The Broken Appointment System In Indian PSKs (Passport Seva Kendra)s

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Siva

7am in the morning is a bit too early for me to be awake (as I sleep quite late). And writing a blog on top as early is even rarer (actually first). But I got to write this discussing the situation prompted this.

My parents passports are expiring in September and we wanted to renew them. First, it’s been a long time I have dealt with any govt organization in India. Few months back when I was in India I did some research on how to renew for passports and was pleasantly surprised of the online application filling and appointment system.

While the online process is a boon for people like me, it also has a disadvantage for people who don’t know how to operate the computers or the internet, like my parents. So, the plan was  that they would take the appointment when my sister visits them (I came to know that the appointment can’t be taken much in advance). My sister is currently visiting them and I thought it’s just a matter of time to take the appointment. But yesterday I got an email and she said we have to take the appointment at 7:30pm and we have powercut at that time. Now I am not going to make this post about the power problems in India. Suffice it to say, it’s a genuine problem and I don’t know what people can do about powercuts when the govt itself is increasingly providing facilities requiring computers and internet.

I said I can help take the appointment. That’s how I got up at 7:00 am (a little earlier actually) and got on to the system and called my sister. Then two things happened. First, I got a message telling me that I need to get into the system tomorrow at 7:30pm without any indication that the slots are over and hence I need to do that (otherwise, one can easily think it’s broken or no clue what went wrong). Second, apparently the power was there and my sister was logged in prior to me but her session got terminated because I got in.

I was surprised that we couldn’t get an appointment slot within 3 minutes of the window. I then did a search and to my surprise and horror I read all kinds of stories where people have been trying for 2 months!

Whenever there is an inefficient system, there are going to be people trying to make money out of that. So, in the few blogs where people provided suggestions on how to secure an appointment, there were many comments where the poor mortals explained how they are having difficulty getting an appointment. And then there are these travel agents or someone who are offering “passport appointment booking” services for a fee of 200 to 400 Rs. Most likely these people are using some scripts or something like that and exhausting the slots.

There is also a news article Online passport appointments snapped up in 15 minutes. In that article a govt official was stating that there is a 35% absent rate. Sure, what do you they expect? You expect people far away to book the appointment for the next day that too almost in the night and show up next day? It may or may not be practically feasible.

Another concern I have is, we need to renew 3 passports as a family (my dad, mom and sister). But the appointment system allows taking appointment for 1 person at a time. If it gets exhausted so fast, does it mean the family has to go 3 times? I don’t know for sure till I see the subsequent appointment screens if they have an option to indicate that it’s for a family of 3 people.

Anyway, the reason why the situation is like this is because someone responsible for coming up with a process didn’t do a good job. Here is how the system should have been designed.

1) It should be possible to book the appointments at any time of the day. It is likely that they allotted different time slots for each PSK to reduce load on the system. But by creating this windows and difficulty to make an appointment, they are actually creating unnecessary load (look at all the forums and tips about repeatedly trying, opening multiple tabs etc).

2) It should be possible to book an appointment for up to a month or so. If Indian Railways can support for up to 3 or 4 months in advance, I am sure the PSKs can sure do it.

3) Allow people to cancel an appointment 3 days in advance if they can’t make it. But people can abuse this unless they are charged some money and they need to forgo full or a part of it. Time is money. So, another option is, if someone cancels an appointment, then do not allow them to take appointment for the next N days (N can be 15 or 30 or something reasonable which discourages people to cancel unless there is a very valid reason).

Anyway, I am not sure how long it’s going to take for us to secure an appointment but the current system is very broken IMHO.

Update 1: The next day my sister tried it again and was ready to hit the button exactly on the spot. It got submitted but we had to wait and wait and wait and wait for the response that I ended my phone call and let her continue. Later I came to know that after almost 20 minutes on that screen the session timed out! So much for being ready.

Change of plans. We decided to go with the local agent who did the initial passport 10 yrs back when this system was not in place. Apparently they can get it done (charging of course), I don’t know how. Once my parents go and get the passport, I will update this further on how exactly it worked.

Update: Today I heard they got the passports. Some local travel agent told them to go there on a specific day, no particular time. It’s about 3 hrs from where we live and they went by taxi, reached there before 11am and submitted the documents. They came back and in few weeks the police came for verification and finally today I heard they got the passports.

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Building an App using HTML5 & JavaScript

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Siva

Coming from C++, Java, Perl, Python and JavaScript background for OOP I just couldn’t take Objective-C. I think there are a good set of libraries and Objective-C also has a good set of language level features but the syntax is the annoying part. Half-heartedly I have been going over a bunch of documents from Apple.

Then I came to know of PhoneGap. It provides a framework to write the app using HTML5 and JavaScript. Then I decided to give it a try. I had the app working in a two days and could see it in action in the iPhone Simulator.

Then I read about the dreaded 10.6 ios rejection on the forums and that’s when I realized that while I do have a working app, it doesn’t feel native.

That’s when I came to know about JQueryMobile. The way HTML is written for JQueryMobile is completely different from the normal HTML. It actually makes use of the data- attributes of HTML5 to control various aspects of the rendering and navigation.

Switching to JQueryMobile realy made the app to shine and look very native for the transitions and the UI components. There are even css themes designed specifically to look like iOS LAF and after adding that as well, my app just looks and feels native!

I think the approach of developing apps using HTML5 and JavaScript has a lot of potential. For one, it allows to write the app once and run on multiple OS platforms such as iOS and Android. Ofcourse, there are device specific features like the camera, accelerometer, gps etc and PhoneGap (or other similar frameworks) typically provide JavaScript wrapper APIs so the developer doesn’t have to know the native APIs. I also like the fact that PhoneGap tries to base their APIs on the W3C standards where available (for example Storage and File).

There is one and only thing that is a pain with PhoneGap development (I think I should actually say Cordova). The javascript calls to the native APIs are asynchronous. This is a real pain. For example, if you have a set of app preferences that have to be read at the beginning of the app, then it requires chaining a lot of async calls together to get all the values. That’s when I came to know about the concept of Promises in JavaScript but it still doesn’t look promising (no pun intended) for someone who just want to feel like writing a regular synchronous call.

I don’t know the exact reason why these JavaScript to native app calls have to be asynchronous. Apparently a url with protocol of gap:// is used to handle this type of calls that require it to be asynchronous. I wonder if there are other ways to do it synchronously.

Anyway, the simple I app I have just has one such app level preference and for now it isn’t too much of a pain, but if I were to work on a more advanced app, let’s see how that goes.

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Creative Hiring

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Siva

As I am with software background, this is about software engineers. How do you hire smart software engineers? Historically, companies recruit via Campus Interviews and Online Job Postings.  Some companies did it via cryptic bill board messages, but that’s not for all companies. The quest for some companies is to hire the top notch developers. But where do you find these top notch developers? Some companies do yearly competitions and that’s a means to recruit developers. But again, that’s not for all.

So, are there any other ways to hire developers interested in solving complex problems? The answer is not surprisingly yes. There are a few websites online that provide complex problems for anyone to solve. Some of these websites track the progress and provide some sort of rating or ranking. A few examples are Project Euler and Sphere Online Judge.

Some of the recruiters are scouting these type of websites, figuring out the people at the top of these lists and sending them emails asking if they are interested in joining their companies. How do I know? Because I got similar emails from recruiters from Google and Facebook. I happen to be in the top tier on Project Euler (actually completed 100% as of Problem 391) and since I appear among the top in the Country listings and the State of the Art award list (those who solved the latest 25 at some point), I was picked. Some of the others also received similar emails. For example, see this forum post on Project Euler.

These days with LinkedIn and others the way to recruit people has certainly changed. However, I think trying to recruit people based on these online programming websites is also interesting.

For startups interested in recruiting exceptional talent via this unconventional route, here are a few suggestions

1) It’s not just them, it’s you as well! I mean, don’t go to these places and start with the top most rankers. If you are a very small startup, why do you think these guys should join you? Also, you may not always need someone who is the top most for the kind of job you have in mind. For example, if you recruit someone who solved more than 150 of the 391 problems on Project Euler, you would get reasonably good programmer.

2) Try to find out a little more about the person before sending out the email with an interest to recruit. Some of the people who hang out in these places are not there to get a job but just for the fun of it. They just love the challenge, or the education process or the ability to hang out with like minded people, or the chance to see how other people with great ideas solve the problems and so on. For example, on Project Euler, the age range varies from about 15 to 80+. The younger ones are going to join college and the older ones are retired and don’t need a job. So, no point blindly sending these people an email with a  job opportunity.

3) For many of these problems, there are solutions online. There are people who submit the answers directly by searching online. Frankly I don’t know what they get out of this, but this happens. One way to find out such people on Project Euler is to check if they a) provide comments in the private forums with their own insights and code b) if they happen to be among the fastest 50 solvers c) if they participate in the public forums offering help to others.

Feel free to contact me if you need further insight into this.

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Visualization

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Siva

I wasn’t really planning on starting my next post with a one word title starting with V like the previous one. This happened purely by accident and I will provide the history first.

Some of my close friends are aware that I am a big fan of Project Euler. If a problem is hard, I focus on it in my spare time to solve it. If I am done with it, I used to have several unfinished problems in the past. But after reaching 100%, I mostly have to wait for the weekly problems. And right now, the season has ended with a break till 1st September. To entertain myself, I look on the web for people gossiping about Project Euler. In one of those moments, I stumbled upon the website of Mr Anand. I visited this website earlier and one more time today. I would have almost not recognized who that was until I saw the About Me page and his nicknames. He was a 1 yr junior from the same hostel when I was doing my BTech. I tried contacting him first to congratulate that he was working Project Euler, second to admonish him to not post the solutions on the web as it’s against the spirit of Project Euler. I never received a reply but probably some spam filter ate away my email.

Anyway, now let’s come to the topic. So, in one of those poking around the web to see what people are talking about Project Euler, I stumbled upon this website again. I was looking at some of the stuff he was working on that eventually took me to the Visualizations blog of Gramener. I first looked at the language of tweets and noted that love is being more used in the evenings.

What caught my attention was the Mahabharatha visualization app. First, I am all for visualization. I even created a very good word cloud app for public to use and I get lot of hits. Forget about word cloud, I even created an image cloud using Amazon product data offered as a webservice. However, visualization techniques are not the end of data analysis, it’s just the beginning. They provide a direction to someone who is lost. It offers a way to prioritize what to focus on with the limited resources one has.

The bigger problem I see with any visualization techniques is coming to a conclusion too soon. Let’s take the above Mahabharatha visualization app. If I understand correctly, the way it’s developed is, they parsed all the freely available text, created a set of records of the form chapter, section, character-name, word number. Here, word number indicates the position of the word from the beginning of the section.

Let me digress a bit regarding Big Data. While they claim 1.8 million words is sort of a big data, I have to disagree. I disagree because I have a cron job that processes more than a million products from Overstock’s product feed and dump the data into SQLite and I implemented my own rudimentary full-text-search and all this processing takes less than a few minutes on my 2.8 GHz Core i7 machine. So, I know it’s not much volume.

Anyway, once they have that data, they present this info in a very nice visual form that can be accessed by anyone via a browser. The statement “This makes it easy to see where characters speak together (e.g. where does Kunti throw away Karna? Where does she meet him again?” caught my attention. And so, I immediately checked that and something caught my attention. Mahabharatha has 18 chapters. See the below image for Kunti and Karna together (I am only showing from chapter 7 which is sufficient for what I want to say).

The blue dots are for Kunti and the other color is Karna. Notice that the last time you see both these dots appear together is in Chapter 18, Section 4. Going by their statement “This makes it easy to see where characters speak together” one might quickly draw the conclusion that these two were talking to each other till the very end of this epic. There are a few problems with this. One, even if two names occur in the same section, there is no way to know that the conversation is actually between them. Next, just because there is a name, doesn’t mean that that person is actually talking! Someone else could be just referring the name of that person.

Their blog also says “But the growing field of text analytics and text visualisation tell us that there’s a lot more structure to plain text than one might think.” Yes, but it’s very very difficult to figure out by just tokenizing the text. Yes, I know information retrieval has sound math (td-idf) to it. But when it comes to text analysis visualization is not the main obstacle, but the sophistication of algorithms that can actually understand the context.

The reason why this immediately caught my attention is actually because I know a bit of that great epic. So, I know that Karna actually dies in the Kurukshethra and so there is no way for Kunti and Karna to be talking till the end! In fact, Karna actually dies in Chapter 8, Section 91, several chapters earlier than the end. So, because I knew Mahabharatha already, I could easily spot this anomaly. For someone who is not familiar, how can they make a wise decision even when all the data is presented with good visualization.

So, points I want to make are

  1. Visualization is important
  2. But even more important is, cleansed data
  3. Cleansing data is relatively easy for numbers occuring in transactions
  4. But not so when it comes to text analysis

Also, in my personal experience of using reports, those who use the reports are the best people who can suggest what changes are required to the reports to help them better in their work. At work, we have something called a bugdb that tracks bugs. There are frontend ad-hoc query tools for this system. But me as a manager, if I want to know more about a specific metric, while I could use one of the stock reports, it’s my ability to formulate complex queries and get the result in the exact way I want makes it easy for me to respond back to the answer much faster, with confidence and understanding of what went in coming up with that final magic number.

So I think as the cloud picks up and more and more transactional data is on the cloud, tools that provide the ability to easily create reports the way a non-technical (but sound in statistics or a number-savvy MBA type) person wants it would have a great demand. Of-course, offering reasonable response time is the key for wider adoption of such tools.

 

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Virtualization

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Siva

In my previous post Protecting Software Programs I talked about my experiments to get some old games up and running. I did some more research and I am going to enumerate some of the lessons learned and the best practices mostly so that I have access to it when I need it.

My requirements:

1) To be able to allow my 3 yr old son whose account is with parental controls to be easily play with the old games

2)It should be easy for him to access the games when he needs them even if I am not present. At 3 yr old, he mastered to put the dvd into the dvd tray so for those games that need the original DVD/CD, he can manage.

Solution I formulated:

1) I would manage the VM from my account and keep it running.

2) Whenever he needs to play, he would switch to his account and login (which he already knows how to do) and invoke some “app” and he should be ready to start playing.

While this is all simple, along the way I ran into some issues.

Here is the list of things to consider irrespective of the VM for the solution to work.

1) Sound. The sound should play on the guest OS, which is not difficult, but not from within my account, but from my son’s account when accessed as a different user. Note that since both my account and my son’s account are in the same machine, this is not as trivial or not the standard configuration. I managed to do this in VirtualBox but not in VMWare Fusion. In VirtualBox, configure audio as follows by choosing “Null Audio Driver”.

This essentially just generates the sound but doesn’t play when the guest is accessed directly from the host. However, when the same VM is accessed using VirtualBox’s built-in RDP, the sound is played on the RDP client.

I didn’t find similar options to configure sound on the VMWare Fusion 4.1.3 (I am using a trial license and my goal was to evaluate the free VirtualBox and VMWare and decide which one to go with).

2) My second requirement is the remote desktop access. There are two ways to achieve this. One is, to enable remote desktop access in the guest OS and then directly use it. However, this may not always be a viable option. The two reasons for this are

a) The guest OS may not support RDP, for example Windows 2000 and before (Terminal Services are not available in Windows 2000 Pro)

b) A more important problem to some is that when you run a virtual machine, there are multiple ways to make it connect it to the network. The simplest and default option is to NAT. That is, the VM can access the outside network but the outside network can’t directly access the VM because the rest of the network doesn’t see this. There are other types of network connections and one of them actually gets an actual IP address from the router and so every other computer on your LAN can see this VM. All these options are a bit confusing and even in NAT it’s possible to do port forwarding and things like that that gets even complicated.

As a result, the simplest option is to use the virtualization software to provide the remote desktop service. Both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion provide this option. However, VirtualBox provides RDP while VMWare provides VNC. I initially didn’t care which option as long as my requirement was met. But then I realized that the mouse pointer was very very slow with VNC (I used Chiken of the VNC on OS X). When I searched on the web I found that RDP is more sophisticated, smart and network efficient and VNC is dumb.

I also wanted to run the VMs in headless mode from my account. I could do that with both VirtualBox and VMWare Force.

So, after evaluating both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion, here are my conclusions.

1) None of them is perfect especially for non-conventional uses like mine.

2) VMWare seems to be more compatible in switching to full-screen mode as required by most games. I couldn’t get Crazy Machines to work on VirtualBox either in OS X or Windows as a guest. The program starts and then stops.

3) Adding the additional tools to integrate the guest OS better worked fine for VirtualBox but not so with VMWare for Windows 2000. It requires upgrading Windows 2000 to PS4 and then RUP1 of PS4. Only then it works. I actually downloaded those patches on to my host and I was expecting to create a shared folder to install those patches. However, because the additional tools don’t install without those patches, I couldn’t access the shared folder and without that I can’t apply the patches. But all is not lost, I simply had to create an iso file containing those files and mount it as a 2nd CD/DVD drive.

3) VirtualBox seems to hog the CPU. Based on the documentation I thought it’s only for OS X guests but even Windows guest had the same problem. It seems to constantly running at the max CPU capacity given to the VM. This in my opinion is a big deal breaker for me as my host machine is getting hot very fast.

I still have a few days before the VMWare Force trial license expires. If I figure out the pending problems (sound and faster remote connection) then I will get a proper license for sure. Otherwise, I need to think what to do. For example, may be resurrect my very old PC containing Windows 98.

Note: The above opinions are personal and I have evaluated and commented purely for my personal needs. I don’t have experience with either of them in a commercial setting.

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Protecting Software Programs

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Siva

After upgrading to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard I realized that some of my old games I got for my son are not working. I didn’t even realize till then that those games worked only because of a technology called Rosetta to run PowerPC based software on Intel based Macs. I started with OS X only starting 2010 and so I never new all the history till now.

My 3 yr old son wants to play Zoombinis Logical Journey (he doesn’t really play it properly and himself, but let me put it that he can spend some time moving those cute Zoombinis around and losing them all to the Pizza guy). I told him that we can’t play anymore but 3 times I have noticed he put the CD into my iMac’s DVD tray. So I realized that he is not going to give up and then started the quest to get the game running.

a) First I installed the VirtualBox and tried installing OS X Snow Leopard using the original DVDs that came with the iMac. Installation was successful and I could get everything up and running. However, the game did not run. I think there was a problem entering into the full-screen 640×480 mode that the game requires.

b) Then I thought may be if I tried a different virtualization technology, I might have luck. I downloaded the trial version of VMWare Fusion and went through the VM creation process. If everything worked, I wanted to get a copy of it from Amazon. That’s when I realized for the first time that OS X actually has a client version and a server version (call me dumb, but as a consumer who was using Windows and Linux, I never had a need to know that level of details especially when all I get to order is a shiny iMac for well over $3000 with top-of-the-line customization) and Apple only allows virtualizing the server version.

c) So as I was evaluating other options, I briefly thought of buying a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard. First, it’s not possible to get such a system on Apple. The ones on Amazon are too expensive. Found a few on Craigslist and eBay but too much price variation I wasn’t sure which one is the best option.

I wish Apple should have done one of the following things

  1. Continue to support Rosetta
  2. Give a big warning that can’t be missed when trying to upgrade from Snow Leopard
  3. Sell Snow Leopard based hardware for a few more years
  4. Or better, change the EULA for OS X client versions that they can be virtualized (I don’t now how legally it’s possible for already accepted EULAs). I feel annoyed that I paid so much for the Mac, then I upgraded to Mountain Lion and the only reason I want to hang on to Snow Leopard is for the fault of Apple not supporting Rosetta and I can’t make use of the Snow Leopard copy because of the restrictive EULA.

I also briefly thought of buying the latest Mac Mini with Mountain Lion, partition the disk and install Snow Leopard as a second OS so that I could dual boot (I have to warn this is also not legally allowed I think because though the hardware is from Apple, I think it’s allowed to install only on the original hardware for which the OS disks were provided) but I dropped this idea because apparently such installations can fail if the 2+ yr old installation can’t recognize the newer CPUs it won’t work.

Just when I thought I was running out of options, I got another idea and there comes option d) below.

d) Luckily all these game CDs were meant for both Windows and Mac. So, what if I could get it to run as a Windows game? Then I installed wine using macports which initially had a few hiccups but finally went smooth (one issue was that /opt/local/bin/python was pointing to Python 3.3 and another was I had several dependent packages built without the universal flag). But finally when the time came to run the game I ran into an issue. Wine can’t directly interact with the CD disk (atleast on Mac) and the Mac’s mount point only shows the PowerPC files and not Windows files. So, I have no idea how to get it to install the Windows files. I even tried this with WineBottler and ran into the same issue.

e) Now comes the final option. Given that I was going down the Windows path, I suddenly realized I have a big paper weight lying around with Windows 7 Ultimate edition on it. Here I am calling my HP Laptop the big paper weight because after spending $15000 in 2009 and having heat problems in less than 3 months and getting it serviced via the warranty, it heat problem never went away and even crashed my harddisk due to the heat. I bought a new hard-drive and installed Windows 7 on it but due to the heat problem just kept it aside. Only time we were using it was for taking some printouts.

So I thought of trying out the game on this Windows 7 machine. I was skeptical if it would run a decade old game made for Windows 98. But interestingly it ran perfectly though it crashed in the middle. Forgetting the heat problem I first thought it might be a compatibility issue and so downloaded the Windows XP Mode and ran the game in that. It worked just fine.

Now I am almost ready to let my son give it a try. Except, I wanted him to try it from the Mac itself rather than giving that hot laptop to him. Then I thought I will use Remote Desktop (RDP program). For that I need to provide the IP address of the machine and what IP address should I give for the virtual machine? Because I was using the NAT option and can’t really use other options, I ran out of options to use the remote desktop.

Then I shelved the Windows XP mode and tried it back on Windows 7 itself (after realizing that the original crash was the heat problem) and everything worked fine. For a brief period I made my son play the game on the laptop (under my supervision) but he really had difficulty with the mouse. Given he is very comfortable with Apple’s magic mouse, I completed the initial mission of making it run on the iMac.

Now everything works as expected except there is some problem for Windows 7 to go into a low resolution full-screen mode when accessed using RDP. For this I first have to start the game on the laptop and then access it using the RDP. I also bought a laptop cooler now that I might use it a bit longer.

After 2 days of multiple hours of effort and learning a lot (technical, legal, historical details) I decided to write about this experience and ponder the bigger question. While researching on running PowerPC applications on Mountain Lion, some people suggested moving to modern programs, latest version of the apps etc. Sure, I don’t mind paying again and getting newer version of those games. But unfortunately, the original game companies got acquired (and reacquired) and in the process there are no newer versions of those games and those games are simply too good (classic) to give up.

This brings a bigger question. There is a lot of concern about losing a lot of digital content because of change in hardware and standards. But what about the software itself? While it’s technically feasible to run any software with suitable emulators, as time passes it’s going to only get difficult. How do we protect the best of our software for future generations?

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Snow Leopard To Mountain Lion Upgrade

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Siva

I have a late 2009 27″ iMac which I bought April 2010. When Lion came out I didn’t upgrade as I wasn’t sure what all was involved in doing it, especially backup part. Now after Mountain Lion came out, after talking to a colleague and learning it’s a simple process, I gave it a try over the weekend.

Everything went smooth except for a few things that I observed so far. Below is the list.

1) I like the new iOS style launchpad. But there is one problem with it for the user account with parental control. My son shares my iMac but he has his own account with parental controls. He has been using the computer before even he turned 2 yrs old and so I like the fact that the Finder app can be made to run in simple mode which removes a lot of complexity. One of the side effects of running the Finder in simple mode is that it’s not possible to customize the dock. Ideally Launchpad should have been part of this simple mode finder but it’s not. As a result, there is no short cut to accessing the Launchpad. I need to train my son to use the App folder and invoke the Launchpad from there. Even that is painful because the location of the Launchpad keeps changing as new apps are installed and now it sits in the second sheet and I don’t seem to find a day to drag it to the first sheet and fix it there.

2) I have a directory called /home which got converted to /home-preserved. Not sure why that was done, but I just moved it back to /home

3) I had some customizations in the httpd.conf file which got overwritten. Luckily, the only overwrite I had was including the localapache.conf file and so it was easy to fix it.

4) More rantings about parental controls and Launchpad. I organized the apps nicely into folders from within the Launchpad for my son but anytime I go back to the parental controls to make changes like granting access to new app, all the folders seems to disappear and all the apps show up unorganized.

5) One main disadvantage after upgrading from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion is that the old power pc based apps won’t run any more. Had I known this before, I may have postponed it because I have two nice games for my son which don’t work any more. Unfortunately, they are not available for the newer OSX even if I am ready to spend again.

I also noticed that my computer has been becoming very hot and initially thought it’s related to upgrade to Mountain Lion. However, after reading the forums, performing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), SMC reset, PARAM reset and all that, one of the forum gave a clue that the small holes at the bottom of the iMac (which I haven’t realized till now) may be clogged up. So, I cleaned that out and immediately started seeing improvement. Mainly the secondary heat sink has a difference of 10o C.

Overall I am happy with the upgrade. This also allowed me to upgrade Xcode.

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Hello world!

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Siva

Writing is not new to me and I have a whole bunch of stuff on my website. I decided to use WordPress so that it becomes easy to blog rather than using my handcrafted HTML pages.

So, why my blog has such a strange name? When I was installing the WordPress software on my hosting provider, one of the fields was to enter the blog title and I had to think of something quick. Then I thought what I wanted to do with the blog. After a bit of thought, I know I wanted to make my point so started with Point and then I also like providing tips and experiences for others to do something better or not make the same mistake as I. That part refers to the Pointer. And finally, being a human, I can be wrong and hence the err. Point, Pointer and Err, overall it becomes the title of my blog.

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