iGeek Blog

iGeek blog is now moved to a new home at http://jigneshpatel.co.in/blog, where it is now hosted under the hood of Wordpress.

All older posts are already moved.

If you are able to read this line, you will be redirected to a new place in few seconds.

The Year is ending soon, new one is going to begin. In '09 I've seen lot of ups & downs in world around me, whether its family, friends or its professional world, nothing was just stable as it should. Lot of bad and good things happened.

Lets have a recap of the Year 2009.

Family & Friends
Some incidents in family drawn my family in a bit trouble. It was the hard time. But as time passed, all got back to normal.

I lost my Nana this year. He got paralysis attack. He was aged. The good thing was, we took the initiative for Eye donation. We donated his eyes to the Eye bank. I wrote about it here earlier: Eye Donation: Our little efforts will give someone new life

Apart from that just few months back I lost one of my close friend, Jatin. He got an heart attack & passed away. Just few months back from that time, we used to go office together on a bike, as his office was at the little distance from mine. We were in contact since we were in primary school. RIP Jatin.

Just after few days I lost him, I heard about the death of one my colleague at my office. She worked at my office, but she left long ago. We were not in contact since long, and all of a sudden, Dhaval, who was the common friend with her, called me & gave the news that Jignisha died in Dubai due to food poisoning.

Health
Beginning of the year was just good. Me and Rahul joined the health club thinking about loosing some some kgs. We joined in the end of 2008, but we were succeed to continue with it in 2009 as well. achievement huh.. :). It lasted till the middle of Feb. You will feel good when number of people tell you that,"Oh Jignesh, you really looking slimmer." And it feels really good when girls say it. I was lucky to get those comments. I lost near 2 inches from the tummy. Satisfactory. But for some reasons we failed to continue it for long.

Only Salad in Lunch for consecutively about 8 months !! Yes, thats true. In those span of 8 months, 90-95% of my lunch Salad only. Having lunch with mates at my work place is always a fun. Those days, when I had salad & others having ordinary food. I had to answer everyone in office, why I am on it. Some of the comments I got from others were very interesting. Some of them were like:
"Are you sick? Has doctor asked not to eat anything else ?"
"Are you going through some Ayurvedic treatment or what ?"
"You are one of healthiest people here. C'mon.. share your food with me. I need it. You take my food."
"I got now, why your skin is so fair, because you take lots of Salad a day. Salad keeps you skin shiny & healthy, keep it up."
But apart from all above, the Truth is, I decided to have salad in Lunch to avoid the sleepiness after heavy lunch and good thing was it really worked.

Magento
Since I joined the current organization, I never worked on the Magento E-Commerce. But this year I got an opportunity to work on it. It was hard, was totally different from the other frameworks I worked earlier. But Hitesh, one of my friends & colleague in my Team helped me a lot to start with. I'm very much thankful to him and the other people who supported me. I bought a domain: jigneshpatel.co.in & I started a blog on Magento: Magento Coder. Based on the statistics my blog was getting good number hits. Getting comments from other developers & replying to them has became part of daily activity.

E63
After a long time, I was able to buy a new Handset. After spending a good amount of money for body and battery still I was not satisfied with the reliability with my old mate Nokia 3230. Finally I handed it over to my Uncle and got the new one. Since I needed a Wifi enabled phone having qwetry or touch keypad, Nokia E63 was the perfect choice for me as the price was also near the budget. Hoping for an iPhone in near future.

Magnet
Magnet, my current work place, I joined it more than two years ago and I've seen lot of things happening in here since beginning, but 2009 was a bit unexpected. Upper level management decided some bigger changes in Management. The upper layer has been changed totally. Company had gone through some tough times. For me, the bad thing was.. some best friends left. At some point of time I felt, I was alone. Gone were the days which will never come back. Because of some reasons I have decided to leave Magnet. Just after few days route to my work place will be changed.

Took a DNS Performance Test with the DPT App. I tried that with the list of around 200 domains. Basically the App is having list of 10000 domains list. I minimized it to 200 & took a test for both Google Public DNS and the Open DNS. The results are as below:

Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8; 8.8.4.4)

Font Smoothing is good on Windows Xp/Vista, but not the best. The font smoothing you can get in Mac OS X is very good. One will love to have OS X like font smoothing on Windows as well (If that buddy want to switch to Windows from OS X, little strange.. huh..).

However from my point of view, Ubuntu 9.04 does provide much better font smoothing. After seeing that Ubuntu, I would like to have the same on the Windows Xp as well.

As a solution I was able to find a library named 'GDI++'. Just google it & you will get the download link easily.

I tried out, not satisfied with default settings. So I did make some changes in ini(s) settings file & it worked. I was able get the satisfactory results after spending around an hour on it. The screenshots are as below for the font smoothing on various Operating Systems. Have look, which one you like?

Windows Xp - Cleartype Fontsmoothing


Windows Xp - GDI++


Ubuntu 9.04


Mac OS X Leopard


Note: This post is for the people who understand the font rendering/smoothing.