Geek with an attitude

A New Desktop for a New Year

2012-01-01T15:12:00.001+05:30

Compared to other new years where I would spend some time cleaning up my room or upgrading my gear, this year I did none of that! Instead I invested some time cleaning up my online space starting with a brand new distro. I’m a big fan of MacOSX’s Lion desktop and wanted to bring some of that minimilistic simplicity to the Linux desktop. So if the above screenshot looks appealing, then read on to see how you too can get a modern desktop that is simple and elegant. Unlike some of my previous desktop customization article, I’ll keep this one to the bare minimum so that you can implement it fairly quickly.

Installing the base OS

IMHO, Gnome 3 is the best next thing when it comes to being a modern desktop. I realize this is a controversial statement, given news of some ditching and some forking the project. But IMHO when you have a project that can polarize a community that was once united, it means you’ve got true innovation - not just incremental tweaks.

Having said all that, I’ve started with Linux Mint 12, as the base distro to build my minimilistic desktop even though Mint has many of the traditional Windows like UI elements. Now, I’m sure you could do this with Ubuntu 11.10, the base for Mint 12, but I like Mint due to their focus on usability where most of what I need work out of the box!

Let the tweaking begin!

Don’t worry I’ll keep it to a minimum! The first thing I did was to get rid of the bottom taskbar completely, because its soo Windows 95 like! Fortunately, Gnome 3 comes with an “Advanced Settings App” (gnome-tweak-tool in CMD line) which uses the same iPhone like on-off toggles to do the job.

Goto Desktop section within Advanced Settings App.

Have file manager handle the desktop -> ON
Computer icon visible on desktop -> OFF
Home icon visible on desktop -> OFF
Network Servers icon visible on desktop -> OFF
Trash icon visible on desktop -> ON
Show mounted volumes on the desktop -> ON

From the above list if you decide you want to see the Computer and Home icons or perhaps not have any icons then go right ahead. I have my reasons for the above :)

Goto Shell section and make sure every toggle is OFF

Goto Shell Extensions

This is where we do most of the customizations. We will come back to this but for now:

Menu Extension -> OFF
Media Player Extension -> ON
Smart Overview Extension -> ON
Monitor Status Extension -> OFF
Bottom Panel Extension -> OFF
User Themes Extension -> ON
noa11y Extension -> ON
Alt Tab Extension -> ON
Notification Extension -> ON
Shutdown Menu Extension -> ON
Window List Extension -> OFF

Goto Theme section and select Mint-Z-Dark as the Shell theme

Installing tweaks

As I’m running this distro on a 10” netbook, I wanted all the screen real-estate I can get. Besides running apps in full screen mode is all the rage these days! The other tweak that comes from the same repository, is to overlay an icon when viewing all open windows in the Exposé view. This makes it a lot easier to figure out which window preview is for which App.

Install PPA repository and plugins

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions-autohidetopbar
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions-windowoverlay-icons

After logging out and back logging back in (or Alt+F2 followed by r), head over to the “Advanced Settings App”

Next to the “Shell Extensions” section you should find new toggles

Smart Overview Extension -> ON
Auto Hide Top Panel Extension -> ON

In order to get more space and simplify the window, I wanted to get rid of the menubar by integrating it as a global menubar. Unlike MacOSX’s global menubar which is horizontal, this one is vertical and works perfectly with my limited screen width.

sudo apt-get install gnome3-globalmenu

Next I wanted get rid of the scrollbar, similar to how it is with Ubuntu. I used an updated verion of it from another PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ayatana-scrollbar-team/release
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install overlay-scrollbar

Ok almost done. The final step I did was to install a nifty applet that is great for laptops to manage power settings and screen resolutions, especially when you want to project. It adds itself right to the top menubar for easy access.

Install Jupiter

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter

And we’re done! Enjoy your new desktop this holiday season and Happy 2012!

Update (02-Jan-2012)

After writing the article I wondered if it was possible to get the Window titlebar to dissapear whereby Apps can run in full screen similar to Lion. Though its not perfect, the following hacks will give you just that!

Install window-buttons extension to mirror minimize, maximize, close buttons in the top menubar

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-window-buttons

Now enable the extension using “Gnome Advanced Settings” by visiting the “Shell Extensions” section.

Window Buttons Extension -> ON

Install maximus daemon to automatically remove the title bar as a window is maximized.

sudo apt-get install maximus

Restary Gnome 3 and your set. You can restore a maximized window using the buttons in the top right corner of the top menu bar.

References

Track Your New Year Resolutions With ii.do

2011-12-31T21:41:00.004+05:30

I know, I know, it’s a bit of a cheesy title to promote my Open Source project but here me out - it really does work. Though I didn’t really write it to track my new year resolutions (I’ve never found them effective beyond a week), I did write it out of constant frustration with not finding a TODO productivity tool that stuck with me.

Let me explain… I’ve tried EVERYTHING!

Google Calendar & tasks
Sending myself Emails
Wiki (Dokuwiki, Mediwiki, Twiki etc.)
Tomboy
Tomboy with UbuntuOne & Android App
EverNote
Remember the Milk
Gedit notes on my desktop
Post-it notes widget
Actual Post-it notes
Old-skool diary
Pieces of paper including backs of payment receipts

From the above list, if anything came remotely to sticking as a habit, then it’d be the sticky notes & pieces of paper. I’m not suggesting the other methods suck, but I wouldn’t use it beyond a couple of weeks.

Why was it that despite me spending hours on a computer, the best thing that had a chance of remotely working was old-skool pen & paper? And then it hit me. A good todo App should be:

In your face!
Really simple to use (like pen & paper)
Did I mention in your face?

Now my solution isn’t for everyone. At this moment, it is intended ONLY for fellow geeks who spent a lot of time in the command line (GNU & UNIX only), and I call it ii.do.

What is ii.do

ii.do, pronounced “I do”, but really a roman play on 2.do, is a command line todo list manager that uses a simple text file and simple MarkDown syntax to track your todo tasks. The beauty of using MarkDown syntax is in it’s resemblance to the natural way we jolt down text on a piece of paper.
ii.do is optimized around querying tasks as opposed to updating tasks. For entering and updating tasks, it uses a plain old vim text editor, which has syntax highlighting for Markdown built-in. If vi is not your thing, then it’s relatively easy to configure another editor by exporting the shell $EDITOR variable.

The other main design goal I had was to make it into a standalone shell script which could stand (mostly) on its own. Except for standard shell commands like sed, grep and bash itself, it doesn’t demand much.

But the main power of ii.do comes ONLY (and I repeat ONLY), if you modify your shell to :

Define an easy alias (such as t) which can be used to summon ii.do from anywhere within the shell
You modify your $PS1 shell prompt to update it with the pending number of tasks (this is the in your face bit)

The second one point above is important, if you plan on actually using it productively, for there is nothing like an App stalking you with a reminder of how many things you have left todo.

Installing ii.do

You can download a tarbar ball of ii.do from github. Then just extract it to your home directory, make the shell script executable (just in case) and finally copy the sample todo.markdown to your $HOME

 $ tar zxf geekaholic-ii.do-iido-xxx.tgz
 mv geekaholic-ii.do-\* ~/ii.do
 chmod +x ~/ii.do/ii.do
 cp ~/ii.do/todo.markdown ~

Though ii.do is now usable, you should create an alias in order to make it more accessible and add it to ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc

 echo "alias t='$HOME/ii.do'" >> ~/.bashrc

Finally the most important step of adding a counter to your SHELL prompt is semi-automated via ii.do!

 ~/ii.do/ii.do -S "$PS1" >> ~/.bashrc

Your all set! You might want to logout and login or do a source ~/.bashrc
Note: if you would rather relocate the todo.markdown, for instance in your Dropbox folder then use the -f option.

 echo "alias t='$HOME/ii.do -f $HOME/Dropbox/todo.markdown'" >> ~/.bashrc

Using ii.do

Now the fun begins! Lets start with the most basic.

 t -h

    Version: 0.6.1

    Usage: ii.do [-f todo_file.markdown] [-T topic_number] [options]

    Options :
     -e          Open TODO file using $EDITOR
     -n          Count number of pending tasks. Can be filtered using -x, -X etc.
     -X          Filter to show only pending tasks
     -x          Filter to show only completed tasks
     -i          Filter to show only important tasks
     -t          Filter to show only topics with topic_number
     -C          Don't colorize output (useful for piping)
     -H          HTMLize the output
     -S "$PS1"   Will return modified PS1 prompt to contain pending task count
     -h          Show this help screen

    By default, we expect a ~/todo.markdown to be in your $HOME if not overridden 
    by the -f option. Refer to http://github.com/geekaholic/ii.do for examples of 
    creating this file.

To edit a file using vi or $EDITOR

 t -e

Using markdown syntax to maintain todo.markdown is simple. You start out with a main heading called a topic.

  # Weekly Activities

or using the alternate style

Weekly Activities
=================

Next you start your list of tasks as a bullet * list

* Come up with a BIG idea
* Implement BIG idea and be awesome

You could further break up your topic into subtopics as follows:

# Weekly Activities

## Entertainment

* Watch a Movie
* Go bowling

Excercise
---------

* Go to gym at least 3 days a week
* Play some wii sports

As you might have guessed the --- are the alternate form for a sub level topic. This way you have have multiple top level topics followed by sublevel topics, having tasks at each level.

Now we got the data entry part sorted, lets see how we can query the task list.

Will show all your tasks using terminal colors.

To filter tasks to show only pending or only completed ones:

 t -X
 t -x

To filter by topic, so that it only shows tasks belonging to one topic including it’s sub topic:

t -t

1: # Weekly Activities
2: ## Entertainment
3: ## Excercise
4: # Home Work

t -T 1

The above will show everything up to topic 4 (Home Work)

To count the number of pending and competed tasks

 t -X -n
 t -x -n

To update the task to mark it as complete, place an x in front of the task

* x Take out the trash

To mark a task as important, place an ! mark in front of it

* ! Go to gym at least 3 days a week

To mark a task with a high priority, place the priority number in front of the task

* (1) Finish history essay

Finally, ii.do has two options that customize the output. The first option is to turn off color which is handy when you want to pipe the output of ii.do with more unix commands.

t -C | grep '^*'

The other option is to export the todo list as html

t -H > ~/todo.html

Other Uses

Besides tracking my todo list on a daily basis, I’ve recently found another use for ii.do - track my bookmarks. I know, your probably thinking of delicious or firefox/chrome bookmark syncing but for me those solutions just don’t cut it. For one, I use about 3 browsers and finding old bookmarks can be a real pain. So now I just use an alias with a custom bookmarks.mdown

alias bm="$HOME/ii.do/ii.do -f $HOME/Dropbox/bookmarks.mdown"

Another use was to keep track of lecture topics by marking them off as I taught them over a period of two months. I also use it to keep track of some interesting quotes I come across, just for inspiration.

Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-22T19:54:00.002+05:30

The passing of Steve Jobs came in as an instant shock that morning as I was reading the news on my phone. While it wasn't as much of a surprise as when MJ passed away, mainly because I had seen that one photo of Steve wearing a black gown coming back from the hospital, something inside me felt empty. When many flooded the social media and TV with messages of condolences and looking back at his achievements, I just watched not sure how I should express the loss.

So after about a week later, when I was asked if I can do a talk on Steve Jobs for Refresh Colombo, I immediately and almost impulsively said YES! But I still wasn't sure what I wanted to say. One thing I did know was that I didn't want to recap his life or accomplishments like I knew the guy.

Soon after accepting the talk, the next thing I almost instantly realized was that I needed to get Chanux in as a co presenter, not because we've recorded so many episodes of a podcast together but due to his reaction to Steve's death, which surprised me even more than Steve's death itself.

Why the majority of the people reacted the way they did will probably take a book to investigate, rather than a simple blog post, but I suspect it's complicated. So rather, I asked myself, what is it about Steve Jobs that I'm mostly going to miss. The keyword here being mostly, I realized I was going to miss his persona, his insight, his principals and his approach to doing things. And so that is what I decided the talk should be about - what made Steve great, or rather insanely great!

Myself and Chanux started doing brain dumps of Steve quotes which captured his philosophy just from the top of our heads. The way I saw it, if we couldn't really remember a particular quote and had to research on the Internet then it hasn't really had much of an impact on us personally. And so except for looking for some great images of which suited the slides, we didn't much go looking for his quotes. Consequently this probably means we might have not got the quotes in verbatim accuracy.

What follows is our presentation slides which we delivered last week. By highlighting these tidbits, we hope that it will inspire you to think differently about what you are currently doing before it is too late. Because our time on this planet is quite limited and even if we believe we're coming back it doesn't matter when it takes a new form factor with a completely new UI and Operating System!

Remembering steve

View more presentations from Buddhika Siddhisena

Getting Down With Markdown

2011-09-03T12:38:00.001+05:30

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to docbook, which I've used for most of my tutorial handouts and internal developer documentation at Thinkcube. But the more I used it docbook the more I wanted a simpler solution which didn't require me to make sure my XML was in order.

Naturally, at first I thought I'd try Latex since it had a pretty good wrap with geeks and has even surpassed usability expectations set forth by some of the mainstream wordprecessors :). What I loved about Latex was you could concentrate on the content first and formatting later. Its legendary ability to output desktop publishing quality documents and convert to a variety of formats such as html, pdf or odt was a killer.

Just as I was about to dive into Latex, Chanux suggested Markdown as an alternative. Hmm, Markdown, I pondered... I even liked the sound of it. It turns out Markdown is even better! You could think of it as a simplified wiki syntax but a better description would be to call it a WYSIWYG wiki syntax.

I've always endorsed the KISS philosophy. There is nothing more simple and satisfying than to write a text file using vim and track its progress via git. After briefly going through the syntax, I realized this is exactly what I needed. I also realized that I had already used Markdown without actually thinking about it as part of using github for a pet project. Everything about Markdown was all good and the whole controversy around Markdown's html compiler names were exactly the kind of celebrity gossip it needed to grab attention!

It was around this time, I was due to create a note for a tutorial for the ICTer workshop myself and Dr. Ajantha from UCSC was to deliver. By now, I had decided on Markdown with upskirt (yes this is one of the controversal names) to create the notes but what about the slides? Could I use Markdown for that as well? After a little looking around, I found a wonderful system called Landslide which enabled me to compile Markdown syntax into a beautiful html5 slide show presentation. After a little playing around I managed to build slides as well as the note using a single markdown source code! How cool was that? I will write a separate post soon on the HOWTO details but for now enjoy the slides, if thats your cup of tea. My Markdown adventures don't end there. This post too was written using Markdown and converted to html using octopress.

There's something about Lion!

2011-08-11T05:04:00.005+05:30

So it's been a little over a month since I switched to MacOSX Lion as my primary desktop after running Ubuntu and before that Gentoo on this Macbook. So why'd I finally switch? Well I'm sure it comes at no surprise to existing mac owners who mostly run OSX anyways.

I'm different! I owned two Mac's to date, first a MacMini G4 (PPC) since 2006 and now a Macbook Aluminum since 2009, both primarily ran some flavor of Linux. Sure I had OSX lying around in another partition, but I'd only boot into it once in a while, just to update or checkout an interesting app or two.

Linux was what i used, not because OSX was bad (like Windows is) but because I was more comfortable with it, it was more flexible, had more innovation happening (pretty much every 6 months) and above all it was fun to use. Part of that fun was really the do-it-yourself attitude Linux has had for years but is somewhat fading away IMHO with distros such as Ubuntu. Its also no secret that I like the OSX interface and have tweaked my desktop in the past to resemble it somewhat. At the time, what made me buy a Mac was not the OSX interface. I really bought the Mac for its beautiful hardware design and higher build quality despite Linux not being treated as a first class citizen on it.

After years of owning other laptops I was fed up! I recall my first ever laptop, a Sony Vaio back in 2000 which only lasted 3 months before the disk died. Coupled with my project manager's ignorance it would later never be able to have a hard drive! Years later I bought an IBM thinkpad which worked fine except that the plastic frame around the LCD started to crack one day as I opened or closed the lid and over time the crack increased to the point it was crippled as a portable device. My next HP pavilion developed a random boot feature (especially when compiling or transcoding) which I could never reproduce to get a replacement and lastly the Acer which had far too many problems to mention before it too died. Seriously people, whats a good Laptop thats reliable? Is Dell reliable?

When I first saw Lion being previewed at one of the Apple events I brushed it off as the same old OSX with an iPad like icon interface, which they now call Launchpad. It wasn't till the recent WWDC event when they showed off the full deal that I got an urge to install it. And so I pondered, "How do I get this beast on here?". My Mac partition was small and had less that 2GB free. I hardly had room on my Linux partition either to get away with a resize. Besides I knew Lion would not install with Linux lying around as the installer wasn't that smart to deal with it. I decided, it was time to delete the Linux partition!

Now I'd like to say it was a sad move which I pondered for days like when you have to move to a new place, leaving your friends behind. It really wasn't! I don't miss leaving Ubuntu. Not a lot at least...

And I ask my self, why am I not missing Ubuntu as much as I missed Gentoo or Debian before that. IMHO, Ubuntu isn't fun anymore. It was even somewhat frustrating to use with the new Unity interface being default and I tried to install Gnome 3 over it. That didn't go too well. It's not just in the GUI but also in the command line where things aren't that much fun. It just too easy! and you mostly don't need it. Don't get me wrong - this is all good and Ubuntu is doing fantastic work for getting Linux to the mainstream. Its just not that fun as say Gentoo or even Fedora. But the reason I'm not switching isn't because Ubuntu is not fun or because I'm frustrated with Ubuntu. I'm really not! If that was the case, I would have switched to another distro like Mint or Debian.

Lion had a few features which I thought was neat and fun to explore. One such feature I really like is full screen apps on its own desktop being a built in feature of the core OS. This is a usage pattern I was quite used to when working with multiple desktops on Linux. I'd always open several apps in maximized form and move them to their own desktop and switch between them using control + arrow keys. But its better on the Mac...

Your not limited by the static number of multiple desktops. On Linux I sometimes run out of desktops

It's an app feature so the desktop is automatically created and destroyed as you click the new full screen button found on the titlebar

Apps are in true full screen (no titlebar or menubar)

..and my favorite, it supports 3 finger swipe in addition to the keyboard short cut. Its really fun swiping between multiple desktops

Gnome3 looks promising in this respect as it too has the concept of dynamic desktops. Unfortunately it resets your desktops to always having just one and you have to create them all the time, which is more annoying than having a static number of desktops.

The other killer feature I like in Lion is support for multiple versions of a document. When Apple introduced "Time Machine" back in the day, the UI looked cool but it was not so practically usable as I would imagine as you needed an external hard drive in order to do continuous backup. Unlike what many speculated to be the adoption of ZFS and its online snapshotting capabilities, it turned out to be a far less elegant method under the hood. I doubt its as elegant as ZFS even with this feature because the underlying filesystem is still HFS+ but it works quite well in a practical manner for apps that makes use of this new API (Apple's own apps at the moment). Whats really cool is that the same time machine like UI is adopted to browse the different versions of a document where you can even copy & paste objects between versions.

The automatic save and resume of application's state between reboots is another interesting feature worth studying about. Again it only works for apps that use special APIs but essentially the app is hibernated and resumed as opposed to the whole OS. As a result its a lot faster. The ability to access documents by file type regardless of where its stored in the filesystem is another good usability feature which I always wanted the Linux desktop to have. In a world where hard drives are large and there are too much clutter, the filesystem organization is really a bottleneck. I don't think Lion nailed it either but its a good start. Vista tried and failed with WinFS. Google, beagle (now tracker) and Spotlight's approach of giving a search engine doesn't quite scale in my opinion. You'd think search would work, especially from Google but the more I think about it the more it seems to me that, we think Google is awesome because it finds the information we're looking for and gives us an answer - not necessarily the the needle in a haystack. For instance I really find Gmail frustrating for finding a mail which I vaguely remember about. Desktop search breaks down as opposed to web search because it is needle in a haystack problem but I digress!

There seems to be tons of other small technological as well as usability features of Lion and OSX which are pleasant having around and are interesting to study. So to summarize why I switched, its not one single thing but many things. I'm looking forward to the MacOSX command line and I've already started exploring it with the help of O'Reilly's book "Mac OSX for Unix Geeks". It was only recently after arriving at OSX, I really appreciated the bonjour protocol and its implementation on Linux via avahi. Most Linux users don't know that they can ping their neighbors machine without DNS or IP address but merely using the machine's hostname with .local appended to it. When did you drop in to a command line on Ubuntu and try running avahi-browse -a or avahi-discover?.

Trying to install LAMP on MacOSX I realized how frustratingly fun it was. It was like going back to the Redhat 9 days of manually enabling apache modules. There is also Mac Ports which is akin to Gentoo's portage where you download and compile apps, which is fun!

Having said all this, there is so much more of little things that I like (such as being able to right click on a word and look it up or have it read me the text via the excellent TTS which can also be done on the command line using the say command) and some things that are annoying like Finer (file browser) not supporting tabs, cut & paste of files or ability to delete without first sending to the trash. And I hear printer configuration is also non intuitive if your coming from Windows/Linux despite it using CUPS. I also find it using a bit more memory than usual on some apps and as a result my 2GB is almost fully used making it too slow for running Virtualbox.

All in all, I'm pleased with the move and look forward to learning more of its underlying intricacies and BSD origins in days to come. There sure is something about Lion!

Why read when you can listen?

2011-08-01T00:20:00.006+05:30

There's an old quote, "Reading makes a full man". I'm not quite sure who said it but I know it's got to be at least a couple of years older than myself because I was introduced to the concept early on by my dad. Despite the early infusion of such words of wisdom, I really never turned out to be a good reader.

For one, I could never read on a moving platform for more than 60 seconds without feeling nauseous. Forget about reading in bed either, for more than 40 - 60 minutes (my record might be about 90 minutes) before the book starts slapping my face multiple times as I loop over the same paragraph of text over and over before giving up and falling asleep!

When I do get into the mood of reading, it still seems to take me much longer to finish a book when compared with, oh I don't know my sister! She's got a ton of books, almost all novels and I remember seeing her finish them fast.

So early on as a kid, I realized, my reading time was precious and best spent on things that I ought to really care about. Things that add real value as opposed to mere entertainment. As a result, I hardly read fiction or even science fiction for that matter but instead resolved to science fact books like astronomy, GW Basic programming and my favorite - books on magic. This was probably early signs of my geekiness.

Eventually I did get around to reading fiction (and sci-fi) in limited quantities and throughly enjoyed it. I got "what the fuss was about", but still felt it was a waster of effort which I could substitute with watching the movie.

Now don't get me wrong! I love books as much as the next guy. I have a shelf full of books and a few more overflowing around the house. The problem is, I have way too many books that I've started to read but never finished. Fortunately almost all of them are computer books. More recently though, I've had better success completely reading books thanks to the Kindle because I can carry it around.

And then I decided to try out audible. They had a couple of deals which they advertised often on Amazon (amazon owns it), but only made me consider after listening to a sample of a book I owned and loved.

My first audio book which I purchased and downloaded was "Contact" by Carl Sagan. It was one of the few sci-fi books I already owned and read only because I fell in love with the movie. It was also one of those rare stories in which I felt the movie was as good (if not better) as the book even though the two had a considerable difference to the story line. After hearing a sample narration of the audio version by Jodie Foster, I wanted to download it immediately. Contact was my catalyst (aka killer book) for getting on the audio book bandwagon.

Since then I've picked up several books, fiction and non-fiction. While I won't mention them here, I will mention one great book I just finished today listening to and which made me want to write this post. The audio book is none other than "The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (HHGG)" by Douglas Adam and narrated by Stephan Fry. Unlike Contact, I had never read the book though I owned it and always meant to get to it. Having obsessively listening to it the past week, even falling asleep to it, I admit this was probably the best narration I have ever heard of anything so far, ever! (not that it's saying a lot given my geek background, but I do have good taste!)

Before I conclude this post which I didn't expect to be this long, I'd like to throw in this food for thought. Was my dad right about the "Reading makes a full man?" quote or is reading overrated? Should reading even be considered as an optimal means of consuming knowledge or gathering information? I mean think about it! We live in an age where information is available at the tip of Google but its mostly just text which needs to be read. The more you think about it, the more you realize that reading is the "last mile" bottleneck between information and your brain.

I am not saying reading and writing must die! I do feel reading fast (skimming) might be more efficient to discover the relevance of information than listening. Writing and reading what you've written might also be more useful for gathering thought. What I am debating is whether once the message has been devised (through iterative writing and reading), delivering that concise message need always be done via text to be read.

Why then are we still fixated on reading? Is reading a legacy practice that's been passed from generations and one that made perfect sense when it was the only viable means of recording information? If so, given today's rich multimedia options, why aren't we switching our primary medium?

The answer may well be the generation gap. Perhaps we will realize once the kids who are now growing up in a world of podcasts, youtube and interactive games decide what to do with it when they rule the world. What do you think? Should I stop writing and just stick to podcasting after all?

It's true, I'm on a Lion

2011-07-29T22:52:00.002+05:30

Greeting fellow bloggers and no I'm not dead. Blogging for me has got to a point where its a post or two per year! So at this point it doesn't matter what I say because I doubt any of my old followers are going to read this any time soon.

As usual, I would have blamed busyness (a result of %s/y/i/) and twitter but honestly speaking it was the absence of the mood which killed it. Lately I've been doing so much of writing at work, the last thing I want to do is come home and do more of it. So instead, I'd prefer to pretend to hack on some C/C++ or Ruby or PHP and play some PS3 and call it a day.

Today was different, it was our celebration of the International Sysadmin's day. So unlike my typical day, I went to a bar and talked geek with fellow sysadmins, all the while munching away on bites and sipping on some free beer (free for now, IOU Deep). During our conversation, amidst the noisy band that was playing, one of the things, I came out and confessed is the topic of this long awaited post.

And since I'm in my geeky little mood, I thought I'd share my confession - I run Mac OSX Lion! Further more I run Mac OSX Lion, wait for it....., at the expense of Linux.

Now for the random reader this might not be such a surprise. Apparently you can't go to a conference in the US without seeing 90% of the devs on a Mac. But I'm not the type to join a mono culture for the sake of it. Those who know me, knows I've had this Macbook since the days of Mac OSX Leopard but 99% of the time it was running on Ubuntu.

So what happened? Why'd I switch? My answer isn't the stereo typical "I'm a Mac fanboy", "Linux is frustrating" or "I want it to just work" sort you'd get. Its much deeper than that.

Stay tuned....
(P.S. Don't worry it's not 42 and I'll try to get to the post soon!)

The Linux Speed Boost!

2010-11-22T11:20:00.002+05:30

Oh my, it has been a while since I visited my Blog. While there were few worthy posts which I should have blogged about, that never happened. Recently, when I came across a post on OMG Ubuntu, about a new kernel patch which supposedly speeds up Linux, I just had to try it out. Its been a while since I've compiled my own kernel (these days I rely on stock Ubuntu), but after seeing the results myself thought it was very much blog worthy for me to share with you.

First off, for the impatient or the unmotivated, let me point you to another post on Phoronix, which contains a video showing the night and day difference this patch brings. If your still not impatient, then you could wait for 2.6.38, which will hopefully have this, considering Linus's supportive comments, regarding the patch.

Ok now for the glory details on getting this patch up and running. I did this on Ubuntu 10.10 but it should work the same for other Debian and Debian like distros as well as other popular distros with minor tweaks.

Get the kernel

Download the kernel 2.6.37 from kernel.org. At the time of writing, 2.6.37 had not been officially released and was at RC2


cd /usr/src
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.37-rc2.tar.bz2
tar jxf linux-2.6.37-rc2.tar.bz2

Get the patch

The patch published by Mike Galbraith can also be copied from here. Save it to a file called kernelboost.patch in /usr/src/kernelboost.patch

Dry-run and Apply patch

Go to the kernel directory and dry-run the patch to make sure it applies cleanly. If everything is ok, go ahead and apply for real ;)


cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.37-rc2
patch --dry-run -p1 < /usr/src/kernelboost.patch

#if everything is ok
patch -p1 < /usr/src/kernelboost.patch

Configure and compile the kernel

This is a generic step of compiling the kernel. The configuring step can be performed using your current config file. Make sure you enable the patch by answering Y to CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP.


cp /boot/config-2.6.35-22-generic /usr/src/linux-2.6.37-rc2/.config
make oldconfig
make
make modules_install
make install

If your on Ubuntu, I'd recommend installing the kernel the Debian way instead of using the make, make modules_install and make install steps.


apt-get install kernel-package fakeroot build-essential ncurses-dev
cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.37-rc2
sed -rie 's/echo "\+"/#echo "\+"/' scripts/setlocalversion
make-kpkg clean
CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=`getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN` fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers

cd ..

You should find two .debs in /usr/src related to the new custom kernel. Install using dpkg -i or by double clicking on the deb from the file manager. Once you reboot to the new kernel everything should be all set. Just to double check make sure :


cat /proc/sys/kernel/sched_autogroup_enabled
1

If it has 1 then its enabled. You can echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/sched_autogroup_enabled to disable the scheduler on the fly.

I noticed a significant improvement when trying to play BioShock from Steam using CrossOver Games. With the previous kernel, I had a lot of lag, especially with Compiz turned on. For instance, when moving the mouse to look around, it was very much discrete. Now I notice things are smoother and the game is much playable.

Your experience may be different depending on how you use the computer. Chances are that if you tend to use CPU hogging applications such as playing games or watching HD movies, you will notice an improvement.

Till next time a blog worthy event that excites me happens~

Splitting a git repo

2010-02-08T15:52:00.008+05:30

Its been almost an year since I last blogged and what can I say, micro-blogging killed blogging for me. Even micro-blogging has got to a point, I don't do as much as I used to. Perhaps the end of web 2.0 or perhaps I'm getting too old for this :)

Anyhow, getting back to the subject of this quick post, it seems splitting a git repo into two separate git repos is somewhat obscure and required a bit of googling around. Fortunately I came across this great blog post, but wanted to summarize it in one place (the author made me look at several pages to put it together).

Say I have a git project called foo.repo which had a subdirectory called bar, that I now want to make its own separate git project called bar.repo.

Current state


foo.repo/
  .git/
   bar/
   abc/
   xyz/

target state


foo.repo/
  .git/
   abc/
   xyz/

bar.repo/
  .git/

Step 1 : Clone existing repo as desired repo on the local clone

$ git clone --no-hardlinks foo.repo bar.repo

Step 2: Filter-branch and reset to exclude other files, so they can be pruned:


 $ cd bar.repo
 $ git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter bar HEAD  -- --all
 $ git reset --hard
 $ git gc --aggressive
 $ git prune

Step 3: Create new empty repo on git server


 $ mkdir /var/git/bar.git
 $ cd /var/git/bar.git
 $ git --bare init

Step 4: Back on the local machine, replace remote origin to point to new repo


 $ cd bar.repo
 $ git remote rm origin
 $ git remote add origin git@git-server:bar.repo
 $ git push origin master

Step 5: Remove bar directory from original foo.repo


 $ git filter-branch --tree-filter "rm -rf bar" --prune-empty HEAD

or supposed to be faster, I haven't tried

$ git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -r -f --cached --ignore-unmatch bar" --prune-empty HEAD

Reference

Refactoring my personal git post

Detach subdirectory into separate GIT repository

Setting up a remote GIT repository

Fedora 11: First impressions

2009-06-16T01:58:00.001+05:30

Fedora 10 (F10) was one of the best fedora release I've come to use. I liked it so much that I made it the default OS on my Mac Mini PPC. So naturally I was looking forward to the release of Fedora 11 (F11). But with a couple of release dates slipping, the wait was somewhat of a torture. This of course is to be expected with Fedora, I was told, because all good FOSS community software follow the philosophy "IT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN IT IS READY!" (oh and "RELEASE OFTEN" but thats beside the point :).

Now before I give my first impressions, I must warn that if your a die hard Fedora fanboy, then please STOP reading.

....

Even if your not please note that these impressions are based on the Fedora Live CDs (both standard and kde based) and I have yet to download the DVD release. I did not install the Live CDs but merely ran them Live and only for a short period of time (a little over an hour combined). I tested the Live CDs on both my older Acer TravelMate 4200 laptop as well as the relatively newer Macbook Aluminium Unibody.

F11 on the Acer notebook

The first thing that I noticed was that finally Kernel ModeSetting (KMS) worked on this Intel GMA 950 GPU. If I recalled correctly, with F10, the Intel drivers were broken with KMS. Unfortunately I found the KMS boot splash somewhat boring. Compared to F10, which really showed off the power of KMS with an awesome solar system animation (I saw it on an ATI GPU), F11 had a much simpler Fedora logo that filled up as the system booted. I'm sure there may have been a logical reason for simplifying the animation, but my first impression was it needed more sex appeal.

Once the system had booted and transitioned nicely to the login manager (thanks to KMS), followed by the desktop (after auto login), I found my self further disappointed esthetically, this time due to dull looking wallpaper and theme. IMHO, F11's wallpaper is several steps back when compared to the beautiful wallpapers of F10, F9 or even F8. The desktop theme plays a key part in the first impression and so perhaps they should have stuck to the wallpaper they had during the beta release.

F11 beta wallpaper wasn't so bad

One thing I did like visually over the previous releases was that of the notification popup balloon.

Beyond the look, F11 felt like a very solid distro. Before F10, with earlier releases, I felt somewhat on unstable and shaky ground. F10 changed my perception and F11 takes it a little further.

While pretty much everything worked on my Acer notebook, there were few noteworthy bad first impressions I had with the out of the box experience. First up was the touchpad tapping being turned off by default. Now while I'm aware this is the default behavior on Windows, it is nevertheless a bad idea. Why disable this feature that most find useful? Other desktop focused distros such as Ubuntu or Mint seem to have tap turned on by default. Having said that, its pretty easy to turn tap on using the Gnome mouse preferences dialog. Unfortunately the same cannot be said with KDE 4 Control Center. I was unable to find this setting on the Fedora KDE spin.

Another default setting that I didn't understand was the 3D desktop (aka Compiz) being turned off. Considering Linux very well supports composition on the Intel GPU, I don't understand why Fedora does not want to give this cool first impression feature (actually for me Compiz is beyond cool, its a necessity). The kde spin did not even have the "Turn on desktop effects" helper application and the one that is part of the kde 4 Contol Center was functional but slow.

As far as the applications went, I was thrilled to see Firefox 3.5 beta in there. Even though this was a beta release, most people have reported that it was stable and visibly faster than the previous version. Unfortunately if your on the kde spin, you wont find Firefox at all! I'm also glad to see Pidgin back as the default IM instead of the cool but not so functional Empathy IM, the default on F10. The lack of OpenOffice on the LiveCD struck me as a definite lack, and other Office suites (Gnome Office nor Kde Office) are simply not worthy of being default replacements.

A complaint most often heard from the Windows cross over crowd is the lack of basic codecs for playing multimedia formats. Given the legal nature of shipping these codecs, most desktop distros try to simplify the "finding and installation" process by providing helper software. As far as my tests went, F11 was not friendly in helping me find and install some of the basic codecs such as mp3 or xvid. In contrast Ubuntu seemed to do this reasonably well.

Nevertheless I saw improvements in terms of functionality and stability with Package kit - Fedora's answer to unifying package management in a consistent manner across distros. While its exciting to see where this project is heading, there are still some fundamental usability issues that need to be fixed. For example, a simple thing such as the lack of a proper progress indicator when updating the package database can be frustrating to watch and wait, especially with low speed broadband Internet connections. Another annoyance are the multiple dialog boxes that can appear during an install, in which all of them are waiting for the package database to be released. What would have been better was to have a single dialog which showed the task queue with the current one highlighted and progress indicated.

F11 on the Macbook

Next up was to test how F11 fared with my Linux hating Macbook. As expected I ran into many problems most of which are not unique to F11 but are seen in pretty much all current Linux distros. Two things that did not work with F11 at all but partially worked with Ubuntu/Mint was the touchpad and wireless. On F11 the mouse cursor would not move at all, while on Ubuntu it can be used as a single buttoned mouse (no tap support but click works). The wireless also worked on Ubuntu using the free Broadcom driver with the option to install the proprietary one. Not so in F11 and I had to use the wired connection to fix this. Sound did not work either, but neither did it on other distors. The lack of pommed package in the F11 repo was another frustration in trying to get the touchpad and some multimedia keys working. But this is not to say its impossible and if you google around, you should be able to find a few HOWTOs. I was a bit disappointed that even with the latest Nuova drivers that came with F11, it was still unable to boot via KMS or even auto load the driver under Xorg. Instead F11 seemed to use the vesa driver instead.

Conclusion

Overall I'd recommend F11 for anyone fond of RPM distros, those thinking of upgrading from a previous version or anyone who wants a bleeding edge but rock solid distro with the (almost) latest kernel and set of packages. Personally I prefer deb based ones but with YUM and Package Kit getting better the difference is likely to disappear. I'm definitely going to upgrade (or install from scratch), F11 on the Mac Mini PPC because Fedora supports PPC quite well. If your going the Fedora route, I really couldn't recommend the Kde spin due to the lack of some important pieces and the poor integration. I would rather install the standard Gnome based one and install kde on it.

Lights, Camera, Action!

2009-06-06T20:37:00.002+05:30

SinhalenFOSS, the audio podcast we started a little over an year ago is now available as a vidcast. A couple of months back, I got a call from Dr. Ajantha and I was thrilled to hear of UCSC.tv, the latest venture by UCSC. I was even more thrilled when Dr. Ajantha invited us to produce the SinhalenFOSS podcast on it.

Despite our enthusiasm, we soon learned how hard it was to produce the show as a vidcast. We were used to recording the audio podcast at our own time, sometimes in the car, sometimes at home or office or even on the road. We would sometimes answer phone calls from loved ones in the middle of the recording and edit that out. Our podcast was pretty much a basement operation by 3 sweaty guys :)

So I guess the most difficult task was to make us presentable on video. To that extent, the UCSC TV crew has done a good job with makingup us! The next challenge was time management. While our audio show was roughly 1 hour long, it wasn't strictly 1 hour long. Sometimes we went on and on for 1:45 hours and at times was done in 45 min. With the vidcast, we now have to be aware of time and wrap up when we see the 2 minute sign. To further complicate time management, we have to break the show up to 2 parts of 25 minutes each but make it appear to be one show on the audio podcast.

While all this might seem like a list of complaints, its actually been a blessing. We've now have the opportunity to show visuals of news sites and software screens when doing reviews as opposed to just talking about it. The sound quality has also improved vastly due to the studio setting.

Unfortunately the vidcast is still not in line with the audio podcast as the video post production
takes time and there many shows on UCSC.tv. They're also still on a pilot run and looking for a partnership to broaden the reach of the online tv channel. As a result, atleast initially, shows are likely to have a delay when they air.

In addition to Sinhalenfoss, I'm also producing another geek talk show appropriately named Geek Katha. On this show, we talk about gadgets and technology in Sinhala. Producing a gadget/tech talk show is a challenge and takes a lot of preparation, especially with the style of live recording we do. Once we start recording, its a continuous recording for 25 minutes. The PS3 show which will hopefully air next week, took a considerable amount of time to produce. But I enjoy producing both shows and so far the response for both shows have been quite good.

So finally I ask you to head on over to the ucsc.tv web site and watch the shows and provide your valuable feedback and encouragement to take this effort forward. The success of this new venture depends on you.

Birthday gift

2009-05-01T23:26:00.006+05:30

Kanchana, my wife had an old P4 machine from back in the days before we met. It was a PC House branded G-Max. Anyways, she's been wanting to fix it up and give it to her sister to use and so we'd figure it would be a good B' day gift for her. So last weekend, about this time, I was sweating it off trying to put it back together in time for April 25th, her B' day.

We'll it began a couple of days earlier, 23rd to be exact, when we picked it up from her parents place and cleaned it up and tried plugging it in. For better or worse, nothing happened - nothing worked. At least this thing wasn't going up in smoke.

I removed the casing which was slightly more difficult than usual as a result of the case design. You couldn't pull out the motherboard because the CPU fan hits the CDROM and you couldn't pull out the CDROM for exact same reason. So I removed the power supply, slid the motherboard and lifted it up once the CPU fan was in the clear.

The fun part was cleaning off the layers of dust and the few cockroach eggs that could be seen on the chassis. After blowing at the board frantically, I know I needed some sort of compressed air. Not having it, I improvised with my deodorant spray which did the trick. After letting the deodorant alcohol to dry, I went about setting up the system on top of a piece of wood. To my pleasant surprise it turned on, after shorting the jumper pins that would otherwise be connected to the power switch.

As expected the CMOS battery was dead and needed replacing, which I did. I also thought it would be good to upgrade the CDROM to a DVD ROM/Writer which I had lying around. This proved quite difficult as it was impossible to get the CDROM from the back and getting it from the front proved quite difficult. There was no straight forward way of getting the front blue panel off from the casing and I struggled for at least half an hour. A half and hour and a bucket full of sweat later I just ripped it off damaging just one revert in the middle. Fortunately this wasn't a big deal as I was able to upgrade the CDROM and reattach the panel.

Timing was good as Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 had been released just a day earlier so I slapped that on while wiping out Windows XP and Redhat 9. Despite the machine being several years old, everything worked quite well, even with the 512MB ram it had. The machine booted in under 20 seconds thanks to the bootup optimizations found in the new Ubuntu. Unfortunately 3D (compiz) did not work even though it had a built in Intel 945 graphics.

Since she was into media, I installed inkscape, skype, elisa, audacity, sinhala stuff and various codecs needed to get by. To top it off, we bought her a 17" View Sonic flat panel display which cost only 13K - not bad IMHO.

Overall she was quite happy and has somewhat gotten used to working on Linux. A couple of days ago she commented that it was becoming easier to use - easier than Windows XP.

Pulling along ...

2009-04-18T05:58:00.001+05:30

Considering it's been exactly 1 year since my last post, I pondered a bit on a title for this post. "The comeback", "Still live and kicking" or "I'm back!" sprang to mind. But then I realized I'd be fooling my self and you, if I even remotely meant this blog was going to be regularly updated. Hence a title which better reflects the current state of my blog and to an extent my life - pulling a long a day at a time.

Now don't get the wrong impression - I'm not depressed! As some of you already know my life's gone through a few transformations. Hmm let me see, first there was the marriage, then moving to our own (rented) place, loosing my iPod touch (oh the drama), moving again to a bigger house, moving again to a new office, moving away from
Gentoo, moving back to Gentoo, buying new iPod touch 2g, getting a new macbook, buying a few ps3 titles including guitar heros 3 and buying an actual guitar and taking up lessons.

Ok so that last para covers the highlights that come to my mind at this early 1:42 sweaty AM. For the juicy details leading up to now checkout my Twitter time line. Basically I've been a geekaholic all along, you just didn't see it here.

Besides the random stuff, I've been atleast (somewhat) keeping up with the SinhalenFOSS podcast to the point we have at an average 2 shows a month, which is what we planned initially before going for a weekly format that we find difficult sticking to - pulling along.

My usual old reason for blogging less was micro blogging and it still holds true. The one thing that will replace micro blogging is telephathy and I suspect we're a couple of decades away from seeing that.

zzzzzzzzzz ....

5.45am
Looks like I fell asleep while typing on the iTouch. Anyway I conclude by asking you to watch this space while I pull my way back in to blogging.

Posted with LifeCast

24hrs Sinhala Blog Marathon Starts Today!

2008-04-18T00:16:00.004+05:30

The Sinhala Bloggers Union is organizing a 24hrs Blog Marathon starting from 8pm local time today, 18th to the 19th. There are currently over 30 participating blogs, including our sister (or brother depending on where your from :) site sinhalenfoss.org. Each blogging site will be trying to reach a crazy difficult target of 96 posts! In otherwords, we're talking about a blog post appearing from each site every 15 min! Multiply that by 30+ sites and boy I hope the net doesn't crash :P

The easiest way to catch all the fun is to constantly reload http://marathon.sinhalabloggers.com/, the official blog aggregator (syndicator) for the event. But it doesn't stop there. These guys have created a custom Face Book application for the FB junkies, a twitter channel for twitter addicts like myself, a Yahoo Pipes mash up for the web services oriented and even IM based updates.

If your interested in blogging in Sinhala Unicode, it might not be too late to enroll your self by contacting them.

Best Last place to listen to Music

2008-04-14T13:47:00.006+05:30

If your a music lover and also inclined to discover new (&old) music then last.fm is the place to be. I've signed up a couple of months back and have really been enjoying music surfing. Thats right! similar to channel surfing last.fm is about discovering music based on what you like and what others who are like you like. There is plenty of research in this field, some of which are headed by the folks at lastfm, but what it essentially means is a good trip down music lane :)

You can sign up for a free account and search based on artist or a tag such as pop, rock, jazz or female vocalist. In any case your search result becomes a virtual radio station which goes off on all sorts of tangents discovering similar artists or similar artists, tags and so on. When you hear a song you really like, you can express your pleasure by marking it as loved, or display your hate by banning it and you shall never hear it. You can also skip tracks, unlike web streaming radio but can not seek within the song, since it isn't meant to be "music on demand" sort of a service but more of a personalized radio like service.

The killer feature is scrobbling, which you can get by downloading and installing the Free/Open Source last.fm client on your computer or portable device such as an ipod touch/iphone or N800. What scrobbling essentially is tracking the music you play and uploading that information to the last.fm server against your profile to improve the kind of music you hear and to provide user listening patterns and charts.

The ipod touch/iphone client for those who've managed to jail break their device is simply awesome. I am so hooked on listening to music wirelessly while lying in bed and marking tracks I like and checking out lyrics, information on the artist using the integrated wiki lookup as well as checking artist tour dates and locations (not that I'll ever go but its fun). Unfortunately the desktop clients seems to lack some of these fine features integrated for the time being.

So if your music lover, go check it out. Its web 2.0 done for music where you can form your own little friend network and discover music together. if your really hooked on it, might even be worth dishing out a couple of extra bucks for the value added features the network provides.

Sinhalen FOSS Blogcast

2008-04-10T10:26:00.002+05:30

Recently I've been trying to start a Blog and Podcast as a means of reducing the language barrier when it comes to learning and playing around with Free and Open Source Software, aka FOSS. So a couple of months back I started the Sinhalen FOSS Blog at Wordpress.com. The idea of the blog is really to introduce various aspects of FOSS such as howto's, command line tips/tricks etc. and provide a forum for other Bloggers to contribute related articles. In this regard, I am grateful to Lakmal and Kanchana for their contributions and hope more of you will take the challenge in installing Sinhala Unicode and getting in to the habbit of remembering to write in Sinhala :). Yes it can be a pain, especially with the current state of input methods. Yes there are always complexities in writing proper Sinhala. But as far as I'm concerned writing something is better than not trying at all. In this regards, I'd have to thank my mom who is my personal Sinhala specialist (she's got a degree in it), and Dhahajaya who is an upcoming singer/song writer (not to mention our accountant).

So the next natural evolution from text is to get into audio. Actually thats not really the case, but for now about an year I've wanted to start podcasting. I've, myself am (me me me) a huge fan of podcasts and listens to over 10 podcasts while on the road on my ipod. Besides I've always had a thing for talking so finally with the help of 2 more geeks, chanux and seejay, I've managed get over the inertia of getting into podcasting.

With the launch of the podcast, I've decided to get its own domain so from now on both the Sinhalen FOSS Blog and Sinhalen FOSS podcast will live at http://sinhalenfoss.org. We'd like to call it a BlogCast because its a fusion of both those elements. Talking about the show, its going to be bi-weekly (hopefully) at first and depending on the feedback and our time availability we might go in to a weekly format. The show will roughly be an hour long, where we will talk informally about news events in the foss world, reviews, gossip and what not in sinhala.

So go check out the pilot episode and give us feedback on how to improve, what you'd like to hear more of less of.

Good bye Gentoo - Hello Leopard

2008-04-01T16:50:00.007+05:30

The following post was an April Fools Hoax :) While bits of it are true such as I did finally move away from Gentoo as my primary distro its got more to do with lack of time and laziness to reinstall gentoo. Hopefully I'll do another post on me moving to Kubuntu (Ubuntu + kubuntu-desktop package). I did find few annoyances but one should expect that running a beta software. I am happily using kubuntu with full desktop effects that is far superior that of Apple of Microsoft.

I did buy the Mighty Mouse and Apple keyboard as mentioned I wanted a good portable bluetooth device and they worked effortlessly (almost :) on the latest Ubuntu 8.04.

No Leopard's were harmed in creating this hoax as the desktop your seeing on my Acer laptop is actually a full screen screenshot sent to me by Siraj using his Mac notebook which I loaded before taking the picture.

Its been a little over 3 years since I switched from Debian to Gentoo. I still remember my blog post titled "Goodbye Debian, Hello Gentoo" like it was yesterday. Gentoo was a gr8 distro for me since my machine ran like a speeding bullet as a result of being able to optimize it to my old P4 notebook at the time. Actually before loading Gentoo on my notebook I actually ran it a on my AMD64 bare bone system as a 64 bit OS. I later install gentoo on my Mac Mini PPC as well and was loving it.

But then came the painful realization of upgrading packages and I would spend a lot of time on the PPC machine and the AMD 64 machine downloading and compiling packages. You see unfortunately in most cases downloading source code takes up more space than the compiled binary and compiling it on an old PPC system or even an old AMD 64 (2GHz equivalent) was a killer. But I must say I enjoyed it - until of course the system was still half broken and I had to do a revdep-rebuild to rebuild those packages.

Eventually I gave up running Gentoo on those systems and started running Ubuntu or Debian. Till recently my Apple PPC G4 was running Debian but when I upgraded to Leopard (aka Mac OSX 10.5) it replaced the boot loader so now its just running on that. My AMD 64 is running Ubuntu 64 with a Leopard like theme by following the instructions at Mac4Lin.

So basically till last weekend I was only running Gentoo on my main notebook and funny enough it was the same installation I did 3 years ago on my HP P4 notebook. You see when I got this new Acer, I was too lazy to re-install Gentoo so copied the files across and re-emerged everything. And thats how Gentoo is. You can rebuild the whole system and have it like a new one. But for things to work right sometimes you end up recompiling a couple of times only to find by the time your done its time to upgrade again :) But more recently I had a couple of apps which just crashed like wvdial and X with compiz.

So last weekend, I carefully backed up my data and started installing Ubuntu. Since I was already using xorg 7.3 and what not I thought I'd install Ubuntu+1 (aka 8.04 beta). Its one thing to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu but another to also switch from Kde to Gnome. I've been a Kde user for over 6 years! So I did the apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. Oh boy is kubuntu not so ready. Compared to Ubuntu I find it buggy and not polished at all.

After spending the whole of weekend I managed to get something which sort of resembles my favorite desktop - Leopard.

But it was such a pain. When ever I rebooted the machine kubuntu would not properly start desktop effects. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and even went on IRC #kubuntu but no luck. Finally I nailed it down to a some sort of a dbus error. And that was the last straw! I've had it spending time messing around with my OS. The reason I left Gentoo was to have an easier time enjoying the desktop and now the same thing with kubuntu!!!

All this happened yesterday and I was quite frustrated with Kubuntu and Linux in general. I know linux has come a long way and its still a great OS but when all you want is to "just do it" Linux tends to fail more often. So I was quite frustrated and went for a shower since by then I was feeling so sweaty and sticky. While showering it occurred to me that I was really most comfortable with the Mac OSX GUI than anything else. If you've been following my blog you would remember that I wrote several posts from even before Compiz-beryl was invented on making the desktop look more like Mac OSX. I remember a couple of years back I managed to install a hackint0sh version of OSX Tiger on one of the IBM Thinkpad, so yesterday started looking into it. I had the ISO for Tiger but wanted to install Leopard instead. Luckily I had the ISO's for Leopard also :) since I had upgraded my Mac Mini with it so after following the instructions at this site I managed to get OSX Leopard running on my Acer.

Everything pretty much works great such as Sound, 3D acceleration, Networking, Wi-Fi and even bluetooth. I recently bought an Apple Mighty Mouse since I wanted a bluetooth wireless mouse and it works great. It was so much easier to configure on OSX than on Linux.

So it looks like for the time being until I have a bit more time on my hand I am leaving the OS I spent the last 8-9 years using for an OS I've aspired all other OSes should become. Apple has always been very innovative and I think the desktop OS will be won by them at the end.

I am still a hoping to use a lot of Open Source software from within Mac OSX. When I get more time I might even look into the wonderful Darwin system which is a truly Open Source kernel based on BSD Unix. I am also very keen on getting into Apple's Objective C based CoCoa development using XCode since it will provide me with the means to develop iPhone apps using the SDK. I also hope to buy an iPhone once the 3G version is available. Wooh! can't wait!

Anyway I wrote a lot and I'm quite excited and hope to bring you guys more articles on using Mac OSX!

Wicked Shell Programming Workshop @ UCSC

2008-03-15T23:19:00.003+05:30

We had a nice couple of sessions on shell programming today at the LSF lab @ UCSC. Anuradha started off with a great introduction that set the stage for the rest of the day. I followed with my invent as I go style of presentation, which for the most part I believe (hope) made sense. Then Sapumal did the evening session on brining all of it together with an advanced session.

There was a good geek crowd that filled the small LSF room where geeks were seen on chairs, couches, on top of tables and on their feet. All of the speeches and some interludes were recorded and could go up youtube if and when someone gets around to it. Overall it was a good first day and more will follow tomorrow.

I have a session in the evening and will try to pop in and out between my usual Linux lectures at UCSC and the workshop. In the mine time, enjoy these few pics I took from day 1.

Our first IEEE paper has been published!

2008-02-24T19:00:00.002+05:30

Dr. Ajantha came back from the "International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology" after submitting what appears to be our (that is myself and Wathsala's) first paper at an IEEE conference. The subject of the paper which you can download and read here, is about a Next Generation Proxy caching system which fuses the idea of Cached content and Bandwidth utilization with web 2.0/x.0 trends.

These ideas are the result of what we learned by implementing Bassa, an Open Source Next Generation Proxy Server (NGP) at UCSC. We are very excited about continuing our research and development to expand its scope.

Just another day @ the Sri Lanka Customs Office

2008-02-23T18:40:00.000+05:30

Oh boy what a day it was! I spent a good 5 hrs at the Sri Lankan Airport cargo office on Friday trying to clear a 3" tiny piece of memory which I had ordered for my Toshiba L1 laptop.

I didn't really expect this to be held by customs in the first place, considering its size, weight, cost and the fact it was a 256MB chip (quite outdated by todays memory standards). I was also misled by FedEx's tracking comments which gave no indication of the shipment being held at customs but stated that it was on its way for delivery. It was only when the courier guy came and handed a letter I knew what happened. What was more amusing was the next update on FedEx's tracking site - Goods delivered.

I called up FedEx and they said in order for them to clear it I had to get apply for a VAT number which seemed like an unnecessary hassle. They did suggest I go to the customs and try to sort it out myself - thank you FedEx for getting me FedUp!

So I made my way to Katunayake which turned out to be a real Katu (needle) trip :) Granted you have to go through a strip search of the vehicle and get two passes, one for the person and another for the vehicle, considering the current security situation is understandable. What really ticked me off was the series of events that happened after I got in.

To be continued ...

IMPORTANT: Upgrade Linux kernel to fix possible root exploit

2008-02-15T02:36:00.003+05:30

Its rare but sometimes it *can* happen. This is an important one to fix! If your running a GNU/Linux server (or desktop), running kernels from 2.6.17 - 2.6.24.1, it is HIGHLY recommended that you update the system using what ever package management system your distro provided, IMMEDIATELY.

If not updated, your system could be at risk allowing a normal shell user to gain root access (i.e root exploit).

A technical overview of the exploit and links to POC code and source code patch can be found here.

OLPC coming to Sri Lanka

2008-02-04T01:48:00.000+05:30

Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop on "One Lap Top Per Child" or OLPC as they call it, at HNB Towers. The OLPC is a marvellous piece of technology (note, I fell short of saying hardware). For instance it has a very low power processor that was developed by AMD to only consume 2 Watts of electricity, compared to 30 - 40W on other notebooks!

The battery has a life span of 4,000 hours compared to about 2,000 on others and only costs USD 10 to replace it (costs about USD 60 - 100 on our laptops). The screen works great in both indoors and in bright sunlight where it consumes less energy and has a higher resoultion in a black & white mode. The screen's back light can be replaced easily without having to replace the whole LCD panel and it only costs 25 cents to replace!

It has a WiFi like no other! It supports mesh computing, a standard known as 802.11s (as opposed to 802.11b/g). And still normal wireless devices are welcomed to connect as p2p devices (ad-hoc mode). Wireless distance can range all the way up to even a 1km away (shhh don't tell TRC) by auto negotiating its connection speed to a lower value. All it needs is 1 laptop with an internet connection for others to have internet connection. It even triangulates and shows other OLPCs in a relatively positioned map.

Its water proof, dirt proof and shock/drop proof. Held together by 13 or odd screws, this is probably the only laptop in the world where you are encouraged to take it apart and try to fix problems before taking it for repairs with no warrenty issues.

So in other words, this is device of freedom. Total freedom! And who better to have that but the next generation. I just wish they'd come up with an OLPD too (see below :)

With all that enthusiasm, I started digging around the OLPC's shell to dig up info I could cherish about its specs (hardware & software). So for all you GNU/Linux geeks out there this bit is for you. Other (Mac & Win users) can enjoy the pics, read about the hardware and run to learn GNU/Linux ;)

/proc/cpuinfo


processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 5
model  : 10
model name : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
stepping : 2
cpu MHz  : 431.222
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug  : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu  : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp  : yes
flags  : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 sep pge cmov clflush mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 863.54
clflush size : 32

/proc/meminfo


MemTotal:       237852 kB
MemFree:         27792 kB
Buffers:          1008 kB
Cached:          98988 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         118936 kB
Inactive:        67584 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               4 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:       86544 kB
Mapped:          26180 kB
Slab:            16588 kB
SReclaimable:     5712 kB
SUnreclaim:      10876 kB
PageTables:        864 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:    118924 kB
Committed_AS:   163984 kB
VmallocTotal:   794604 kB
VmallocUsed:     17856 kB
VmallocChunk:   776592 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

lspci -v


00:01.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Unknown device 0028 (rev 21)
 Subsystem: National Semiconductor Corporation Unknown device 0028
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248

00:01.1 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Geode LX Video (prog-if 00 [VGA])
 Subsystem: National Semiconductor Corporation Unknown device 0030
 Flags: 66MHz, medium devsel, IRQ 14
 Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
 Memory at fe000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Memory at fe004000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Memory at fe008000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Memory at  (32-bit, non-prefetchable)

00:01.2 Entertainment encryption device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Geode LX AES Security Block
 Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Geode LX AES Security Block
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0
 Memory at fe010000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]

00:0c.0 FLASH memory: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4100 (rev 10) (prog-if 01)
 Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4100
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
 Memory at fe020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: [88] Power Management version 2
 Capabilities: [9c] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:0c.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4101 (rev 10) (prog-if 01)
 Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4100
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
 Memory at fe024000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: [88] Power Management version 2
 Capabilities: [9c] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:0c.2 Multimedia video controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4102 (rev 10) (prog-if 01)
 Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4100
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
 Memory at fe028000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: [88] Power Management version 2
 Capabilities: [9c] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:0f.0 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] ISA (rev 03)
 Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] ISA
 Flags: 66MHz, medium devsel
 I/O ports at 18b0 [size=8]
 I/O ports at 1000 [size=256]
 I/O ports at 1800 [size=64]
 I/O ports at 1880 [size=32]
 I/O ports at 1400 [size=128]
 I/O ports at 1840 [size=64]

00:0f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] Audio (rev 01)
 Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] Audio
 Flags: 66MHz, medium devsel, IRQ 5
 I/O ports at 1480 [size=128]

00:0f.4 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] OHC (rev 02) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
 Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] OHC
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
 Memory at fe01a000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
 Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

00:0f.5 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] EHC (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
 Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] EHC
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
 Memory at fe01b000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
 Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

lsmod


Module                  Size  Used by
nls_utf8                1888  2 
vfat                   12064  2 
fat                    48124  1 vfat
sg                     33276  0 
i2c_dev                 7268  0 
usb8xxx                18084  0 
libertas              183324  1 usb8xxx
ieee80211              32232  1 libertas
ieee80211_crypt         5664  1 ieee80211
cs5535_gpio             4740  0 
mousedev               11192  0

xorg.conf


# Xorg configuration file for OLPC

Section "ServerLayout"
 Identifier     "Default Layout"
 Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
 InputDevice    "fake" "CorePointer" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

# Fool 1.4 autoconf into seeing a mouse and keyboard so it won't
# try to synthetize them
Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier  "fake"
 Driver      "void"
EndSection

Section "Module"
 SubSection "extmod"
  Option "omit XFree86-DGA"
  #Option "omit XFree86-Misc" # needed by 'xset m'
  Option "omit MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD"
  Option "omit TOG-CUP"
  Option "omit Extended-Visual-Information"
 EndSubSection
 Load  "freetype"
 Load  "evdev"
 # Load "record" # Mostly a debugging tool
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
 Option  "XTEST" "Disable" # Mostly a debugging tool
 #Option  "SECURITY" "Disable" # CRASH!
 Option  "XC-APPGROUP" "Disable"
 Option  "XINERAMA" "Disable"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 Identifier  "DCON"
 HorizSync   30-67
 VertRefresh 48-52 
 DisplaySize 152 114
 Mode "1200x900"
  DotClock 57.275
  HTimings 1200 1208 1216 1240
  VTimings 900 905 908 912
  Flags    "-HSync" "-VSync"
 EndMode
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Geode"
 Driver      "amd"
 VendorName  "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc."
 BoardName   "AMD Geode GX/LX"

 # Disable VGA for the OLPC board
 Option      "NoVGA"  "true"
 
 Option     "AccelMethod" "EXA"
 Option     "NoCompression" "true"
 Option     "CustomMode" "true"
 Option     "DconPanel" "true"
 Option     "PanelGeometry" "1200x900"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Screen0"
 Device     "Geode"
 Monitor    "DCON"
 DefaultDepth 16

 SubSection "Display"
  Depth   16
  Modes   "1200x900"
 EndSubSection
EndSection

iwconfig


lo        no wireless extensions.

msh0      IEEE 802.11b/g  Nickname:"Mesh"
          Mode:Repeater  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Bit Rate:2 Mb/s   Tx-Power=18 dBm   
          Retry limit:8   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr=2346 B   
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=90/100  Signal level=-46 dBm  Noise level=-86 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:15504
          Tx excessive retries:424  Invalid misc:781   Missed beacon:0

eth0      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"olpc-mesh"  Nickname:"MRVL-USB8388"
          Mode:Ad-Hoc  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Cell: 02:24:14:95:01:57   
          Bit Rate:2 Mb/s   Tx-Power=18 dBm   
          Retry limit:8   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr=2346 B   
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=54/100  Signal level=-59 dBm  Noise level=-78 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:15878
          Tx excessive retries:432  Invalid misc:794   Missed beacon:0

ps aux


USER      PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root        1  0.0  1.7   4968  4152 ?        Ss   05:51   0:02 oatc               /init
root        2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>  05:51   0:00 [kthreadd]
root        3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   05:51   0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root        4  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [watchdog/0]
root        5  0.1  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:03 [events/0]
root        6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [khelper]
root       47  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [kblockd/0]
root       48  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [ksuspend_usbd]
root       51  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [khubd]
root       53  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [kseriod]
root      114  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    05:51   0:00 [pdflush]
root      115  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    05:51   0:00 [pdflush]
root      116  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [kswapd0]
root      118  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [aio/0]
root      518  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [kpsmoused]
root      560  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [kmmcd]
root      616  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    05:51   0:00 [init] 
root      642  1.3  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   05:51   0:39 [jffs2_gcd_mtd0]
root      645  0.0  0.2   2136   664 ?        Ss   05:51   0:00 init [5]         
root      734  0.0  0.2   2260   600 ?        S>s  05:51   0:00 /sbin/udevd -d
root      863  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [libertas_main]
root      864  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:51   0:00 [libertas_worker]
root     1231  0.0  0.2   1804   600 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 syslogd -m 0
root     1234  0.0  0.1   1740   396 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 klogd -x
dbus     1257  0.0  0.4   2956  1040 ?        Ss   05:52   0:01 dbus-daemon --system
root     1279  0.0  2.8  15700  6704 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/sbin/rainbow-daemon --daemon
root     1294  0.0  0.3   5392   936 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root     1306  0.0  0.9   7564  2188 ?        Ssl  05:52   0:00 console-kit-daemon
root     1339  0.0  0.4   5336  1108 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 crond
root     1383  0.0  0.2   1740   624 ?        SNs  05:52   0:00 anacron -s
68       1416  0.1  1.1   4696  2828 ?        Ss   05:52   0:03 hald
root     1417  0.0  0.4   3080   992 ?        S    05:52   0:00 hald-runner
root     1441  0.0  0.9  28740  2152 ?        Ssl  05:52   0:00 NetworkManager --pid-file=/var/run/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.pid
root     1451  0.0  0.4   3172  1072 ?        S    05:52   0:00 hald-addon-input: Listening on /dev/input/event0 /dev/input/event1 /dev/input/event2 /dev/input/event3
avahi    1480  0.0  0.6   2788  1504 ?        Ss   05:52   0:02 avahi-daemon: running [xo-05-26-00.local]
root     1481  0.0  1.4   9140  3372 ?        S    05:52   0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/olpc-hardware-manager
avahi    1482  0.0  0.1   2656   432 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 avahi-daemon: chroot helper
root     1507  0.0  0.1   1728   464 tty1     Ss+  05:52   0:00 /sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1
root     1511  0.0  0.1   1728   460 tty2     Ss+  05:52   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2
root     1512  0.0  0.2   1740   508 ttyS0    Ss+  05:52   0:00 /sbin/agetty ttyS0 115200 vt100
root     1513  0.0  0.5   2884  1196 ?        Ss   05:52   0:00 /usr/sbin/olpc-dm
olpc     1538  0.0  0.4   2556  1068 tty8     Ss+  05:52   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/olpc-session -- -fp built-ins -wr
olpc     1555  0.0  0.3   3072   928 tty8     S+   05:52   0:00 xinit /usr/bin/olpc-session -- /usr/bin/X -fp built-ins -wr -auth /home/olpc/.serverauth.1538
root     1556  2.5  3.0  12540  7284 tty3     Ss+  05:52   1:11 /usr/bin/X :0 -fp built-ins -wr -auth /home/olpc/.serverauth.1538
olpc     1566  1.9 13.1  53660 31184 ?        Ss   05:52   0:56 python /usr/bin/sugar-shell
olpc     1574  0.0  0.2   2836   612 ?        S    05:52   0:00 dbus-launch --exit-with-session sugar-shell
olpc     1575  0.0  0.4   3076  1176 ?        Ss   05:52   0:02 /bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
olpc     1586  0.0  1.8   8008  4484 ?        S    05:52   0:01 matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar no -theme sugar -kbdconfig /usr/share/sugar/shell/kbdconfig
olpc     1588  0.2  4.6  15368 10948 ?        S    05:52   0:06 python /usr/bin/sugar-presence-service
olpc     1590  0.0  1.2   8200  2920 ?        S    05:52   0:00 /usr/libexec/telepathy-salut
olpc     1592  0.0  3.7  13272  8820 ?        S    05:52   0:01 python /usr/bin/sugar-shell-service
olpc     1594  0.3  5.8  46412 14012 ?        Sl   05:52   0:09 python /usr/bin/datastore-service
olpc     1603  0.0  0.1   1728   380 ?        S    05:52   0:00 /bin/cat
olpc     1605  0.8  9.7  35768 23244 ?        S    05:52   0:24 python /usr/bin/sugar-activity journalactivity.JournalActivity -b org.laptop.JournalActivity -a 5b61a1f8af585a3b41fd3bb974a9289ac4695e81
499      1670  0.0  0.2   1824   708 ?        S    05:54   0:00 avahi-autoipd: [msh0] bound 169.254.2.71                                                  
root     1671  0.0  0.1   1776   356 ?        Ss   05:54   0:00 avahi-autoipd: [msh0] callout dispatcher                                                  
root     1749  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   05:58   0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
olpc     1802  0.0  0.1   1732   384 ?        S    05:58   0:00 /bin/cat
olpc     1827  0.0  0.6   3440  1636 ?        S    06:01   0:00 /usr/libexec/gconfd-2
olpc     1843  0.5 10.3  49576 24560 ?        Sl   06:04   0:11 python /usr/bin/sugar-activity terminal.TerminalActivity -s -b org.laptop.Terminal -a a33cc298fb40442a4de34be74e637289c40777e6
olpc     1844  0.0  0.2   2424   628 ?        S    06:04   0:00 gnome-pty-helper
olpc     1845  0.0  0.6   4688  1528 pts/0    Ss   06:04   0:00 /bin/bash
root     1966  0.0  0.4   2872  1092 pts/0    S    06:11   0:00 su -
root     1977  0.0  0.6   4684  1536 pts/0    S    06:11   0:00 -bash
root     2144  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   06:39   0:00 [scsi_eh_2]
root     2145  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S>   06:39   0:00 [usb-storage]
root     2182  0.1  0.4   3176   980 ?        S    06:39   0:00 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sdb (every 2 sec)
root     2191  6.0  0.3   4516   944 pts/0    R+   06:39   0:00 ps aux

What is OLPD you ask? "One Laptop Per Dad" of course! Sorry mom, you can borrow mine.

RMS events in Sri Lanka

2008-01-18T22:33:00.000+05:30

I've just come back from UCSC's roof top, where RMS came to say hi to the many geeks, students and staff as the last event before he heads back tomorrow noon.

The last couple days had been quite hectic, balancing between home, work and organizing RMS events. From before his arrival on the 14th to the present day, its been a juggling act of trying to stay on top of things. It was challenging and non trivial considering the nature and importance of the visitor (after all RMS started it all) and the fact we wanted to get so many different groups involved. There was ICTA, FOSS.lk (which in itself is a bunch of groups), SLIIT, UCSC, UoM, UoP, IIT, NIMB, APIT, PC House, Cannonical, Redhat, WSO2 and probably more. And looks like we pulled this one off quit well, phew!

RMS arrived in Sri Lanka on the 14th of Jan and I ended up tagging along with Himira of ICTA/LKLUG to the airport. The flight was supposed to be at 11:45am and we were doing the whole CIP (Commercially Important People as opposed to VIP) thing. But it so happens the new CIP doesn't have a lounge and so we ended up staying at the VIP lounge. Besides getting up close but not personal with CBK, JRaj and SarathA as well as me reading RMS's book, we were pretty much waiting, waiting and waiting, for 4 hours! RMS was on a Sri Lankan UL flight from India, which was only supposed to be an hour flight. When asked as to the reason of the delay from one of the airport staff, he humorously explained it was due to UL flights being Usually Late. There was nothing we could do anyways since we were pretty much in house arrest with no way of even going out for a bite.

He finally did come at about 2:30 pm. We greeted him at the terminal and proceeded to immigration after taking few pictures (I'll post them as soon as I get them). RMS started reading and replying to his mail, which I presume he had downloaded before getting on the plane, using Emacs, on his rather bulky Thinkpad, using vt text console. He also offered a stack of CDs and challenged us to pick a CD to listen to. I picked the first one, not knowing exactly which was better. It turned out to be some pretty nice Vietnamese music, which we listened to on our way back to Colombo. There were a few little nice things that happened such as getting my book autographed and him offering us delicious New Zealand cheese but I'm too lazy to blog about details. Your just gonna have to read my twitter if you wanna catch that, or better yet follow me so you don't miss it next time :)

Anyway I didn't see him again till today at the Malabe SLIIT event where he delivered a speech which can only be described as one of the best speeches I've heard of his filled with humor, ridicule, inspiration and wisdom. Somehow he managed to create a perfect fusion of speeches he is known to give into one spectacular speech. The auditorium, known to support about 800 people was full with a few people even standing at the back. And yet the place was silent, if not for RMS's voice. Ven. Mettavihari and Chamath managed to clear the Ubuntu CDs that Cannonical had couriered from customs and bring it to SLIIT just in time, before the event ended. Those CDs vanished fast - 600 CDs gone in 600 seconds!

Now if you knew and admired RMS and still missed the events, may be because you didn't know or just couldn't make it, well you have my apologies (for not doing enough advocacy) and sympathies (might have been a once in a life time chance if he never comes back, though you never know). If you don't know him, well then you probably think your not missing much, but boy were you wrong! In any case we do hope to encode and upload video of his speech on to one or more of the popular video uploading servers. So come back to this post and you might just find a link to it.

Links related

My photo blog (sorry not many)

Suchetha's Photo blog

Deep's photo Blog

Dassa's Photo blog

Siraj's photo blog

Suchetha's Blog post

Laktek's Blog post

Chanuk's Blog post

Laknath's Blog post

Imesh's Blog post

Sahana guy's post hanging out with RMS

Dhammika's Blog post

Article on the Nations

Article on News.lk

Article on Lanka Newspapers

ICTA, the host of this event

FOSS.lk(an organizer's) event page

Hacking the iPod Touch / iPhone - Part 3

2007-12-25T01:18:00.000+05:30

Right! so you had plenty of time to purchase the touch or the iphone and Steve had enough time to cut me a check for the previous 2 articles. But since the later didn't happen, lets just concentrate on the former - but this time in combination with GNU/Linux.

Once the new line of ipods were released, it was soon obvious that third party media players, such as gtkpod/amarok/winamp, were no longer able to sync with them. Whether this was intentional or just a consequence of Apple improving things will depend on who you ask :) Fortunately though, (ipod Linux?) hackers managed to figure out a way to get syncing working again - in just a couple of days, might I add!

Unfortunately the ipod touch/iphone is another beast altogether! Neither support the USB mass storage modes and instead rely on a proprietary message passing method that is yet to be deciphered.So AFAIK, neither of the two devices can sync over USB as far as gtkpod is concerned. Hopefully someone will figure it out or we may not need it after all if as rumored, Apple adds USB mass storage using a firmware update. But rather than languishing on what may or may not happen, lets see how it can be done at the moment.

Before you begin, make sure you have a Jail broken iTouch/iPhone with OpenSSH server installed and running.

Mounting the iPod Touch

While we may not be able to mount the iTouch as a USB mass storage device, we can mount it over the network - provided it has been Jail broken. The easiest method, which I'll discuss involves mounting the device over SSH with the help of sshfs fuse driver, a user space kernel driver. Other methods you might want to look into are the Apple File Share (AFP) and Samba which are installable on the Touch.

Before you can mount over sshfs, you need to install fuse and the sshfs driver. On Ubuntu, this would go something like:


  # apt-get install sshfs

You might also want to load the fuse driver manually if you get an error in the next step.


  # modprobe fuse

Create a mount point (in your home directory) to mount the iTouch and mount it using its ip address.


  $ mkdir ~/mnt_itouch
  # sshfs -o allow_other root@<ip_of_itouch>:Media mnt_itouch

You should now be able to see the content of your itouch on mnt_itouch directory.

Compiling GTKPod

At the time of writing, you needed the svn version of libgtkpod and gtkpod in order to support the hack explained earlier w.r.t the new ipods. Hopefully by the time you read this, you might be able to use the stock version that come with your distro of choice. If not, there is a good howto. These are basically the steps involved.


  $ mkdir gtkpod
  $ svn co https://gtkpod.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gtkpod/gtkpod/trunk gtkpod
  $ svn co https://gtkpod.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gtkpod/libgpod/trunk libgpod
  $ mkdir ~/local
  $ cd libgpod
  $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/home/<user>/local
  $ make && make install
  $ cd ../gtkpod
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home//local/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh --prefix=/home/<user>/local
  $ make && make install

Create a small launch script for gtkpod as follows


  $ cd ~/local/bin
  $ echo 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/<user>/local/lib /home/<user>/local/bin/gtkpod' > gtkpod.sh

New hack: Getting the Firewire GUID and setting it in libgpod

The hack for the new ipods require something called a firewire GUID to be taken (I think its used as a salt in the hash algorithm) and written so libgpod can use it. For this, you need to plug in the iTouch over USB and wait a couple of seconds for things to settle before executing:


   # lsusb -v | grep -i iSerial | head -n 1 | sed -e "s/.\+3[ ]//"|cut -c1-16
   a12b3c1a35c7ba56

   $ echo 'FirewireGuid: 0xa12b3c1a35c7ba56' >  ~/mnt_itouch/iTunesControl/Device/SysInfo

Now if you launch gtkpod via gtkpod.sh it should recognize your iTouch automatically (since its mounted on your home directory). Before you sync any files, it would be a good idea to select the ipod touch / iphone model from the list available on gtkpod.

There are still some issues with this method (at the time of writing):

Album art doesn't seem to work.

Only preliminary support for Photo management. I could only view and download photos. Not upload new ones.

Podcast playlist not supported. AFAIK this isn't quite supported with old ipods with gtkpod. But it does work with old ipods on amarok - not sure why.

Slow, very slow syncing large files. I think this is a result of mounting over ssh. The encryption must be stressing the iTouch processor. May be the Samba or AFS is faster here.

Another tip if you plan on using iTunes and gtkpod is to use the SwapTunes.app on the iTouch to keep two copies of the iTunes database - one for iTunes and the other for gtkpod. This way you risk less, corrupting the iTunes database.

Thats it for now. As always, do check out the comments for additional things I may find after writing this. In the next article, I'm hoping to write a little about the productivity apps as well as some other cool apps focusing once again on desktop integration (spelled GNU/Linux desktop integration). Till then, enjoy your technology! (sorry Cali)

Christmas came early for me this year...

2007-12-18T20:37:00.000+05:30

My command center went through a major overhaul this year a couple of weeks ahead of Christmas as I upgraded my 19" LCD monitor for 32" LCD TV. This was good because I now no longer need to juggle swap A/V cables when ever I want to switch between watching Dialog TV, Playing the wii and ps2.

The BIG screen was fabulous but I was and still am a bit disappointed when viewing non HD content. Even though this Samsung TV is not that bad, its not so high end to have an upscaler needed to convert the image from 480i to 720p. Unfortunately as far as DialogTV goes, I'm going to have to be stuck with SVideo at best (actually Composite seems to have better quality where). On the Wii and the PS2 end, I'll have to try and get a component cable, which I could not find in
SL. But still those two don't support full HD.

On the otherhand, once you plug in the Mac mini via VGA, things looked great. Playing DVDs also works well because a computer can upscale video. Unfortunately my Mac mini is an old G4 based one, and chokes under HD video. I'm also running out of desktop space to my full desktop PC. Size matters, and I miss my old barebone form factor.

Anyway so I dropped a big one and bought a PS3! Yes it was heavy to carry out of the shop and heavier on the wallet but hey, now I've got HD through HDMI. Its all courtesy of "Buy now, suffer later" also known as Credit Cards :) Buy hey, atleast I'll have a ton of fun this Christmas while I keep the economy moving, right?

Upgraded my command center :D. Showing 32" Samsung, PS3, Wii. The Wii is shown in picture-in-picture while I'm playing NFS Prostreet demo. Also visible - Mac mini, Dialog TV

Why KDE4 (might) suck!

2007-11-24T20:35:00.000+05:30

I've been a kde user for very long time, since from before version 3.0. I vaguely remember being excited with version 3.0 to the point I was using the beta releases on a daily basis.

Similarly I have been anticipating kde 4.0, the next major release since 3.0 I suppose. But it seems that is just its problem! Its too much of a major release to be pushing out in such a hurry. I have been following kde 4 from time to time by reading some of the discussions on the panel-devel list, trying out the alpha releases via the SUSE live cd and of course discussing with Siraj, our local kde developer, on the internals (technology and community wise).

While things have improved a bit, with each release of kde 4, its far from ready. We are now at RC1 and the announcement says its ready for prime time testing.

Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling on the community to participate in reporting bugs during the time remaining before the release of KDE 4.0 in December.

Meanwhile, preparations for the KDE 4.0 release event is taking place, with the main event taking place in Mountain View, California in the USA in January 2008. Make sure you don't miss it!

Well from what I saw on the Debian based LiveCD, its far from being usable on a daily basis. I sincerely hope this is because the Debian guys didn't compile or package it correctly, even though thats very highly unlikely.

And while I don't want to ruin the January release party at Google, which by the way, goes up to Jan 19, which happens to be my B' day (Whooo!), my feeling is kde 4 should have been pushed back to June/July to make give that polish.

Anyway rather than just rant on and on, let me put forward my main issues with it, coming from a kde 3.x background. My testing procedure involved booting up kde 4-rc1 debian live cd and taking notes on the iTouch. To get a bit more background to the issues I was facing, I mailed those comments off to Siraj and I have included his comments and my replies to his comments :) Even he seems a bit frustrated with some aspects of the current state of kde. I'm sorry I don't have screenshots. All this was tested in 30-40 minutes, which only goes to show that its too easy to be annoyed with kde 4.

Legend: My initial comment, Siraj's comment, My response to his comment :)

Bugs like

* I see a floating klipper with black background

> Not a bug, plasma is yet to find a way to using XEmbed windows
inside a QGV , so till that is ready clipper will float.

>>Well its a bug! I get this from time to time even on kde 3.5.x after compiling with library versions used with beryl/compiz. But that happens randomly on 3.5.x and is predictable on 4.0. This should be fixed before final release

* I can't adjust time using clock applet. How do I change time format from 12/24

> you can't ;) it's a known issue :P

* I can't remove some applets like Lancelot. Why not have a remove applet functionality inside add applets dialog

> I don't think the IPC (dbus call) to remove an applet is not ready yet

* I can't resize plasma applets!

> hehe, the clock you can! others u can't ;)

>>Thanks for adding that feature. But its still crude (you need to type in a value under configure menu). Resizing should part of (inherited in )all applet

* Its not clear how I add stuff to kde menu's quick access tab.Would've been easy if I could drag and drop from app tab

* Plugging in my iPod, USB disk didint fireup the what should I do pop up. Neither did it show anything on my desktop.

> I don't thing solid supports all that, but do u have the solid applet loaded ?

>>No didn't have this loaded. I think such applets, if there are any needs to be loaded by default.

* I can drag a file from file browser to desktop but it only shows icon not file name and I can't move its position

> I think the applet lock is on, unclicking unlock should let you move it
around.

>>I'd really like to believe that, except there is nothing that shows its the case. There was no indication in the icon (via an emblem of a padlock for example) and I don't recall an unlock option in the context menu or even a context menu :) Its also bad you don't see the file name. Imagine having 10 files on the desktop all having just the same icon!

* How do I get multiple desktops. Used to be more intuitive

> there is an applet for virtual desktops.

>>If there is, this should be on by default.

* Launching the pager applet crashed the desktop and upon reload all the applets I had added were gone.

> Kwin and plasma is having lot of problems, this is just one of those. Yeap, no history support implemented yet ;)

>>A critical must fix bug, since kde4 seems to depend so much on these applets to provide core functionality previously supported natively (via kicker, konqueror)

Usability issues (and sometimes bug like)

* On the top right seetings widget has zoom in/out. Zoom out shrinks the desktop to a point of no return. Why not have a zoom default. Also this should be implemeted better esthetically.

> this is a pre plan for ZUI, which mean the default should be keep to zoom out. ZUI is not ready so it's a feature not a bug ;)

>>:) its a bug, because its a missing feature ;)

* Lots of missing icons so defaults to ugly icon.

> Oxygen is doing some major rework, when done should be ok!

* Default clock in systray looks ugly

> Agreed, argued no use, users are stuck with that! Aaron likes it

* In add applet dialog its not clear what the star does. If to rate then why 1 star.

> hehehe, maybe for the looks!

* Kde menu based on kicker looks unpolished and ugly

> :( life!

* Would be nice if I can clear recently used histry on that tab itself

> you will just have to wait :)

>>I can wait. Just wish kde can too instead of being released in Jan without all these

* Left and right click has the same effect on k menu button. How do I
add a custom item to menu?

> you can't for now :)

* I can't right click on taskbar. What happened those functionality.

> not implemented yet !

* Right click on desktop and I can't create new file, folder, launcher icon. WTF. Bettr to offer this along with option to hide icons from desktop. Dont cripple it

> not ready :)

* Where is trash icon? Should be in desktop or dock. Its not even an applet. It should be there by default.

> trash widget should be there but not ready yet :)

These are just some of the issues I found after playing with it for 45 min or so using the debian live cd. Definitely not RC1 quality. More like beta 1 or alpha 3!

So in conclusion, kde 4, IMHO doesn't offer much that isn't already available via other add-ons but as a result as compromised on usability and most of all flexibility which differentiates it from say GNOME. Worse yet, it seems to be missing a lot of the things we currently have with kde 3.5.x and earlier.

As a result, I think kde 4 has diverted from what its current users love and expect of kde. Its as if it has tried to be something its not. So my main complaint is that it needs a lot of work to get the same polish which we currently enjoy with kde 3.5.x series and should take the time needed before releasing prematurely. There is a saying in FOSS - It will be released when its ready!

In the mine time lets continue making kde 3.y.x incrementally better :)

Hacking the iPod Touch / iPhone - Part 2

2007-11-20T00:13:00.000+05:30

Previously on Part 1 ...

Just kidding! Scroll down and read it your self.

Its been a while, and I think I'm falling into the "Oh twittering is so much more easier than blogging" trap. So if you've been following my twitter, then you'd know that I've been discovering quite a few uses for the iTouch.Unfortunately its late and I think you'll have to wait for another post before I get into all that :( So instead, lets first cover some of the basics.

Freeing up some space for 3^rd party Apps

I'm assuming you have already setup the openssh package as well as the BSD Subsystem, there by enabling you to remotely login or copy files (scp). If not, use the Installer app to install those two packages.

One of the problems you'll quickly realize as you begin to install more and more apps, is a pop up message notifying you that your running out of disk space! This is due to the root partition (/) which also happens to hold /Applications, being only 300MB. Most of this 300MB was already taken up by the Darwin (OS) itself as can be seen by doing a df -h, while sshed into the iTouch.


# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1          300M  268M   30M  91% /
devfs                  15K   15K     0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2           15G  6.0G  8.9G  41% /private/var

Therefor what you want to do is to move /Applications directory over to the /private/var directory, as it has the rest of the free space and create a symbolic link (aka shortcut), to the root (/). The following command should do it:


cp -a /Applications /private/var
rm -fr /Applications
ln -s /private/var/Applications /Applications

Once your done, just logout and restart the iTouch, just to be on the safe side. You should now be able to install all the apps to your hearts content. Similarly, I also moved the /opt to /private/var to free up a bit more space.

Turning an iPod into an iPhone

The ipod touch is a crippled version of the iphone, in terms of missing applications (notes, google maps, mail) and missing hardware (bluetooth,speaker, mic) . While the missing hardware can't be compensated, you can install most of the iphone apps to the touch and get the PDA experience of the iPhone on the iTouch.

In order to do this, you do need to get a hold of the iphone apps. If you know someone with an unlocked iphone, then you can copy it from that person or else you might be able to download it off the net. Try here. Once you grab the files, its mostly a matter of copying the app_name.app directory to the /Applications directory (using scp for example).

Most other 3rd party Free & Open Source or otherwise free-ware apps can be installed using the Installer application itself.

Finally here is an ipod touch compatibility list of iphone apps that also work on the touch. Stay tuned for part 3.

Hacking the iPod Touch - Part 1

2007-11-04T01:07:00.001+05:30

So now that I had a little time to play around with this cool gadget, I think its time that I shared some of fun in hacking the iPod Touch. But first a friendly government warning :

<disclaimer>
WARNING: Hacking gadgets is known to cause bricking and in some instances may even void your warranty. As a general rule assume you won't be able to upgrade your firmware in the future. If your doing this, do it AT YOUR OWN RISK!
</disclaimer>

Don't worry in reality its almost impossible to brick the device since you can restore it using iTunes. So if you're still with me then "welcome to a brave new world of hacking!". First let me explain how the iphone/ipod touch hack works in layman's terms.

TIFF Exploit

The key ingredient for performing the hack is around a bug discovered in libtiff, a library used widely to provide tiff image handling capabilities. This bug can be used to cause a buffer overflow, allowing arbitrary code to be executed. Such exploits can aid (in a good sense) to unlock a device which has been locked, limiting its functionality to what ever the device manufacturer wants it to do.

Before the iPhone, the PSP firmware 2.0 was also hacked using a similar TIFF exploit allowing third party home brew apps to be executed.

In the case of the iTouch, you would visit a site containing a specially crafted TIFF image vis the Safari mobile browser. This would crash the browser and execute the payload. What that code does is simply to remount the root file system with full read/write permission, enabling the browser to break out of the chrooted jail its running under - jailbreak. This is possible thanks to Apple running the browser as root (admin), something any one with a little sense of security would not do.

You can read more about the TIFF exploit here.

Jail breaking the Touch

Jail breaking the touch has been made so easy that even a 5 year old could do it. The easiest method which was released less than a week ago, requires you to just visit www.jailbreakme.com and click on a link. It will display a TIFF which will jailbreak the device, making it suitable for running third party apps, install a user friendly App installer app and finally patch the TIFF exploit so you won't be compromised in the future! If your a GNU/Linux user, this also means you no longer need to goto a Mac or Windows to Jail break.

There are also a GUI tools which can be run inside MacOSX (iJailbreak) and Windows (Touchfree).

But I used the almost manual method since I thought it would be more fun going through the steps. I used my Mac Mini (PPC) but there is also a how to for Windows (sorry not for GNU/Linux).

If everything went ok, you will now be able to install apps by launching the Installer.app ifrom the SpringBoard interface. All you need is to be connected to the net.

What ever you install, you'll definitely want to install OpenSSH server (and even client), BSD Subsystem, DNS tools, SummerBoard.

In part 2 I will talk about some of the productivity apps and some other interesting apps that you can run. I'll also try to touch up on getting the Touch to work on GNU/Linux so that you can transfer music, videos and may be even photos (still trying to figure this out) without using iTunes.

If you can't wait... subscribe to my twitter blog for a near real-time update of what I'm upto.

Its been 3 years...

2007-10-31T23:15:00.000+05:30

And I'm still here! That's right, its been exactly 3 years as of today (31st) since I got into the world of blogging. For the curious here is my first blog post which I made out of UCSC's MSc computer lab, under not so good circumstances :)

Anyway thats history. Now lets talk about the future. From today onwards, I'm hoping to start micro-blogging on twitter in addition to current blog. Sometimes I find little things or interesting bits that I never get around to blog about because its either too little information or I just don't get the time.

Well hopefully (no promises), I'll try to do that in the form of a micro-blog using of my mobile devices.

So I hope to see you at twitter!. I'm off to configuring my mobile clients.

iPod Touch turned out to be the one!

2007-10-29T03:17:00.000+05:30

so I had my reservations about the iphone mainly due to the lack of 3G but also other reasons. Instead what wanted was really a good PDA device thats flexible and not too limiting - some thing like the upcoming N810.

But all that changed when I walked in to BTOptions hoping to checkout an FM Transmitter for my ipod. That's when I saw they had the latest iPod touch 16GB. What happened next was unbelievable in that I remember handing my credit card before blacking out. Ok so may be I'm being a bit too dramatic. The touch was a device which had already been under my radar but I did't think I'd actually buy this first-gen device.

But I did and here is why:
* it was staring me in the face
* price was close to getting from the US
* runs on UNIX aka BSD though would have prefered Gnu/Linux
* Ultra portable, scratch proof surface
* Nice UI and input method
* BUT ABOVE MOST - It can be hacked!

So here I am after having installed two dozens of nice home brew apps lying in bed writing this blog on my new shiney iPod Touch.

P.S: Photos uploaded and included later using a notebook.

This could be the one...

2007-10-19T19:05:00.000+05:30

So I've been thinking of getting Nokia's Linux tablet PC ever since the 770 was released a couple of years ago. When the N800 came that was a major improvement over the 770 and I was hoping to buy that.

Well now, Nokia has released a further updated version, the N810 and this just might be the one. Due to release in Novement, the N810 has a nice touch sensitive screen of 800x480, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS (YES!), FM-Radio, FM-Transmitter!(Awesome), QWERTY slide keyboard (and virtual keyboard), VGA camera, up to 8GB SD, 14 days standby and 5 days being always online.

The only thing missing is Wi-Max which is to be released sometime later next year.

Check it out.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3669465936.html

Tired of Vista? well then downgrade to XP

2007-10-11T00:25:00.000+05:30

Microsoft's biggest enemy is probably itself. Getting users to upgrade to Vista hasn't received the kind of welcome many thought. Microsoft has tried hard to get users to switch using the "Wow starts Now!" campaign and even taking desperate measures such as launching a "Get the facts campaign against itself", similar to the discontinued "Gets the fact on Linux" but stating that XP's flaws.With all that failing, recently they started providing Vista Business and Ultimate users (aka users who paid BIG $$$) an option to downgrade to XP.

Many vendors including IBM, Dell, Fujitsu and HP are offering this downgrade option or providing XP as an option.

Given all this, who can blame users that have been stuck with XP for so long. Asking them to upgrade is like asking them to move from the home they grew up in, even if its supposedly a better and more secure home. At the end of the day M$ is to blame for dumbing down the majority of users to a point where they get nervous the second the desktop wallpaper isn't a blue sky with green hills!

This is probably where the Free/Open Source desktop users are better off. We have a desktop that gradually, but rapidly improves. Software packages update pretty much on a daily basis and most GNU/Linux distros have at least a bi annual (6 month) release cycle. Our users are always upgrading and looking forward to the next version. And why shouldn't they be?

We have a lot of things to be excited about such as the best 3D desktop, exciting kernel improvements with each release (check out the latest 2.6.23), best 64 bit computing support (make better use of Core2 Duo/AMD64), hottest Virtualization Technologies and support for an insane amount of hardware devices. To top it off, we have a bunch of "kick ass" FOSS licenses to tie it all together and provide the user with total control! What more can users ask for?

At the end of it all, I feel that though M$'s gamble to treat users as a bunch of noobs has paid off in getting them to buy into computers by the masses it is now faced with how to go about lifting off those XP couch potatoes and moving them to another couch. Till they figure out a way...long live EXPee!

Hotplugging a Secondary Display on Linux

2007-09-24T00:22:00.000+05:30

GNU/Linux has been ready for the desktop for quite some time. And yet, when trying to tell the world about how ready Desktop Linux is, using a well prepared Open Office presentation, I am often faced with having to smile and say, oops looks like I need to restart X windows before my computer [Linux] can detect the LCD projector.

Lets face it, there are still some glitches here and there but the FOSS community is working hard at solving those problems, one by one. One such problem has been the inability to plug in an external display such as an external monitor or LCD projector and get it to "just work" without having to restart X Windows. That was until Xorg 7.3 came along!

Ever since I heard of Xorg 7.3 a couple of months earlier, I waited eagerly. Xorg 7.3 was finally released earlier this month. Unfortunately I was too busy to install it (i wanted to update other gentoo packages before I did this). Finally this weekend, I managed to upgrade my system (emerge -avuDN world) and get xorg 7.3 working!

Before I get to the monitor plugging, I'd like to make few comments on my experience doing this on Gentoo. First off, after emerging X org 7.3, X didn't start at all! Turned out that the upgrade process didn't recompile some dependency packages because their version hadn't changed. These are pretty much Gentoo specific issues and your not going to have to worry about it on binary based distros.

The other problem I had was with my synaptic touch pad not working. While trying to figure that out, I remembered that xorg 7.3 is supposed to have INPUT hotplugging and work even without an xorg.conf configuration file. So I renamed /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restarted zapped X (Ctrl+Alt+BS), and everything worked beautifully -- sort of. The synaptic touchpad worked and everything seemed fine, except I was having problems with compiz-fusion, the 3D stuff. I could get the 3D cube to rotate and see the wobbly effect but was unable to see what I was typing in the terminal. I could also not see any icons on certain windows such as of ccsm. It took me about an hour to figure out this was actually a problem with using an auto detected xorg.conf. So in the end, I reverted back to the old xorg.conf and found how to get synaptic working on it (thanks to google of course). Here is how my synaptic configuration on xorg.conf now looks like:


Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0

        #InputDevice    "TouchPad" "AlwaysCore"  # Old setting
        #InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"   # Old setting
        InputDevice    "TouchPad" "CorePointer"  # New for xorg 7.3
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "SendCoreEvents"

        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        Option         "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
   Driver      "synaptics"
   Identifier  "TouchPad"
   Option      "SendCoreEvents"
   Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
   Option      "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

Anyway, so now for the good stuff! I plugged in my 17" monitor to the VGA out of the notebook and waited. The signal not detected sign went away and the screen was pitch black. It was on indefinitely on standby. I zapped X again to restart it and this time got a display on the monitor. Hmmm not the hotplug I had in mind. A bit disappointed I wanted to get to the bottom of this - I mean hotplugging was supposed to be the main feature.

Turns out you can turn on a secondary display without restarting (zapping) X and here is how:

Meet the updated version of xrandr. You should have xrandr 1.2 for this to work.


# xrandr -v
Server reports RandR version 1.2

To get a list of displays available along with its status issue:


# xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 800, maximum 2432 x 864
VGA connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
   1152x864       74.8
   1024x768       84.9     75.1     70.1     60.0
   832x624        74.6
   800x600        99.7     84.9     72.2     75.0     60.3
   640x480        99.8     84.6     75.0     72.8     60.0
   720x400        70.1
   640x350        70.1
LVDS connected 1280x800+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
   1280x800       60.0*+
   1024x768       60.0
   800x600        60.3
   640x480        59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

The output of xrandr -q shows two devices, VGA which represents my VGA out and is also shown to be connected to the monitor and LVDS, my LCD display. A third TV out is shown but is unfortunately not physically available on my notebook model :(

To enable my VGA out display and show an exact copy of whats on my LCD:


xrandr --output VGA --auto

This should automatically pick out the preferred resolution for the monitor and enable it. Alternatively if you want to specify the resolution from one of the modes supported (as given by xrandr -q):


xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

You can turn off the external display by issuing


xrandr --output VGA --off

If you want you can create a VGA out toggle script and assign it to a keyboard short cut.


# vi ~/toggle-vga.sh
#!/bin/bash
XRANDR_OUT=`xrandr -q`
if echo "$XRANDR_OUT"|grep -q 'VGA connected'; then
        echo 'Detected VGA connected';
        if [ `echo "$XRANDR_OUT"|grep '*'|wc -l` -gt 1 ];then
                echo 'Turning off VGA';
                xrandr --output VGA --off
        else
                echo 'Turning on VGA';
                xrandr --output VGA --auto
        fi
else
        echo 'No VGA connected!';
fi

Ok now for some fun stuff with xrandr! RandR was built to rotate the screen so lets try a rotation on the second screen:


# xrandr --output VGA --rotate left
# xrandr --output VGA --rotate right
# xrandr --output VGA --rotate normal

That last line will restore all rotations. Feeling dizzy? If not try these cool tricks:


# xrandr --output VGA --reflect x
# xrandr --output VGA --reflect y
# xrandr --output VGA --reflect xy
# xrandr --output VGA --reflect normal

Finally, wouldn't it be nice to extend your desktop to two displays. Well its now possible without having special dual head monitor settings in xorg.conf and even on an intel card! (with two vga outs of course).

There is a catch - you need to predefine the maximum combined resolution so that X server will pre-allocate that memory. Currently on intel cards, this means not enough memory for AIGLX/Compiz /3D. So I recommend creating a separate xorg.conf file for this purpose.


# vi /etc/xorg.conf
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        Device     "Card0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Virtual  2432 864
        EndSubSection
EndSection


# xrandr --output VGA --left-of LVDS

Depending on your monitor being to the left, right, above or below of your LCD screen you should use the proper option (see man xrandr).

Thats it for now.

SFD 2007 was HUGE & Hot!

2007-09-19T00:34:00.000+05:30

Software Freedom Day concluded on the 15th with several events happening around Sri Lanka and the world ofcourse.

The Excel World event, which I helped organize, turned out pretty well. It could ofcourse, have been a lot better if not for the matches that kept people @ home. But hey, who's complaining? Not me!

We had a lot of fun setting up the place. No one was in any particular hurry and we took our time. I got up about 8:30am or so and took another hour to get ready. Then grabbed a bunch of stuff like power strips, wireless dongles, power cords, mice, keyboard -- basically what ever I could lay my eyes on, and stuffed it in a luggage bag. I also picked up my desktop, my x-monitor (now dad's), and the mac mini (which I forgot to take) and headed off to TLC to pick up the APITT guys.

By the time we got to Excel it was close to 11AM. We then went to APITT to pick up rest of the stuff and it was probably around 12PM we actually started to set the place up. But help was on the way, as more friends showed up. The rest as they say it was history. The event went well in to the night and finished just minutes away from midnight.

Ofcourse, I am leaving out some of the drama we had to face @ Excel World, except to say it all worked out for the better in the end and that freedom shouldn't be taken for granted - "Even on SFD, you still have to fight for your Freedom, to have an event the way you want to have it". If some of you might remember we had a really bad experience last year.

me putting on the organizer hat:
All in all I felt that this year's SFD was bigger and a lot better as a whole. This couldn't have been possible if not for the FOSS community that came in at the right time and (magically) made things happen!

Special thanks to all the sponsors, Hardware Partner Digital House (Pvt) for giving out good looking machines that traveled around the country, Suntel for sponsoring the WiFi (with upgraded bandwidth mind you!) and doing too many radio spots in soo many channels :). Other thanks go out to ICTA for encouraging and supporting us, Excel World for a gr8 venue and support, APITT for giving us storage to store all the items and anyone else I might have forgotten because I drank too much coffee. Yes I'm sure it was coffee!

Enjoy the pics

My SFD pics @ Excel

Nazly's SFD pics @ Excel

Kandy SFD pics

Mifan's SFD pics from Kandy

Suchetha's SFD pics from many SFD locations

Gayal's SFD pics from APITT

Waruna's SFD pics from Ruwanpura

Anyone other pics I'm missing? Leave a comment with link and I'll add it.

Come celebrate Software Freedom Day tomorrow @ Excel World

2007-09-14T21:27:00.000+05:30

Just came home after dropping off some items at APITT, which is a convenient storage location due to proximity, for tomorrow's SFD event at Excel World. As usual, the venue got finalized at the last minute (last minute being this evening)!

Tomorrow should be a busy day as nothing has been setup as yet. I am planning to head towards Excel in the morning along with the APITT LUGers to set the place up.I'm planning to bring a couple of my machines at home, like my recently dissected Mac Mini, or even perhaps my first notebook, the Sony Vaio which can only be used as disk less think client, which I showed off yesterday, at the SLIIT SFD event.

This is the 4th SFD event being held since its inception and this year seems to have the most events being organized around the country. Here are some of the local SFD events that are, or have been organized.

Anyway I'll blog more about the event tomorrow, live from the Excel World.

Not sure if you should attend? May be this will help...

Software Freedom Day is an international day dedicated to educating, advocating and celerating Free & Open Source Software (aka FOSS). Several countries are including Sri Lanka are having public events to celebrate the occation.

If you wanted to participate in a FOSS Community event then this is your chance. Couple of us geeks will be hanging out at Excel World through out Saturday from 10AM onwards.

We hope to show off some cool Free & Open Source applications, play video games on GNU/Linux and show you how you can too! and have an Install Fest where we will help you install GNU/Linux on your computer. Thats right!, bring your PC (no need monitor) or Notebook and get Linux installed for free! There will also be free Wi-Fi access thanks to Suntel so you constantly be connected!

We'll also have some cool geek merchandise like Tuxes, T shirts and
Linux distros.

See you all tomorrow!

Using a download accelerator with apt-get

2007-08-06T23:21:00.001+05:30

If dist-upgrading your Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux distro is taking a considerable amount of time (or says it will), then this might be a useful tip to speed things up a bit.

This is nothing new really; something I used to frequently back in the day when Debian was my primary desktop disto. You see I got sick of waiting for debs to complete downloading, not to mention the apt database being locked, so I wrote a small perl script which used prozilla to quickly download the debs into /var/cache/apt/archives.

Recently, my g/f told me to dist-upgrade her Ubuntu box, since she didn't have broadband @ home and thats when I remembered that I have forgotten where I'd put that script. So I wrote new one that was an even smaller script.

But before that, I wrote a tiny bash "one liner" which can also be used download debs but it may not work with some debs that have to be renamed by escaping some characters. But nevertheless it too can be useful for downloading one or two packages with dependencies.

I'm assuming your running this as root


 # cd /var/cache/apt/archives
 # apt-get -y --print-uris install package_name > debs.list
 # egrep -o -e "(ht|f)tp://[^\']+" debs.list | xargs -l1 axel -a

Instead of using prozilla, I now use axel which is also another download accelerator. You should be able to easily apt-get install axel. Replace package_name with either a package name you are installing or dist-upgrade if you want to upgrade the system altogether. Be warned that you may have to rename some files before apt sees the file as being downloaded completely.

Now on to the "slightly longer, works better", perl script:
# cd /var/cache/apt/archives
# apt-get -y --print-uris install package_name > debs.list
# vi download-debs.pl



#!/usr/bin/perl

while(<>){

 if(/([^ ]+)[ ]+([^ ]+)[ ]+/){
    ($url,$rendeb)=($1,$2);
    $url=~s/[' ]//g;
    $deb=$url; $deb=~s/.*\///;
    $rendeb=~s/[ ]//g;
    print "Downloading $deb \n";
    system("axel -a $url");
    if($deb ne $rendeb){
        print "Renaming $deb to $rendeb \n";
        system("mv $deb $rendeb");
    }
 }
}

# ./download-debs.pl debs.list

While your waiting for the download you might even be able to squeeze in a few new smaller packages, as the apt database isn't locked. Once the download is complete, just run the same command without the -print-uris option and your good to go.

Be warned that using a download accelerator might bring your sys admin running to your desk screaming before you can say "apt-get are we done yet!".

Be an Open Source Guitar Hero!

2007-07-27T00:33:00.000+05:30

Undoubtedly one of the best games that came on the PS2 and more recently on the 360 is Guitar Heros II. Ever since I got my hands on this came, I haven't as yet swapped the DVD to play another game on my PS2.

For those who haven't heard of this game, it basically lets you "rock on" to some popular and not so popular rock tunes as if playing a guitar. You could use the standard D Pad game controller or for the ultimate experience purchase a Guitar controller.

Unfortunately I don't have the guitar controller though, and would probably buy it if I can find it in a local store. I wanted this so bad, I almost picked it up from a shop that was situated in Dream Land. Unfortunately the alarm woke me up before I could pay using my credit card.

So whats better than Guitar Heros 2? No its not Guitar Heros 3, but rather a Free & Open Source clone called Frets on Fire!. Sure it doesn't look as good as GH2 but its got some feature that makes it better. But before I get to that, have a look at this dude "rock on" in Frets on Fire using the GH2 Guitar Controller

So what make Frets on Fire an awesome alternative:

You can use a full size keyboard and hold it similar to a guitar

You can import all GH2 sound tracks, if you've got the GH2

Its got the ability to import new songs unlike GH2 where your stuck with the tracks that came with it

There is an inline music editor within the game

Runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows

Free in every way

So check out Frets on Fire! Chances are you'll either burn the keyboard if not your fingers.

Will the real "Geek with an Attitude" please stand up, please stand up!

2007-07-25T14:47:00.000+05:30

Ah just came across another Geek-with-an Attitude . Seems like an interesting Blog with "Technological advice you can actually use".

Now excuse me while I run off to perform a DoS.

Just kidding

PEacE out

My Mac Mini taken apart and put back together

2007-07-07T14:24:00.000+05:30

My Mac mini had been pretty much dead for the last couple of months. It just wouldn't boot and would give a gray screen (without the Apple logo), after the Apple chime. Following advice on Apples's Support site, I tried the weird key combinations that were supposed to clear the CMOS and other settings, but that didn't fix the problem.

I was thinking about taking this for repairs to either BTOptions or DMS but both will take a fair amount just to open it (and it may well be fair, because opening and servicing this thing is a pain) and possibly more to fix (warranty had lapsed). I felt adventurous and as if there was nothing to loose.

The fact it was a Friday night and after the end of a long week, I felt the need for a change from thinking about software to may be thinking of hardware. But before I could give much thought to the idea, I found myself tearing the Mac Mini apart.

I've seen a couple of videos on Youtube on opening up the mac and it looked easy enough :) One problem was that I didn't have a putty knife. What I did have was something that looked like a putty knife, if only slightly bent and was primarily built to flip eggs.

To make a long story short, I managed to open the mac mini, remove its memory and test that separately using my desktop, remove battery to manually clear the CMOS. I also got access to the hard drive and made a few mistakes along the way which came back to haunt me during the re-assembly.

For some weird reason all the partitions on the hard driver were gone, not even recoverable from testdisk. Finally I ended up repartitioning it from within the MacOSX beta (intel) boot CD I had. Then it occurred to me that this might actually explain the gray screen because on Macs, part of the firmware is on a special partition (EFI partition). But then again, I think the CMOS clearing also had something to do with it.

Finally, the Mac mini started to work after I had put everything back together. I was quite pleased that it was now booting to the boot loader and more astound to find that my data partition (which had all my downloads) still in tact. Hmmm, one of those X files things, I can't quite explain. Anyway, I re-installed MacOSX on the first partition and it works great now!

I'll install GNU/Linux on it later, but before I closed the casing I decided to upgrade the memory, since it risky reopening it and old memory types will run out. So I went to Unity Plaza and "got me self" a 1GB stick and put that sucker in. My mac mini seems a lot more happier now.

One good thing about using the Mac Mini (G4, in my case), is that it consumes a lot less energy than, say my AMD64 desktop. It essentially has notebook like hardware, and I've even seen a few hacks that convert it to a battery driven device.

Well the Mac mini is all setup and updating itself, and I'm just in time to watch the Earth Day Concert.

You can see photos and comments of the dissemble process on my photo blog.

myPhone - Waiting for my kinda iPhone

2007-07-02T21:37:00.000+05:30

Photograph by: Eliya Selhub

The iPhone is a pretty good looking phone and functional phone by the looks of it and it might actually end up being a hit in the US, if it wasn't for the high price tag. While $500 - $600 seems like a good deal for us Asians and some of us are used to spending that much on a phone it seems to be uncommon in the US. They're still using crappy old cheap models over there :), which generally come for a real cheap price or for free as part of the plan. So I really don't think the iPhone as it is, is going to be anything like an iPod.

But it can be like an iPod, only if Apple did a few things more. Here are a list of things I want on myPhone:

3G - Its great this thing has EDGE but I wouldn't dish out so much and not get anything that hasn't got 3G

User pluggable SIM card - What were they thinking! Oh wait physical security to please AT&T. Do we have to dissect just to change the SIM card? Give us a slot to insert/remove the SIM

Expandable Memory - 4GB and 8GB are plenty but having a removable, expandable SD slot is a must in any modern phone

Custom Apps - Steve Jobs sold the fact that developers can't develop native apps as a good thing at the recent WWDC. While its awesome its got a full fledged browser, Steve said him self, "But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment.", that desktop apps are richer and can take back what was lost to the web. If Apple decided on every thing that was to run on the iPhone, its going to be a boring, under utilized device.

Voice recognition menus/Dialing - The touch pad is great but with such a powerful phone you would have expected some more natural ways of input. I hear the touch pad doesn't work well with gloves which can be a problem under freezing weather.

Skype - A great use with WiFi around. Oh wait AT&T wont like it.

IM - SMS chat is ok, if you want to burn money but how on earth can you ignore an IM client. True with Safari, you could use a service like Meebo, but then again you could just use google maps too

Flash, Java - Are these technologies so yesterday? Can we do it all with Ajax

TV out - Does this thing have Video out? I hope they didn't drop that. (iPod video has it)

Record Video - I can't believe this can't record video with the built in 2MB camera.

A Flash please - A Flash makes a BIG difference when taking photos. At least a fake Flash like some of the older SE phones

Video conferencing - Now I am getting a bit more demanding here. I'm thinking, with a 2 year plan your looking at being stuck with this till end of 2009 - 2010. I would think most people would find video conferencing a common thing by then.

Project it - Ok I may be asking for too much here :) But it would be cool and very Business like if I could some how just run a Presentation and project it to a big screen without taking out my notebook

Well thats my rant on the iPhone's missing features. I am sure there are more and the best way around this is to just make it easy for third party apps, even if Apple has to first examine and digitally sign them. If it can do half as much as what I mentioned then there is a good chance the iPhone will be a hit in Asia if & when it is released.

In the mine time, I am holding my breath for a truly Open Phone, the Open Moko and the great apps the FOSS community will build to run on it.

"FOSS-ed on Windows" is on tomorrow

2007-06-25T13:39:00.000+05:30

They didn't think we'd do it. We didn't think we'd do it! But we're gonna do it ... tomorrow. For a change, we are gonna temporally hold off on telling you to switch away from the Windows platform and instead tell you how you can make your Windows experience so much better.

Guess who's sponsoring? Its those guys from Redmond - Microsoft.

FOSS-Ed for windows will show you how you can save time, money and be in control of the software. There will also be plenty on interoperability with other Operating Systems & other applications.

Why flush hundreds of thousands of Rupees down a proprietary
product when there are many free alternatives to choose from?

For more info
http://www.foss.lk/events/2007/fossedforwindows

Ok now that the "advertisement disguised as a blog post" is out of the way :), I'd like to invite your guys interested in using FOSS on Windows to drop in for the event. The pricing is a pretty good deal considering its a 3 day event with food, and Brian Behlendorf, the Co-Founder of Apache Foundation will be there too. Best of all, I will be there, doing a talk on Securing your IT Infrastructure using FOSS :P. You can also get a look at what we've been doing at THINKCube and the soon to be launched Collaboration Server 2.0, since we are sponsoring the event.

So see you all there

Btw someone else beat me to this announcement and even dugg it: Microsoft sponsors FOSS event (what the hell's going on!!!)

Goodbye Prof.

2007-06-14T18:24:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I attended Prof. VK Samaranayake's funeral proceedings which took place on a gloomy onset, as if the sky was about to break down and cry but was holding off so to not cause any discomfort to the event.

Many from the Academia, IT industry, Media, Government Bodies, Students, Family and friends had come to bid farewell to the "Father of IT in Sri Lanka", whom to many will remain a hero and a role model.

A quick look at the online condolence guest book is all thats needed to see the variety of people's lives he has touched.

Hey Micro$oft.... Sue me!

2007-06-11T14:08:00.000+05:30

Desperately seeking Micro$oft makes some dubious claims when it accuses that GNU/Linux and FOSS violates some 235 of M$'s patents. With each passing day it is evident that this latest of a series of unsuccessful maneuvers on M$'s part is done just so they can create enough FUD to possibly kill off the threat or make some money off of Fortune 500 companies through licensing.

As I posted earlier, you could only do so as long as you don't disclose the supposed patent violations that GNU/Linux and other FOSS apps are said to be violating. So this is turning out to be a new business model for M$, where they can sit back and Steve Balmer can play Tony Soprano and make extra cash.

Well its about time Micro$oft put up or Shut up! Either disclose the so called patents that we are supposedly violating, sue us or just shut up! Since the former doesn't seem to be happening a couple of people started signing a petition called "Sue me first". It only takes one person to be sued for us to know and the world to show that its all a bunch of BS.

So what the heck, I signed it too...

See #1427

Also read what Linus the creator of the Linux kernel had to say..

Finally got a Flickr Pro Account

2007-06-11T00:54:00.000+05:30

I was wondering how many photos I had on flickr. Because with the free account, 200 was all I could see. The first time I tried to fulfill my curiosity, a couple of months back, to find myself utterly disappointed and annoyed that I couldn't just pay the $24.95 and unlock my photos, because Paypal didn't recognize Sri Lanka as a country worth doing business with. So I gave up, even though I was aware that you could get it done through someone who had an AMEX CC.

Anyway long story-short is I finally upgraded and was amazed to find I had a little over 500 photos! (more than twice the limit).

So if you know me and want to go down memory lane or just want to see how crappy I was at taking pictures then (not that I'm a lot better now), check out my Flickr Photo Blog.

Don't forget to click the last page :)

Dialog mticket - A complete waste of time (and money)

2007-05-18T23:27:00.000+05:30

This is the follow up to my Spider Man3 - Not a complete waste of time post. Compared to the movie, using Dialog's new 444 mticket service, which promises you a hassle free, ticket buying experience turned out to be a A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME!

Instead of mumblings from the crowd of "what a BIG shot" I was to jump the queue, there was only silence, probably accompanied by silent thoughts to the effect of, "there goes another mticket looser".

As you might imagine, not only did I not have any reserved tickets (not even tentatively), my name wasn't even on their database. This is despite Dialog confirming the ticket with a reference number, two days prior to the screening. This wasn't an isolated incident either, as the person at the counter explained, it had happened before on several occasions including one earlier that very same day! It is somewhat unlikely that the other person also booked the ticket in exactly the same time frame when the system was down and who also wanted to watch the movie 2 days later.

Anyway as you might imagine, it wasn't a pretty scene and my girl friend and I were quite disappointed at the prospect of going home early. There was nothing left to do but to spend another 15/- and make another call (the 3rd by this time) to 444. Here is what that call sounded like ....

As you might have heard it took ages for someone to pickup. The help desk person seemed quite nervous, probably because he knew of the issue, and put me on hold for a good long song. All in all, I was probably on the phone for as much as 15 min.

The audio clips are broken down into two parts, because while I was on hold I wanted to retrieve my reference number stored in another section of the phone, which stopped the recording process. I was hoping he'd at least ask for the ref number, but he never did! He didn't even ask for my name nor mobile number (yes they could have CLI, but what if I was using someone else's phone? Dialog customer support normally asks for your phone number). Unfortunately, I ran out of phone memory to record the second part completely, because I was on hold for a long time. (I cut short the on-hold music from the recording). Basically the part you missed on the recording involved me getting may be 10% more angry and telling him that I didn't want the service and demanding they not charge my phone bill with the ticket price. Only time will tell whether they remembered to cancel it from my bill.

I sensed something was fishy, from the beginning - when I made the reservation. For one thing, I was expecting some sort of automated ticket reservation system. After all this was supposed to be the future today. But hearing a real human voice was actually better and welcomed, even if it seems a little too high to charge the 15/- just to talk to one. Instead they could have added the 15/- to the premium charge for reserving the ticket if they really need that money.

Anyway after conveying my movie requirements, he offered me a seating area and then put me on hold for a couple of minutes to confirm the booking. He came back with bad news stating that he was not able to confirm my booking and for me to call back in another 1 hour time. At this point I remembered he had already asked me for my Name, mobile number and even my email address, which was a first. I asked if he could send me an email or an sms but he refused and insisted that I call him back. That was my first clue it was fishy :)

I called back in about 2 hours, to learn they had no recollection of me making a call. The new support person asked the name of the person I spoke with, a piece of information I never expected to be asked by a company with over 2M customers. At one point during the conversation, the new customer support person seemed to be questioning the actions of the earlier support person, which made me annoyed enough to ask "You tell me! He works there!".

I was then put on hold for a few more minutes only to come back and say that he will call me back shortly. I was somewhat relived that for a change he was going to call me back instead of ask me to call him back and pay another 15/-.

As promised they called me back. "I'm sorry sir, our system was down and I got caught with something. Here is your reference number; please write it down" was his response. So I wrote down the reference number down ET218...... I asked him if I was going to also get an SMS, to which he said no. He assured me that the booking was confirmed and all I had to do was show this reference number.

The rest as you know by now is history! If you know anyone at Dialog, who can fix this problem please forward this so they are aware of this issue. Dialog usually has a pretty good Customer Support System, which totally contradicts with my mticket experience. Overall, I am a happy Dialog phone customer, being with them close to 10 years now. So I would like to see them fix this ASAP, or at least bring down the service till its fixed. As far as I could tell, it was really a poor process/work flow from Dialogs end on what they need to do when the system is offline.

I later discovered that the Dialog's 444 service is provided in partnership with Ceylinco Internet Services, who also have their own ticket reservations system. Perhaps, I was actually talking to some not from Dialog, but regardless it is still Dialog's responsibility to ensure a good customer experience.

So for now, my advice is to stay away from this unreliable service and save your self the embarrassment.

Spider-Man 3 - Not a complete waste of time

2007-05-17T01:19:00.000+05:30

I've just returned home from watching the block buster hit, Spider Man 3 and thought I'd blog my thoughts while its still fresh on my mind. A word of caution for anyone who hasn't as yet watched the movie - don't read this if your like me in that you don't like to have any pretenses about the movie before you watch it. While I promise not to outline the plot, if there was any, chances are your going to have a pretense. This is also why I generally don't like to watch movie trailers, read reviews before watching the actual movie, though I won't necessarily shy away from them should I accidentally bump into one. On the other hand if your the type that researches before you spend time and money on a movie, then read on.

I had high hopes for Spider Man 3, so much that the second I learned of its existence in town, I immediately wanted to book tickets. So for the first time I tried booking an e-ticket using Dialog's much advertised, 444 service that was exclusive for postpaid customers. In the end that service turned out to be a complete waste of time and possibly money (I won't know till I get my next bill), but luckily I was able to manually get two tickets, after learning my e-ticket was never made. More on that later, in another post perhaps.

Anyway after watching it and coming out of the theater, all I could think about was why this was the worst Spider Man movie out of the three. I say this with disappointment, only because I really think they tried too hard to make a good movie, but ended up over doing it and really deviating too much from the previously established (as far as the movies go) Spider-Man spirit.

Essentially I felt like this was an attempt to combine characters and ideas from too many successful movies to create the ultimate movie. Unfortunately, as a result I felt it turned out to be a salad or cocktail that was just too crowded for the taste buds.

To begin with, I thought there were far too many super characters (the word hero isn't totally un-appropriate here either, as I will explain later), somewhat similar to what you'd expect from X-men. Then the sand man reminded me of the sand man from "The Mummy". The sand man also resembled "King Kong", when ever he grew to be a giant and especially when he was under attack. Similar to King Kong, it turns out, the sand man was also misunderstood. There was also a Terminator like, "I'll be back" thing going on where you think the villain is dead but he comes back. A bit of "Superman" is encompassed in the black alien substance that falls from space, similar to how Superman came to earth, and which has lots of power but also a lame weakness similar to Kryptonite. Coincidence? I think not! There were also some musical moments similar to "Mula Roughe" or "Chicago".

Despite all these rip offs, the movie was nevertheless quite enjoyable to watch, with hardly ever a yawning moment. Still one thing I could not stand to watch was the Titanic/Hindi movie like scenes of Spider man crying like a girl. Not once by twice! By the audience's giggle reaction, especially when the circumstances were emotionally depressing, hints to a fundamental flaw with the Spider-Man, if not any man's character we are stereo typically led to accept. Those scenes were just so lame and thankfully short. There was also a bit of soap and fantasy as you learn that none of the villains were true villains (some what hero like at times) and the hero, Spider man, acts like a villain at times. They all had a personal story to share, which didn't feel right.

Some of the - "Oh how convenient" or "Wow what a coincidence" moments just make this story feel really lame and unrealistic. I can't go into details here without ruining it so I won't. You'll see what I mean when you watch. Anyway its certainly not the Spider-Man we were led to accept - the ordinary, nerdy guy that made mistakes but understood that with great power comes great responsibility.

So while the movie is an enjoyment to watch due to the cool effects, a roller coaster like ever changing theme, my conclusion is that Spider-Man 3 killed Spider-Man as we knew him.

Honey, I sunk the ipod

2007-05-05T01:37:00.000+05:30

It was the worse day of my (ipod's) life. It drowned a feet under water for god knows how long. What probably was 5 - 10 minutes must have felt like an eternity. As of now, my ipod is in a coma, waiting for me to wake her up.

It all began a little under 36 hrs ago, when it was raining hard. I came home yesterday a little earlier following a wedding and thus managed to avoid traffic and more importantly the heavy rain. After a little bit of relaxation listening to the rest of a podcast from my drive back home, I began to settle into reading a book, when my sister said she was about to go off to work.

She being a doctor, has to generally deal with a crazy time table. By this time it was raining hard and fast. So I offered to drop her off, which she accepted gladly and as usual took my ipod along to keep me company.

We didn't get too far before land was nowhere and water was everywhere! This was not my first time crossing a pool of water by car, so I wasn't as scared as I should have been.

All was fine until my feet started getting cold - I mean literally cold from the water that was now seeking in from beneath the car. I must say there was a little panic, especially after seeing a couple of dead vehicles stranded on our path. There was no turning back. We were surrounded by a queue of vehicles, in both directions.

The water level continued to rise until it was about a foot or more. Finally we made land but the water that had entered into the car, didn't seem to retreat back. Luckily there was an empty 1.5L bottle of 7up, which my sister started filling up with the flooded water and throwing out. Thats when she felt something under the water -- something which felt like, my ipod!

As she handed it over to me, my fingers touched the wheel and it came alive. I panicked and suddenly shut it off by pressing on the play button. I vaguely recall the locked icon coming on even though I hadn't locked the ipod at the time, as if she was going into cardiac arrest. Anyway I immediately locked it to prevent from accidentally being turned on. Once I got home, I dried it using tissues and kept it next to my lava lamp before falling asleep, myself. The ipod is still asleep.

After a bit of research online, to my surprise (shock), I've discovered that ipods are known to fall into toilets and still survive. So there is a ray of hope that my ipod will recover, despite it being under water for a longer period.

To be continued...

Screenshot of my new (shiny) desktop

2007-05-01T03:34:00.000+05:30

I'll let the screenshot speak for itself.

But just in case your wondering this is Gentoo GNU/Linux running the beryl Window Manager (WM), on top of KDE desktop environment, with screenlets as widgets/gadgets, kiba-dock for an OSX like dock and kbfx with a dark theme as the next-gen kde menu.

That's it really!

M$ & GNU/Linux: A way out of the patent mess or the best weapon to take over the world!

2007-04-20T02:03:00.000+05:30

Ooops it happened again! The second cross patent licensing deal between M$ and another company - Samsung this time around. While this deal may not be as controversial as the first deal between M$ and Novell, its nevertheless going to have a bad taste with the community.

But I just realized GNU/Linux might actually be a ticket out of this whole patent mess we are in. It goes something like this:

A claims to B that by using GNU/Linux B is violating patents of A.

B in return reminds A that it too might be violating some of B's patents because A also happens to use GNU/Linux.

A and B come to an agreement not to sue each other over patents.

C comes along and does the same with A & B

In other words A, B and C can cross license their patents without actually having to disclose the patents they are cross licensing in the first place. This is because if any company (A, B or C) discloses a patent which Linux is supposedly violating, that piece of code will be instantly removed, leaving nothing to FUD over about.

Eventually, all the major players end up promising not to sue each other; the patent system goes into hibernation and dies out. Everyone lives happily ever after!

Ok so the above scenario plays out if you'd taken the Blue pill.

Now if you had instead taken the Red pill this is likely what happens:

A doesn't use GNU/Linux, while B does.

A threatens B saying by using GNU/Linux B is violating A's patents (obviously without mentioning which patents)

A offers to enter into a cross patent licensing promising not to sue B and vice versa

A enters into B's business without a fear of being sued over obvious patents A is violating of B's.

Eventually B goes out of business or moves to a different business in desperation.

A continues this practice on to C

I suppose its still too early to say which pill we might end up taking. Hopefully GPLv3 will fix everything and Linux will adopt it just in time take a sleeping pill instead.

Watching the Worldcup over WiFi

2007-04-14T22:48:00.000+05:30

Sure it doesn't beat watching the match on the big screen. But wouldn't it still be cool if you could didn't have to always sit in front of the tv all time as the match went on. Well today I decided to play around with the idea since Sri Lanka wasn't playing anyway.

Now my home isn't physically networked in anyway so I have to rely on the slower WiFi to do the job. Worse still is the fact that my WiFi Router is upstairs where our phone line happens to terminate, (it doubles as an ADSL Router) and so the signal reception is pretty bad (about 40%).

Its been a while since I played around with VLC and I knew it has improved somewhat since I last had a go at it. Mainly the addition of H.264 for better quality at lower bit rates. So after playing around with several codecs, I settled with h.264 (AVC) after discovering a combination that worked (you can't just mix arbitrary video encapsulation containers with a given codec and expect it to just work). Following are the settings, I ended up being satisfied with: (Also see screenshot)


Stream Type: HTTP
Stream Port: 8080 (you can use any port here)
Video codec: h264 @ 192 kb/s
Audio codec: mp4a @ 64 kb/s (mono)
Video container: ASF

As far as getting the TV in, I plugged in the S-Video out from my cable box to the S-video in of my bttv878 compatible Prolink Pixelview Play TV Pro2.

For playing the stream, I used mplayer (you could also use VLC itself for this) with the following URL at the command line.

mplayer http://192.168.1.3:8080

That's it! Back to watching the match ... NZ just came to bat second innings :D

FOSS project: Sahana wins an FSF award!

2007-03-28T12:43:00.000+05:30

The Sahana project, a large scale disaster/relief management software developed soon after the Asian Tsunami and subsequently used during several other disasters, has won an award titled "2006 social benefit award", from the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

I myself feel proud and fortunate to have been involved with this project during its inception, and wish it will continue to be useful during unfortunate times. At the same time, I wish, there would be a less need for the deployment of Sahana, as a result of lesser number of devastation disasters. I think those now directly involved with the project wish for the same thing.

More info (with pics at):

Sahana wins the 2006 social benefit award

Anuradha Weeraman's Photo Blog

My iPod now runs Linux...

2007-03-27T14:02:00.000+05:30

Inspired by my favorite Linux podcast, "The Linux Action Shooooooooow" (thats how its pronounced), where each week Chris would talk about some new cool gadget that supposedly runs Linux. On the same spirit, I'd like to announce, the above.

I managed to install Linux on my somewhat recent 30GB video ipod. While ipodlinux has been around for quite some time now, the newer 5.5G (Generation) ipods weren't supported. Well all that has changed as of late February 2007.

Installation was quite easy, and I didn't even have to backup my data and repartition anything. Installation was actually quite easy due to the fact I had a Macpod (an ipod formatted using iTunes on running on my Mac Mini's OSX) which had put an hfsplus file system. Since hfsplus was a UNIX file system (POSIX compliant), I could just install Linux over it.

In contrast, for the majority of people that are running their ipod on FAT32, the process is slightly more complicated, required a separate ext3 FS to be created.

Anyway here is a video of my ipod booting off ipodlinux

On a similar note, I recently saw a digg post which claimed that someone has figured out how to run PowePC (ppc) Linux on Microsoft's latest Xbox 360. Running Linux on the Xbox 360 was considered quite difficult due to the system being heavily locked down via DRM, but apparently using a game exploit this is now possible.

Just makes you wonder if Microsoft will try to fix this exploit and prevent Linux from being installed or turn a blind eye, just so that they can take away the title from Sony's PS3 as being the only 2nd Gen console that can run Linux, something that Sony's PR engine emphasized.

Oh well, Yet-another-Gadget now runs Linux.

Previously on FOSSEd Kandy ...

2007-03-07T10:44:00.000+05:30

Last weekend, we had our first FOSSEd on wheels event in Kandy. It was organized by the faculty of science, University of Peradeniya and was held on the 3rd and 4th (Sat & Sun) of March.

Since I had other commitments, I was only able to attend the event on the 3rd. I did a small presentation on deciding to choose a GNU/Linux distribution, a task that can be quite overwhelming, considering the hundreds of distributions out there. Nevertheless, I think I pulled it off by recommending they initially just try the Ubuntu distro, that was distributed to them at the event.

Just to make things a little bit easier, I demoed a live Ubuntu installation (using VMPlayer), which took only a little more than 15 minutes.

There was good balance in the number of attendees from universities, schools and a few from the industry who participated by asking questions as the event progressed. All in all, I thought it was one of the best FOSSEd events we had in a while.

Check out the following links for more on FOSSEd Kandy:

Lasantha's Photo Gallery

Sagara's (Organizer) Blog

Mifan's Blog

Dell should be punished!

2007-02-28T14:26:00.000+05:30

When I read the, once "Highly Confidential" - but now public (as a result of the Iowa anti-trust case), email thread from Redmond, it just cracked me up.

Sounding much like a bunch of kids fighting over who's daddy is better, this is further proof that M$ is so damn uncertain of its self.

Here are some funny moments from the memo:

"This is just life. I am not giving up. I don't have a penguin in my basement. I LOVE windows which is why I want us to face this so we can figure it out."

"Did Russ Holt know you were there, I can't imagine he would be this blatant against us if he knew you were there. "

"I was sitting right across the panel from him. We waved at each other briefly before the panel started."

"I want them to think very, very carefully about when and which forums they decide to push Linux very, very hard. Today, they do not. When they do, you can bet, behaviour will evolve."

"He said Windows three times during the whole discussion (it was a Linux panel tho) and then proceeded to push Linux very hard, never mentioning Windows."

You can read the memo here.

Interestingly this comes at a time, where Dell is currently conducting a brainstorming survey from their customers whom which the majority is asking for GNU/Linux pre installed on Dell desktops and notebooks. This is followed by other requests including having OpenOffice pre installed.

Check out the results of the survey.

It is yet to be seen if Dell can stand up to the bully and deliver what consumers want.

The Darker side of Vista...

2007-02-19T14:05:00.000+05:30

There is a darker side to Vista, one that far exceeds, beyond the dark theme that greets you after login in!

Vista has taken, "Restricting the user's rights to do what they can", to an unparallel level, never seen under any previous OS to date.

Most of these restrictions, were designed to set the stage for the inevitable, widespread adoption of technologies such as HD content that are currently at a bleeding edge state, thus expensive and not widely used.

As a result, for many of the early users of Vista, these defective restrictions are likely to go ununnoticed and then it will be too late... for all of us.

What am I talking about? you ask? Is it about activation thats got a number of tries attached to it? Or the fact that you can't change your motherboard without Vista considering the license invalid? Or perhaps the fact that you no longer can install Vista inside a virtualized platform such VMware or Xen?

While all of the above restrictions can be thought of as being somewhat annoying, especially when you've paid a considerable amount to acquire the OS, what I am talking about is an even darker monster - called DRM.

DRM = Digital Rights Management

Such a beautiful name for such a Cruel Intention! While it sounds like a party line from a Digital Rights activist group, DRM actually is trying to do the exact opposite - take away your right to the media you purchased. In the olden days, you could play a cassette you bought on any cassette player, such as your Hi-Fi or walkman and also make a personal backup just in case it got damaged. Well those days are going to be in the history books if RIAA/MPAA has it their way.

In a nutshell, the Vista DRM issue is that Microsoft has gone in to great lengths to architect Vista in such a way that it mandates a certain commitment from hardware vendors, just so that it fulfills the fantasies of the Record and Movie companies, thus undermining the users, hardware vendors, and ofcourse the single most important thing that made Microsoft the biggest OS vendor - the Open Personal Computer (PC) platform.

It is unacceptable to argue (see Microsoft's response url below), that because protected HD specifications require these stringent regulations inorder to play protected HD content Vista had no choice but to implement them. In other words, loosing your flexibility and freedom to tinker with an open PC platform by locking it down both in terms of hardware and software is worth it because otherwise we can't watch HD movies!

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history"

"...in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes that it were possible"

- Peter Gutman

A recent paper by security expert Peter Gutman, titled "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection", examines the technical issues behind Microsoft's DRM fantasies and why its not even technically feasible in the long run.

Microsoft's (unofficial) blog post response to this article didn't seem to go down so well (read through the comments). After reading it what I felt it boiled down to was - "Well thats the cost of doing business with RIAA/MPA. XP and ME had some of this already so don't sweat, its no big deal!".

As primarily a non Windows user, my initial reaction was, "I could careless, about Windows issues!". But this DRM issue has the potential to impact the PC itself as a result of Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market. The result is a tight grip on all the major hardware vendors where its easy to dictate terms and conditions and they are forced to follow through or face consequences (e.g: Dell almost got punished for distributing GNU/Linux).

Since most of the DRM technologies are based on keeping secrets (keys,obsfucating code), the result is that user's of Free Operating Systems such as GNU/Linux and BSD will not be able to play HD quality content that they have legitimately purchased. Worse yet is the possibility that as a result of these restriction, the device may not function at all or quite poorly with limited features because the hardware vendor will be forced to do their utmost to protect the DRM secrets making it extremely difficult to reverse engineer an Open Source driver. When taken in to account the insane DCMA, there is no way to legally use such hardware, because the mere act of even attempting to reverse engineer (even using a clean room method) will be considered illegal!

It's bad enough we have a screwed up software patent system. Now thanks to Vista selling out to DRM, it will only get crazier and crazier. If we're lucky, we will see that suicide note realize, or Vista somehow undoing this mess with a service pack before its too late.

Sleeping on the net

2007-02-10T00:39:00.000+05:30

Well, I can finally fall asleep, (in bed) while browsing the net on my PSP over wireless. Thats right ADSL has finally come home. I was waiting for it to come to our neighborhood for the past two years or so. For those can recall would know that I had to go through several painful temporary solutions with nothing much to settle on. At last now, I can finally disconnect that CDMA piece of crap!

Getting the ADSL connection wasn't painless either. Since it was my dad who owned the phone line, I had to get him to sign the forms and even submit a photo copy of his ID since he couldn't be there in person.

The real problem was that I only got to know about it, only after trying to handover the filled form. So I had to make two trips over two days just for them to accept the application. But that wasn't the end of it.

I initially handed over the form to the WTC Teleshop, and waited for about a week before calling to check on progress. Thats when I realized what seemed to have been a lost application in transit - from WTC to the Kotte exchange.

I wasn't in the mood for a miracle, so instead decided to fill in another form and to take my dad along to the Kotte exchange, this time around. We hit another snag when they said that according to their computer system, we hadn't paid the last phone bill, despite my dad remembering it was paid a little over 3 weeks earlier. It turns out that when you pay bills through the bank it can take some time. Since the system didn't allow our application to be entered with an outstanding balance, and since we hadn't brought our receipt, we decided to repay the last bill with the understanding it will be adjusted in the next bill. Fortunately they did let me add the ADSL connection fees on credit to the next bill as opposed to paying it then and there.

If all this wasn't enough, I later came to learn that our home address was somewhat outdated on the SLT database. Basically we used to use a different house number (Don't ask me why) to the one we use now. This resulted in another request to fax a letter signed by my dad explaining it.

But finally when all of that was sorted out, I did get the connection in just two days. So if I hadn't gone to the WTC teleshop and instead gone direct to the Kotte exchange and didn't have the address issue - so in an ideal world, I would have got it in just two days, which in itself is pretty amazing (considering what they tell you its gonna be). I am yet to officially be notified of my connection though.

For anyone is wondering about ADSL, head on over to http://www.slt.lk/data/forhome/106adsl_areas.asp and wonder no more.

My first post for 2007!

2007-01-19T02:15:00.001+05:30

Been really really busy the last couple of weeks at work that I really wasn't in the mood for blogging. But what better way to break the ice, and kick off blogging in 2007 than to do it on your Birthday. Yes! you heard me right folks, its that day of the year, when your not sure whether you should be happy and excited or anxious and lost.

I've just hit 30, a couple of hours ago and at this point, I'm still contemplating how I should feel about it. Should I declare myself as an old person or as a (not so old) person. Oh!, how the passing of a few hours can try to change your (outlook on) life :)

And thats' sort of how I feel about this year. I'm very excited about 2007, from a technological standpoint, but not so sure with the way the world is ticking. But first, here are some things why I think things are going to be exciting this year:

Linux Desktop Effects: Compiz and Beryl blew away the competition, and excited anyone who saw them. Expect more exciting developments from those two projects and of course the upcoming Ubuntu and Fedore distros that will make use of them out of the box. Desktop Linux is on steroids, and several projects such as the effort of the Opensource nvidia driver, possibly better Opensourced ATI drivers are going to make things much much better. I will fall short of saying, this is the year of the Desktop Linux.

GPL v3: GPL v3 will be finalized this year and we can expect to see some projects migrate to using GPLv3 from GPLv2, while some may even make a stand saying they will not migrate to it. But what is certain is, the debate wont be over. There is sure gonna be some more of those interesting discussions involving the controversial DRM and software patents issues. I was listening to a podcast with Jeremy Allison, of the Samba Project think that Microsoft might actually have to rethink their deal with Novel, when it comes them distributing SuSe Linux coupons they bought from Novel, if they want to continue to rant about the so called "every Linux user owes Microsoft an undisclosed amount of debt" piece of crap. Because the GPL v3 patent clause says that you can't distribute a software if you know that it violates any patents and if you distribute a piece of software, then you cant later sue claiming patent violations. So essentially, if you are a patent owner and you distribute a software then by that very act, you've given the community a promise you won't sue.

Windows Vista: For the majority of people who has been running a 10 year+ old Operating System, something to look forward to. While I don't think people will flock to shops to grab Vista, people opting to buy a new machine has something to look forward to. I think we will have 1GB become the standard memory size and most people will opt for 2GB memory as a result of the high hardware demand.

Apple's Leopard: Like with all of Apple's products, we are going to be dazzled seeing Steve Jobs demoing Apple's next OS. Though people probably wont rush to buy an expensive Mac, it will probably set a trend with some cool features that other OSes will eventually want to copy.

PS3: This awesome gaming machine, is going to totally kick ass! I think we'll hear a lot about the PS3, not just about the games but also other cool things involving Linux. The PS3 might be the killer device for Linux because, unlike a PC which could run many OSes, the PS3 currently can only run Linux besides the games.

iPhone: The iPhone is cool. Sure it may actually have less features than some of the SE or Nokia N series phones, but the freaking touch system coupled with the interface is hard to resist. I just hope they manage to have a 3G unit (with 2.5G + EDGE) in by the end of the year.

Nokia N800: Ok this phone isn't really a phone. Its the successor to the 770 tablet. Similar to the 770, I don't think a lot of people are going to buy it, mainly because Nokia doesn't seem to want to push it aggressively. But nevertheless it is an awesome device that runs on Linux and already has many useful applications. Its definetely a geek must have gadget.

OLPC This is one cool gadget that people are going to rush to somehow get their hands on. I hope kids won't get mugged in the process :). Its got a cool new interface (which I sort of found awkward at first), runs Linux, has WiFi built in, and has an innovative way of charging the battery my using some sort of mechanical energy (rotating shaft).
Second Life: Its been around for sometime now, but as a result of recent high profile events by organizations such as IBM and Sun having virtual replicas inside Second Life, and holding virtual conferences attended by many, the popularity of it has picked up. Second Life is like an early manifestation of the Matrix, a virtual world that some people will spend more time in than in the real world. Recently there was a woman who successfully runs a virtual real-estate business and as a result has became a millionaire (in terms of real world money) inside Second Life. I think there will be some mobile clients of second life on some hand held devices (if it hasn't already happened) and I think I heard that they might OpenSource some of it.

We sure are living in crazy times. Especially when you hear stuff like this year being one of the most hottest ever, or the fact its damn cold in California with snow in the Malabu area after some 20 years, or the recent floods in Asia with yet another Tsunami warning. And to top it all off, the Doomsday Clock, which is maintained by some of the top physicist, was brought forward by 2 minutes, and now stand at 5 minutes to destruction of all things as we know it!

That's why, (like my age), I'm not quite sure whether to be excited about 2007 or feel a little bit lost.

I pledged $10 for an Open Source Nvidia driver

2006-12-28T12:54:00.000+05:30

Nvdia makes great drivers, awesome drivers for Linux. Those drivers are so great that no one has been motivated enough to write a good Open source driver for it.

OK, I'm kidding, there is a good Open Source driver for Nvidia cards already but they only support 2D functions. So if you want 3D hardware acceleration, you have to settle for the official driver. So whats wrong with that? you might ask.

Well if you are a Linux user, you might have come across the inconveniences involved with of upgrading the Nivida driver or the Linux kernel. But thats really a minor price to pay, compared to the freedom lost as a result.

An year or so ago, Nvidia dropped support for some of their old graphic cards such as the Riva TNT2. The result - you either had to upgrade your graphic card or use the last driver they put out. Chances are that last driver doesn't support any of the recent kernels. So your also stuck using an old kernel. Your freedom to keep up is lost.

One of my friends had an Apple PPC notebook (a really expensive Powerbook) which had an Nvidia card. He decided to install GNU/Linux and all of a sudden, there is no (3D) driver for his graphics card. Nvidia doesn't think its worth the trouble to put out a PPC compatible binary driver for Linux as most Apple users' run MacOS.

There are just some of the reasons why its healthy to have an Open Source Nvidia driver which supports 3D acceleration, thats good enough to run a 3D desktop such as XGL/AIGLX. Thats why I made the following pledge:

"I will pledge at least $10 USD towards the development of the
open source nouveau driver for the nvidia card series but only
if 1,000 other people will too."

If you believe in the cause, you too can pledge (no you don't need to enter your credit card just yet). If anything, it motivates the developers who are working hard with no official support from NVidia.

http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver

The alternative KDE Menu (made in Sri Lanka)

2006-12-01T17:07:00.000+05:30

Came across this article that featured KBFX, the alternative application for KDE, which IMHO is a whole lot more appealing than what KDE and Gnome , for that matter currently has by stock. The KBFX project, by the way was started by our very own, Kandy resident, Siraj Razick, but now has few other developers & graphic artists contributing from around the world.

KBFX is quite popular because it enables one to theme the menu system in addition to providing a much cleaner UI to find all those apps. Popular eye candy portal, KDE-Look, even has a separate KBFX Theme category.

Anyway check out the article:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/74/Ktools_Kbfx_Menu.pdf

The geek is back...

2006-12-01T15:01:00.000+05:30

Been a long time since I've last blogged. Kept my self extremely busy at work and home, and I guess been a little lazy to blog given a couple of newer developments. So I thought I'd share the main developments that kept me away from blogging...

My new ipod

After battling with the idea of whether I should buy an ipod or not, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new 30GB video ipod. When Apple came out with these slightly improved babies (models), I figured that if it was good enough for all those million users then it was good enough for storing my mp3 collection.

After accidentally repartitioning the ipod, becuase it didn't seem to show the partiton using fdisk -l on Linux, and then finding out that I had just destroyed the the firmware partition, I had to go through the hassel of downloading the latest version of iTunes for my Mac mini just so I can download and install the firmware from within it.

But on a positive note, that process installated the firmware on an Apple HFSPlus filesystem, which of course was far more superior to that of Microsoft's FAT32, which was there by factory default.

Getting everything working on Linux was a snap thanks to GTKPod. All I had to do was to compile the hfsplus module for the Linux kernel and it automatically mounted as I plugged it in. While not all the features available through iTunes for the newer generation ipod, worked with GTKPod, I was neverthekless able to do the essential basics such as upload music/videos, create playlists, modify meta data and create smart play lists.

Podcasts

Another thing that kept me away from Blogging was all those great podcast shows. Now I don't want to sound like I've been living under a rock, not knowing about podcast. Actually, I've even created a video podcast with Arunan, which of course was too lame to be properly released. But the fact that I can have a bunch of these podcast on my ipod, ready for listening on my way to work and back was just ideal and highly addictive. Instead of listening to lame DJs go on and on like a theme from Titanic, I now get to listen to geeks go on and on :) So I now get most of my geek news from podcasts.

Console mania

Tracking the launch of the Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii was another one of those things that took away some of my blogging time in trade of doing research into these awsome nextgen consoles. I admit, I'm a fanboy of both these consoles (ok even M$'s Xbox 360 is pretty awsome). It was very exciting watching a video on utube showing an 8 penguins lineup (as a result of the 8 core processor) as Fedora Core Linux PPC version booted on a PS3.

The Wii with its motion detector and the ability to emulate the classic NES/SNES and perhaps with an optimistic possibility of even running Linux (Wii is also based on PPC) did keep me awake at night. So I do somewhat sympathize with all those losers that stood in 2 week ques to bye it :)

CBN Sat

We were all doing fine, and I've even forgot all bout that gadget, until that is, they started shouting about how the courts had allowed them to broadcast immediately. Well, its been a couple of days but nothing much except for a few minutes of the green light. The channels are not yet back on online. And so we wait, reading the CBNSat blog, reading the humorous comments by people who are formulating crazy plans to get even with their enemies.

So there you have it folks. The top 5 reasons why I was away from my blog (the 1st being work of course).

Buttala, we made it!

2006-10-13T03:25:00.000+05:30

FOSS on Wheels got on to a lazy start yesterday. We waited for the bus (though it made it on time - 4pm), waited for people (LSF guys were late!) and then went shopping!

After a couple bottles of Mountain dew, Pringle cans and Kist fruit drinks among other things, seemed about right to start moving.

Traffic down high level was high as usual, and we made it to Ratnapura close to 9:00. We had a tasty mix fried rice dinner, at a restaurant just close to the Ratnapura police station. Apparently this restaurant was a famous spot for concluding business deals among Gem dealers, though that didn't seem to be the case on that tonight.

Couldn't do much after dinner, especially with the PSP batteries dying on me, so I dozed off instead. All I could remember was us making several stops for "nature call" sessions.

Finally we made it to Buttala. The room had a row of beds waiting for us to lay upon. The first thing we did was to reserve a bed for our beloved gadgets that needed to rest and charge.

So while I type away this blog post.. yawn... Anuradha and Suchetha are comparing their prizes - SLR like cameras by challenging each other to read the ingredients on a bottle a couple of feet away. As my camera wasn't upto the challenge, with only a 3x zoom, I instead settled for this picture of them taking the picture.

Yaaawn... good morning

Building an offline version of Easy Ubuntu - EasyERUbuntu HOWTO

2006-09-24T15:35:00.000+05:30

Motivation

Ubuntu has become a popular GNU/Linux distributions and has introduced many new users to the world of GNU/Linux and FOSS. Nevertheless, some felt that new users migrating would find it difficult not being able to perform certain functions such as play DVDs, listening to mp3 etc., even though the platform supports these functions. Getting these packages installed might not be trivial for some newbies even though much of the details has been well documented at http://ubuntuguide.org.

Easy Ubuntu was an attempt to provide a user-friendly front end that made it very easy to install several key packages that were missing in Ubuntu due to possible legal reasons. Unfortunately, the current stable version of Easy Ubuntu doesn’t support an offline mode. The development versions seemed to have a work-in-progress implementation for an offline mode, but that doesn’t seem to support the same user friendly GUI that is available during the network install.

EasyER Ubuntu (pronounced Easier Ubuntu) is an attempt to provide a companion CD for Ubuntu that uses a slightly modified version of Easy Ubuntu. Additionally, the CD is aptable, meaning you can add it as an apt resource using the apt-cdrom tool.

Here is how I made this CD:

Steps

Downloaded easyubuntu and ran the installer, selecting all packages.

Install any other packages. If you want you can use the option –download-only to prevent the package from being installed.


apt-get --download-only install foo

Installed apt-move utility and configured it so that it doesn’t actually delete the package cache (as a result of moving)


 # apt-get install apt-move
 # vi /etc/apt-move.conf
 COPYONLY=yes

Created the local apt mirror directory


# rm -rf /mirrors/debian
# mkdir -p /mirrors/debian

Ran apt-move to copy the debs from the apt archive


# apt-move -d dapper update

Because ubuntu repository structure, not all packages are inserted into the Packages.gz file by apt-move. We must remake Packages.gz with the help of apt-ftparchive.


# cd /mirrors/debian/dists/dapper
# mkdir -p {non-free,contrib}/binary-i386


# apt-ftparchive packages pool/main/ | gzip -9c > dists/dapper/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
# apt-ftparchive packages pool/multiverse/ | gzip -9c > dists/dapper/multiverse/binary-i386/Packages.gz
# apt-ftparchive packages pool/contrib/ | gzip -9c > dists/dapper/contrib/binary-i386/Packages.gz
# apt-ftparchive packages pool/non-free/ | gzip -9c > dists/dapper/non-free/binary-i386/Packages.gz


Archive: contrib
Component: contrib
Origin: APT-Move
Label: APT-Move
Architecture: i386

We need to remake the Release file so we first create a template apt configuration file called myapt.conf


APT::FTPArchive::Release {
Origin "APT-Move";
Label "APT-Move";
Suite "dapper";
Codename "dapper";
Architectures "i386";
Components "main multiverse contrib non-free";
Description "Ubuntu Updates CD";
};

# rm dists/dapper/Release
# apt-ftparchive -c ~/myapt.conf release dists/dapper/ > Release
# mv Release dists/dapper/

Next we need to sign the Release file using out GPG key. But first we need to create our GPG key if it doesn’t already exist


# gpg --gen-key
# gpg -bao dists/dapper/Release.gpg dists/dapper/Release

Next, we delete unwanted .apt-move directory


# rm -rf .apt-move

Next we need to identify the cd by making a .disk directory and making an info file in it.


# mkdir .disk
# echo EasyERUbuntu `date +%Y-%m-%d` > .disk/info

Then we need to put our public keys in it.


# gpg --export -a "Your Name" > public.key

Easy Ubuntu Hack

Stop Easy Ubuntu from updating the conf/sources.list file by commenting out detect.replace(confdir) from easyubuntu.in


 ###detect.replace(confdir)

Put a static sources.list line that only uses the CD ROM


 deb cdrom:[EasyERUbuntu]/ dapper contrib main multiverse non-free

We can further modify the EasyUbuntu script to prevent it from running apt-get update on the CD everytime you install a package, which would cause an annoying error message .


### self.manager.remove("--update-at-startup") # EasyER Ubuntu Hack

### synaptic.update() # EasyER Ubuntu Hack

Thats it!

Burning and Using

Copy the modified easyubuntu directory to /mirrors/debian.


# tar zcvf /mirrors/debian/easyerubuntu.tar.gz easyubuntu

To create the iso


# mkisofs -r -A "EasyERUbuntu" -o ubuntu-companion.iso /mirrors/debian

Before you could use the CD, you need to add our GPG key to apt GPG keys


# apt-key add /cdrom/public.key

Finally add the CD as a source.


# apt-cdrom add

You can now extract the easyerubuntu.tar.gz from the CD to your home directory


$ mount /media/cdrom
$ tar zxvf /media/cdrom/ubuntu.tar.gz

Now you can execute EasyERUbuntu


$ cd easyubuntu
$ ./launchEU.sh

Issues: While most packages install properly, not all of them do. Most packages in the system tab don't work. These may require a bit more hacking to get working offline.

See Also: AptMoveHowto

Freedom LOST at Software Freedom Day!

2006-09-20T00:57:00.000+05:30

Last Saturday, 16th of September, the Sri Lankan team geared up to celebrate the Software Freedom Day (SFD). As part of the day's events, it was decided to have them in popular hangout locations. After some debate, the locations were realized as be that of Majestic City, Crescat and Excel World.

While we managed to secure the Crescat lobby by paying the reasonably quoted amount in advace, the quote from Excel World seemed too pricey, given the nature of the event. As Majestic City had already been secured (through Epsi computers), it was decided to drop Excel World as a location at the last minute, despite the pre-marketing brochures already mentioning otherwise. For the moment it seemed as if the management of Excel World, did not see any value in us having the event for the low price we asked.

What follows is the story of how things took a completely different turn, at the last moment and how the three different managements of the three different locations affected us.

Crescat

Saturday morning, we turned up at Crescat with a bunch of computers, brochures and lots and lots of CDs. It was evident that the security personnel had already been informed of our arrival. They were very polite and helpful in getting Crecat opened. Further more the security guard was courteous enough to open the door for us when ever we wanted to move an item across as if we were customers walking in.

It was about this time that the Fecom Technology's guy turned up with a couple of tables, a huge HP server and a couple of notebooks. The guys went about getting the Crescat lobby setup. Myself, the two guys from Matara and Ven. Mettavihari, on the otherhand departed towards the next location - Majestic City (MC).

Majestic City

By the time we arrived at MC, the Epsi guys had already started getting the lobby setup. We offloaded some banners, CDs and handout and was pondering as to how we wanted to promote the SFD event, without hijacking the Epsi event. As this was the second day of Epsi's promotion, they already had their place including banners all setup.

After a bit of inspection, we decided to hang three banners, one that was horizontal, just above the main stage like area and another two vertical banners just next to the horizontal one. Two way sticky tape seemed to do the trick, except that it took some time for the exercise. Half way through, tough, a security guard came up and asked if we were part of Epsi as if we were upto something illegal, to which we said "yes".

He immediately just walked away with no hint at all as to what was to come! After finishing sticking up all three banners, and feeling somewhat proud as people looked up from below and down from above, we entered a bookshop to buy a white bristle board and a permanent marker. These were used to drew a sign with the message "Get your free (zero cost) GNU/Linux CD!".

We placed a few handouts and CDs on top of the piano at MC, and had just finished sticking up the "free CD" sign on the granite beam right next to the piano, when the same security guard came walking (fast) back telling us to take it down!

My initial reaction was, "Sorry, we'll take the sign down", as we had a doubt whether it was proper to stick a sign up on the beam. But then, he insisted that we should also take down the banners! The banners we spent a good 20 minutes sticking up and getting it just right. Just then my phone rang! It was a guy from Epsi on the other line apologizing and explaining that we have to bring down the banners and that he had just got blasted from the MC management. I asked him if there was anything that could be done but he seemed sure there wasn't. "These guys are very touch", he told me.

We decided, that we should try to talk to the management and explain that we were part of the Epsi promotion. The previous year, we had already had a similar promotion with the Notebook shop which was very successful. We asked the security guard if we can talk to the management. He said that we should talk to the head of security and vaguely pointed his finger to a man. It wasn't clear who he was pointing to. We asked again. Again he pointed to a person in a crowd. It was evident he did not want to be the one to introduce us to his superior. I mean the security guard that was literally telling us to bring down the banners and posters seemed scared. So we followed the man we thought was the head of security. He quicky went into Cargills, so we too went into Cargills.

He seemed like a nice person, who was walking slowly, looking around, not much keen on buying anything. Sort of like an undercover agent, masquerading as a customer. My self and Hamudurowo approached him together and asked, "We were told that you are the head of security". The man calm and smiled and said no. Soon we saw his family walk over to him. We knew we had the wrong guy so said sorry and went back to catch the guard.

Now he was pointing to another person who was speaking loud with one of the Epsi guys. We walked over to him and said are you the head of security. He barked at us saying, "This does not concern you!". Hamuduro and I tried to explain that today was a special event to which he said, you have no permission. We explained that we were part of the Epsi promotion but he said that Epsi had no permission to hang banners in the middle or to get any other party involved. We asked if there was anyway to which he kept nodding and moving his face away as to walk off. We finally said, that we'll pay to which gave a steep gaze and said, this place costs 15,000/- but since Epsi has a shop its free for them. We asked if we can pay that but he said, "Send a proposal and we will have to put it to the board". Then if we want we will allow. We tried to ask the procedure of how to get the location in detail to which he snapped and repeated, send a proposal and we will decide. We said that we had this event last year, to which he replied, "I didn't know about this last year". We explained that we had publicized and was bringing in people to the location to which he gave a blind look.

By this time he was very angry and popping like a can of pop corn. He told that we couldn't not have the promotion and that we should immediately "Get out!". All our attempts to talk sense with the guy had failed, miserably. He didn't have any decency to even ask what we were trying to do there. We decided to can the location since we didn't want Epsi's promotion to be in jeopardy.

The Epsi guys were quite upset as well. They didn't expect this but knew that MC was very tough and a bully. They had the shop at MC for the last 14 years but still was treated like dirt.

Excel World

We decided to focus primarily at Crescat and so went back. But since the brochure's had mentioned Excel world, and since we were down to just one location out of 3, we decided to send a small team to just sit at Excel World with some brochures and CDs while having some food. No banners, no computers, just some handouts so as to not cause much of a problem. A senior person from the management had seen us and the team had also identified him as management and had approached him for permission. He had given the permission and had wanted to offer a better rate and so had asked for my phone number. I got a call from that person saying that he was very busy and that he would like to work with the community and offer a better rate. Though it wasn't as low as Crescat, the rate seemed fair enough and so I gave the goahead. He offered us the necessary arrangements to bring computers and setup. Later that evening after the Crescat event was no longer happening, we moved all the computers to Excel world and continued celebrating well into the night. Since it was Karoke night, there the place was packed and out of which some people visited out table.

Final Thoughts...

So except for MC, who got overally hot tempered and as a result, totally lost it in front of customers, the other two locations was very much supportative. The management at MC has somehow built up a massive ego and a bureaucracy that they ended up ruining their image with us. They have violated our freedom to celebrate an important day in a peaceful manner which could have added a lot of value to them. As a result, I don't see myself ever wanting to have a promotion at MC but am looking forward to having more of such events at the other two locations.

An Open invitation to celebrate Software Freedom Day, the 16th

2006-09-15T09:27:00.000+05:30

Software Freedom Day is a global effort to promote the use of Free and Open Source software. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Its a matter of the users freedom to run, copy, distribute, study,change an improve the software.

As part of the celebrations we are having two events at two locations:

Majestic City lobby

We will have some cool, sleek notebooks running Free & Open Source software both on Windows and GNU/Linux. Come see the new GNU/Linux desktops in action and how running FOSS can save you money while preserving your rights!

Crescat lobby

This event is all about power computing. We'll have powerful gaming machines and servers running optimized versions of GNU/Linux that will make games screammmmm! See how the Linux system can be optimized specifically for your hardware even if its an old Pentium 1.

Ready to see how deep the Rabbit hole goes? Well bring along your desktop or notebook and learn how to get GNU/Linux installed on it.

There will be FREE GNU/Linux CDs distributed at both locations.

More info at
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org

Linux booting at 30,000 feet...

2006-09-04T22:31:00.000+05:30

My good friend Iranga, had taken this photo (on his way to SL from UK) of the Linux kernel booting on the on-flight personal entertainment system of a First Choice Airline.

So I guess, First Choice has chosen GNU/Linux as its first choice! Iranga told me that once the kernel booted it loaded a kiosk like interface.

But if the airline itself ran on the Linux kernel? or any other commmon OS? Reminds me of this joke...
http://www.webaugur.com/bibliotheca/field_stock/os-airlines.html

Reader's Digest Newsweek's guide to FOSSSL2006

2006-08-23T18:48:00.000+05:30

Last week has been both exhilarating and some what exhausting with a series of events that began with the Hackathon on Monday, and ended with Geekout on Sunday (though I came back on Saturday).

I've finally got around to uploading the photos which is available at my flickr blog. Here is the recap:

Sunday 13th

On Sunday, I spent the whole day setting up my barebone with Ubuntu64 and testing out VLC hoping to steam the cricket match during the Hackathon. First I tried the multicast mode of steaming video via ipv6, which sort of worked, except that it flooded the network to the point that no one could browse the internet. So much for that! Instead, I settled for the good old http streaming.

That evening we went out to dinner at the Thai restaurant at Trans Asia with the "geek people".

After dinner, I was very much intoxicated after a hefty meal, but knew that the show must go on. So I set about to test the video streaming setup in a similar condition to that in the conference. Luckily for me, we had two rooms reserved at TransAsia for some of our guys to stay over, so I decided to spend the night hacking at the video streaming problem. As a result of the wireless router (belonging to WSO2) being bought from the US, it required a 110v power supply, which was only to be found in the bathroom, where you would normally plug an electric shaver. The solution involved co-locating the equipment near the bathroom, which enabled us to conduct a successful test :)

Monday 14th

With all that testing, you would have expected me to say how managed to stream the match. But Murphy had his way and we were never able to stream due to several problems such as an unstable wireless link. Nevertheless (on a positive note), we did show the match using a video projection on to a big screen. I'm not sure if people coded or watched the match, as I didn't stick around to watch. I had to run off to FOSSSchool and FOSSUni.

Out of those two events, FOSSSchool was extremely successful with a full house, while FOSSUni was moderately successful, perhaps due to other prevaling circumstances.

Tuesday 15th

ApacheConAsia got on to an awesome start with several interesting talks. I was surprised that even though I wasn't directly part of the Apache Developer community, there seemed to be a track that suited the technologies I was interested in (hint: not java).

Russ Nelson stood out as the other "geek with an attitude" ;) I could have sworn he was my twin older brother when it came to the love for gadgets. Actually he is much smarter and geekier than I could ever be. After all he writes packet drivers for a living!

He had a cool glove like keyboard, which he had developed to make it easier to type (after a not soo steep learning curve), in mid air without ever touching a conventional keyboard. Keystrokes are transmitted via bluetooth to his awesomely cool Nokia 770 tablet PC, which by the way was also running on GNU/Linux!

Another fun session at the ApacheCon Asia were the "Lightning Talks". Unlike Count Dracula's lightening talks, which involved counting numbers, accompanied by thunder and lightening, these topics weren't restricted to just counting, though there was a count down timer of 5 minutes. Each person had the freedom to talk about anything, be it technology or "what they did last summer", as long as it ended in exactly 5 minutes.

IMHO, Mifan probably did the most hilarious talk involving an adaptation of the Sahana disaster management system for managing, well family disasters, so to speak :). David Recordon, more commonly known as Dave, started his session talking about a RPG game called, WereWolf, which at the time seemed total greek - that was until geekout (see below).

The last session for the day was another common item in the ApacheCon menu, known as a BOF (pronounced Boff) which stood for Birds of a feather. BOF's are basically a place for small interest groups to informally meet to discuss on an interesting topic. As I didn't much understand what was actually been said, instead I concentrated on something more tangible and at arms length -- free Beer!

Finally we all went out for dinner to the Gallery Caffee which had a nice romantic ambiance.

Wednesday 16th

Woke up late after a night out and missed Sanjiva's talk on, "The world is flat in Apache" :( I had some catching up to do with organizing fossenterprise that was going to happen in another 2 days, so spent most of my time was spent at the Hackathon lounge. I still managed to squeeze in a few interesting talks such as Embedding Axis2/C by Samisa and ofcourse the panel discussion that was moderated by Manju Hathotuwa.

The day ended with an award ceremony, followed by cocktails. During the awards ceremony, I was called up on stage and given a T-shirt for mentoring FOSSCode. I also won a nice IBM denim shirt from a lucky draw that was held by US Technologies.

Cocktails were fun, especially for Russ who seemed to enjoy playing the role of the "confused, wanna-be" minister.

Thursday 17th

I came late on Thursday, just in time for the "Web Application security bootcamp" tutorial, by Christian Wenz, which literally scared the crap out of me! He dazzled the crowed with some amazing JavaScript and SQL injection methods to show how naive web developer's are and how easy it was to penetrate their web sites. While he did show how to write secure code that can minimize this sort of cross scripting vunerabilities, at a considerable cost of putting in a lot of extra effort. Good security concious framework should (hopefully) make this trivial.

Friday 18th

Got up earlier than usual and rushed off to water's edge. Most of my involvement at FOSSSL 2006 was with the planning of FOSSEnterprise, which was about to be put to the test. At first, there wasn't a huge crowd, apparently due to a high traffic jam as a result of the security arrangements for the SAARC games. But by about 10am we had a full house of corporate people wanting to know about FOSS. As a result, by the end of the day, we only had two file dockets left of which I took one. Anuradha took the other ;)

Danise did a touching opening speech on what FOSS was all about and how it has/is changing the lives of many in the world that at one point I had to fight hard to keep my eyes dry.

This was followed by 5 short case studies, each lasting no more than 15 minutes, which talked about how FOSS was the differentiating factor. My talk on "securing your infrastructure using FOSS" was the last talk for the day and was rushed to finish in 15 min. Luckily I ended up escaping an official escort even after taking 18 minutes.

After FOSSEnterprise we got on the Geekout bus and started our journey to Kithulgala, which turned out to be a long long long journey...

By the time we got there, it was raining hard, and we were starving. The bus we came in had a few glitches that prevented it from going anything over 30km/hour. Pretty much everyone who was using alternative transport beat us to the destination. Nevertheless we managed to kill time arguing over the GPL License and what it meant that we didn't notice it as much.

The "Kithulgala Rafter's Retreat" we stayed in was indeed a great retreat from modern life. The cottages we stayed in were well designed to look simple and in touch with nature. For example, you could barely see the wiring, that provided electricity to the ancient looking switches. The yellow ambient lighting (which was of energy saving type), gave a warmth feeling.

Each cottage was uniquely built to fit the landscape it was in. Myself, Anuradha and Sanjaya shared a cottage. After a tiring day, we decided to hit the sack early. There was a constant loud sound of the water stream rushing a few feet across and below us. One could also hear the sound of frogs, crickets and other natural beings. But we were too tired to appreciate these by this time.

Saturday 19th

Got up late to a lazy Saturday but after a naturally cold shower I was ready for anything! After having a delicious breakfast consisting of bread/string hoppers with samen,dal, coconut sambol, we started to contemplate on white water rafting. But before it was the time, there was a little time left to play a little game called Geocache, which was basically a modern hitech version of "Hide and seek" or to be slightly more accurate "treasure hunt", but using a GPS device to locate the hidden treasure.

The way the game went was as follows: First Russ hid a box containing nothing useful :) somewhere in the field (of leeches) and then gave the Geo Co-Ordinates which we entered on to Rich Bowen's GPS device. Then it was a matter of walking around trying to find the hidden box. Ofcouse its not easy as it sounds due to the relatively lower accuracy of civilian GPS and that fact that you have to be constantly moving to get a reading. We eventually managed to find the device but had some bad leech experiences along the way.

White water rafting was truly exhilarating but the hightest point for me was that of jumping off a high rock into fast moving water stream. It didn't feel dangerous until it was my turn. My body only felt it was suicidal just a split second after letting go of the ground, but then it was too late. I can't wait to do that again!

After coming back and having a delicious lunch, we started playing WereWolf, the weird game that Dave was talking about during Lightening Talks. I found myself in an awkward position when I discovered that my girl friend was a were wolf, capable of eating me as I was a mere villager. Convincing the other villagers to get rid of her would also prove touch as they might suspect me as a werewolf. Ultimately I played it safe and helped kill off two of the other Werewolves before they relialized she too was a werewolf. The final werewolf turned out to be Ken core, whom I pointed out as my dying last word purely on gut feeling and it turned to be correct, ending the game.

Later that night we had a barbecue after which I rushed back home, thanks to a ride by Rucith and the gang!

FOSSSL 2006 bill board

2006-08-16T17:38:00.000+05:30

Well you haven't made a mark until your up on a billboard, so they say and that's what I saw yesterday as I was driving my way to the ApacheCon conference.

Many thanks to Virtusa for donating their hoarding to the FOSS community during the FOSSSL 2006. Also a special thanks to the army dude that gave me permission to take this picture. Sorry for forgetting to take your name down.

You can see the hoarding in front of the Bera Lake.

Blogging from ApacheCon Asia

2006-08-15T18:04:00.000+05:30

I'm currently at ApacheCon Asia, the first ever ApacheCon in asia which is also a part of a week long FOSS event known as FOSSSL2006.

You can catch all the pictures from the event on my Flicker photo blog.

We had a good event yesterday at the Univerisity of Moratuwa, called FOSSSchool and FOSSUni which was to talk about FOSS in the academia.

Door-to-Door marketing FOSSSL 2006

2006-08-08T22:32:00.000+05:30

We are not your average sales people. We couldn't be... had we even tried to. We shouldn't be... because we are already selling just fine. We ought to be... because that's what people seem to expect.

We are the Sri Lankan FOSS community and we're coming to your door step - well if we find time, that is.

Here are the top 5 reasons, why your never going to think of us as the average sales person:

We don't wear a tie. We don't have shiny shoes. We generally like to wear jeans and cool FOSS T-shirts, some of which, has the GPL license printed on the back.

We don't carry a brief case full of sh**. We might have a poster or two in our hand.

You like what you hear so much that you have an urge to invite others to listen to our gospels.

After a few minutes of listening, your not sure what we're here to sell. You might even ask "So what is it that you want from us?" or "So what's in it for you?"

We leave your place without having taken a penny or a filled up registration form. And yet, you feel like we've sold you something.

Even though my feet are killing me after all that walking, it was a very satisfying day. All the places that we visited was welcoming and they had already heard about Free & Opensource software (FOSS) to some degree or the other. You could tell they knew something about FOSS but were eager to learn more.

After talking with many guys in the banking, insurance, shipping and the telecom industry, it was apparent that there is a high demand for learning GNU/Linux and about other Opensource software that could replace their current proprietary IT infrastructure. Many of them had a sense of "Opensource is the new trend, the future", but was somewhat unsure of how to go about deploying it. While some places I visited had already adopted one or two servers for handling mail or proxy, the majority is still running on proprietary systems, with an expensive overhead. What is evident is that they realize that its high time to start shopping for an alternative - something that brings back control and reduces cost.

This thirst to know more is the primary motivation for us when we organize events to educate the public at different levels. FOSS(SL) was a week long series of events we started last year, around the first ever Software Freedom day celebrations. So while the rest of world was celebrating a day, we were doing a week :)

Similar to last year, this year's FOSSSL 2006 is a special one as it encompasses the first ever ApacheCon for Asia. ApacheCon is a very popular conference in the US and Europe, that brings thousands of developers and technologists on to a multi track sessions comprising of talks and tutorials. ApacheCon Asia will have a star line up of speakers both local and international. This will be a good opportunity for our local developers to interact with key developers of the popular Apache software that powers nearly 65% of the web (at the time).

Another useful event for the above said local industry looking to migrate is FOSSEnterprise which looks at the know how of adopting FOSS in the enterprise. There will be several real world case studies followed by panel discussions that will be moderated by key FOSS personalities. Similarly, there will be prominent line up of speakers, who have a lot of experience working with the industry.

To end it all off, there is a fun event called Geek out which is an action packed camping trip with a chance to hang out with the geeks!

Buddha statues emitting magical rays or Mass Hysteria?

2006-08-03T02:50:00.000+05:30

On my way home today, I got caught to an unusual traffic jam. The kind you get when there is a heavy storm, an accident or a very smart cop trying to override traffic lights! But as soon as I turned off from the Nawala junction towards, Nugegoda it was evident none of those were the cause. For some weird reason, traffic was just moving slow as far as the eye could see.

Then without thinking much about it, I joked to myself, if this was caused by "yet another Buddha statue" emitting rays and people flocking to see. All day, I've been hearing people musing about how this phenomena was happening in multiple locations and how it had caused traffic jams and even few accidents. But I was too busy at work to think much of it. I didn't really think there could be anything other than a Sri Lankan cricket match that was capable of such things.

After getting home, I got to know that my mom, my girl friend's two sisters and a few other relatives have also witnessed this phenomena. Dinner was spent debating the different theories ranging from that of a conspiracy theory to misdirect attention, to possible chemical agents that might have reacted, to glow in the dark phosphorous to.. well the list goes on. Things got more bazaar when I learned that my gandmother and aunt had seen this in their own living room!

Ladies and gentleman, we have just witnessed Mass Hysteria, induced possibly by an optical illusion caused by a memory effect in the retina due to over exposure. Shocking isn't it?

Mass hyteria can do some horrific things to people as in the case of War of the world's, radio broadcast.

"The War of the Worlds, a radio adaptation by Orson Welles based upon H. G. Wells' classic novel, was performed by Mercury Theatre on the Air as a Halloween special on October 30, 1938. The live broadcast reportedly frightened many listeners into believing that an actual Martian invasion was in progress." - wikipedia

Though I personally didn't get much excited to stop the car and witness this myself, the following demo might illustrate what people think they are seeing.

Concentrate on where the red meets yellow for some time and you should begin to see a light-green glow that changes in width and intensity. Many people have supposedly reported green as the color of the rays. But this theory requires the statue to be of two colors. Anyway these are not my findings but some that I heard on ITN from some viewers that have done some field research.

The final decision by the experts are yet to be announced. Fingers crossed for I hope they don't say that its real :)

P.S
What you see is not always what you get. Check out these optical illusions.

Swap (old_monitor, new_panel);

2006-07-15T01:22:00.000+05:30

Liquid Crystal Display(LCD) Panel prices have come down considerably, perhaps partly driven by some competition from plasma displays, though I feel the LCD will win in the long run.

The price drop has encouraged many organizations (especially in developed countries) to ditch their old monitors, (that have been arriving by the container loads into Colombo), for new LCD displays.

I've been contemplating on an LCD TV versus a Plasma TV but both seem a tad too high for my budget. I didn't want to settle for a 15" or 17" LCD display either because there was already a perfectly functioning 17" monitor. So anything above 17" that was reasonable was what I had in mind and thats exactly what I found (sort of).

I came across a brochure from Metropolitan, that said they would buy back any monitor and sell you a 19" Acer LCD for 10k less. I was a bit skeptical as to the price saving so I decided to do some home work at Unity Plaza. From initial investigations it seemed as if this wasn't a good deal at all, because I could buy a 19" LCD without returning an old monitor for about the same price or a little higher!

Further investigation into the specs revealed that none of those displays were as good as the Acer display. For example most displays could only go up to 1280x800 or in some instances 1024x768 while the Acer could do 1440x900. Also most other displays did not mention their response time which probably meant it was around 12ms or higher, while the Acer one had a wooping 8ms. The lower the response time the less ghost effect you get with high action video. So I came to the conclusion that the dislay was worth more than the extra 10k that is being reduced.

But where would I get an old monitor thats worth less? Ah.. thats where my 10 year old 15" monitor which my dad was using comes in. Its a win-win situation. He gets a 17" monitor; I get 10k off for a really old, "not so good for your eyes" monitor; our family saves on electricity because I'm a heavy computer user; the problem of disposing a junk monitor without hurting the environment has been handed over to someone else.

So if your looking for an upgrade, this might be a good opportunity.

BabyTux Digest, probably the first...

2006-07-06T18:03:00.000+05:30

The babyTUX Digest came as an idea to some of us to create an online magazine that covered Free & opensource software(FOSS) and related technologies. It is probably the first FOSS Magazine from Sri Lanka, carrying several articles by local writers.

The magazine hopes to cover a wide range of FOSS applications in the style of reviews, how-do-i/how-to etc. as well as other local news and events related to the local FOSS movement. While it is primarly written for the intelligent newbie, there will be some articles for the intermediate and advanced user as well.

To commemorate the launch, there was a small private party at "The Commons", which was attended by few key contributors to the project as well as some well wishers (who'll hopefully be future contributors). Arunan, who is also the Editor, gave a run down of the pilot issue and enlightened the gathering as to how and why it was put together. In addition to the local writers, several foreign writers have also provided articles for the first issue.

The magazine, which is being distributed via a Creative Commons License, can be downloaded from the BabyTUX Digest website - http://digest.babytux.org. Don't forget to sign up for the babytuxdigest googlegroup to be notified as soon as a new issue of the magazine is released. For the moment, the babyTUX Digest will is planned to be released once every two months.

Which came first? The Computers or the Operating System?

2006-07-03T00:42:00.000+05:30

Imagine going to your vehicle dealer to buy your dream car and inspecting evey inch of it. Beautiful interior and gourgous exterior only tempt you to look under the hood.

At first your dazzled by the sparkling engine, but your eyes quicky gaze at a sticker pasted on engine.

"This car was designed for Kaltech Koolant and Engine oil"

"Have times changed", you might think to your self. Last time you bought a car, it pretty much ran on any type of Coolant or even water. Same went for engine oil. Weren't Coolants and Engine oils supposed to be designed to work with cars and not the other way around?

At this point you might change your mind, and start to look for another car. To your horror, all new cars come with this logo.

"What's up doc?", you ask the dealer. "Oh come on....practically every car these days runs on Kaltech, he tells you. Seeing that your not satisfied with his answer, he titls over to your ear and wispers, "Don't worry, it does run on other Coolants or just plain old water... but don't quote me on that!". "We're not allowed to remove that sticker and tell you that the car is more flexible than meets the eye. If we do, we could loose our dealership!", he explains.

Thankfully this story is fiction... atleast in this parallel Universe; or is it??? Something somewhere has terribly gone wrong in our universe, because apprently computers are now designed to run on a certain Redmond OS.

The best things that happened to our computers were a result of IBM opening up their PC architecture design. As a result there was more innovating in both hardware and software that powered the PC. So why deny that power by having a sticker that undermines it.

Get the real facts and ask your self, is the sticker worth it! Shouldn't your computer deserves more.

Your computer doesn't have a chicken and egg problem. Well may be just a chicken problem.

They wanted me to play Games on Linux during the Lecture...

2006-06-29T23:19:00.000+05:30

I've never been officially asked to play games in front of a crowd as part of a lecture before.. until NOW, that is! But to add to the joy, how about going out of Colombo (sort of) and into a camp? LKing Camp was what it was called and this second time around, it was held at the Sarvodaya, Moratuwa.

How much more fun could it get? Especially considering the timing with my dual core upgrade and 1GB RAM. So you could imagine how excited I was at the opportunity, when I was invited right after my speech at FOSS-Ed for hackers.

Getting machines for the setup was the event was a bit of a hassle due to the hardware being pretty new and the machines donated by University of Moratuwa still running Fedora Core 4. Ultimately I was able to convince an upgrade to FC5, which fixed most of the 3D grahic issues. On my notebook, I had to do a quick install of Ununtu since I didn't have time to get 3D working on Gentoo (its working now).

As for the game, I ended up going with the quake 3 demo as it performed very well on the intel based grahic cards we had with the Opensource driver. Unfortunately there were some problems when I plugged my notebook to the projector and so had to use a desktop to play the game :(. This too was quite a challenge as I had to look at a not_so_bright projected screen, where the enemy could barely be seen.

After spending an hour or so explaining how to optimize the system for gaming on Linux, we didn't get much time to actually play the game. Luckily for me. we played the game long enough for me to tie the score with my LAN opponent.....phew~

For more pictures: see all photos from LKing

NIBM LUG invites LKLUG

2006-06-27T23:57:00.000+05:30

I was quite impressed the other day when a few of us from the Lanka Linux User Group (LKLUG) visited the National Institute of Business & Management (NIBM) as a result of an invitation we received a little over a month ago, to deliver few lectures. The event was held on the 24th of June.

I thought they did a fantastic job in organizing the event by inviting us well ahead of time and following it up with suggestions for topics to talk of and later fixing a proper time slot that was convenient.

Surprisingly this was the first of such an event and they had even made it a public event (which we were unaware of until later), and had yet managed to fill an entire auditorium of about 90% outsiders.

It was only a couple of years ago that LKLUG first walked into NIBM and planted the seeds of Free & Opensource software by conducting a 2 day workshop on GNU/Linux. Therefore I think it was quite rewarding for us to see how organized and determined they have become in executing this event.

Good job NIBM! Keep spreading the love and freedom....

Few pictures from the event

Getting a Lanka Bell CDMA working on Linux

2006-06-26T10:33:00.000+05:30

Thought of bloggin on the topic as I am constantly asked about the topic. Its not that difficult to get the Bell CDMA phone working most of the time. If you have the hotplug or hald running as soon as you plugin the phone to the USB port it should get detected and the proper driver loaded.

This is how you can check if the driver was loaded properly:

Type dmesg and check the end of the output you should see something that says the ti_usb_3410 driver was loaded successfully.


# dmesg
ti_usb_3410_5052 2-1:2.0: TI USB 3410 1 port adapter converter detected

You can also check that the driver was loaded by using lsmod. The dmesg output should also tell you the USB serial port that the driver has bind itself to. (Usually /dev/ttyUSB0)


# lsmod|grep ti_usb_3410

Also make sure that the proper ppp modules have been loaded, or else you will notice that the dialer will not be able to connect to the ISP.


# lsmod|grep ppp

ppp_generic
ppp_async
ppp_deflate

To connect, I'd recommend using wvdial with stupid mode. I'm not sure if any other dialers support the stupid mode. Create the wvdial.conf script as follows.


# vi /etc/wvdial.conf

[Dialer Defaults]
Init = ATZ

[Dialer BellNet]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Phone = #777
Baud = 230400
Init1 = ATZ
Stupid Mode = 1
Dial Command = ATDT
Username = your_user_name
Password = your_password

Your ready to dial.


# wvdial BellNet

At this point, I find that sometimes the driver is unable to activate the phone's modem unless you pick up the handset and set it down. This isn't always the case but most of the time wvdial gives up because it doesn't get any respose from the modem.

If by any chance you are having trouble with the driver when you look at the dmesg output then usually upgrading the kernel to the latest should help. Otherwise you could try downloading the old driver for 2.6 and installing it manually (you need to have the kernel source)

http://gate.brimson.com/downloads/ti_usb-0.3-1.tgz

Thats it!

Cloning my notebook...and then mutating it!

2006-06-19T23:59:00.000+05:30

Who said that only rich doctors were allowed to clone? I've just cloned my 3 year old notebook on to my brand new Acer TravelMate 4200 notebook that I got from my office.

While the operation wasn't extremely easy, given that I had about 30GB to clone accross a 100MBps shared LAN, it was relatively easier than reinstalling all my 500 odd packages. Given my preference for Gentoo Linux, this would have resulted in a considerable amount of down time waiting for everything to compile. Instead I had a workable system that was identical to where I left off.

Cloning 101

Cloning a GNU/Linux box is relatively simple. I booted both machines off two Knoppix LiveCDs, and then proceeded to configure the network cards on each notebook, so that they can ping each other. Then I partitioned my new notebook's hard drive, wiping out windoze, but keeping the hidden recovery partition just in case (i needed to return it). If you thought that this required creating partition sizes identically to the old notebook, then think again. I was able to utilize my new 80GB hard drive as I pleased, evenleaving some unpartitoned space to play with in the future.


Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         509     4088511   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hda2   *         510         521       96390   83  Linux
/dev/hda3             522         770     2000092+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda4             771        7617    54998527+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5             771        2637    14996646   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            2638        7617    40001818+  83  Linux

So as you may have noticed that unlike the doctors, we are not cloning the body but instead the soul.


# mkdir /mnt/install

Ater creating the install mount point, next I formatted the different partitons and mounted them, but in the following order:

format /dev/hda5 and mount to /mnt/install

# mkreiserfs /dev/hda5; mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/install; mkdir /mnt/install/{boot,home}

format /dev/hda2 and mount to /mnt/install/boot (I prefer a seperate /boot partition)

mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda2; mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/install/boot

format /dev/hda6 and mount to /mnt/install/home

mkreiserfs /dev/hda6; mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/install/home

Next I mounted the different partitions from my old notebook in a similar manner (without the formatting steps..duuh!).

By using rsync tool that was already installed on knoppix, I could now begin the cloning process by issuing the following commands.

On the old notebook


# /etc/init.d/rsync start

On the new notebook


# rsync -av root@ip_of_old_notebook:/mnt/install/ /mnt/install/

..and after about a few hours later the system would have completely been cloned.

Unfortunately as my hard drive layout (body) wasn't compatible with the old one, I needed to reconfigure the /mnt/install/etc/fstab and /mnt/install/boot/grub/menu.lst files and change the partitions to the correct values.

Finally, I installed the boot loader, GRUB on the new machine and rebooted it.


# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/install/boot /dev/hda

kernel panic!

Ok so it didn't exactly go smooth, but only because I used a custom kernel that was optimized for my old notebook. After recompiling a new kernel with drivers for the acer notebook, and rebooting, I was able to get it to work like a charm. If you're using a standard stock kernel, then you are unlikely to have these issues.

One other point to keep in mind is to have some sort of automatic hardware detection deamon running so that you don't have to manually specify drivers. For this, redhat systems use the Kudzu package or something similar while debian systems tend to use the Discover package. I ofcourse opted to manually configure my drivers the Gentoo way!

Introducing Mutations...

I've already done a bit of mutation by modifying a couple of files, but ultimately the whole point of running Gentoo is to optimize it for my hardware. This is going to take a bit of time, as it requires me to recompile the complete system with new compiler flags (aka USE flags). I've already started download all the package sources and hopefully within a day or two I can finish that. I am eager to see how long it will actually take to compile the system, (while I work on it ofcourse), since it has got 1GB of ram and an intel Duo Core Centrino processor (see full specs below).

For anyone purchasing a new notebook thats worth value for money, the Acer TravelMate 4200 is an excellent choice IMHO. And if you want to fully utilize its power then an OS such as Gentoo or any other GNU/Linux disto for that matter is *the* excellent choice!

Processor: Core Duo T2300 1.66 GHz
Motherboard chipset: Intel 945GM
Memory: 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (upgraded)
Hard drive: 80 GB ATA 5400rpms
Optical drive: DVD Super Multi writer
Connectivity: Ports 4 x USB 2.0; RJ45 (LAN); RJ11 (modem); VGA-out, Bluetooth,Built-in devices 1 x Type II PC Card slot
Network: Ethernet 10/100/1000, Wireless LAN 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g
Display: Graphics hardware Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, 224MB
Screen: 15.4 inch, TFT (widescreen) 1,280 x 800
Dimensions: 358 x 269 x 33.8 mm
Weight: w/battery 2.98 kg
Other: Disk Anti-shock protection, Quick charge (80% in 1hrs)

My new Cybershot!

2006-06-09T14:36:00.000+05:30

After the last foss-Ed event and seeing the quality of the pictures taken from my (6 year old) Kodak 3600DX camera, I decided it was time to buy a new one.

When deciding what sort of camera to buy, it occurred to me that having a small, highly portable one would be most practical as I can always carry it around with out pre-planning to take pictures. There were countless number of times that I wished I'd brought my camera along and had to settle for a quick phone camera shot, instead.

So I decided to go with a Sony cybershot T series. After reading a couple of reviews and especially this one, I was sold on buying the T30. I got mine at Nastash, a/the gadget shop at Liberty Plaza.

A few days after I went on a trip to Amaya Hills (aka Le Kandian), and took these pictures among others :)

ENjoy!

More Pictures from Amaya Hills

Ubuntu [Drapper] Launched in style!

2006-06-07T22:10:00.000+05:30

Many geeks turned up at ExcelWorld on last Sunday for the launch of the much waited and anticipated version of Ubuntu, codenamed Drapper. Drapper, aka Ubuntu 6.06, has several improvements over previous versions. Here are some of the high-lights:

Single installable LiveCD

Graphical Installer

Nice sleek look (Ubuntu only IMHO)

Official promotion of Kubuntu

Update notification applet

Improved hardware support, especially for wireless devices

Anyway, I hope to write a review on my first impressions on Ubuntu later this week.. so stay tuned.

I got to the party a little bit late - at around 6pm even though it was on from about 1pm. As I arrived I could see a table infested with geeks, notebooks and digi camera's. Got myself a set of Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs of which I installed Ubuntu on my home barebone system as an addition to the existing 3 or 4 other distros :)

Anyway it was a fun launch... enjoy the pictures.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ubuntu/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mahangu/tags/ubuntu/

Foss-Ed for geeks [Day 1 & 2]

2006-05-23T01:51:00.000+05:30

[day1]

Listening to Prof. Lawrence Lessig speak was like listening to a continuous flow of harmonic notes resonating ever so smoothly and flawlessly, you'd wonder if he has memorized it.

They say "a picture is worth a thousand words", and yet somehow, it seems just the opposite with Prof. Lawrence's slides. Even though it contained only a couple of words per slide, when synchronized with his continuous train of words, had a powerful effect to convey a message - a message of commons.

I've never heard or seen anyone speak so effortlessly while flipping though a serious of slides, atleast 10 - 20 slides per minute at times, each only containing a word or sometimes a couple of words, and to do the whole exercise without pausing to look at the screen to change slides. The closest I've seen to this was probably the "weather report" on CNN or BBC.

I was lucky enough to not only listen to two such high passed but yet calm speeches done at the FOSS-Ed and later in the evening at the laugh of the Creative Commons Sri Lanka website, but also had the privilege of talking him to lunch.

While the highlight of the day was undoubtedly the talk by Prof. Lawrence, there were a lot of other great technical speeches that seemed to keep most of the audience at the edge of their seat. Unfortunately I couldn't sit throughout the rest of the talks, as my own rear was on the line to finish the presentation on Kernel Configuration, that I'm supposed to deliver tomorrow (today by the time you read).

[day2]

On day2 I didn't stay for many of the lectures and was basically running around and trying to finish my presentation. When the time came, I think I had enough slides to get me through the kernel config lecture. Everything went pretty well except for the fact that my notebook did not display anything on the LCD when hooked up to the projector, which was annoying as I had to keep turning my head to see if I was typing the commands correctly.

Later we had an interesting guest speech that wasn't in the schedule by Wipul Jayawickrama. It was on the topic of using "Social Engineering" to penetrate security and contained many real-world stories from his experience.

The ended with a "not-so-great" panel discussion, (of which I was also a part of :)), either because the crowd was shy or dumb struck for questions. I think this was a another very successful foss-ed.

My Photo Blog

Anuradha R's Flickr

Arunan's Flickr

Arunan's Blog post

Nazly's Flickr

Nazly's Blog post

FOSS-Ed for Hacker's is coming to town

2006-05-20T13:09:00.000+05:30

The second installment of FOSS-Ed, an ongoing series of seminars to educate on the wonders of Free and Open Source Software or FOSS in short will commence from the 22nd, Monday.

FOSS-Ed was a huge success last time around with very good participation and you read more about on my previous post Fullhouse @ FOSS-Ed.

This time around we expect an even greater participation and by looking at the number of current registration, looks as if we are heading for another Full House! Unlike the previous FOSS-Ed seminar, the latest installment is targeted at the IT savvy geeks that enjoy programming and installing and fine tuning software for security or performance.

Whats more exciting is that Prof. Lawrence Lessig, the great visionary, an excellent speaker and founder of Creative Commons, the alternative to copy right, will be the keynote speaker. I'm very much looking forward to hearing him speak.

And finally, ahem, ahem... I too will be speaking on "Linux kernel configuration and optimization" that I hope will help to demystify the topic and help people realize that "Kernel compiling" doesn't require you to have an inhaler, standby!

For anyone interested in coming for the event, there is still time to register at http://www.foss.lk.

Late night Anatomy : Playing Dr. Hannible with my gadgets

2006-04-23T03:12:00.000+05:30

Lately, I've been getting urges to dissect things; computer things to be more specific.

First involves an unsuspecting DVD writer and the second my first ever notebook that has always been a favorite item to show off at exhibitions or lectures involving gadgets.

My DVD writer has always been giving me trouble since I've got it a little under two years ago, during a visit to Singapore. Not only did it cost me about $120, it was very picky as to what DVDs was appropriate to play or write to.

For example, the first disappointment came when I was unable to write to any of the cheap "Melody branded DVD +R" I had bought (25 stack). Then there were many accounts of (pirated) DVD movies, that I had to go back to return, only to find that it played well on the player or on my notebook.

Finally, just a few weeks ago, it completely stopped reading DVDs of any sort. At first, it seemed a little spin with a cleaning disc would do the trick, but that wasn't the case.

So I decided to rip it apart to see if I could get more personal with its inner workings as well as clean the laser by hand. I'll let the pictures speak for them self.

Finally after putting it back to together, the result hadn't changed. While it no longer played DVDs it was happy to play CDs. This was abou the time my brother was also visiting from UK and wanted some DVDs written before leaving, so I ditched it and bought the same Sony DVD writer (newer model of course) for half the price, locally!

The decision to dissect my sony vaio notebook was really sudden and was purely because I "just felt like it"! Actually, I've had put away my vaio, a much loved device, not to mention my first of the kind, for some time now. It has always been an inspiration and a triumph for the only OS - GNU/Linux that could make use of a crippled notebook that only worked for about 3 months, before the hard disk along with its controller failed. That is why, I always took this gadget along to captivate the audience of a notebook that had no permanent memory, with no apparent use, suddenly coming to life by using a floppy containing a few kilo-bytes of ether-boot code that enables it to boot off GNU/Linux completely off another machine lying on the network.

Sony (and apple) has made it difficult to remove their devices by packaging it ever more tightly. Unlike most notebooks, the vaio that lay before me, did not like anyone tampering with it to install a hard drive or even expand its memory. But tonight, I was feeling comfortable to finally remove a device that was never meant to be removed.

It was a highly sweating journey through the process from dissembling to assembling. Though I was able to put it back together, removing the unwanted hard drive and making the device even lighter, reconnecting the touch-pad cable onto the motherboard proved impossible under the circumstances. I was working under limited space between the 3 millimeter thick cable that was supposed to just sit under a small plastic lock. Unfortunately I had broken one side of the plastic lock while snapping it out with my fingernails.

Other than that, the notebook worked as before and the following day I bought a 5-port USB that made it easier to plug in the USB floppy, thumb driver for extra memory and a USB mouse simultaneously.

Which device will I dissect next? Stay tuned.

ASUS center launch

2006-04-07T00:04:00.001+06:00

Today I dropped in at the newly opened ASUS center and checked out some of the coolest hardware around. They had, what they proclaimed "The fastest desktop in this region", that was powered by a dual-core AMD 64bit processor and two very powerful ATI graphic adaptors, each having 512MB of video RAM linked together for a combined 1GB + 2 GPUs.
All this was placed inside a glass like transparent casing to reveal the beauty inside.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera, and was too excited to even remember to take a (crappy) photo or two from my phone camera. Oh well, I've never been a press person (but I did go with an X-press person. Oh Hasmin, how could you forget?).

Photo by: Chamil. Check out more photos by him

Other than that there were some really crazy-sexy-cool notebooks and a few nice LCD TFT displays. The die-hard gaming barebones were also a killer to look at.

Anyway I'm grateful for Larry Adams, the COO (the koo!, how cool is that?), for inviting the LKLUGers to come and enjoy the opening. He was also kind enough to gift me with an awesome Xitepad(joypad with force feedback) and told me -- "You'll need this". What did he mean? Could it be a hint that he was going to help us beat the .NET guys at the Unreal Tournament challenge?

And so we left with a note -- "We will be back", with a couple of GNU/Linux LiveCDs and really put these machines to the test. After all, there really is no point running an inferior OS, when you've claimed to have the fastest desktops in the region.

Switching art students to GNU/Linux

2006-03-24T11:30:00.000+06:00

I usually don't blog about other articles (usually I just talk about me, myself and I), but after reading about an art school that completely wiped off their MacOSX along with other propietary software infavor of Ubuntu and free & opensource software, I got a warm & fuzzy feeling that drove me to blog this.

Check it out and see if you feel good about this article:

http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/09/2238246&from=rss

There are also links to some interesting software such as an alternative to flash, moho (cartoon animation) and DVD mastering.

Enjoy.

Bleeding on the Bleeding-Edge :(

2006-03-17T19:34:00.000+06:00

The unthinkable happened today -- My hard drive crashed! The machine stopped booting with scary looking messages I don't recall ever seeing. I looked desperately, among the randomness for a message of relief - Kernel panicked, but not even that message was to be found.

It all started soo innocently. I updated my Xgl portage tree - just like any other morning, and went about compiling the update packages. Now my machine is known to be quite buggy and reboot, especially during disk or processor intensive tasks. Overtime I've learned to live with it, blaming it on bad hardware (after all Linux is stable right!). But the random reboots were only a mere annoyance, thanks to reiser-fs the journaled filesystem, I never met with any sort of corruption -- that is until today.

The gruelling path to recovery

I booted off a taprobane Livecd, and went about fscking the root partition. The exact command was:


reiserfsck /dev/hda3

After checking for over an hour, it came up with a long report that basically said, my partition was severely corrupted! It adviced me to re-run the command with the --rebuild-tree option, but the man page had some alarming text about this option:

--rebuild-tree
This option rebuilds the entire filesystem tree using leaf nodes
found on the device. Normally you only need this option if the
reiserfsck --check reports "Running with --rebuild-tree is
required". You are strongly encouraged to make a backup copy of
the whole partition before attempting the --rebuild-tree option.
Once reiserfsck --rebuild-tree is started it must finish its
work (and you should not interrupt it), otherwise the filesystem
will be left in the unmountable state to avoid subsequent data
corruptions.

So instead I decided to use the more safe --fix-fixable option which basically said to fix anything fixable. Well that wasn't enough and I did ended up running --rebuild-tree after all.

Luckily my /home partition and the smaller /boot passed with good heath after fscking them :) All seemed well now, so I rebooted as I eagerly expected things to work. It turned out I was still far from recovery.

At first I could see the kernel boot and load drivers. I immediately noticed now the sound driver was giving an error, but that didn't seem too important to worry bout. Then came the following message:

Your system seems to be missing critical device files
in /dev ! Although you may be running udev or devfs,
the root partition is missing these required files !
...

But I did see a login prompt, but supprisingly it never prompted me for the password! I couldn't login :(. So I rebooted again, this time with the Gentoo Xgl CD. Copied all the /dev files from the live cd onto the /dev directory on the hard drive.

That's when I noticed the lost+found directory. I've rarely seen this directory on a reiserfs partition (its quite common on an ext[23] partition). Surprise surprise.. there were over 3-4 dozen of files that had been recovered with the inode numbers -- pretty useless without the file names. Suddenly it occurred to me -- I might have to reinstall Gentoo, something that could take a week or more.

Gentoo to the rescue

I rebooted to get the same message and the same login problem. I rebooted again and chrooted into the root partiton. I first ran revdep-rebuild -p to check reverse dependencies but that only came up with xterm as being broken. Trying to emerge xterm revealed another problem : the gentoo package database was inconsistent, but it told me the exact command to execute.


/usr/lib/portage/bin/fix-db.py

That came up with a list of packages that came up as corrupted. So I unmerged (removed) some and re-merged others and rebooted the system. Still had no luck, so back to the livecd. Again I chrooted to the root(/) partition and started looking at the logs which revealed more kernel drivers that have failed (acpi for example). Looks like I'll need to recompile a kernel. But that still didn't explain the login problem. Looking through the log files, one revealed the problem.


#tail -100 /var/log/auth.log
 agetty[2933]: tty1: can't exec /bin/login: No such file or directory

Sure enough, /bin/login was infact missing. A bit of esearching hinted pam-login was responsible for that file, so emerging it at rebooting fixed it. Phew, a sigh of relief as X-windows booted to enlightenment(e17).

I still have to recompile the kernel and stay on the lookout for other (possibly) broken packages, atleast I've save on a couple of days/weeks starting from scratch!

I guess you can't live on the bleeding edge without bleeding a little (or a lot in this case) sometimes :)

Yahoo! Xgl works on my redeon card

2006-03-15T15:29:00.000+06:00

While the title of this post isn't affiliated with Yahoo Inc., that was my reaction soon after I re-emerge Xgl and compiz with the paint_patch enabled.

Now it works perfectly.. well except for the F12 compose like effect. No more black patches on the screen.

Gentoo does really rock! when you need to be on the bleeding edge as after I switched to the latest unofficial portage overlay called xgl-coffee, I got the transparent patch that allows me to easily make any focused window transparent, simply using Alt+mouse wheel as well as an all important kdelibs patch that allows applications to be minimized to the system tray.

As you can see in the screenshot, I'm running Xgl on kde (using gnome-window-decorator for now since kde-wondow-decorator is not ready) with full transparency and other nice effects. Here is the custom script I use to load kde.


#!/bin/bash
echo ">Starting XGL at Display: $1"
echo "========= XGL ============"
# If nvidia or any other
#Xgl :$1 -ac -accel xv -accel glx:pbuffer &
# If ati
Xgl :$1 -ac -accel xv:pbuffer -accel glx:pbuffer &
sleep 3
echo "======= COMPIZ ==========="
DISPLAY=:$1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib/ compiz --replace decoration wobbly fade switcher minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place opacity &
sleep 3
echo "====== DECORATIONS ======="
DISPLAY=:$1 gnome-window-decorator &
#DISPLAY=:$1 kde-window-decorator &
echo "======= Kde ============"
DISPLAY=:$1 /usr/kde/3.5/bin/startkde &

The only other important thing missing is 3D direct-rendering, which I hope will be resolved soon! I also had the liberty of checking out the Xgl livecd (again based on Gentoo ;) on my Nvidia barebone system and it works awesomely great! Superfast, no flicker.... absolutely stunning!

The fascinating cases of amnesia

2006-02-23T00:35:00.000+06:00

It's been a while since a movie has got me thinking beyond the post 30 min day dream session. But that's just what happened when I watched "50 first dates", accidentally on HBO. And while, I do admit that I'm a sucker for romantic comedies, the fascination comes not from the awesome Walrus (who I'd rank as the best actor) nor the great chemistry between Adam and Drew, but the plot.

movie spoiler: (highlight the following paragraph to read)

In a nutshell, Lucy (Drew Barrymore) is suffering from a form of amnesia called Goldfield syndrome where every night as she sleeps her brain sort of reboots and all her short term memory is lost. As a result she can't remember anything since the day before her accident an year ago. Harry(Adam), falls for Lucy has to make her fall in love with him daily as she can't remember him the day after. While goldfield syndrome is really fictional (you wouldn't think so unless you studied neurology), its not total fiction. For example there is another patient who can only remember 10 seconds -- seems like fiction? read on...

I knew very little about amnesia, so I did some research on the subject and found some fascinating stuff. For example in a form of amnesia called Anterograde amnesia, one can indeed forget things within a few seconds to few minutes, hours or days, much like in goldsfield syndrome.

One such extreme real case is the man with a "7 second memory!". There is a documentary film on this, which I hope to find somewhere on the net.

Another interesting book, that I'm keen on reading is, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", which has several accounts of patients suffering from loss of short term memory.

The brain is an awesome machine, and a mystery that's worth trying to understand - both biologically and spiritually.

Some success with Xgl...

2006-02-20T23:42:00.000+06:00

Well.. after messing up my system with broken packages and then fixing it by unmerging or recompiling them, I managed to get everything installed (thanks to the revdep-rebuild tool).

Once everything was working, I emerged gnome-light and then copy & pasted the startxgl script from the Gentoo HowTo. After running this script, within a few seconds, it loaded the Gnome desktop.

The first thing I noticed was the smooth bump effect to drop down menues and popup windows. Moving a window also had the rubber like effect, just as in Novell's demo video. Other effects such as macosX's expose like application switching worked beautifully and fast.

3D switching of desktops was also supprisingly fast as so was moving a window across multiple desktops! Manual rotation of the desktop was also quite fast. Now the amazing thing is, all this was happening despite my 3D acceleration having being broken under Xgl! I know this because glxinfo says Directed Rending : No.

But I'd be lying if I said eveything worked. Unfortunately, as for my ATI IGP 340M card, Xgl isn't well supported. The main issue (besides the lack of 3D), is the ugly black window I keep getting. Clicking on an empty space redraws the window correctly, but scrolling will screw it again. Seems to be a problem with glitz package and how it uses OpenGL.

Transparency effects also seem to work faster with compiz than compmgr (or kompmgr). This is all alpha quality software so you really can't complain much. But so far things are looking really good. This is exactly what the GNU/Linux desktop had been waiting for.

Desktop dominance is inevitable!

Trying to get Xgl working

2006-02-19T00:08:00.000+06:00

After a good Foss-Ed event and having met the 3/4 of the people who were founders' or co-founders' of LAMP stack, I was ready to get back to dangerous life living on the bleeding edge.

What better way to start it off by trying to install the highly experimental Xgl server. If you haven't already heard about Xgl, I'd recommend you run! to novell's site and download the awesome videos.

In a nutshell, Xgl will bring the cool, slick MacOSX desktop effects to GNU/Linux. Actually it will even be better than the MacOSX desktop and will most probably be superior to the upcoming Vista desktop. Check out the videos, as words simply can't describe it.

So I set off trying to get it installed on Gentoo. As a first step I removed the current stable molothic X, in favor for the unstable and hard masked modular Xorg as described in the Gentoo XGL Howto. This wasn't at all easy has it sounds. After unmasking a couple of dozen packages, some that weren't even mentioned in the Howto, I managed to get X working again with one glitch -- no keyboard support. After a bit of resting and googling, I managed to find the problem. The path of the XKeysymDB had changed in the new installation but X was still looking at the old location. Creating a symlink and additionally adding some keymapping entries to the xorg.conf file fixed that.


 ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB


Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
        Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
        Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Next up was getting the latest port overlays that had the glx and compiz packages which makes all this magic possible. Unfortunately at the moment kde isn't supported and I didn't have the latest gnome packages. As a result emerging compiz didn't generate the gnome-window-decorator which is required to wrap around a gtk app to provide the gui eye candy.

So it looks like I need to emerge more gnome stuff that I've been keeping away for a long time, if I'm going to see anything at all. Just started re-emerging cairo, gtk+ and pango to discover I needed more - gnome control-center and libwnck.

But it's late already, 1AM. Since I have a class tomorrow, looks like I'm gonna have to postpone this to tomorrow.

Fullhouse @ FOSS-Ed

2006-02-14T17:12:00.000+06:00

After a long long break from blogging, I am back. So where was I, one might ask? Lets say I was too busy having fun :) I've pretty much upgraded my life when I bought a new Sony PSP and later a Mac Mini. But the best of the devices was the PSP as it was more fun to hack it to run homebrew opensource applications.

Hacking devices to run FOSS applications such as GNU/Linux has always been a time killer and personal obsession. Today I was able to share some of my experience at the FOSSEd when I demonstrated a sony PSP running a home brew FOSS application called PSP Radio to listen to an audio stream that was being broadcast by ice-cast, an FOSS audio streaming server, via 802.11b (WiFi)!

The location has been full with students, corporate people and individuals keen on broadening their understanding in FOSS. Anuradha did an excellent presentation yesterday on the different myths that is surrounding FOSS, especially among some IT literate communities .

Manju Hathotuwa of the ICTA also made an excellent presentation has he usually does :) about the benefits of adopting FOSS for certain sectors such as education and government process automation. This was reiterated during the panel discussion, where I learned that the Government is moving towards the use of open standards as a first step to ensure interoperability. I hope this will push companies such as Microsoft to open up their document formats or endorse the open document format.

In another presentation, I learned a lot from a talk on SE Linux (Security Enhanced Linux) developed by the NSA. It was presented by Suranga de Silva.

During the evening session there was a talk by Mr. Dinesh Fernandopulle, CIO DFCC, who was talking about how the banking industry can benefit from FOSS adoption for certain aspects of banking. He even went as far as inviting experts to help DFCC in using more FOSS applications.

But probably the best talk of all was that of Brian Behlendorf, the guy who started the world's favorite web server -- Apache. He brought few of us with up to speed with the trend towards FOSS adaption by enterprises. He also broke out some rumors about Oracle's plans to purchase Jboss (J2ee app server), Zend (major contributor to the PHP engine) and Sleepycat (developer's of Berkly db).

So all in all, I think FOSSEd has made some impact atleast the way people precieve Free and Opensource software. With that note, I'll sign off wishing all of you a happy valentines day.

Obsessed with Mac - on Linux

2005-12-16T18:02:00.000+06:00

What can I say, I love the Mac GUI and some features like the drag on drop approach to installing software in the apps folder. Its not just me; there seems to be a growing Mac craze among some friends and office colleges.

Yet my heart is with GNU/Linux, and the last couple of days, I have been somewhat busy customizing it to a near Mac experience. Baghira is the main KDE theme engine for Mac wannabe's like myself. It provides few tools, among which one I simply use quite often called Baghira Starter. Its quite useful in that if you can remember the beginning of a command or even an application category, it will auto complete and enable you to launch it. Gone are the days, straining your eyes looking for an application among the many in the K menu (or Start button in the windoze lingo).

Unfortunately to get a better Macperience, you also need to install some additional software.

- A Mac like application launch bar. There are some, such as Kxdocker, Ksmoothbar or some found in Super Karamba. But none are perfect. I ended up using something called engage which is part of the awesome E17 desktop.

- Kompose is a Compose clone found on MacOSX that allows you to switch between applications. You can even configure this app to respond, when you move the mouse cursor to one corner, something I do on the Mac.

- Finally while experimental and quite slow, get the latest version of xcompmgr (X composite Manager) for a drop down shadow effect.

- Though I didn't install it, for a drag-n-drop approach to installing apps, similar to the Mac DMG way, have a look at Klik and Auto Package.

There is a great HowTo on how you can customize KDE. If you prefer GNome, not to worry. Just head on over to www.gnome-apps.org and search for gnomac.

That's it! A near Mac like experience.

A Trip to Mac OSX on Intel

2005-11-30T23:20:00.000+06:00

Its been a long obsession ever since I heard the existence of the x86 port. Unless you've been living under a rock (or an msn umbrella), chances are that you have heard about Apple's decision to dump the powerpc architecture in favor of Intel. You might also have heard that the developer version (was/had been) leaked (by apple?). Anyway, I wanted to get my hands on this baby; not only to satisfy my curiosity, but also to see what the competition was like.

Sure the MacOS X is going to slaughter any short or long horn that will come its way, but could it also hurt some desktop GNU/Linux deployments in the short term atleast?

Well after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, we (yes we!), managed to convert the dmg image to an iso(dvd) image and then burn it. Unfortunately it turned out that MacOSX refused to install after complaining the hardware wasn't supported. After trying several notebooks and desktops, it was obvious that none of the hardware we could find was supported -- or so we thought!

A bit of research on google revealed that this edition indeed required a binary patch to make it work on any machine other than the one Apple had provided its developers with. So after a 143MB or so download, I was left with a binary patch that used a windoze binary patch tool called ppf-o-matic. "Hmm windoze, now where can I find one of those", I thought to myself. Investigation of the tool's website turned up a Mac OS version, which after trying on a friends iBook, failed with a crash. The recently released java version too couldn't cope with 4GB+ iso image. Being somewhat skeptical, I tried the windoze patch tool with wine, the FOSS windoze emulator, to find that it worked great.

Everything was going well - the md5sums matched as published on many howtos. Once the dvd was burned, I tried booting it off to be greeted with a beautiful installer.

Sanjaya helped me with the initial bits of the Mac installation, but it looked like I was going to loose my data - the installer didn't know how to resize my Linux partitions. So I booted off from the Taprobane LiveCD and ran qtparted to resize my partitions. I discovered that wasn't going to work either as QTparted didn't allow it. Just then I remembered a page from the LVM howto about having to manually resize the filesystem before resizing the physical partition.

So I fired up a shell and typed:


  resize_reiserfs -s -12G /dev/hda1

which basically said to shrink my reiserfs root (/) partition by 12 GB. Again I ran Qtparted, now hoping to be able to resize the physical device, but again I found that option wasn't available. The alternative left was scary - to use fdisk/cfdisk to delete the partition and recreate it while the data stays in tact! Oh boy! was I heading for disaster and I'd be foolish not to do some sort of back up, which I did.

So without thinking twice, I deleted /dev/hda1 partition and recreated it starting from the same location (beginning of the hard drive) but spanning only 2GB more than the size of the filesystem.

Then I resized the file system to grow back to fill the 2GB gap in the physical file system.


 resize_reiserfs /dev/hda1

Once again, I rebooted onto the Mac installer and found that it still couldn't install on to the free disk space without removing the current Linux / partition. So once again, I found myself inside the LiveCD trying to fix things from Linux. Again I fired up my shell and ran cfdisk to create the MacOSX partition and set FS_Type_ID to Hex AF (which by the way cfdisk has no idea about).

Now this time when I booted into the Mac installer, it detected the presence of the partition and allowed me to format it without deleting the Linux partitions. From this point onwards, the installation was a breeze.

After installing, it turns out that the installer hadn't installed any boot loader at the MBR, as I was still left with GRUB. After a trial and error, I discovered that with the installation DVD in place, if I don't press any key then it would boot the installed MacOSX as opposed to running the installer.

By this time there was a small crowd looking over my shoulder at the beautiful and speedy Tiger desktop that lay before our eyes.

It was late, and time to go home (from office) so I rushed home hoping to try to install the OS on my AMD64 barebone. Unfortunately, it seemed the installer cannot detected my SATA hard drive for some reason even though I remember seeing the Nvidia chipset as supported.

Afterwards, which I managed to get working, I also managed to get GRUB to boot MacOS directly on the IBM Thinkpad, without the need to bootstrap via the DVD installer.

After a few hours of using MacOSX x86 version, I admit that I am impressed. Not only of the extremely user-friendly GUI that's covered with eye candy, but also because the OS seems very responsive and feels light-weight even with all those effects. I am not sure what it is - whether its the free & opensource Darwin micro kernel, or the non-free & proprietary x-window like system, it feels fast!

The Mango party!

2005-11-26T23:42:00.000+06:00

A new distro sweet as Mango was (un)officially launched by our very own Arunan, who is celebrating his B' day today* happens to be one of the youngest Slackers in the LKLUG. The occation, which was held at the newly opened "The Linux Center" or TLC in short, was filled with several LUGers and showered with slices of Mango EVERYWHERE, going fast!

Mango is a new distro that is based on Slackware/Vector (do I hear.. long live Slack????), and contains sinhala and tamil localization as well as several useful packages. Though I would have preferred if he had used Debian/Taprobane instead, I guess a slacker will always be a slacker :) (FYI:he has shown interest in a remastered taprobane with a different undisclosed name)

Among the Mango there was a very noticable Apple. Anuradha's brother Sanjaya, took out his new Apple iBook, hoping no one would notice (specially with all the mangos' around). But boy was he wrong! For the rest of the evening, the Linux center was pretty much a Mac Center :) No one complained, as the Mac OSX is powered by a FOSS kernel and subsystem.

Interestingly enough the key person, Arunan was missing from the event. Most of us waited and waited for him to turn up while some people had to leave ealy. After several hours of waiting (while having fun), he turned up with hands empty. It seems the Mango iso image was too big to fit on to a CD. So I guess, we'll have to wait for the official version or ask for a DVD version.

* Today also happens to be my brother's B' day. If your reading this - Happy B' day malli!

My quest for the perfect wireless world

2005-11-20T00:38:00.000+06:00

So after my unplesent experience with CDMA, and the difficulty of carrying a full fledged phone around all the time (I even took it to Blue waters last week), just to satisfy my online cravings, I decided to take a plunge and upgrade my cell phone.

Those who have seen my old cell phone know how ugly it looks, with bits of colors torn from the cover and the keypad virtually erased (well, ok .... most of gadgets end up looking so), wouldn't second guess that it was about time I upgraded.

After flirting around with the new Nokia 6230i, I decided she was too expensive for my purse, and decided to go with the next best thing – the SE K700i. Thanks to my friend Asanga and his underground contacts, I managed to get a decent price (I think).

Well after charging it for a good 2.5 hrs, which gave me some time to skip through the manual, I got right down to business – with Linux ofcourse.

Since my notebook doesn't have inbuilt support for Bluetooth, I used the IR port instead. Irda is fairly well supported in Linux, except when it comes to enhanced modes that are specific to the IR chip. Unfortunately, my IR chip isn't detected by the findchip tool.

Nevertheless, using IR to emulate a standard COM port is how I generally connect the two. Tools such as irdadump and irdaping are useful when it comes to debugging the connection.

Transferring files to and from was quite a breeze (as usual), using the command line tools such as ircp, irxfer and obexftp. The challenge was connecting via GPRS. Thanks to google, I was able to quickly find details of how to set that up. Even though there are no drivers for my Irda chip, using the irtty_sir module, it turns out, I can still connect, thanks to serial emulation!

Here is the wvdial.conf I used to connect to Dialog


[Dialer Dialog]
Modem = /dev/ircomm0
Baud = 57600
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = crtscts
Username = ""
Password = ""
Phone = *99***1#
Stupid Mode = 1

Next I wanted to check if GPRSEasy Connect could do the same and sure enough, by selecting Sri Lanka – Dialog from the drop down provider list (yup, they know we exist!), and selecting SE K700 (700i wasn't in the list – but then again, my software version is old), I was able to easily connect.

So there you have it folks - everything works, and I didn't have to install a single third party driver. GNU/Linux rocks!

LiveCD from scratch workshop

2005-11-12T21:22:00.000+06:00

Just came back from a long day workshop organized as part of the IITC 2005 Conference. Myself, Anuradha and Chamath undertook the almost impossible task of a, "less than a day" workshop, consisting of several integrated interruptions (ie. lunch, tea breaks), to cover a relatively advanced subject, to a relatively inexperienced GNU/Linux user, and still managed to pull it off - somewhat!

Now that I'm done patting our selves in the back, I'd like to say that it was extremely fun :) After all, there is really nothing like going under the hood and getting some "machan (grease)", on a Saturday morning tinkering with Linux. For those who missed it, we had a small crowd (that is too small to mention), but made it much easier to managed and give personal attention to each attendee. Here is a summary of tasks we managed to cover:

Presentation on the Linux kernel's boot process, from the BIOS all the way upto the runlevels, both during a normal hard drive boot and during a Live CD boot.
Install Taprobane GNU/Linux, using the cfdisk->mkfs->cp -a method
Create an initrd using mkinitrd and use it as a prototype to build a modifiable initrd
Hack the initrd's /linuxrc script to drop us to a shell and play with a world before the BigBang - /sbin/init
Presentation on using Squashfs and UnionFS to provide write support anywhere
Creation of a squashfs file system using out live running system
Creating the final iso and testing it using qemu

Unfortunately, our iso booted only half way before panicing, by which time we were out of time for debugging. Despite this, I hope, the attendees had a lot of fun, hacking away.