Planet LUG-Jaipur

Rise till you fall

2010-07-21T17:04:39+00:00

I stand on the edge of the shore
Watching the waves gliding by
They rise and fall
As does my mind and fate
They come close to me
And caress my feet slightly
Then retreat back
They stand all alone
Through their fate
Though they encounter
Many a support at the shore
But they always leave alone
They ask me, why you stand here?
Don’t wait for us waves
To come and hold you
‘coz we can’t do so
Go fall and then stand up
Again on your own
And keep rising till you fall
‘coz otherwise you waste
This life of yours in vain

Computational Fluid Dynamics General Notation System

2010-07-20T13:00:00+00:00

The Computational Fluid Dynamics General Notation System (CGNS) library is now available in Fedora under the zlib license. Install it using:

  $ yum install cgnslib

It provides a general, portable, and extensible standard for the storage and retrieval of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis data. It consists of a collection of conventions, and free and open software implementing those conventions. It is self-descriptive, machine-independent, well-documented, and administered by an international Steering Committee.

Chalmers Lava2000

2010-07-01T11:00:00+00:00

Chalmers Lava2000, a hardware description library in Haskell is now available for Fedora. Thanks to Emil Axelsson and Jens Peterson for their feedback, and package review. You can install the same using:

$ sudo yum install ghc-chalmers-lava2000       \
                   ghc-chalmers-lava2000-devel \
                   ghc-chalmers-lava2000-doc

To illustrate a half adder example with the use of the Lava library, create a Test.hs file:

import Lava

halfAdd (a, b) = (sum, carry)
  where
    sum   = xor2 (a, b)
    carry = and2 (a, b)

Load it with ghci (Glasgow Haskell Compiler):

$ ghci Test.hs

GHCi, version 6.12.2: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
Loading package ffi-1.0 ... linking ... done.
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Test.hs, interpreted )
Ok, modules loaded: Main.

Test half adder with low, high inputs using:

*Main> simulate halfAdd(low, high)
Loading package syb-0.1.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package base-3.0.3.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package array-0.3.0.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package filepath-1.1.0.3 ... linking ... done.
Loading package old-locale-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package old-time-1.0.0.3 ... linking ... done.
Loading package unix-2.4.0.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package directory-1.0.1.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package process-1.0.1.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package time-1.1.4 ... linking ... done.
Loading package random-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package haskell98 ... linking ... done.
Loading package chalmers-lava2000-1.1.1 ... linking ... done.
(high,low)
*Main>

Testing half adder with high, high inputs gives:

*Main> simulate halfAdd(high, high)
(low,high)

You can also generate vhdl file using:

*Main> writeVhdl "halfAdd" halfAdd

Loading package syb-0.1.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package base-3.0.3.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package array-0.3.0.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package filepath-1.1.0.4 ... linking ... done.
Loading package old-locale-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package old-time-1.0.0.4 ... linking ... done.
Loading package unix-2.4.0.1 ... linking ... done.
Loading package directory-1.0.1.1 ... linking ... done.
Loading package process-1.0.1.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package time-1.1.4 ... linking ... done.
Loading package random-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package haskell98 ... linking ... done.
Loading package chalmers-lava2000-1.1.1 ... linking ... done.
Writing to file "halfAdd.vhd" ... Done.

Copy /usr/share/chalmers-lava2000-1.1.1/Vhdl/lava.vhd to your project directory, and you can verify the generated halfAdd.vhd with it using ghdl:

$ ghdl -a lava.vhd
$ ghdl -a halfAdd.vhd 
$

You are encouraged to read the "Slightly Revised Tutorial on Lava" by Koen Claessen, and Mary Sheeran for more detailed documentation on using the library.

Hardware Complexity Tool

2010-06-18T23:00:00+00:00

Hardware Complexity Tool (hct) is now available for Fedora. It generates scores that represent the complexity of the modules of integrated circuit design projects. It uses McCabes' cyclomatic complexity for understanding branch complexity. You can run hct on verilog, vhdl, cdl (computer design language) files or directories that contain these files. For example:

$ hct verilog
Directory: /tmp/verilog

verilog, 18 file(s)
+--------------------+--------------+------+-------+----------+--------+
| FILENAME           | MODULE       | IO   | NET   | MCCABE   | TIME   |
+--------------------+--------------+------+-------+----------+--------+
| Case.v                              0      0       18         0.1504 |
|                      case           0      0       18                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| modules.v                           1      0       2          0.0137 |
|                      m1             1      0       1                 |
|                      m2             0      0       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| RAM.v                               7      0       4          0.1653 |
|                      RAM            7      0       4                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| hello_world.v                       0      0       1          0.0113 |
|                      hello_world    0      0       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| one_day2.v                          0      0       2          0.0423 |
|                      one_day2       0      0       2                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| S430.v                              13     4       1          0.2438 |
|                      S430           13     4       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| one_day3.v                          0      0       4          0.0305 |
|                      one_day3       0      0       4                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| first_counter.v                     4      3       3          0.0765 |
|                      first_~unter   4      3       3                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Multiplier.v                        7      4       1          0.1646 |
|                      Multiplier     7      4       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Sys430.v                            10     12      9          0.5017 |
|                      Sys430         3      12      5                 |
|                      LEDTest        7      0       4                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| first_counter_tb.v                  0      1       1          0.0279 |
|                      first_~er_tb   0      1       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| longtest.v                          9      5       12         2.1130 |
|                      RAMB16_S9      9      5       12                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| GPR.v                               8      0       3          0.1039 |
|                      GPR            8      0       3                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| encoder_u~g_case.v                  3      0       16         0.1384 |
|                      encode~_case   3      0       16                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| RAMB16_S9.v                         9      5       12         2.0922 |
|                      RAMB16_S9      9      5       12                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| comment.v                           0      0       1          0.0264 |
|                      comment        0      0       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| encoder_using_if.v                  3      0       17         0.1941 |
|                      encode~ng_if   3      0       17                |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| MUX2.v                              0      0       1          0.0035 |
|                      INV            0      0       1                 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

Fedora 13 release party in Bangalore

2010-06-12T10:48:54+00:00

I am a little late on writing about the release party we had last week on Saturday, was occupied with $work. Well it all started with the mail of Rangeen to FSUG mailing list. That time I have just come to Bangalore and thought it will be great to meet all the Fedora folks in Bangalore during such party. Venue was a big issue initially as almost all the colleges in Bangalore were having exams. But I knew my friend Saket who has been pretty active in FSMK Bangalore. I contacted him and asked him if we can organize this release party at FSMK Bangalore office. I got a positive reply and after confirmation from the FSMK folks we finalized to have it at FSMK Bangalore office on June 5th.

I personally never expected many folks to turn up because of two reasons. One been that many colleges in Bangalore were having end semester exams plus we don’t have much Fedora folks here in Bangalore. Initially we (Me, Ankur, Hiemanshu , Dipjyoti and Rangeen) had a hard time finding out the office. Point to remember GPS in India will not be accurate enough with all these narrow lanes everywhere.

Finally we found the place and till then FSMK folks also started turning up. I would like to specially mention Vignesh, Prabodh and Naveen from FSMK core team who turned up for the party and assisted with the logistics. We had few other people some friends of Rangeen , students of Prabodh’s previous college CMRIT and other FSMK members.

We started with the discussion about why people should use Linux and not Windows. I never expected to start with such discussion in a Fedora release party but I love to be part of such discussion. It was great. Many questions were thrown on us. Why Linux? Linux? Is it user friendly enough? Why would a normal user plan to switch to Linux? People there who were using Fedora for past 4 years had such questions. I respect all the points given by them.

We started answering one by one. Inputs were given by Naveen on how the current scenario is changing and government bodies across India are encouraging FOSS in schools and engineering colleges. The current projects by Knowledge Commons and MHRD were been discussed with all the participants.

Me and Rangeen told the participants about how things (hardware) works out of the box these days with Fedora. How easily if you plug a mobile broadband card you can be sure that it will work without any hassle (all thanks to the great NetworkManager). We discussed why latest hardware sometime doesn’t work on most of the Linux distributions and how things are now changing. Times have changed and we should look towards improving things instead of blaming about them (my personal opinion).

Naveen introduced us to the FSMK activities currently going on. I personally got to know lot from that and looking forward to contribute to the cause FSMK is supporting.

While the hot discussion on various topics related to Linux/Windows was going on we ordered pizza’s for all of us. I would like to mention here how happy was the pizza girl over phone that she told me to not pick her phone after few minutes. She loved my Kannada ring tone

Once the dust of doubts and questions settled down Ankur started giving the Fedora 13 DVD/Live CD media to all the members. We also copied ISO for others who brought USB stick. I personally got DVD 32bit ISO from Ankur. Thanks a lot Ankur because I am writing this blog post from a Fedora 13 loaded laptop

After that we briefly discussed the new features in Fedora 13 among the participants and touched few special points from the release notes handouts given to them by Ankur and Rangeen

Pizzas had arrived by that time and we ate them all!! It was great having pizza and garlic bread-sticks with jalapeño. Finally we all exchanged our phone numbers and promised to stay in touch

Overall turn out was around 10 + we four Fedora folks (Me, Rangeen, Hiemanshu and Ankur). That was a good figure. We have now aligned ourself with the FSMK and we plan to conduct some good workshops as soon as the college re-opens in Bangalore. Fedora is going to spread everywhere in the air of Bangalore I am sure. We are looking for contributors and FSMK is also planning their strategy on the same grounds. I hope to see some good action coming in next few weeks.

Oh yes, I don’t want to miss this part. After the release party ended me and Hiemanshu planned to end up in pub (purple haze in Kormangla). Ankur and Rangeen didn’t supported us so we went there alone. Hiemanshu had I believe 2 different cocktails and me 1 pitcher of Foster’s

Drink beer use Fedora our motto!! Few pictures were shot by Me, Rangeen, Dipjyoti and Ankur. You can find them here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dipjyoti.ghosh/Fedora13ReleaseParty#

http://picasaweb.google.com/sherry151/

http://picasaweb.google.com/sanjay.ankur/Fedora13ReleaseParty

silence !!

2010-06-12T09:08:23+00:00

The real has no existance, and the un-real ceases to be, the reality of both has thus perceived by the seers of truth. voices have no answers, neither do I, voices hear the presence, without any essence, the sounds of sorrow, neither the sounds of joy, do I here, Its presence lingering somewhere, with the deep blue essence of the meadows, cant [...]

A long silence…

2010-06-08T05:07:49+00:00

What is happy, What is sad
What is smile , What are tears
A mere difference of perspective
And here I am
Against all those laws of human nature
I cry when I am happy
I smile when I am sad
The days will go by
And all you’ll be left with
Is a long silence
Where there is no happiness and tears
No pain and smiles
Just , a long silence…

Blender meet, Hyderabad

2010-05-17T14:30:00+00:00

Attended May months' Hyderabad user group meeting on Sunday, May 16, 2010 at:

Rhythm & Hues Studios India Pvt. Ltd.
The V, Vega Block, 11th Floor,
Left Wing, Plot No - 17, Software Units Layout
HITEC City, Madhapur, 
Hyderabad 500 081
India

Satish "iloveblender" Goda gave a very informative talk about the history of the Blender project, animation movies created using the Blender software, pipelines involved in animation movie production, and on how the blender community functions in producing open animation movies with the guidance of Ton Roosendaal.

Their open animation movie projects are code named after names of fruits. One interesting aspect is that before starting on a new movie project, one can pay and pre-order the DVD, and your name is added to the credits when the movie is released. This funding also helps the team in producing the movie!

Thanks to the Management of Rhythm & Hues Studios India Pvt. Ltd. for hosting our user group meet at their auditorium. Special thanks to "cheedhu" and "iloveblender" for initiating the effort. We hope to have more sessions of blender and other F/OSS sessions at this venue.

A photo taken at the end of the session:

KMR Foundation

2010-05-08T21:00:00+00:00

Visited Sreenidhi International School and members of the KMR Foundation today, Saturday, May 8, 2010 in Hyderabad. They have OLPC XOs that they are using for class(grade) IV students in a school near their premises at Aziznagar, Ranga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh, India. They require support for Telugu language and use of XO software for the school students. Here is a screenshot of one of the XOs:

perl-Sys-CPU

2010-05-07T01:00:00+00:00

Pushed perl-Sys-CPU to Fedora repository. You can use it like:

use Sys::CPU;
  
$number_of_cpus = Sys::CPU::cpu_count();
printf("I have %d CPU's\n", $number_of_cpus);

print "  Speed : ", Sys::CPU::cpu_clock(), "\n";
print "  Type  : ", Sys::CPU::cpu_type(), "\n";

\newcommand macro substitution

2010-04-21T00:22:00+00:00

Used \newcommand to abstract the four actor names in di-git-ally managing love letters presentation:

\newcommand{\oneactor}{pretty-zinta}
\newcommand{\twoactor}{raaani-mukerji}
\newcommand{\threeactor}{nayantaaara}
\newcommand{\fouractor}{aishvarya-ray}

You can now get the sources from gitorious, and replace the above names to your liking, and rebuild the presentation by invoking make from the sources directory.

Hackers dom in Hyderabad

2010-04-18T03:12:40+00:00

Well we hackers can’t live without our machines and that’s so true. Recently I have been playing with EBS volumes in Eucalyptus but was not able to make it work on Centos 5.4 with XEN more information can be found here. Then I thought to give it a try on our KVM + Fedora 12. But wait a minute we need more than 1 machine to try EBS volume. Hmm, just gave it a thought and remembered that I have another laptop with me at home. My brother’s new DELL laptop which is only having Windows 7 and nothing else. He doesn’t like anyone else to install any other OS on it so I thought of putting Fedora 12 inside VMware and finally after doing that I started my hacking experiment.

I have been running my Eucalyptus private cloud on a single laptop till now and knew that I can’t use brother’s laptop as node because it has windows 7 and fedora 12 was running inside VM. So I started installing eucalyptus 1.6.2 on that VM via source and finished eucalyptus as well euca2ools installation. Created that VM as the head running Cloud controller, cluster controller, storage controller and walrus. Next I switched to my laptop from scratch installed eucalyptus and configured it to run as node. My laptop is super cool. It’s been 4 years I have had this machine but the good thing it has the special processor flags which gives VT support so that I can run fully virtualized VM in KVM (kvm_intel).

The next thing which started bothering me was I didn’t had much space on my laptop left to store the instance copies when it boots up and later runs. But I have a 500 GB hard drive which I can use for this purpose. Created a directory on one of the partitions in my external hard drive and inside my node’s eucalyptus.conf

INSTANCE_PATH="/media/f5a889e3-9300-4565-9cb3-9d14b79ad124/images/"

The other thing I changed in my eucalyptus.conf was the VNET_BRIDGE interface which by default is xenbr0. This works good for XEN but not for KVM. Changed it to following:

VNET_BRIDGE="virbr0"

Then I remember that console thing didn’t worked for me when I first tried eucalyptus on KVM+Fedora 12 sometime back and for that to work I was suggested a patch at the forums. Applied that patch on my /opt/eucalyptus/usr/share/eucalyptus/partition2disk and all was set.

The next big thing to work out was my networking. The two laptops could have been connected to each other via a ad-hoc network but I prefer a cable connection as it makes the image transfer faster. I have a cross cable with me so I used it to connect both the laptops. The cross cable connection was available inside my VMware VM via bridged connection. The only thing I did different was the gateway IP inside my head (brother’s laptop fedora 12 VM running inside VMware) I gave my laptop’s eth0 IP. This was done because my instance will get a IP on the subnet 192.168.122.0/255.255.255.0 and my network was on 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0. Once I did that I started the instance and later when it booted was able to ssh to it with my private key (password less login).

The other problem I had was sharing internet connection at the same time. I use a reliance usb device for internet connectivity. I attached that to my laptop started the connection created a simple squid proxy configuration which allows 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 and configured the same proxy on the fedora 12 VM in my brother’s laptop. This made internet as well as yum (had to made a proxy entry in /etc/yum.conf) working on the VM which was required to install some RPMS from the repos.

Sounds cool, eh? Let’s see a picture of this setup.

In the picture above you can see my laptop on the left hand side connected to my external 500 GB maxtor hard drive, reliance USB device and my brother laptop on the right via cross cable wire.

Though the setup worked and I was able to boot instance and login to them I was not able to see my EBS volume inside the VM. I have updated my forum entry for the same and you can find more information about it here. Let me know if you have any suggestions for me.

Please note that this is a small private cloud facility running out of my home and its scalable so if you got a laptop or a machine which you would like to add to this cloud do let me know.

Signing off for now but the love for machines still not ends up going to office to play more with those.

mcu8051ide 1.3.5

2010-04-13T00:11:00+00:00

Pushed recent mcu8051ide 1.3.5 package to Fedora repository that has bug fixes.

Fedora Summer Coding 2010, DGC GTK+ GUI

2010-04-12T00:10:00+00:00

Inviting prospective students for Digital Gate Compiler (DGC) GTK+ GUI implementation for Fedora Summer Coding 2010. More details are available at Summer Coding 2010 - DGC GTK GUI.

FOSS tool for the week

2010-04-11T21:35:40+00:00

This weeks software is denyhosts.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

I was having a look at my audit log file few weeks back and i noticed many chinease IP hitting on my server with SSH based dictionary attack. After spending some time on sourceforge i came to know about this project. It helps in solving the issue the script automatically after investigating the flow/trend puts the IP inside hosts.deny list.

Nitish, Development and my loving Bihar !!

2010-04-11T19:22:56+00:00

So the election cloud is all over bihar again and our sitting Chief Minister thinks he and his party is coming back in power again. I just wonder what makes him think so. One a note Media has been a loud mouth in citing development all across. As a young 24 yr old s/w engg if i have to rate development graph i wont rate development more than 4 on a scale of 10. I agree Nitish babu will cry hard and start mentioning his development quotient which will be :-

1. More reservation and divisions of minorities.

2.More division of dalits into maha dalits.

Beer is the cure!!

2010-04-06T20:03:57+00:00

I know my relatives and friends who thinks i should not have written this will curse on me. I really don't care much its my life and this is my homepage apart from that India is still holding freedom of speech and Internet (Thank god am no Chinease).

mukt.in 2010 cfp open now!!

2010-04-05T21:11:11+00:00

After a long discussion and brainstorming session i would like to say that we have finally announced the date for www.mukt.in.

This year the event is happening in Jaipur instead of its traditional base Hyderabad. The reasons are many and i would prefer not counting it here.

Thankfully we have got some sponsors with us and we are trying our best to have the event a success with the help on Lug-Jaipur.

Date:- 23,24 apr, 2010.

Dont wonder.Wake up.

2010-04-05T17:55:11+00:00

Benjamin Franklin said, to do it today if you are to do it tomorrow. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow rug, until we cant anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves, that knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping. and that even the biggest failure, even the worst,most intractable mistake beats the hell out of never trying.

I’m trying to get into this habit of posting a few lines if I dont have a few hundred lines to write. Because earlier if a post wasn’t a atleast a few hundred lines, I never considered it to be a blog. That should change now.

vrq 1.0.74

2010-04-05T00:22:30+00:00

Pushed recent VRQ (Verilog Parser) 1.0.74 package to Fedora repository.

sunday

2010-04-04T06:08:49+00:00

How does it feel, sweat dripping down your chin, slowly rolling around from the back of your ear and at times in your mouth but you fight to hold on. You are having a nice time with a bollywood damsel or the girl next door whom you watch reading the newspaper outside her room every morning and wish she would just lookup to find you reading poetry out loud or sticking your head into the view finder of your camera and clicking everything except her, maybe that would make her jealous. But no, you are having a nice time in this world, late night poetry readings in her room which you climbed through a tree in her house, intentional brushing of hands on her legs soft as feather, But wait, where is this sweat coming from, you dont remember doing something which result in this. And you fight to open your eyes which too evade you, but you are able to get a glimpse and you find yourself in your room while your mother ponder on you as if she heard everything you spoke to the girl in your dream, but no that dint happen. She simply switched off the cooling to get you off the bed and ruin the perfect sunday morning. You gather some energy, make a face or two, and go for the loo. There you close your eyes and try to go back to the room of pure bliss, the world of heartly laughter to your stupid jokes, the smell of that perfect perfume which, out of all the things have got you hooked to this human being. A little shake and you grab for balance while sitting in loo and look around why am I even here and mumble some random things or two.

While you wash your face, a sudden blast of music draws your attention, you know exactly what it is and now the morning has taken a dive into the deep ocean and there is no reprise. You dress up and come out of your room and find your grandparents sitting in front of the TV in the dinning hall and watching Ramayana at full blast because the grandmother cant hear properly, and on top of that, despite of the high volume your grandfather has to narrate what all is happening, where is Rama in the quest to get his wife back from Ravana. I have seen people talk about how intelligent, a great brahmin he was. Why do people always have to insist on Ravana being a good guy but succumbed to his wrong doings. Anyway you wish them and briskly walk to the terrace overlooking the park outside your house, where sunlight had difficulty touching the grounds pertaining to the huge growth of Neem trees.

Anyway, now is your moment, you grab the morning paper. First page is always depressing, filled with gang rapes, murders, political agitations, scandals, bollywood celebrity complaining of the heat blah blah blah. So you skip a few pages and reach the middle of the paper, where you find your favorite writers and hope that, atleast they have got something for you, to save the day. And as most of the time, they do save your day. Short laughs, interesting facts, and so brilliantly written articles that for a few hours you forget where you are. Though the maid comes along with the breakfast to remind you of the existence of human beings around you, the fact you loath all the time.

here are a few of them which gave me the sunday laughs today. karan thapar , and Indrajit hazra (he’s really amazing) , though occasionally funny but this one was good by Manas Chakravarty. And I think you should just simply order HT on sundays and forget the pain of me reminding you again that how good they all are.

So who are my heroes who saved the day for me, some literary geeks. At times you envy them, on how beautifully they write and bring joy to you. How they make you feel that you are missing onto better things in life which are far away and waiting for you, though most of these dreams only make you feel terrible rather than encourage.

You are lost again, after this momentary high which even proves ecstasy better, giving you a longer high and enveloping you away from the world around you.

Sun gets hotter after a while and you get back to your room hoping to get inspired soon and get back to your work. You know the world awaits you but when you have lost the inspiration the fire which runs the whole show, you cant do anything other than just sit and wait and maybe if got lucky then get invited to a party to take your mind of things around you. Most of your friends think that you are busy doing something good which you always were but least that they know you are sulking in your room doing nothing but watching your ceiling fan move in a motion if you never realized it ever did, that your bed is slightly bent over the edges, that while pressing the navigational keys on the keypad of your laptop for like a hundred times, produces a unique stutter in yakuake ( the drop down KDE konsole) while your fedora is doing a yum update. Watching yum update is probably one of the lamest of things one can do but you dont mind doing it. And people think you are giving too much of your time to photographing world around you, when those n00bs least know that, it doesnt take long to click a picture, picture clicking is alien to what you might be feeling at that time, you see something, the moment, and it all just looks perfect, so you take out the camera and click it. And while you are at it clicking you click more than one picture. As time goes by you are having a pile of pictures to upload to flickr, but you only upload one or two each day, so the process of uploading goes on for a long time and almost everyday. So the moral of the lame photography story to all the lame people who should give more time indulging in their own affair than poking their noses in other’s business that you dont click everyday.

Setting Up Local Jaunty Repository via Apt-Mirror

2010-03-30T20:12:49+00:00

The article mentions the method to deploy APT-MIRROR so that you can use a local repository in your intranet insted going to internet againa nd again.

I will you the local repository IP to 192.100.100.40

Packages required:--

1.Apt-Mirror

2.Apache Webserver (to distribute to whole intranet)

Steps :---

1.Setting up the apt-mirror

$sudo apt-get install apt-mirror

$sudo nano /etc/apt/apt-mirror (the configuration file of apt-cache)

ragsagar

2010-03-28T04:02:59+00:00

Atlast i came up with a real rhythmbox plugin for setting the status message in pidgin as the current song title playing in Rhythmbox music player .I wrote it a few month before and was using it. Thought of sharing it before but didnt get time. Actually i forgot about my blog when i started microblogging. From now onwards i will be updating this blog regularly.( this is what i wanted to do always )

Download the plugin from here : http://ragsagar.freehostia.com/rb-nowplaying.tar.gz
To install it.
1) Extract the tarball.
2) Copy it to ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/ (if no such directories exists, create them)
3) Open rhythmbox. Edit -> Plugins
4) Check ‘Now Playing Pidgin’

That’s it. If you are facing any problems do comment.

Long way to go…

2010-03-21T09:38:24+00:00

Sitting in front of a PC
Three hours of trauma
Pressing keys on a keyboard
Staring at a monitor

My eyes going sore
My brain going drowsy
My limbs going numb
My senses going blurry

But I got a lab to attend
And preserve energy for another lecture
To stay alive
Amidst all that pressure

Imagine four years of such a life
Living it out each day
I take a break from it
Just enough to pray

But they say its just a start
Brace yourself for the next part
But they do give hope and say
You proceed to heaven once you graduate from this hell

And this is something I’ve heard
A gazzillion times
Every day of school
Every day of college

Still I believe it every time I hear it
‘Coz I know one thing for sure
God has kept me alive so far
So there’s a long way to go.

Setting Up Postfix On Ubuntu

2010-03-04T21:07:17+00:00

Requirement :-

1.A dedicated IP

2.A domain name with A record pointing to the IP/server.

3.Domain Panel control for adding MX record.

In my case my domain name is xyz.com and my hostname is xyz.net.in

Installing Postfix

$sudo apt-get install postfix

Installing Mailx, client to read/send incoming outgoing mails.

$sudo apt-get install mailx

Changes to make in postfix configuration file.

$sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

LAMP setup on Ubuntu

2010-03-03T10:12:19+00:00

Packages we will install as LAMP Stack

1.apache2

2.mysql-server

3.php5

4 .Phpmyadmin

(Installing apache2 and php5)

    $apt-get install update
    $apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php
    $cd /var/www
    $sudo nano testing.php
    <?php phpinfo(); ?>
    $firefox localhost/testing.php

On the browser we can see all the information about the php we have installed.

Installing mysql server/client both

When colours of Holi question me..

2010-03-01T03:38:20+00:00

I woke up one morning
Heard some chants outside
I rubbed my eyes
And went into the balcony

There were a bunch of people
Throwing colours of Holi at each other
Smiles and laughs all around
As they played Holi

I looked at the people
All covered in various colours
Some red, some yellow
Some pink, some green

I went back inside with a smile
But with an itch within
But I couldn’t realise
What that itch was about?

Then I saw some colors
On the table
Placed gracefully
Close to each other

I heard some murmuring
Coming from the table
They were giving strange looks to me
As they chatted with each other

I went closer to them and asked
Why do you look at me like that?
They said nothing but stared at me
I repeated my question

They said
You dare ask us a question?
First you answer us
Why the hell are we sitting here ?

I said
Sorry, but I don’t play Holi
They paused to give me a dreaded look
And said

Is this your answer to every question?
Is this negation of everything, your life?
Is this why never won an award?
Is this why you never confessed your love?

I was taken aback by their questions
I took few moments to stabilize
I looked at them furiously
And asked

What does all that has to do with you?
How does it matter to you?
That I never won an award?
That I never confessed my love?

They all laughed at me
And said
Its because of losers like you
That we sit on this table doing nothing

Not fulfilling our destiny
Not being able to touch someone
That you loved
Not being able to tell them what you feel

Not being able to talk with them
Make them smile
Not being able to bring you two closer
The way we used to bring others

Now I laughed at them and said
What do you know about love?
Why do you care what I feel?
How does all this matter to you?

They all looked at each other
They answered one more time
This time they looked at me with a dull smile
There voice had a tone of compassion

What do you think we colours are?
Its not our fault that you human beings
Are too naive to understand
That we are the feeling called “love”

- Kapil Acharya

Setting up AUCTeX Mode for Emacs in Jaunty(Ubuntu).

2010-02-02T17:43:54+00:00

$ sudo apt-get install auctex, preview-latex-style

Once installed add the below mentioned part in your ".emacs" file.

      (load "auctex.el" nil t t)
      (load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)

Open emacs and try opening a .tex file from there and cheers you are done with it.

lalithsuresh

2010-01-22T13:46:37+00:00

With this, I shall be moving to lalith.in. Thanks to PDJSolutions for getting me the domain and managing the hosting!

lalithsuresh

2010-01-22T03:45:26+00:00

I always feared this day would come, and it finally has. So with a heavy heart, I bid farewell to Sun Microsystems. Thanks to all those of you who made my one and a half years at Sun a wonderful experience. To wrap it up, all I’ve got to say is, “until we meet again!”

Today I set you free…

2010-01-06T16:59:36+00:00

You are a bird
In the bounds of emotions
In the bounds of friendship
In the bounds of pain
In the bounds of love

Today I set you free
Free of all bounds
Go out in the open sky
Fly free
Chirp like you never did

And one day
If
You ever return to me
There will be no cage
That once was

But just a smile
A set of lips to kiss your forehead
A set of arms to embrace you
A set of moist eyes
With old moments flowing out in form of tiny beads
A set of thirsty ears
Waiting for you to twitter.

- Kapil Acharya

lalithsuresh

2010-01-03T08:35:52+00:00

My first post of the year! So here I am, whiling away the last day of my winter vacation at home. December ’09 has been rather fruitful, I learnt a lot about NS-3 and even became a contributor to the project. I also managed to make a good deal of progress with my work on Security Issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks.

Anyhow, the only problem with working from (my) home is the dial-up connection I’m stuck with. My laptop doesn’t even have a dial-up modem and hence, I’m forced to use my trusty (maybe not) 8 year old Windows box, which has housed and nurtured generations of malware. There’s this weird one that forces a click on a particular section of the screen, another one that blocks keyboard input for a while (and surely records/sends it somewhere) before allowing me to continue, and a million others. This system won’t even boot from a USB which ruined my efforts to install Linux on it. And yes, I’m too lazy to go out of home and buy a blank CD/DVD. Anyhow, the dial-up is so slow, I always have a Solitaire window open to keep my fingers busy while my browser struggles to load pages over the connection that gives me blazing speeds of around 1KB/sec. This obviously implies that I’ve played Solitaire a LOT over the month, and this allowed me to make a few observations about it in the progress. Here goes:

1) No matter how many times you hit F2 (New Deal) under a second, the deal won’t change and you’ll end up with the same decks of cards. This kind of implies that their new deal function (which would be using a randomise function) is using the current system time for a seed value.

2) This observation was made possible thanks to all the malware who’ve worked persistently to slow down my system. Upon opening a new card from the deck on the top left (after there’s another card already open on the same deck), and then hitting undo, you can see (only on my machine of course, because mine’s the only slow system on the planet) the entire set of cards upto the previous one flashing by, one after the other. So my guess is, all decks are being maintained as linked lists with a pointer to the card on top and the one just before it. When you opt to undo your action, the entire linked list is traversed (and shown on screen) upto the previous one with the help of the ‘previous-card’ pointer. Guess they took advantage of processor speeds to hide it from the user under normal circumstances.

I might be wrong (my guesses usually suck), so feel free to correct me. And do let me know if you’ve made any observations as well.

Happy New Year and uhm… Happy Solitairing.

Christmas,Ride and Vendor Quotations

2009-12-24T18:40:55+00:00

To start with i will vent all my anger on the fscking harware vendors.Screw yourself arseholes and one more.

The great indian arranged marriage!! part 1

2009-12-24T14:05:03+00:00

Well I’m going a bit over board in calling it the great indian marriage, first of all, I’m calling it a marriage because it will take some time to become a wedding yet. Anyway, it brings me to the real question, what is marriage? There was no concept of marriage in biblical times and certainly not until some thousand years back, The oldest marriage mentions could be dated to the mesopotamian civilization, which was by far, way too different in practice than what it is today. In my opinion it originated as a legal way to mate and have children and eventually to lead your family (because the concept of generations came later), gather food, protection and all the basic things one need everyday to live your life, Thats it, nothing dramatic about two persons bonding or falling in love so much that they dance around in the rain and finally mate under a shed, water dripping through their bodies, that sounds very apt for a typical tollywood movie (I’d have said bollywood but bollywood seemed to have grown out of that generation to a more serious cinema these days ). So the kind of married life we have would make no sense at all to someone travelling through time machine from 4000 yrs back, he’d probably die laughing at us that how we have managed to turn such a simple thing into something so complex, infact that would be his comments on our whole society structure which again makes no sense at all. He would probably go back and tell his friends about what he saw and they’ll all have a nice laugh about it and probably even their so called wives would have a laugh too and eventually the whole some god forsaken town in the middle of no where would be laughing at us. Well this is where our society have come to, you marry, have fun for a little while, have kids, then fight a lot and die while still passing sarcastic remarks over one’s eating habits, how cant they control there bodily fluids and gases anymore..blah blah and more blah.

Well all said and done, but how does the marriage today happen, well, this is how its done in a conservative rajasthani rajput family. No matter what all female activists might say about women right and how women have come a long way today and yet again proved their mental to be more than just produce and make home, but still today a daughter’s father starts worrying about his daughter’s prospects for getting married, no matter how well she might be doing professionally or what her ambitions and aspirations be, she “must” marry early and to a good, successful and rich boy (best if he’s the only son to his parents, and even better if either of his parents are dead, because then that would give much more freedom to their daughter after marriage, no matter how much all these facts bite one, but this is what happens in this hypocritical world). So now the next step, girl’s 6″X4″ picture along with her biodata (resume for being considered apt for your son) is sent to a boy’s family with whom they have had a little chat and said that they are interested in their son and would like them to consider their girl for him. At times this does not so happen directly but through a no. of crisscrossed relatives in between who are commonly known to both parties interested in the deal we are talking about. So now the picture makes round to a lot many households, and through strict scrutiny of half aged,married women and older women too, its like an xray from which nothing can be hidden, no matter how hard has the photographer had tried the lights, the makeup, or a subtle smile, nothing can be hidden from these relentless women whose opinion is invaluable in making or breaking it. After some time now, the so called picture finally reaches its destination and goes into the hands our precious big boy. The boy may not have a good look at it and phone calls start pouring in from all the relatives who saw the picture first and want to know what does he think, and one can imagine what might go through his mind looking at all this, I’m sure he’d be screaming out. “people!! gimme a break, stfu.lemme think” and anyways even if he did that, I’m also pretty sure some aunt would shut him up and prolly declare that he’s agreed to it and the he’s getting married on the next auspicious date declared by the pandit (now thats an another story whole together, how pundits make business in india and how the brahmins manipulated the people for their own interest, well lets not get too political here and leave it for some other occasion).

So lets say for here that the boy has totally agreed to the marriage but the girl’s family wants to meet the boy. So now this is one of those when people like me should be locked up in rooms and not let near to the room where the meeting might be taking place, because its not one of those rooms where you would like to be, the atmosphere is funnier than watching jerry seinfeld doing a live act and what makes it difficult is holding your self from laughing at such stupid remarks and conversation.

A shreek brought me back to the world and to eventually to the room where I was sitting, it turned out that the shreek came out from the very smiley mouth of very lovely and happy mother of the girl, and she was laughing at a joke (which I dint find remotely funny) made by the sister of the boy and if all goes well, would be sister in-law of the girl and mind you, girl is not even present here, infact, she’s may not even know that her parents are here and is working hard at some multi-national corporate company in one of the biggest cities in india. Well also it becomes very confusing for my little head to concentrate on any the conversations going around here,and if this is to happen at a G-8 meeting or a press conference, I’m sure no matter how many journalists might be present there it will be utterly difficult for all of them to even listen to any of it, forget me being a part of this fool’s paradise. But I get a relief we I look at the boy’s face, no expression ever made in english language can express what he might be going through. Men in the room are asking him to listen to what they are talking and so do the women, but it all falls apart when any one of them asks his opinion on the matter, and we all drop to a dead silence and now his phone rings, and jolly good if he has the music from the “kill bill” and that too the “hohhu hohhu”, ‘twisted nerve’ song and he smiles and leaves for a while, and since the conversation was brought to a halt, we need a fresh fire to start it again, so I give the fresh fire by asking the father of the girl about the economic integrity of the country and he sprung back again. Out of the talking about probably everything the world has and also girl’s mother bragging about how wonderful and good their daughter is, she is so intelligent, how she doesnt like to watch movies (and i said “wot”) and how we sent her to an all girl’s school and how she is not interested in men (and i held back my breath).

The most important part of the whole get-together is the exchanging of all the common family contacts and people both of them know. One would ask do you know this guy and the other would say “oh, yes i do” and then go about in length how good he’s done for himself and how much he has earned to much in such a short while and that he got married to recently and how they also know the family to which he has married and then the point of discussion would shift to that family and by the end of an hour or two they would probably cover half the rajput community and come back to the world we are sitting in. The strange part of all this is that how women in the room get drawn to the same discussion and join men and everyone is talking about the same. Someone who has not even spoken even once all this time even jumps into it, the only ones who are watching and not talking and looking at each other’s faces are me and the boy. In all this hoopla hoo, I get lost again in my thoughts only to remind me back of my presence by some loud laugh or cracking of snack bowls. And thank goodness the meeting is coming to an end, what marks the end of the big social mind boggling heart pounding meet is the silent which lasts for a little longer than usual is the end of it.

Note:- I do not intend to offend anyone, the events described maybe a little exaggerated.

You’re already dead!

2009-12-17T07:43:40+00:00

“don’t be afraid
it’s only love
love is simple
don’t be afraid
you’re already dead
love is simple” A very beautiful song by Akron Family called love is simple. what is most beautiful about the song that it reminds of a lot of things, its like all the snapshots of those moments which I cherish or regret or sad go by in a second. I had always wondered how will a dead person might feel, because when you are alive, you are a life form in your self, bursting with liveliness and either making people around you happy or sad by your actions. But once you are dead, how would that feel, how would you feel when you cant see the world like you did when you were alive from your own eyes, its like a real time role playing game of which you are an integrate part of. How you feel happiness, the sadness and all those things which make one happy. And once dead, there is nothing which can effect you, you cant enjoy the pleasure of a smoke in chilly windy night, you cant enjoy seeing the sun set in the horizon, and the nature around you.

And I think death is easy, its more difficult to live, tough is to handle things every day, which give you so much pain that you feel this strong urge to end it, but you feel another strong will to go on with it, you somehow feel that you cant loose this battle against life. I also dont blame those people who take the easy way out and end all this, because suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem because you can never comprehend the pain a human being can take, there are only personal limits and the reference point. The hypocrite world says its a crime to end the life “god” has given you, I want to ask those people, if you care so much for that life then why do you let your actions add up to all that pain, do something to resolve the pain. And also first of all I think the right to take ones life should solely lie with that person whose life we are talking about, he has every right to do whatever he likes himself, why do doctors fillup the consent form from the patient only, and the patient has to tell what he’d like to be done with his body after he’s dead, why dont we let the law-makers decide then too what should be done with the patient.

Human brain is such a complex array of circuits, no other person can every know what might be going inside it. At times life takes such complex terns, you hardly believe this is happening to you, because you had never imagined yourself into this mess and now you are stuck inside it with no way to get out. you feel so helpless when there are changes in your life far beyond your control. You desperately want things to get normal but they dont, and you know that they wont, but still you want to believe that they should, because the changes which are coming are killing you inside out. you dont want to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow and that change so visible and evident that you cant revert back, that fear of the worst hurts like anything. And you question yourself, what wrong did you do, why only you and there is no answer. But some people are so strong and I wonder how can they still be, they never let out how they feel inside. They come out with a lovely smile on their faces as if nothing is wrong, and go about talking about things which are really important for others, I think the only thing that makes them do this is their strong ideals, their strong back bone which makes them even stand up right for even the worst things. They will do anything to go by their standard, no matter how high they are and how much they might go through to swore by it but still they would do it. And this is what gives them the strength to take on the world by the stride and do what they do best, fight with it.

There are so many things which can be said about the same matter and ofcourse with different view points but I guess some other time when I know exactly how these intricacies of life are taken care of. I myself finds my self from time to time tangled in such situations and behaviour of humans. But what more can one say about that, we are only human.

lalithsuresh

2009-12-13T15:04:59+00:00

I typed this entry on board a flight from Delhi to Coimbatore. I spent the first two hours of the flight fiddling with ns-3, and I’m slowly getting a feel of it’s code. Anyway, it’s a beautiful view from aboard the plane, with a stripe of orange lissing the dark horizon of the clouds and blending into the darkness of the night. But that’s not going to stop me from ranting away, so here goes.

I happened to watch ‘The Zeitgeist‘ a few days ago and that prompted me to write this by the way. Yes, I am quite late to join the Zeitgeist bandwagon; I usually miss good releases by an entire era. Quite amazing I’d say. With the kind of interest I have in religion (in spite of being an atheist), I was already familiar with most of Part I which was all centered around religion. Religion is by far the most successful hoax ever and I wonder how it can ever solve the world’s problems. Oh wait, it’s _creating_ problems. I pity the stereotype that Muslims of today have to put up with. While on the bus I’d taken from Jaipur to Delhi yesterday, I happened to sit next to a middle aged man. I opened a conversation with him and we talked for a while. When I asked him his name, he replied, “Ahmed”, paused for a few seconds and then said, “I’m Muslim.” I couldn’t figure out how that piece of information was going to help me judge him in anyway, so I asked him if there was any specific reason why he was telling me that. To that, he replied, “Because that’s the way it is these days.” Our conversation ended there.

Ignorance kills, and it makes one vulnerable to deception. It fools people into buying products that’ll never help them, into accepting beliefs that are baseless and into letting corrupt people govern them. If everyday Joe asked me to fix a problem on his computer, I could easily setup a Trojan in front of him and give him a stupid explanation to convince him that it’s there for a good reason. Heck, ignorance helps the quacks and charlatans of all areas on a daily basis. Look at Ankit Fadia for instance. Anyone who’s got as much as a grain’s worth of knowledge about security knows better than to believe that Fadia has the skills required to be a ‘security consultant’. Yet, he rode the media all the way to popularity and fame, because, to your everyday noob, he’s a prodigy and an ‘ethical hacker’. And regardless of whether or not you know what being a hacker is all about, please read this article by Eric S Raymond. I’m pointing even those who ‘know’ to that link because there are a lot of people I’ve met who think they know what it means to be a hacker but are just as misinformed as the others.

Need I even get started about religious rituals which are supposed to cure diseases and other problems? How about an AIDS vaccine people? Or how about you all get together and cast “Heal the World Level 3″? While you’re at it, you could possibly follow it up with “Fulfill all UN Millenium Objectives Level 100″ as well. If you can’t it’s ok, you can still help by trying out those really cool mass suicides. At least we’ll end up with a better planet that way.

Will the educational system ever evolve enough to overcome these brick walls? Maybe yes. Maybe not. Bah!

Jagriti

2009-12-09T05:20:41+00:00

Chill in the air, a foggy morning, dew drops sparkling on flower petals, asking for anything more from a morning would only be greed i my opinion. And that was the kind of morning when I started out from my home to awakening the mortals in my college, and the event was aptly named JAGRITI ( जाग्रति ), which means awakening in sanskrit, and that is exactly what I had intended to do.

lab ready with fedora machines

And soon enough I was waiting for all lug-jaipur members to arrive and help me in the workshop, infact more than just helping me, speak at the workshop. We had intended to take the workshop for teachers but were also given the permission to take a workshop for students as well. so we have invited steve to take teacher’s workshop and jai, udit and pranav to help us with students one, along with out college gang comprising of mukul, anuj and some juniors which to my surprise were very interested. And everyone seemed to have arrived at almost the right and steve started his session at the lab running over 30 fedora machines. And he soon started his session on linux basics, making them feel at home on fedora so that those teachers can in return go and do the same to their students, atleast that was is our plan, thankful to our comp science HOD he made it mandatory for all teachers to make their students work on open source technologies, which eventually brought us in.

steve talking to teachers and teaches listening intently

So after leaving steve with teachers I went to see start the students session. And I was amazed at the seminar hall we were given, I had seen it for the first time in my college and it was awesome, with 2 screens and a seating capacity of over 300 students, and fully air conditioned, it surely felt so good to even get onto that stage and talk.

So pranav started talking about a little introduction to foss and then I took a few more minutes asking for some queries and talking a little bit more about foss and in general why linux. And we soon went to jai to talk about web development. Which seemed like an interesting topic for students and they thoroughly enjoyed getting to know intricacies of web, which they were all new to.

A view of the students seminar

I could now leave the seminar hall to fellow hackers and see what is happening around and also talk to nandeep who had just arrived, and was being told the interesting things sarai is doing and there are some possibilities of sarai working with some colleges in jaipur to spread foss. After an hour of talk we moved onto the snacks, and there again, my college surprised me and swept me off my feet. Or it can be that, this is the first time I have organized/done something in my college that I came to know that my college can be a very wonderful host to its visitors. Steve had also come there on a break from his teachers workshop and the response was quite good, some of them were really interested to know what he was talking about. While we were having snacks students had already started moving out, partly because, audience always decreases after the first talk and only the interested ones are left, so its kind of good for the organisers. And udit sharma was sent to hold the crowd in place with his expected to be mesmerizing talk on drupal and advance web technologies (but it proved otherwise ). Well so now we were only left with people who were interested in learning.It seemed they were so interested that some of the guys ended up on stage taking drupal setup from udit and udit soon got swamped by the crowd. So we had to step in between and take the control and move the house back in rest.

Though we had planned for a BoF session, but it dint come out as one instead jai ended up going on stage and talking about stuff from mailing lists, IRC and we also showed them how to get there, community contribution etc etc. And more over I was amazed to see such a wonderful seminar hall in my college.

The whole session was so good and interactive that all of us lost track of time and we had far exceeded our limits but the audience was still in place and wanted us to carry on, but after promising them that we will return soon with more interesting things we parted.

To call it a day, we sat in college lawns to reflect on the day, Also discussed plans for the sarai workshop at MNIT on 14th and 15th, though its already done now and was a success too.

So it seems like lug-jaipur is out again in the socially active world and a spree of workshops to welcome its coming back.Will soon write about the MNIT workshops and the first full-day out with lug members, doing loads of stuff.

Going to foss.in

2009-12-09T04:44:34+00:00

Bone chilling cold, a night full of aspirations, talk of the future to come, paths to light up, a great journey to embark on with a group of friends,young at heart and destined to change the world around them. Well this is just a little wave of thoughts which fill your heart and
mind, partly because of the sense of travelling and being a vagabond overpowers your perfect little monotonous life and the other being to meet the fellow revolutionaries.
With all those feeling we reached jaipur station after an install fest which turned into an introductory talk on foss which jai very energetically handled and I was sitting behind and exploring the N810 which udit recently acquired to take his linux love to the masses, and trying to recover from the sleepless 36 hrs which not much later turned into 48hrs, all thanks to jai and his plan to take a train from jaipur to ajmer which apparently turned out to be very late and so waiting for it could eventually mean to miss our train from ajmer to bangalore.

Our seat in the bogy 57,59,61 (by jai)

Anyways all said and done, I now write this sitting in the comforts of an AC compartment of Indian Railways and on the first day of our journey which actually takes almost 42hrs, but time losses its significance looking at the fact that we’d be crossing half of the country, from western part of india to the southern, crossing four states and an opportunity to look at India more closely.

mirror trains by jai

For some facts, languages in India changes every 100 KM, though the change would depend on the location but still there are sure enough noticeable changes which actually fills your heart with a sense of the unkown, going through your own country and wondering at what exactly peolpe are trying to say gives a deep sense of belonging and the urge to get to know fellow country men. From changes to lagnuage to clothing to food to even playing cards, which was the most fun part of day 1 of the 2 day train journey. We had the company of two girls and two other boys who were going to pune and on top of that they were all engineering graduates which took the toll to 7 engineers in our bogy, we became friends instatnly and were chatting and eating Indian Railways grub tog, until the moment came at round dusk that a little boy selling playing cards came around, reclusive to goods he was selling but looked like the train man, one who not only travels but live in it, anyways we bought them not knowing how would it effect our journey.

Remains of the day&night well spent by jai

It was 1 AM, with sleep in some eyes, some still wide awake to de-board the train at their respective stops, some still trying to get a hang of the whole thing that just happened there, and some utterly happy and some sublime after being called a many great things, this was now the end of our journey together and also the end of the last game we played. The people whom we met were Ankit, Khushbo, Sunita and Viral with whom I spent a lot of time at the bogy door looking out in the open, at the cloudless skies and the moonlight night whose beauty couldn’t be subdued by the noise of chaging tracks, rolling over bridges, and the gaps in the fish plates, they all seem to add to the little moment of freshness from the bogy filled of people from all walks and parts of india, where some husbands were still clueless about why on earth are they going to meet this distant relative, in whom they have no interest in meeting or some wives were disgrunteled with the train food and the washrooms and telling other women how they just missed the flight they were intended to take and how much gold she owns and blah. While sunita had to get down at valsad and the rest of our new friends were going to pune, they had 3 more hours to sleep and then a morning of office and their damn bosses waiting for them, so we slept after a day full of life. At around 4AM train arrived at pune station and it was time for our fellow travelers to get down, though there was still an important task for Viral to do before he could go home, which was to get something for me from outside the station, which we had earlier used together, and now it was pay back time becuase the train halt was 10min and he had to run and get it, and to my utter surprise, while I was asleep he came, woke me up and handed it over to me and said goodbye before I could say anything to him, he was gone, and I lay there awake for a few more minutes trying to figure what had actually happened, I met a stranger and just after a few hours he dint feel like an staranger anymore. And I slept with a smile on my face, though I could also hear some sarcasm for me and praise for viral

well rest of the journey went quite smoothly and boring, since we had nothing else to do than to try out different snacks and salads which used to come our way in the train and listen to some music once in a while and sleep. But the anticipation to attend foss.in for the first time was growing.

And the rest of them were clicked by me from jai’s camera when he was not around and with a little help from aniket with holding my laptop (mainly in front of his face)

Hangover,Code and Lots of Music

2009-12-06T23:12:42+00:00

Morning World!!

So many things happened last week.I finally got a guy who can clean/wash my cloths

My guitar is with me and now i am hunting 4 a teacher.

lalithsuresh

2009-12-04T04:41:05+00:00

* Disclaimer: Even though I’ll try to tone things down, this article might end up disgusting most of you, to the point that you might want to turn yourself inside out in the process. Any harm caused is the reader’s fault and not mine. You have been warned. *

The MNIT hostels have always had a reputation for not being really clean; reasons being bad mess food, a poor maintenance cycle, and mostly, plain old sick people.

So having lived here in these hostels for my fourth year running, you can say I’ve been inured by the ‘exposure’ gained. The most noteworthy part of these hostels involve the bathrooms themselves, the conditions of which I’d like to enlighten you all with. Every trip to one of these common bathrooms is a new experience, as the occupants of these hostels are never out of ideas to churn your guts.

In any case, I’ll be drawing out a list of things you _don’t_ want to see when you walk into one of these bathrooms. So here goes:

A rat the size of a kitten running towards the latrine, and disappearing down the toilet.
A snake disappearing down the toilet. No kidding.
The bathroom drains being blocked (because someone thought he’d stuff his empty can of shampoo down the hole), and the entire room being flooded with water upto ankle level. Note that the water’s connected to the toilets, the bathing area, the wash basin area and the urinal section.
Someone walking bare feet through the above mentioned flooded room.
The toilet with a hell lot of shit left untouched. (Abides well with Murphy’s law, as it happens only when you’ve got to take a crap, and very badly that too).
Same situation as above, but you notice two different sets of shit. (Guess why?)
Plastic bottles lying around inside the toilets. This might be a little hard to figure out for people who’re on the cleaner side of life, so I’ll tell you. The said people use those instead of mugs (they share a bottle which they leave in the latrine itself).
Now it starts getting weird: A packet of chips lying inside the toilet. Cigarette buds too.
The next one usually happens the night after every exam: the wash basin clogged and filled to the brim with puke. You know. Good ol’ booze?
A variant of the above involves puke all around the toilet and absolutely none inside it. Talk about horrible aim.
A guy putting his hands down the toilet to get his key which fell through it. Just kidding.

Anyways, call me sick for even bothering to post this. Yeah whatever.

Screenshot

2009-11-30T04:54:15+00:00

I _love_ eye candy.

I know a lot of people would disagree, claiming that it doesn’t offer any increase in productivity for a developer and only uses up resources, but what the heck! I’ve got 4 Gigs of RAM to burn, and even when I’m running two OpenSolaris VMs in my Ubuntu, my Compiz doesn’t chug! This in spite of the fact that I’m using an Intel based shared memory graphics card.

Anyhow, I recently installed Terminator which is a really slick x-term emulator that offers you a single terminal window which you can split into multiple ones (either horizontally or vertically). I’m used to leaving Alt+T as my key binding to start a new terminal, but the problem is, when you set this binding from the System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts menu, it is set to launch gnome-terminal instead of your default x-terminal-emulator. Now since I was in one of those lazy moods where I didn’t feel like finding out the right config file (among the millions out there) to tweak, I decided to go for the not-so-graceful way of solving the issue:

$: sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-terminal /usr/bin/gnome-terminal-old

$: sudo ln -s /usr/bin/terminator /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

Done! Here’s my Desktop with terminator running (that’s cairo-dock on the left by the way):

Peace!

ragsagar

2009-11-26T13:16:09+00:00

Just thought of sharing the code i written to learn linked list implementation the day before my data structures model practical exam.

/*
 *      linkedlist.c
 *
 *      Copyright 2009 Rag Sagar.V <ragsagar@gmail.com>
 *
 *      This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 *      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 *      the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 *      (at your option) any later version.
 *
 *      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 *      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 *      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 *      GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 *      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 *      along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 *      Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
 *      MA 02110-1301, USA.
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

typedef struct list
{
	int data;
	struct list *next;
}LIST;
LIST *ptr,*temp,*start=NULL;
void insert_after(int ,int );
void remove_item(int );
void display(void);
int count=0;
int main()
{
	int item,opt,dat;
	system("clear");
	ptr=NULL;
	/* printf("%d",sizeof(LIST)); */
	do
	{
		printf("\n########## MENU ##########\n");
		printf("1.Insert\n2.Remove\n3.Display\n4.Exit\n");
		printf("Enter your option : ");
		scanf("%d",&opt);
	 	switch(opt)
	 	{
	 		case 1:
	 		printf("Enter the data to insert ");
	 		scanf("%d",&item);
	 		if(count==0)
	 		{
	 			ptr = (LIST *)malloc(sizeof(LIST));
	 			ptr->next = NULL;
	 			ptr->data = item;
	 			start = ptr;
			}
			else
			{
				printf("Enter the item after which you have to insert new element : ");
				scanf("%d",&dat);
				insert_after(dat,item);
			}
			count++;
				break;
	 		case 2:
	 		if(count==0)
	 		{
	 			printf("\nList is empty\n"); break;
			}
	 		printf("Enter the item to remove : ");
	 		scanf("%d",&item);
	 		remove_item(item);
	 		count--;
	 		break;
	 		case 3:
	 		if(count==0)
	 		{
	 			printf("\nList is empty\n");
	 			break;
	 		}
	 		else
	 		{
	 			printf("List elements are \n"); display();
			}
			break;
	 		case 4: break;
		}
	}while(opt!=4);
	return 0;
}
void insert_after(int data, int item)
{
	LIST *tmp;
	temp=(LIST *)malloc(sizeof(LIST));
	temp->data=item;
	ptr=start;

	while(ptr!=NULL)
	{
		if(ptr->data==data)
		{
			tmp=ptr->next;
			ptr->next=temp;
			temp->next=tmp;
			break;
		}
	ptr=ptr->next;
	}

}	

void remove_item(int item)
{
	ptr=start;
	if(ptr->data == item)
	{
		start = ptr->next;
		free(ptr);
	}
	while(ptr->next!=NULL)
	{
		if((ptr->next)->data==item)
		{
			temp=ptr->next;
			ptr->next=(ptr->next)->next;
			free(temp);
			break;
		}
		ptr=ptr->next;
	}
}

void display()
{
	ptr = start;
	while(ptr!=NULL)
	{
		printf("%d -> ",ptr->data);
		ptr=ptr->next;
	}
}

IBM and the great indian debacle

2009-11-22T12:13:15+00:00

Everyone feared IBM in the good old days, when guys in black suits and tie would either make you go out of business or buy you off the hook. IBM guys were considered evil big brothers, who were ruthless and sung company songs. So anyways IBM seemed to have changed quite a lot in recent years and we all know its open support towards free and open source mentality, and anyways I am here to talk about what is it doing right now which actually violates that very philosophy.

There is a very popular competition which IBM runs in india called TGMC (The great mind challenge) for students. Well that is all good but the tricky part comes here. IBM only accepts projects made using its technology i.e. the tools which only IBM provides to the educational institute you are in and yes, they dont give these tools to individuals, they can only be acquired once your institute is in the program and it so happens that IBM after sending its big boys to your institute and, your college will soon will make it compulsory for everyone in the final year to make their major projects for IBM, and my college is one of them and we are stuck with making our major projects in TGMC if we want or not.

The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
WAS/WAS CE
DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB

and as it seems that you cant do this project without IBM’s help. But what is more important are the Terms and Conditions, what it has imposed on all student developers working on it, here is an interesting one :-

“By submitting entries, entrant grants IBM and their agents of the program the right to publish, use, adapt, sell, edit and/or modify such entry in any way, in commerce and in any and all media worldwide, including but not limited to the Internet, without limitation and without compensation to the entrants. Entrant also grants IBM worldwide irrevocable, nonexclusive and royalty-free right and license to use, have used, copy, reproduce, transfer, modify and/or display any information contained in their entry in whole or part and in any form without compensation.” for a complete set of Terms and Conditions

Woah!! So that means you dont own your work, it just does not belong to you. I wonder what is this giant teaching young students on this country. And what is this policy where, on one hand its promoting open source and on the other its doing this.

And this is not limited to my college alone, I know a lot many college in jaipur, rajasthan, india which have fallen for this and have made it mandatory for their students to work on it.

Bike/shillong and some sweets

2009-11-22T09:17:52+00:00

Well I know i been too lazy to write blog and as a result of that once in a blue moon i post things here.

Neways this month been exciting so far.I visited Shilong and Guwahati.It was great experiance meeting students/faculty and government employees.

I really liked the way they were all GO GO towards Free and Open SOurce Software.I just visited police bazaar in shillong and made trip to Cherapunji.Shillong is a heaven in all respect.I loved the place and people there excluding boiled food which am nt at all used too.

fedora 12 and my machines

2009-11-21T16:36:29+00:00

So finally the wait is over now, and we have a brand new release of our lovely fedora. Though it took me a few days to download but it was done today morning and I had planned to upgrade my machines in the evening. One of my machines was already running fedora 11 and the other one could never actually see the face of fedora due to this bug (ATI device drivers) but has seen faces of all other linux flavors. But I had high hopes from constantine since there has been considerable work done in the field of ATI video drives.

Machine one (laptop):- Well this was easy and had more chances of success as it already was running fedora 11 and had no issues at all. So I put in the fedora 12 DVD and upgraded fedora 11 to fedora 12, it was running the default i.e. gnome, but my main working installation runs kde so after gnome’s upgrade I upgraded the kde one too. Though the upgrade process is quite long and time consuming but the upgrade was worth the wait.

The login screen is so beautiful.

And so is the plasma desktop, this is why I love kde, it gives you immense functionality to work.

And I have found this application called “digiKam” which I have totally fallen in love with, those I could not install the plugin which lets you export pictures to flickr and facebook as one of the dependencies of that plugin does not even exist on the site , the libkexif-0.2.5.tar.bz2 does not even exist on the download link. fail!!

Machine two (desktop):- Now this is a weird one, and I feel cheated because this machine which has an ATI board and everything else on the chipset by ATI was sold in the market as an intel product as a 3rd party product, but I was stupid enough to understand any of that to not to buy it, so anyways, now I’m stuck with it, and thanks to closed ATI drivers I could never install fedora on it, I’ve been trying fc6 but never, well finally filed a bug and after some work by some people on it, its pending, mainly because of my non-interest, but would now like ot revoke it back and hopefully fix it by f13, though, there have been some improvements and will update the bug report ASAP. So finally I couldn’t install f12 on this machine.

Well even after not a normal boot, I could install fedora on my desktop which is a new milestone in the bug, because I could never even run the install media properly, so this is a very joyful image. My desktop with a kernel option and my laptop being upgraded to f12.yuppy!!

Well, apart from this, there is a f12 install fest lined up in my college on 25th Nov and also another one on 28th in another college in jaipur, seems like lug-jaipur is up for an active week Will report on it soon.

lalithsuresh

2009-11-08T16:29:48+00:00

I was in the process of getting transcripts issued for a senior of mine, so after getting all the necessary photocopies made, I made my way into the Dean of Student Affairs’ Office, which MNITians lovingly (not!) refer to as ‘dosa’. The folks in that office are well known for playing ball with you. While that would be fun under normal circumstances, it isn’t quite that way when ‘you’ are the ball as is the case here. No one there really has a clue of what he/she has to be doing, so if you ask one person, “Sir, I want <insert requirement here>”, he’ll calmly point towards some chair behind some other desk. I say chair here because that’s what you see; there’s usually no one occupying it. I have a feeling that that’s part of their plan. Leave an empty chair behind a desk and when you don’t know what the student’s asking you or you’re not interested or simply because the sky’s blue, just point towards the empty chair. That’s like the ‘default’ case in a select-case block. Only thing is, the actual cases are useless code, written poorly and no input will ever reach those branches of code. The game ends when the ball leaves the office in a spite of frustration, after visiting all the desks.

Anyhow, I got rather lucky that day and my request got a HIT in the first try. Since I was getting eight sets of transcripts, each with nine sheets, the guy proceeds to write the following calculation for the amount I was to pay on the request letter:

9 x 100 = 900

8 x 9 = 63 * 2 = 126

Total = 1026

Guess I don’t even need to explain this.

beer/rum,ashish & old delhi !!

2009-11-06T02:04:41+00:00

Neither am dead nor is my homepage, its just i am not finding time to slap my post here.

"hello world" all again on a wonderful Friday morning.i woke before all my alarm can ring today.

It was nice last evening with ashish and we kept drinking for few hours and cheering Indian team to win which never happens whenever u expect them to.

dscn0486 by uditsharma03.

2009-10-30T18:15:19+00:00

Neuron ’09, a technical fest, was held between 23rd and 24th of October, 2009 in my institute and I must say, those guys managed to pull it off pretty well! A once in a blue moon situation, most of the events violated the ‘Indian Standard Time’ rule by actually beginning and ending on time! When’s the last time you saw that happen here? Anyways, as always, we from the MNIT Open Source User Mesh (MOSUM) decided to conduct a little FOSS workshop during the three day programme. The 24th of October was the auspicious date as per the alignment of the planets (yeah right). So just like we did with all our other workshops that happened during our tech fests, we decided to bring in speakers from outside. Steven Fernandez (who works for Druvaa, and is also a former Red Hat employee) talked about the FOSS ecosystem, how it works and how one can be a part of it. Jai Pandya (JECRC, Jaipur) followed with a beginner oriented talk on WordPress and how to use it setup a website in under 5 minutes. Finally, I took over with a not-so-beginner-oriented talk on parallel programming using OpenMP (#pragma anyone?). Furthermore, the turnout of 120 was far more than any of us expected! Wonder if the city of Jaipur is really awakening. Let’s just hope that we see new faces turning up for our LUG-Jaipur meets from here on.

Emacs,Python and some R.

2009-10-21T19:57:08+00:00

I been lazy all this while as i had viral apart from that my internet was not working for over week.

Life is getting more in "eat,drink,code" .

Was extremly happy connecting to irc via emacs now i have some more cheers using it

lalithsuresh

2009-10-11T11:35:23+00:00

The past one week has been quite interesting. Things that never crossed my mind, seem to have happened, and no amount of pinching myself seems to change things, which certainly proves that all this is real. In one part of the world, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize. While this seems to have generated quite a furore, the media looks like they’re enjoying every bit of it. Check out these cartoons to get an idea of why people think he shouldn’t have won the award. Mahatma Gandhi was nominated five times for the same award without winning it, yet, people like Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Yasser Arafa found a way through. Sigh. Anyways, to all those of you who think he didn’t deserve this, at least be happy that it wasn’t given off to his predecessor. That thought kind of works for me.

Diametrically across the planet, in a hostel room numbered 4/24, of a university named MNIT-Jaipur, something strange has happened as well. In what seems like a bizarre case of insanity, I am actually _slogging_ for a change. No, this is not another one of those mid term exams (which should be aptly renamed to something like take-a-break-from-whatever-you’re-doing exams; makes more sense that way), nor does it have anything to do with assignment submissions either. Neither of those take up much of my time anyway (final year stereotype I’d say). What seems to have got me bogged down, is an exam, which I’m bound to write if I wish to fulfill a destiny I’ve chosen for myself. I’m talking about the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). By the way, this is supposed to be gee-ar-ee and not gree (which rhymes with glee). There’s a reason why I’ve mentioned this here, because there are people in this institute who’re known to say stuff like, “I’m going to write gree, toofil and iltus” (referring to GRE, TOEFL and IELTS), and they are _not_ trying to be funny. So if one of you guys stumble upon this, please do get it right from here on. Anyways, so here I am going through word list after word list, passage after passage and silly math problems that make you so over confident, you end up getting them wrong. Man I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy, or wait, maybe I would.

The best part about the whole idea behind the GRE is that it isn’t the sole factor that determines your admission to a foreign university. Your academic profiles and recommendations matter the most so yes, if you’re one of those guys who people look at and say OMG-I-WISH-I-HAD-A-PROFILE-LIKE-HIS, then relax, an average GRE score will do as well.

I’ve gotten into a good deal with my conscience, and we’ve both decided to give the where’ll-I-be-after-I-graduate thoughts a one way ticket to /dev/null. To all you non techies, you can say those thoughts were sent to hell. The amount of attributes that affect the answer to that question is overwhelming, all the way from the N masters programmes you could apply to, to the companies you could work for and finally to the roadside shops you could open. It’s options galore! For me, the question still remains unanswered but yes, there seem to be little sprouts of options coming up, although, they’re far from bearing fruit. The day it _does_, I’m treating myself to a drink, maybe more.

I’ll be glad after this phase is over, until then, I’m getting back to my word lists... duress, dutiful, dwindle, dynamic, dyspeptic…

Wow, I’m excited already.

Installing Ushahidi_web on ubuntu.

2009-10-07T20:16:46+00:00

Well finally after some time a Tech blog.

UShahidi is a cool Web tool that has been deployed/used all across Africa to report crime related activities.you can find more on www.ushahidi.com

So what i did is tried installing it on my ubuntu box.

Some pre-requirements :--

1.apache with mod_rewrite enabled

2.mysql

3.PHP version >= 5.2.3 (with below mentioned extenstions)

Njoying my Ride.

2009-10-03T19:19:55+00:00

Well its been over 1 month since i been riding my simple "Hero City Bike" from office to home.I am enjoying it.I need to fix few things and remove its back carrier and both mudguards in order to make it little lighter.
I have to admit that my love for Firefox is not over yet.I am planning to buy Firefox next month and will keep this bike as well.

infixterminal1

2009-09-22T17:04:29+00:00

About Infix and Postfix

In an expression if the operators are placed between the operands, it is known as infix notation ( eg A+B) . On the other hand if the operators are placed after the operands then the expression is in postfix notation .( eg AB+)

Infix Notation Postfix Notation

(A-C)*B AC-B*

A+(B*C) ABC*+

(A+B)/(C-D) AB+CD-/

Code

#!/usr/bin/python
#http://ragsagar.wordpress.com

postfix = []
temp = []
operator = -10
operand = -20
leftparentheses = -30
rightparentheses = -40
empty = -50

def precedence(s):
	if s is '(':
		return 0
	elif s is '+' or '-':
		return 1
	elif s is '*' or '/' or '%':
		return 2
	else:
		return 99 

def typeof(s):
	if s is '(':
		return leftparentheses
	elif s is ')':
		return rightparentheses
	elif s is '+' or s is '-' or s is '*' or s is '%' or s is '/':
		return operator
	elif s is ' ':
		return empty
	else :
		return operand							

infix = raw_input("Enter the infix notation : ")
for i in infix :
	type = typeof(i)
	if type is leftparentheses :
		temp.append(i)
	elif type is rightparentheses :
		next = temp.pop()
		while next is not '(':
			postfix.append(next)
			next = temp.pop()
	elif type is operand:
		postfix.append(i)
	elif type is operator:
		p = precedence(i)
		while len(temp) is not 0 and p <= precedence(temp[-1]) :
			postfix.append(temp.pop())
		temp.append(i)
	elif type is empty:
		continue 

while len(temp) > 0 :
	postfix.append(temp.pop())

print "It's postfix notation is ",''.join(postfix)

Code Explanation

Above code converts infix notation in variable infix into postfix notation and stores in postfix list. This algorithm makes use of list temp to hold operators and left parantheses in the infix notation. The postfix list will be constructed from left to right using operands from infix and operators which are removed from temp.

output

Back to blogging..

2009-09-20T08:01:07+00:00

Well i have been out of my homepage for almost month or two.

I forgot to mention i joined new job and thankfully its walkable from my house.I am loving the way i been exploring soo many new things here.I would say am doing a proper multitasking job from sytem admin to programmer to a web developer and at times as IT guy fixing whats wrong in my LAN cable.

lalithsuresh

2009-09-19T14:17:22+00:00

This is yet another one of those long-time-no-post-buster posts. I’ve been quite bogged down by work as always, with exams not exactly helping either. The past one week flew by with the Software Freedom Week celebrations we had here in MNIT. While I still wish we’d done something like last year, where we had 5 seminars, 2 labs and a trip to BITS-Pilani to top it off, this year, SFW was held on a slightly duller note but the intention remained the same: get the juniors involved in the world of FOSS!

Unlike last year, where everyone had to put up with me through 4 out of the 5 talks, I took a backseat this year as I let my juniors showcase their work and areas of interests. On day 1, the 15th of the month, Harsh and Nitin from 3rd year kicked off with a very good presentation on developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) using JavaFX. I took over day 2, with a talk I’ve always wanted to give, titled “Virtualisation: The why, the what and the how”. The toughest part as far as the topic was concerned was to strip it down well enough and keep it light enough for a crowd of 2nd and 1st years who didn’t have a solid computer science background. So my talk was pretty much confined to the different kinds of Server Virtualisation and a little bit of Storage Virtualisation all of which was depicted in a newbie friendly way using pictures alone. Day 3 was launched with an introduction to SunSPOTs by Ankit and Sarguru, who gave the juniors a very good overview about the capabilities of one of the coolest gadgets ever! The demos that followed also took the students by surprise (mainly the sample demos that are freely available). Day 4 was again a talk by Harsh on PHP and other aspects of web development, especially the usage of Content Management Systems. Finally, Day 5, that is today, was the finale with me giving a talk on Parallel Programming concepts. While I had a feeling that this would go over their heads, I was quite surprised to see almost everyone scoring well on the quiz that followed the talk! I talked about the switch to the multi-core era, about the free lunch being over, what threads are, multi-threading, the devil in the form of race conditions and how to go about parallel programming with OpenMP.

Perk bars were handed out freely to students who were active during the presentations and headphones were given away as prizes to the quiz winners.

Being my last SFW session here in MNIT, I just can’t help but wonder how it’ll be like in my absense, next year on. Maybe the flame’s been instilled into my juniors, maybe it’s not. Bah… who cares!

Jagriti in my college

2009-09-12T10:45:37+00:00

# JAGRITI
well all this started a few months ago when i saw fedora 9 in many computer labs in my college and i was pretty astonished and awed at the very sight of it, there was this feeling that i have an another option to work at other than windows(which is non existent anyways) which is very difficult to putout in words and i could see a new beginning and a fresh air was all around which only spoke of freedom..well many days passed and i was waiting for some news to come on its own from the college front about the new gained freedom in its machines but nothing happened a few more months passed.
This campaign was called Jagriti, as it looked as an apt name for it since, its an awakening from the darkness which has for so long prevailed that, is not confused by light by all the mortals who don’t have a mind of their own
And at last i thought it was time to take an initiative to start the freedom movement afresh where it had lots its steam. So now it was the time. This is exactly what i have started along with another lugj member mukul gupta, also skit-osum leader of my college, which also is an enthralling community of over 500 members which also makes it one of the seven such communities the world over. The project is well supported by our IT-Head of the department who is willing to do anything for it, he is even willing to change the whole infrastructure of few labs who have computers from the times of Adam, and would get some new sleek machines and you can imagine the joy of installing fedora 11 on them.

That is just a notice which had to be circulated around the college to inform all the teachers and students what is going around. According to it, all the programming work will be done on linux and we are to assist the concerned teachers to implement it in their respective labs. This becomes so necessary pertaining to the wide spread use of turbo C which sensible people all around the world have even forgotten about but for some god knows what reason it happens to be the most popular IDE in india for c/c++. Though when we were planning our shift to fedora a guy also suggested to use another IDE for windows instead and i remember giving him some strange sort of looks and he knew what was coming and he shut up, but later i also explained him a few things and made that strange thought to go away. Everything seems to have been falling into place and we are about to start with our labs from monday, assisting teachers to write their c/c++ code on fedora.
The project is witnessing a mild start but the whole picture will get clear by end of the next week and how have we performed in the coming week, and there-after we would be too glad to involve lugj and the indian foss community and take the initiative to a whole new level.
keeping fingers crossed

That old song!!

2009-09-01T09:36:49+00:00

Wating under the starry night,
thro’ fieldth of grass and hay,
singing that solitary song,
which long ago a reaper sang.

The first presage of winter is following,
starth are moving faster than i can walk,
I am running from the solitude but can not,
helpless rooted I stare from the midearth,
thro’ the starth where i can reach not.

The old song is following from the meadowth,
across the earth, thro’ the shadowth,
who eclipsed come from the back,
on the track,
on which i sit.

Gone are the months of may,
when we, in arms lay.
in the fields of grass and hay,
where my soule still stays
starth did shine but did not move fast
to watch us–at last.

long gone are the dayth of love
when that old song was sung by none,
but all the starth, all the meadowth,
drown in the solitary tone.

My hearte bleeds for thy love,
No, the aching said,
thine love was lost long ago,
in the vast tar and tor.

still the helpless ignored the solitude,
and went astray with thine lost love,
now, awake thy poore soule,
run, save thy soule, not get lost any more,
in the vast tar and tor…

Anisingh (signed)

#Found it buried somewhere in my book shelves.. Dated May 2004

ragsagar

2009-09-01T06:58:29+00:00

My first post in tuxopia is a how-to for writing basic IRC bot in python.Thought of sharing the link here

facebook addiction (from fedora)

2009-08-31T18:31:30+00:00

Like all the best things that ever happen to a man, this too came to me while idling and listening to good old kishore da’s unforgetful melodies and browsing (though not all men browse, internet is young you see :/ ) and suddenly came across something which will never let you disconnect from facebook which most of you are already glued to like in-separable half siblings.

For all you pidign users there is a plugin for pidgin which will let you sign in to your facebook account and sing-in to the facebook chat, and noone would ever know i f you are even really on facebook. Your list of friends will appear just as like any other IM account and under the facebook tag. All thanks to efforts of Eion robb who created the thing in may 2008.

Note: the plugin is available for window and other platforms too, you just need to be a piding user to do this

Well that is not always alright when you have to install from source and that is exactly the thing with the main project site, but when scrolling down to comments you I came across a link which has rpm for fedora here and which has been very nicely maintained since fedora 8

so simply firiing

[Acedip~ #]wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/purple-facebookchat/1.60/1.fc11/i586/purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
 libjson-glib-1.0.so.0 is needed by purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586

oop, what is that!! well seemed like we have to get it, so after a few clicks i got it

[Acedip~ #]wget ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/Packages/json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]# rpm -ivh json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:json-glib              ########################################### [100%]
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:purple-facebookchat    ########################################### [100%]

n the picture, you can also set your facebook status and also get all updates form facebook.

And that is it, done with the install part, now what you gotta do is simply.

Download and install plugin for your specific platform as below
Restart Pidgin (or go to Tools->Plugins) to redetect plugins
Add a new account to Pidgin (Accounts->Manage Accounts->Add)
Choose “Facebook” from the dropdown list
Use your Facebook email address in the username field
Start chatting
you can also update your facebook status from here, no need to even login to facebook, until and unless you want to try out those freaky quizzes and application which maybe even god may find difficult to comprehend.

well this was a short guide to get the plugin work on fedora, a complete documentation of all platforms is available on the main package site.

A new beginning

2009-08-29T07:14:48+00:00

Finally I sit gazing at my new laptop. I dont think no one has ever spend so much time in getting a new machine, it took me over 4 months to get this one, no!, I’m no weirdo but the situation and more over ones which I liked had larger issues with fedora and once you cant get what you want, you wait, so I waited and here I am finally relieved.

Installation of fedora 11 was quite quick keeping in mind almost all the packages I’d selected to install amounting uptp 1400 of them, and then the system booted, It felt really great on seeing the fedora screen once more in my life (after a short stint with ubuntu because of hardware issues). I choose not to send my hardware profile to smolt until later time and had to do it late with

[Acedip@localhost ~]#smoltSendProfile

and here is my machines hardware profile.

Everything seems fine till now, but I sensed some troubles coming my way as soon as I saw that Broadcom Corporation in my network chips, and there I was struggling over a few late night hours to get my wireless working. I was pretty determined to have it my way and finally after brooding over a couple of web pages and some help from #fedora got the wireless working with this.

Well while fixing it i noticed that the above link would largely satisfy all broadcom wireless needs but this one really helped in knowing about broadcom chips here but this can only satisfy your hungry mind and not actually help you with the issue and I also got to know that there is an IRC channel for broadcom BCMxxxx users at freenode: #bcm-users, though its always better to do your homework before you go to that channel.

Though I still have some minor issues like battery tray icon often doesnt give right readings, but it has to be fixed ASAP, and the default brightness controller keys does not work properly either.

Well the pictures are fine looking at the output from sony ericsson k530i.

The sound of the machine is pretty awesome with two speaker built in the screen. Later I installed Gnash for playing flash, comix for viewing pictures in archives and as the name signifies to view comics, and did other usual stuff to get my machine up to date with all non-free codecs etc. and when I checked for update I was again astonished to see 900Mbs of yum update, woof!!