Hell Oh Entropy!

Just put up a couple of userpics… that’s me :D

I've finally got almost exactly what I wanted out of the combo of MTNL and Sify. I now use MTNL as my primary connection and whenever the router overheats and bails out on me, sify kicks in. There's some minor race condition-like situations where if a site is requested while the transition is happening from sify to mtnl, all requests to that site are routed through sify. I'll probably have to strictly alternate the interfaces to resolve this -- eth2 up would lead to eth1 down and eth2 down would lead to eth1 up.

I was thinking about redundant gateways as well, but feeling too lazy to go for it...

Apparently some banks in India are moving/have moved their IT infrastructure to Windows Vista. Due to that we have to test whether our trading applications work on Vista and, probably, work regularly on Vista if all goes well. CCIL will then have to upgrade all of their computers to make them 'Vista Capable'. Also, as is always the case with Windows, their SP2 (and later) releases are often more stable, so it's best to wait for those if you're obsessed with MS products. Better still, get [KX]?Ubuntu :)

But really, why would these banks want Vista so bad? Either their IT guys just don't get it or they have too much money to throw around on broken backward compatibility, Treacherous Computing, DRM, memory hogs and irritating UAC.

And guess what, the first thing our support guy did when setting up Vista was to turn off all security features. Way to go! :)

I recently got both Sify and MTNL broadband connections working at home and contrary to what many have been saying, I've found Sify to be slightly faster and more importantly, consistent compared to MTNL. I've put together a little script that will make it easier for my mother to switch between mtnl and sify when I'm not around. It's basically simply upping one interface and downing the other along with copying resolv.conf for sify.

One issue with MTNL is that if the modem reboots, the interface gets disabled and does not get enabled automatically. I'm using USB (with DHCP, probably this is why) since I've already used up the two eth ports on my system (one for sify and one for my Celeron dabba). Hopefully I'll get this sorted out by this weekend.

The tooltips for status window are done and I'm wondering why nobody's written the widget and published it yet. If someone has and I haven't found it then I must really suck at searching. Anyways, I've now learnt how to write custom widgets in GTK, so all is good :)

Philip suggested I look at Gaim's method but those guys had written the tooltip code along with the status window code. So we have a more modular approach in that case. The outcome is not very different looking for now -- I want it to look even better though.

Absolutely beautiful sights the Kokan Kada and Taramati peak were. Their description, however superlative it may be, will still be modest. One has to see it to witness nature’s art at its best. Visit, but be responsible and do not litter the place. We cleaned it up day before yesterday. 4 gunny bags full of glass, 5 gunny bags full of plastic and 3 gunny bags of paper -- enough said isn’t it?

I had thought that it would not be possible to pirate Vista but I guess I was wrong as expected. I just saw a copy of Vista ultimate on the stands at Andheri for 150 INR and a Norton antivirus 2007 for 50 INR

Just imagine, a copy of Norton 2007 for 2000 INR + Windows Vista starting at 22,000 INR and Office at 6000 INR (from www.pcworld.in) and that's not the end of it. So software would cost us more than 30,000 INR if there was no piracy.

And my computer cost me only 26,000 INR last year. The OS cost me 10 INR (cost of a CD) which was all I needed for my Debian Netinst ;-)

Transparency on Smileys and icons is finally working correctly for ayttm. I feel stupid for missing out on a very obvious solution. Thanks to a post on gnomesupport.org for the solution.

Also, I forgot to mention in my previous post that I got the mouse movement and click concept for the anchor tag from koders.com. It is originally from the gtk-demo application that comes with gtk+.

Yes, it finally has a new HTML parser. The gtk_eb_html.c/extgtktext.c combo had to go out because of the immense difference between gtk1 and gtk2. There's a lot still to go before ayttm-gtk2 becomes official I guess.

There are still a few chinks in the chat windows as of now that haven't been resolved yet. For one, the smileys and icons look awful since I haven't got the transparencies right at all. I'm still working on them.

One thing's for sure, I'm learning a lot from this :-)

I've now got the html parser bit working in ayttm. I've re-written the entire thing since the entire approach to styling is different here. I wrote styling of only the bold tag today and will weed out all the GTK warnings before I put in the rest of the tags. I'll commit when I'm through with everything that used the old gtk_eb_html stuff.

My back's killing me.