Push-ups

Saw this video in youtube that claims you can shape your upper body like a model if you just do 300 pushups in a day for 20 days.

The fact that it was all done in 20 days was what that caught my eye. This looked to be well within the reach of my attention span.

The first day, though was a disappointing 70 until my arms gave in. Hoping the other days would be better.

Also, just recovering from throat infection and fever. I don't believe in going to the doctor for every little niggle. Temperature throughout was less than 101 and apart from minor aches, and throat irritation, it seemed nothing major. Just drank hot water all day, with salt-water gargling and lots of rest. I seemed to get better in a day itself. 

Compaq armada M300

Seeing that many people at workplace wanted to buy a network storage device (NAS), I thought I would make one. I had this ancient thing lying around in home unused. 

It is Pentium M, 333MHz machine with just 256MB of ram. It actually had come with 64MB. But somewhere I had it upgraded to 256MB. This was my first laptop. It had served me well in the first two years, both for development as well as writing papers. Then my brother used it during his time in college. As we went onto more powerful machines, this was relegated to be used by my father who actually made the best use of it. As a document processor, it was a fine machine. He wrote many a novels there until he too moved onto a better machine. Since then, it was lying unused.

At the minimum, I thought a NAS box would probably have an OS, a CIFS or an NFS server. I looked around for possible OS candidates. Two things seemed like good choices to me: Damn Small Linux and Lubuntu. I went with Lubuntu because it looked same as Ubuntu but with a lot of packages removed. It would be a lot easier to maintain in case I need to install other packages. DSL didnt have samba package listed in their website. So it was an easy choice.

Installing Lubuntu was easy. But it didn't detect my PCMCIA wireless network card Netgear WG511. Google search said ndiswrapper package had some issues since Lubuntu 12 and the workaroud required me to compile driver for my system again. I thought this would take a lot more time than needed. But thankfully I had an card from DLINK. I thougth I will try this one before getting down with compilation. Luckily the DLINK card worked out of box and network connectivity was not a problem anymore. The card claimed a good speed of 51Mbps, so I thought this would be fine.

Then I connected my 1TB Seagate portable drive to the machine, only to see it fail again and again. The drive was not registering with my system. I connected a cheaper externally powered USB drive to see if USB current was an issue. Even that drive could not be detected. dmesg kept on showing hub-port disabled messages. In this entire effort, I had never thought about USB being a problem. I assumed it would work. But this machine was just having USB 1.1 and wasnt able to detect both these drives which were working perfectly fine on modern machines. So, this project with M300 is stuck at this point. 

There's still an unused desktop lying around at home. It hasn't been booted for a long time. And this one supports USB 2.0 and higher CPU clock with dual core Pentium. I am hoping I will have more luck on this machine. As for as M300, it gets back to the storage, having served us extremely well.

First post

Yay, my own blog. And first post !!!

Let's see, I am currently working on code review of TGT. Trying to get a sense of iSCSI task and how they ought to be handled, while reading rfc 3720 at the same time. This thing is hard.