Life without Twitter
November 10th, 2009
With Twitter blocked in my office (*sigh*), yes, it’s a tough life without it! 
.NET at Accenture
September 24th, 2009
Since I landed in Bangalore, my schedule has been extremely busy. Yeah, I had heard in the past that the training period in an IT company, especially Accenture, is very tough, I am experiencing it only now. I have yet to take out some time to go out and explore that grand city that is Bangalore. Most of my time everyday is spent preparing for in-training tests. But anyway, the first phase of my training ends today, the last test of first phase being on 28th Sept.
A ray of hope in my frustrating daily schedule has to be me getting .NET stream, that is, I would be doing my second (and final) phase of training on Microsoft .NET technologies, and eventually be getting projects based on it. I am curious to begin my stream training, more because my stream is more web-development oriented (yippie!). By the way, it would be ASP.NET + C#.
That’s all for now. I’ll try to keep my blog as updated as possible.
Going to begin a new life
August 21st, 2009
I got my Accenture (India) joining letter last week, the thing I had been waiting for so long. I am going to join Accenture on the 31st of August 2009 in Bangalore. And contrary to many predictions that Accenture joining for new recruits would be delayed this year due to the global economic recession, we (me and my college mates) got it on time. But well, I still feel like wishing we had gotten the joining letter a bit later. Maybe that’s because this is the first time I am going to step out of my home for long. So although I am very excited about beginning my first job, I am going to sourly miss the comfort of my home at the same time.
In all probability, during my initial days at office, I would be without an Internet connection (damn!), a TV (where would I watch sports?), my (sweet) PC, a fridge (?), and many more of those comforts at wherever I get to live. On the other hand, some things to cheer about include the pleasant weather of Bangalore and the company of few of my college friends.
I hope it all goes well in Bangalore. With this, I wish myself good luck in my quest to begin a new life. 
Tutorial: AJAX with jQuery
July 31st, 2009
jQuery is a very powerful JavaScript framework, and to put in their own terms, is The Write Less, Do More JavaScript library. jQuery’s slogan indeed holds true to its claim, as you’ll discover as soon as you start coding using jQuery. Although jQuery has an extensive set of API and a collection of many functions in its arsenal, I would be concentrating more on the AJAX capabilities of jQuery in this tutorial.
Most of the modern websites, irrespective of whether they offer a simple or a complex interface, usually use AJAX for some task or the other. While designing in order to cater to today’s needs, it becomes almost indispensable to use AJAX to make the end-user experience faster and more pleasant. So, if you had been deferring the use of AJAX till now owing to it’s complexity in raw JavaScript, here is your chance to start using it with utmost ease.
It is really amazing to see how much simplified AJAX is with jQuery. The developers have seemingly (and painstakingly) done a lot of hard work behind the scenes to make it easy for the web developer to implement even the most complex JavaScript concepts, including AJAX.
For the purpose of demostrating AJAX, I’ll be making use of a simple web application (that I designed using HTML, PHP, jQuery, CSS and MySQL). I call it the Albums Database.
Enabling 3D effects in KDE 4
July 29th, 2009
KDE 4 comes with it’s own set of cool 3D effects built-in, but disabled by default. In order to enjoy these effects, you need to enable them manually through the Desktop section of System Settings. But in some cases, enabling 3D can get painfully difficult, as was in my case.
3D can be enabled through one of two options – XRender and OpenGL. Effects using XRender are quite slow and inferior to what is offered by OpenGL.
Enabling 3D with XRender normally works well on almost all machines, but problems start when you try to enable 3D using OpenGL. The most common error that pops us when trying to do so is:
Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values
Here are some simple steps to make sure you can enable OpenGL 3D effects without errors and problems.
To start with, make sure you have:
- Proper video drivers installed (proprietary drivers in case of NVIDIA and ATI) and 3D acceleration enabled.
- The xorg.conf file setup properly.
In most situations, these sections are usually missing from the file xorg.conf (found in /etc/X11):
Section "Files" ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia" ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions" ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules" EndSection
Section "Screen" Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True" EndSection
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