Geek with an attitude

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 s...

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 prov...

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, i...

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 d...

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 ev...

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 wit...

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 ident...

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

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/phot...

[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...