My Two Paise - Rs.0.02

Calculating IRR (Internal Rate of Return) for your investments

2011-02-26T18:48:00.005+05:30

In the last couple of days I have been trying to understand what IRR means and how one would calculate it. I could be wrong here, but, from my understanding, its a measure of effective rate of interest for your investments and is one of the factors to be accounted for when making investments.

I have first come across this here. Although, this explains how to calculate the IRR, the spreadsheet mentioned on that page is locked. Even if it were to be open for edit, I wouldn't be too comfortable sharing my investment details there. I have been looking online to find ways to calculate IRR and have realized its quite simple. Here is how you go about calculating it:

1. You'd need Microsoft office installed. But, if you are a free/open source user like me Open office would do equally good.

2. Open a spreadsheet, list your investments as. Column A: years, Column B: investment made.
* For all payments being made make negative entries i.e., if you are investing 50K during a year. The entry should be made as -50000. Any yielding returns should be made
as positive.

3. Use the in-built formula/function to calculate the IRR.
* A better tutorial for MS Office users is available here.

Hope that helps.

./M

Flashing your HTC Hero with custom ROM in three simple steps

2010-02-03T12:12:00.003+05:30

Caution: Please do this at your own risk. You can run into problems like: data loss and complete damage to the phone.

This is quick summary of how I flashed my HTC Hero phone with a custom ROM based on Eclair 2.1(India):
1. First and foremost, to flash your phone with a custom ROM you will need to root your phone. Please read here how-to.
*Make sure you take a back-up before you proceed with flashing your phone*
2. Steps on loading custom ROM on your HTC Hero are available here.
3. The custom ROM that I loaded was downloaded from here.
Another ROM based on Eclair 2.1 (CKDroid 1.5.2.1) is available here.

Happy Flashing!

./M

15 Mac 'under the hood' commands

2009-07-21T10:10:00.001+05:30

15 very useful under the hood terminal based commands for Mac: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-mac-os-x-settings.html

./M

Mozilla Firefox command line tweaks

2009-01-19T21:31:00.002+05:30

A very useful reference of command line shortcuts for Mozilla Firefox:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

./M

All about .htaccess

2008-09-19T11:19:00.002+05:30

If you have been involved with maintaining a web site, you must have for sure heard or used .htaccess. The most common use of .htaccess would be to set up access restrictions to the directories under your www root and setup up redirects. But there a multitude of other things that you could using .htaccess like setting up re-write using the apache's mod_rewrite. To find out more and learn all about .htaccess:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

Almost a comprehensive guide on .htaccess. There are other very interesting apache user guides on the last page of the guide.

./M

Differences between 'div' and 'span' HTML elements explained

2008-08-07T13:31:00.000+05:30

Both 'div' and 'span' elements let you apply css styles to elements in your HTML page. But they are not inter-changable. Here is a very good post that outlines the differences between the two and points out when to use which tag:

http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/difference-span-div-tags/

./M

Confgiruing wireless on Dell XPS m1330 for Ubuntu Hardy

2008-07-22T11:50:00.003+05:30

I happened to lay my hands on some hot property at work , its got an amazing finish, stunning looks and for the rest of the non-technical review you watch this:

Now, after getting a feel of Vista that came in along with the laptop, I decided to install Ubuntu Hardy on it. The installation of Linux is no longer intimidating as it was when I first installed it (~8 years back), the process is simple next,next,next,...

After the install, here are a few quick things that I did:
1. Update the repositories : sudo apt-get update
2. Upgrade all the utils: sudo apt-get upgrade

Wireless didn't work by default on this and after some searching and research I got to page which helped me with this:

http://linuxtechie.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/making-intel-wireless-3945abg-work-better-on-ubuntu-hardy/

The initial symptoms of the problem were: ifconfig -> wouldn't detect wlan0
wireless LED - wouldn't glow

Fix: sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic

and reboot, if you find the wireless LED glowing and wireless applet unable to detect wireless -> restart gdm -> ctrl+alt+backspace

P.S. Please ensure that the wireless switch is turned on through the process.

./M

Virus Problems - Unwanted IE popups

2008-06-15T17:58:00.003+05:30

I had a typical virus problem to troubleshoot the other day at work. We had a Windows XP laptop running Sophos Anti-virus and Spybot Search and Destroy opening up IE pop-ups at random. After running a complete system scan with both Sophos and Spybot, I choose to fix the problems through console (both the applications had found a few). However, this doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

That is when I launched process explorer and noticed that these processes of iexplore.exe were being launched by svchost.exe - strange wasn't it. Upon further investigation I noticed that the location of this particular svchost.exe was different from root folder. Bingo! Deleting this svchost.exe resolved the unwanted IE popup problem.

This also explained why the virus went undetected by both Sophos and Spybot, the reason being svchost.exe was being treated as a system process, hence wasn't malicious. But what would have been worth noting would have been the location that it was running from. I leave that for the Anti-virus makers to think about.

Happy Ending :D

./M

Comprehensive Guide On Troubleshooting Sound Problems in Ubuntu

2008-06-04T08:58:00.003+05:30

Just moved to linux and your sound isn't working? Here is a step by step guide to troubleshoot audio problems in Ubuntu. This would prove to be very helpful for those who are novice to the world of Linux and need help in fixing problems with sound card and enjoy good music:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

./M

Reading from a file in bash

2008-04-25T12:15:00.004+05:30

Here is quick and easy way to read from a file in bash and perform and operation on each line in the file:

echo __filename__ | while read line; do echo $line; done #this can be substituted by any operation that you want to do on each line in the file; done

./M

Setting up Cron jobs under Linux - made easy

2007-11-27T17:10:00.001+05:30

Here is a quick how-to to setting up cron jobs under *nix:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/

./M

Fixing Registry problems in Windows

2007-11-10T21:57:00.001+05:30

The Registry is one of the most important components in every Windows
system. And since the Registry is quite sensitive to corruption, it is very
advisable to backup its according files from time to time.

I had recently encountered a laptop with Registry problems, the First thing
I did was to look for a registry back-up. Since, there weren't any I backed-up
the registry (entire registry) using erunt.exe available for download at:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Once I had the Registry back-up in place, I manually fixed the registry keys
that were creating the problem (not advised to play around too much if you
aren't sure of what you are doing here). Then scheduled a regular back-up of
registry (a small batch script did the trick as erunt supports command line
operation).

I also used ntregopt.exe, a util available on the same site to optimize
the Registry, bingo! not only were the Registry problems fixed for good but
also the registry compressed and not to forget we now had scheduled
back-up of registry in place.

Hopefully the registry problems with that laptop have been fixed for good :)

./M

Adding a flash player to your blog/website

2007-11-10T21:33:00.000+05:30

There are a whole array of ready-made flash audio players available today, that can be embedded into your blog/website and allow you to podcast music. This link showcases a wide variety of flash players from www.odeo.com that are sleek and elegant. You could also use Gmail's inbuilt audio player to play mp3's on your site, here is short how to. And if you want to play alpha-geek you could visit any of the sites that offer you an embeddable flash player (viz. www.youtube.com) and change the parameters passed to the player and use the code.

Happy Podcasting!

./M

Choosing between File Systems

2007-03-11T12:52:00.000+05:30

Here is a nice article that I came across when trying to find out the relative merits and demerits of FAT32 and NTFS:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/tips/techrep/filesyst.mspx?mfr=true

(not to forget best viewed on IE ;-) )

./M

Problems with PST files

2007-03-11T10:15:00.000+05:30

PST stands for Personal Storage Table.

Personal Folders questions arise every day—sometimes dozens of times each day—in Microsoft's Outlook newsgroups. Even in Microsoft Exchange Server environments, where people use .pst files for archiving and, sometimes, to keep data out of their mailboxes, such questions are common.

If you don't have an Exchange Server mailbox, all your Outlook data resides in a .pst file. Someday, you might want to move that file to another folder on your computer. To locate your main .pst file, right-click the Outlook Today folder and choose Properties. (If the .pst file you want to move isn't your main data store, right-click the top level of the hierarchy instead of Outlook Today.) In the Properties dialog box, click the Advanced button to see the filename and path for your .pst file. You can't change the path in that dialog box, but knowing the path gives you enough information to locate and move the .pst file manually. Close Outlook; you might have to wait a couple minutes to make sure that it shuts down completely. Next, go to the location that the Properties dialog box specified and move the .pst file to a new location on your computer. When you restart Outlook, the application will prompt you for the file's new location.

If you don't see the .pst file in the folder that Outlook Today's Properties dialog box pointed to, you're probably using Windows XP or Windows 2000, which consider .pst files to be system files and hide them by default. Open Windows Explorer, and choose Tools, Folder Options. On the View tab, select "Show hidden files and folders." After you close the dialog box, you should be able to see the .pst file in the folder. If you know where the .pst file resides, you can move it, back it up, or copy it to a new machine when you upgrade. However, before you perform any of these operations, you must shut down Outlook.

If you've been archiving to the same archive.pst file for a long time (e.g., since Outlook 97 came out), you might want to search your computer for all .pst files and check their sizes. If a .pst file exceeds 2GB, Outlook can't open it. The pst2gb.exe tool, which you can get from Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS), can help you recover most of your data, but you probably won't get it all back. Try to keep any .pst files well under that 2GB limit. To maintain reasonably sized .pst files, delete messages you don't need to keep, empty the Deleted Items folder regularly or automatically, and occasionally compact the .pst file to remove the empty space that remains after you delete items. To compact the .pst file, right-click your folder's top level (Outlook Today if it's your main data store), click Advanced, and click Compact Now. Unfortunately, you can't schedule the compact function or launch it from a command line.

If you have an Exchange Server mailbox, you might have configured Outlook to archive data to a .pst file automatically, or you might have moved data to a .pst file for safekeeping after completing a project. Perhaps you've even burned a .pst file to a CD-R—although if you have, be aware that Outlook can't open the .pst file from the disc. Outlook requires write access to any .pst file. Therefore, to open the file, you must copy it from the CD-R to your hard disk, open the copied file's properties, and clear the read-only setting.

Must you import a .pst file to access your archived Outlook data? Importing is a spectacularly bad idea because you must archive everything all over again to get the old data out of your main Outlook folders. Instead, click File, Open, Personal Folders File (in Outlook 2002, Outlook Data File), then click View, Folder List to see the entire folder hierarchy from the .pst archive.

~An excerpt from an article at www.winitpro.com

With PST files from Outlook 2002 (XP) and before, they had an upper size limit of 2 GB. You'll get no warning and if your file gets bigger than this, it simply won't open. Outlook 2003 does not have this problem.

The link here talks about some tools to recover files that exceed 2gb limitation:
http://www.s2services.com/oversized-pst.htm

Yet another Microsoft kb article that talks about scanpst.exe tool:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197316

./M