Of Capacity and Quality..

MP3 players remain popular as new models roll out periodically. We not only care for the design aesthetics but also the capacity of the player to hold songs so that we may never require adding songs that have been left out apart from the latest ones. When I think of the ‘capacity’ as in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, I compare it with the higher capacity hard drives which are in the market today. It took me back to the year 2000 (now I could say, “a decade ago”!), when I had this Seagate 20GB drive. It was massive in size compared to what we look at today (size zero?). And the capacity? Tiny!!

With a 500GB HDD being a regular drive on home computers, whenever I’ve visit my friends, what I see is the enormous collection of movies and TV episodes of many “popular” sitcoms. A 10 to 15 GB collection of songs is bare minimum. But how much one hear the erstwhile gazhals (erstwhile on the drive!)? how much do we watch the sitcoms apart from all episodes of FRIENDS? And the movie collection is nothing to be proud of as many of them are just archived because we couldn’t find anything better than that!

With my old 20GB HDD, I remember how choosy I was. I used to convert some MP3s, apart from my favorites at the cost of quality, to OGG!! Now wonder why I did that!! I really saved some MBs! I used to archive old files and compress them, not choosing the popular Winzip but going for WinAce (anyone uses it now? I don’t!). I never knew WinRAR then. Once I got a 50MB software from a friend compressed in UHARC format and was amazed when I unzipped it as it had the command line interface and the unpacked software was well over 200MB!! I immediately used it (for a while of course).

I was kept songs that I heard more than once not compromising my collection. Back then CDs were a little expensive. I archived movies on them which I liked and kept some on my drive. What I learnt from my 20GB HDD was discipline. Effective partitioning and quality of data was of importance, which I think sadly is missed these days. What we do is get anything and everything. I still don’t own a 500GB or a 1TB HDD, but I wonder how would I stick on my ‘principles’?!

A Good Friday

Well today happens to be Good Friday (the holiday day for some of us) and it was also our group mate Chinmay's marriage. Good Marriage!!

Manas and i reached first at 10, the venue being Shruti Mangal Karyalay. Vishal came in with his dad, in traditional avatar. Later he would be only accompanied by Ranjeet in traditional attire, as the rest of us were in formals. It was an injustice, but considering the heat, give us a clean chit!

Narendra made a short presence as he had to go to the office. Ajay followed suit. It was pleasant to see Prakash Ramchandran (it had been a while seeing him). Jeetu, Pushkar and Ankur Shah (combo offer of sorts) too were present.

Abhijeet Thakur was a delight, as we have been really good friends, and it had been a long time we hadn't met. He had come from Aurangabad specially to attend the wedding. Nice!

Then followed an adhoc but a pretty good program of going to "Mee Shivajiraje..", Manjrekar's latest marathi film, which has become a cult lately. I had planned uniting many of us at Ranjeet's place and watch "Bolt", which i had copied on my pen drive. But that didn't materialise. In due course we saw a Mazda RX8 in the parking of E-Square ;) WOW!

We enjoyed the movie and i am now home. Let's see what rest of the day follows. It was a pleasant day having met old friends and enjoying with them!

Music Review: Rahul Sharma & Richard Clayderman - Confluence II

VERDICT: WOW!! Confluence is a fantastic and a mind blowing album.
Track listing:
1 Dance Of The Sufis
2 Pure Flame Of Love, A
3 Chase, The
4 Dance AveeTa Vie
5 Fragrant Night
6 Endless Love
7 Forbidden Dreams
8 Le Chant Des Algues
9 Chase Continues, The

Dance Of The Sufis
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The first track starts with RC's prelude piano. RS then picks it up from him, and sets the stage. The beats get groovier, making the track dancable. You would want to do a tango on this one! The middle is a reminiscent of a track(Fragrant Night) which comes later.

A Pure Flame Of Love
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RS's santoor makes its grand entry, while RC's piano lights up the atmosphere in the background. True to its name, its a soft musical perfect for night ambience. RC creates magic with beautiful orchestration. What's more, RC plays the "anatara" of this masterpiece. RS doesn't let you forget his prelude. It’s a fantastic song and keeps the mood 'alive' and 'afresh'. The pace of the song is smooth and soft. Not too slow, not too fast. RS $ RC have their fair share in this track, with each one playing their piece. Certainly, one of my favourites!

Dance AveeTa Vie
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The santoor and the piano in this track have been kept in shade. The track didn't make me say "wow". It would be okay to skip this track or have a listen to it once.

Fragrant Night
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How can the santoor and the piano be used in a hip hop track? Baffled? The answer is "fragrant night". I couldn't relate the music with the name, but its one of the most exciting tracks in the album and has become an instant favourite. RS $ RC have indeed succeeded in making music 'different' altogether apart from taking it to a different level. RC's piano is played in 2 modes, one is subtle and to match RS's firm santoor tune, he plays firm piano notes! WOW!

Endless Love
--------------------------------------------
This track instantly reminds you of the waltz. Its touching, and soothing. It’s an amazing track. RC $ RS have given their best in this track. You certainly cannot miss this one. It matches in tune with the name and symbolizes romance. A splendid example of how an instrumental piece makes you visualise it as a song; something which is not easy to do. The ends are foot tapping and the song is joyous.

Forbidden dreams
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Again a fast paced track. the prelude of the track is racing, it just gets better and better in the middle. The orchestration is amazing and sounds dramatic! True to its name; you cannot stop yourself from seeing forbidden dreams!

Le Chant Des Algues
--------------------------------
RS and RC do an Enigma. With the hustling background and lightly emphasised santoor with a tinge of the piano, the track is kept short and sweet.

Chase Continues, The
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Taking queue from Time Traveller, a revisit to the "Chase" sounds exciting. With more instruments added, like the tabla, and remixing, the track is more of an addition. Something, which wasn't required, but too good to be ignored.

Tutorial : Dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP: with Win XP already installed and having NTFS partitions

Dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP: with Win XP already installed and having NTFS partitions. Ubuntu has taken by storm as a popular flavor of Linux. This has happened because Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu), has adopted a unique strategy for marketing Ubuntu. It not only rests at that; but the OS has undergone a lot of improvements and is ready to catch the eye of PC users, who somewhat fear the “text” mode, by radically upgrading the UI.

Enough said; let’s move on to our target.

I’ll explain you in short, the situation in which I was. That would probably be easy for to relate to.

My notebook specs: Dell Inspiron 1420, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 128MB Nvdia Graphics, 160GB SATA HDD, DVD Combo drive.

Situation: My hard drive had configuration like this:

Since I wanted to dual boot the system; I needed to make room for Ubuntu. That would mean reconfiguring the whole file system or resize partitions using any partition tool.

The easiest way to dual boot Ubuntu with XP, is getting XP installed first, and then installing Ubuntu. The reason being, Windows needs itself to be installed in the master drive (C drive). If you do it other way around, you might end up screwing up your bootloader. I found Ubuntu’s bootloader (GRUB) to be friendly (it understands the Windows installation its location).

So the point to remember is : Install windows XP first and then install Ubuntu.

A 10 GB partition was quite sufficient for Windows XP, as all my program files get stored onto my D drive which is large enough. Ubuntu can enjoy itself on a drive which is of 20GB. Its too much, still, with a large HDD, it can be worth it, since, you want to learn Ubuntu and keep installing its free programs.

The re-configuration of my HDD and creating new partitions and then again installation of Win XP, was pointless in this case, as I felt it would be okay to sacrifice my Stuff0 drive. (You can choose any drive you want, depending on your data intensity).
Note of caution: Back up all of your drives before starting this. Get a portable (you can borrow it, as I did!). Copy all the data which means to you.

You need to only COPY PASTE your data onto any external media. Do not CUT and PASTE. Cut paste is NOT required here and it also takes some more time.

Next, format the partition where you want Ubuntu to be installed. Right click the partition and click “format”. Then select the checkbox “Quick Format”. The partition shall be formatted in NTFS format. That shouldn’t matter to us, as Ubuntu will format the same drive in its type. In my case; I formatted my Stuff0 partition after copying all my data onto a portable.

Once you backup your partitions (which takes hell lot of time to complete); we proceed to our next step.

Insert your Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Installation disk (which also acts as a live CD) and restart your system.

Assuming that your DVD drive comes first in the boot sequence; select the option “Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer”.

Let the live environment load. It takes some time as you are booting from the DVD. We need to check if Ubuntu shows our existing partitions. One way to do this is to go to “System >> Administration>> Partition Manager”

Here you’ll see your partitions. The “unknown” type of partition (mostly /dev/sda) is your C: drive where Win XP is installed. Identify the drive where disk space free is maximum. That would be your target partition. In my case it was /dev/sdb6. Drive D was /dev/sdb5, while the last drive it showed as /dev/sdb3. The numbering depends on primary and logical extensions. But let’s not get into that.

Identifying your target partition is very important as any mistake shall install ubuntu on that drive. Hence, be careful. It’s not difficult at all. Just that you need to be in your senses while doing this step. Now you can close the partition manager. Now that you’ve identified the target drive, things to come are a piece of cake.

Double click the “Install” icon on the Ubuntu desktop. We’ll now proceed with the installation.
Select appropriate choices, like languages, time zone, keyboard layout etc and proceed. Ubuntu installer will then scan your existing drives and OS installations (XP here).

What you would see next is “Prepare disk space” window. It would show you “Before” and “After” bars.
Select the “Guided” option (it’s selected by default). You see /sda6 (referring to the Stuff0 partition) selected here. Don’t change anything here. It shows you 2 boxes with percentages of space that Ubuntu would occupy. You don’t have to do anything here.

What happens is internally, ubuntu makes space for /,/home and swap partitions.
What’s going on here?

As you can see partition sdb6 (which is your Stuff0 of 20GB) will have ubuntu installed on it. And of course, Ubuntu’s bootloader (GRUB) will take care of dual boot sequence.

Proceed for the rest of the installation. The DVD will be ejected once it’s done, before asking you to restart the system.

When you restart the system (remove the DVD before that), GRUB shows Ubuntu in its list as well as Windows XP entry in “Other Operating systems” list.

Check into Windows XP to see whether XP is working fine. It should probably do. All your settings are retained files left untouched. All the drives show up in “My Computer” as it is, with only exception being “Stuff0” which is empty and would show something like a 3GB partition. Don’t worry, as XP doesn’t show Linux partitions as it is. It’s better not to touch that drive and keep it for Ubuntu itself.

Well then! Ubuntu is finally installed, and is in dual boot! Enjoy!