I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Ubuntu G780 laptop which came with Windows 8. It was relatively painless. I downloaded the ISO image and created the CD. Most online articles recommended disabling secure boot from your BIOS. This was easy to do from the BIOS menu. I also had to change BIOS setting to start from CD drive first. This setting does not seem to be reverted back to its old value once you boot into Windows. Every time I had to try booting from CD I had to change this setting.

After booting from CD the initial menu was garbled. No text was visible. Since I knew the first option was try Ubuntu without installing I just hit enter. Ubuntu booted fine and everything worked. I could use Wi-Fi without problem. So next time I booted the CD, I pressed down arrow once and pressed enter. This is the install option. After that the screen worked fine. Installation was a breeze. Ubuntu worked great. But Windows was gone. I could not boot into Windows.

The error was something about invalid EFI. Googling it pointed to some boot repair commands to run from Ubuntu. Just running those commands added some boot menu options. There are about 10 choices now. I have to choose “Windows UEFI Recovery” to boot into windows. As long as dual boot works I do not mind the name. I am sure with grub I can rename them. But it works and I want to leave it alone for now.

I was following the tutorial at bitbucket to setup SSH for git. When setting up .bashrc file with the code shown in the tutorial I got the error “syntax error near unexpected token `then”. This was happening when bashrc was being run. I could not understand why. Google search did not help much. It turned out that there was some problem with file format. If I edited the file using vim directly in the console there were lots of unknown characters before the beginning of each line. After deleting all those characters bashrc worked fine. I am not sure where those extra characters came from. I used vim to edit bashrc in windows 7. I also tried changing the file format from dos to unix which did not help.

In addition to editing the file directly I also had to add the line “eval `ssh-agent`” to make ssh-add work. I found this eval solution at this blog.

If Android SDK complains about not finding JDK, you need to set environment variable JAVA_HOME to the path of JDK. The path for JDK is something like C:Program FilesJavajdk1.7.0_04. When setting the environment variable do not use quotes around the path. Setting this made the SDK continue install on my win 7, 64-bit system.

Here is a clip I found at Google news. Three different sources are reporting in 3 different directions.

Four different teams combined together to break the 10% improvement for movie rating predictions. They currently show 10.05% improvement over Netflix’s own solution. According to the rules, there is a one month period until Jul 26, 2009, for anyone to submit a prediction that will be considered for the prize. I think many more teams might now try to blend together their results.

Calling cards must be a cut throat business. I have been using them for a long time to call India from USA. The rates are now nearly 10 times lower since I came to USA. I did use Reliance India call when it first started. I think it was around 10c per minute when it started. Then I switched to pingo which offered around 6c per minute. Currently this is 4.5c/minute. I also briefly used linq when the rate was around 5c. Now I switched to Pinless where the rate is 2.2c for mobile and 2.5c for landlines. The quality is good and the lines are available most of the time.

Recently some one pointed to me to Airtel Call Home which advertised 1c per minute. When I looked at the page their idea of the price calculation of 1c looks ridiculous. It goes roughly like this. You charge $x amount. Then you subtract an arbitrary $y from that. Then you calculate the rate per minute using ($x-$y)/total minutes. They call $y as the rental fee. You can make this any amount so that your final rate comes out as 1c per minute. Why do I care how much is $y? This is bad business practice. If their service is good they should be able to put $x/total minutes which is the real rate I am getting for the money I pay. Reliance India Call also seem to be following this practice and has put in a 1c per minute feature. Reliance calls their $y as administrative fee.

It may be just a marketing tactic and did made me notice their site. But I got back with a bad impression and I will think twice before buying anything from Airtel or Reliance. Who knows what other hidden charges might be there in their fine print.