Quick Summary: Edit the file /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm to modify the number of columns & rows there & restart all terminals. The relevant line in the file would look something like that shown below. To change the number of columns, change the co# number, in this case 80. To change the number of rows, change the li# number, in this case 24.

:co#80:it#8:li#24:\

Mostly everything was nice, but somehow the sound was not working at all. After a little bit of browsing, I discovered that installing ALSA drivers could solve my problem; which it did. I was pretty happy to get sound working on my machine again. BTW – did I mention installing them was pretty easy through the “Synaptic Package Manager”.

However after 2-3 weeks – I guess after installing some updates a new problem cropped up. On plugging in the head-phones; sound continued to come from PC speakers as well. This was pretty irritating as I could not listen to music now at office. On spending some time on google, I discovered this again was a pretty common problem and there were a number of solutions offered around editing the config file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. I tried making a few changes, but I guess this was beyond my level of skills and couldn’t get it to work.

However a few solutions also talked about upgrading the alsa drivers. I discovered that I was running version 1.0.18 rc3 of alsa drivers (which is what was available through synaptic) but the latest version available on alsa drivers home page was 1.0.21. I tried updgrading the version and my problem was solved. This link here was very helpful and I just followed the information there to the letter to upgrade the drivers & I was happy again.

http://monespaceperso.org/blog-en/2009/08/31/upgrade-alsa-1-0-21-on-ubuntu-jaunty-9-04/

Lightning

Lightning screenshot

The first thing that you miss with a plain Thunderbird installation is when somebody sends you a meeting invite. With Outlook it was pretty straight forward – you hit the accept button & you get the entry in your calendar which shows up a pop up at the right time to remind you of the event. Lightning adds just that functionality to Thunderbird. Once installed you get a calender & tasks interface which are pretty easy to use.

To download Lightning or to know more, please visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Buttons!

I remember when I started using Thunderbird, one functionality that I used to hate was that it used to open a Response or Forward in a new window leaving the original email message still open. After sending a response I was required to close the original message window as well. Now this was pretty annoying to me. However a simple add-on called Buttons! came to my rescue. It allowed creating new set of buttons (Reply!   Reply All!    Forward!) to my email message windows and using these instead of the regular ones gave me the desired effect of automatically closing the email message on hitting the Reply/Forward button.

To download or learn more about this add-on, please visit – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/106

Display Mail User Agent

Besides the above two add-ons, I have also been using a simple add-on called “Display Mail User Agent” that I like. This one simply displays the user Agent (email client) used by the email sender. This neat add-on displays a nice logo in the header of the email message depicting the client used. To download or know more about this add-on, please visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/562.

What has your experience been with Thunderbird? Any interesting add-ons that you would want to share?

Xebia is an IT consultancy and project organization focusing on Enterprise Java technology, Agile development methods and outsourcing services. The India office is based out of Gurgaon on NH-8 (pretty close to where I live) & consists of a small team that is growing rapidly. Xebia also has presence in The Netherlands and France & I believe the biggest chunk in terms of work-force is in The Netherlands. So far I have  spent around two weeks in office and I think I made a good choice to join them. Some good points about Xebia that I could notice in this short duration are

1. Everybody at Xebia (irrespective of the no of years of experience) writes code & people are pretty passionate about it.
2. These guys practice Agile by the book which ensures daily progress & high productivity even with distributed teams (sometimes across 3 locations)
3. A great work environment that is very developer focussed.
4. There are a plenty of senior people around who have spent years in programming Enterprise Java. Working closely with them is definitely a good learning experience.
5. My learning curve (Enterprise java) is already started to move North.

This also obviously means that I would no longer be working as a freelancer. I enjoyed my freelancing stint a lot (here’s why) , but it was a conscious decision to move away from it. Though Freelancing offers a lot of freedom in terms of work, but it also comes at a cost – There are times when you have more work than you can handle & similarly there are also times when you don’t have work & I’m not prepared enough to be sitting idle.

To summarize – Though I enjoyed freelancing but I’m equally happy & excited to move to Xebia & am really looking forward to have a good time at there.

This year I’m again thinking of running the 1/2 marathon again. Had infact started training before I got hit by fever a couple of days ago. I have done half marathon in 2006 which was my first and had clocked 2:50 mins. This year I want to do this in less than 2:30.

I quickly came up to speed with PHP – the best resource that worked for me was of-course www.php.net – I kept using it even when I was developing. Their function reference is pretty handy. I initially started coding with Zend Studio only to realize later that it would very soon expire. I switched to PHP IDE which is also an eclipse based IDE (like Zend) but was free. Being familiar with eclipse I was comfortable with both these IDEs.

The project was a web based application & I had to develop a few pages. I must admit problem looked simple initially but gradually as we spent more and more time with the client we realized that it is far more complex. At the end of it, I had ended up using a lot of java script, AJAX, JSON & JQuery all in 2-3 PHP pages.

Once I got comfortable with PHP, I tried my hand at other PHP based open source products like wordpress & joomla. Even tried installing something called sugar-crm. I have already built my blog over wordpress (currently hosted on wordpress.com) and am planning to build another website over joomla.

WordPress allows you to change visual look and feel through something known as a theme. The idea is that you should be quickly allowed to modify the visual aspects of your site without worrying too much about. Applying a theme to a blog/site is a simple matter of a few clicks. When running off wordpress.com, it allows you to pick & choose any theme out of 75 really neat ones. Mostly one should find a theme that meets his/her needs. If you are running wordpress from a hosted machine; then you can even upload any theme that you bought or downloaded free from the web and use it. I settled after experimenting with a few for a theme called “Spring loaded” from the449.

Next Besides the blog, I wanted a set of links in the top navigation that would tell a visitor about me. WordPress has this neat concept of a Page which is basically a static HTML document. Once created, your theme can create a navigational set of links on top/left/right automatically. You can even select one of these pages as the default page when someone visits your website and have a separate link (blog) that points to your blog posts. For more information, refer to this wordpress support page.

Now the only piece remaining was pointing your domain to your wordpress account. This unfortunately is a premium feature and wordpress.com requires you to pay for it. However it is not very expensive as compared to hosting a website on your own. It costs something like $9.89 for a year. However you must change the name servers for your domain to those of wordpress. This article should help you out. With these basic set of changes, your website is up pretty quickly.

What do you think? How has your experience been with wordpress – it would be great if you can share it with other readers of this blog. Of-course any opinion on guneetsahai.com is welcome.

Importing my blogs from blogger was a breeze and my new blog with existing daata was up with a new theme in no time. Customizing wordpress to make it look more like a website somehow is more easier than my current skills with blogger. I’m sure blogger also allows its users to do a lot of stuff but I guess I had been avoiding wp for quite some time now.

I have been primarily been using Microsoft Windows for most part of my career and am therefore quite at ease with applications on it. However switching to ubuntu was pretty smooth. The installation was pretty quick & did not ask too many questions. Pre-installed Open Office could open all MS office documents (even those of office 2007), acrobat reader got working within no time. This along with mozilla firefox (which I was anyway using on windows) & thunderbird got me up and running without too much of an effort.

One important difference that stood out with Windows was the way installations were done. Ubuntu comes along with a software called “Synaptic Package Manager” that can fetch and install various softwares that you would need. Before installing something, you should check if it can be found in the repositories used by Synaptic. If yes you can be assured that the installation would be pretty smooth. Having a common repository (or a number of them) where you can get all the software that you would need is something definitely different.

I was pretty happy & content with my new ubuntu system before I got a visio document that I was to read. I couldn’t find any way to open the document in ubuntu. However I figured a way to boot windws from ubuntu. There are a couple of virtualization softwares out there that allow you to do this; However I settled with Virtual Box from Sun which allowed me to add a virtual windows machine. Setup of the same was really easy and could happen through Ubuntu’s Synaptic Manager (again with no questions asked). Once installed it allowed me to create a virtual machine (It required an installation CD with a valid license). Once the virtual machine was ready I could install other windows applications on it and use them. I could share documents between the root and the VM pretty easily, if required I could switch completely to the VM making it look as if I was on Windows.

Pretty Neat stuff from open-source folks !!!!!!!

How has your experience been with Ubuntu? Any interesting tip or problem that you may want to share?

Sometime in May Last year I along with a friend started www.chahiye.info (see my earlier post here). Running a company certainly drains out a lot of energy from its founders, leaving absolutely no time for anything (writing blogs included). Another side-effect (of running a co) is that it leaves your bank accounts with lots of empty space. This obviously makes the whole process more painful and interesting at the same time. If time permits I hope to write another post about the experience & some gyan sometime soon. It might make an interesting read.

Anyway a few weeks ago; with our bank accounts exhausted, we figured that it is critical to generate some cash to sustain ourselves & keep the company going. The only way I could help in that was to re-start my freelancing work (I had actively stopped working on projects a couple of months ago – wanted to devote all my time at chahiye). I was fortunate enough to get work real quickly. I am currently spending half of my day consulting on an interesting project & might just take up another one in PHP (I’m new to PHP and therefore looking forward to it). Resuming tech work again exposed me to interesting observations, which I plan to share with all here. Stay Tuned …..

Its good to be back !!!!!!