Reach

I have noticed this more than once now. If I try to view a youtube video via Facebook, the stuff doesn't show up quickly. The same video if I get through youtube directly at the same time, streaming starts almost instantly. I finish my video on youtube and facebook is still trying to fetch it. Well, there are multiple questions here:

1. Does Youtube throttle Facebook servers? They could well do it owing to a high traffic rate from Facebook servers.
2. Is Facebook - Youtube network a bottleneck? This could be owing to the traffic that flows between the two websites. Facebooks hosted videos work fine, so facebooks servers are certainly not overloaded.
3. What format is Facebook trying to fetch the video from Youtube in? Well, Youtube does content adaptation to match the rate of incoming connection. So if I view a video on a extremely high speed network, Youtube would show me HD. On my home network I get 360 by default and that streams slowly too. So I manually switch to 240. If Facebook tries to fetch video in a particular format from Youtube and tries to send that over on my slow connection at home, that explains where the problem is.
4. Finally, is Facebook trying to throttle Youtube fetch from its own side? No idea.

I finished writing this post and Facebook is still fetching the Youtube hosted video as I write.

Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: facebook, throttling, video, youtube

This was simple. It reminded of my college days when we had to do a lot more work while installing a linux version. Here are a few steps that me and my friends used to do then as I roughly recall (well, this was a decade ago) -

1. Create the partitions on Hard Drive to accommodate both Linux and Windows.
   
2. Get a bootable CD ROM. I had RedHat from my friend.
3. Boot from CD.
4. Install
   
5. Try to locate missing drivers if some components don't work. After step 4, just pray that things would work else this step was more tedious.

Forward to now, I did this -

1. Downloaded Ubuntu Installer for Windows from here. No HDD partitioning required. I already had Windows running. It is still just plain simple
2. Install like any other Windows program
3. Boot and you see Ubuntu alongside Windows. Done!

However, my wireless card wasn't working after install Ubuntu. Ubuntu just did not detect my wireless network. I thought I had to repeat my college step 5. However, I was lucky. After a lot of Googling, came across this post - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1490123

Just 3 commands fixed my wireless card issue with Ubuntu -
%sudo mkdir -p /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/
%sudo touch /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
%sudo service network-manager restart

The steps worked fine because my wireless card provider was RaLink and this was a Ubuntu workaround for that.

Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: RaLink, Ubuntu, wireless issue

My company Persistent is about to be listed at the stock market. The response to the IPO was phenomenal. IPO was subscribed 93.3 times and received the highest bid in 26 months! More on this story at - Moneycontrol.

Labels: IPO, Persistent Systems

I suspected Google playing with TV in my previous post - here.

Recently I stumbled upon Chrome TV extension.

Opera, the fastest browser on earth! Yes, it indeed is, I felt so. I was a devoted Opera user for past 2 years. Finally, my association with Opera came to an end. I switched to Maxthon.

Maxthon is based on IE engine. So whatever opens in IE, has to open in Maxthon. Well, that's what the site claims and is their USP. And the very same was Opera's biggest drawback. Some sites just did not render correctly. Nothing to blame to Opera since Opera browsers are web compliant. However, site designers tweak sites to render them perfect in IE.

So why did I switch from Opera -

• Issues with rendering few sites may be because of no fault of Opera at all.
• Memory leak in Opera. Opera keeps growing in memory and I had to restart it once after 3 days since it became unresponsive thereafter.
• Hogged a lot of CPU during data fetch.

Maxthon gives me Opera's features with IE's rendering capability. It runs smooth and takes much less memory for its operations. It has everything from Tabbed Browsing, Mouse gestures and so on.

One feature that lacks in Maxthon though and I dearly miss is the vim type search from Opera. In Opera, if I type slash (/) and search keyword, it would start looking it up in the current page. I simply loved that feature over to doing a Ctrl-F and then entering a search string. It would be great if Maxthon folks add it. Another one is partial rendering that Opera does. Opera goes on rendering the webpage as it fetches it. So you don't have to wait to view the parts of page until entire is fetched.

All in all, the memory leak issue that causes Opera becoming unresponsive was the main reason I considered to switch. I would certainly not have switched otherwise.


Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: browser, Maxthon, Opera

I see her travelling through the train,
And feel that this girl is very sane.

See her daily in the train lobby,
But I still don't know what's her hobby.

Dusky female with an angelic face,
Haven't talked with her, such a big disgrace.

This thing can't happen I new from the start,
Some people are destined to be very apart.

Pray that she finds her Perfect soon,
The guy will be born with a silver spoon!

Manish.

Labels: girl, poem, train

Found this site while browsing the internet - http://www.seat61.com/India.htm

Wanted to know about the different classes (First Class, Sleeper class) provided in trains of India. This site had covered them all with pictures of each.

The site also gives you details about ship and train travel across many countries - http://www.seat61.com

A wonderful source of information indeed!

Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: first class, sleeper, train