My experiments with Windows Vista - experience too.

I Already ready blogged about the nightmare os called 'Vista'. i bought a AMD turion Compaq v3000 series laptop a few months back. i liked every feature of it, other than its operating system - Windows Vista Home Basic. According to them this particular series is designed for vista..ok fine...

but it has only 512 MB Ram, and vista hanged many times in the very first day itself. my display is getting blank if i click in to some messageboxes( * MAD * ).

Finally i decided to switch back to pretty old windows XP. and i managed to get a XP CD, and installed it..then only i came to know that many of its devices are not detected ( sound, Wireless LAN, Ethernet, Card Reader, Display etc..). and its display looked weird and scratchy. i rushed in to HP's web site and searched for XP drivers.. but according to them, this laptop is specially made for windows vista, and the XP drivers are not available, and they are not responsible for any damages caused by our experiments with any other drivers and in that case the warranty will be expire...

again i searched in many other popular forums, and driver repositories, but i got some partial or not soooo sure replies. thus i ended up with my hopeless search for XP drivers..and i restored Vista( what else?) .. then vista started its magics again in my laptops, i was struggled with FTP uploads, Yahoo messenger ( yahoo messenger is not supporting windows Vista, FYI, if it is working fine in your machine, praise the lord, for his miracle), i was frustrated and hopeless. then i decided to upgrade my RAM in to 1 GB, i got a little relief for the copying exercises, but all other things were pretty bad as earlier.

and in the last barcamp event only i met sobhan, he also having the same model, and he managed to get the drivers from somewhere.. thanks god..you saved my soul.. and he was so kind to share those drivers with me..and now i'm much happy with XP and Suse Linux( Using VMWare ). - oh one more thing to add on, in vista they are not supporting the VMWare workstation, and if you tweak and install it once, vista will take additional 10 more minutes to start up after showing some dump and ugly blank screens.

If anybody wants XP drivers for their Compaq v3000 series laptops, please do contact me.

Vista was a total failure. they invested their time and money for inventing an ugly operating system. i would like to call MS UOS - Microsoft Ugliest Operating System ( as MS DOS - Microsoft Dirty Operating System). i'm seeing such a total dump stiff after the release of Windows ME.

Uderline : Microsoft implemented a 'Kill Switch' for Windows Vista, which cease hobbling Windows Vista installations that fail the company's validation processes. by implementing of such a mechanism they are expecting that the entire world will switch in to the genuine version of windows vista.

XP will be discontinued soon, probably by Jan 2008.

In closing i will say this Vista might become a good OS after 2-3 service packs but until then stay away from it. Stick with XP or switch to Linux.

Spammers hasn't any rules? Even google got spammed today!

Look at the spam message posted in Google's android home page today


It was very unfortunate to see some spam posts in google's page itslef. i am a regular visitor of their android site. and today i saw a community created by some of the naughty spams, and its listed in their android home page.

It seems spammers hasn't any rules, they can enter anywhere without permissions( open doors?).
one of my forums powered by phpBB 2.0.22 is attacked by a couple of spams now a days. they can even break up the most modern captchas also. ( how brilliant they are.... )

Spamming is considered as one of the criminal offenses in most of the countries. but still thousands of spam boats as well as human spammers are active and they are posting millions of spam messages across the internet. they are paid for what they are doing. in my opinion, rather than tracing out the spammers, punish the people behind these spammers.

SMS turned 15 today - Happy Birthday !!!

SMS - Short Message Service. the most popular text message sending service available in GSM mobile phones turned its sweet 15 year today!

That first message, which read "Merry Christmas," was sent by Neil Papworth, an engineer at AirWide solutions, via the vodafone network to a colleague at the mobile operator who was enjoying the festivities of a staff Christmas party.

That first message sent back in 1992 was just the tip of the iceberg. It wasn't until the following year that phone-to-phone texting was born, thanks to an engineering student at Nokia being the first to type an SMS on a GSM phone

So Happy Birthday and long live Sweet Messaging Service....

The power of scripts

Today, i've got a strange(???) problem, like i have to make a new repository in our backup server, which should looks exactly like another folder tree in same machine, but my requirement is more specific, i don't want to copy the entire folder structure including its sub folders, i.e i need only the top level folders. At first i thought to write a C program for that, but it may take a few hours to write and test. so i decided to experiment with some VBscript. as i am using it for first time, i felt an odd feeling by seeing its syntax. but truly said, its the most powerful stuff for doing such kind of tasks. see my first ever script - to copy the top level folder structure of a repository.


' Get the source folder, subfolders

'create the folder structure in destination as in the src folder
'No subfolders support
'Authour : renjith.sreeATgmail.com
'

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")

srcFolderPath = InputBox("Enter the source folder","Select a folder","", 100, 100)

If srcFolderPath = "" Then
WScript.Echo "Invalid source folder, quiting..."
WScript.Quit()
End If

destFolderPath = InputBox("Enter the destination folder","Select a folder","", 100, 100)

If destFolderPath = "" Then
WScript.Echo "Invalid destination folder, quiting..."
WScript.Quit()
End If

' dest folder

set destFolder = objShell.NameSpace(destFolderPath)

Set srcFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(srcFolderPath)
Set colSubfolders = srcFolder.Subfolders

For Each objSubfolder in colSubfolders
destFolder.NewFolder (objSubfolder.Name)
Next

WScript.Echo "Folder creation completed."

undefined reference to `__gxx_personality_v0' !!!!

Stunned by this error message when i tried to compile a simple c++ test program under UNIX.
> gcc -o out atol.cpp
/tmp/cci91B6Q.o(.eh_frame+0x11): undefined reference to `__gxx_personality_v0'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

actually i spend a half an hour to rectify this, but later only i found it as a programmers blooper ( shame on me ! )

Even if the gcc and g++ are from the GNU's compiler collection, there is a significant difference between them, at least for the context for using them.

The mistake was i tried to compile and link the a .cpp file by using the 'gcc' compiler. but the programs using the c++ object files should always be linked with g++ in order to supply the c++ libraries. My mistake was i tried to link the c++ object files to be linked with c libraries, and thus it showed 'Undefined reference'.

These undefined reference to the internal library functions like - __gxx_personality_v0.
when you see such an error, it is because you tried to link the C++ object files with gcc.

But there is another question, why the gcc worked in the first place?
It is like that - actually gcc will compile the c++ file, when it found a .cpp extension. but it cannot successfully link the generated object file(s)

These are very small things, but its enough to take away a good chunk of our time.