An alternative attitude

It started at my age NULL. Everything from my gender to school, dress, food and etc., had an alternative option and it still continues. Is there an alternative to stop this sensation?

Do we really need an alternative for everything that we do, see and all sort of feelings. Why don’t we feel happy with what we have or what we deserve? Is it good or sin? What will happen if there is no alternative?

I am not a good analyzer to do that. Because there can be an alternative analyzer who does it better than me. I was sitting at a local tiffin center for dinner yesterday. Egg is a common side-dish here for any cuisines in India. Some people who eats egg categorizes it into vegetarian dish and still they are considering themselves as vegetarians but not pure vegetarians. That is not an issue any way for me. One guy ordered a boiled egg at first. And then another guy ordered an omlette. The fellow next to me ordered a half boiled egg. Then the list was keep going with different flavors from different people like, full boiled egg, egg mixture, egg powdermass, egg without pepper, with more pepper, egg masala and so on. But the core product doesn’t change still. I simply ordered an omlette. (An additional unnecessary info: I am a semi-omnivore creature)

Everything changes from people to people. Hence what is the solution to this? It will be stopped only when people never think of an alternative option. I was talking with a fellow recently regarding some programming languages. I was telling that I am comfortable with floating around PHP. That fellow argued me that Python is better than PHP. I accept the fact but it doesn’t mean that Python is the best. Tomorrow something else can beat python. He never agreed my point. Then he should have created something like goosebook or nosebook to compete against facebook.com to prove it. The same continues with Windows vs Linux battle. When something comes in bigger, people feel it as monopoly.

You be on your way and choose whichever you feel right for you and stick to it. Nothing is fixed here. There is always a better alternative for everything. So be happy with what you have , you will get what you deserve. It applies to everything.

The life is a software bundle which comes with more errors prebuilt inside. Its our duty to find out and and clear those defects and make it perfect. Some souls comes as an open source so that anybody can check it out and modify it as per their preference. You just need better understanding and mold it to your need. But most of them are proprietary and also you need some severe three or four factor authentication to login which is reCaptcha enebled to avoid bots and spams. Just go ahead with either open source or proprietary. Neither open source nor proprietary can solve your problem, its just YOU. Yes, you alone.

So, don’t find an alternative to everything. Just go ahead with what do you have. You will get the best one for sure. I am repeating the samething again and again. I don’t know an alternative to this. Because the search never ends.

Yes. It applies to your girl friend too! :P

Firefox banned on Windows 8?

Today I was going through this headline on many of the news sites. So I went on digging more about the news. I am not a windows guy. I love open source and its philosophy. But I like Windows too when it comes to UX. I am taking a neutral stand in it. Since my laptop doesn’t support Linux installation, I am using VM VirtualBox for installing Ubuntu inside it. It works fine anyway.

I have a good hands on with both Linux and Windows. With Windows 8 too. It is supposed to be released by the end of 2nd quarter of this year. It is expected to be a great release on their products portfolio which is being washed away by Android and iOS. Microsoft has their own browser IE which is still having the biggest market share than their competitors Firefox, Chrome and Safari. And also they have the biggest market share in desktop products. They have no other way to compete with Android and iOS, hence they have rewritten their Operating System to make Windows 8, which can also run on ARM based processor. Its a compulsive move for them to bring up the sinking market.

As far as I know, MS don’t follow any strategy to ban any particular application or software. They have a better platform to let others to build their own. I think this is just to make a media attention towards it and to make some stupid headlines without understanding the reality. I have reasons to stick with my point. I have used all versions of almost all browsers(IE, FF & Chrome). In my opinion, Chrome – Best|FF – Better|IE9 – Good. It varies between people and their usage. MS has made a lot of changes to their latest browser and Windows 8 comes with IE 10. I have tested that too. I am sure that it is better than IE9. They have completely rewritten their JS engine for IE9 and named it as Chakra.

The claim made was, Firefox is banned on Windows 8 ARM based editions. It is going to be used only on mobile, tablets and not on desktop products. My question is whether iOS allows firefox installation? whether Chrome OS supports firefox installation? A big NO to both the questions. They why not Microsoft? They have made a better product and they want to make it more popular now. And I don’t think, they are banning other browsers and definitely the standards and quality should be in higher end to get an approval since they are making a bigger push into both tablet and mobile market. Lets wait and see how this comes out.

Cygwin – child_info_fork::abort: address space needed issue

I was trying to install redhat client for OpenShift cloud paltform in my Windows 7 laptop. But I got the following error,
_______________________________________
ERROR: Error installing rhc:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby.exe mkrf_conf.rb
3 [main] ruby 1688 child_info_fork::abort: address space needed by ‘etc.so ‘ (0x1E0000) is already occupied
3 [main] ruby 2220 child_info_fork::abort: address space needed by ‘etc.so ‘ (0x1E0000) is already occupied
Building native extensions. This could take a while…

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rhc-rest-0.0.14 f or inspection.
_______________________________________

I have raised the same with OpenShift community forum and I have received a very quick response which pointed me out to a knowledge base article. I followed the procedure and it worked very well. Actually the original solution is at mattberther.com. Thanks to him.

Follow these steps to resolve the address space issue.
1. Open Cygwin terminal
2. find /lib/ruby/gems -iname ‘*.so’ > /tmp/ruby.gems.local.so.lst
3. Quit cygwin
4. Start –> Run
5. cmd.exe
6. cd c:\path\to\cygwin\bin\
7. ash.exe
8. usr/bin/rebaseall -T /tmp/ruby.gems.local.so.lst
9. Reboot

But still I am getting the native extension building issue. It will be resolved soon I hope. Anyway I am happy for trying out something new.

OpenShift from RedHat

I thought of doing trying something new by this week end. I was discussing with my room mate to host it on a free cloud paltform. So I thought of doing it with Google App Engine platform. So I was just googling for other alternatives and found OpenSHifthttps://openshift.redhat.com from RedHat team. Recently read in news that RedHat becomes the first billion dollar Linux based company. This cloud platform is really cool for deploying Ruby, Python and PHP based apps. It has a Apache and JBoss server running behind it. The advantage here is they are providing access through console too and also provision to run cron jobs. That is really cool when comparing to other cloud platforms.

We can do it from any machine. I am trying it out from Windows 7 since my laptop doesn’t support Linux installation. :( Trying to buy a new one soon. For Windows to make it work for OpenShift platform, we need to have Cygwin and also a rhc ruby gem. So I have to install a Ruby gem for rhc(RedHat Client) application for commandline access. But unfortunately the gem installation is failing. I went through their forum for raising an issue for this. But there is another fellow facing the same. So I have just updated with my comments on the same thread. Let me wait for sometime for them to resolve it. Going through their architecture overview docs.

Trip to ooty

Last weekend on a trip to Ooty from Chennai. We were 10 people started from Chennai on 30th april night by bus. And we reached Coimbatore on 31st morning. We directly went to Ashwath’s home there. Later we went to Black thunder – water theme park at Mettupalayam which is one hour bus travel distance away from coimbatore. We enjoyed the whole day there in the theme park. The rides were good. But still it is the same for a long time from the time when I visited there around 6 years back.

From Black thunder it will take 3 hours of bus travel to ooty. And it is difficult to get seats in the buses nearer to the theme park. Otherwise you have to get hired cabs which will cost 150 rupees per head. So we went back to mettu palayam bus stand to get seats in the bus. We reached ooty around 10:30 PM. It is around 50 KMs of travel in hills.

We stayed in a lodge, which we booked through online. They charged 1200 rupees for a night per room. We took 2 rooms to accommodate 10 people. It was comfortably enough. On the next day, we took a car to roam around. It costs 2000 per day travel. We roamed through many tourist places that people usually watch. And we went around thodar tribal community people area. There was a sacred temple of them built by them. You can check that in my picasa photos. There was a big ball kind of stone, which they use it as part of the marriage ritual. The boy should lift the stone till the shoulder and through it behind him to get married. Still they follow those rituals it seems. It was nice to know. Then we returned back on the same evening and reached Chennai on April 2nd morning.

Beware of using the F word

It has been a long time when I have written something useful to the people :) . I don’t think I have done much anyway. Today when I was rushing to office at morning, the incident happened. I was waiting at Thiruvanmiyur traffic signal, Chennai. There was a two wheeler besides me, a girl aged around 20-25, was driving it. She was supposed to be a girl working in any IT company as per the appearance. She was in much hurry than me it seems. When the signal was changed to green, she moved very fast and hit a car from the back. Anyway nothing happened to anybody. The car driver scolded her to drive carefully. He doesn’t know english it seems. When he was scolding her, she was keep on using the F word.

Girls always thinks as they are right. Because stupid guys pretend to them to look so often :) . Atleast it happens with majority of girls. They will not even go for the second opinion. Then she started talking like, it was the mistake of the driver since he didn’t move faster when the signal changed. And in between she was using the word ‘f***’ often. Then our hero interrupted them :) . He told the driver to move and came nearer to the girl. He told her that the driver was not feeling well and not ready to do it in public. I was confused for sometime as the girl. But realized before her. :) :) :) She won’t use the word here after for sure. I thought of getting down from bike and congratulate him. But the signal change made me to move. Those who didn’t understand please read it again :) .

Moral: Use words appropriately. Before that know the meaning of the word :)