Hard workers vs. Smart workers

Are you a hard worker or a smart worker? (or neither of them??) Found this discussion on CodeRanch to be quite amusing, yet true.

The Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

An interesting and inspirational speech.



More background information can be found here.

BitTorrent over HTTP

Sometimes your computer may be behind a proxy, or your ISP may be blocking bittorrent traffic, making you unable to use P2P bittorrent protocol. Torrific provides an awesome solution for such situations. This website accepts a link to a torrent file and then almost in no time they expose the contents of the torrent as direct HTTP downloads free of charge. It's still in Alpha stage, but worked fine for all the files I downloaded so far.

Math puzzles to beef up your brain

Today I accidentally came across a few interesting math puzzles and tried to solve them. Here's one which put me in trouble.

"The following is what seems to be a mathematical proof that ten equals 9.999999.... What's wrong with it?

               a =  9.999999...
            10a = 99.999999...
        10a - a = 90
             9a = 90
              a = 10 "

You can find more puzzles here - many of them are straightforward though.
Give it a try. Good luck!

Project epZilla - recent events...

After a couple of months of silence, events are happening once again for Project epZilla. This time, we've moved the official project website to http://www.epzilla.org.

We've also updated the website with more recent happenings, including our paper presentation in ICTer 2010 conference held in Colombo. The paper we presented - 'Scalable fault tolerant architecture for Complex event processing systems' is now available at IEEE Xplore digital library.

Solution to the Lenovo G530 Display flickering problem

I've been using a Lenovo G530 laptop for more than an year now. Recently it started having some display problems. The display started to flicker at random intervals, especially when playing videos. Initially it was not irritating as it occurred only rarely until the last week. However during the last few days it occurred so frequently that I just couldn't watch any videos, so I was trying to diagnose the problem.

I was a bit disappointed as the symptoms suggested that the problem can most probably be with the video adapter, which requires replacing of the main-board.

I found a solution to a similar issue posted as a comment to a review here, which says that the problem occurs when the video cable running from main-board to the display loosens. However, I was not quite sure whether it is the same problem my laptop was having, since the problem often occurred only when playing full-screen videos. So to figure out where the problem was, I plugged an external monitor to the laptop and tried playing a video. The monitor was displaying it smoothly while the laptop's display was continuously flickering. Obviously, the problem was not with the video adapter, but with either the LCD display or the video cable running from main-board to the display.

The video cable starts from underneath the keyboard, so I disassembled the power-board, key-board and reseated the display cable and tested whether the problem is still there... Luckily, it was no longer there and now it is working without any problems!

I found that many G530 users are having this problem and many of the forum posts asking this question don't have the correct solution mentioned. If you've also faced such an issue, you'll find this forum post really useful.

Moving to Airtel HSPA

I've had a Dialog Mobile Broadband (HSPA) connection for an year now. I don't have much to complain about its connectivity issues like most of the others do. But definitely I'm not satisfied with their service....It's too costly for what they offer.

They have a very unreal fair usage policy - After the downloads exceed 5GB, the speed goes down to 384kbps and then after 6GB....it becomes 64kbps! That's totally useless stone-age connection and it always remembers me how I went online in 2002 with a dial-up modem. What can you accomplish with a 64kbps dial-up like connection?

I waited for some time thinking that they will change their FUP to be more practical, but it never seemed to happen. Now that the time has come for a change and today I bought an Airtel HSPA connection. Here are the speeds they promise they are offering:

Downloads upto 10 GB -> 1.8 Mbps downlink (384 kbps uplink)
10 GB - 40 GB -> 512 kbps downlink
40 GB onwards -> 256 kbps downlink

This looks to be a much more usable connection compared to the Dialog's one. Both connections have the same tariff rates. I haven't tested the connection yet.... But hope this will produce a better Mobile Broadband experience.