your internet connection and wanted to solve the problem, would you!?
Anyways, here goes...

nbtstat -RR - Purge and reload NetBIOS cache (lmhosts)
ipconfig /renew - Release and renew the DHCP lease

You can also right click the wireless connection and click repair - but you could use the above method if some other application is managing the wireless connection.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Website template / css changes

More than 8 hours! it's taken me to update my website alternateplanet.net to a fresh new template, a new look two-step menu system and a new css template! hard work it was - 8 continuous hours, but it does look good now! (No, not better, coz I liked it the same earlier)

I have expanded on a set of base templates available from a german website phpwcms-templates.de/ and amended the style sheets and changed a few pages with small/major changes that I was planning since a few years now!

Time to go to sleep I guess. It's after 4am in the morning!

Good Night and keep visiting...

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Domain Renewal and Hosting Change

Just completed a domain renewal and a hosting provider change a few days ago (weeks actually ;) )

The previous provider was pretty good actually, just one small problem - No Support! You write an email and wait for days and the reply.... no, it doesn't materialize!

So, I moved, to a better provider, higher rates but more disk space means I won't be running out of my disk space contstantly and good support means I get my questions answered quickly and hopefully, problems sorted out with a similiar speed as well.

Anyways, just another case of how support is more important than the quality of service you provide.

Getting a stable server a huge pipe doesn't mean you can be a good hosting provider, you have to have humans answering support queries and resolving them before the customer takes the next best offer and you lose his custom.

Welcome to the new alternateplanet people!

- Tarun.
(yes, I still live on planet earth)

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Formula 1 Race Dates / Schedule for 2006

12 March Bahrain Grand Prix
19 March Malaysian Grand Prix
02 April Australian Grand Prix
23 April San Marino Grand Prix
07 May European Grand Prix
14 May Spanish Grand Prix
28 May Monaco Grand Prix
11 June British Grand Prix
25 June Canadian Grand Prix
02 July United States Grand Prix
16 July French Grand Prix
30 July German Grand Prix
06 August Hungarian Grand Prix
27 August Turkish Grand Prix
10 September Italian Grand Prix
17 September Belgian Grand Prix
01 October Chinese Grand Prix
08 October Japanese Grand Prix
22 October Brazilian Grand Prix