Geek with an attitude

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 Peop...

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...

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 ...

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 par...

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...

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 exploi...

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.

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 w...

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

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 poi...

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...

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 w...

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...

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 packa...

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...

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 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 :) O...

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 Exp...

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...

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.