• My Dell XPS M1330 laptop had been freezing randomly for the past one month or so, and finally, on Monday I decided to call up their customer support. After around 40 minutes of being kept on hold and being redirected among different departments and IVRSs, I finally got hold of a support guy, who was quite helpful. He told me that complaints similar to mine had been coming in for some days, and he would send someone to replace the laptop’s motherboard by Thursday. Which was OK, till Thursday evening…
  On Thursday evening, I got a call from a Kolkata number, and the guy on the phone told me that the replacement motherboard has not arrived yet, and they had no clue whatsoever on when it could land up. The guy was however, helpful enough to give his direct contact number, but explained that he was working for some subcontractor hired by Dell (Wipro ??) and all I can do at this stage is call up Dell support again. Bleh… so much for “Next Day On Site Service”.
  (I really hope that this does not turn out to be like my previous experience with Dell)
• In case you are trying to flash your OLPC XO-1 drive with a SD card, and if you get an error which says SDHCI: command ready timeout, Bad read of .img file, take a look at this workaround. It should work.
• Finally managed to watch Khuda Ke Liye. Highly recommended.

• New iMacs and Linux:
  Can anyone tell me how good the Linux experience is on the newer editions of the aluminium iMacs ? I need a second machine badly (I can’t send away my Dell XPS M1330 for servicing before I get a second box to work from). I have been looking at the Dell Vostro systems, but it looks like due to some new laws/regulations, I’ll need to do a lot of govt. paperwork myself before I can get the machine, so Dell is out of question.
  I’m looking at the lowest version of the iMac (20 inch, 2.4 Ghz one). I need to run a couple of VMs on it, and access some external storage to it (for storing my photos, etc). I will max out the RAM to 4 GB (no, I won’t buy Apple RAM) - the rest of the config should remain the same.
  
• New internet connection:
  I have been using the UL900 plan of BSNL, which gave me 256Kbps speed (with no data transfer cap) for the past one year. 256Kbps was a bit slow for my work, so I finally changed my service provider, and opted for a 1Mbps no-cap plan from Airtel Broadband. It costs a bit more (Rs 2222 monthly, which is approximately equal to 52USD), but I’m pretty happy with the service till now.

Last Saturday, I appeared for what was the last examination of our four year BTech degree course. College life has ended for me, at least for the time being. It was fun while it lasted, bordering on insanity sometimes (can you imagine “normal people” participating in a sport which involves pouring rotten, and really stinky paper-maché over each other’s heads ?). The last few days were bitter-sweet, with a lot of memories, some of them happy, some of them not so happy, coming back all at once. I guess, in the end, all of us had a wonderful four years, years that made us mature, strong, and much more acquainted with the ways of the world. Thanks to everyone who has been beside me during the past four years, through all my ups, downs, successes and failures. Thanks a lot .

This week, I’m starting full time with OLPC. Apart from facilitating and helping with the l10n and i18n efforts (which I have been doing for the past six months), I also expect to start helping out with various parts of the OLPC software stack.

This part of life is called: interesting :-).