I am completely sold to DVCS and in particular mercurial. You already know that I maintain most of my projects on bitbucket but what you dont know is the fact that every bit of my creation now lives inside a mercurial repository.

Most of my creations on my laptop are inside Documents folder. I have made two main folders inside documents, code and Docs. Code is a folder with multiple software projects and hence multiple repos. Some of them are open source projects and can be see them on bitbucket.

Docs is a single repository which contains everything else I create. The central repository for this lives on my home server. I pull and push to this home server from my Laptop every-time I connect to my home network. In that way every version of everything I create lives on my laptop and the same thing gets replicated onto home server.

May be in future I will push the repository from my Server(Desktop) to external Mercurial hosting provider (may be a pvt repo on bitbucket).Creating a third backup stored in a different geo location.

You can follow the below steps to have a similar setup.
On Desktop (or your home server):
1. Create a mercurial repository on your desktop using TortoiseHg
2. Add all your present creations into this folder. You can maintain the folder structure as you generally do,
3. Commit the whole folder with contents
4. Start the TortoiseHg – Webserver (allowing push)
5. Now Server (Desktop) is ready to send and receive from everybody in the network (make sure you are okay with that)
6. Repository is served on HTTP @ http://ip_address_of_desktop_or_server:8000

On Laptop(or any machine on the same network)
1. Right click -> TortoiseHg->clone
2. Give the url http://ip_address_of_desktop_or_server:8000
3. Say clone
4. All your creations are on your laptop
5. Make changes
6. Commit often (doesnt matter where you are)
7. Push to your server when you are back at home
8. Of course you can have as many backups as you want, just clone.

Enjoy. Now you have every single step of yours saved and backed up.

Recently I have seen number of users reading my feed on outlook. Its been increasing month by month. So I thought there could be many more users who will be interested in reading feeds in outlook. The recent version of outlook, i.e outlook 2007 has feed reader built into it. Using which you can read the posts just like mails.

This is useful as most of us, corporate users have outlook installed by default. You don’t have to fight with your IS/ITS department for a new software or you don’t have to keep your browser always open.
Your browser should recognize outlook 2007 as a feed reader when you access a feed. You can easily subscribe from there. Read the rest of this entry »

OK.. After a lot of thinking..rethinking and multiple calculations, I gifted myself an early birthday gift, a Cannondale F8. It costed a bomb but worth every paisa.

well its been a long time dream to own onw of these which came true today. As of now I am planning to cycle twice a week to office. More to come, cant type much on mobile.
Updated: on 25/May/2005
You can get more info on the bike on their site.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had a conversation with my team mate about the recent buzz word in the market upgrading yourself. The buzz word used by most of the bosses to warn the young generation mostly in connection with recession and pink slip.

Both of us were of the opinion that continuous learning (or so called upgrading) is part of culture you have grown up with. I am not just talking about the work related learning here. I am talking about learning in general.As kids we used to be very curious about the things surrounding us. We always wanted to know more about radio or pictures in TV. The motivation for learning new things was fun or simple curiosity. As we grew up the motivations changed. It was degree in college, job change or promotion when we started working. But the problem was the motivations like job, salary or promotion are not sustainable. Once you get the promotion you are free till the next season.

Simple curiosity or fun of tinkering with the stuff around never dies. Think of kid lost in toy shop. It just goes behind one after the other. Kid never loses interest because its having fun. When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Ourselves to blame?
Mostly yes. Last year I started learning Spanish. My Spanish class mostly had university students, few working professionals. In the second class my Spanish teacher asked me “Are you going to get a promotion after you finish diploma?”. To her I said “yes” but in reality I just wanted to learn another language (one of my dream is to follow the path of Che in South America. Now you know the motivation…its Che). The point I wanted to make is we are mostly behind money than other things. I want to ask you again When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Is it Indian education system to blame?
May be. Most of the parents have a very simple advice for their kids. If you don’t learn this you wont get good marks. If you don’t get good marks you won’t get a good job. That is where we set a wrong motivation to learn something new. Its not just parents, its teachers, professors, bosses and society. We all motivate people around us learn for money.

How about our work place/culture?
May be that too. We will wait till the recession to learn or to innovate. Its not just about the people I am talking here. I am talking about the organizations too. Organizations should also understand person who is not interested in how telephone works probably wont be interested in how internet works. So be careful when hiring the candidates. Motivation for learning is as important as learnability.

So how do we inculcate the culture of learning?
I really don’t know. I am looking forward for tips from you, my readers. All I can say is if you still have kids curiosity, You don’t have to learn anything special to beat the recession.

I have been hacking my sleep to achieve the optimum sleeping period. Two months back when I started this experiment, I was sleeping almost 9 hrs per day. Today I am spending only 6.5 hrs per day on sleep. The gain of 2.5 hours per day is very big.

It started with reducing from 9 hours to 7.5 hours. It was tough, specially during the afternoon. Initially I had to take a quick nap (20 minutes) at my desk after lunch. But then my body got used to it. A month & half later I took another giant step and reduced the duration to 6.5 hours. Again I went through the same cycle which involved similar noon naps. As of today, my sleep duration is only 6.5hrs per day *with out* any noon naps.

Another change I made w.r.t to my sleeping is to have fixed timings. Before I used to sleep anytime between 9pm-2am and get up anytime between 7am-9am. Now it is more fixed. Now I sleep strictly at 12am and wake up by 6am. My body is so used to it that I don’t need wake up alarms.

The standard side effects of reduced sleep are loss of weight, irritation, low concentration etc. As of now I don’t see any side effects (or I don’t know). In fact my other experiment of “Put on weight” is also giving positive results :)

The ultimate plan is to reduce the sleep duration to 6 hours. But I am still not sure if my body can take it. I am planning to go with 6.5 hours for six more months and then take my next step.

Additional Reading:
1. Polyphasic sleep
2. Why We Nap
3. Dymaxion Sleep-Time Magazine