Loading... Born a day after the American Independence in Jalandhar, Punjab, India, I've spent most part of my life there. Studied till 5th standard in St. Joseph's Convent School, Jalandhar, and later had to join Apeejay School, Jalandhar as, perhaps, the former school decided boys could be troublesome in a girls' school after 5th. After completing schooling in APJ (till 12th), joined National Institute of Technology [NITJ] (again, in Jalandhar) as a Computer Science & Engineering student in 2005. During the worst period of downtime (recession), got an on-campus placement in Accenture in 2008. Graduating from college took another year after that, and finally joined Accenture in mid-2009. This is my story so far... Btw, you can find me at: facebook twitter last.fm digg librarything granular
Nov 05

TestDisk — A life saver

Blogging, Rants No Comments »

TestDisk

TestDisk


Turning on your computer one not-so-fine day just to discover an entire partition (drive on harddisk) gone is nothing short of a nightmare potent enough to give you a mild heart attack. Unfortunately, exactly that happened to me yesterday.

An ardent distro hopper that I am, I recently installed (K)Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop. Things were all fine for 4 days until I fixed a startup issue with my Windows installation using its DVD. The issue was temporarily fixed and I was able to log into Windows. But the next time I booted into Linux, my Windows partition was no longer being shown in the file manager. I fired up “fdisk -l” just to find out that the Windows partition had been overwritten by another hidden 2GB FAT partition, which was now being shown as a twin duplicate of the original. It didn’t take me much time to realize that the Windows DVD had screwed up my partition table, making the whole 80GB Windows partition disappear!

After some research, I found this excellent opensource partition recovery tool by the name TestDisk. Thanks to its Linux version, I was able to find the lost Windows partition, recover it and write the updated partition table to the harddisk. Although it’s a command-line application, believe me, it’s damn straight-forward, and as simple as any other GUI thing.

(God forbid) In case, some day, you find yourself with a partition or two gone from your harddisk, give TestDisk a try. Highly recommended.

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Jul 16

Inspired Thoughts

Blogging, Science 5 Comments »

Sometimes watching a movie, a TV series, or reading a book can be so inspiring as to spontaneously start a chain reaction of beautiful thoughts in mind. I just happened to watch such an inspiring episode of a science documentary called Into the Universe, presented by Stephen Hawking on the Discovery Channel. The episode titled “The story of everything” contained so much information that I had to take several pitstops in between, pausing from time to time to grasp what had been told. From the origin of the universe to the creation of stars, Earth and other cellestial objects to the creation of life, it’s one hell of an interesting (and thought-provoking) story told in a so effectively simple manner as to hold one mesmerized and wondering (in amusement) about the different phenomena described.

Weird how the mind can be so random about thoughts. In the moments of silence that followed my watching the documentary, my mind switched between thinking again of the various physics/cosmic concepts that were told to the equally intriguing economic/behavioral laws.

As I (like everytime) cannot stop myself from sharing my thoughts, here’s what’s keeping my mind captivated.

Big Bang – The Big Bang model, or theory, is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe.
Creation of a star
Creation of all the elements around us
Doppler Effect – the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to the source of the wave.
Black Holes – regions of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Supermassive Black Holes – the largest type of black holes in a galaxy, in the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses.
Milky Way – the home galaxy of the Solar System, and of Earth.
Law of diminishing marginal utilities – the marginal utility of each (homogenous) unit decreases as the supply of units increases (and vice versa).
Pareto Principle – for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

On another note, it has just started raining (violently) out of nowhere, after a bright & sunny day. I can hear the distant cries of people screaming outside.  

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May 16

Excited to play Portal 2

Blogging, Gaming 2 Comments »
Portal2cover

Wow! I got my Portal 2 the next day of ordering it from an Indian online games store (nextworld.in). That was impressive!

Immediately after finishing Portal (the prequel), I wanted to play the sequel (ah yes, I knew at the time that a sequel was in the pipeline). Portal was damn good: a fun way of solving puzzles the FPS way. Now to get my hands on the live gameplay when I get the time to install it. :)

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Apr 08

Here comes GNOME 3

Blogging No Comments »
GNOME 3

GNOME 3 is finally here, and it looks so darn beautiful in the screenshots. I admit, being a KDE fanboy, I was not as excited about this release as I was about KDE 4, but going by the looks, GNOME 3 looks elegant, modern, and [most importantly] stable. Cannot wait to put my hands on it.

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Jan 24

What am I thinking?

Blogging 5 Comments »

Apple App Store

Apple App Store


Finally the Apple App Store has crossed the outrageous figure of 10 billion app downloads. Well, with the increasing adoption of Apple devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), one would have seen this coming. The 10 billion figure can be a little misleading as it probably includes app update downloads and app re-downloads which contribute to a major part of the aggregate downloads. Whatever it maybe, I was also a significant (lol) contributor with 50 or so apps download on my iPod Touch.

Just thinking about Oracle already infuriates me enough that I sometimes fancy smashing my computer screen when I read about yet another news about Oracle suing somebody. It has become such a suing machine that I doubt it bought Sun primarily for suing others for purported copyright infringements of Sun’s various products. And what’s worse about Orcale is instead of building on (or at least maintaining) Sun’s reputation as an open-source promoter and leader, they are shamelessly destroying it. OpenSolaris and OpenOffice have already got their shares of apathy from Oracle. I wonder what’s next. MySQL? Solaris? Shame on you, Orcale!

The Hobbit

The Hobbit


And finally, I was able to make use of my Landmark discount coupon (I won in a caption contest in office). On Friday, I bought two books – The Hobbit (There And Back Again) and To Cut a Long Story Short. Now, to finish my on-going reads and get to The Hobbit fast before the release of the movie (Peter Jackson‘s) next year. Talking about the movie, I am excited about it. :)

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