The Master Neophyte

Beyond GIGO

2009-06-08T11:02:00.002+05:30

The Garbage In, Garbage Out principle is hard to apply to massive amounts of data. Some of the data will always be eventually flawed. And so the results will be too.

Ergo, algorithms that expect to work on perfect data will probably be less useful than ever.

Sigh.

Linux

2009-05-24T20:20:00.001+05:30

How the heck can it be so easy?

[Kudos to the Desktop Linux architects and programmers!]

Why Debian is my favorite distro #17

2008-11-28T11:10:00.000+05:30

I was struggling to get the PID of an SSH invocation that backgrounds itself (-f). It's being setup as a TCP forwarder in a script and I need to tear that down when the script finishes. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clean way -- I ended up using a hackish "ps", but isn't there a better way? Can't ssh print its pid, like for example wget -b does?

Like that search shows, I'm not alone. This issue was reported as Debian bug #446932 in 2007. OpenSSH has it as the bug #1473 about six months later. Note that I tried the exec solution, but it did not work because ssh forks -- I hadn't read that bug report when I tried it -- but the "control socket" method seems workable.

oldstable (sarge) files going away ...

2008-10-27T18:19:00.000+05:30

And just when I was creating my first ever Debian mirror (which has been crawling at 6GB/day). Oh well, at least this will test whether files get deleted.

Frustrated by the slow speed, I wrote a script ("kanadi") that improves upon one of my older scripts, by merging in files on DVDs into a Debian repository. I merged in amd64 and i386 of etch (the soon-to-be oldstable), but have been resisting doing so for Lenny.

Some thoughts on Windows HPC

2008-07-02T00:18:00.000+05:30

Also known as Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, or Windows Server 2003 R2 + Compute Cluster Pack (which we used).

I'm hugely grateful to the following communities:

The Linux Kernel Team: for a kernel that detects all the exotic hardware that we pushed at it and works with all of them out of the box. Without requiring BIOS upgrades. Without hanging forever, with no indication of what went wrong.
The Linux Kernel driver authors: for giving us 100% hardware performance out-of-the-box without any tuning whatsoever. Seems silly to praise this, but yes, thank you! And without "Quality Labs" certification too!
The Debian GNU/Linux Project: for building one of the finest customizable distributions out there. And one that requires no license keys. And that downloads updates using standard mechanisms that allow me to accelerate update delivery.
The FAI authors: For a system that installs an entire OS with applications and configures it in 4 minutes flat across all nodes (dependent only on Internet speed and network and disk transfer rates). And without borking on "incorrect" license keys despite us doing everything correctly.
The OpenSSH authors: for a secure, remote shell that integrates very well with the system, allowing us to save loads of time, and doesn't have silly restrictions on the number of concurrent users.

Windows 2003: "The most productive platform ever". Yeah right.

And before I forget: to the people who implemented "Last Known Good Configuration", thank you!

Out of touch with reality

2008-05-10T14:44:00.000+05:30

The administrator who expects systems to work out-of-the-box is either working on a single function device, ordering other people about, is seriously deluded, or maybe most of the above.

How to save any Flash Video to disk from Firefox in Linux

2008-01-14T23:15:00.000+05:30

I've used youtube-dl to download videos from YouTube, but it can't handle, say, about.com videos. Or any of the other random video sites popping up all around the net. Turns out there is a very simple way to save any FLV file to disk in Firefox (as a friend showed me):

Type about:cache in the Location bar.
Click "Disk Cache Device", loading this page might take some time.
Search for the FLV file (Ctrl+F). You may have to look around a bit.
Once found, click the link, which will open up a "Cache entry information" page.
On that page, the "file on disk" parameter shows you where Firefox has stored that FLV file in its cache on disk. Now just cp that file to wherever you want it:

cp /path/from/file/on/disk /path/to/where/I/want/FLV/file.flv

Incredibly simple and easy! (Tested on Ubuntu Feisty)

Programming Truths

2007-11-20T19:26:00.000+05:30

Repeat after me:

Programming is difficult

Again, for effect:

Programming is difficult

Here something else to ponder about:

Just because the computer seems to do what you wanted it to do, does not mean you've written the program correctly.

A analogy to a pack of cards that collapses because one card wasn't properly placed at the bottom is helpful to understand the above.

And above all:

If your code isn't working, it's not perfect.

Never come up to me and tell me "My code's perfect, but it's not working". Please re-parse that sentence to understand how silly it is. I've lost count of the number of people who tell me that. The computer makes mistakes, but more often than not, your code's not right. Let alone perfect.

And yes, of course:

Perfect code is a thing of beauty.

Never forget that.

Supporting Linux

2007-11-12T14:06:00.000+05:30

Many of my friends have recently switched to Ubuntu, making me the tech-support guy again. Not that I like to play that role, but if there's something new to learn, then I'm game!

Unfortunately, the support has largely been anti-climatic. When the wireless wasn't working on a friend's laptop, he lugged it to my lab, only to find out that the "wireless enable" switch was off. Turning it on got it working immediately.

Another friend recently installed Ubuntu, and he has a TV tuner. It worked out of the box, except that there was no sound. We finally tracked it down to a mute AUX mixer control. Raising the volume there got that working again.

The second could be attributed to bad defaults -- the AUX control isn't shown by default, and is muted too, but frankly there are no sane defaults in this case.

Thankfully both of these friends do read manuals and explore, so helping them is not quite the pain it usually is.

There have been more "complex" problems that I've handled, installing the Flash and Java plugins on a 64-bit machine. Neither are officially supported (Java's 64-bit JRE ships without the browser plugin!), so problems are to be expected. For Flash, nspluginwrapper worked like a charm, but for Java, the only recourse was a custom 32-bit install of Firefox.

Tech support is boring, especially when you've done it again and again. And these days, if the problem is something that Google can solve, I refuse to solve it. Sometimes rudely.

Amazon EC2 is out of beta!

2007-10-16T21:29:00.000+05:30

So Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is finally out of beta, meaning anybody can sign up for it. Now, you can hire a computer on the net for 10cents an hour. Want 10000 machines computing for you? It'll cost you only $1000 or INR 50,000.

You don't have to worry about where these machines will live, how they're setup, who pays the electricity bills -- nothing.

Does this mean that I now win the NetFlixPrize? Maybe...

The IA64 Experience

2007-09-04T10:40:00.000+05:30

The machine in the Supercomputing Bay is old. Older than most people in the lab. Yet it has impressive specs. Four Itanium processors. 8GB RAM. Two 80GB SCSI HDDs. And Red Hat 7.2.

This Itanium "server" was condemned to that slow death that is inevitable when you install a distribution that doesn't support in-place upgrades. It grows so old, software-wise, that nobody wants to use the perfectly good hardware anymore. So, last week, when a friend wanted the latest kernel on this machine, I decided to install Debian Etch onto it.

The first thing, of course, is that Itanium machines don't have a BIOS bootloader. Like the Intel Macs, they have EFI. Think of it as a inbuilt Grub, but with lots of additional features. For example, it can boot over the network using PXE directly. There is a command prompt with commands faintly reminscient of DOS commands. It even features a full screen text editor that you can use to edit files on a FAT partition. And yes, it takes a glorious 100MB partition for itself. No more 512-byte boot sectors for EFI.

Unfortunately, this EFI bootloader couldn't boot from the ATAPI slave CD-ROM, without a master.

So it was upto network installation to save the day. Debian installed onto the IA64 over the Internet nicely (yay for Mbps internet speeds!), and booted up just fine. Like all Linux distributions, it uses elilo to boot on the IA64 -- Grub is not supported. However, elilo seems much nicer than its cousin which has been supplanted by Grub on
the x86.

Here are somethings I learnt:

The Pause key is useful for paging through output at the EFI console.
If the "EFI Shell [Built-in]" option does not drop you at a shell, but starts up elilo instead, the file startup.nsh might exist. You can press CTRL+C quickly after selecting EFI Shell to get to a prompt. This will cancel elilo and allow you to delete/edit the startup.nsh file.

Simplicity and the Beast

2007-07-25T22:23:00.000+05:30

Go read the WSJ article.

This blog post is about the sentence that says:

"If you're a wonk and you want lots of controls and features, Microsoft is right for you," Mr. Kay says. "If you want a simple experience and you're not tech-savvy, then you'll probably do better with Apple."

Why is this wrong?

It's simply the wrong way to think about the UI for an application.

There are two issues here: Features and configuration. Features govern what go into the program. The configuration controls which features are turned on, and how they behave. Programmers will usually put in all the features they can imagine, and then produce a hideous UI that controls which feature is enabled and how.

But that's the lazy way out. As a programmer, you'd reduce a lot of your load if you figured out which were the most common features used by your users and in which configurations. Then by choosing such a configuration as the default, you're going to make a lot of your users happy because they don't have to fiddle with your program's settings. Note that it's not *all* users, it's a majority of users. For the fringes, make sure you have configuration options, but I'm willing to bet that the UI that results will be a lot more manageable.

One story I've heard tells of a programmer who released a program with some configuration options accidently removed. Nobody complained. In fact, nobody even noticed. That was sign of overdesign. He promptly ripped out the features in the next release. Less code == less maintenance. The original Unix programmers were sparse in their outlook, adding features only when asked to, not mis-anticipating user's demands.

GNOME 2.0 went this way, and I'm extremely happy they decided to take it that way. It's no less powerful, but I spend time working instead of tweaking my GNOME configuration. Ubuntu pared down the menus, bringing down the number of image editors to one from maybe a dozen, one web browser, etc. The rest are still available, but most people use Firefox, so why install Elinks and clutter up the menu?

The only program that I use that is overflowing with features is Amarok. Thankfully, it can be used in a simple mode to play my music and I use the exotic options only rarely. But it's a remarkable program able to tackle everything I've thrown at it (iPods, album art, synchronization, queues, auto-mounting, replay gain, etc.) but I fear as these features will become more "standard", other programs will include them in the GNOME fashion -- it just works -- and I'll move away.

In short, let the users do their work, make your program get out of their way.

And it isn't the number of buttons that count.

Suspend works again!

2007-07-15T14:51:00.000+05:30

Decided to spend a peaceful Sunday pursuing Feisty's inability to suspend my laptop.

After a dozen reboots and no solution in sight, I decided to install the latest 2.6.22-8 kernel from Gutsy. I'd tested suspend with 2.6.22-6, but that hadn't worked. But with 2.6.22-8, it worked! Kinda. The nv driver doesn't bring up the backlight, so I had to go back to the nvidia driver. But now it works!

Regressions: bcm43xx doesn't really work with my card, and ndiswrapper is not included in 2.6.22-8. Dunno why. The changelog has this cryptic comment "No longer provide ndiswrapper or ivtv modules (l-u-m does)". ~~Unfortunately, I've no idea what l-u-m is!~~
Attempting to recompile ndiswrapper results in some dependency problems which I'm in no mood to fix (requires linux-headers, but linux-headers requires libc6 2.6, etc.).

Ah well. It's still a couple of months away.

Update: l-u-m is linux-ubuntu-modules, which I found out by following the dependency chain from linux-generic.

Intel BIOSes require the Bootable flag on partitions

2007-07-10T11:09:00.000+05:30

Not much on my tech blog these days, but here's a quick solution to what seems to be a common gotcha. We recently got new machines for our lab, and they all run a 946 chipset. The installs went smoothly with grub getting installed, but after rebooting, the BIOS refused to boot from the hard disk, pretending as if it wasn't there at all!

It turns out the BIOS on these machines refuse to boot from the hard disk if none of the partitions has the bootable flag set. This is a bit crazy, and can make you go hunting for unconnected hard disks and stuff like that.

Here's the quickest solution, for the above mentioned problem:

Boot from CD, I used the Ubuntu CD.
Choose "Boot from Hard Disk" or equivalent.
In the resulting grub menu, press 'c' to get to the prompt, and execute the following commands, where hd(X, Y) is your boot/root partition:
```
root (hdX,Y)
makeactive
```
This will set the bootable flag on (hdX, Y).
Press 'Esc' to get back to the menu, and boot normally.

Does Windows have that?

2007-05-26T00:10:00.000+05:30

Sometimes I wonder, on seeing some wonderful new feature in Linux, whether Windows possesses the same feature. The feature this time, was dynamic ticks, that headline grabbing, gut-wrenching (atleast for 2.6.21) patch that allows Linux to save a lot more power than your Windows laptops. Or does it? I mean, if Windows has that feature, then Linux has just "caught up", and I can't claim advantage.

Thanks to Kernel Comparison: Linux vs Windows -- whose motto is "Everything you wanted to know about your kernel, (but were afraid to ask)" -- I now know that Windows does not support dynamic ticks.

Useful reference that.

An Open Source Google Base

2007-05-23T10:38:00.001+05:30

I think Google Base is far too good an idea to see only an implementation from Google, accessible only through their APIs.

Is there an open source clone?

Or wanna build one? *grin*

At the very least, it'd require the following components:

A frontend to convert and store the XML data into the backend. See the "* Feeds" reference documentation for the formats.
A query engine to understand and execute the URL query syntax. At high-speeds. This is the hard part. See also: Query Lang Specification.
A mechanism to store data in such a way to enable high-speed lookups as well as support all those different types of data. This is the very hard part, in my humble opinion.

Think of it, at a minimum, as a way of putting an URL query mechanism to an existing database like PostgreSQL. We could probably take it from there.

What's the use? Well, the web could do with a database service that can do everything Google Base can, but without any Google-specific idiosyncracies. Plus, it'd be compatible with Google Base!

Unlike most of my projects, this one is not so well thought out, as you can probably see from the fact that I don't even have a name for this project yet. Suggestions?

Why FOSS is Better, Yet another Case Study

2007-05-18T18:27:00.000+05:30

Recently developers at Intel released a tool called PowerTOP. For users familiar with top on Unix systems, this tool is similar, except it displays information on programs that are "waking" up the CPU often. What does this mean? To cut a long story short, it means you can now identify which programs are interrupting a CPU's sleep, and determine if that interruption could have been handled in a better way, letting the CPU sleep longer. That way, battery power could be saved.

Why is this tool a good example of Free Software at work? Not only did the developers create this tool, they also identified many free/open source software programs where things could be done better. Because the source was available, they were even able to make patches -- or modifications -- available so that battery life was extended by "an hour or more!" This is amazing. Imagine doing this on your insert-favorite-proprietary-operating-system here. It'd take years for the OS vendor to get it, then the programmers to get it, and then for them to get together and do it.

Why is this on my blog? I use liferea, a feed reader that manages my RSS feeds, and the latest release has this cryptic changelog: "This release decreases CPU power consumption for laptop users". My life is already better, thanks to PowerTOP.

Oh yeah, bonszai says, "Thank you, Intel!"

Summer Surprise

2007-05-07T22:40:00.000+05:30




This is a PicoPeta Simputer...you are assimilated!


blob version 2.0.5-pre2 for PicoPeta Simputer

Copyright (C) 1999 2000 2001 Jan-Derk Bakker and Erik Mouw

Simputer platform Copyright (C) 2002 Vivek K S, PicoPeta Simputers Pvt. Ltd.

blob comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; read the GNU GPL for details.

This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it

under certain conditions; read the GNU GPL for details.

Memory map:

  0x01000000 @ 0xc0000000 (16 MB)

  0x01000000 @ 0xc8000000 (16 MB)

Loading blob from flash . done

Loading kernel from flash ... done

Autoboot in progress, press any key to stop ..

Starting kernel ...


Uncompressing Linux............................................ done, booting the kernel.


Simputer login: root
[root@Simputer /dev]$cat /proc/cpuinfo /proc/meminfo
Processor       : Intel StrongARM-1110 rev 8 (v4l)
BogoMIPS        : 127.38

Features        : swp half 26bit fastmult

Hardware        : Picopeta-Simputer
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  31494144 19243008 12251136        0  1429504  9195520
Swap:        0        0        0
MemTotal:        30756 kB
MemFree:         11964 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:          1396 kB
Cached:           8980 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB

Active:           3452 kB
Inactive:        11716 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:        30756 kB
LowFree:         11964 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB

[root@Simputer /dev]$

Saturday, May 12.

The Feisty Fawn Upgrade

2007-04-30T19:12:00.000+05:30

I finally did it last Thursday, upgrading from Edgy to Feisty. I thought it would be fun to relax by installing Feisty after a rather tough academic session. Oh boy, was I wrong! Regressions, a root file system corruption, and the eventual re-installation kinda disappointed me. But I'm running Feisty now! Here's how it went off.

After burning the DVD, I noticed the cdromupgrade script on the DVD, and decided to run it, instead of the normal aptitude dist-upgrade. A couple of clicks and one hour later, my system was upgraded to Feisty Fawn. Such simplicity -- I thought -- it can't be this easy! Yet it was. In a way.

Unfortunately the reboot failed. It would come to the boot screen and simply hang. Turns out, I had installed a custom kernel in Edgy, which was also set to be the default. This was simple to solve. Just select the Feisty kernel in the grub boot menu, and later reconfigure the previous kernel, dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-old, and it booted fine. I guess upstart's not really working well with the old kernel's initrd. Boot time is now 45s, down from 55s for Edgy.

The nv driver, as I mentioned in an earlier post, works perfectly. The coolest feature about X.org 7.2, is its ability to run without a xorg.conf file. Just remove the xorg.conf file, and see it run perfectly! It did, for me, atleast. I did have problems with the scrolling on the touchpad, but that was easy to fix, just add options psmouse proto=exps to /etc/modprobe.d/options.

Unfortunately, there were two regressions. The most evident, and a show-stopper for my laptop was support for the headphone jack. Unlike Edgy, where it wasn't even recognized, and I had to install the latest ALSA, in Feisty, both speakers and headphones work, but have a single volume control. Unfortunately the speakers aren't muted when I plug in my headphones. Incredibly annoying, as my labmates will testify, as I blasted Jonny Quest's theme song again and again. Feisty ships with ALSA 1.0.14rc1, and I had to compile and install 1.0.14rc3 from Debian, which was, thanks to make-kpkg, a breeze. Now, plugging in my headphones automatically mutes my speaker, and vice-versa. It's not perfect yet, I've to trigger the detection by muting/unmuting, but this is how it should be. The speakers also seem to sound much louder. FYI, the sound card/codec is a NVIDIA/Conexant CX20549 (Venice).

The second regression was Suspend/Hibernate. I use Suspend rarely, and it used to work beautifully in Edgy. Unfortunately it's broken in Feisty. I first thought it was a problem with nv, but the nvidia driver has the same problems. Also it turned out that my forced shutdowns ended up in me corrupting the root filesystem. Ouch.

Recover or re-install? Well, I always wanted to re-install Feisty (just for kicks), and here was the opportunity. So I wiped the root partition, and re-installed Feisty. Took about another hour, and I'm still re-installing apps -- but thanks to aptitude that's not much of a pain. All of my settings and data were not affected -- thanks to the good fortune of having a separate /home partition. What is a painful is that main in Feisty does not fit on the DVD, and you'll need the web repositories too. Irritating.

~~Oh yes, beryl 0.2.1 doesn't work either. The window decorator (emerald) doesn't work.~~

After all of this, what's Feisty worth to you? If you're using Edgy on a laptop and it's working, I recommend you continue. However, Feisty's GNOME feels much faster and lighter (and is too!), and having the latest and greatest applications always feels good. As I said, fun, but not relaxing. It works, but keep your fingers crossed!

What's really different about this install is the amount of software I had to add to make it all work. For Feisty, only ALSA. For Edgy, I had to do ALSA, ndiswrapper, network-manager, and some other stuff I've forgotten. So, this is progress. Two steps forward and one step backward, but progess nevertheless. Now to wait for the Gutsy Gibbon.

Update: May 7, 2007 Monty is my hero! Here are the options to add to the screen section in xorg.conf to get beryl working:


Options "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Options "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

Flash 9.0 on 64-bit Ubuntu with Firefox 2.0

2007-04-26T23:33:00.000+05:30

I'm watching the Mac vs. PC ads on Youtube, in the 64-bit Firefox 2.0 browser. This shouldn't be working, Adobe does not have an official 64-bit Flash player for any operating system, let alone Linux. You ask how? Here's the trick:

Get nspluginwrapper sources from the Debian website.
Compile and install.
Get the Flash 9.0 player from Adobe.
Untar, and copy libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt to ~/.mozilla/plugins/
Run nspluginwrapper -i ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Enjoy!

I've done this before, with an older version of nspluginwrapper, but could never get sound working. Maybe the fact that I used RPMs (converted by alien) messed things up. Even now, however, nspluginwrapper segfaults. Thankfully it works for nspluginwrapper -i, which is all I that's required.

As an aside, swfdec is a free software Flash viewer that plays Flash videos, and so is gnash.

Furthermore, youtube-dl allows you to download the flash videos to your hard disk, where mplayer or ffplay (better) can play them.

Freedom in Sight?

2007-04-26T02:10:00.000+05:30

I justed booted into Feisty Fawn today, using the live CD. Some pleasant surprises were in store.

Video worked perfectly. With the nv driver. Yes, the free nv driver. And from what I can tell by reading the X log, it seemed to have detected the external video outputs as well. If this really works, drivers from nvidia get thrown out.
Not only did the nvidia driver give me fewer resolutions, it also messed up my console. I used it only because it gave me VGA-out support, which is needed for presentations using bonszai. If nv can do that, well, nv it is then!

And bcm43xx, the free driver for Broadcom-based chipsets? It works too. Not only can the latest bcm43xx-cutter (006) use the drivers provided by Compaq, it also warns me that support is not in mainline yet for those drivers. So I must use the older drivers. Which is fine with me. So far web-browsing works. Web downloading does not, with speeds of 4--5 KByte/s (which is worse than dial-up)But to be fair, I really haven't tried wireless from my new location, so maybe I better check out my older version. Ubuntu now has network manager, which is really a painless way to configure networks, across operating systems I must add.

Given that video and wireless were the only two components of bonszai that used non-free drivers, I'm looking forward to running a fully-free bonszai!

We're now Doctors!

2007-04-14T15:26:00.000+05:30

Found when browsing a list of not-so-well categorized books:

Under section "Medical Books"

Artificial Neural Networks
Genetic Algorithms

The Death of the Web 2.0 Company?

2007-03-08T19:40:00.000+05:30

I recently attended a talk by a Yahoo! executive on "Socially Immersive Media". That's the term they use for the phenomenon of user-generated content and other Web 2.0 elements. He was rather gung-ho about the prospects of these new Social Media companies, and how traditional media was finding it difficult to compete.

And then it hit me right in the middle of the talk. These "Web 2.0 companies" will be going the traditional way very soon. Their victory is a short victory.

Let's take a look at the web as being composed of "content", "applications" and "infrastructure". Early on, all these three components were supplied by one central, logical entity, not unlike how "old media" does it. And then came these new media companies, the "social media" companies, who ceded control over creation of content to the masses. They just provided the application (like Blogger, Flickr, etc.) and the infrastructure, but content was by the masses, of the masses and for the masses.

Of course, it's not written anywhere that applications or infrastructure are the exclusive domain of these social media companies. Open source applications, community-owned, have existed for a very long time now. Indeed, many users are already constructing applications (or "mashups") using APIs provided by some of these companies. These companies are the lucky ones. They'll go, but slower. It's not difficult to surmise that a few years on, these companies will be relegated to just providing infrastructure on which the masses write and run their applications.

But to truly democratize the web, we must own the infrastructure too. Now, this is a difficult problem. Can we set up a masses-owned Google, for instance, that meets similar standards of quality and performance and even exceeds them? Peer-to-Peer applications have already demonstrated that infrastructure can be owned by the masses, but how long is it before these protocols go "mainstream"?

Pipe-dream? Science fiction? Thanks to the Democracy TV/Player, it's not. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The content for this Wired Magazine's "future of Net TV" application is all user-generated. It's a Free Software application written by the community. And it uses BitTorrent to get around the nasty problem of hosting video broadcast infrastructure. And it works!

Me doth think these companies rejoice too soon.

On the Mechanics of Code Writing

2007-03-03T23:52:00.000+05:30

Code writing contains some mechanical activities which are best automated by your editor. Here are some features any decent code editor should provide, to make your code writing more pleasurable. If you didn't know that these features existed, you should revisit your editor's manual now!

Block commenting and uncommenting of code

You've written some code, and you want to try out some other approach. You don't think this is worth a version control system, so you comment out code, and write new code. You probably do this frequently.

So it makes sense for your editor to support automatic code commenting and uncommenting features. You select a piece of code, press a few keystrokes, and the code selection is commented out. Beats inserting comment characters, especially when certain languages don't have a single-character comment delimiter.

Indenting and Re-indenting

Indenting improves code readability. I do not find reading badly indented code a pleasure. Perhaps the editor they used to write the code didn't support code indentation. Indentation affect newly written code, or old already written code. A good editor supports both.

When new code is being entered, the editor keeps track of the current indenting level, and then automatically indents the next line of code for you. Most editors do this.

Then re-indenting old code, some editors provide manual block indent and un-indent block features. You select a block, and then you can indent the block in or out, but manually. This is better than nothing.

The really good editors will allow you to select a region of code, and re-indent that region as per surrounding code.

Syntax Highlighting

After indenting, the next best feature that improves readability is syntax highlighting. Unlike most other features, this is something that you don't invoke, but something that always works in the background.

"Locate Symbol" Feature

Most editors have a Find feature, but a "locate" feature isbetter. You position the cursor underneath a symbol (function name,constant, etc.) and invoke locate. You'll find yourself at the definition of that symbol, regardless of whether it's in the current file or somewhere else.

Autocomplete Features

Autocompletion of variable names, function names, and other symbols. Very very productivity enhancing when done right. Unfortunately it's not easy to do this for some languages, and hence not many editors support it.

Copyright Myths and Misunderstandings

2007-02-28T18:42:00.000+05:30

I first learnt about copyright the "hard" way. I was on the verge of releasing a program, and that entailed that I learn as much as possible on copyright and software licensing --- I'm one of those guys who actually reads the license agreements! As a pleasant side effect, I learnt about "copyleft", the GNU GPL and Free Software, which eventually led me to stop considering licenses for my software: my software is usually in the public domain (i.e. no copyright) or is GPLed (i.e. copylefted).

Here are some things you should know about copyright:

Copyright registration is not required. It's very useful if you ever expect to go to court, but as a friend pointed out, just e-mailing the source to yourself at some public e-mail service, such as Gmail, would probably establish that you did it earlier. And you can keep your work secret too.
Copyright is assigned automatically to you. There is absolutely no need to even say "Copyright (c) Year, Author". At least after 198x, I think.
Copyright is available for all works, regardless of quality. It protects both your kindergarten drawings and Escher's complicated and beautiful works equally.
Copyright covers only distribution. That should be evident from the name, but a lot of people put restrictions on use and ascribe them to "copyright". If you intend to distribute the work, for profit or otherwise, you need permission from the author. Note that if your use of the material falls under "fair-use", permission might not be required. However, fair-use is never defined explicitly, it's upto the courts to decide what exactly is fair-use.
Copyright is limited. It expires. However, current copyright time limits are so generous that you may have to wait for a very long time for any part of current culture to fall into the public domain.
The public domain, as a legal expression, means that there is no copyright asserted. A public domain work belongs to all, and everybody is free to do whatsoever he/she desires with it. Copyright and public-domain are mutually exclusive. You can put your works in the public domain by stating so, without having to wait for the expiry of your copyright.

Note that I'm not a lawyer, and the US Copyright Office's Copyright FAQ page has lot more information.

I'm Kewler than You Think (!)

2007-02-14T18:50:00.000+05:30

Behold! My new SHE-F18P ~~MP3~~ Music player!

This little baby brings me into that hallowed land of people who possess hardware digital audio players! Well, these days that's about almost everybody, and so nothing "kewl" about it, but who goes for technicalities anyway?

It's a 1GB player with ~~MP3/WAV~~ support. ~~Unfortunately~~. Why did I get this? Well, it was gifted to me, and I couldn't refuse a freebie. I had my eyes on the Cowon iAudio family of players, which would have set me back a couple of thousand bucks, but no price can beat FREE when it comes to a poor student :)

Removable LiIon battery, with both wall and USB-based charging, support for about a dozen languages---it started up in Traditional Chinese! (This is probably why I got it!) I concentrated and hit the right buttons, and there was the French interface! Soon after there was the English interface. Some fumbling on part, Japanese followed by German/Deutsch and then finally English. I bet I can now do this in my sleep now.

In other notable features, supports LRC (Lyric files), can display text files as well, easy USB transfer mechanism (though seems very very slow on the download path). Notable anti-features: ~~MP3-only support (no OGG!)~~, doesn't seem to support M3U playlists (haven't tried PLS), no FM radio (though the manual does hint at FM support, I can't read Chinese!) and tacky buttons.

Amarok seems pretty happy with it, though it does seem to have it's own individual ideas of how to place files (configurable, of course), though the player doesn't seem to mind. But I do want playlist support.

As another sweet thing, I also got that old 256MB player that I lugged around once or twice in Jan 2006 (remember?), which means I can get down to reverse engineering it. My folks were kind enough to send rechargeable batteries and a charger too!

It does have firmware upgrade support, but I doubt the manufacturer has released anything at all. Retails for 199 Yuan (around 1200 rupees) in Walmart China I suppose.

Now I can get down to practising for Marathon 2008!

Update: It does play OGG! I've never been so happy to be wrong! Can't seem to read the metadata, but who cares (for now)! Note that the OGG support isn't advertised anywhere, it justed started playing the files! Whoo-hoo!

[Photo courtesy: NP]

Open your Data!

2007-02-13T23:45:00.000+05:30

[Warning: Long long rant]

I'm scratching a rather irritating itch. I'd like to travel around in Bangalore, but I don't have the money to move around in rickshaws, nor can read Kannada to figure out where a particular bus goes (No dual language boards here!). After having been pampered by BEST, the BMTC is getting to be a royal pain.

I've bought maps, guide books, route maps, time tables, but they've all been "designed" without even consideration for the most common use-case. Just know the stop names? You're out of luck. No source lists stop names, only stage names (which is what the BEST also does, BTW).

Well, not exactly no source, for there is one source that has stop-level granularity. The superbly detailed large-format BMTC route map (50 bucks!) is that only source, but nobody intended it to be used that way. In fact, it's a mystery to me how people are supposed to use this thing. Only a laborious search through the entire map will reveal the locations of the stops, and once that is done, correlating that information to route numbers is next to impossible. In fact, the map wastes precious space on "segment numbers" (which I guess actually constitute routes), but that information in its present format is only intelligible to somebody on the inside--it's not used by any other information on the map.

Well, this is Bangalore, the IT capital of India, and so the BMTC provides a web-based interface to search. Except that it sucks big time. There are two versions, (and I'm guessing here) a "professional" JSP edition, and a "final-year project" PHP version. Forget the technical mistakes---using POST for idempotent data---the UI design is horrid. It's what most UI designers would say is the perfect example of the programmer-designed interface. Letting the UI reflect your code, and not the opposite. Both the "search engines" present drop-downs, presenting stage-to-stage information. Wow. I imagine that everybody travels from stage to stage only.

So what do I do? I do what I do best. I'm now writing a search engine for finding information about buses. Its called busfinder, and will initially provide "similar" functionality to the existing "search engines". Except, of course, it won't be tied down to the BMTC. I intend it to be used by any bus service. It will be small, fast, and featureful. It'll be written with the traveller in mind, and not the backend database structure. I've got a little experience doing this sorta thing, and hoping this will also clear up some of my programming blues.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post. Which is data. Everyone who's spent some time in this industry knows that programs are a dime a dozen. It's your data that's actually valuable. That's why vendors prefer to use proprietary data formats--once locked in, they know you'll be at their mercy forever. And that's why there exists even a data conversion sector.

But for my search engine, I need data. The BMTC could do me a wonderful service by giving me access to their data in a machine-readable form (maybe they will, if I ask, but I haven't and won't). But for now, I had to scrap their HTML pages. And as I have found, their data sucks. There are missing routes, incorrect stop names, and inconsistent information that all stink to heaven of five-buck-an-hour typists and even cheaper database architects (normalization, anyone?).

And then I had this idea inspired by their application to make their route maps available via Google Maps (which now has street-level data for Bangalore, but not yet searchable, aargh!), but there seem to be no public-domain (or even freely-licensed) geo-referenced information available for Bangalore. The info exists--see http://traffic.mapunity.org (functionally similar to busfinder, but with the same UI problems)and http://www.janaagraha.org/jmap/, but no data is available for download. It's all locked up behind the respective applications. No APIs either, so no mash-ups possible.

Which is why I make this appeal. Free your data! Make your data available in machine-readable format with liberal licenses for use by the general public. If you're a government institution or somebody who doesn't necessarily have computer expertise---tap the internet! Release your data and see how the brilliant minds of the 'Net breath life into your data. Remember, there is always a better program. But you may have the best data.

G'bye Windows Support

2007-02-12T00:38:00.000+05:30

With Windows Vista, it's now two windows versions that I've never seriously used. I stopped using Windows when XP was released about 5 years ago, and have never looked back. I moved to Red Hat Linux, then to Ubuntu, using Debian along the way. This has meant that I'm really out of touch with the "mainstream" computing world.

That is not so bad. Imagine the tons of support requests I'd get, which I now decline with "Sorry I don't use Windows". And I'm not lying either.

Wirefree!

2007-02-08T20:52:00.000+05:30

I received a Jabra BT135 Bluetooth Headset, courtesy HP, a couple of days ago. Funny thing is that they import it to a place that's ten minutes from the Institute, but I had to wait for two months for it!

My primary purpose for this new toy was to use it with Bonszai, rather than with a mobile phone. Yes, it's mono and not stereo, but going wireless with audio would be fun! Turns out Linux does support these headsets out of the box, with the snd-bt-sco driver. Essentially, this driver supports bluetooth headsets by appearing as another sound card to all applications. This page has more details.

Unfortunately, nothing ever works out of the box for me. Turns out that because I'd re-compiled ALSA separately from the rest of the kernel, the snd-bt-sco driver refused to load, citing lots of missing (and version mismatched) symbols. Either I could recompile the entire kernel or go back to the older version of ALSA (and lose the normal headphone support!). I decided instead to upgrade to kernel 2.6.20 which I knew would have the latest ALSA. The only thing that would break would be the nvidia drivers.

So there I was, snd-bt-sco loaded, btsco running, and trying to get a song to play using aplay or mpg123. Except it just wouldn't play! The headset would pair up, authenticate, send messages to the computer whenever I pressed buttons, emit a ringtone when I commanded it from the computer, doing everything short of playing a song. All the music playing apps would just freeze. Others had encountered this situation too, but nobody seemed to have found a solution to it. Just bugreport after bugreport. I struggled for a long day, before giving up.

Today, I found this bluetooth-alsa page and this thread that documented a fix to exactly the same problem. The solution was simple: use the force_scofix argument to the hci_usb module (when you load it the first time), especially if you're running a Broadcom adapter.

Voila! It worked! Sound is not that great, but it is convenient to listen to music about 5 meters wire-free away!

I hate Broadcom. What's wrong with them? First wireless adapters, now Bluetooth adapters. Sigh.

iPod 2nd Gen with Ubuntu Dapper

2006-12-31T20:49:00.000+05:30

There was an nice Christmas present this time, bug #66068 had a fix and nice clean instructions as well! After a bit of recompiling (the debs in the bug report are for edgy!), meanlix now works perfectly with the second generation iPod Nano. That means none of the instructions here are required any more! [Except the part about using the latest version of libgtkpod]

D-Bus and HAL rock!

Meanlix gets some new hardware

2006-12-27T00:46:00.000+05:30

I put in a much overdue USB 2.0 4+1 PCI extension card into meanlix today. That means the USB proliferation (and slowness!) has been limited. Going from a single USB1.1 slot to 4 USB2.0 slots should bring a sigh of relief to my gadget-happy siblings whose appetite for cameras, mobile phones and music players rather strained that single slot. And there's still an extra slot for that another USB gadget.

Another change I made was to put in another network card into meanlix, making it so much more easier to setup bonszai to access the Internet. No more swapping cables, now the net is shared between both the PCs. Maybe I should've gone further and put in a Wifi-adapter instead. Then I'd be able to roam the house with wi-fi in every corner. Maybe ...

Meanlix now has used up nearly all of its PCI slots, just one left, which is a first for my computers (and I think for most computers).

P.S.: Anybody got good PC100 256MB/512MB SD-RAM? I'd like to buy (after testing) please.

Technology Funland

2006-12-16T22:56:00.000+05:30

bonszai brought some unexpected benefits into my computing life. When you know meanlix is 5 years old, you realise that I'm really at the bottom of the hardware technology curve.

Not so with bonszai. It has technologies that I've never played with: Wi-fi (802.11g), bluetooth, and Firewire (IEEE1394).

With campus Wi-fi access, I'm really not tied down anymore, and can roam with ease, atleast within most departments. Furthermore, in Ad-Hoc mode, my friends and I can form a private Wi-Fi network (MANET) that leads to interesting possibilities.

Bluetooth (and especially it's Linux implementation) also has opened up some fun possibilities. I'm looking forward to receiving a pair of bluetooth headphones (courtesy HP, hopefully they'll be sent) and am trying to increase the number of bluetooth devices I'll use, especially a planner. BTW, the Linux implementation rocks and I've never seen it so user-friendly. Want to send a file to somebody in the neighbourhood? Just right-click the file, click Send-To, and select Via Bluetooth. Voila, a list of devices in the neighbourhood is presented for your sending pleasure! I think only Mac OS X has a better implementation.

This is, of course, nothing to say of the ethernet-over-bluetooth implementation (modprobe bnep) which is ultimately cool. It means my teensy laptop can connect via four different mediums (eth, fw, bluetooth, wifi), which is the most I've seen a device ever do! It often suffices when wi-fi doesn't (due to buggy drivers). Not very great speeds though.

Firewire is another story, for "sustained" speeds and rated 400Mbps, it's an excellent industry standard for data transfer. It's only now begin showing up in desktops and laptops, and I must say it rocks too! Firewire is built for point-to-point communications and unlike USB2.0, has no problems connecting computers to each other. RFC 2734 details a IPv4-over-Firewire implementation, and the Linux module eth1394 implements it. Not very great speeds (I've got about 17MBps sustained), but again, fantastic to be trying out such technology. Windows too has this, but Microsoft has announced that "due to lack of demand", they'll be removing it in Vista.

All of this has meant that I now carry the following along with me wherever I take the laptop:

One straight CAT-5 cable
One cross CAT-5 cable
One Firewire 4--6 pin cable
One Firewire 4--4 pin cable

The shopkeeper was out of S-video to S-video cables.

Working on the Cell BE

2006-12-16T22:46:00.000+05:30

For one of my courses (Computer Architecture), we (my partner and I), decided to port the popular ffmpeg library to the Cell Broadband engine. Yep, this is the same processor that was developed for the Playstation 3. It has got impressive computation capabilities that made us believe it would lead to significant speed-ups to video encoding. We already knew of real-time encoders written by Toshiba for H.264 (the industry's leading-edge codec), and so we decided to do the port for MPEG-4.

Our initial attempts to get hold of a Playstation 3 failed :D, and we had to settle for using the simulator to code our application.

Since we had no idea what approach would lead to a speed-up we tried many approaches, coding, benchmarking and then deciding what to do next. We got very close to both ffmpeg and Cell, but in the end, we had underestimated the task of porting a legacy application to the Cell. If you're wondering why most of your applications are not multi-core yet, you better realise it's hard. Even more, the Cell has 9 cores, 8 of which can only access their own memories (256K). Fun.

Our final results were not impressive. We could only port a single function off to the SPU (one of the 8 vector cores), and not take advantage at all of the 8 cores. Thankfully, despite the overhead, we had 0% speedup. That does mean there is scope here. Let's see, I'll be continuing on this project for some more time. Hopefully it'll lead me to some interesting research problems.

For now, I'll be content pushing the changes we made back to ffmpeg.

P.S.: Anybody tired of their PS3 and wishing to donate it, can please contact me.

Hardware Virtualization and KVM

2006-12-13T19:29:00.000+05:30

One of the other reasons I went in for a AMD Turion 64 X2 was its support for "hardware virtualization". People familiar with QEMU know what virtualization is, and it is very big craze right now in the server market. While there are software based virtualizers (QEMU, MS Virtual Machine/PC, VMWare, etc.), Intel and AMD added virtualization capabilities to their recent processors. What this means is that I could run unmodified copies of that other OS under Linux, at "full" speed. Not that I want to, of course :D

Here's the relevant /proc/cpuinfo flag:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm cr8_legacy

If present, it indicates that your AMD processor supports virtualization. For Intel processors, look for the vmx flag. Unfortunately, due to concerns that a "hypervisor" rootkit could gain control over your main OS, many computers that show this enabled on their processors could have it disabled in the BIOS---often with no option to restore it. Determining your BIOS's support requires some debug voodoo at the FreeDOS prompt.

Thankfully, that's not an issue on my laptop. I was planning to install Xen sometime and check out this capability, but a new entrant to the virtualization scene made me do it quicker. kvm is the Linux virtualization module to be included in 2.6.20, but you can compile it today! It's easy. Also, it will tell you if your BIOS has disabled virtualization.

I tried out release 7 (after Debian's 5-2 failed to work for me), but was disappointed. It is slower than qemu, and has frozen my machine once in two tries. Oh well. It's still being developed, let's see how this turns out.

Install Report for Compaq V3133AU (V3000 Series) AMD Laptop

2006-12-06T22:23:00.000+05:30

[This is the final version of my document]

Mostly everything works out-of-the-box on the system. Some things (graphics, sound) require some love to get working properly. Some (wireless) fail to work at all until the proper drivers are installed. Nothing has completely failed to work so far.

Note: I chose a AMD Turion for the 64-bit capabilities, as Core 2 Duos weren't available. However, based on experience installing Kubuntu Edgy on a friends V3000 series laptop with the Intel Centrino chipsets, everything seem to work completely out-of-the-box in every respect. Unless you really need 64-bit computing, I'd recommend going for Intel-chipset based laptops to make things easier.

Operating System: Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 64-bit. The laptop comes installed
with FreeDOS. GNOME 2.16.1 used on the system. Linux Kernel 2.6.17-10-generic SMP.

Processor (AMD Turion 64 X2, TL-52, 1.6Ghz)
Works. Dynamic frequency control works too, however, powernow-k8 seems to switch to only two frequencies (800/1600Mhz) despite ACPI reporting that the processor supports 8 speed steps.

Dual-core = Smooth computing.

On Board Graphics (nVIDIA GeForce Go 6150)
nv driver was not detected for the card, started up in VESA. With nv, hsync/vsync frequencies need to be specified, after which the maximum resolution of 1280x800 works. Font corruption seems to occur randomly for the nv driver.

I currently use the nvidia driver, which seems to disable 1280x768 (which works with the nv driver). Switching to a VT causes problems with the display, with lots of flickering. I'm yet to resolve this problem.

BrightView totally sucks in my opinion. Oh the glare!

S-Video: Not tested

External VGA
Works in dual-head configuration with the nvidia drivers (1.0.8776), see Appendix P (Configuring Multiple X Screens on one card) in the nVIDIA documentation for details. Note that some false alarms seem to go off, with another card supposedly being detected by X, but both the Device instances must use the same BusID.

I've not tried to get "copy out" functionality working on the external display, for now, it is a separate display.

Hotkey functionality (Fn+F4) doesn't seem to work or most likely isn't configured.

Unable to get this working with nv driver.

Expansion Card Type 3: Not tested

Integrated 10/100 Ethernet: Works.

USB2.0: Works.

Firewire (IEEE1394)
Works. Linux supports IP over Firewire! (400Mbps!!!!) See the eth1394 module. Update: I tested this out, works like a charm, but I've achieved only a peak of 17MB, with the hard disk spinning like crazy :D

SD/MMC Card Slot
Detected by the sdhci driver in 2.6.17 and above kernels, but I've been unable to get it to work with the only MMC card that I've tried. 2.6.18 supposedly has much better support, and I've heard rumours that only SD cards work. ~~Will try this out soon.~~ Update: SD cards work fine. It's the MMC cards that do not work.

PCMCIA
Not tested

Bluetooth
Works. Use the bnep+PAN module to get ethernet over bluetooth! This is lovely! KDE seems to have excellent BlueTooth applications, GNOME is still lacking in this area.

The command hciconfig shows you your Bluetooth devices, for which the wireless switch must be on.

Wireless (Broadcom 4312)
Works with ndiswrapper 1.28, which I had to compile for my kernel. Seems that Edgy ships with a broken ndiswrapper (Invalid argument errors). The driver is from the the SP33008A driver package
from Compaq.

The bcm43xx driver fails to extract firmware from the driver package, and does not work with my card.

Note that ndiswrapper was originally in Dapper Drake (32-bit) picking up the 64-bit driver, and obviously failing to run it.

Trackpad
Works. Use the gsynaptics (note the 's' at the end) package to get a utility to manage it.

Keyboard
Works. Including all the multimedia keys and special keys! However, some keys (like Mute) don't seem to reflect the current status (or they don't turn orange).

Audio
You'll need ALSA 1.0.13, with the disable_msi=1 parameter, to get the headphone working on the nVidia chipsets. That also seem to have stabilized things. Embedded Microphone (LCD Panel), headphones and speakers all work. Front-panel microphone not yet tested, but shows up in ALSA mixer, so should work.

DVD-Writer+CD-ROM
Works.

Power/Battery (6-cell)
Works. Displays status (charging, etc.) with charge remaining as well as time remaining.

65W AC Adaptor works.

Internal Modem
Not tested, though Edgy does show a ppp0 connection.

Suspend
Works. Edgy refused to show the Suspend button, probably because Dapper settings were imported with my home directory. Wiping out ~/.gconf/ helped restore the button (though this was done for other reasons).

The only flaw is that the trackpad comes back disabled, but a single button press gets it working again.

Hibernate
Works. However, on restore, the muted Speakers are unmuted, and headphones stop working. I must do a /etc/init.d/alsa force-reload to get everything working again.

See also: http://hpwiki.cactii.net/hpwiki/Presario_V3%2A%2A%2A for more install reports on this series of laptops.

Multiheaded Madness (was Ze Cool Factor)

2006-11-30T16:19:00.000+05:30

How ultimately cool is this?

Finally got a dual-head/multi-head configuration working, with only the nvidia driver, unfortunately. But it works!

The magic includes (despite X telling me that there are two cards) using the same PCI BusID, and setting the Screen parameters in the Device section. Bit of struggle, but finally resolved! nvidia do have good docs for their drivers.

Theoretically, bonszai supports 3 displays, with the third a TV-out (via S-video). Will try that later.

Now, me is pro-programmer, with two displays. If the other display becomes an LCD, it'll be ultimate goodness!

Install Report, Compaq Presario V3133AU, V3000 Series [DRAFT]

2006-11-16T21:08:00.000+05:30

(Update Dec 6: This is obsolete document only kept for historical purposes. This is now the definitive version]

(Update Nov 22: I've changed a lot of the info below. For now, bear with me and the strike throughs, as I get a new article written)
Mostly works.

Here are the specs. Note that I'm using Ubuntu Dapper Drake 32-bit for now. I will move to Debian ASAP.

UPD: Moved to Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 64-bit. Waiting for Debian Etch AMD64.

UPD: I've tried getting an external monitor to work, with no success.

What works:

All of the keyboard keys including special "multimedia" keys. Some issues with status updates (blue leds don't turn orange :) )
Monitor comfortably displays "1280x800" using the nv opensource driver. But it wasn't autodetected, and I had to write out frequencies to the xorg.conf file (though they were automatically detected).
HDD, RAM, CPU everything work fine, though I get messages of "BIOS BUG detected" during bootups.
Bluetooth.
UPD: Wireless works with ndiswrapper and 64-bit Broadcom drivers. bcm43xx does not work.

What doesn't (yet) work:

~~Headphones (ouch!), even with the latest and greatest ALSA, though they're working on it.~~ Headphones now work, with stock alsa-1.0.13, but snd-hda-intel requires the disable_msi=1 parameter eliminate an irritating looping and to have headphone support. As a side effect, I don't seem to need noapic anymore. Sound is terrific on these speakers though.
Broadcom Wireless LAN has "issues", ad-hoc networking wasn't possible, I'm waiting for my wireless account to test out "managed" networking. I'm using the bcm43xx driver for which my card is "unstable". ndiswrapper refuses to take a 32-bit driver, and picks the 64-bit one and then complains. Don't ask why.
Wired ethernet worked perfectly, ~~and then decided it wouldn't work without noapic. This seems to have thrown out the CPU frequency daemon out of gear.~~
Suspend and hibernate have issues.

What wasn't tested:

The Card reader (update: I did try this with one card, but nothing happened), the expansion slot, the modem, external monitor and S-Video.

And yes, Compaq expects you to have Windows and IE to test for updates. Ouch!

It's not smooth sailing yet, but there are a lot less issues than I'd been brought up to believe.

Ask for more details, if you need any.

My Computers

2006-11-13T12:05:00.000+05:30

The first one was named "MeanMachine". Don't ask why. This was my first ever computer, and was bought on September 24, 1999. Here are it's specs:

Celeron 266Mhz Processor, no L2 cache, Slot 1
64MB RAM
4GB Seagate HDD
14" Samsung 4BNi monitor
104-keys Mercury Keyboard
"Yamada" Speakers
Creative 32X IR CD-ROM Drive
Zida/Tomato Motherboard
Windows 95

It lasted for about 2 years, when a power surge destroyed the motherboard and power supply. The replacement "MeanMachine", gifted by a friend, looked like this:

PIII 550Mhz
160 MB SDRAM
4GB HDD
Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 9
D-Link 56Kbps Modem

However, with the coming of XP, and with MS deciding to kill off VB, I made the move to Linux also buying a 40GB HDD on the way. Thus "MeanMachine" became "meanlix", and now looks like:

PIII 550Mhz
160MB SDRAM
40GB Seagate 5400 RPM
17" Samsung 793S
104-keys Mercury Keyboard
"Yamada" Speakers
Sony DVD-ROM
Logitech Optical Mouse
Ubuntu Dapper Drake
USB 1.0
D-Link 502-T Router
D-Link RTL8139 chipset based NIC.

Along the way, I've replaced the power supply, a couple of mice, the hard disk, the CD-ROM drive, the monitor. I've added the network card and the router, so only the keyboard and speakers have survived from MeanMachine.

Meanlix chugs along fine, though it's no longer adequate for most tasks that family uses it for, though Dapper Drake is (looking) faster than Hoary Hedgehog on this machine. It's time for an upgrade, and perhaps, come December, and with some money, I'll upgrade this machine to a newer one. Any suggestions on what to go for? I'm looking for processor (probably a Core 2 Duo/AMD 64 X2), RAM (1GB/2GB), Motherboard, and perhaps a 80G HDD. Maybe the speakers too. And the keyboard. And yes, the cabinet :) I won't be using this machine much, it'll be a family machine. And yes, it'll run Linux.

Update on the Laptop search

2006-11-10T19:30:00.000+05:30

Couldn't buy a laptop while I was in Mumbai, but did get very good leads on some very nice laptops.

BTW, here's what disqualifies a laptop: a Core Duo processor (not 64-bit), 1024x768 maximum resolution, 512 MB RAM or less, less than 60GB HDD. I'll definitely consider Core 2 Duo processors for notebooks, but I can't seem to find any. Any leads?

My sweet spot looks to be around 40K--70K.

So here's what I like:

Compaq V6102AU: This is the coolest model so far, with everything going for it. The only thing that bugs me is the TL-50 (I'd like a TL-52 or better processor -- double the cache). Another possible thing to dislike is the shared video memory, I'm really ignorant of performance problems here. I'll also have to pay the MS Tax, unless I can convince HP to ship it with FreeDOS. But this is one cool laptop. (58K with 3year warranty -- 2 of those years without battery warranty. A new battery costs around 4K)

HP nx6235 Series: This is what been recommended to me by most friends, but the thing that bugs me the most about this is the 1024x768 max. screen resolution. Add the fact that it ships with Windows XP Professional which has definitely pushed the price to greater than 50K, and I'm very very reluctant to buy this.

Compaq V3029AU: This is another cool model, which I didn't list last time as I thought it did not have wireless ethernet. Turns out it has, and so far, it is the cheapest of the lot. It also ships directly with FreeDOS so that's one less headache to worry about. Only difference with the V6102AU as I can see is the 512MB ram, 14.1" display and the 80GB hard disk. It's also half-a-kilo lighter.

Compaq V3133AU: Perfect match at last? AMD TL-52 with everything I'm asking for, including FreeDOS only! This is a new notebook, according to HP who've finally replied when I e-mailed during them office hours (!). Retails for 43K, but I'll have to add RAM (512 default), and suffer a 20GB HDD loss. It's also a 14.1" screen. I'm awaiting more details, as I can't seem to locate this on their website.

On another note, the August 2006 issue of PC Quest had a notebook shootout, can anyone send me the magazine, scans, or anything of interest?

Update: Added the Compaq V3029AU, anybody know of any Core 2 Duo model laptops?
Update: Corrected 3102 to 3029. Sorry.
(yep, this page is gonna see lot of updates)
Update: V3133AU, found what I'm looking for?

Installed SuSE 10.1

2006-11-07T23:09:00.000+05:30

I need a GLIBC_2.4 distribution, and SuSE's the only one tolerated here. Had a Debian Sarge DVD but no DVD drives :(

And was reminded why I moved away from RPM-based distributions.

TASK: Install Mplayer.

Solution: Look for MPlayer RPMs for SuSE 10.1 on the i686 architecture. Use services like rpmfind.net and
and realise that RPMs for your distribution have not yet been indexed there. Ho-okay, Google's always there. Find references to a website. Go crawling around the net trying to verify credentials of that site.

Then download RPM! And install!

Installation failed. Missing dependencies. Make "intelligent" guesses as to what RPMs will contain the files that MPlayer depends on. Download each dependency RPM individually, and hope you're right about them providing the file you're looking for.

Try installation. See it fail again due to dependencies by the new RPMs you downloaded. Go back to site and download again.

Install again. Whoops! Forgot to download one RPM. Go back, download and try again.

Failed again. Turns out one of the dependencies provides library.so.54, but the MPlayer RPM requires library.so.48.

Sigh.

Okay. Now I'm mad. Force install of MPlayer. Run it, and it fails, of course.

Go to /usr/lib, and copy library.so.54 to library.so.48. Feel totally unclean.

MPlayer works! Though I doubt H.264 encoded files will play.

It would have been so much more easier to compile from source.

I'm so glad Debian releases next month.

Note to Self

2006-10-24T21:47:00.000+05:30

Investigate iPod Suite and Satellite devices.

MeToo: How To Get an iPod Nano (2nd Gen) working with Ubuntu Dapper

2006-10-24T17:45:00.000+05:30

Here's a quick round-up of things I did to get the iPod Nano 2nd Generation working with Ubuntu Dapper. Note that all other iPods work out of the box with Ubuntu Dapper, but this one seems to have firmware changes that cause major problems with auto-detection and auto-mounting. Coupled with the fact that this is barely a month old (it was released on 12 September), it means some software doesn't even know it exists! To the best of my knowledge, HAL detects the iPod correctly, but the GNOME Volume Manager refuses to take any action. Debug messages show "No sensible filesystem found". Given that dd and file both show a valid boot sector and filesystem, and mount has no problems mounting the partitions (there are two -- for the firmware and for the data), I wonder what exactly is the problem. Since I had little time to investigate this is detail, here's what I did to get it mounted and unmounted:

Mounting: Use the pmount command. In case you're not aware, pmount is what allows non-privileged users to mount and unmount hardware given that certain conditions are met (must not be in /etc/fstab, must be removable, etc.). An invocation of this command looks like:

pmount /dev/sda2 ipod

This will mount the iPod at /media/ipod.

Unmounting: The pumount command unmounts the iPod, and is similar to "Eject" in iTunes. However, it does not send a message to the iPod that it's been disconnected, and as a result the iPod continues to show a "Do not Disconnect" message even when it is safe to remove it. The correct command therefore is the eject command, which (surprise) ejects SCSI-like devices too. The command is:

eject -s ipod

Note that the -s is not necessary, but is given for completeness. The pumount command, for reference only, is pumount ipod.

Once the iPod is mounted, there are a number of software available for GNU/Linux that allow you to fully use the iPod's various non-song features. For example, you can store contacts (just save/sync vCards to a folder on the iPod), store notes, photographs (see below), and a lot more. Here I'll just talk about songs and photographs.

GtkPod: GtkPod is the de facto application for managing songs with the iPod. In its latest incarnation (0.99.8, which I had to compile) it supports the new iPod Nano completely. As a bonus, it also supports the various iTunes-supporting mobile phones like those from the Motorola stable.

In recent incarnations, GtkPod has split into two parts -- the UI application, and the library called libgpod. Most of the software that support the iPod tend to use libgpod internally. As of v0.4, libgpod supports all the song-related features of the iPod, but does not support Photos. The good news is that it does support cover art, which it did not in the previous versions.

GtkPod should've ended my search, but its UI is a bit clunky, it supports only the file formats supported natively by the iPod (MP3, AAC, WAV), does not automatically search for cover art, does not show song lyrics, does not connect to Wikipedia to show information about the artist, etc. As you can see, these features are really extras, and GtkPod does the job very well. My brother uses it with his Motorola phone without any complaints.
Amarok: This is my first serious introduction to Amarok, the player I'd heard is the do-all, end-all music player. I must say, I concur. Amarok is KDE's default player, and puts all competition to shame. It's also built for the power user, so that means no more running mounting and unmounting commands individually: there's a preference that automatically allows you to run commands before and after using the iPod. And then you simply click buttons! It also talks to HAL (I think) and automatically mounts the iPod if you've connected it.

It scanned the music library, allowed me to edit and change tags to my heart's content, downloaded cover art automatically (including those for some Hindi films!), lyrics (including for Hindi songs!), Wikipedia connectivity and what not, exported it to my folder (with plugins), and transcoded files when and as necessary (with plugins). This was my application of choice to use with the iPod. It's complete.

Unfortunately, Amarok had one serious lacking --- it failed to sync cover art. This is understandable because it probably uses an older version of libgpod, but this spurred me to look at other players (or "music management" applications) as well. I did try to dynamically use libgpod 0.4, but that broke a lot of other things in Amarok, so I let it be. I would've recompiled, but I didn't. For now. It's also a lot heavier on the memory, but that's a trait it shares with all the other players with similar abilities that I looked at.

I used Amarok 1.4.3, the latest version, which isn't in the Ubuntu Dapper default distribution. However, Ubuntu Backports has a nice backported version. You'll also need the CopyCover (to export cover art) and transKode plugins, along with support for M4A (faac) installed.
Banshee: To be honest, I looked at Banshee before I turned to Amarok. Banshee is a GNOME-native application written using Mono. In earlier times, the Mono bit would've turned me off, but I don't care anymore. Unfortunately, while Banshee looks like an exceedingly capable application, I wasn't able to use it with the iPod. Firstly, Ubuntu ships with a older version of Banshee. There are no backports available. Secondly, to get a newer version requires a dist-upgrade with an archive maintained by the Banshee developers. Needless to say, there were complications, which left Banshee 0.11.1 un-installable, un-compilable, and my patience with it ran out. I had limited time, and perhaps I'll come back to this player in some time, but for now, Banshee wasn't what I would use.

Interestingly, Banshee does not use libgpod. It uses its own internal libraries, which is why I tried rather hard to get it working. Maybe some other time.
Listen: When traversing various lists and forums looking for solutions to my problems, I stumbled upon a reference to the Listen player. It, too, is a native GNOME application and is written in Python. It uses python-gpod (i.e., libgpod) internally. Though its stable (which I used throughout) version advertises that it works with libgpod >= 0.3.2, I was a bit skeptical after Amarok's experiences with the new libgpod. But I decided I'd give it a try.

Listen ships with Ubuntu Edgy, so I had to use the developer's backports for Ubuntu. They installed perfectly, but I quickly ran into a major problem. Even with the iPod mounted manually, Listen would not show it in its UI. Like most GNOME applications these days, there is absolutely no manual override.

It turned out that Listen directly talks to HAL and the GNOME Volume Manager. In ideal circumstances, this is very good, since everything would Just Work. But of course, Murphy's law demands that HAL/G-V-M be broken. Sigh.

Thankfully, the Listen code is well-written, and in Python, so I was able to code a manual override for detection (and since stable Listen is pre-iPod Nano 2nd Gen, that detection had to be coded too). Now came the acid test: would it work with libgpod 0.4? Of course not. There have been some changes to the libgpod API, and that caused it to fail. A simple change to the relevant line of code and it worked!

Listen is a player that is still evolving, and while it's leagues away from Amarok's functionality, it did everything I wanted it to. It managed my music library, supported minimal tag editing, could download lyrics, had Wikipedia functionality and automatic cover art support, and also transcoded songs when necessary. And best of all, its sync cover art function works beautifully thanks to libgpod 0.4!

Listen is not perfect, however, in that it often freezes up when doing lengthy operations, which multi-threaded multi-tasking Amarok has no problems with. Also, while Listen's transcoding works out of the box (it uses GStreamer and outputs MP3 instead of M4A), it's slow. Very very slow. I don't have a clue of why this is so, but an hour for transcoding a 8-minute Ogg/Vorbis song is too much. Moreover, it gives you no features like transKode's profiles that let you control quality (and therefore encoding speed). It does the right thing by attempting to maintain the same quality as the Ogg/Vorbis file, but perhaps this is simplicity taken to its extremes. Whatever.

With Listen wrapped up in a script that automatically mounts and unmounts the iPod, said iPod's user is surprisingly happy with Listen's simple interface and uses it exclusively. Maybe the GNOME guys are onto something?

I did not look at YamiPod, Rhythmbox, Exaile, GNUpod or any of the other players out there due to lack of time. Do let me know if I missed something. Rhythmbox 0.9.6, in particular, seems to be very featureful.

Photographs on the iPod are of two types, the thumbnails for viewing on the iPod itself, and full-size photographs for transfer to other computers (via a copy from the Photos folder). GPixPod had no problems with storing thumbnails with very good support for albums and such, though I couldn't check out the full-size features (I wasn't aware of it, until I read the iPod manual). I compiled it from source.

How does all this compare with Apple's iTunes? Well, I also installed Apple's iTunes (on Windows, of course), and found a few things that you'll probably still need it for.

You still need Apple's iTunes to update your iPod's firmware (I'm sure the iPodLinux and Rockbox guys can do this too, but no application I looked at did this, understandably).
Importing photographs using iTunes is rather non-intuitive. You need to have everything organized on your hard disk, and then drop that folder onto a minimal "Sync Photograph Folders" UI. Or you need to have iPhoto installed. GPixPod has no such hang-ups, and works as you'd expect it to. GPixPod had a problem reading a photograph created from within iTunes, but I didn't worry too much about it, since the iPod itself has no problems with GPixPod.
Cover Art finds little mention in the manual, but my understanding is that you'd require access to the iTunes store to add cover art. Of course, there are freeware applications for doing this, but the fact that most Linux applications can do this directly is fantastic!
iTunes Song statistics and Smart playlists are probably best supported only with iTunes, but Amarok does support song statistics, and though it has Smart Playlists of its own, I don't know if they work for the iPod (though libgpod does support them).

There a lot of other iPod features that I've missed like Lyrics support and such, but I'll re-visit this article a few months down the line. Libgpod's new features seem very exciting. While Rockbox doesn't yet work with the new iPod Nanos, hopefully they'll be ready too by that time.

There are a lot of itches above, many of which I can competently scratch. Sadly I don't have access to the iPod Nano here so I'll just have to wait.

Of Little Things that Matter Much

2006-10-12T21:23:00.000+05:30

Often you encounter good programs that would be good as they are, but are much better due to very small features. You wouldn't notice these features unless you looked very hard, but their presence boosts the utility of the original progam greatly.

Take Emacs, my favorite text editor, for example. It has tons of these small refinements. Suppose you decide to replace "xyz" with "xen ya zen". During the search/replace if it encounters "XYZ", it will replace it with "XEN YA ZEN", and if "Xyz" then "Xen ya zen". Pretty nifty.

And then there is an "Artist Mode" in Emacs that allows users to draw ASCII art. When lines intersect each other, the code takes care to replace the intersection points with either X or +, as the case may be.

Gmail has this feature that tells you that the mail was sent, for example, "11 hours ago", that is more valuable and useful information than the DD-MM-YYYY HH:MM +OFFSET format followed elsewhere.

In Inkscape, an open source vector drawing program, that I occasionally use, copying and pasting a object has a feature I wonder why no other such program has (or if they have, why haven't I discovered it yet?). After you copy and paste, most programs will paste the object either:

On top of the object you copied or,
In some random location.

Inkscape will paste the object where your mouse cursor actually is. This is such a handy feature in drawing programs! Pressing Ctrl+V with the keyboard, while moving the mouse cursor around.

These features are not likely to be highlighted in advertising material for the program. Then why do programmers spend so much time coding these features? Agreed, some of these features are trivial to implement, but that's not always true for others (Emacs).

We had a lesson/text in school that probably explains this best. During the construction of a big and grand temple, a visitor finds one of the sculptors hard at work in one of the darkest corners, where no sunlight will ever illuminate the sculptor's work. "Why?" asks the visitor of the sculptor, "are you pouring so much work into something no one will ever see?"

"He will see," answers the sculptor, pointing to where the diety will be installed.

We computer programmers do not believe God uses our programs, but it shows how passionate both these types of artists are. They do not want beauty that is only skin deep, but one that survives even the most piercing glance. May their tribe live on!

The NetFlix Prize

2006-10-08T22:13:00.000+05:30

It's a very good time to be a machine learning researcher.

Small is Beautiful

2006-09-24T23:09:00.000+05:30

I've been always interested in small computers, so when I looked at this, I'm like: Way cool!

The GumStix is a way small, 20x80 mm, and can run Linux 2.6! comes with 64MB SDRAM too! What can you do with this small computer? Custom audio player? "Wifi-devicelet"?

Imagine ...

Laptop Hunt

2006-09-17T23:35:00.000+05:30

I'm looking for serious laptop/notebook to use as my primary computing device for the next 5 years or so. I just found this page that seems very very informative. But I'd like your comments too.

Here's what I have in mind:

A dual-core 64-bit processor (preferably, the AMD X2 series). I'd definitely want one with the hardware virtualization features.
About a GB of RAM
80--100 GB of HDD, though I must say, 60GB seems okay too.
15" screen, preferably SXGA+
Wireless + Fixed-line networking
Works with Linux.

I'm not that concerned about power now, though I'd be interested to know how much time you get on your laptops.

NFS Locking

2006-09-17T01:20:00.000+05:30

It doesn't work. Atleast not for me. Maybe it does in a properly configured environment. But this certainly isn't one.

Software that lock files can suffer badly when the files they lock are on NFS. And with most home directories being NFS mounted, this means that sooner or later you're going to encounter such software.

My first practical experience with NFS locking issues was during a ill-fated talk on Arch/TLA to a (thankfully) small group of friends. Arch/TLA doesn't work on NFS. All our demo machines had NFS-mounted directories. End of talk. Well, not exactly, since we did manage to salvage some part of it.

Then, of course, came the SQLite database problem. Or was it the PHP PECL compilation problem? Whatever. And lately, I discovered that Skype,stores its configuration files and uses locks to manage it's databases. On NFS, it just refuses to start, or takes ages to begin. I've experimented with moving the files to /tmp and creating a soft-link, which does work --- Skype starts up. But an unrelated(?) problem causes it to crash when I try to connect. Using Google to find out more leads to pages which complain of ABI differences between Skype's binary and the system glibc, and given that Skype is closed-source, can't do much about it. As an aside, I'm not using Skype, was just trying to debug the problem. For VoIP, I recommend GTalk or its free implementation at http://tapioca-voip.sourceforge.net. Note that I do not use VoIP.

So how do you assure conflict-free access to your files across all local disks as well as NFS? There should be a general solution, but my guess is, it varies from application to application. For a good example of how a lock-free mail spool was implemented, see the Maildir format invented by DJB.

New Software: Webfiler

2006-09-13T00:40:00.000+05:30

After deciding not to use static HTML pages for my website, in order to make my website appear more "active", I looked around for some content management system for a single user. Mostly the list boils down to blogging software. Now I don't want to use MySQL or Postgresql (preferring SQLite), so the list shrinks even more. Unfortunately as this post showed, SQLite sputtered too. So now I was reduced to using flat-files. So scratch all software.

Now I'm not a programmer for anything! With strong NIH syndrome to boot. So I decided to write my own. I've been mulling over it for some days, and the idea was that the system would basically handle documents which have tagged. No folders, etc. Just tags.

I had just finished writing the tag database management library, when I realized IkiWiki probably did everything I wanted it to do (and better!). Not wanting to abandon whatever I had already done (after all I'd sacrificed lunch :) ), I continued, and Webfiler 0.1 was born.

It's now working nicely enough to be running my website. I'll put up the sources sometime.

Free Advice

2006-09-11T12:32:00.000+05:30

Learn a high-level, managed language. Any language that is not C. It could be Java, PHP, Python, or any of the .NET family. This is because C is not very suitable for prototypes, and you may end up fighting the language more than you end up writing your program. This is especially true if you're a neophyte at programming.

SQLite databases on NFS mounts

2006-09-10T01:58:00.000+05:30

I encountered this while installing Serendipity (a PHP based blogger) on PHP4 on a SuSE Linux system with apparently misconfigured NFS locking.

If your application accessing a SQLite database seems to hang forever, you might wish to check if said database is on NFS. SQlite uses locks, which don't seem to agree with some systems, causing it to think that the files are permanently locked. You can verify this by running sqlite dbname on the command line, you'll get the following output:


SQLite version 2.8.16
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> .tables
Error: database is locked
sqlite>

It will work fine if the database is relocated to local storage. Or as the commentary on this ticket entry shows, by running and installing nfs-utils. I think that it is installed, and running (lockd processes showing up), but I can't find the rpc.statd mentioned in the ticket entry. So am slightly puzzled, what is going wrong? And where is rpc.statd?

My First "Publication"

2006-09-07T00:34:00.000+05:30

Was writing the publications section for my student website, and remembered this:

Article #1 (?)

Yes, yes, I know. Those were very different times. And a very different me.

And my publication section still contains "None". Sigh.

Gotcha!

2006-08-25T13:44:00.000+05:30

It isn't everyday that your code exposes a bug in a C compiler, that too, one which has been around for 7.4 versions. I've been writing code that tests a computer's floating point routines for compliance with IEEE 754 with respect to NaNs, denormals and the REM operation. gcc-2.95 has been my friend on all the various archs that I've tested, except on the SGI workstations, where I'm using the vendor supplied MIPSPro v7.4 compiler.

Now consider:

number != number

What will this condition evaluate to? False always? Right? Hence the compiler simply replaces the above with False (or zero) at compile time.

Except, it gets it wrong when it does the same to float variables. You see, if the float contains a NaN, then the above test is true! NaNs do not compare equal.

Aha! Now where do I report this bug?

Some other "crazy" stuff (called constant foldings, or compile-time evaluations done by GCC):

n * 1.0 => removed, as n is not changed
n / 1.0, likewise
n * 2.0 => n + n

And all of this with optimizations disabled! Wow!

It's Raining Unices!

2006-08-24T01:14:00.000+05:30

In pursuit of the execution of an assignment, I met and was introduced to:

Solaris (UltraSPARC) [actually, have met this during undergrad]
HP-UX (PA-RISC)
Tru64 (Alpha)
AIX (PowerPC)
Irix (MIPS-based SGI)

All of them are old. Lack decent shells (GNU bash), some lack decent editors (Emacs), all lack good GUIs, good browsers (Netscape 4 is everywhere!), decent compilers (GCC where present is 2.95 and ye gods, even 2.8!) etc.

Fun. Me thinks.

Farewell!

2006-08-18T14:47:00.000+05:30

So it was finally laid to rest. The 7-year old 14" monitor, the last-but-one-remnant of my first computer, is no more. May it rest in peace.

The Samsung 4Bni was a nice monitor to work with, if a bit troublesome. Within two years, it had two "crashes", which caused it to hiss in a wierd manner. Those were fixed, albeit leaving movies a bit darker, and the next 5 years were peaceful. Last December, a curious high-pitched whistle started emanating at 1024x768, dying down only when I switched to 800x600. Within a few weeks, the hisses were back.

I was reluctant to repair it, given that it had served so long, and so set out to buy a new one. Shortage of funds meant that I would have to continue working with it. Thankfully (?), RSI made me largely stop using the computer, which rendered the question of when to buy it redundant.

When I did get back to it, it seemed better, but would not start up. Eventually, I would boot blind, and it was only in the 800x600 mode that it would come on. By July-end, it had stopped doing that too. Given that I would be moving soon at that time, and then could work headlessly, the computer was operated without the monitor.

But given I'm not the only user of the computer, pressure kept mounting, until it finally resulted in this 17" Samsung 793S:

Given my experience with the 793DF (that I'm typing on, and which differs only in the dot pitch with the 793S), it looks to be a good monitor. Here's wishing it a long life.

BTW, the Linux Addict is not me.

End of an Era

2006-07-16T01:05:00.000+05:30

Today I disconnected the D-Link DFM-560E external analog modem that had been my only link to the online world for over 7 years. With my month-old ADSL connection never failing, and in fact, working even when the dial-up would have failed, during the recent phone outage, the modem was never needed. Rather than sit around gathering dust, I decided to pack it up in its box, so that I can return it to the person it actually belongs to!

Yes, the modem isn't mine! I borrowed it from a friend the day it arrived in May 1999, and it's been with me ever since. That friend moved onto an internal modem years later, and then to "broadband" always-on internet, and is now moving to DSL as I write. This modem will, therefore, be as much of use to him as to me now.

Before it arrived and took up its place on top of my chassis, I used to connect using a 14000bps modem, whose history, I must say I've misplaced in my memory. Clearly, this modem featuring 56K connectivity, supporting both the K56Flex and V.90 standards, was a huge improvement. It also meant that I could now consider downloading huge files, and eventually did end up doing so. The 6 CDs with a huge assortment of (for Windows, and therefore now useless to me) software are a testament to that. The biggest download? The newly released DirectX 7 SDK (with support for VB!) that at 128M (or so) took over a month for me to download! Nine cryptically labelled red leds: PWR, MR, DTR, HS, AA, OH, CD, TD, and RD kept me company on those nights and early morning jaunts into cyberspace for that next download, that next shot of information.

VSNL, now Tata Indicom, was the only ISP in those times, until the ISP sector was finally opened up. I remember using Sify too at one time. Then MTNL crashed the party with its post-paid dial-up Internet scheme. I've used only dial-up, refusing to replace the brown box on top of my cabinet with a unknown and unreliable cable modem service. It's been a long time.

Now green leds stare and blink at me from my D-Link DSL-502T router. And the download meter shows 25.6 KiB/s.

Blogging Tools

2006-06-30T23:59:00.000+05:30

I'm using Drivel 2.0.2 for posting my blogs using the Blogger Atom API. I've also tried BloGTK and the really nice Blog Entry Poster, but Drivel is what I finally ended up using. Here's why:

* Drivel doesn't store my password
* It supports the Blogger Atom API, which means I get proper titles on my Blogger blog
* Has almost everything I need (drafts, etc.)

I also did try the Emacs plug-in, but dial-up + CURL seemed not to like it. Pity.

Drivel's not perfect however, in particular, I seriously miss toggling comments per post, but it's the Blogger Atom API at fault over here. Hope they get the Atom Publishing protocol finalized soon. The Atom Syndication format is really nice, and I'm really hoping for a good API.

For reading blogposts, I prefer to use Liferea. So please enable RSS feeds on your site. Yes, UT, this means you.

DSL Line Installation experiences

2006-06-30T23:03:00.000+05:30

My MTNL Triband DSL line was "installed" on June 19, and here's how it came to be.

First of all, while the 1500 call center is extremely quick in issuing your work order (next day), it took upto June 22 for someone to call me up and ask if I had asked for a Triband connection. On replying that my broadband connection was well and fine, he disconnected and then called back to ask if I indeed had Triband or some other connection! Talk about organizational ignorance.

Anyway, I had to go buy my own DSL "router", a D-Link 502-T, as they finally told me that modems were out of stock. Once that was done, my connection was up in 3 days. Here's the complete chronology:

May 29: Apply to 1500.
May 30: Work order issued.
June 6: Account created on MTNL's servers. 150 MB used up for testing (?)
June 12: I get back from Bangalore, and am concerned nobody's called back.
June 13,14,15: Run around on the telephone calling up everybody, and all they do is redirect me to other numbers. But they do this very helpfully :-).
June 16: Finally reach somebody who's supposed to come and deliver the modem, but that person tells me modems are out of stock, and will take another 3--4 weeks. Yikes! Go and buy modem the same day, sets me back plenty, but heck, I'm not penny wise and pound foolish. Spend hours trying to configure the modem (as they've told me that my connection is already enabled). After a midnight call to 1504, I'm told maybe the exchange hasn't enabled DSL on my line yet. Thankfully, Saturday's a working day.
June 17: Call up, and am told that work is done. But since the ADSL light on my modem is not lighting up ("DSL Carrier Down" in the logs), a double check reveals that indeed some work is remaining at their end. Not my fault then. Tell me that it will be done by end of day.
June 18: DSL is not yet up, and my phone line goes dead. My mood gets mean.
June 19: Afternoon, phone line comes back up, and hurray, ADSL light starts blinking, indicating modem is "training". However, it never turns solid (indicating connection), and I make a call to the exchange. In between the call, it connects! I quickly check out if the Net works, and it does! It's very very slow however. But I think that's a problem at my end. I do the "reset" test --- switching the modem off and trying again. Unfortunately just blinking, but no connection. Make a call again, and same results -- it's connected! Turns out that I need to pick up my phone (on a parallel line) for a few seconds to connect. And I thought I had left dial-up behind!
June 22: Some guy calls asking if I had asked for Triband, is rather surprised that it's already installed, and thankfully cancels the monthly rental.
June 30: 1500 calls back and asks if everything is done. Surprised that I bought my own modem, but said they'll not charge me the security deposit. That about wraps it up I think.

Well, the slowness I experienced was a result of a problem with the DNS forwarder on the router (host(1) complains about invalid replies), which I bypassed by connecting directly to MTNL's DNS servers. And not line length (nearly 20 feet from the wall jack), or noise as I initially thought. Indeed, it's a sweet line, with very consistent speeds. Only two disconnects so far on my watch. There does seem to be a problem with low-bandwidth apps like IM clients (which mysteriously lose connections and conversations), but maybe that's some other problem.

Now I wait for the day Indian ISPs will grow up and offer more than 256kbps without metering downloads, like say 6Mbps!

Motorola RAZR V3i + Gtkpod

2006-06-19T17:46:00.000+05:30

If you want to use the Motorola iTunes enabled phones, make sure:

1) You run the packaged Windows iTunes on the phone atleast once before running gtkpod.

This seems to setup the correct directory structure, and (more importantly) the correct encoding inside the iTunesDB file.

2) You're running a CVS version of GtkPod (0.99.6CVS works for me).

Then, you don't need the Windows iTunes anymore.

Enjoy!