Geek with an attitude

[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...

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 ...

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 de...

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 ...

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.

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 repor...

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 :...

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 fictio...

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...

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 ...

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 ICT...

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 Su...

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 -- ...

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 ...

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...

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 b...

Just finished watching the 13th episode of the Firefly , to discover, I've run out of episodes :(. About a month back Suchetha handed me a stack of DivX CDs and insisted that I watch it. The pilot episode was a long 2hr show, somewhat weird and not soo interesting. I was expecting something like Star Trek or Andromeda but this was like a space cowboy movie - where have all the aliens gone? But as I watched more episodes, skipping days due to a busy schedule (like flying off to Pakistan for one), I was drawned to the characters (specially to one :), j/k). Each episode was some what connected, but had its unique cinematic style. And now after the 13th and final episode (excluding the pilot), its all over :(. Fox that originally aired it, had pulled the plug! Like many fans , I am left wanting more...But there is a bit more to come, Serenity , the movie named after the ship in firefly, will be released soon on dvd. Till then, perhaps the theme song will remain stuck inside my head. T...

Though its a little sad leaving Islamabad and the folks here, who has really taken good care of us during our short visit, I am looking forward to get back. For the past few days, we've been seeing and hearing about the earth quake and its survivors and have been totally our of the loop as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. Judging by some of the funny emails, I've been getting, I can only imagine the heated atomosphere with the upcoming Presidential Election.

Today we visited the Nadra (not to be confused with the more familiar Narada center), which stands for the National Database and Registration Authority. They are the government organization that issues National ID cards to eveyone. The place is amazing when you consider the data they have on pretty much everyone. For example they can, just by using your name along with your fathers name, tell pretty much everything about you such as whether your married or single, which cities you've been living in, and information about uour reletives. One of the IBMers, after seeing the demo, said "he felt naked". Later in the evening, we visited the main hospital in Islamabad to talk with some of the senior doctors to see what can be offered. We then walked around the hospital and saw some of the victams. Due to space limitations, they were placed all accross the lobby area. According to the doctor, the numbers just keeps increasing. We met one of the girls, who had been stuck betwee...

This morning I woke up with a sudden gasp! I thought some one had jumped into my bed. After looking around and under the sheets, I went back to sleep a bit longer. It turns out, I had experienced a slightly bigger after shock. Acording to the earth quake center, I believe it was of magnitude 5.6. Later that day we felt another smaller one in the evening. It was probably not as big, since I didn't get the usual email alert from the Earth quake monitoring center.