Topa: My Way

iTouchberry

2009-02-07T10:52:00.007+05:30

I now own a iTouch 16GB. I think it is the best MID/web-tablet currently in the market. Being a web-tablet was something which my N82 was failing at miserably. Though it had opera mini and a decent Webkit based browser, it just was not cutting it. But I did not want to get an iPhone because a) Its costly and b) It's costly..

A couple of days back, I read Steve Litchfield's blog on www.allaboutiphone.net about how he had combined the iTouch with the N82 to get the best of both worlds and that is when I realized that I was doing the same thing. My N82 has a great camera and the iPhone's 2.0 Mpx one does not even stand a chance against it. The iTouch has the best web browsing experience ever on a mobile device. But that again is not the best thing about it.

The best part of the iTouch is an application called NetNewsWire or rather the iphone application for the Newsgator RSS feed reader. It allows you to download RSS feeds to the iphone and then browse them offline. Think of it like a blackberry for RSS feeds. One can add new RSS feeds via the Newsgator website or the Feedgator desktop application. And there's more, the feed read/unread status gets synced between the three platforms.

Using the NetNewsWire application has been great for on-the-go catching up on news. I can now finish off most of my news during the morning commute. This would not have been possible on a EDGE/GPRS based connections. The UI is great to quickly dispatch off a couple hundred unread items and the feed-sync means when I login to my desktop once I reach office, I have the exact read/unread items. The iTouchberry is not only the best web-tablet but when combined with the NetNewsWire iPhone application, the best feed reader.

Kübler-Ross model for the IPhone India News

2008-08-20T11:33:00.003+05:30

Here is how Apple fanboys reacted to to the Vodafone press release about the launch of the iPhone in India.

Denial : "How can this be happening to an Apple product ?"
Anger : "36K for the 16GB model? Are they crazy ?"
Bargaining : "Maybe if I take a personal loan I can buy it"
Depression : "This is too costly, I'll never own an iPhone."
Acceptance : "I dont need the iPhone. A phone should just be used to make calls."

The Kübler-Ross model.

The Death of the Feed-Reader

2008-03-10T00:32:00.001+05:30

Well what do you know ?! Two blog-posts in two days.

Have been thinking about this for sometime and thought it would be best to just get it out. I've used a lot of feed-readers in my (short) Web 2.0 life. I've used Liferea, Sage, Microsoft Outlook, Google Reader, Netvibes, Pageflakes, FeedDemon so I'm not looking for recommendations. What I'm more interested in is how Twitter (here we go again) has killed the classical feed-reader for me.

This is how I use Twitter as my feed-reader. On twitter I follow Slashdot, Ars Technica, Engadget and Techmeme and each time a new news item comes up on these sites it gets posted to my Twitter feed. Now I know I could possible roll my own RSS feed based on a combination of RSS feeds but doing it the "twitter-way" is more fun as I can get my (limited) social networking fix also. All in all it works out great. A combination of tweets and RSS items gives me the feel of the 'river of news'.

The other reason why I feel the classical feed-reader is dead is because of Techmeme which has changed the way I consume tech-news. If you are new to Techmeme go ahead and visit the site it's a great way to keep in touch with hat's hot at the moment in technology. Instead of having to peruse through 250+ blogs I just wait for the blogosphere to do it's job and bring the most important tech news to me. I then wait for Techmeme to post it on it's Twitter feed and then wait for TwitterFox to fetch it from my Twitter feed. In all quite a bit of abstractions but it's good as I do not need to have a RSS feed-reader open all the time.

Ofcourse I'm not following all the 250+ feeds on Twitter just the most important ones. For the rest of my feeds I still use FeedDemon which is perhaps the best RSS Feed-reader for Windows. The other reason why I've picked FeedDemon is because it has the best three-screen-play among the feed-readers. It has a desktop based client which is really really fast once you set it up with a few turbo-RSS-munching settings. It has a really simple, low-bandwidth mobile-version which till now has worked the best for my GPRS (!!) connection. And finally it has a passable web-based reader which can be used whenever I need to access my feeds from elsewhere. Also it syncs my read/unread items across all three platforms hence I dont need to suffer at the hands of data-reconsumption.

Still Alive and Kicking

2008-03-08T15:48:00.001+05:30

I guess this is it right ? Once someone posts a 'Still Alive and Kicking..' entry the blog is dead. Well that's what it looks like from here. I'm still regular at Twitter and if you are interested in following me then that's the place to catch me.

Free PDF Viewer for Windows

2007-04-22T13:12:00.000+05:30

Logged into Windows to install a few security updates and update my laptop BIOS. Also ended up downloading a pdf file and found that I did not have Adobe Reader installed on this machine. Funny, as this laptop is close to a year old. Shows how much neglect Windows on my laptop gets.

Anyway, just wanted a lightweight PDF viewer and looked around on Wikipedia and saw that there is an excellent program called Sumatra PDF. It's based on libpoppler which is the same pdf rendering library that evince uses. Nifty!

Cowon , now in india

2007-04-04T17:45:00.000+05:30

My favourite MP3 player manufacturer, Cowon just started distributing it's hardware in India. Though I've never owned a Cowon product, I've been following them for nearly a year and my must-have MP3 player is the Cowon iAudio X5 60GB. To my surprise as I was browsing the official Cowon website, I came across the 'Where to Buy' link and (surprise, surprise), there was our dear Indian flag.

Here are the contact details if anyone needs them:
LipLap Systems Pvt. Ltd, A-213 , Virwani Industrial Estate, W.E Highway, Goregaon, Mumbai - 400063. Email : iaudio _at_ liplap _dot_ com.

Here is a detailed review of the MP3 player I'm interested in, iAudio X5 (60GB). It's a bit outdated player but still one of the most feature rich, non-DRM supporting, open-formats(Ogg) playing player which runs Linux (yay). Also it's fully hackable by installing the rockbox firmware. Liplap did seem to have the X5L which has better battery life but a bit thicker for around Rs.17,000

Technorati Tags : cowon, mp3 player, iaudio, hardware, iaudio x5, cowon india

Bandipur : A tale of two bandhs

2007-04-03T11:49:00.000+05:30

me decided to go to bandipur to visit the Bandipur National Park on Friday. Well this trip was even less planned than the dandeli one. Atleast for the dandeli one, I had an address, a telephone number and a name to look for when I got there. The Bandipur trip was totally chaotic from the word go.

Day 1 : Saturday March 31st
Started at 10:00 from Bangalore. When we landed at KGBS, heard that there was a strike in Tamilnadu and all outward buses to T.N were cancelled. Bandipur lies on the border of Karnataka and T.N and one needs to take an Ooty bus from Bangalore to reach there. Once we got the refund, we decided to take a bus to Mysore. Reached Mysore at 14:00 (blame the traffic), had lunch there and took a bus to Ooty (strange!). Bandipur is 18 KM from Ooty and around 13 KM from Gundlupet (the last place where IT-people can survive). Reached Bandipur at 17:00 and immediately took the mini-van jungle-safari.

The mini-van safari costs around Rs.75 and is recommended if you are on a shoestring budget or are travelling with a large crowd(15-20) in which case you can book the whole van for around Rs.3000 (will tell why this is a good thing later). The problem with the mini-van is that it's very very loud (animals in Africa can hear it), it's crowded (and hot), you'll have babies in the bus who can't stop crying and that everpresent jerk who thinks he's funny everytime he shouts "Look! TIGER!". Saw a bunch of peacocks, spotted deer and a elephant family which practiced "We 2, Our's 1".

After the safari, we had a problem, No place to stay and it was getting dark, fast! We tried the forst department if they will have us for the night, but they just shooed us away. As luck might have it, the person manning the STD/ISD booth helped us out by giving us the contact info of a farm owner who might have a "room with a double bed". Seeing the sun go down, we had two options, take the offer or prepare to be scratched and mauled by local langur's. We took the safer option.

The farm house we were to go to was around a couple of kilometers from the national park. It's pretty close to Tuskar Trails, a pretty well known resort. The owner (?) of the farmhouse Mr.Shumalu was very kind and showed us to the room. It was nothing to talk about: a double-bed, a bulb and an attached bath. We took the room and cleaned up. I guess we were just lucky as all throughout the night, cars kept pulling up to the farmhouse asking if any room was available. The place is packed during weekends as people come in from Kerala and T.N to dirty up the place. We just got lucky in finding a place to sleep.

Day 2 : Sunday April 1st

Saw daybreak after a long time. Beautiful..

Was back at the Bandipur National park at 7:00. Not quite satisfied by the mini-van safari the previous day, we decided to take the Gypsy Safari. This has a bag of advantages. It's quite, the driver stops the vehicle when you want it to, your party is the only one in the vehicle and he will take detour's into the jungle rather than follow a tar road. Downside ? it's costly, around Rs.1750 per jeep (can accomodate 6 people).

Moving into the internal parts of the jungle gives you the probability of catching a glimpse of shy wildlife. We saw a bunch of tiger pugmarks all around the place. Either we were late in spotting the tiger or it didn't want to be seen. At all times you have the feeling that a tiger is watching you from the tall grass which is prevalent in the jungle. Spotted a Malabar red squirrel which os pretty huge for a squirrel. We saw a bunch of sambar, it's strange how sambar look so meek in photos but if you get close to one you can really feel it's presence. The male sambar is almost as big as a horse and is a daunting sight as it leaps away at the faintest sound. Though the jeep safari is around 90 minutes long, the last half hour was kinda boring as it was almost 10:30 and was starting to get hot. No hope of any animal coming out of the coolness of the jungle to be photographed by a bunch of camera weilding IT folk.

We had plans of visiting Ganeshgudy Betta but couldn't find anyone to take us there. So by 11:00 we decided to start the journey back to Bangalore and boarded a Mysore bus.

A turn of events
When we got to Gundlupet, people were talking about riots in Bangalore and Mysore. When we got to Nanjangud, the bus stopped and we were told that all buses to Mysore have been cancelled due to bus/lorry burning on Mysore highways. Time is around 11:30. After a hour of sitting at the Nanjangud bus terminus and getting our nerves in order we decided enough was enough and decided to keep moving towards Bangalore.

Took a private van to Mysore. On the way to Mysore we saw the burnt vehicles being towed way. Reached Mysore at 14:00 to see large groups of people walking and the city almost shutdown. Most of the shops were half-closed. Immediately took the next bus to Bangalore and reached 'bang' safely at 18:00.

Will definitely visit Bandipur again, just to relive the travelling experience. There's something about mixing with the local population and eating, sleeping and commuting as one among them.

Technorati tags :bandipur, bandipur national park, wildlife, travel

LibraryThing.com

2007-02-27T15:30:00.000+05:30

LibraryThing is my obsession of the day.

It's amazon.com done right the community way. Think of it like flickr but only books. You can search and add the books which you have read and found interesting and tag them. This way you make a book-list of yourself. You can see mine here.

Once you do that you can discuss with the community which liked that book and see what other people have to say about it. Members can also write mini-reviews and rate the book.

You can also view the Zietgiest to see what are the top books and what books are reviewed most.

LibraryThing has exploded in the online scene and they have already surpassed Amazon in the number of tags. Also, like in flickr they also have communities for books where members can discuss books which gives it a book-club like feel. Here's the Green Dragon community for Tolkien, it's the largest and the most active community. Go Join!

Technorati Tags :librarything, books, library, web2.0

Songbird 0.2.X

2007-02-04T12:38:00.000+05:30

I'm revisiting Songbird after a considerable break and what I have to report is very encouraging. First, there are now linux builds available (YAY!) so it's on it's way to become the iTunes of the Linux desktop.

Second, there is now a URL bar so setting the proxy values though is slightly shady is now possible without having to hunt down files in the mozilla profile directory. Songbird is really a great example of what can be done with Gecko using xulrunner.

The software is pretty neat in what it can do. You can browse Music blogs, listen to online radio and even play your local media files. Not sure what are the underlying codecs but I think it's VLC. It also has inbuilt search with a bunch of options ranging from Google/Yahoo to Music based domain search engines. And yes, Creative Commons is there too.

At the end of the day though this is just a browser so it can also function as your default browser though there doesn't seem to be support for tabs :( which would have been interesting as I can then consider it as a 2-in-1 application and take firefox off my desktop-app list.

Still, Songbird is definitely worth a try for those who are on the continuous search for the one-true-media-player.

Technorati Tags : linux, songbird, media player, music

Twitish

2007-01-30T10:09:00.000+05:30

I'm a huge twitter fan and it has even replaced Blogger as my prime blogging outlet.

Twitter has an API. The access methods is REST (of which I'm a huge fan) and the data obtained is in XML or JSON format. I'm a JSON newb so I picked the XML methods and came up with a REST based CLI shell for twitter called twitish.

You can download and use twitish. Will also put it up on the twitter wiki.

It's written in Perl and hence you will need that. It runs on Linux and might run on Cygwin and Windows. It also needs the following perl modules.

You can install the above modules using CPAN or from your Linux distro's repositories. The XML::Liberal is a very rarely used module in distro's so you might need to compile it.

Once you have those modules installed, you can start interacting with Twitter through the command line shell. It supports only three commands.

post will post a message to twitter. Something like "post Hi from twitish" will post "Hi from twitish" to your twitter-stream.
updates will print the last 10 updates made my you and your friends.
public will print the last 10 updates made by the general Twitter junta aka the Public Timeline.

Will add mode functionality soon. Also you will need to change some code in the twitish.pl file. Just replace "XXXXXX" with your username(e-mail) and "YYYYYY" with your password.

Have fun and do drop in your comments.

Technorati Tags : twitter, hacks, REST, perl, twitish

IJCAI 2007

2007-01-15T11:50:00.000+05:30

I was in Hyderabad the whole of last week attending the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence or IJCAI-07 in short. This was perhaps the biggest conference held in India which I've attended, but I've also not attended many conferences.

I restricted myself to only Machine Learning and Data Mining talks and some of them were really interesting. Was able to take-away a lot from the papers presented at the conference. The Tutorials and the Workshops were the best part of the conference as that's where most of the learning was done. I did go into uncharted territory once with "Intelligent Agents" , just to learn something new. The presenter , Hiranmay Ghosh from TCS did an excellent job of introducing Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in about 3 hours.

Lot's of new idea's to take away from the conference and met a bunch of exciting people from academia who were surprised to see people from the IT industry interested in A.I. Photos are up on flickr.

Technorati Tags : ijcai , ijcai07, ijcai2007, ai, conference, computing

Blogger Custom Domains

2007-01-09T00:09:00.000+05:30

I'm now using Blogger's Custom Domain service to map my domain 'toufeeq.net' with my blogspot blog. If you are a Blogger-user you can make use of it too.

Wikiasari - Wikia Search project

2006-12-24T17:49:00.000+05:30

Wikia is launching a Wikipedia based search service. Though the service will only launch early next year, the project homepage has this to say :
Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Amen!

Nowadays I notice that almost 70% of my search queries end up at Wikipedia. Why shouldn't there be a we just bypass Google. Also wikipedia's references on a particular topic are peer-reviewed and on-topic so not only do I get an explanation of what I’m looking for but I also get the best references and not have top bother “screening” Google search results. Is this the dawn of the real Web 3.0 ?

Wikiasari is also based on Lucene/Nutch which is a Open Source search engine. Right now, the only way to keep an eye on developments of the Wikiasari project is to join the mailing list. I'm already in.

Technorati Tags :wikia, wikiasari, wikipedia, search, google

HiPC 2006

2006-12-21T15:17:00.000+05:30

I was away attending HiPC 2006 for the last three days. It was a nice conference, small and very focussed on the Supercomputing and High Performance Computing industry. It was also a chance for me get back to my Beowulf/Clustering roots, something which I've not been in touch for the last two years. Suffice to say nothing much has changed in the field. The only major development is the use of multi-core CPU's int eh field which should have some very good effects.

This was an opportunity for me to sit down with hari to discuss some virtualization ideas which I had filed away for some time. I should really dedicate some time from weekends for Xen and VMS. Also got a chance to meet old buddies from ILUGC, students from CEG who were there for HiPC and presenting posters.
Photos are up on flickr.

Technorati Tags :hipc, hipc2006, conference, bangalore, virtualization, hpc

Alex Martelli - Highly-technical Management of Software Development

2006-12-08T11:19:00.000+05:30

Heard an excellent podcast from OpenSource Conversations yesterday and thought I would share with all. This was a talk given at OSCON 2006 by Alex Martelli of Google wherein he talks about software development/engineering methodologies followed at Google.

He starts of by talking about what strategic technical managers are and what are their roles and then moves on to the defining what are good programmers and how the technical-manager can get the most from his development team. He also talks about synergy among developers and how to get over day-to-day hurdles which one faces in the working environment. He finally concludes by listing the merits of Agile development practices.

Definitely a must-hear.

Technorati Tags :google, podcast, softwareengineering, management

Doing the Twitter

2006-12-05T16:47:00.000+05:30

I'm loving it ! (tm)
Twitter looks like social networking done just right. You just need to create an account and post one-liners (something like blog-entries, but less formal) about what you are doing currently. Those one-liners then show up on your page and what you get is a life-blog if you do manage to constantly update your thoughts/activities on twitter. The best part about twitter is how you go about updating your life-blog wherein comes the integration with mobile phones and IM.

Why is twitter cooler than social networking site ?
I've always wanted to maintain a life-blog but the problem was that, there are times wherein I don't have access to a PC to post to my blog when something interesting happens around me. When I do get to a PC, I'm not interested in blogging about the "interesting" thing which happened as now it seems "outdated". All that can change with twitter, here, I can just update by twitter blog using my mobile phone. Just a few words is enough and off I send the SMS which get's posted on my blog. One can also use an IM account (Gtalk, LJ, AIM,Jabber are supported) to update twitter. There is a full lingo page which talks about how one can interact with twitter by using just the cellphone and sending in commands.

Now if you and your friends are signed up on Twitter you dont need Orkut (or any website) to social-network. You can do it from your phone itself, on the bus, at home, anywhere. You will however be charged for an international SMS. :( But you can receive updates of what your friends are upto on your mobile phone which is kinda good as you don't need a PC and a RSS feed reader.

You can see my Twitter badge which shows what I'm upto on this blog and you can also read about my interactions with my friends on my twitter page.

Technorati Tags :twitter, socialnetworking, web2.0, social software, blogging

Oh Phuleeeeze!

2006-11-23T16:20:00.000+05:30

CNet's top 10 geek women is absurd. Was horrified to find Paris Hilton at number 10. What were the editors thinking when they decided to club that dumb female with luminaries like Marie Curie , Grace Hopper and Aleks Krotoski.

A few ladies who(according to me) deserve a spot instead of Paris for their association with Computer Science.

Repeat after me, carrying a Sony PSP and talking on your pink RAZR doesn't make one a geek. Even having Lisa Simpson there is an affront to women in science. Here are some more brilliant women in technology.

Emmy Noether. Einstein calls her "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began".
Jeri Ellsworth
And more recently Kim Polese.

And then, we have the organizations of women in technology.

And finally, perhaps the most beautiful woman geek of all time Hedy Lemarr

Metal-Sort

2006-11-14T21:40:00.000+05:30

Made my day. :)

I <3 SUN

2006-11-14T21:36:00.000+05:30

Thank You, Thank You!

and.. We forgive you. ;)

Free Hugs Campaign. Inspiring Story! (music by sick puppies)

2006-11-09T14:07:00.001+05:30

This is an awesome video which reaffirms faith in human caring.

Gazzag is 3v1L!

2006-11-06T10:58:00.000+05:30

A huge thanks to all my friends who spammed me. See, unlike you, I never signed up on Gazzag (I refuse to link to them) and handed them the 200+ e-mail addresses of my Orkut contacts. Gazzag is now my enemy.

Technorati Tags: orkut, evil, gazzag

Parakey : The Web OS

2006-11-02T11:57:00.000+05:30

Looks like we will finally have it. The Web OS!
IEEE Spectrum has a great article on Blake Ross' new creation Parakey. Here's a quote from the article.
"Here’s how the Parakey experience works: you plug in your camera, and your photos get stored seamlessly on your computer in such a way that you can view them quickly and easily through your Parakey site. No more digging through folders for the right image files. They’re organized and displayed as attractively as a site like Flickr might display them, as thumbnails with identifying text beneath them."

My dream of 'the browser is the OS' might finally come true.

Technorati Tags: webOS, parakey

Go Edgy Efta!

2006-11-02T11:11:00.001+05:30

Partitioning Woes

2006-11-02T10:35:00.000+05:30

Why is it that every time I touch the partitioning on my PC, Windows plays havoc with my existing partitions. I had a 5GB partition on which I used to run NetBSD. For some reason I needed to recover that disk space back, as I was rarely using NetBSD anymore. So I decided to convert it into a FAT32 partition as I don't trust NTFS at all and frankly think it's overrated. So I fire up GParted and try to convert the UFS partition to FAT32.

Hard luck! The 'fat32' option for creating a new partition was disabled. After fiddling around with it for some time (loading/unloading kernel modules) I gave up and decided to use Windows' inbuilt partitioning program. This one is hidden and can be found under My Computer(right-click) > Manage > Disk Management. After the partition program went about creating the partition, I decided to reboot to Linux.

Hard Luck 2.0! Windows managed to corrupt the grub bootloader. Worse Windows did not even boot! It complained that the system32.dll was not found and my installation was corrupt and I should re-install. So, I was struck with two problems at hand. Get grub back (the easy one) and fixing the Windows installation.

Getting grub back was easy. Just booted with a Knoppix CD , mounted my root partition and and did a grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda2 /dev/hda. Here /mnt/hda2 was my root Linux partition mounted under Knoppix. Getting Windows back to work was slightly tricky, I had to boot from the Win XP Installer CD, go into recovery mode and do the following.

Attrib -R boot.ini
Attrib -H boot.ini
Attrib -S boot.ini (For some strange reason Attrib -RHS didn't work!)
Bootcfg /Rebuild
Fixboot

The basic problem was that due to the new partition, the partition numbering had changed and everything had to be re-configured.

Technorati Tags : windows, linux, disk partition

You and your Research

2006-10-31T17:13:00.000+05:30

You and your Research by Richard Hamming [PDF].

I've read the transcript of this talk about 4 times. Each time I do that, I find something interesting. Here are some of the best quotes:

You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you'll lead a nice life.
Newton said 'If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.' These days we stand on each other's feet!
There is an element of luck, yes and no. Luck favors a prepared mind; luck favors a prepared person. It is not guaranteed; I don't guarantee success as being absolutely certain. I'd say luck changes the odds, but there is some definite control on the part of the individual.
The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go. You can't make it happen from the bottom very easily.

Technorati Tags: research

Re-constructing Wikipedia

2006-10-31T14:47:00.000+05:30

My research work requires re-construction of Wikipedia on a local PC. Before this I didn't know this could be done. These are the steps required for getting a local version of Wikipedia running on your Desktop PC or laptop. Minimum requirements are php5, mediawiki 1.7, Linux (duh!) and around 8 Gig's of Free space.

Install Mediawiki by following these steps (Debian specific).
Configure it in the normal manner you configure any mediawiki installation.
Download the latest Wikipedia dump. I got the pages-articles dump.
bunzip2 enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
Move to the maintenance directory of the mediawiki installation. On Debian systems this would be in /var/lib/mediawiki1.7/maintenance.
cat enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml | php5 importDump.php

If you view your mediawiki from your browser and visit a random page, you should be able to see the Wikipedia articles which got imported.

Technorati Tags :wikipedia, mediawiki, backup

The Nokia 870

2006-10-27T10:26:00.000+05:30

Anyone remember the Nokia 770 ? Well, it became the linux-hacker's favorite toy last year and was a hit among the Debian and GNOME projects, mainly because it used a custom Debian distribution and a bunch of GNOME apps. Well, Nokia hasn't given up on the internet-tablet and we seem to have the succesor to the 770, the Nokia 870. New features seem to be a web-cam and better VoIP support. It should surely have GPS built into it. If this thing has some sort of mobilephone functionality, I'll buy it the first day it releases.

Technorati Tags :nokia770, nokia870, linux, internet tablet, debian, GNOME, maemo

Long Holiday

2006-10-25T20:24:00.000+05:30

My "long vacation" (a week) comes to an end today. In 2 hours it;s back to bangalore. Some interesting work needs to be done once I get back so this vacation was important for keeping my energy-levels high for the next one month. Oh! Happy Deewali and Eid Mubarak (belated) everyone one.

Is Fedora the new Slackware ?

2006-10-25T17:26:00.000+05:30

Well, Fedora Core 6 finally released after a couple of delays. Here is the official announcement. As I say this, the fedora site seems to be down , maybe because of the number of downloads taking place currently. What's interesting to note here is the community buzz surrounding this release of Fedora Core. There is none!

The one good review I found is available here. Rahul Sundaram has his 'Inside Fedora Core 6' article on RedHat Magazine. Of course Slashdot and Digg did carry the release coverage and the news made it to the front page.

But what is missing here is the Linux newbie reviews. The teenager who got his first copy of the Fedora Core distro and ran to blog about it. The 'Fedora Core rokxorx!' reviews are missing. Where are the kids running wild on digg claiming 'Ubuntu is teh hakxor OS, Windows sucks!'. All this reminds me of 2002-03 when RedHat 8/9 was at it's peak and each release of RedHat was greeted with the same fanfare and festive planning that Ubuntu receives today. RedHat replaced Debian/Slackware as the desktop distribution back then and now Ubuntu seems to be returning the favor. Slackware 10 was the last Slack distribution I tried out from before I stopped paying attention to it.

For a second, let's consider Google Trends as a worthy benchmark to measure buzztivity (activity around a buzzword). Here's what I see for a comparision of ubuntu and fedora.

Red Line is 'fedora' and blue is 'ubuntu'

Dear Fedora Project,

Your audience seems to be getting disinterested. The zealotry is missing. New users are looking elsewhere for cutting-edge goodness. The only user's still loyal to you are System Administrators who have made the move from using a RedHat based distribution on their servers to their desktop/laptop and the only reason why they are using it is because they refuse to learn apt/dpkg. Your hype-crankers have deserted you and the few loyalists still lurking around are getting frustrated for lack of freedom. At this point you are even re-thinking the community edition as the 'market-size' is unknown.

Hope, you get well soon.

- An Ex-RedHat 9 user

Digg This

Technorati Tags :ubuntu, fedora, fedoracore, linux, slackware, FC6, linux distribution

Toufeeq Hussain, I want to invite you..

2006-10-23T11:47:00.000+05:30

For the love of GOD, please, somebody, make it stop!

Retrevo Gadget Search Engine

2006-10-18T11:18:00.000+05:30

Retrevo is a domain specific search engine for consumer electronics aka geeky-gadgets. A search for my preferred MP3 player (iAudio A5L) turned up some good results. None of those e-com shopping-front pages which masquerade as a review-page just because they have a 'user-reviews' section which talk about why a particular device 'is teh suck'. It even filters out Amazon product-review pages. Blog reviews are indexed however which is good. It also manages to filter splogs (spam blogs) which is again great. The search results can be viewed in a two-pane with the right side providing a preview of a particular search result.

Technorati Tags :retrevo, geek, gadgets, consumer electronics, domain search, search engine, iAudio A5L

My first n00by patch

2006-10-16T12:08:00.000+05:30

Some of my work tends to float into the Linux-embedded space from time to time. It's instances like these when I need to get back to some kernel fiddling. I use a ARM 9202T based Cirrus Logic EP9312 board. The full specifications of the board are available if anyone is interested.

WinCE is supported on this board, but it's of no interest to me. Cirrus does provide a linux support for both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel versions. The Cirrus based 2.6 linux is based on uCLinux and hence is crippled. There is however hope in the form of the ep93xx community which provides a full glibc based 2.6 kernel for the board. The ep93xx community was spearheaded by Michael Burian and his patchset is still very usable. The only problem seems to be that getting this into mainline was causing proving to be difficult. The mainline push was started by Lennert Buytenhek with 2.6.16 when traces of the ep93xx started appearing in the kernel tree. Support for almost all the ep93xx based boards are available in mainline with 2.6.19-rc1. My contribution to this is support for the EP9312 board. This was my first kernel patch to the linux-arm community. Hopefully, I should have time to sit down and get ethernet support for the board soon. Ah! I also see there's a patch floating around for the ep93xx-lirc.

Technorati Tags : linux, linuxkernel, linux arm, linux embedded, software, infosys, work

Firefox 3.0 Brainstorming on Mozilla-Wiki

2006-10-13T12:08:00.000+05:30

Firefox 2.0 is quite stable now and ready for day-to-day use. Of course some of the extensions have not been update so you might end up with a situation wherein once you move to Firefox 2.0, your favorite extension might not work. I'm currently facing this problem with the del.icio.us extension. Please for God's sake, update your extensions!

Looking into the future of Firefox development, Firefox 3.0 planning has already started. Mike Bletzner (Mozilla QA) had started a thread on the firefox.dev mailing list asking people to give feedback on what problems they face currently in Firefox. The thread produced some interesting feedback and quite a few people poured their gripes about Firefox into that thread. The thread can be viewed here.

After gathering the problems users/developers face it's now time to brainstorm on new features and modifications. The Mozilla Wiki has hosted a page called Firefox 3.0 Brainstorming to further discuss on the feature-set for Firefox 3.0. You can help out by adding the feature which you want to the growing list, or provide a mock-up of your new idea through a XUL file or a firefox extension. My Firefox 3.0 wishlist can be viewed here. I've concentrated on three things.

Import/Export of Firefox Addons-information. An extension which I'm currently working on and which should appear on AMO after I get it ready for Firefox 2.0.
A direct download solution for the Download Manager using URLs.
In-Page Bookmarking and content highlighting, possible through Web-Marker.

Technorati Tags :firefox, firefox 2.0, firefox 3.0, mozilla, wiki, FOSS, brainstorming, me, firefox wishlist

My first flood

2006-10-12T11:28:00.000+05:30

Thanks to the blogger beta update, I managed to flood Planet FLOSS India. As punishment they have thrown me out :(. All this thanks to the ATOM feed blogger provides. If you need a RSS feed of blogger you can get one from the following URL: http://blogger-alias.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. RSS feeds are available, they are just hidden away. Funny thing was I never knew my blog was syndicated on Planet FLOSS-India.

Dandeli Trip

2006-10-10T19:09:00.000+05:30

My Dandeli trip pictures are now available on Flickr. Dandeli is by far the best place I've visited as a trekking spot. One can find more information on Dandeli from the master. I'll try and share some wisdom anyway.

Visit during end of September or early October. Season starts from October to March. If September-end the forests are wet and have that rain-foresty look though most are deciduous.

Book a good resort. All resorts are in Ganeshgudi and NOT in Dandeli. Dont think you can drop in Dandeli and expect rooms to be made available or expect to be in the middle of a jungle. Dandeli is a proper town.
Take the private buses, Suguma Travels and TRL are better options than the 14-hour KSRTC bus. The best route is the Bangalore-Hubli-Dandeli-Ganeshgudi route when travelling by car.
This is not the place to go with your family(grandpa's and grandma's and auntie's). If you have a healthy family then it's fine.
Be prepared to walk atleast 10KM every day to really make use of the trip.
Leech's will bite you. So learn to live with these parasites.

You will slip, fall and have a few scratches.
Syntheri Rock is a good place to die. Be careful on the rocks!

You _must_ be _inside_ the Wildlife Sanctuary before daybreak (4:00 AM) or you've missed all the animals. Don't expect to see lions, tigers, (your favourite big cat). At the most you might see a wild-cat if you are really lucky.
If you are planning to visit Kavala Caves, you have to explore them on all fours with bats flying at you if you turn on your torch/candle. Also the cave-surface is filled with bat droppings and it STINKS!
If you see rapids don't think of swimming, most of the rapids have whirlpools and if you get sucked in you might emerge in Kerala.

You might end up spending Rs.2000-3000 for the weekend. 1250/- extra if interested in white-water-rafting.

Have fun, Dandeli/Ganeshgudi is a thousand times better than Coorg, Ooty and (insert commercial hill-station) and at the same times thousand times painful/dangerous if you are not careful. All the pics were taken using my trusted Sony Ericsson k750i. A big thanks goes to lawgon who suggested the place.

Technorati Tags: dandeli, travel, trekking, photos, traveltips

Blogging

2006-10-08T15:52:00.000+05:30

I'm now on Blogger Beta. Don't find anything new, have to tinker around more to actually discover what's new here. There seems to the the addition of 'labels' (similar to tags) for each new blog-post.

I'm also playing with Wordpress. My wordpress blog is currently a mirror of this one. Not migrating yet, just figuring out how good it is.

Update :Looks like there are layouts which replace the templates. Good, no need to play with CSS. The biggest difference seems to be that instead of modifying CSS people just need to maove around bit's of CSS which give the whole blog a "layout".

Y! reproduces Vannevar Bush's Memex using Flickr (sort of)

2006-10-02T15:36:00.000+05:30

The winner's of Yahoo! Hack Day might not have such high aims as trying to solve the problem Vennevar Bush addresses in his 'As We may think' paper but the solution they provide is really interesting. Their 'hack' involves a combination of flickr , geotagging(i think) and the flickr API. It involves a phone-camera which is kept inside a ladies handbag and which captures a photo for every few steps traveled. This photo is then uploaded to flickr through the flickr API and posted to a moblog. Techcrunch has the full coverage.

This is really interesting as the device in question is similar to a memex. One can even call it the Web 2.0 memex as it seems to have a taken a Web 0.0 idea and implemented in the Web 2.0 world. Microsoft's Gordon Bell also seems to have worked on the memex idea and his MyLifeBits project is the result of his work.

The coolness of the Yahoo hack is the amount of simplicity it contains and way it's being implemented. The hack can be viewed online at BloggingInMotion. Pictures taken get added and are shown on the front page. At the time of this writing all I can see is a bright light.Maybe the handbag is kept near a table light, blocked by a piece of cloth or is facing the sun. All leading to some very interesting assumptions. :)

Now what's required in this hack is a way to capture idea's, feelings and emotions when the picture is taken and post it as the text of the moblog entry. That would make it the perfect dear-diary solution. Maybe even throw in GPS positioning and speech to text and we have a winner. An idea for a web 2.0 startup ?

Waymarkr is another solution to creating a Web 2.0 memex.

technorati Tags :Memex, Yahoo hackday, MyLifeBits, flickr, Web 2.0, Waymarkr

The Onion State

2006-10-02T14:03:00.000+05:30

It's one of the greatest articles I read every year and it never fails to surprise me. Well, if the author is Larry Wall, can you accept anything less. Hear me o Programmer, read this and be enlightened.

Technorati Tags :perl, perl6, Larry Wall, OSCON, keynote, opensource

Netvibes with Firefox 2.0 Beta2

2006-09-30T18:07:00.000+05:30

Have started using Firefox Beta2 (BonEcho) for the last two days. The biggest difference is the automatic spell-checker for text-entry fields. This really helps with GMail and Blogger. You can get the latest version of Firefox Beta from here. Some of my extensions seem to work, most of them don't. The ability to subscribe to feeds has improved. One can now use an online-feed reader or a desktop feed-reader to automatically subscribe to RSS/ATOM feeds from a website which offers one.

The right way BonEcho by default ships with support for Google Reader, My Yahoo! and Bloglines. I really wanted support for Netvibes as that's my main feed-reader. Here's how I went about doing it.

Open a Tab and type in 'about:config' in the address bar.
Filter the list by the words 'contentHandlers'. This should list the Google, Yahoo and Bloglines feed-readers.
You will need to create new entries for Netvibes.
To create a new entry right click the window and select 'New > String'.
For the first string enter 'browser.contentHandlers.types.#.title' as the preference name and 'Netvibes' as the string value. '#' is the next biggest number for the feed contentHandlers. In my case it was 6.
For the second string enter 'browser.contentHandlers.types.#.type' as the preference name and 'application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed' as the string value.
For the third string enter 'browser.contentHandlers.types.#.uri' as the preference name and 'http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=%s' as the string value, '%s' here is replaced by Firefox as the URL of the RSS/ATOM feed when it subscribes to Netvibes.
Restart Firefox and check if 'Netvibes' is listed as a feed when you subscribe to an online feed by choosing 'Bookmarks > Subscribe to this Feed'.

The ugly way At times I've seen that the netvibes value does not show up in my feed-selection. To fix this I just modified all the 'about:config' entries which point to 'My Yahoo' to Netvibes. In my case I had to change the values for contentHandler numbered '1'. You can edit a value by right-clicking and choosing 'Edit'.

After setting up Netvibes in Firefox 2.0 I can now go to a website and subscribe to the site's feed directly instead of copy-pasting URL's.

Technorati Tags: netvibes, Firefox, feedreader, bonecho, Firefox beta, howto

Audioslave Revelations

2006-09-27T10:12:00.000+05:30

Following up to 'Out of Exile' would be an easy task for hard-rock's supergroup Audioslave and they seem to have done a good job of it. Here are the best tracks from their new album Revelations.

Keepers:

Revelations
Sound of a Gun
Until We Fall
Original Fire
Wide Awake
Moth

Weakpoints : The lyrics are not as good as the first album or even 'Out of Exile'. Some songs like 'Jewel of the Summertime' have overdone chorus parts with Chris Cornell just plain shouting and trying to sound loud and angry. Tom Morello takes the back seat and his trademark guitar solo's are missing, the only saving grace is 'One and the Same' which has the rare riff from Tom. Cornell's voice seems to have lost that icy smoothness which was evident in 'Like a Stone' and 'Heaven's Dead' and gained a lot of "force". Rock-ballads are missing in this album.

Strengths : It's LOUD!. There's more variety in this album, genre's range from grunge-rock to R&B to Disco and all the times making sure they have a hard-rock touch to it.

Rocktivism : I loved the music of 'Rage Against the Machine' and their politically charged songs like 'Killing in the name of' and 'Sleep now in the Fire' which are masterpieces in the power-metal/rock-rap genre. It was sad to hear that when Audioslave was formed the band was going to give up on their previous politically charged lyrics and instead concentrate on music. With 'Revelations' the formaer-RATM members seem to be back with political activism and it's evident from song's such as 'Sound of a Gun', 'Original Fire' and 'Wide Awake'. Either the band's ideology seems to have changed (for the better) or these are just antics to cash in on Republican-bashing. I really hope it's the former. You can read more about RATM's political activism on the Wikipedia article about the band (NSFW).

Technorati Tags : Audioslave, hardrock, RATM, revelations, Audioslave

No Feeding today

2006-08-21T16:23:00.000+05:30

Managed to spend a day without reading a single RSS feed. w00t!

Wiki.com

2006-08-15T20:25:00.000+05:30

Whoever paid around 3 mil for the domain wiki.com, let me tell you, this is not a wiki. It's a cheap way to push a crappy online word processor. And don't tell me what a wiki is. Look at JotSpot to see what a wiki really is.

Blogger and BitchX

2006-08-15T16:18:00.000+05:30

Blogger seems to have a beta. Can't say what's new. First off, they are migrating accounts from blogger to gmail.com and it seems to be a controlled-migration. I got a message saying that I need to wait.

Trying out a number of bitchx scripts. One of which almost got me banned at irc.mozilla.org for the away messages it was spewing out.

Think Flat!

2006-08-11T10:05:00.000+05:30

Infosys has a corporate Blog.

Technorati Tags: Infosys, blogs, Infosys Consulting

Google SoC : BSDL vs LGPL

2006-07-28T10:48:00.000+05:30

Good to read** that BSDL has more SoC projects than LGPL.

** Web-Marker Link : Use the Web-Marker Firefox extension.

Shooting yourself in the foot

2006-07-26T10:57:00.000+05:30

Picked up from file:///usr/share/doc/pugs-doc/other/shot_in_the_foot

Perl 5:
(from http://lincoln.midcoast.com/~del/task.html )

There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot that you post a query to comp.lang.perl.misc to determine the optimal approach. After sifting through 500 replies (which you accomplish with a short perl script), not to mention the cross-posts to the perl5-porters mailing list (for which you upgraded your first sifter into a package, which of course you uploaded to CPAN for others who might have a similar problem, which, of course, is the problem of sorting out email and news, not the problem of shooting yourself in the foot), you set to the task of simply and elegantly shooting yourself in the foot, until you discover that, while it works fine in most cases, NT, VMS, and various flavors of Linux, AIX, and Irix all shoot you in the foot sooner than your perl script could. Then you decide you can do it better with the new, threaded version...

Haskell:
(from http://santiago.mapache.org/humor/shootfoot.html [2])

All you have to do is calculate the value of the shoot function on foot. (You did define shoot, didn't you?)

Perl 6:

You pick up an object which assures you it provides the function of a gun. You load the gun with something that functions like a bullet, but are not sure whether you actually loaded it or whether it will load itself when you try to use it or check the chamber. You point and fire the gun at your foot, or something which functions like a foot, but because you did not specify which foot, the interpreter fires the bullet in each of two parallel universes. You are not sure whether or not you hit your foot, or indeed which foot you fired at, but you decide that you don't currently care. You carry on doing something else and forget what happened. Later, when you go to get a bite to eat, or at least find something which provides the function of being bitten for the sake of nutrition, you notice a parrot grab the gun, load it, and shoot you in both feet - both hit the mark, but only one leaves a bullet wound because the operation was atomic.

Technorati Tags :perl, perl6, haskell, documentation, programming, shootingyourselfinthefoot

Deliciously Yours!

2006-07-24T13:27:00.000+05:30

After having played around with Shadows for around a year I'm now back with del.icio.us . The shadows thing was good, but the biggest problem was that shadows unlike del.icio.us does not allow me to export my bookmarks. This is vendor lock in and very very bad. Something which should not be encouraged with any Web 2.0 startup. So long guys and thanks for hosting my stuff. If there was atleast a sync-with-del.icio.us feature I would have stayed. I wish there was a "delete" feature in shadows so that I can delete my bookmarks, but there doesnt seem to be any.

If anyone is planning to move back to del.icio.us from Shadows, use Flock , configure it with your shadows account and get all your bookmarks, then change to the del.icio.us account and Flock will sync all your bookmarks with del.icio.us and yes, it will take care of the existing tags and duplicates which exist on de.icio.us . Oh! and check out Flock 0.7.3, it rocks!

My del.icio.us link is here.

Technorati Tags :socialbookmarking, del.icio.us, shadows, flock

EQ

2006-07-24T11:01:00.000+05:30

Your EQ is 127

50 or less: Thanks for answering honestly. Now get yourself a shrink, quick! 51-70: When it comes to understanding human emotions, you'd have better luck understanding Chinese. 71-90: You've got more emotional intelligence than the average frat boy. Barely. 91-110: You're average. It's easy to predict how you'll react to things. But anyone could have guessed that. 111-130: You usually have it going on emotionally, but roadblocks tend to land you on your butt. 131-150: You are remarkable when it comes to relating with others. Only the biggest losers get under your skin. 150+: Two possibilities - you've either out "Dr. Phil-ed" Dr. Phil... or you're a dirty liar.

What's Your EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient)?

Silent Hill - The Movie

2006-07-23T13:13:00.000+05:30

Watched Silent Hill-the movie yesterday. Being a big fan of this playstation game I was very much interested in seeing how well they had adapted the game to the big-screen. I played the original Silent Hill for the Playstation when it came out and I have to say it's one of the scariest games I have ever played. The movie does not stray away from the game either. The familiar street-fog is present everywhere and if you are a SH player then you will get nostalgic when you see the familiar street names and the famous landmarks of Silent Hill re-created in the movie. Seeing the red-bridge brought back old memories. There was this one part in the game wherein when you start on one side of the bridge the town is normal, and as you start running and coming towards the other end of the bridge the city is transformed to the dark-side. Though that particular moment is not present in the movie, seeing the bridge brought back the old chill in the spine.

The other good part about the movies are the evil characters, though the story is based on the first version of the game, the enemies are taken from Silent 2 and 3 which came out for the Playstation 2. This is an excellent decision, the enemeies of SH1 were "weak" and their scare-factor was almost negligible. The best of the baddies is "Pyramid-head", this guy is basically a 7 foot man with a steel pyramid over his face and a 10 foot blade in his hand. Totally awesome!

The story is based on the Gillespie family tragedy (again SH1 based) and officer Cybil Bennet is also present in the movie. Some scenes are lifted directly from the game, for example: the first horror scene where the protagonist is attacked by zombie-children and is rendered unconsious and when he wakes up, the radio is playing. The "enemy prespective" technique of saying that there's "someone watching you" is also taken from the game. What is lacking are the puzzles, I would have liked it if there were more puzzles in the movie. There is one but there's not much mystery to it and it gets over as soon as it begins. The OST has also taken a lot from the game.

All in all, an excellent adaption of the first game of the Silent Hill series, though the storyline is changed immensely, it is all for the better. The SH1 plot was too straight-forward and was heavily occult and daemon-worship based. This one is less occult based and you don't see samael or any such daemon in the movie. I have no idea why Sean Bean was cast in this movie though. All in all, a great saturday night horror movie.

Technorati Tags :silent hill, silent hill movie, silent hill game, playstation, horror movie, videogame

DELL XPS m1210 Blog Reviews

2006-07-21T08:18:00.000+05:30

A couple of good blog-reviews of the Dell xps m1210.

Bryan O'Sullivan talks about how he managed to get FC5 running on the XPS m1210 laptop. he also seems to have sorted out the suspend-to-ram problem by using a kernel patch to the SATA module.
G0SUB, the free g33k got Ubuntu Dapper running on his girlfriend's XPS m1210 and wrote a mini-review of it. Both Debian and Ubuntu seem to face the same problems ATM on the Dell XPS m1210 i.e suspend-to-ram and the MMC/MS card reader support.

I managed to get suspend to disk working with the suspend2 patches. Only problem is that I need to stop GDM, go into text mode and then hibernate as the proprietary nvidia kernel module seems to have problems with the suspend2 patches. Till I get proper suspend working, this will have to do.

PS : Bryan, If you are reading this, drop me a comment, I need to know which patch you used for fixing the the SATA/suspend problem. I tried leaving a comment on your blog but it would'nt let me and there was no contact info on your blog. :P

Technorati Tags :dell xps m1210, linux, ubuntu, fedora core, fc5, suspend2, hibernate, linuxkernel

Banspot!

2006-07-21T07:18:00.000+05:30

Hoo Haa!!! everyone is going gaa-gaa over the Blogspot/Typepad/Geocities ban. If you are late to the party you can still catch up with the Blogosphere by spending 20 minutes and listening to this podcast.

If your ISP is blocking any of the blogs/domain then use this cross-platform software called Your-Freedom to access those sites. Enjoy!

Oh yes, you will need to sign-up at the web-site, and download the java archive file and run it using Sun's JVM (on Linux), but it's an easy procedure and should not be much of a problem. For Windows guys you have an installer.

Oh and btw, here is the scanned version of the document which was circulated to all the ISP's. You can see the doc, try to figure out the websites listed there, use Your-freedom and access the websites in question.

Technorati Tags :ban, blogspot, censorship, freedom, software, ISP, internet

Javed Miandad's son is my classmate!

2006-07-20T14:47:00.000+05:30

IndiaTimes XtraEdition seems to be Indiatimes' gossip based online webzine. They also have this interesting article on Javed Miandad's son's marriage picture with Dawood Ibrahim's daughter. It's a good picture, only problem is that it's not Javed Miandad's son nor Dawood bhai's daughter but my college classmate, Aejaz's marriage picture. I had blogged about it earlier. Stupid gossip sites! And "Javed Miandad's son" even commented on my blog. heh!

Technorati Tags: marriage, indiatimes, aejaz, pics, dawood

Dell xps m1210 Pics

2006-07-19T14:01:00.000+05:30

I've uploaded a few pics of the DELL XPS m1210 on flickr.

Links for the Day - July 17

2006-07-17T10:49:00.000+05:30

A collection of cool and must-read links:

Is Perl Dying ? - PerlMonks has a good discussion-article. [link]
A 70's review of the CRAY-1. [link]
Dual Processor vs Dual Core [link]
Which is Hotter ? Dell or Apple [link]
Linus on dropping from the elite A-list of "Men who matter in technology". [link]
Chris Pirillo on Links. [link]
Firefox now allows you to spam your friends. [link]
How to be an elite otaku. [link]
Tin-foil hat Linux. [link]
Generate info about your Flickr photostream using FlickrInspector. [link]. Here's mine:
toufeeq's flickr score: 1205
Ars on the Core 2 Duo CPU's. [link]
Digg Digging Diggs Digg. [link]
Debian - Copying and ripping DVD's tutorial. [link]
Debian - Multimedia Tutorial. [link]

Technorati Tags :links, technology

Linux on the Dell XPS m1210

2006-07-16T13:57:00.000+05:30

I finally got the new laptop and managed to get Linux running on it. I did have my share of battles with getting Linux working on this Laptop. I wanted to try out Ubuntu badly after hearing such glorious reviews and the whole FOSS community going ooh-ahhh over it. Well sadly, I couldn't get it to install!

Here's how the Ubuntu saga went, I downloaded the ISO from the website, burnt it and booted off the laptop's CD-ROM, it gave the boot-choice-screen and I selected the default installation method. Everything went well till it tried to bring up GDM at which point it stalled and I had to reboot. I tried another time, this time it started X and stalled again. Frustrated I got an old Oct 2004 Debian-testing CD and did a minimal installation. Everything went perfectly. Thank you Debian!

After a dist-upgrade to etch and getting X working using the vesa X.org driver I managed to install most of the packages which I require, GNOME, gVim , Firefox. The kernel, hal and DBUS were installed from debian-unstable as it's better to have the latest versions of these packages. ACPI events were handled very well by the acpid daemonand battery information is available from gnome-power-manager. cpufreqd was setup to control CPU frequency scaling and I even managed to test out the VGA out capability of the laptop. I also got the nvidia driver working from the nvidia.com website.

So, here's a run down of what works and what doesn't on the Dell XPS m1210.

Works

ACPI - works through acpid
Bluetooth - works with kde-bluetooth. Debian does not have gnome-bluetooth.
CPU frequency scaling - works with cpufreqd.
Nvidia Go 7400 - works with the latest nvidia drivers. I installed them through the nvidia-installer and not the Debian way.
Touchpad - Debian identified it as a regular mouse. However installing the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package and using the "synaptics" driver in X.org works fine.
USB - works , it identified my MS wireless Optical mouse under /dev/input/mice
Sound - ALSA works with the Intel HD audio driver. Some problem with the volume though, the main volume control seems to be the headphone , haven't poked around much, I'm just glad it works.
Multimedia Keys - works with lineakd.

Doesn't Work

Ricoh Card Reader - Tried with my Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo in a Memory Stick adaptor and it doesn't work. Havent tried with SD or MMC but other m1210 owners have said that SD works with the Ubuntu kernel. The drivers for the Ricoh card reader are available in mainline 2.6.17. If anyone has success with MS Duo please let me know.
Suspend to * - The system goes to sleep but fails to wake up. Suspend to ram was tested with s2ram.

Not Tested

Wireless - seems to use the ipw3945 drivers. Haven't poked around much.

Coming back to Ubuntu, I got a Dapper CD from a friend at work and tried to install it on the laptop, this time the gods favoured me and I managed to clear the GDM screen and see the desktop. Clicking on the "Install" icon started the installer and I managed to get to the partition manager. gParted is so better nowdays, it mimicks Partition Manager so well and is a pleasure to use. Resizing existing partitions is a breeze. I allocated around 5 GB for Ubuntu and clicked "Next". This started a "universal progress bar" which seemed to be doing everything.. formatting partitions, copying files etc. Unfortunately it stalled at 43% and I had to give up. Oh! it even managed to screw up my Windows NTFS partition, no problem though, I wasn't going to use it anyway. The only info I could mange to get were some bad I/O messages on the sr0 device (cd-rom). I didn't investigate further. Will try Ubuntu when Eft comes out.

General Info on the m1210

It's an excellent laptop as in it allows you to carry around a lot of power for a reasonable price. It looks pedestrian compared to an Apple MacBook or a Sony Vaio SZ but considering the value for money factor the m1210 is better than the SZ. Build quality is rock solid, it feels monolithic with nothing dangling or "squeezable". The LCD is sharp and bright. Controlling the LCD brightness works with the Fn keys in Linux. I have the 9-cell battery and batter life lasted around 5-5.5 hours(without wi-fi) which is pretty good. The keypad has good sturdy full-sized keys. The touchpad seems a bit small but is workable. I use the wireless mouse anyways. the 12.1 screen is readable, I was worried I might have to squint to read text, but it didn't turn out bad at all, the sharpness of the screen is amazing. It reflects everything though so I would say it's going to be tough reading in daylight. All in all a good laptop to have around if you are a semi-frequent traveller.

4 out of 5 stars

The Dell XPS m1210 is a great laptop

Reviewer: Toufeeq Hussain - July 16, 2006

The Dell XPS m1210 is one of the best Core Duo based laptops in the marker. It has solid build quality coupled with some amazing performance features and is fully customizable to the core.

Technorati Tags: linux, ubuntu, debian, laptop, linux on laptop, linux installation, dell, dell xps m1210, dell xps, opensource

Five Images to take away from World Cup 2006

2006-07-11T13:21:00.000+05:30

The WC 2006 was amazing. The best team in the tournament didn't win, the most-creative team in the tournament didn't win, the most hyped-about team in the tournament didn't win. The MOST CONSISTENT and TACTICALLY BRILLIANT team WON. A job well done Squadra Azura!

There were some memorable images which will always be etched in mind. Here's the top among them:

Zidane hedbutting Marco Materrazzi
Fabio Grosso's celebrations after scoring against Germany in extra-time.
Brazil's Robinho running and hugging Zidane after France beating Brazil. You could almost lip-read Robinho, "You were brilliant!" he seemed to say.
David Beckham's emotional departure after an ankle injury in the England-Portugal match.
Fabio Cannavaro holding aloft the World Cup after Italy beat France. It was retribution for Euro 2000 when France managed to escape with a late goal and a golden goal.

Technorati Tags :worldcup, worldcup2006, FIFA, football, cannavaro, italy world champions, zidane, davidbeckham

Current issues in the Debian and Ubuntu relationship

2006-07-06T18:13:00.000+05:30

Debian Developer Martin Krafft outlines the current challenges that the two distributions face when it comes to better co-operation between the respective projects

read more | digg story

Rhythmbox Love

2006-07-05T17:57:00.000+05:30

I <3 Rhythmbox. It fits in nicely into my GNOME desktop. However I would like to see one change. I use Rhythmbox as the default 'Music player' in GNOME, meaning, whenever I double-click on a .mp3 or .ogg file it opens up in Rhythmbox, however while opening the file it also adds that file to the library. This is nice if I need that file to reside in my library but if it's a one minute sound clip and it shows up in my library , it irks me. What we should have in rhythmbox is a command line option , something in the line of --view which will take the values 'normal' for the normal view, 'party' for the fullscreen view and 'small' for the small view (duh!).

So, how will this work out ? When I open a music file by double-clicking in Nautilus, I intend to open it by passing the '--view small' commandline parameter, so that the player opens in 'small' mode ; plays the file and quits. This will also involve another command line option which will be --play-file-and-quit which will play the file and quit. So, I'm now trying to get my hands dirty with Rhythmbox code. Let's see how it works out. Will post later on how stuff works out.
So, something like rhythmbox --view small --play-file-and-quit foo.mp3 would be great.

I'll try and post this suggestion to the Rhythmbox mailing list. Expecting to be flamed :P
Comments welcome...

Technorati Tags :rhythmbox, multimedia, musicplayer, GNOME, linux

Playing YouTube Videos on the Sony PSP

2006-07-03T12:59:00.000+05:30

This is my latest obsession. Since I travel for around 2.5 hrs during my office commute, I need to keep myself entertained. Till now the Sony PSP was being used to play the odd game or to listen to some music. I finally managed to get all the pieces together to start encoding videos for the PSP on Debian GNU/Linux. This got boring after a while as I didn't have new content to keep me entertained on a daily basis.

The next step was to get the videos from YouTube to play on the PSP. This actually turned out easier than I expected. Here's how I managed to do it,

Get Mozilla Firefox.
Install the "VideoDownloader" extension.
Install ffmpeg on Debian. apt-get install ffmpeg. My ffmpeg version is the one pulled from the ffmpeg subversion repo. This is on Debian unstable mind you with the debian-multimedia repo's.
Go to YouTube/Google Videos and view a video, click on the VideoDownlaoder icon on the Status bar of Firefox, this will inturn popup a window with the link to the video being currently played. Right click and "Save the link" on your PC.
Videos will be saved in the FLV (Flash Video) format. You can play them using VLC.
You need to re-encode these videos to the PSP's aspect ratio. Here's the ffmpeg one-liner which will do it for you.

ffmpeg -i $input_file -f psp -r 29.970 -s 320x240 -b 768 -ar 24000 -ab 32 $output_file
$input_file :: is the name of the Video you just downloaded (.flv)
$output_file :: is the name of the output file for the PSP which should be of the type M4V000XX.MP4 , where XX is a random number.

If everything goes well, stick that into a bash script like so:

=====start=====

#! /bin/sh

input_file=$1 output_file=$2

echo $input_file echo $output_file

ffmpeg -i $input_file -f psp -r 29.970 -s 320x240 -b 768 -ar 24000 -ab 32 $output_file

=====end=====

And you can invoke the script as ./psp_enc.sh ~/Videos/youtube.flv M4V00010.MP4

The whole setup should also be possible on Fedora and Ubuntu too. The next best thing I discovered is ffmpeg2theora, very useful command-line tool if you have a set of divx files and worried that you might loose the ability to play them due to patent problems. ffmpeg2theora will allow you to re-encode your videos to the Ogg Theora format which is an open format and widely supported by almost all the players on Linux.

Technorati Tags :psp, sonypsp, linux, youtube, ffmpeg, debian, video, video encoding, ubuntu, bash, shellscripting, firefox, firefoxextension, videodownloader, googlevideos, ogg, ffmpeg2theora, oggtheora, theora

Where the hell is Toufeeq ?

2006-07-02T13:21:00.000+05:30

I wish I can just get up, leave all work, forget all the worries, ditch my PC and just go out and see the world. Just like Matt. Read about him.

Digg Sucks

2006-07-01T18:46:00.000+05:30

After the Digg 3.0 launch, digg sucks! That's why I'm moving over to Digg-Technology. Oh! and my first choice for tech news is now Reddit and not Digg. Go see Reddit, if you've not seen it already.

Technorati Tags :Digg, diggtechnonology Digg 3.0, reddit, socialsoftware, web2.0

Guadec2006

2006-07-01T13:03:00.000+05:30

I'm not at Guadec, but have been following Guadec by gazing at the planets and by listening to the Lugradio coverage. This year it's at Vilanova i la Geltru in Spain (near Barcalona). This year a couple of talks have been of interest and both of them are from the Fluendo guys. I've tried out both of them and they rock! They are Gstreamer based and are vital future constituents of the GNOME Desktop.

Elisa

Elisa is a software written in Python, Gstreamer and SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer) which in turn uses OpenGL for the rendering of the user-interface. I like the UI, though it's completely non-mouse/keyboard based (for now, I guess) ,it's simple and intuitive to use. In the media center software area, we already have Myth TV and Freevo, do we need another one ? I would say yes. Myth TV has the "TV-viewing" part of it nailed down pretty well and Freevo, well, though it's pretty fast and easy to use, the pygame-UI sucks! Elisa, one thing which it does really well is it excels in the UI department. Each of these media-center softwares seem to have something going for them. Coming back to Elisa, it's actually a very visually pleasing piece of software. The Installation was pretty straight forward on Debian, an Ubuntu specific installation page is also available. Elisa allows you to view pictures, listen to music and play DVD's throiugh it's UI, the typical Media-Center stuff. Apart from that it also has "task-management" wherein your actions(playing music,video,DVD's) are available through a task-manager interface so that you move and re-arrange tasks. Here's is a screenshot:

PiTiVi

PiTiVi is a non linear video editor based on Gstremer and gnonlin. Still in a very nascent stage as lot's of core video-editing functionality is missing. The features page of the project has a list of features which are implemented and which are still being worked upon. PiTiVi hopes to turn into the Gnome Video Editor, one package which is sorely required in the GNOME Desktop. I managed to install it and play around with it, though it does an excellent job of getting video's into a playlist window and playing them, there's nothing much it can do. This is really pre-alpha software. UI is another thing which need some attention. Here's a screenshot:

Gstreamer + Python

Both Elisa and PiTiVi illustrate the fact that Gstreamer (esp. 0.10) has come of age and has proved that it is a viable multimedia framework for the GNOME Desktop. Fluendo should get most of the credit for what Gstreamer is capable of. Gstreamer bindings in Python is another plus point which is giving rise to an excellent application development framework. It's good to see that the future of linux desktop multimedia is in good hands. Keep up the great work guys.

Technorati Tags :Gstreamer, GUADEC, GUADEC2006, lugradio, podcast, python, linux, media center, fluendo, elisa, SDL, mythtv, Freevo, screenshots, pitivi, videoediting, gnonlin, GNOME, multimedia, multimediaframework, software, softwarepreview, beta software, linux multimedia

Debian etch/sid Bug: 359328

2006-06-30T10:25:00.000+05:30

Bug #359328 is an irritating bug which has plagued X.org in Debian since the move from X.org 6.9 to 7.0. The most irritating part of the X.org migration is the Bug which involves getting Direct Rending Infrastructure working with the Intel 810 and 915 graphics cards. I've been wrestling with this bug now for a couple of months, trying to get it solved. I can't blame Debian however because the problem seems to be with upstream packages. Here's what's happening from what I gathered from bits and pieces from the Internet.

Debian migrates to X.org 7.0
X.org 7.0 is a modular approach to the X-Server
All X "drivers" now exist as separate packages. To use the "i810" driver I now need to install the xserver-xorg-video-i810 package which will install the i810 driver for X.org. The same holds for input devices too.
DRI now depends on Mesa which has not been updated to cater to Xorg 7.0, or atleast not for the Intel chipsets
The Mesa developers have made the required changes which are required for the intel chipsets but the changes are in CVS but have not made an official release.
Debian can't provide CVS based packages as it goes against the Debian packaging principles.

So Debian folk are basically stuck until the kind Mesa dev's decide to release with the i810 changes. The Ubuntu people however do not mind using the CVS based packages. Now if you are stuck with the same problem , here's the solution:

Get the following packages from Debian Experimental. If you can't get them from there they are also available here.

libgl1-mesa-dri_6.5.0.cvs
libglu1-mesa_6.5.0.cvs
libgl1-mesa-glx_6.5.0.cvs

Download them , shutdown the X Server and install them using 'dpkg'. Restart X and run 'glxinfo' and verify whether 'Direct Rendering' is enabled. You should be able to see it in the top of the text output which 'glxinfo' spews out. You should be able to see something like:

topa@anduril:~$ glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes

Technorati Tags : debian, linux, debian unstable, xserver, Xorg, opengl, MESA, DRI, intel i810, graphics

ILUGC Community Work

2006-06-25T00:09:00.000+05:30

In chennai this weekend and I got to meet the ILUGC regulars in Gandhi Mandapam. It was not like any of the normal LUG meets wherein people come over to IIT, talk tech and leave. This time it was a more informal meeting with the agenda being the discussion of future ILUGC community activities. More such meetings with a community development focus would be interesting. Will upload pics later as my mobile phone's USB cable is back in B'lore.

Technorati Tags:

community, ILUGC, Chennai LUG

Web-Marker - Firefox extension to mark and share web-pages

2006-06-19T19:03:00.000+05:30

Web-Marker user's and fans(there must be some), if you want to help spread the word on the firefox extension, help us by digging for it. The Digg link is here. Below is the announcement on Digg.

The extension acts as a marker pen for the web. It allows the user to mark multiple ranges of text content, on a web-page, and generate a link to the marked page. This link can be used in the same manner as normal links.The receiver of the link should also have the extension installed to view the marked web-page.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags :web-marker, liveurls, firefox, digg, mozilla firefox,

Tabblo.beta

2006-06-17T13:25:00.000+05:30

Tabblo, brain child of Ned Batchelder is a new photos-sharing Web 2.0 app which is similar to flickr and zooomr. Tabblo however is different in a way as it allows tabblo-users to publish photo-pages called 'Tabblos'. Why the wierd name and what it means I have no idea, but it does seem to cater to solving one interesting problem which people have faced with photo-sharing services on the Web and that is "How do I structurize my photostreams ?". Well flickr has a concept called photosets wherein the user can club a number of photos to make a set but still that doesn't convey much. What if I want to have a commentary style photoset ? flickr doesn't provide me that. I could also write a blog entry and pull in flickr photos, but that's trying to get two minolithic web-apps to behave well with each other and usually involve lot of low-level stuff like getting the flickr url and using it in the blog-entry, possible but not usable. Trying to create a simple way to write commentaries for photosets is exactly the problem that tabblo is trying to solve.

The Service

Before I show you how a tabble looks like, some information (mini-review ?) about the website. The web-site is written in django, a web-framework written in python. The site has that Web 2.0 AJAX-y look and feel to it. The site however seems to be slow , which could either be due to python or due to the large amount of asynchronous processing (AJAX) happening in the background. If you don't have a fat pipe to the internet, forget it, stuff seems to be taking ages. Enough of Tabblo bashing, some good points. It has seemless integration with flickr and that's what really matters as I don't want to be re-uploading all my photos to a new web-service often. I would much prefer if my data can be shared by web-services easily (that's another topic for another day). Anyway, it managed to integrate with flickr without any problems , I didn't even have to give it my flickr(yahoo) login crdentials, guess it look them from the flickr cookie. It managed to get the first 20 photos and the rest of my 250+ photos seem to taking time appearing on the tabblo website. My tabblo photos can be seen here.

Creating Tabblo's

Creating Tabblo's is very important as the USP of the site is creating personal mash-up's of photosets. This however can sometimes get to be a usability problem. The site's "BETA" tag is very much evident as the interface can do with some performance tuning. The current interface is so clunky and at times it's almost unusable due to the heavy AJAX involved. It however tries to be a full blown webapp but like all web-apps this one seems to be slow and un-responsive at times. It is however a beta so I guess this is expected.

OTOH, The site provides templates (much like the blogger.com templates) for the tabblo's and some pretty good layouts are available for the user to choose from while creating the tabblo. The tabblo creation process however could be time consuming depending on the number of photos you want to display. The UI comes with a irritating sidebar which follows you when you scroll down the page. It can however be made to go away with the help of a click. The biggest problem is that each "action" you perform on the tabblo is accompanied by a server-request messagebox which tends to slow up the thought flow of the user. There also seems to be another usability problem, if I'm editing a taboo and I navigate away from the edit page, and return back to the edit page(back button) all my edits are lost. It would be a good idea if each edit can be saved on the server during the "message-box" process. I managed to make a tabblo of Roslyn Chapel. You can view it here.

Tabblo on the whole looks promising. But there are lot's of usability issues due to the AJAX jazz and that could turn off people who have a low level of patience. I will however be using tabblo to share some interesting pictorial stories. For updates on tabblo you can subscribe to the tabblo blog.

Technorati Tags: tabblo, beta software, web 2.0, flickr, photo sharing, web apps, roslyn chapel, cool, django, python

Roslyn Chapel

2006-06-17T12:53:00.000+05:30

Left: The entrance to Roslyn Chapel. ... See my Tabblo>

Laptop Cleanliness

2006-06-14T11:13:00.000+05:30

Macbook users now need to take a bath before they start using their laptops.

I'm just glad I'm not buying one.

Technorati Tags :macbook, macbook problems, apple, laptop

Web-Marker is a hit!

2006-06-13T19:36:00.000+05:30

Numbers don't lie. Web-Marker reached the 1500+ download mark in 2 days , liveurls reached the same in 2 months!

If you've not yet tried out Web-Marker, what are you waiting for ? GO GO GO!. And while you are there, please rate the extension. :P

Technorati Tags: webmarker, web marker, firefox, mozilla firefox, firefox extension, liveurls

Microsoft and it's people

2006-06-11T23:44:00.000+05:30

There are two faces of Microsoft, one is the corporate one which tries to fool people through it's PR. (read this on why it's bad) The other is the people face who are similar to the hackers of the FOSS world, i.e there are some interesting people in MS which everyone in the computing world respects.

Dave Cutler is one among them, so are Kim Cameron and Ray Ozzie. I'm sure there are many, like the people who work on the .Net development team ,who write the world's most famous development platform and the same people who work closely with the mono team on the ECMA standards. It's these people whom I root for, not because they help a multi-million behemoth sell millions of dollars worth of software packaged in cardboard boxes but because these are the same people who make sure that technology prevails at all costs, even if it's proprietary technology. Proprietary software and free-software will always have to co-exist, I don't think we can discount that fact, sure the percentage-numbers might change but both have their place in the computing world.

Coming to the point, Robert Scoble was one such guy whom I was beginning to respect as a Micosoft employee, an uber-celebrity in the blogging world and a person who was entrusted with the responsibility of hand-holding MS as it entered the Web 2.0 paradigm. The Econoimist once termed him Microsoft's Chief Humanising Officer. Through his blog Scobelizer , he managed to reach millions of people not as a MS PR guy but as a normal g33k talking about the cool stuff his employer was upto. Well, all was going well until when Robert Scoble decided to leave MSFT for Podtech.net . It happens very rarely when one person manages to change the outlook of a whole organization with his honest criticism and it's much more rarer that such an initiative continues to last forever. In Scoble's case it lasted for a few years and during that time he managed to tell the online world that MS was, something more than a laptop trotting marketing organization out to get your money.

On why Scoble left MS, Dave Winer has an interesting take through this blog-entry. But I guess it's better to read the official announcement from the man himself.

Technorati Tags: scoble, robert scoble, microsoft, blogging, people, dave cutler, kim cameron, ray ozzie

Web-Marker 0.1

2006-06-11T17:32:00.000+05:30

Sometime back Nata and me released a mozilla firefox extension called liveurls which allowed a user to create links out of normal textual web-content. We received a lot of feedback from the Firefox community and users. We took all that feedback and pondered for a few days on how to improve the extension. Some points which came up during the feedback phase were.

Ability to highlight and bookmark content so that when a user revists the page the next time the "state" of the web-page is retained and the user is able to identify which is the important content he had earlier marked through highlights.
Ability to highlight multiple sections of a webpage.
Ability to navigate between multiple highlights.
Ability to clear a highlight without reloading the page.

All of the above are really good feature-adds to the liveurls extension. So, announcing now, the next avatar of the liveurls extension.. WEB-MARKER. We demoed web-marker at the WWW2006 conference and got some really great feedback. We have been spending the last week ironing out bugs and making it release-ready. It's now finally here and available through Mozilla Addons at this page. Go ahead install it, play with it and drop in your feedback. Also,remember to uninstall the old liveurls extension before installing web-marker. Liveurls development will be discontinued.

Oh! another thing, if you find web-marker useful(or useless) drop in a rating for the extension at the web-marker homepage.

Technorati Tags: liveurls,webmarker, firefox, firefoxextension, xul, javascript, xpointer, contentaddressing, mozillafirefox, annotation, webannotation,url, links

Audioslave

2006-06-11T15:49:00.000+05:30

w00t! Audioslave , the alternate rock supergroup has an RSS feed of the official site's news. Maybe the first rock band to have one.

Speaking of Audioslave, their next album "Revelations" seems to be gearing up for a september release. More coverage at VH1.com

Technorati Tags: audioslave, alternaterock, music, vh1, rss

Dell XPS M1210

2006-06-08T20:22:00.000+05:30

I've been in the laptop market for a couple of years now, researching and waiting for that one perfect laptop to be available which will give me the best of both worlds, portability and performance. I started off with the Intel Prescott based laptops as they had heat issues and were available for dirt-cheap at one point of time, I then looked at Acer and HP's AMD Turion based laptops, I spent days researching over various Centrino based ones but couldnt decide on one. Suffice to say, I could never make up my mind on which laptop to buy as there was not one perfect laptop which would have satisfied me in all aspects a personal computer can.

That laptop was finally announced a week back, the Dell XPS m1210. I've ordered one from Dell India. That makes me the first person to have ordered a PC from the Dell XPS line in India (atleast the sales guy claimed so). Anyway, the lappie is expected in 15-20 days.

Some of it's important features of my laptop include:

Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz processor T2400
1 GB RAM
100 GB HDD
Nvidia GeForce Go 7400
12.1" WXGA (Widescreen 1280x800)

A perfect laptop as a desktop replacement and at the same time perfectly portable.

The weight should come to around 4.8 pounds which should make it almost-portable and the only problem I see here is the 12.1" screen which can get a bit small, but since it's a widescreen and portable I guess it's a fair compromise.

The other laptops I considered during this time were the Lenovo V100 (review) and the Apple Macbook. The Lenovo lost out because of the unimpressive build quality and the Macbook received a thumbs-down because of the heat problems. The final decision was actually a tough one to make, on one hand was this gorgeous beauty and on the other was a roaring performer. This blog-post by Mark Pilgrim and the comments within it helped me finalize on the Dell. Also Dell's build quality and the fact that ASUS is behind the manufacture of the XPS laptop line gave me confidence. The XPS M1210 casing is the same as ASUS's top-of-the-line laptops. If I had got a macbook, I would have been running Firefox and gVim on it for most of my needs. Also the fact that Apple doesn't allow me to install Linux (easily) put me off, Linux today on the macbook is a hack at best. People looking for a laptop in the 60-70K should consider the DELL m1210.

For me this laptop is a long-time commitment, a laptop which should last atleast three years and this looks like it's outfitted with the right stuff to last much longer. NotebookReview.com has a wonderful review. The forums on notebookreview.com were also helpful.

Technorati Tags : dell, dellxps, xps, dellm1210, m1210, laptop, macbook, apple, markpilgrim, notebook, lenovo, lenovov100, laptopreview, laptopreview.com, computer, purchase, dellindia, asus, freesoftware, linux, debian, amdturion, intelprescott

Flickr Pro User

2006-06-05T18:06:00.000+05:30

I'm now a Flickr Pro user.

Why? , turns out once you have 200+ photos in your flickr account, only the latest 200 photos turn up on the user page. Since I want all my photos available at all times I had to turn pro.

Technorati Tags: flickr

Diaper Drake's

2006-06-05T13:10:00.000+05:30

NOTE: This is not a review. These are just my views based on "reviews" from friends and other community members.

So Diaper(Dapper) Drake is making a lot of noise in the FOSS world since it got released on June 1. Lot of people have migrated over from Fedora Core ,Mandrake and Gentoo and they seem to be loving it. Me ? NO!, I'll be sticking with Ye Old Swirl. That baby has a lot of juice still left in it.

Back to Diaper(oops Dapper), this looks pretty solid for a server release. The first line of the server page tells the reader that Ubuntu is sticking deep to it's roots (which is good). Next there's the presence of the one-click-LAMP-Server installation (eeks!), which installs a full blown LAMP server and there's the minimal installation, which just just installs the core packages. The minimal install seems to be called a "server" install but amusingly doesn't install any "server" packages. A little confusing for normal users but old school debian admins will get the logic behind the naming. ;)

They still seem to be sticking with the whole non-root thingy and requires all apt based functionality to be 'sudo-ed'. Not sure if the minimal install process has a root account. Makes sense for linux newbies but that's a turn off for me. I know when to use root and when not to.

The Desktop users seems to be quite gung-ho about this release but I see no reason how it's different from Breezy. There seems to be a better(GUI) installer but an installer is no more an issue for desktop-linux, nor is the LTS thingy a major reason for desktop users to move from Breezy. If you are a desktop user you will want the latest software as fast as possible not bug fixes for ancient gnome packages. On the whole, there's no major reason why a bleeding edge linux desktop user should migrate to Dapper apart from the latest (and greatest) versions of GNOME and kernel. The enterprise-desktop users, OTOH would be interested. Kubuntu seems to be the latest official release for the Kuser's and there's even Xubuntu for the xfce-loving , PII hugging folk.

On the whole, a great release from the Ubuntu team, solid, solid, solid release but not enough in terms of new ground breaking features to migrate old-school desktop linux users to Ubuntu. The server and the enterprise market should have a look and will be interested. Me ? , I'll wait for the next Ubuntu release, Edgy Eft, the bleeding edge itchy one.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu,linux, dapperdrake, desktoplinux

Debian Mashup

2006-06-04T16:32:00.000+05:30

I run a hybrid Debian system and maintaining it sometimes gets to be a major PITA when it comes to meeting un-met dependencies across the three debian distributions. The Debian apt guide is an invaluable reference material when running a hybrid-bleeding-edge distro.

Today however, I came across this article which details the important points when trying to maintain a hybrid desktop distro with all the bells and whistles.

NOTE: Don't try this on a production box. If you want a "just-works" linux distro (linux for mortals) try this.

Technorati Tags: debian, aptget

Amateur Photography Question

2006-06-02T16:47:00.000+05:30

What's the best method of taking travel photographs ?

With the person (traveller) in the photograph or without him ?
For me the photos I take are to re-live that moment and maintain a digital capture. Having a "person" in that digital-memory spoils the whole nostalgic experience.
I tried to test out Yahoo! Answers so posted the question there. The responses seem to indicate a 50-50 split. You can find the open question here.
I've left the question open and not picked a "best answer" yet. Looks like there's not going to be a "Best Answer" for this question.
You can leave a yahoo answer or leave a comment below.
Tags:photography,yahooanswers

Netvibes++

2006-06-02T09:50:00.000+05:30

My favourite online RSS feed reader just got way cooler.
Tags: netvibes,rss

MacBook Multi OS

2006-06-01T20:37:00.000+05:30

Watch the video below to see how three Operating System can co-exist on a Macbook at the same time.

This is done using Parallels Workstation.

Pics and Vidz

2006-06-01T14:24:00.000+05:30

Final set of the WWW2006 Conference pics are available here. I've updated the old set with new ones which include Roslyn Chapel of Da Vinci Code fame.

Some videos which I managed to grab are up on You Tube.
Here are the individual links:

View from Carlton Hill in Edinburgh
View of the city from Edinburgh Castle
Conference Opening Ceremony Part 1
Conference Opening Ceremony Part 2

Please leave your comments in the corresponding pic/video.

Techniorati Tags: edinburgh, scotland,www2006, www06, travel

Back in Chennai

2006-05-28T23:08:00.000+05:30

Back from Edinburgh after attending the WWW2006 conference. Was there to present a poster. First set of photos are up.

Techniorati Tags: edinburgh, scotland,www2006, www06, travel

Ditching gnome-terminal

2006-05-15T15:33:00.000+05:30

Are you a terminal junkie who still has to use the GUI as you can't live without Firefox ?
Are you a a GNOME fan-boi ?
Are you tired of the gnome-terminal bloat when you have multiple tabs open ? Are you considering moving to KDE's Konsole because gnome-terminal puts you off ?

Have no fear, mrxvt is here! It's basically a gtk-1 version of gnome-terminal/Konsole with the same familiar keybindings which you've grown used to gnome-terminal.
According to the benchmarks in this article by Davyd (a GNOME dev) , mrxvt even blows away the new gnome-terminal of GNOME 2.14.

According to the above linked article the time taken to output all the words in the dict file through the following command is:
$ time cat /usr/share/dict/words

gnome-terminal 2.14 : 1.0 s

gnome-terminal 2.12 : 3.1 s

xterm : 4.3 s

Here are the timing results for mrxvt.

$ time cat /usr/share/dict/words

real 0m0.274s

user 0m0.001s

sys 0m0.088s

The vanilla installation of mrxvt is boring. You might want to use this .mrxvtrc. The only compromise with mrxvt is that since it's gtk-1 based you might have some quirks as it doesn't quite integrate well with a purely gtk-2 theme based GNOME desktop environment (such as mine).
Technorati Tags: gnometerminal,mrxvt,linuxconsole

PS3

2006-05-09T10:24:00.000+05:30

I'm Sold! Engadget/Joystiq have an excellent coverage article of Sony's E3 press conference.

OPML-ing!

2006-05-08T11:23:00.000+05:30

Latest craze on the web, sharing your OPML files.

Dave Winer's pet project "Share your OPML" launched and has been well received. (For those new to OPML)

I've been a big supporter of sharing OPML feeds for a long time now and this new idea is trully one in the right direction. As netvibes doesn't provide an opml-export option I'll have to submit one of my old OPML files which I managed to pull off liferea. You can take a look at my shared OPML file here(rather old one).

The other interesting feature is that Share-OPML let's you see who else has also subscribed to your feeds. Another neat feature is the feed-rankings page which shows which RSS feed is subscribed to the most. One can pick up a few good feeds from there. Another cool one is the most prolific subscribers page , people who live,breathe and crunch RSS feeds. As expected, Chris Pirillo is numero uno.

Links of the Day - May 4 2006

2006-05-04T11:06:00.000+05:30

Here's something new I'm trying out. Stuff which caught my attention for the day. :-)

1. Yahoo! seems to be using microformats for all their product reviews on Yahoo! Tech which is really kick-ass. The product reviews seem to using the hReview microformat.

2. Apple seems to have a new ad campaingn glorifying Macs over PC's. Too bad, I might never convert. Well there's always hope.

3. Sun's ZFS seems to be making a lot of noise in the Mac circles. Here's an article on how to use ZFS on a home desktop PC. There's also an online ZFS demo (flash). [Download link]. The demo shows creation of 100 filesystems in 20 seconds!

4. There are plans to make Etch ship-shape and stable by December 2006.

Submitting bugs for GMail ?

2006-05-03T20:27:00.000+05:30

Is it possible ? There seems to be a google-group for it. But I need some sort of Bugzilla like interface where I know my issues are taken into consideration.

Spent the evening submitting bug reports for Debian unstable.

#365880
#365885
#365875

Submitting these bugs reminded me of a nasty bug I seem to hitting with Gmail. On Firefox, when I compose the mail and attach a file to the mail, I get a "Cannot connect to GMail.." error. Removing the file seems to work. Either something is happening at the proxy server on my side or GMail's beta tag is justified.

Other's seem to be facing the same problems too. Hope it get's sorted out soon, it's getting on my nerves.

r2 turns 1

2006-05-02T14:48:00.000+05:30

My Sony PSP which I've named r2d2 is almost a year old. It's a 1.5 firmware PSP which means it allows all homebrew apps (and ISO backups) to runs on it. The asking price for a 1.5 firmware PSP on EBay seems to be anywhere from $200 to $230 and that too old ones. Looks like I have some "treasure" in my hands currently. Now to see what will be the price of a 1.5 PSP next year at around the same time. And here's also hoping that by next year the homebrew can also be run natively on 2.5+ firmware based PSP. Though I rarely use the Wi-Fi on it, it will be good to know that I can use it if need arises and not have to compromise on homebrew.

Cult of the FOX

2006-04-28T11:52:00.000+05:30

I'm a big Firefox fan, but isn't this a bit too much ?

Reminds me of the days of "This website is suited for IE with 640 x480 resolution" .

Firefox is great, it will eventually beat IE but aren't we touching extremes of fanboy-ism here ?

Agreed, that it does provide three options of advocating Firefox usage, still isn't Spread Firefox enough ?

technorati tags: firefox, advocacy, explorerdestroyer

[Debian-Bugs]

2006-04-25T13:38:00.000+05:30

Got hit by BUG 360421 . Had to go back to sarge and run a 'apt-get -f install'.

technorati tags: debian, bugs

Blog Template Cleanup

2006-04-25T10:43:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Blogger's custom templating system I had screwed up my blog's template. It's fixed now(i think) , had to remove the "Rollyo Search" thingie and the "Bloglet" and "Blogshares" thingies. Looks more cleaner now. Have left the "newsvine" and "digg" stuff for blog visitors to stumble upon some interesting stuff.

CodeMonkey

2006-04-24T17:27:00.000+05:30

Look Ma, They wrote a song about me.

Torrent.

Lyrics:

Code Monkey
by Jonathan Coulton

Code Monkey get up, get coffee

Code Monkey go to job

Code Monkey have boring meeting

With boring manager Rob

Rob say Code Monkey very diligent

But his output stink

His code not functional or elegant

What do Code Monkey think?

Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself

Code Monkey not say it out loud

Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Code Monkey like Fritos

Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew

Code Monkey very simple man

Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart

Code Monkey like you

Code Monkey like you

Code Monkey hang around at front desk

Tell you sweater look nice

Code Monkey offer buy you soda

Bring you cup, bring you ice

You say no thank you for the soda, cuz

Soda make you fat

Anyway you busy with the telephone

No time for chat

Code Monkey have long walk back to cubicle

He sit down pretend to work

Code Monkey not thinking so straight

Code Monkey not feeling so great

Code Monkey like Fritos

Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew

Code Monkey very simple man

Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart

Code Monkey like you

Code Monkey like you... a lot

Code Monkey have every reason

To get out this place

Code Monkey just keep on working

See a soft pretty face

Much rather wake up eat a coffee cake

Take bath, take nap

This job fulfilling in creative way

Such a load of crap

Code Monkey think some day he have everything, even pretty girl like you

Code Monkey just waiting for now

Code Monkey say someday, somehow...

Code Monkey like Fritos

Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew

Code Monkey very simple man

Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart

Code Monkey like you

Code Monkey like you

technorati tags: codemonkey

LiveURL's - my best hack till date Part II

2006-04-22T22:29:00.000+05:30

knutties has already written Part I of the LiveURL's story so I'll not be repeating that here.What I will be focussing on in this post is the feedback received on LiveURL's and the future direction of the project.

The Release:
The release was poor. This was the first time we had submitted code to addons.mozilla.org and we made a mess of it.We forgot to enter a proper description text about the URL. People who came to the website were left guessing as to what the extension did. Some rather negative comments which were posted on the day of the extension release would have made early-adopters leave the extension page in a hurry. But considering that the extension has been downloaded 1100 times in 3 days we think it's a good start.

Lesson learnt:
No matter how cool the technology if you don't describe your product properly it will fail

Feedback
The best part has been the feedback from peers. Getting some good feedback from people like sunson and nearfar is really satisfying. Also managed to get some feedback off IRC today. Feedback on Mozilla.dev.apps.firefox was lukewarm but the folks did give us something to think about on how this can be extended to the existing bookmarks section of Firefox.Here's a cool idea which Mike Beltzner gave.

Lesson learnt:
Open discussion is good.

Future Plans

Multiple content representation : Extending LiveURL's to indicate multiple selections would really be a good feature add.
Centralization : nearfar really believes that a centralized system wherein users needn't install any extensions/software on their PC to enable LiveURL's would be good. A webservice which incorporates a service like tinyurl.com + liveurl like capabilities would help. People just need to upload content to the liveurl.com site and they will get a URL which can be used by a browser which does not have any extension/software installed.
Annotations : We really feel annotations are the way to go when it comes to collaborative content sharing. A service like Annozilla modified to have a LiveURL for every annotation would be good to have.
Bugs: Writing a solution to encompass the trillions of webpages available is next to impossible, so as and when we come across a website wherein LiveURL's fail we need to fix it.

All in all, LiveURL's 0.2 should be a good update.Watch out for it. :-)

Back to school

2006-04-22T12:17:00.000+05:30

I'm in chennai for the weekend and while I'm here, I'm going to my oldschool days of music-listening. So,

Green Day,Madonna,Psapp,Audioslave,KoRn = OUT

Sepultura,Anthrax,Megadeth,Theatre of Tragedy,LedZep = IN

Feels good to get back to one's roots.Currently my playlist holds the following albums.

Megadeth - Rust In Peace - 10/10
Anthrax - The Greater of Two Evils - 8/10 *new*
Sepultura - Dante XXI - 7/10 *new*
Theatre of Tragedy - Storm - 5/10 [Single] *new*
Led Zeppelin - IV - */*

I'll give a rough rating for each album. No need to rate Deth's best album till date, it automatically deserves a 10-er. The Anthrax one is a re-recording of good old stuff which deserves a solid 8 just for the replay value. Sepultura's offering is not another Chaos A.D, it is however a concept album and narrates Dante's "Divine Comedy". Filled with short 3 to 4 minute thrash-blasts it is also the best Sepultura album post-Max Cavalera. I thought Theatre of Tragedy was down,out and done with after Liv Kristine left the band to form Leaves' Eyes but they seemed to have found a replacement Nell Something and I have to say she is no Liv Kristine.ToT disappointed. Guys, go get Liv Back and give me another "Hamlet for a soulful vassel", the pop craze is over. The last one on the list, heh.. there's really nothing *I* can write about it.

GData

2006-04-20T16:43:00.000+05:30

Now Google seems to be creating mashup's of syndication formats.Introducing GData , Google's brand of RSS + ATOM feed with their own little modification layer on top of it.Guess from now on Google users(like me) will get a constant feed of their GData.

Coverage here.

technorati tags: Gdata, syndication, feeds, rss, atom

Cool Firefox Extension

2006-04-20T16:09:00.000+05:30

Want to try out a cool firefox extension ?

Read about it here. Install it from here.

I'll post a more detailed blog entry soon. :-)

technorati tags: firefox, extensions, liveurls

Online Doc's using Writely

2006-04-19T10:36:00.000+05:30

I'm moving all my documentation to the web so that I can access it from anywhere.All collaborative mails which need to go out from my side and a few peers are now being done online through Writely. Just migrated a 7200+ .txt file which has served as a scrapbook for various odds and ends into Writely.

technorati tags: writely, onlineoffice

Netvibes ++

2006-04-17T12:09:00.000+05:30

So my fav online RSS manager,netvibes introduced tabs making my online RSS feed management easy.The new feature is really a welcome relief as my feed-list was growing and Netvibes was _not_ scaling up to handle all of them. The tabs feature now allows me to categorize the feeds into "feed-groups". Read the Netvibes Blog for other new features.

technorati tags: rss, feedreaders, netvibes, web2.0

Modern, Cool Geek

2006-04-03T14:32:00.000+05:30

Modern, Cool Nerd
60 % Nerd, 60% Geek, 39% Dork

For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.
Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!
Congratulations!

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 63% on nerdiness
You scored higher than 87% on geekosity
You scored higher than 65% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test.

Theo does it again..

2006-03-29T10:44:00.000+05:30

Newsforge has an interview with Theo,the lead developer/leader of the OpenBSD project. An excerpt:

NF: Lots of hardware vendors use OpenSSH. Have you got anything back from them?
TdR: If I add up everything we have ever gotten in exchange for our efforts with OpenSSH, it might amount to $1,000. This all came from individuals. For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars? Companies such as Cisco, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Siemens, a raft of medium-sized firewall companies -- we have not received a cent. Or from Linux vendors? Not a cent.
Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.
If you want to judge any entity particularly harshly, judge Sun. Yearly they hold interoperability events, for NFS and other protocols, and they include SSH implementation tests as well. Twice we asked them to cover the travel and accommodation costs for a developer to come to their event, and they refused. Considering that their SunSSH is directly based on our code, that is just flat out insulting. Shame on you Sun, shame, shame, shame.
I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already.

Help the blowfish to keep swimming

2006-03-22T15:04:00.000+05:30

Been planning to do this for a long time, finally did it today.

If you follow OpenBSD, all their development happens in Hackathon's held mostly in Canada,for this they fly in people from around the world and get them together under one roof and hack away at code..either OpenBSD or OpenSSH or any part of the BSD subsystem which requires attention.

One such Hackathon

Something happened in 2003,basically Theo went ahead and made anti-Iraq remarks and DARPA cut off their funding to one of the projects the OpenBSD team was involved with.

Today OpenBSD needs funds to continue the hackathon-culture.The CD sales have dried up and as people prefer to use the FTP mirrors instead.The project's unofficial press releaseon the project's finances and the release of OpenBSD 3.9.
So I ordered a tee-shirt from OpenBSD.org . Here it is

Costs $25 + shipping but worth it,and it's for a good cause.

It's a not a big amountand OpenBSD CD's are worthless to me(for now ) and I'm not an IT manager to donate money but the tee is a small way of saying Thank You for their work on OpenSSH which basically makes my life complete. :)

technorati tags: openbsd, teeshirts, theoderaadt, bsd, unix, blowfish