Geek with an attitude

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!

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 ...

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 th...

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

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 ex...

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 fo...

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 ...

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 bei...

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 bee...

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 develo...

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 Ap...

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

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...

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...

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 Easi...

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 ...

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/...

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

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 confe...

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.