Sony Ericsson's new PC suite

I was on the brink of getting "bored" of my Sony P1i and switching back to Nokia. A good opportunity presented itself as my wife's handset got damaged. I thought I'd convince her to use my P1i and get myself another phone. Problem was, I didn't really know what I was missing.

I am not a music-on-the-go kind of person so am quite happy with the multimedia capabilities on my cellphone.

I hate cameras on mobile phones because they are frankly rubbish. I leave "taking pictures" to my (awesome) 450D

I do care for email and calendar synchronization and that's where the problem was.

When I got the phone a year back, the PC suite that came with it couldn't sync with Lotus Notes. But the new PC suite does connect to Lotus Notes and does it rather well actually :)

The only downside seems to be the fact that there are enough unfortunate people in the world who use Lotus Notes to induce SE into integrating with it.

Mail :-)

Does your day begin alright but as soon as you reach office and check mail you get really frustrated?

Are you actively contemplating switching your job because your organization's mail system?

Are you a victim of Lotus Notes?

Are you using 6.5?

Amazing as it may sound I have found the solution. Use Notes 8 client and replicate. It worked for me maaaayyyybe it'll work for you too :)

Canon 100mm f2.8 macro!!!

Got this amazing lens yesterday. Haven't been able to do much with it yet but I can tell you that it's sturdy ( and heavy) lens. I took a few random shots on my way back from the store and I think it'll do good as a street portrait lens as well. Specially since it gives you some distance.

I'll put down my review on my photography blog around next weekend I guess.

BTW Kata bags are really nice for carrying your photo equipment and your laptop around. Lowpro are way over-priced.

Locked out of WoW

It's been a while. I have been busy with a QuickStart I am doing for a client here in Chicago. I have always had to ask friends in the US pick up WoW / BC for me. But I got here on 10th and the latest expansion came out on 13th so I had to get this one.

I tried to track down the stores near by, but the biggies like GameStop, BestBuy, etc are all pretty far off from where I stay. In my haste I ended up ordering the WOTLK Strategy Guide from amazon instead of the real game. It's going to take a while to ship anyway so I didn't buy the game on amazon.

At last I asked a guy at a nearby RadioShack if I could get PC games close by and he pointed me to FYE, a 3 min walk from my place.

So I finally got the game!!! Tried to install only to find out that I didn't have enough disk space :(
This means I'll have to get rid of my beloved linux... but the next project requires windows anyway so I am going to go ahead and do it this weekend.

So why am I writing this post instead of playing my existing version of WoW?? Well in my excitement I went and upgraded my account to WOTLK. Now when I log in it says I need a WOTLK client :(

The problem solved...

Thanks to this thread, I realized that the problem was my graphics card temperature. And I should've guess coz my fingers burned when I played WoW. The card was hitting 100-105C !!

For now I play in 1280x800 windowed mode with a game CD box to elevate the screen end of the laptop. I take the CD ROM out for more airflow. Thanks Dell for this facility.

So I got to get the card cooled properly and I am done.

XFCE Startup

Recently my battery died. Well it was about to die so I got it replaced. But it got me thinking about setting up a bare bone lightweight desktop to use for browsing and coding when battery life is important.

I setup XFCE 4.4.2 with conkeror and emacs, happily ran emacs and type "XS".

Damn Caps_Lock key. I had it remapped to be another CTRL in Gnome. It was a simple option in the settings program. Nothing like that in XFCE, so I scripted it using xmodmap

xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
xmodmap -e "remove Control = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "add Control = Control_L"

So I put it in a file ~/.xmodmap

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keycode 66 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

and then started looking for a way to call "xmodmap ~/.xmodmap" at startup. I was directed to ~/.config/autostart by one post. But this is not true.

I put it in the .bashrc but that required starting the terminal for the script to run and Ubuntu does not use bash_profile.

So I was searching for XFCE 4.4.2 specific setup when I came across this post. So if you are looking to autostart anything with XFCE, create a ".desktop" file in the /etc/xdg/autostart folder.

Flying Fun

As I mentioned WoW keeps dying on my machine lately and I have been doing a lot of testing to find out what goes wrong. This involves doing something in the game for about 10 mins after which the system will start dying.

Killing is impossible in these test runs, coz I am bound to die after the game hangs. So I thought I'd just play with my flying mount for a while.

So I was doing this. (hovering right in front of another hovering toon)



Most of the "hoverers" were AFK. But I found one guy who wasn't.

He started by going higher (hitting space). I responded in the same way. And then we suddenly started on these acrobatic feats... going very high up, diving nose-down, stopping just before hitting the ground, flips (Ins and Del) and turns and keeping track of each other and suddenly stopping to hover in front of each other.

Then we talked a while about mounts and enhancements and how to grind for the 5000G needed for the epic flyer.

Good Fun!

Can't play WoW... mysterious CPU hog

Actually the title is really not true. I mean I have had this problem for the past month at least... Just because I have two machines and one of them runs WoW fine, I get to play.

Problem Statement:
Every #$*& 10 mins, some @#&*% processes hogs ##*&%* 100% of the Every #$*& 10 mins, some @#&*% processes hogs ##*&%* 100% of the $&$*%&* CPU and the game %*$(%* hangs. This goes on for 5 mins, after which, I get to play for another 10 mins. It's #$(#*%& annoying.
amp;$*%&* CPU and the game %*$(%* hangs. This goes on for 5 mins, after which, I get to play for another 10 mins. It's #$(#*%& annoying.

Solutions Tried:
Number 1
Getting really frustrated, banging the mouse on the desk, kicking the table, getting up and looking out of the window... (apparently looking for a solution "out there").
Result
Didn't work at all

Number 2
I realized that I am a software developer / analyst and that I can't let this puny process bring me down.
Attempt 1 - Location OFFICE
So next morning I go to office, download process explorer and file monitor and start the game with these programs running.
Result
Nothing... it worked smoothly for 2 hours, after which I stopped playing in office out of embarassment more than anything else. (I am on the bench these days. so I was not goofing off on project time, but still)

Attempt 2 - Location HOME
Went back home and found the same behavior again.
Result
This time I caught the process "System" and saw that one of it's threads running "kmixer.sys" was hogging away the CPU. Loads of threads on the internet saying that some viruses disguise as kmixer.sys. I ran scanned and found nothing wrong. Tried in vain to get rid of this process but to no avail.

Attempt 3 - Location OFFICE
Went to office and started playing again, ironically, hoping that the game crashes...
Result
...and it did. Filemon showed me wow.exe trying to set my windows wallpaper!!! Not to any new file but the wallpaper that is set by default, bliss.bmp . I set the wallpaper to "None". The game worked beautifully again.
I went home happily confused. But life is not so crooked :( . The game started hanging again.

Attempt 4 - Location HOME
Started process explorer and filemon and watched
Result
found that DPC (Deferred Procedure Calls) was the process hogging memory this time. I googled it to find that a number of WoW players were facing this issue already. None with concrete solutions though. Here is the thread.

I updated (reinstalled) the drivers, tried to take out all USB devices, played with the nipple mouse for 10-15 mins. Nothing would solve the problem. When the game hung I couldn't even Alt+Tab to the procexp window.

Attempt 5 - Location OFFICE
Went to office next morning read some stuff again. Renamed the file to "Wow-dont-die.exe". Ran in windowed mode with the system performance graph and filemon running besides WoW.
Result
Found that the game didn't misbehave but I was experiencing "jerks" in the graphics. Played for 1 hour without problem. CPU was consistently at 50-60%. Wow-dont-die.exe being the top process.

Attempt 5b - Location HOME
Not really a solution but to make sure that the game dies, I ran it at full resolution. 1440x900 on my D620. I was running at 1280x800 pitying the Quadro 110M card on my machine.
Result
To my surpirse the game started rendering B-E-A-Utifully well. The CPU usage was never more that 15%.
I left the game running for another one and a half hours. I would alt+tab and check if it was working now and then. No issues at all.

Conclusion
None yet. It works well in office but never at home. So I am going to try it out at home again. Unfortunately today is maintenence till 2:00 in the night (in India), so I'll have to wait till tomorrow.

I hope it works... but whether it does or doesn't, I'll probably never know why it screwed up in the first place.

Woot!! Flying Mount!!

Today morning saw me earning 400 something gold out of auctions, which made my total 1211G. I needed 900 for the flying mount so off I went to wildhammer stronghold.

The thing with rare gryphons is that you have only 3 options. The Golden Gryphon looks like the public transport gryphon... so no one really buys it. Everyone buys the really cute looking "Snowy Gryphon", which is why I didn't want to buy that. So I got the "Ebon Gryphon" :D

Happy with my purchase, I went off to the Shatari-Skyguard base in Sethkyl Mountains. Remember this can only be reached with a flying mount. I started on the quests and hit my first problem with flying mounts. Not a problem really just something to be wary of.

My machine keeps hanging occasionally for some unknown reason while playing these days. I got the symptoms of this happening and was looking for a good place to wait till the game came back to life. In a hurry, I thought just hovering high in the air would be a nice idea :D

Firstly, I got attacked in the air by the birds flying around. Now that's fair. I had even read about that on some site. But the funny thing is I died in mid-air and I could get to my body from the graveyard coz my body was too high up in the air!!!

So be careful about dying in mid air. I can almost imagine someone dueling me, killing me and then dying in mid air due to one of my DOTs!!! That WOULD be fun :)

The Swift Stormsaber

Woohoooooooooooo... Hit exalted with darnasuss at last and got my Swift Stormsaber.

After yesterday's situation, I was left with two options.
1. Morrowgrain
2. Pristine Yeti Hide

The morrowgrain quest is a waste of time for those seeking reputation. At 70, it gave me 275 for the first 10 morrowgrain and 27-28 for each time then on. I have to mention though that I got 3 morrowgrain consistently for the first 4 harvests, which seems incredible after the posts I have read about the drop rate.

The Pristine Yeti Hide is a good quest for reputation seekers. At 70, it gives 70s and 275 rep every time! The rage scar cave is quite close to the Feathermoon Stronghold. It took about 10 mins for me from Feathermoon to the cave and back with the Pristine Yeti Hide (using my level 40 mount).

I have definitely given up the idea of getting a Dreadsteed now. I don't want to spend 200G more. I'd rather get my gryphon instead... what say?

Darnasuss Reputation

I have not paid too much attention to reputation while leveling up. I am not even exalted with StormWind... Now that I am at 70 and everything is about reputation, I set off on my new journey.

As I mentioned in the last post, I don't have an epic mount yet. I also really want the elven tiger mount. Now I have wasted about 200G on the materials I collected for the DreadSteed Quest. I am supposed to spend another 200G for the next set of materials. I thought I'd rather build up my reputation with Darnasuss and get the tiger mount... although I'll have to spend on training.

With this in mind, I set the darnasuss reputation as my experience bar and started right from shadowglen... I worked my way upto Auberdine and ended up increasing my reputation from 4500+ to 18700+ in a couple of days. Now there's not much to do since I had done the higher level quests for the Night elves while leveling.

This left me with two options
1. Cloth Donations
2. Yeti Hide

I started with the cloth donations and spent 20G on the wool, silk and mageweave. I didn't want to spend on runecloth so I started farming. First the blood-elves of Azshara and then at the expedition armory. Expedition armory is the best spot for farming runecloth. I had 7 stacks in 25 mins. The Knights and the Footmen drop 2-3 runecloth most of the times.

The first runecloth donation gives 57s + 385 reputation for 60 runecloth. But the repeatable quests give only 82 reputation for 20 runecloth. That leaves me with 19361 reputation. Don't know where I am going to get the remaining 1700.

Ding 70!!!

Well if you play WoW you'll understand.

For those of you who don't... I am level 70 now.

For those of you who still don't get it... This is the highest level possible in the game until 3rd Nov.

First priority, get a mount.

Being a warlock is uber-cool. The only thing that sucks is no one does Dire Maul anymore so you don't get a group for your level 60 mount. At level 70, I might be able to do the instance by myself, so I am going to give it a try. Meanwhile I am also building reputation with the Night Elves for their gorgeous NightSaber mount :D

Second Priority, gear up.

I am off to find the best way for locks to get gear... PvP / Arena / Reputation? If any of you have ideas, post a comment.

End of a good project

For the past 8 months I have been working on omio. We got it from being just a mobile deals aggregator (for the UK) to also being a social network around mobile phones with reviews, ratings and stuff. Ruby on Rails was fun too... but then, that's always true, isn't it. Today was the last day of the project.

I have to say it's been a blast all throughout. First in Chennai with a new office and an extremely smart and totally insane team. Then in Pune with Sid, Aman, Deep and Anand... lot of fun.

Sid is rolling onto a .Net project and I did not try to hide the devlish pleasure I got watching him install Windoze on his machine :P But well, it's time he got out of his comfort zone. These rubyists... I tell you.

Aman, Deep and I remain on the beach (or bench, if you will) for a while. Hopefully something good will come out of it. Aakraman anyone?

The windrock, the clefthoof and the talbuk

So yesterday I reached level 68 :) and I am pretty happy about being able to make it in one day.

In an MMORPG, like WoW, getting a good group is everything. I had about 10 group quests to do. Group quests... not dungeon quests. I had been LFGing for a couple of weeks unsuccesfully. Because I play from India, people are mostly not online when I am.

But weekends are different and yesterday was amazing. Got 3 different groups and finished 15 tough quests in Nagrand on the way from 67 to 68. Here's the list of kills from yesterday :)

• Ban'thar (67 elite)
• Bach'lor (67 elite)
• Gutripper (67 elite)
• Tusker (68 elite)
• Gurok (68 elite)
• Durn the Hungerer (67 elite)
• Brokentoe (66 elite)
• Rokdar the Sundered Lord (67 elite)
• Skra'gath (67 elite)
• Blue Brothers (67 elite) x 2
  
• The Warmaul Champion (68 elite)
• Mogor (68 elite)
• Windroc Matriarch (66 elite)
• Cho'war the Pillager (67 elite)
• Warmaul Chef Bufferlo (66 elite)

Well... it was a perfect Sunday :)

Off to Shadowmoon Valley now...

Conkeror Rocks!!!

Would you rather use your keyboard than your mouse?

Are you unhappy about having to use your mouse while browsing?

Do you use plugins for mouseless browsing on firefox (I am assuming you don't use IE obviously) and are not happy with them?

Go checkout Conkeror now!!! It's amazing!

Conqueror is an emacs inspired, keyboard driven browser. It's a good way to learn emacs too, for those of you who want to start using it. The shortcuts are all almost the same.

So go check it out... and enjoy!!!

P.S. Remap your caps-lock to ctrl. Who needs caps-lock anyways?