Microtek UPS Problems (And A Solution)

I got myself a Microtek 800VA UPS (MDP800+) a couple of weeks ago to save my PS3 from the frequent power outages that we are seeing in Hyderabad but the purpose was rather lost when I found that it worked fine only till the mains power was on. As soon as there was an outage, it couldn’t stop the PS3 from an abrupt shut down. I ran around the pathetic Microtek customer service for days and they finally sent an “engineer” down to my place (after a week) to diagnose the issue and he couldn’t say anything more than that the UPS is meant for a PC and nothing else. All logical discussions to tell him that PS3 is essentially a PC but in a different form were kind of like pouring water on a well-oiled rock and hoping it would stick.

Why You Should Not Upgrade to Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

Update: It has come to my notice that many people do not know about this (and other problems listed in comments of this post). Please digg and reddit this post so that more people can be made aware of it before they upgrade unknowingly.

You should not upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), released a few weeks ago, if:

  1. You have an older ATI graphics card (prior to R500, .e.g xpress 200m)

TIP: Perforce - Sync Files In A Label Without Deleting Previous Files

If you have used perforce, you’d have definitely come across a situation where you wanted to sync files belonging to two different labels, but as soon as you sync the second label, the files from the first label get deleted. P4 help suggests the following ways to achieve this:

p4 sync @label1,label2

or something like

`p4 sync @label1,@label2``

But I’ve found that depending on the perforce version you are using, the above commands might not work. So, here is a tip that will always work for you irrespective of which version you are using:

Project: Figlet Online - Text To ASCII Converter Tool

Figlet is a brilliant tool to convert text to amazing ASCII Art that I have used for many years. This weekend I thought of creating an online version of it, so that anyone can use it even if they can’t install it on their systems. It is pretty easy to use. The drill is just to choose the font you want (and there is a very extensive collection of more than 250 to choose from), input the text that you want to be ASCII’fied, press a button and you are done.