Mobile Friendly Website
Posted December 20, 2009
This website is now iPhone friendly, and possibly renders nicely on other phones as well. The changes involved the following -
- Mobile browser detection
- Hiding of the side menu and crumbtrail, replacing them with a menu across the top.
- Creation of a mobile stylesheet that removed unnecessary decorations.
- Making divs inline on pages with two columns of content so that the right column is rendered after the left.
- Specifying the viewport meta tag -
<meta name="viewport" content="width=600; initial-scale=0.53;" />
A Low Power Media Center
Posted December 18, 2009
Until now I have needed two devices for my server needs at home. One to serve as a general purpose router, phone, web and file server (Dell PowerEdge SC420) and another to watch my media on TV (Popcorn Hour). But recently I decided to combine the two and build a single, low power computer that costs less than the resale value of the previous two devices. Save money and save energy, what's there to not like. Read more...
IP Mutton - it's better than chicken!
Posted June 27, 2009
Do you ever wish you knew what your Internet IP Address is? Maybe not, but check out my new service to humanity anyway. Go to IP Mutton. It took me about an hour to set it up. It has some neat features which I plan to use shortly for some of my projects.
Let's Communicate - IM Style
Posted May 3, 2009
Remember the time when your email resided on AOL, Prodigy or CompuServe and you could only send emails to people on the same sytem? That's the state of affair with Instant Messaging sytems today. If you are on MSN, Yahoo or AIM, you can only send messages to people on the same network. But there is hope. Services such a Jabber and Google Talk are decentralized, federated systems which allow you to communicate with other domains. Essentially, someone on gmail.com can send an IM to a person on jabber.org. This is because they use the standardized protocol called XMPP.
I have set up my own XMPP server now (ejabberd). So my personal email address is also my IM contact ID. If you use one of growing list of XMPP-based services, you may add me to your contact list using my email address. Here is a list of programs which you can use to connect to XMPP based services. My personal favorite is Pidgin.
Recording of my Desktop
Posted September 20, 2008
Here is a recording of my desktop running Ubuntu. Notice how much cooler it is than yours (if you run Windows) :). Apart from eye-candy, the UI is extremely clean and functional. The animation was recorded on my cheapo laptop with a pathetic graphics chip. If you want to see the true potential of this system, head over to YouTube to see some movies others have made. Search for keywords 'compiz' or 'beryl'.
Coat Hanger Antenna
Posted August 15, 2008
I decided to build a coat-hanger antenna last weekend. It required 6 coat hangers, one long block of wood, screws/washers and a balun (UHF/VHF converter). The whole project cost less than $10 and now the signal strength is 100% on all channels. In fact the TV reports 100% at 24dB where as the signal is as strong as 30dB on some channels! And the antenna isn't even positioned precisely. I just dropped it next to the window. Lesson learnt - never spend money on a TV antenna.
Instructions to build your own are on YouTube.
Olympics 2008
Posted August 7, 2008
All eyes will be on the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing tomorrow. Well almost ... us Americans won't get to watch it until 12 hours have passed since this historic event. Apparently, NBC has bought exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the U.S. It has deemed it more important to air at a convenient time rather than have people watch it with the rest of the world. "One World One Dream," eh?
The beauty of fiber optics
Posted July 1, 2008
After much waiting, Verizon finally decided to lay down fiber optic cables in my neighborhood. Last night, the final connection was made when my FiOS service was activated. I have 10Mbps/2Mbps service. It appears to be working well so far. Ping times are much lower than cable modem. Some pictures of the equipment installed are below.
I asked the installer to run a cat5e cable to my wiring closet. So now everything is neat and clean inside the house. No modems, no routers, no extra power and ethernet cables. Consequently, the power consumption in my closet has dropped from 94W to 77W. The only gotcha was that the installer is required to install and test with Verizon provided router. After he left, I quickly removed the router and connected the cat5e directly to my server. But the ONT installed outside remembered the router and wouldn't let my server have an IP address. So I masqueraded as the router by changing the MAC address on the server. And voila, I was online.
[sbirla@europa ~]$ ping google.com PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=244 time=22.9 ms 64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=244 time=22.4 ms 64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=244 time=22.2 ms 64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=4 ttl=244 time=23.0 ms
Is this Tampa?
Posted January 3, 2008
I woke up this morning to see this!! Brr....
An Update
Posted September 9, 2007
I haven't posted anything in a long time. So here is a summary update -- Bought a new Lenovo 3000 N100 Laptop. The old desktop with it's spaghetti wiring is history.
- Had a week long vacation in San Francisco and surrounding areas.
- Drove to Saint Augustine for a weekend getaway
- Started taking a grad class (Computer Networks) at USF
- Selling a bunch of stuff on eBay
The House is Wired
Posted April 22, 2007
And wired it is... for data, voice and video. I have completed installing atleast two cat5e and one coaxial connection in every room of the house. All wires terminate in my study closet. Clickity-click aqui for more details.
A New Guestbook
Posted February 21, 2007
Check out my new PHP/MySQL Guestbook script. It is fairly simple and took just a few hours to program. My next task is to migrate all my old entries into the new system.
Update Mar 15: import complete.
I've given Cable TV the Boot!
Posted February 3, 2007
Out of boredom, I decided to hook up a piece of wire to act as an antenna for my upstairs TV. And behold, I was receiving all local High Definition channels in all their glory. Crystal clear with no disruptions. So, why pay $75/mo to the cable company? They have been eliminated from my monthly bills. Ta ta.
List of channels and more details here.
End of vacation bliss
Posted March 4, 2006
Spend two good weeks in India covering Hyderabad, Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. It was great fun to be on the road again after such a long time. My last trip was to Argentina in 2004. The year 2005 went by too fast! I finally got to see the Taj Mahal in all its glory. You may find some of the pictures I took during the two weeks if you snoop around a little.
Now it is back to the usual routine - work, work, sleep, eat etc.
Off to India
Posted February 6, 2006
Check out my t-mobile album. Hopefully I will be able to post some photos directly from my cell phone.
Mmm....Hot Pot!
Posted August 27, 2005
Nothing in the world like a good hot pot dinner! Picture from two weeks ago.
Standards Compliance
Posted August 07, 2005
Today I took my first step towards making this website XHTML 1.0 compliant. XHTML is a stricter version of HTML conforming to XML specifications. The framework in which all content resides has already been validated. The style sheet is also valid. Updating each individual content page will take a while. While I am at it, I may also try to make the pages database driven so that future updates will be easier.
Here is a test page.