Had to share this. Say NO to racism....

Amazing Video with a song message. Say NO to racism 

I am back

Well after a break of 4 years I am back. A lot has changed over the last five years, but I would try to be much more regular with these posts going forward. So till next post, see you.

Use your old router as a Switch or use your router as a Switch to increase your wifi range

Was faced with a perplexed problem. In order to increase the wifi range at my home had been working with a couple of Wifi Routers with quite some time now.

The first router was ADSL Wifi Router which was provided by my ISP (Airtel) in this case. The second one was a Netgear router which I had bought from Flipkart for 1.5 K.

The initial setup was that I had setup 2 NAT subnets at my place. The first one was setup by the ADSL Wifi router in the series 192.168.1.X and the second one was setup via my Netgear router with 192.168.2.X

But two different subnets did mean, connectivity issues between PC's on the network. So what i really did was to convert the second router as a Switch by simply plugging in the cable from the first router in one of the output ports of the second router (instead of the input port) and voila.. it worked :-)

Make Big Bubbles at Home

A great site for making big bubbles at home

http://happyhooligans.ca/homemade-giant-bubbles/

Worked for me. Will post some pics soon.

Sugar Sync going Pricy. BitTorrent Sync to the rescue

Sugar Sync dropped a bomb last week, when they announced  that they would no longer be offering free 5 GB accounts to customer, and for existing customers either they migrate by Feb 2014 (to a paid account), or wish goodbye to their data.

For a home user like me, who has 3 PC's to deal with and ensuring that the desktop and My Documents is in sync, Sugar Sync 5 GB plan was a blessing, ensuring online backup as well as keeping the 3 PC's in sync. But i was in no appetite for shelling out ~ 75 $ a year (that's the cheapest plan they offer) for my data backup.

Bit Torrent Sync to the rescue here. Its uses a P2P protocol to ensure folders across PC could be kept in sync. What's more for devices on the LAN it uses the local network (rather than going through the Internet which Sugar Sync used to do) and save me in bandwidth, since out here in India data speeds are still capped. Android version of the application is pretty sleek and ensures that music and photo transfer happen in a jiffy over the network.

Have been using it over the past couple of days and have been more than happy with what's on offer. For now have bought an year's contract with Sugar Sync (for a discounted rate of 17$ ), but if things go fine with Bit Torrent Sync, wouldn't be renewing the contract any further.

What are some new features in the latest version of Java

Believe me, this is got to be one of the most common questions across various interviews. Being honest as always pays the dividends here. No fun in saying that you have worked in Java 7, when you haven't.

For the purpose of this post listing below some of the key features (amongst the hundreds released along with )introduced with Java 7

1. Diamond Operator <> - Gives you the ability to use Generics without declaring the data types both sides of the = operator. E.g. Map> trades = new TreeMap <> ();  instead of Map> trades = new TreeMap> ();
2. Ability to use String statements with SWITCH - Restricted to just being used with enums and primitives, Java 7 gives us an ability to use switch statements with Strings which is a life saver and helps us to get rid of those long if then else statements.
3. Numerals with underscore - Again more from a readability perspective you now have an option of declaring 1 million as int temp = 1_000_000 for better readability perspective
4. Support for extensions in JVM to support dynamic languages

References

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/java7-features.html

http://donaldojdk.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/55j7.pdf

Satyamev Jayate - Does aamir khan have another hit on the cards ? Maybe not ....

Satyamev Jayate - Good Intent and nice execution, not sure about the outcome though (Cases pending in courts for years. Would Aamir's letter really make a difference ?, I hope it does but not sure if it will )

Also Aamir did a great job as the host - Considering a huge fee of around Rs 3 crore per episode he sure had to deliver :-) 

http://www.livemint.com/2012/04/21000711/Aamir-Khan8217s-Satyamev-Ja.html