This may be applicable to other websites also, but I have seen such a trend in my blog’s webmaster page. Happy blogging!

PC-BSD is a desktop oriented free, open source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD. It is not another distribution, it makes FreeBSD accessible to everyone. FreeBSD does not come with a Graphical Installer. It still uses a text based installer, which is very comfortable with expert users. But for someone new to BSD, an installer with a nice installer is always nice. Also, PC-BSD 8.0 comes as a Live DVD, which means that you can try it out before installing it on your PC. For this review, I grabbed PC-BSD 8.0 DVD iso from their website www.pcbsd.org. There are both DVD images and USB images available in 32bit and 64bit. 32bit DVD image is 3.28GB in size. I have installed it on my Dell Inspiron 6400. The configuration is:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
• 1GB DDR2 667 MHz
• 80 GB SATA Hard Disk
• Intel 945GM/L Mobile Graphics Card
• Bluetooth and Intel 3945 Wi-Fi

Installation

When you boot with new DVD burnt from iso, it gives you various options including an option to start installer and another one to start with a Live DVD. I chose the latter one. There is also another option to start with VESA in case you are having trouble with your Graphics Card. The installer DVD boots into a nice KDE desktop. PC-BSD 8.0 comes with KDE 4.3 as the default Desktop. It has a very nice wallpaper and is very nice to eyes. You can test the functionality of all the features in distribution. If you are satisfied with the performance, you can move to installation. Click with on the “Install PC-BSD”  icon on the top left corner of the desktop. Installer takes you through a lot of options, many of which are very simple. When it comes to disk partitions, be a bit careful. Select the partition on which you want to install and do NOT check the “Use Entire Disk” check-box. Also, check the “Install PC-BSD bootloader” check-box. Note that this may render your system unbootable if you use windows along with it. You can still boot FreeBSD. If you come across a unbootable windows situation, do not worry. Just put your Windows installation media and do a boot recovery. This option is available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. For more information on that, please check the PC-BSD Wiki. The installation screenshots are available in the following slideshow:

The installation program is very easy to handle and the installation process itself is very comfortable and smooth. It gives to option to select some programs during the installation like Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Web Browser, OpenOffice and VLC. Once installation is complete, you can reboot into the world of BSD. During the first boot, it will ask you for Screen Resolution Configuration. I had to manually select the display resolution, although Video Card was properly detected.

User Experience

The system is very cool to use. The KDE is very pleasant and you can customize it to your satisfaction. Most of the programs and applications needed for daily use and more are available in the KDE. The system is very easy to navigate and it recognized Windows NTFS partitions. You can play music, watch video and more. If you want to use Office Applications, the entire suite is also available. The default theme is very nice and icons resemble that of Mac OS X. The konqueror file browser is very user friendly. I am sure that you will not be disappointed with the KDE experience.

If you want to install any application, you can install it with a single click. PBI files can be downloaded from Internet. PBI files are equivalent to DMG and Setup.exe files available in Mac OS X and Windows respectively. It contains all dependencies needed to install the program. You can browse all the applications available as PBI files at www.pbidir.com

The Good

KDE which is included with PC-BSD is customized to nicely fit into the entire system. It is very stable and I did not have any problem for the entire week I have used it. The system never hung up. My laptop used to have very frequently with newer kernels. I think it because of the new graphics drivers which are included. The graphics performance was also very good. I have experienced the stability for which FreeBSD is very famous for. I use this laptop very roughly. Installs everything, uses it continuously and still I had no problem.

I was never comfortable with KDE. I used KDE with Red Hat Linux 5.x. I used KDE last time was to test Pardus Linux 2009 during last September. It however, left me unimpressed. But I have become a fan of KDE after I used PC-BSD. Especially, big titlebar is awesome. KDE is so tightly integrated with PC-BSD. It uses less memory compared to other Linux Distributions.

PBI files make it easy for anyone to download and install applications without the hassle of thinking about the dependencies.

The release cycle of FreeBSD is 18 months. So you can assured to have an OS which will stay for sometime without any major changes. And FreeBSD releases an update only if it is very stable and thoroughly tested. So you need not change your desktop every six months as with Linux distributions. One can argue that you can choose a Long Term Support (LTS) version for that purpose, but in my opinion, it is very tempting to upgrade when a new OS arrives with a lot of ‘features’.

The Bad

Installer does not allow you to add/remove some core programs. I do not have a printer and so I do not want CUPS to be installed. But it installs CUPS by default. Such a feature is not so expected in an OS with importance to simplicity.

The huge size of ISO file may discourage many people from downloading it and then giving it a try. I think there should be a version which fits on a CD with minimal applications so that many people will give it a try.

There is not much community support for PC-BSD when compared to major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. You can find most of the answers in the forums for your problems. I really wish it had wiki like that of Arch Linux.

The ISO image is compiled with a generic i386 processor support. I think there should be support for many architectures like it is available for Funtoo Linux. But these things will make a sense if it becomes popular. I did not experience a very fast KDE compared to Linux.

There is no GUI for Bluetooth configuration.  If you want to use Bluetooth extensively, be prepared to use command line. Google will be your best friend.

PBI files make it easy for you to install applications. But the size of these files is enormous. Can you think of downloading Firefox with a size of 80MB? For me, that size is not acceptable. I think they should reduce the number of dependencies included to make it small.

Another thing I noticed is about the System Monitor. It shows only one graph for CPU. Since my CPU is Dual Core, I do not know if the OS is utilizing both or not.

And lastly, there is no native Adobe Flash support.

Conclusion

Although you can count more number of cons in the above list, those are very insignificant, compared to the advantages it offers. Inheriting FreeBSD’s tradition combined with a very nice user interface, PC-BSD will not disappoint you. At least, it made me a fan of KDE from a hard core GNOME fan. If I am asked to rate this OS on a scale of five, I will give it sure 4.75/5.0.

To watch videos using HTML5, rather than using Adobe Flash:

1. Head on to http://www.youtube.com/html5
2. Click on “Join the HTML5 Beta“
3. Now you can watch the videos using HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash

Supported Browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari (v4+)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer with Google Chrome Frame Installed

Note that videos with Ads are not supported currently. They will play using Adobe Flash.

Enjoy the experiment. As always, you can leave the beta at anytime.

I wanted to find the culprits who abuse the email id and sell my email id. Google provides a nice way to find them, if you are a bit careful while giving your email id to someone else – use an address alias. What is an address alias? From Google’s help:

Gmail doesn’t offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.

You can set up filters to automatically direct these messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account.

So when you signup for example.com, provide your email id as username+example@gmail.com. When you receive a spam email, you can check the to id. If it shows that username+example@gmail.com, then you can be sure that it was sold to spammers by example.com. So you can setup a filter to delete all the emails to username+example@gmail.com, so that such spam mails do not land in your inbox.

So, what is the catch?

1. This will work only for signups, you do from now onwards. But it is still better than having nothing.
2. This is a simple trick and spammers can filter their email ids with ‘+’ sign and get the original email id. But this will work till spammers update their filters

Let me know if you know any better methods to keep the spam under control.

First, let me explain why I am moving to blogger.com when everyone else is doing the other way round. The primary reason is that I want to get rid of the administrative overhead. I do not want to manage the server and the blogging platform. There are so many updates to both WordPress and plugins coming out, that I do not get time to update and manage things. Secondly, I needed to make sure that the servers are up and running all the time – I have tried all the options for web hosting over a period of time – from simple shared hosting to reseller hosting to VPS. Each time I had to think of the quality of the hosting service, their uptime and above all, I am paying for all those stuff. In short, I was paying to waste my time, though it remains a fact that I have learnt a lot of things in the process.

Now that I have decided to move, I need to make some changes and be prepared to inform search engines that I have moved, without losing any traffic from them. Since most of my traffic comes from search engines (around 70%), I need to make sure that I do not lose it. Major hurdle in such a change is the permalinks. I was using a custom permalink in WordPress, which is not supported by Blogger. Luckily, WordPress has nice feature to accomplish that – it will automatically redirect ( 301 Permanent redirect ) from the old permalink to new one. But it will take some months for the search engines to update those, and till that time I will continue to use WordPress. I have already updated the url scheme, with new structure. If you are planning to move to blogger.com, please let me know – I will be glad to help you.

One big complaint I have about WordPress is that it has so many features. It is no more a simple blogging platform. Some people like it, some doesn’t.

If you have any suggestion, please let me know.

Sad, I am still getting calls though, the frequency has reduced. Today also, I got a call from someone. I asked the caller where did they get my number from. They say that my number is there in their database. Next, I asked them for their details — which company she is working for. She handed over the call to someone else, who says that all those information is ‘personal’. How can the name of the company be personal? When I repeated the question, he hung up the call.

I filed a complaint with my telephone operator. You need to give them the number from which you got the call, date and time and details of the call. The call which I got was from someone who was doing marketing for a bank. My operator has given me a complaint number and assured me that they will take an action by 5th February, 2010. Let me see what happens.

I do not know how many people ‘enjoy’ such commercial calls. All the numbers in India should be added to NDCR and people who are willing to receive such calls should be able to remove their number from registry and receive the call. Telecom operators should also look into the big  issue — how these numbers reach a telemarketer?

Step 1:

Go to the list of people you follow.

Go To The List Of People You Follow

Step 2:

Hover your mouse over the small phone icon for the friend you want.

It shows that the updates are not sent to your mobile for the friend

Step 3:

Click the mobile phone icon and enable updates by SMS on your mobile.

Enjoy Twitter via SMS on your Mobile!

Why Outsourcing?

The number one answer for this question is that it is not one’s core competency. The age of Do It Yourself has gone. With the increase in market exposure and growth of Internet, anyone can practically pose a challenge to one’s core competency if one does not manage it very seriously. Taking your competition for granted can become a nightmare for one’s business. And the news spreads like fire and becomes a joke among peers.

Can Anything be Outsourced?

The answer is yes – unless it is your core competency. For an advertising agency, it makes sense to focus on their advertising business, rather than managing other things like logistics and networking. But when you choose some one as a partner for outsourcing, you must ensure that the organization you deal with has got a very good expertise in managing it. Also there should be some SLA and Non Disclosure Agreement signed. But there are some industries where there is no possibility of outsourcing, like defence. When your industry handles some very sensitive information it is advisable not to outsource.

Case Study – Computer Networking

Since I work in Telecom, I know about outsourcing of networking infrastructure.  Some challenges you might face are:

1. You grow bigger, adding more locations and expanding to more geographies
2. You acquire a company. Integration of existing network infrastructure and the acquired one becomes a big challenge.
3. You consolidate various business verticals into one, to achieve cost effective operation
4. Managing a data centre for your business becomes a very big headache

I have heard many people having arguments against network outsourcing like:

1. You get benefits of depreciation
2. You have more control over things
3. You can run it in a more cost effective manner

Personally, I feel that these are myths. There is no reason why I can support these arguments. You do not get the benefit of depreciation – it will be offset by increasing expenditure in Human Resources and Networking Infrastructure. You need to train your people to handle each and every scenario, there would be salary increments and other perks. So you are losing more money than what you get from depreciation.

Having control over things has got nothing but a comfort level. But it boils down to the question if you want to control the things or want to run something smoothly. If you want to have control of each and everything and has time to control and monitor, then you can not find a better replacement than yourself. But if you fall in the latter category, then outsourcing that work may be a better thing.

Cost effective operation is a myth as I pointed out in the previous paragraphs. In order to save some money, you are spending more of your valuable time doing something you are not that good at. Does it really make sense? For me it is not. From my personal experience I spent more time managing servers trying to save some money. But in the end, I realized that there is no saving, but I end up wasting my time trying to do things for which I can not devote more time. During the time I spent for fixing my web server, I could have done some better things.

First, you need to have an IPv6 address. IPv6 Tunnel Brokers would help you achieve this. You can have an IPv6 tunnel created from Hurricane Electric’s free Tunnel Broker.

Get an Account from Hurricane Electric

It will take you to registration page. Fill in all the details.

Fill the registration form

Now it is time to login to your account.

Now that you have logged in, you can create a tunnel.

Let us create a tunnel

Just enter your IPv4 IP address. You can select a nearby location or Hurricane Electric will select one for you.

Let us enter the IPv4 address and nearby server

You will be taken to a page containing details of the created tunnel. You can select the OS and click the button.

Select the OS and Click the Show Config button

It will show the configuration generated.

Configuration for your platform is displayed

Open Command Prompt.

Open Command Prompt

Copy paste the configuration in the command prompt.

Now ping the IPv6 server IP address from the command prompt.

Ping the IPv6 Server IP

Now let us try if we can open a web page. Type http://ipv6.google.com in the address bar of your browser.

You should now see Google’s IPv6 Home Page – with bouncing logo.

Google IPv6 Home Page