News from Nepal

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Life, Links, Nepal

Things are pretty tense in Nepal. Demonstrators have defied the shoot on sight curfew that has been imposed for 18 hours. Now it’s extended by 7 more hours. More than 100 thousand people have come to demonstrate against the Royal regime. Police have fired on mass protest killing at least 3 and injuring hundreds. I’m quite sure things are going to change soon. The whole nation is awakening. King has ignored the people’s aspiration, so he’ll have to bear the responsibility for what’s coming next. I don’t know what he’s waiting for till now?! He shouldn’t be wasting time when he has so little left.

I’m so dying for the latest news from Nepal and these are the sources I’m relying upon (checking every few mins):

OneStep DVD is really one step

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Blogging, Reviews, Technology

I think Apple keeps things simple, yet powerful and effective. I was pleasantly surprised with iDVD. The Magic iDVD is very easy to use and yet lets you create a very professional DVDs with few clicks. The most amazing experience I had was with the OneStep DVD. All you’ve to do is; connect the camcorder via firewire, insert a blank dvd disk and press OneStep DVD. That’s all. Also good thing about the MacBook Pro is that you can do other things with it as the iDVD is running. There is no noticeable delay in performance.

I’m enjoying the Mac life as a newbie. After yesterdays post Mac Applications for daily use I’m receiving a lot of comments. Thanks to everyone who’ve read, commented and sent emails with a lot of suggestions. OS X and Mac Applications are great, MacBook Pro is a very fast and sexy machine but it does have some serious problems, so we’ve finally sent it to Apple for repair. I think they’re going to repair instead of replacing it. I’ll let you know how the repaired or replaced MacBook Pro behaves.

Mac Applications for daily use

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Blogging, Reviews, Technology

After getting little familiar with the OS X now it’s time to plunge into the applications that are essential for daily productivity. Of course first thing is the web browser, then comes email client, office suite and other special applications. Before going into the applications I would like to mention about the installation and uninstallation process in Apple. It’s little different than windows. In windows you have an installer (install.exe or setup.exe) and an uninstaller to remove the program. Macs are little different, just drag the .app to Applications folder and it’s installed. Just drag the installed application to Trash and it’s uninstalled. Easy, straight forward and very cool indeed!

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Getting used to Apple way

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Blogging, Reviews, Technology

I’ve to say that now I’m quite familiar with OS X. I mean I know where to find what :). Let me start with few things I found different in Apple.

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My Mac Experience

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Blogging, Reviews, Security, Technology

After monkeying enough with the new MacBook Pro; Installing Win XP and opening it to take out the stuck DVD, we’ve finally settled with Boot Camp (not sure for how long :)). Actually I really wanted to try the Mac OS X but due to the MacOnXp and Boot Camp thing the MacBook Pro was hanging around with me and my boss like a pendulum. So, now we’ve settled down and I’ll have one week of uninterrupted Mac OS X environment. I will not use any Windows for a week to see whether I can live without it. If I find it worth I’ll buy a MacBook Pro for myself and will join the club of switchers. BTW, this switcher’s blog is very interesting and I’ll also share my Mac experience here.

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This time democracy in Nepal is for real!?

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Life, Nepal

nepal-standoff.jpg

Curfew has been imposed in many different parts of Nepal to suppress the demonstrations against the Royal regime of King Gyanendra. The mobile telephone network is brought down to disrupt communications but the normal people are defying curfew orders and coming out to protest. Hundreds have been arrested and 3 are known to have died from police/army bullets.

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Apple Everywhere…

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Links, Technology

Recently I’m getting pretty obsessive with apple. Reading all forms of news and apple related blogs. For the past few weeks most of my Internet reading is related to apple. After my first encounter with macbook pro, then Installing XP on Mac and now with the release of Boot Camp, it looks like Apple is everywhere…
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Linux software mirroring with Grub

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Admin, HowTo, Linux/Unix, Technology

I’m in Guangzhou, China today to reinstall one of our Linux SMTP Server. I’ve installed CentOS 3.x with software mirroring. It’s pretty straight forward to make the Linux Software Raid partition during the installation but by default the system will boot only with the first hard disk (id0). This means if the first hard disk (id0) fails then the second hard disk (id1) will not be able to boot alone.

In order to make sure that the server can boot from each of the mirrored hard disk in case the other one fails, you need to run grub and install onto all other drives that are part of raid that the /boot partitions are on.

  • #grub
    grub>
    grub>find /grub/stage1
    This will give list out where all the grub setup files are located:
    (hd0,0)
    (hd1,0)

sda=hd0 sdb=hd1 for scsi and hda=hd0 and hdb=hd1 for ide

After knowing that hd0 already has grub in mbr, we run:

  • Grub>device (hd0) /dev/sdb (/dev/hdb for ide)
    Grub>root (hd0,0) and then:
    Grub>setup (hd0)

With above we’ve succeeded putting bootable mbr on the second drive and now both hard disks should be able to boot individually.

With Boot Camp Macs do Windows, too

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Technology, Windows

Apple has released a software called Boot Camp to allow Intel Mac users to let dual boot between Windows XP and Mac OSX. The software is in public beta and doesn’t come with official support but I think this is a very clever, bold and timely action taken by Apple. Now it will become irresistible for users like me to buy Intel Mac.

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

The Boot Camp helps to burn a CD with drivers for Windows which includes:
– graphics
– networking
– audio
– AirPort wireless
– Bluetooth
– the Eject key (on Apple keyboards)
– brightness control for built-in displays

I’ll definitely try this as soon as I get the replaced macbook pro. You can download Boot Camp and the Installation & Setup Guide before starting your own installation.

MacBook Pro problems

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Apple, Technology

I have noticed few issues with MacBook Pro and seems like I’m not the only one. Some of the problems that I’ve noticed are:

  1. It’s too hot to handle. The heat on back side makes it impossible to put it on your lap and the upper left corner gets heated even when the notebook is idle.
  2. The whining noise of cpu or fan comes and goes on it’s own and doesn’t depend on whether you’re running some application or not.
  3. The mouse is lost and appears magically every once a while.

tuaw.com confirms the heat and noise problem. It looks like Apple knew about the problem from the very beginning and is finally fixing it.

We’re sending our MacBook Pro to Apple for repair or replacement. If the replacement looks good I’ll buy one for myself too otherwise I’ll wait for second revision of the MacBook Pro.

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