तरूणाई (Tarunaai)

Accidental success - Working DRI on iBook G4

2011-06-11T18:15:00.000+05:30

I upgraded the Ubuntu installation my iBook G4 recently to 10.10 version (Maverick Meerkat). Ubuntu has worked pretty well on this laptop considering that powerpc is not officially supported architecture.
Compared to 10.04 the video/graphics performance is certainly better in 10.10. There are no blocking artifacts in video playback with totem/VLC. The one thing I wanted to test is if DRI works. Unfortunately it does not work by default. AFAIK this is because the radeonfb driver is built in the kernel and it doesn't allow the radeon driver to take over. This also means that hardware acceleration is not enabled.


onkar@iBook:~$ dmesg |grep radeon # radeonfb module loaded, not radeon
[    0.629237] radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: enabling device (0006 -> 0007)
[    0.824915] radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
[    0.824925] radeonfb (0000:00:10.0): Invalid ROM signature 0 should be 0xaa55
[    0.824934] radeonfb: Retrieved PLL infos from Open Firmware
[    0.824942] radeonfb: Reference=27.00 MHz (RefDiv=12) Memory=190.00 Mhz, System=183.00 MHz
[    0.824947] radeonfb: PLL min 12000 max 35000
[    1.734848] radeonfb: Monitor 1 type LCD found
[    1.734852] radeonfb: EDID probed
[    1.734856] radeonfb: Monitor 2 type no found
[    1.734870] radeonfb: Using Firmware dividers 0x000600ad from PPLL 0
[    1.873860] radeonfb: Dynamic Clock Power Management enabled
[    1.916986] radeonfb: Backlight initialized (radeonbl0)
[    1.916991] radeonfb (0000:00:10.0): ATI Radeon 5c63 "\c"
[    6.978088] [drm] radeon defaulting to kernel modesetting.
[    6.978102] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[   72.399727] radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
[   72.399919] radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
onkar@iBook:~$ glxinfo |grep -i render # No hardware acceleration
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
    GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp, GL_NV_fragment_program, 
onkar@iBook:~$ ls -l /dev/dri*
ls: cannot access /dev/dri*: No such file or directory
onkar@iBook:~$ cat /proc/fb
0 ATI Radeon 5c63

After looking through some search results in google I decided to try a simple kernel parameter - video=ofonly.
And it works. Following is result of same commands after booting.


onkar@iBook:~$ dmesg |grep radeon # radeon module loaded, radeonfb nowhere in the scene
[    5.863269] [drm] radeon defaulting to kernel modesetting.
[    5.863283] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[    5.863409] radeon 0000:00:10.0: enabling device (0006 -> 0007)
[    5.898390] radeon 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
[    5.898411] radeon 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
[    5.898419] [drm:radeon_get_bios] *ERROR* Unable to locate a BIOS ROM
[    5.898454] [drm:radeon_agp_init] *ERROR* Unable to acquire AGP: -19
[    5.898477] radeon 0000:00:10.0: VRAM: 128M 0x98000000 - 0x9FFFFFFF (32M used)
[    5.898485] radeon 0000:00:10.0: GTT: 512M 0x78000000 - 0x97FFFFFF
[    5.898550] [drm] radeon: irq initialized.
[    5.898751] [drm] radeon: 32M of VRAM memory ready
[    5.898757] [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready.
[    5.920977] [drm] radeon: ring at 0x0000000078000000
[    5.921436] [drm] radeon: ib pool ready.
[    6.566905] fb: conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs OFfb ATY,Via_B - removing generic driver
[    6.568244] fb1: radeondrmfb frame buffer device
[    6.568431] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.5.0 20080528 for 0000:00:10.0 on minor 0
onkar@iBook:~$ glxinfo |grep -i render # Direct rendering working, cheers. :-)
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R200 (RV280 5C63) 20090101 PowerPC/Altivec TCL DRI2
onkar@iBook:~$ ls -l /dev/dri*
total 0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 226,  0 2011-06-08 22:15 card0
crw-rw----  1 root video 226, 64 2011-06-08 22:15 controlD64
onkar@iBook:~$ cat /proc/fb
0 OFfb ATY,Via_A
1 radeondrmfb

Caveats:
1. In boot sequence, after few text messages the screen goes completely blank for about 1 minute. It looks as if the screen is dead. But in the end the gdm shows up fine.
2. The consoles accessed through Ctrl + Alt + F1-F6 are no more available. When trying to access them the screen simply freezes and mouse cursor disappears. Good thing is that pressing Ctrl + Alt + F7 makes the display alive.

Notes:
The same kernel parameter does not work on Debian (testing). After the message about 'conflicting fb hw usage' appears on screen the boot process stops completely.

Next steps:
1. Now that hardware acceleration works, try Ubuntu 11.04 with it's infamous Unity interface (using live CD for now).
2. Try to rebuild the kernel to make radeonfb a module instead of being built in the kernel. Then check if DRI works without the special kernel parameter.

Advantages of cycling

2011-04-28T10:36:00.000+05:30

It was about an year ago that I realized I was becoming one of those typical IT guys in India, the ones with pot belly, weak hearts/lungs and no time for improvement. So I decided that riding a bicycle was probably easiest way to change the situation for better. Better late than never.
After taking advice from some friends I bought one Schwinn Frontier Sport bike from Lifecycle store in Pune. It's a mountain bike with 7x3 gear combination. On the contrary to the website information mine is actually blue. It is really light weight, sturdy and comfortable to ride considering that it does not have rear suspension. The tires are pretty tough too. Along with cycle I also bought a helmet, hand pump, eye gear, head light and tail light. Most of the accessories are from bTwin. The whole deal costed about Rs. 15k.

Since I brought the cycle I have been trying to ride it to office at least on alternate days covering about 40-60km/week. But the maddening heat these days in Pune makes it hard to keep this frequency without sweating a lot. So I hope to increase the frequency after summer finishes.
Anyway, here are some of the advantages of cycling I observed in last few months.
1. Cycling is the cheapest and easiest way to save your health. Saving the environment is just a positive side effect.
2. Cycling also happens to be the second cheapest way of commuting. The first one, walking, is not practical for long distances.
3. Considering the fuel expenses saved the cost of cycle is recovered within two years. All the saving after that is pure profit.
4. Cycles have by default very low maintenance (almost zero).
5. You don't need to carry a license, vehicle registration card or 'pollution under control' certificate to ride cycle. In other words trafic police has no reason to check up on you other than your breaking traffic rules.
6. You don't have to gear down the bike to stop, although it is recommended.
7. There are two more ways to get out of a traffic jam, walking with your bike and carrying your bike.
8. On the road your slow speed doesn't cause traffic problems as nobody bothers staying behind you. :-P
9. Most people on road will applaud/praise you for taking the efforts to ride a bike. Some may berate you as if you are insulting them by being on same road as them, but this probably happens only in Pune.
10. Other bike riders are likely to start a conversation with you about your experience. Some of them become your friends. :-)
11. You get to go on the some sections of road that are restricted to pedestrians because you can walk with your bike. ex. The crossing below the Wakad overbridge in Pune.
12. When riding bike, you will notice more things about the road than you usually do. For example, opposite the HDFC branch in Hinjewadi there is a shop named 'Baba Ramdeo Mobile Shop'. :-D

In related news:
1. In Infosys' huge campus in Pune they keep cycles to go around within campus.
2. I heard that about 25 employees of Geometric company took some sort of 'Go Green' initiative and commuted to office on cycle last week.

That's all for now. Will share more experiences later.

gnusim8085 maintenance - 1.3.7 released

2011-02-22T09:11:00.004+05:30

After one year since last release, lots of laziness/busy schedules and some coding in between we have finally managed to release 1.3.7 version of our beloved app. Please read (and link/forward) the release
announcement here - https://launchpad.net/gnusim8085/+announcement/7810

Binaries for old versions of Debian/Ubuntu will soon be available on downloads page. For other distributions we rely on respective package maintainers to update the packages.

gnusim8085 maintenance - 1.3.6 released

2010-02-28T23:54:00.000+05:30

After long silence followed by sudden burst of activity in the codeline we finally managed to release version 1.3.6 of GNUSim8085. The release was late by about 13 days than originally planned, but better late than never. :-)

This version contains three important features.
1. The UI is now internationalized - Apparently Sridhar had tried to i18nize the UI when he started the development but the support was partial and probably never worked. I found some time in December month to actually make some sense out of gettext manual and complete the i18n support. No offense to gettext maintainers, I am not very good at using autotools. :-) Kartik Mistry was first to complete translation in Gujarati using using launchpad. Thanks to numerous other translators the UI is now translated in nine languages.
2. Printing support - The 8085 lab practicals in second year of engineering course are one of the most favourite things I did in my education. The pain point of these practicals was to lookup the opcodes for assembly instructions and feed them into the memory on 8085 kit. And when the results of program were not as expected it meant trying to locate fault in the program, correct it, lookup the opcodes and feed them again. What Sridhar had done in GNUSim8085, long before I started hacking on it, was to add a assembly listing window which shows opcodes of the program currently written in editor. So feeling nostalgic about old days I decided implementing the printing support for the contents of this window. Thanks to the nice printing API in GTK+ this was easier than thought. There were some obstacles though as the tutorial fails to mention some API calls that are a must for a basic printing functionality. Thanks to the nicely written gedit source code the issue was not hard to locate. The printing support in my opinion bridges a gap between the simulator software and actual lab practical. Once it was confirmed that printing was working as expected the same workflow was implemented for the program editor component as well.
3. Better looking Windows installer - The Windows installer now uses the modern UI provided in NSIS. There is also a finish screen with option 'Run Program' and the text on various screens is available in multiple languages. Unfortunately both i18nized UI as well as printing are not available or don't work as expected in Windows version. We hope to solve this in upcoming versions.

And oh! We have a brand new logo courtesy of Kamaleshwar Morjal.

This is first release since migration to launchpad for project management. We hope to be more responsive to feature requests and bugs in near future. :-D

So head to http://www.gnusim8085.org (currently redirects to launchpad project page) to download latest version. The packages for various distributions are expected to arrive soon at appropriate places.

Happy Simulating!!

Devotion to duty

2010-02-23T23:01:00.000+05:30

Image source - http://xkcd.org/705/

Knowing how rare the 'devoted sysadmin' species are, I want to thank all the sysadmins working behind the scenes in Ubuntu and Debian projects. You guys/gals rock. :-)

Dear News Media

2010-01-29T09:25:00.000+05:30

Indian TV news channels and other news media are seriously broken these days. And this recent issue from PHD Comics nails it. Although it covers only one particular type of news items (poll discussions) it surely represents the general problem with Indian news media.

Enjoy. :-)

(NOTE: Link to the comics page just below the embedded image.)

Image source - http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1271

gnusim8085 maintenance - migration to git

2009-12-23T20:36:00.000+05:30

I hate to admit it but I am bad at maintaining gnusim8085. Until few days ago there has been zero activity from my side and almost zero activity overall from last stable release 1.3.5. Hopefully this will change soon.

It was already discussed on the mailing list if we should migrate to some DVCS. But since I was not very comfortable with concept of DVCS at that time we decided to live with svn. But beating my own reluctance (and ignorance) about DVCS I have finally converted the repository to git. I found some time in last week to actually learn basics of git. So I am not living under rock anymore. The conversion was as easy as 'git svn clone <svn_url>; git push <git_url>'. I also hope this will reduce the barrier to entry for contributors/patch writers.
The project is still hosted on sourceforge.net because even with really slow UI it is still overall best hosting solution IMHO.

Since the conversion to git I have already pushed some bug fixes and a feature addition. I am having fun using git and going forward I will use git for most of the projects. :-D

Less than 1% non-Free

2009-09-15T13:31:00.003+05:30

Joining in… Planet Ubuntu Virtual Richard M. Stallman meme.

My iBook laptop when using Ubuntu Jaunty.


onkar@iBook:~$ vrms
  Non-free packages installed on iBook

linux-powerpc  Complete Linux kernel on PowerPC.
tangerine-icon-theme Tangerine Icon theme

  Contrib packages installed on iBook

b43-fwcutter  Utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware

 2 non-free packages, 0.1% of 1389 installed packages.
 1 contrib packages, 0.1% of 1389 installed packages.

Correctness:
1. I am not sure why linux-powerpc is being considered non-Free. I will have to discuss with powerpc team in Ubuntu.
2. As already pointed out at several places tangerine-icon-theme actually uses CC-BY-SA license and is wrongly identified as non-Free.

Same laptop with Debian testing.


onkar@iBook:~$ vrms

No non-free or contrib packages installed on iBook!  rms would be proud.

Correctness:
1. I am using non-Free firmware for bcm4306 wireless chipset. But I didn't install b43-fwcutter to download/extract firmware. Instead I simply copied the firmware files from Ubuntu to Debian.

My PC with Ubuntu Karmic.


onkar@ubuntu:~/programs/swt-gtk$ vrms
  Non-free packages installed on ubuntu

tangerine-icon-theme Tangerine Icon theme

  Contrib packages installed on ubuntu

flashplugin-installer Adobe Flash Player plugin installer

 1 non-free packages, 0.1% of 1562 installed packages.
 1 contrib packages, 0.1% of 1562 installed packages.

Correctness:
1. tangerine-icon-theme shows up here too.

The day has arrived

2009-02-14T04:30:00.004+05:30

The day has arrived when ...
1. Debian's next version 5.0 "Lenny" will be released. Not that I use Debian, but a new release means Debian unstable will not be frozen anymore, many new packages will land in unstable and syncs/merges from Debian 'experimental' will reduce in Jaunty development cycle. :-D
2. The Unix time will reach 1234567890. It is about 17 minutes from now. While in some time zones it will be Friday the 13th, in my time zone it is already Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. :-)

Review Board reaches 1.0 alpha 2 milestone

2009-02-06T19:32:00.007+05:30

I don't exactly remember how I came to know about review board. Most probably it was a one of the first ten results in google search for term "code review tool". We decided to evaluate it for use in our time and code reviews have been the easiest part of my job since then.

I must say review board is one of the best tools "of the developers, by the developers, for the developers". The reason it found place in our day to day work is because the initial setup and the use is really easy. I had the review server up and running in flat 30 minutes, this included time to fetch and install all the dependencies.
Note: The setup time may vary on a Windows box.

What makes review board a handy tool is ...
1a. Really intuitive user interface.
Now I haven't looked into other similar tools such as crucible, codestriker but I am really wondering if the UI can be made simpler than what RB offers.
1b. Easy setup.
This shares its first place in the list with 'easy UI'. You have to set it up to believe it.
2. Command line as well as GUI to post the review.
The post-review script is blessing for us because 'p4 diff' s**ks. For other VCS you can use GUI if they want.
3. Syntax highlighting in diff viewer.
Python pygments is working behind the scenes.
4. Diff between the diff revisions.
You post a diff to fix a problem. Someone makes a comment and you post another diff. Not the commenter can check what you actually changed between two diffs. :-)
5. Multiple authentication backends
We are using standard username/password authentication, but there is support for Active Directory as well as NIS.
6. Too many version control systems supported.
You name a VCS and it is supported ... almost. If it is not then scratch your itch. Write a plugin for <insert your favorite VCS here>. On a side note we are using perforce and RB really works well with it.

And the good thing is that it is Free software (otherwise it wouldn't be a subject of this post). :-)

The tool had 1.0 alpha 2 release recently. Which means that all the 'must have' features on the roadmap are implemented. There might be still some quirks/announces depending on the setup but it is being improved every day.

By the way, who is up for the challenge to package review board for Ubuntu before feature freeze. :-)

We did it - finally

2008-12-31T20:03:00.004+05:30

The announcement is a bit late. But better late than never.

We released version 1.3.5 of gnusim8085 exactly one week ago. The code changes done in last five months are finally out in the wild i.e. downloadable in a tar ball. The main features of this release were use of gtksourceview2 and a Windows port. Funny thing is that the Windows port and installer was built right on my Ubuntu machine. The only time Windows came into picture was when we had to actually test the application.

I must mention a few people who have helped us for this release.
1. pbor on #gedit for helping time and again regarding use of gtksourceview2 syntax highlighting apis.
2. Aditya M. and Krishna Bharadwaj for their participation in FOSS.in workout and some pretty good bug fixes.
3. Madhusudan C. S. for testing the Windows port and fixing some bugs to put the port in usable shape.

We hope to follow a regular release cycle in future. Let's see what happens.

What's the point???

2008-12-15T20:11:00.004+05:30

1. What's the point of putting email addresses in Bcc if at the end your mail you are specifying which addresses you put in Bcc. ;-)
2. What's the point of using a hands-free accessory with mobile phone if you have to hold it, by hand, near mouth to have proper communication. :-P
3. What's the point of wrapping a scarf around your head, while driving on a motor-bike, to protect your skin when you should actually protect your head by wearing a helmet. :-(

Rufscript - A nice handwriting font

2008-10-18T19:44:00.005+05:30

Hiran has created a nice font called Rufscript based on the handwriting of someone he knows. What is more important is that the font is available under GPLv3 with font exception.

Here is how nice this font looks.

Please head over to Hiran's post for details.

For those who simply want to install the font in Ubuntu, Andrew (asomething) has made a quick .deb for the font in his PPA for hardy and intrepid.

NOTE: I have never interacted with Hiran on any level before. But this was something too good to resist sharing.

Update: Corrected Hiran's name. It is not Hiren. :-D

Keyboard only navigation on websites

2008-10-11T02:13:00.004+05:30

Suddenly on Friday evening you realize how important it is to have websites that can be navigated only with keyboard ... when you are trying to pay for overseas travel insurance for your grandmother and the mouse goes mad.

So mad that it shows following symptoms randomly and intermittently ...
1. Context menus open up in some corner of the screen you weren't even paying attention to.
2. Top panel suddenly becomes bottom panel.
3. Different windows jump between workspaces.
4. A document you had left open wants to scroll up and down endlessly.
5. After teasing you for about 15 minutes the mouse decides to click 'Lock Screen' shortcut on the top panel. :-(

I was so irritated by this erratic behaviour that I had to unplug the mouse to actually be able to work.
Since the website designer decided to make main navigation (seen after login) using javascript, there was no way to select the transaction in queue in absence of a mouse. The accessibility preferences for mouse keys came to rescue but then it took me almost 20 minutes to finish the procedure that should have finished in 5 minutes. So much for misuse of web 2.0 technologies. :-(

On a side note the email service that boasts about keyboard shortcuts has no shortcut for adding attachment. What is worse is that the 'Attach File' link shown when composing an email is not even focusable. No matter how many times I press the tab key focus never reaches on the link.

Memento

2008-09-21T02:19:00.004+05:30

I tried in past to get hold of VCD/DVD for this movie but was not successful. My friend Sabu finally got it from his usual DVD renting center called DVD Express.

Finished watching the movie about an hours ago. Highly recommended. No wonder Christopher Nolan having so good directional skills resurrected the Batman movie franchise and made it one of the most profitable.

I am still trying to figure out how the story happens exactly. Will probably have to watch it tomorrow again. If nothing else, this movie is surely a good exercise for memory and thinking abilities.

Easy VoIP

2008-09-14T03:33:00.006+05:30

A company I work for as contractor, through my employer, manufactures routers for various ISPs. These routers have one of best features you can get on such a device. They support using SIP based VoIP service directly with a phone attached to it.
The way it works is like this.
1. Configure your VoIP settings from administration web interface.
2. Attach a phone to one of the phone sockets on the router and dial a number.

I have been using Diamondcard service for some time to make cheap international calls to my brother. And above mentioned setup will make it even easier, specifically for my parents.
Apart from being easy it has few advantages:
1. You don't have to switch on your PC just to make or receive a call.
2. From what I have heard the feature is designed in such a way that when using DSL you can switch dialing between standard phone line and VoIP with touch of a button. Similar to dialing a 0 to get outside line from office phone.

Unfortunately these devices are not available off the shelf anywhere. They are available only when you buy service one of ISPs to which they are provided. Even then I am sure the routers will not be available for outright purchase.

I have been thinking of buying a wireless router for myself for some time. But if I find something similar to these routers I will probably replace my father's router with new one for the sake of easy VoIP setup and keep the old one for myself.
I have already searched for similar functionality into products of some popular brands like Linksys and D-Link, but couldn't find anything.

Am I not looking hard enough? Has anyone come across such a product available of the shelf?

The Bangalore trip

2008-08-30T03:43:00.017+05:30

After long discussions about suitable time for all, me and Barkha made a short trip to Bangalore last weekend i.e. 22nd -24th August. The occasion was the last meet up before Aanjhan and Barkha flew out of country for their post graduation. The trip was fun all the way. :-)

The arrival -

After finishing the work on Friday and filling up time sheets at office I started from Pune around 8 pm by KSRTC volvo bus. A bit afraid of hectic bus journey of 18 hours from Mumbai, Barkha decided to fly in on Saturday morning. I must say that my journey from Pune was not hectic at all. The bus was very comfortable with leg room between seats the largest I have ever seen. Kudos to KSRTC. :-)
Arriving in Bangalore at 10:30 on Saturday, I went straight to Ashish's place in Koramangala where Aanjhan was staying. After a good amount of chit-chat, a cold water bath and some aloo parathas we decided to visit Ashish's office (Aanjhan's ex-office) as his family for the occasion called as open house. In the office, Aanjhan grabbed a bag by conveniently hiding the fact that he is an ex-employee. Then we visited their sports complex where all had fair share of fun. Ashish and me played carom for an hour where I almost won 2 games. Aanjhan and Amit tried to play tennis and spent more time picking up the ball than hitting it. :-P

In the evening we visited a shopping mall called Forum in search of someone to repair power adapter of my ibook. The guy at Apple store that there was no way to repair it and I had to buy new one priced at Rs. 4700. :-( Not interested in spending that much money we returned empty handed.

Then it was time to visit my sister's place at J. P. Nagar. It was a surprise visit to her. Me, my sister Yogita, her husband Wilson and daughter Vilina had dinner at a hotel called Pai. Vilina is very sweet and smart than most of the kids at age of 2 years. She doesn't talk much but she smiles a lot. :-)

After having a typical South Indian breakfast on Sunday morning Roshan joined me and we returned to Ashish's home. It was now time for an unofficial Ubuntu-IN meet.

The hackathon -

We went to Parthan's home around 1 pm and Barkha arrived soonish.
After having lunch at Nandini we decided to do some hacking.

I really don't remember what she was laughing about

The almighty tuxmaniac

It was time for Ubuntu installfest on Barkha's new Dell laptop. Unfortunately The Ubuntu installer on alternate CD couldn't repartition NTFS drive. So we had to resort to gparted live CD. Meanwhile Barkha decided to book tickets for Chennai next morning. Utterly confused about when to start in morning, she booked two train tickets although she already had a bus ticket. While all this mess was going on Roshan was reading a python book and I was trying to port gnusim8085 to windows with help of mingw cross compiler following the instructions here. It worked fairly well but we had no access to Windows machine to test. And when testing with wine it was giving some weird font problem.

Barkha, Parthan, Roshan, Aanjahn and Onkar (with a glass full of coffee)

After loads of leg pulling and laughter, me, Aanjhan and Barkha went back and joined Ashish and Amit. The hard drive in Barkha's laptop took almost 2.5 hours to repartition and finished just before we went for dinner. That is what you get for buying extra large hard disks of size 250 GB. :-P At dinner we had Chinese food and had some random chat about college time memories.

Amit, Onkar, Aanjhan and Ashish

The return -

I went to my sister's place again on Monday morning and after meeting another friend for lunch and some afternoon sleep I started for Pune in evening. Return journey was also awesome thanks to KSRTC.

In other news -

1. Aanjhan recently became Ubuntu Member - Meeting log
2. The windows port of gnusim8085 actually works. Aanjhan tested it at his home after returning to Chennai.

Now we have to port the application to gtksourceview2, write a windows installer and also ask for feature freeze exception in Ubuntu. :-D

Hello Planet ...

2008-08-06T01:23:00.006+05:30

If everything is setup properly, this should be my first post on two planets.

1. Because of contributions I have made to packaging of java applications/libraries in Ubuntu, I have been accepted as a Ubuntu Contributing Developer. Hence my blog will be feature on Planet Ubuntu.
2. This blog will also feature on Planet FLOSS India, because my good friend Aanjhan thought that it should be and pulled some strings for the same.

Who am I -
Onkar Shinde, Male, 25, Resident of India.

Where am I -
Located at Pune, but spent 21 years of my life into Aurangabad, both cities in Maharashtra state (in case anyone doesn't know).

What do I do for living -
I work mainly as a java developer in Pune. But it has been almost 3 months since I have written any java code.

What you can expect from my posts -
I am a java/ant guy. So you can expect posts related to java applications, libraries which is kind of rare on both the planets. But this doesn't mean there won't be any non technical posts.

Thanks to -
Lot of people. Specifically Emmet Hikory and Michael Bienia for the guidance in java packaging matters, because of which I have found a focus for my contributions.

RDS in India - Big FM

2008-04-15T00:31:00.005+05:30

I was in Mumbai over the weekend for interviews as interviewer (not an interviewee) on behalf of my company. The event was held in hotel Tunga Paradise in Andheri near Seepz. The overall experience was good.

At the end of second day I went to my maternal aunt's home in Worli. The visit was a surprise one as I had not told them I was in Mumbai for the fear that they will feel bad if I couldn't find the time to go. My cousin bought a new mobile finally after using a LG phone with Reliance WLL service for almost 4 years. The plan was to buy a Sony Ericsson phone from W series, because she is music freak and the one with no joystick, because my experience was not good with joysticks.
After lot of R&D she finally bought W810i. The model is now almost out of market.

Sony Ericsson produces some of the most feature packed phones. And I have found the user interface and user experience to be consistent across the range of phones. This was the first time that I actually listened to some songs on a W series phone. The sound quality is amazing. The FM radio reception if above average. And of course there are other usual features like camera, bluetooth, GPRS, midi composer etc.
The surprise of day turned out to be support in the phone for RDS. Although I had heard of it I had never seen it in works. And the channel that is supporting it is Big 92.7 FM. The type of data it transmits currently is track, movie/album, artist. I am not sure if it also transmits the channel name itself or any advertisements. Apparently it also has support for AF, alternate frequency, which is part of RDS. It is nice to see which song is being played so that you can decide whether to mute/unmute the phone.

I hope next time I go to Mumbai even more channels are supporting RDS and I am carrying a phone that can make use of it. :-)

The beauty & the beast - installation of Ubuntu

2007-12-01T17:54:00.000+05:30

NOTE: This installation was done on the same day as I wrote my last post. But didn't get enough time till date to write this.

I was too eager to get to get Ubuntu running on the iBook. I had already downloaded and burnt Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) PPC 'Alternate CD'.
Originally I had planned for freeing up about 15 GB of space by removing photos, songs and some documents. But since my brother was not sure what all things were backed up and I was not interested in spending hours to write backup CDs I decided to go ahead with 5 GB free space.

Put the CD in CD drive and restarted the iBook. 'C' key needs to be pressed while booting to boot from CD.
Started installation in default 'install' mode. The text installer has not changed much since Warty (4.10). Cool. :-)

The installer asks many questions, one of the most important being disk to be used for installation and partitions.
Since I was not sure about what kind of boot partition was needed to have a dual boot I decided to use guided partitioning.
The drive had only one partition of 30 GB so I had to first resize it.
The partition manager asked me the new size of partition. It also told me that it can not be less than 25 GB since the largest free block in this partition was 5GB.
Wonderful. So resize existing partition to 25 GB and then use the 5 GB with guided partitioning to create necessary partitions for Ubuntu.

Nope, not that easy. The partition manager complained that it could not resize HFS+ partition. Stuck. :-(
I don't have a live CD so I can not use it to resize the partition. The disk management program in Mac OS X will not let me resize partition. And alternate CD installer tells me it does not know how to resize HFS+ partition. The worst problem was that I did not have internet access to search the solution.

About 10 minutes of thinking and some trials on my PC and I realized that there was a wonderful tool called parted. Not sure if it can do the job but there is no harm in trying.
I went back to installer menu and executed shell, which is named 'ash'). ash is a POSIX complaint shell with minimal features. Hence it is included on boot floppies and installation disks. (Actually it is dash which is a port of ash to linux)
After executing the shell I started parted program. It showed me the existing partitions and I gave the appropriate commands to resize the HFS+ partition to 25GB.
Wow, it says it will take around 40 minutes to do the job.

Break started.

Listened to some songs. :-)

Washed some clothes soaked up since morning. :-P

Ate 1-2 dry-fruit laddoo. :-D

This is all going on at around 1 in night.

Break ended.

Resizing finished.
Guided partitioning using remaining 5 GB. 1 MB allocated to 'NewWorld' boot partition, 275 MB for swap. Remaining went into '/'.

The installer continues after partitioning. It took around 25 minutes for the installation to finish all the stages and reboot. The boot loader installed was yaboot, not grub as it is usually done on x86 machines. Default boot option was linux obviously which means Ubuntu in my case. :-)

Felt really good to see the familiar screen and colors of Ubuntu on that 12" screen. :-)

Initial goodness:
ATI Radeon Mobility 9250 is supported by Free 'ati' drivers. So compiz works out of box.
Even though the machine is only 1.2 GHz it feels like it runs pretty fast compared to my PC with 1.6 GHz AMD Athlon processor. But this might be due to more RAM or I may be wrong.

Initial badness:
The default installation does not contain OpenOffice.org. :-( (Ubuntu bug 164491)
There is no sound. In fact there is no device created for ALSA to use. (Ubuntu bug 60381)

I realized that there must be some sound module missing (not loaded).
'slocate snd- |grep ppc' told me that there was a module called snd-powermac. So I just loaded module with modprobe command and it was working. I also added it to /etc/modules file to load it on startup.
Surprisingly the sound in Ubuntu is louder/clearer than what iTunes/iPhoto produce in Mac OS X. Not sure if this is problem in applications or Mac OS X.

Soon I installed openoffice.org, many gstreamer plugins, libdvdcss2, thoggen by downloading them at a friend's place.

Now waiting for my phone/net connection transferred so that I can actually start some development work on this beast.
Yes, I have been busy and lazy at the same time. :-D

Coming up next - some nice photos and screenshots when I get the internet at home. :-P

The beauty & the beast - introduction

2007-11-22T19:34:00.000+05:30

Recently my brother decided to sell his old iBook because it was not sufficient for his work. He was planning to get a new MacBook provided he could sell the old one. So I just said sell it to me. And now I have the ownership of his iBook even if I have not yet paid for it. :-P

It is a very sweet looking portable machine. With only 12" screen it is compact enough to carry in a medium sized backpack. :-)

Following is the configuration.
PowerPC G4 processor 1.2 GHz
1.25 GB RAM (256 MB default + 1 GB additional my brother chose while buying)
ATI Radeon Mobility 9250 graphics adapter
30 GB hard disk
1 slot-loading combo drive
12" screen
1 internal modem
1 wired NIC
1 wireless NIC
2 USB 2.0 ports
1 FireWire
1 mini-VGA video out

It has Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" installed along with many useful applications. It has M$ Office 2004. It also 'had' M$ Internet Explorer for Mac which is said to be superior to the Windows versions.

The beauty part of the machine is the portability due to compact size, elegant look & feel. The beast in the machine is the Powerpc processor, the only other processor architecture that ever threatened dominance of x86 architecture on desktop market, AFAIK. It is also said to have surpassed x86 processors in performance in 1990s. These days Powerpc processors are used in many embedded systems including the gaming consoles like Nintendo Wii, Sony PS3 and M$ Xbox 360.

Now here are my initial thoughts about the machine.

The Good:

1.25 GB of RAM :-D

As already pointed, small screen.

Considering that it is 3 years old machine, combo drive, FireWire, USB 2.0 all constitute the good part.

The Bad:

Mac OS X v10.3. I don't plan to put any money on buying latest version and most of the Free softwares are dropping 10.3 support these days. This would have been in the section below but for the possibility of installing Ubuntu on this machine.

The DVD drive is having the region code 4. The default DVD player simply ejects DVD with different region code if I choose not to change region code of the drive. :-( Fortunately VLC ignores/bypasses region restrictions, is free for download and available for Mac OS X :-D

The keyboard. I am very confused about when to use which key out of 'Apple' key, alt/options key, ctrl key.

The touchpad with only one button. Combine this with the confusion mentioned above and I get a machine which is very hard to operate, IMHO.

User interface. While most users will praise how good the UI on their Mac looks, the problem is because I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for long time. This will also apply to Windows. So all those who think that Linux is hard to use, consider that it is also true the other way round. It is just matter of what you are used to.

The Ugly:

Airport Extreme wireless card which uses Broadcom 4306 chipset. It means that I have to use firmware extracted from binary only drivers to make this card work in GNU/Linux.

Now as for the 'Will you ... ' questions ...
1. No. I am not going to try Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard". There is no incentive to spend money for it when you can get Ubuntu for free. And I also try to avoid using pirated software as far as possible. :-D
2. Yes. I will install Ubuntu on it. I may even try Debian when make some space on hard disk or when I decide to eliminate Mac OS X completely.

That is all for now. Ubuntu installation report coming soon. Stay tuned. ;-)

Article featured on 'Debian Package of the Day'

2007-10-31T16:25:00.000+05:30

I have written reviews of some movies, software, books on my blog. But I know the audience of my blog is not large enough.

Few months back I discovered 'Debian Package of the Day'. This blogs features articles submitted by users about various applications available on GNU/Linux systems. Although it says 'package of the day', the articles are published on Wednesday and Sunday of every week.
Answering to their call for submission I wrote a review of Thoggen, a DVD ripping application and sent them a mail. The mail was unanswered till today.

Today I received reply that said that article was accepted with minor changes and will be published mostly by Sunday. Surprisingly the article got published today itself. :-D You can read the article at http://debaday.debian.net/2007/10/31/thoggen-a-gtk-based-simple-dvd-ripper/
For any question related to the article you can ask me via comments or other means. I think I will write more such articles in near future. Who knows, I may work as technical writer some day. :-)

Now who can guess the movie from the third screenshot? :-P

Crossing the border - an octroi story

2007-08-30T20:41:00.000+05:30

For some reasons unknown to me Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad are two different towns and have different municipal corporations. So every time you try to smuggle (i.e. transport) some 'good looking things' across the border you are supposed to pay octroi. The 'good looking things' is a generic term for new furniture, electronic/electrical appliances etc.

Few days ago, with the help of a relative I bought some electrical appliances (ceiling fans) from CME (College of Military Engineering) canteen. Those were packed in a bag rested on back seat of my bike. I was coming towards Shivajinagar unaware of existence of any octroi booth on the border. At some signal near Khadki station, a man appeared out of nowhere and asked me to take my bike on the road side. I had no clue what was going on.

He: "What's in the bag?"
I: "Some luggage"
He: "What luggage?"
I: "Ceiling fans"
He: "Open the bag"

I still had no clue. I though it was a routine security check inspired by bulgy look of my bag. I opened the bag and let him have a glimpse.

He: "Did you pay the octroi?"

A loud bell rang. I don't have a clear understanding of the rules related to octroi. Even if I had I didn't know there was an octroi booth.
I reverted with totally unrelated answer.

I: "I bought them from CME" (with a look on face asking 'what did I do wrong')
He: "Do you have receipts"

I produced the receipt. He verified that what I was saying was true.
He: "You can go"
Without a word I closed the bag, put the receipt in my pocket.
He: "Do you work in CME?"
I: "No, my brother"

It is observed that civil administration personals try not to interfere in matters where defense personals are involved.
He didn't bother to ask me my name or my brother's name. I didn't stop to give him another chance. :-)

Internet Explorer s**ks ... Javascript saves the day

2007-06-08T14:59:00.000+05:30

Internet Explorer s**ks very badly. There are many who would agree and many who would not. I don't care as user. I don't use it. But I have to care as a developer of web application. The web application on which I am working is officially supported on Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 1.5+. This was the decision taken by my client and I have to make sure that there are no problems in the workflows when using any of the browser.

The background:
The web application I am developing provides management interface for a server. Recently the interface was redesigned from usability and look and feel point of view, as per comments of a professional web designer.
While making sure if it was working properly I realised that most of the workflows were not behaving as expected in Internet Explorer. I tried hard to find the pattern in misbehaviour.

The problem:
After some investigation I found that IE was submitting values of all buttons on the page to server with other form data. Due to this the server side code was not able to identify what action to carry out and it carried out the first action that it received in parameters. This is ridiculous. Also this happens when you use <button> tag and not using <input type="button"> tag. As per the HTML4.x standard created by W3C, a <button> tag is synonymous to <input type="button">. The reason I was using <button> was that I needed to show some images on buttons. This was part of the usability point of view of the redesign.

The frustration:
I spent 2 hours to find the solution for a thing that shouldn't be broken in first place.

The solution:
While searching on Google I found out that this was known bug in IE 6.x and was supposedly fixed in IE 7. Many people used different techniques to solve the problem, most of which involved use of Javascript. Finally I used a script found on one of the forums, modified it a little bit and it is now working nicely. The script disables all the buttons except the one which was clicked just before that form data is submitted.


<!--[if IE]>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
 var btns = document.getElementsByTagName('button');
 for(var i=0;i < btns.length;i++) {
   if (btns[i].type == 'submit'){
    btns[i].onclick = function() {
     var btns = document.getElementsByTagName('button');
     for (var i=0;i < btns.length;i++) {
      if (btns[i].value != this.value)
       btns[i].disabled = true;
     }
     this.innerHTML = this.className;
     return true;
    }
   }
  }
}
</script>
<![endif]-->

Sadly IE developers for some reason choose not to follow W3C standard even though M$ is a member of W3C committee.

In other news Mark Shuttleworth asserts/confirms that Canonical/Ubuntu will not make any deal with M$ for protection against 283 unspecified patents that Linux and other Free Softwares infringe (or was it 319, does it really matter?). Good thing, at least some one is standing against the monopolistic and FUD practices by M$.

Marathi blog (couldn't resist)

2007-04-14T00:44:00.000+05:30

ब्लॉगर वेबसाईटने अशातच हिंदी भाषेमधे ब्लॉगींग करण्याची सोय केली आहे. हिंदी म्हणजे मराठी सुद्धा कारण लिपी एकच आहे. असं नाही की मला त्याची खूप गरज होती पण ...
मी माझ्या घरच्या कंप्यूटर वर युबुन्टू वापरत असल्यामुळे मी XKB किंवा SCIM वापरू शकतो. पण आता सगळे मराठी/हिंदी मधे ब्लॉगींग करू शकतात. खास करून माझा मित्र केदार. :-)

माझ्या कडून खूप अपेक्षा ठेवू नका कारण मला मराठी मधे काही चांगलं लिहून खूप वर्ष झाले आहेत. मराठी बोलणं सोपं आहे पण लिहीणं कठीण. :-D

A good weekend picnic

2006-11-23T19:12:00.000+05:30

How do you define a good picnic?

1. College friends.

From Picnic

2. Places where even after spending 3-4 hours you still want to stay.

From Picnic

3. Good, cheap place to stay and good food to eat.

From Picnic

4. No quarrels. Lots of enjoyment. Lots of jokes, laughter, leg pulling.

From Picnic

5. Spending some time alone.

From Picnic

6. Reaching home late at night, so exhausted that you don't want to move a bit next morning.

I just did all this on last weekend. It was whole lot of fun. :-)

Beryl - Special effects at your desk(top)

2006-10-28T17:27:00.000+05:30

Following the keystrokes of G0SUB and tuxmaniac, I finally installed Beryl on Edgy Eft i.e. Ubuntu 6.10 .
('Following the keystrokes' is computer world analogous of 'Following the footsteps')

It is too good. It provides loads of special effects. It is too hard to express in words. That is why I have made a small video for all to checkout. The effects included in video are, minimize/restore, shade, show desktop, switch workspace, switch applications, close application. The video is in Theora/Ogg format. If you are in Windows/Mac OS X, you will probably need VLC player to play it.

Download the video - Beryl Video. The download is about 2 MB.

People using Mac OS X 10.3+ should be already familiar with these effects. Windows users will have to wait till Vista is out I guess.

Notes:
1. I have followed the tutorial provided at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BerylOnEdgy. I use ATI Radeon 7000 AGP card. If you are using any card other than Intel, ATI, nVidia then you will have to use trial and error method.
2. I have recorded this video using istanbul. For that one need to tweak some settings.
a) Once you load istanbul, select 'Record 3D' instead of 'Record Mouse Pointer' in the context menu of tray icon
b) Select 'Full' size in the context menu of tray icon.
c) Open gconf-editor and edit the setting video_framerate in /apps/istanbul. Set it to 5 instead of default 10. Lower the value, more watchable video. This setting is not exposed through UI.
3. I am sure some of you will notice that the time shown by the clock in video is 1st January, around 12 pm. That is because the battery of my BIOS died today and time gets reset on every reboot. :-D

First experience of l10n

2006-09-28T01:33:00.000+05:30

When we were being trained as new developers in my company two years back, our training included concepts of l10n and i18n and how to implement it in programs. Although our project is i18n enabled, I never actually ever took part in any translation.

My first experience with l10n is translation of Totem to Marathi. It has been so far good with Totem getting 50% translated except that I was hit by this bug.
It is funny to get bitten by the bug in your own work on an OS that is in pre-beta stages.
(This is the first time I dared to install a pre-beta version of Ubuntu, or rather any OS)

Following are some sample screenshots.

Totem playing an audio (you can see the properties of file, menus translated)

Totem playing a video

About Totem

Translation credits

The translation is in GNOME CVS and will be available in GNOME 2.16.1
Now I plan to translate at least one more application in Rosetta, probably Sound Juicer, before LanguagePackTranslationDeadline in Edgy.

Tracking the money in FOSS way

2006-08-08T00:45:00.000+05:30

In last 23 years the only time I ever tracked my expenses was when my sister-in-law was with me last year. When she moved to Australia, the habit died eventually.

Due to some recent developments in my financial life, I have been thinking of starting it again. But I am too lazy to write down everything. So finally I decided to give GnuCash a shot (my fingers work faster on keyboard than with a pen).

Yesterday I installed it by compiling from source as latest version was not available in repositories.
I must say that I am pretty impressed with it in whatever time I spent using it from yesterday. Things like various account types, different expenses categories, interlinking of transactions, scheduled transactions make it damn easy to manage/track personal finances. Not only this, the UI is as easy to use as it can be.

I have never seen or used MS Money. But I am sure it can not be better and cheaper than GnuCash (free). Why would someone want to spend money ($20 at least) on MS money to track money when one can do it for free.

Unfortunately (for some of my friends), this software is available only for GNU/Linux systems.
But isn't it one more good reason to use GNU/Linux.

URL handler for GtkAboutDialog

2006-08-07T12:17:00.000+05:30

I have been doing some coding for gnusim8085 for some time. Yesterday Sridhar asked me if there was a way for the website link in 'About' dialog to be clickable. I was already looking for something that would accomplish it.

Although there is an API gtk_about_dialog_set_url_hook() which will hook a function with the dialog for handling of urls, I didn't have idea what the function should look like. I have devhelp installed on my machine and API reference of GTK+. But it was missing sample code for this particular thing.
Finally I hunted down the solution by downloading gedit source. Turned out that I just needed to call another gnome function. I am giving it here for all those who may need it.

1. Declare and define a function in the file which defines the major part of UI of your application.


-- interface.h --
void activate_url (GtkAboutDialog *about, const gchar *url, gpointer data);

-- interface.c --
void
activate_url (GtkAboutDialog *about, const gchar *url, gpointer data)
{
    gnome_url_show_on_screen (url, NULL, NULL);
}

2. Hook up the above mentioned function for url handling in dialogs.


-- main.c --

int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {
..
..

/* hook up url handler */
gtk_about_dialog_set_url_hook (activate_url, NULL, NULL);
..
..
}

मैत्रीण

2006-07-17T23:01:00.000+05:30

(Shamelessly copied from Orkut)

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
बाईकवर मागे बसावी
जुनी हीरो होंडा सुद्धा मग
करिझ्माहून झकास दिसावी !

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
चारचौघीत उठून दिसावी
बोलली नाही तरी निदान
समोर बघून गोड हसावी !

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
कधीतरी सोबत फिरावी
दोघांना एकत्र पाहून
गल्लीतल्या सगळ्या पोरांची जिरावी !

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
जिच्याशी निर्मळ संवाद असावा
कधीतरी छोट्या भांडणाचा
एखादाच अपवाद असावा..

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
आयुष्याच्या अनोळखी वळणावर
तुमच्या व्यथा वेदनांवर
तिने घालावी हळूच फुंकर..

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
जिच्या मैत्रीत विश्वास रुजावा
तुमचासुद्धा खांदा कधी
तिच्या दुःखाने भिजावा..

एक तरी मैत्रीण असावी
चांदणीसारखी मैत्रीच्या आकाशात
मित्रांचे दिवे मावळले म्हणजे
चालावं पुढे तिच्याच प्रकाशात...

Bug in iPod

2006-04-28T19:05:00.000+05:30

I didn't know exactly what to call the event that occurred. That is why I am calling it a bug.

The problem:
Receiving a call on a mobile close to iPod increases the volume of song currently playing.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Make sure that some song is playing on iPod.
2. Keep the mobile on 'Vibration Mode'.
3. Keep your mobile close to iPod.
4. Ask your friend to give you a call on your mobile.

Expected:
Receiving call shouldn't affect your iPod.

Actual:
Volume gets increased.

Additional notes:
iPod used is iPod Video (30 GB) with latest software version (1.1.1)
Mobile used is Sony Ericsson K700i.
The song being played was from movie 'Rang De Basanti' (if that matters).

The problem could be reproduced by two different persons, three times.

Waiting for comments from different iPod owners.

Marathi/Hindi transliteration in instant messenging

2006-02-13T15:10:00.000+05:30

I had been trying to make some Marathi transliteration tool for email sometime back.
Although that work stalled, recently I came across one plugin for Gaim which converted English to Tamil.
(http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1417844&group_id=235&atid=390395)

I was able to modify the plugin for Marathi/Hindi using Varun's (author of original plugin) help.

I have released first version of this plugin for Gaim 1.5.0 on Windows and Linux.

Please read README and transliteration legend for instructions.

The plugin can be found at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1430489&group_id=235&atid=390395

Please try this plugin and mail me your comments and suggestions.

Acknowledgements:
1. Varun, for original idea, helping me understand Gaim API used and implement some additional logic.
2. First victims of some (un)readable Marathi/Hindi messages - Debajit, Shrinand, Himanshu, Rahul and Varun (although he doesn't understand Hindi at all).
3. Shridhar Ratna (whose 8085 simulator project I took over) for giving inspiration to Varun for original plugin.
4. Last but not least, Gaim team for such a wonderful software.

I hope these plugins make their way into Gaim and be a compelling feature for using Gaim.

Last Action Hero

2006-02-10T18:47:00.000+05:30

I took this quiz Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 as suggested by Shrivallabh and following are results.

Tell me if you really think the results are right.

You scored as Maximus. After his family was murdered by the evil emperor Commodus, the great Roman general Maximus went into hiding to avoid Commodus's assassins. He became a gladiator, hoping to dominate the colosseum in order to one day get the chance of killing Commodus. Maximus is valiant, courageous, and dedicated. He wants nothing more than the chance to avenge his family, but his temper often gets the better of him.

Maximus

54%

Indiana Jones

46%

The Amazing Spider-Man

46%

Lara Croft

42%

William Wallace

42%

Neo, the "One"

38%

The Terminator

33%

James Bond, Agent 007

29%

Batman, the Dark Knight

29%

El Zorro

25%

Captain Jack Sparrow

25%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

It's about choice

2006-01-04T21:38:00.000+05:30

Yesterday morning I and Debajit had this chat.

-- START TRANSCRIPT --

Debajit: yes the intel macs will definitely be out in 2006
Debajit: apple will mostly come out with a new intel laptop line that will be cheap or at least comparable to the current dell, compaq laptops etc
Onkar: :-D Then I will wait

(Currently I have no intention to buy a new machine)

Debajit: it will most probably be based on Intel's new "dual-core" Yonah processor, and not on the pentium -- and it will also be 64 bit I think
Debajit: :)
Onkar: Coooooooooooooooooooollllllllllll
Debajit: apple will make an announcement at macworld later this Jan -- it will all be confirmed by then

(Read more about it)

Onkar: Ok
Debajit: apple is also releasing Leopard (Mac OS x 10.5+) the new version of their OS -- that will compete directly with Longhorn when it is released later this year.... and with Linux, the competition is going to be really hot -- 2006 is said to be the year of the 3 L's -- Leopard, Linux and Longhorn :D
Onkar: :-D
Debajit: I think by 2007 firefox may become the most popular browser --
Debajit: :D
Onkar: But by end of 2006 we will have two more releases of Ubuntu family, one more Mandriva, Suse, Slackware, Fedora and perhaps one more Gentoo.

-- END TRANSCRIPT --

So by the time Windows Vista (Longhorn) or Intel based Macs release by end of next year I would have two OS upgrade cycles for my desktop and my dad's laptop which will ...
1. Accomplish almost any task that I will ever want to do including Bluetooth transfers, video transfer over FireWire, video editing, wireless connectivity.
2. not require me to upgrade my machine or buy a new. I already have 512 RAM and my Dad's laptop has almost everything he (and eventually me) will need for next 5 years.
3. not cost me any money other than buying/downloading Ubuntu CD and still I will be using one of the most robust and advanced OS. I will be fool to call Windows robust and advanced. I am comparing Linux to Mac OS X.

I remember Oracle saying to Neo in Matrix Revolutions, "You have already made the choice. Now you have to understand the choice"

In my case I have already understood the choice.

My advice to you,
1. If you are buying new machine then buy something Linux based and save money to be paid for Windows.
2. If your machine is more than 3 years old, having speed at least 400 MHz, RAM at least 128 MB then try Ubuntu/KUbuntu. You won't be disapponited. Once everything is working you can always upgrdae your RAM.
3. If you think Linux doesn't support mp3 or wmv out of box then understand the reason behind it. Know the process to enable the support. Even Linux newbies can do that.

Enjoy the freedom of choice.

NOTE: I have a wish to own a Mac sometime in my life. But I am really happy with Ubuntu currently and don't plan to buy a new machine at least next 5 years just to check Mac OS X.

Breezy October

2005-10-05T18:04:00.000+05:30

This rainy season has been worst I have ever seen (not to mention I have seen just 22 rainy seasons). Mumbai had very bad flood situation and almost all the districts in Maharashtra are poured with more than average rains. Till September last week rain had not stopped (at least in Pune). We can expect a large drop in temperature in winter and it may lead to cold winds.
But that is not why October is going to be breezy.

I have waited long for Ubuntu's next release 5.10. This will be third release of Ubuntu I will be using and it has become my primary and only operating system at home.
Don't be surprised that I dumped Windows an year ago, tired of seeing all those BSODs and taking care of unwanted guests a.k.a. viruses and worms.

I am extremely happy about the way GNU/Linux is blended in a usable distribution by Ubuntu developers/maintainers. The Ubuntu community is growing continuously and the distro is at the top at distrowatch leaving Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora far behind.
And if you are KDE lover (read as 'GNOME hater') then also you have no reason to be unhappy with Ubuntu because sister project KUbuntu delivers same distro with KDE as default desktop environment. I will surely like to try Edubuntu (set to release sometime this month) which is being made for classroom use. The package list looks good. So if you know any school or college in India that would love to try it then let me know. May be I could help.

Since all the releases are code named Breezy Badger, the October is going to be real breezy.

Simply superb - Iqbal

2005-09-08T16:04:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, I saw a movie 'Iqbal'. One more reason to admire Nagesh Kukunoor. After seeing 'Hyderabad Blues', 'Rockford' & 'Teen Deewarein' (all being directed by Nagesh), I was sure going to watch 'Iqbal'. The only question was when and where (theatre or TV/VCD).

And now that I have seen it, here is what I think about it.

A simple story of a deaf and dumb boy who makes to Indian cricket team, against all odds. Only 6 main characters. The boy, his sister, his mother, his father, his master who never made to national team in his time and an academy coach who is more interested in business than emotions. Each character as simple as it can be, and each performance as good as it can be.

Shreyas Talpade is really good as deaf-dumb boy and not to mention Shweta Prasaad is highly talented child actress. And no doubt about Naseerudding Shah. I have yet to find a role of his where he didn't actually fit in.
I think Shahrukh Khan should see this movie again and again for rest of his life to learn at least some acting.

Highly recommended movie. And make a point to watch it in theatre, don't watch it on TV. It is really worth it.
I hope it gets some good awards. (Perhaps you heard it wrong if you think Filmfare awards. I was talking about National awards)

This morning I saw an add for 'Salaam Namaste'. It said 'Yash Chopra's biggest Musical Entertainer'. I was just wondering how can they claim it to be biggest entertainer before even releasing the movie. And why is it just musical entertainer? Is it because these days all the Chopra camp movies only contain goodie-goodie looking sweet people living in large houses and singing a good song every now and then?
I am sure I don't want to go to theatre to just listen good songs. I can always hear cassette.

When can we expect movies like 'Iqbal', 'Teen Deewarein' or 'Ab Tak Chhappan' from Chopra productions?

Partner

2005-07-27T18:14:00.000+05:30

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Translation for those who don't understand Marathi)

Read 'Partner' by V. P. Kale. One more addition to list of good books.
There is a difference between P. L. Deshpande & V. P. Kale, also there is one similarity.

Stories by P. L. are based on pure harmless humour. The characters seem very familiar. It feels like we have met them.

Stories by V. P. are based on events in day today life. There is less humour and more harsh truth. The pains of characters are really true. It feels like 'this can happen to me'.

Both have one similarity. Both make the characters really live.

I was lucky to hear V. P. in college annual gathering. 'Baap' and 'Gargi Parasnis' stories were really good.
Planning to buy books 'Sakhi' & 'Vapurza' soon.

50 years back

2005-07-23T00:17:00.000+05:30

'Sakal' (my favorite Marathi newspaper) has a section titled 'Pannas Varshanpurvi' (50 years back) which contains one significant news each from India and world 50 years back.

Yesterday I read that 50 years ago some congress leaders were proposing a united Maharashtra state that consisted then provinces Mumbai & Saurashtra and remaining region that forms Maharashta today. In short it was combination of today's Maharastra & Gujraath.

Majority of leaders opposed to it saying that it contradicted with Congress' principle of 'States based on languages'. I didn't know that Maharashtra state was planned 6 years in advance (Maharashtra got its today's form in 1961).

If it had happened then perhaps today's Mehtas and Patils would have been distant cousins. Or there would have been no difference between Gujraathi Joshi and Marathi Joshi.

But is there a slightest possibility that Godhra or Malegaon riots would have been avoided?
I don't know, because I don't understand what really divides a group of people, what really creates hate instead of love.

Perhaps as said in Matrix Trilogy, I don't understand past my choice.

Perhaps I don't want to understand.

Struggle

2005-07-07T16:32:00.000+05:30

5th of July was my first day of second year at my company. It has been one year. One great year.

But I notice that some of my friends are still struggling to get a satisfactory (in terms of money) job.

Not that I never had to struggle in my life. I am always struggling on health front. I have always struggled on academic front since I was out of my school. I had struggled to get admission for electronics subject in junior college. I had struggled to get free seat in engineering. I struggled to clear IIT-JEE. I failed every time.
I have struggled to pass in subjects of engineering. 73 was the highest score I saw in my four years of engineering (that too in first year itself, and I never crossed 65 again). My friends used to scold me that I didn't study properly.
And although I was pretty sure that I would have to struggle really hard for my first job (due to my average marks being less than normally expected), it was perhaps the easiest thing that happened in my life.

I read this quote somewhere:
"God won't give me anything I can't handle. I wish god didn't trust me that much".
I think God had given me enough things I couldn't handle. So at the end he gave me exactly what I wanted.

Now I feel like I am in my second year of my new college. College of life.
Everything is same as it was when I completed my first year of college, except one thing. I have lost more friends that I made.

Struggle, you have to do, to keep your friends close to you.

Style sense

2005-07-07T16:30:00.000+05:30

Some people have a great sense of style (out of box). They usually create things/arts that are visually appealing.

When a group of such people come together then they form something like Sony.

I have no doubt about performance of Sony products. At the same time their products are really stylish.

It is hard to find a Sony product that doesn't stand different from other products in same category.
It is hard to find a Sony product that won't tempt you into giving away the extra money they ask for.
It is hard to find a Sony product that is not visually appealing.

Sony has won my heart at least in this respect over others. By now I have at my home a TV, a DVD player, a Walkman, PC Speakers, headphones all made by Sony.
Perhaps I am now looking forward to buying a Sony music system for my own car (when I buy it) or a home theatre system for my own house (again, when I buy it).

I wish Sony made cars and houses.

Courage

2005-06-06T14:20:00.000+05:30

A man was sitting in a chair watching installation of a new machine in his factory. His companion was a dog, a full-grown German Shepherd with height about half of that man and wait about 40 kg.

When it was time to leave the man asked a boy to take the dog away. The boy tried to pull away the dog with the chain tied to his neck.
The dog was ill. It became furious with this action. It went mad.

The dog unexpectedly attacked the man. It went out of control.
The dog was thirsty for the man's throat. The man was fighting with the dog for more than 15 minutes. Nobody dared to come to rescue him.

Finally the man managed to put his left hand in the mouth of the dog. Finally the man managed to save his throat.
He then grabbed the chain and somehow brought the dog under control.

The man received number of wounds on his both hands, legs, stomach.

The man is in his early fifties. His name is 'Ravi', synonym for sun. One that stands high, above all.
He is my uncle. My mother's brother.

I didn't see the incident but just heard about it. I am not sure what I would have done in such situation.

After all, it takes courage ...
... to take 20 injections in one single day.
... to fight a German Shepherd bare handed.
... to put your hand in mouth of a mad dog to save your throat.

Legality & Morality

2005-05-12T13:26:00.000+05:30

A conversation started in the elevator yesterday.

Moreshwar: "I paid for the music in the form of cassette tapes. So I can convert the tapes to mp3 for my personal use."
Onkar: "mp3 is patented format. You are supposed to pay royalty for using it. Use ogg instead."
Shrivallabh: "Any sort of unauthorized copying or reproduction of music in cassette tapes is prohibited"

Assuming that
- Mp3 patent is valid in India.
- There is no law in India to enforce what Shrivallabh says.

Moreshwar is legally as well as morally wrong.
Onkar is legally correct but morally wrong.
Shrivallabh is legally as well as morally correct.

What is your opinion?
What would you choose?

Tombstone

2005-04-10T22:22:00.000+05:30

There are few movies based on real life stories and there are very few out of them that are impressive (according to me). I must say Tombstone was really impressive considering the fact that I didn't know anything about this real life story.

When I read the line on DVD, "Every town has a story. Tombstone has a legend", I wasn't very sure about what I was going to watch.

The time of story is in 1880s when Tombstone is a newly established town in Arizona. The town is threatened by outlaws Johnny Ringo, Billy Clanton, Ike Clanton and their gang known as 'The Cowboys'. The movie starts with a mass killing at a Spanish wedding.

Retired lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) comes to Tombstone with his wife, brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton) and their wives. He is soon followed by his friend and doctor turned gambler Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer). Wyatt is interested in making some money and moving on. But it seems it wasn't his destiny.

One night drunken Billy Clanton kills old town Marshal in a gun fight. Wyatt Earp presents Bill in court but he is released due to lack of evidence. This is the time when Virgil and Morgan take charge and put notices about restrictions on carrying guns in town. Wyatt is not very keen about getting involved. He tells Virgil and Morgan, "Once I engaged in a fight. A man was killed and I killed him. You don't even know how it feels to kill a man." Wyatt knows where it is leading and it only ends with death and devastation. This incidence is followed by the famous gun fight at OK Corral square and eventually some bloodshed. The Cowboys soon cold-bloodedly murder Morgon and cripple Virgil.

Wyatt then decides to leave the town. But Johnny Ringo is interested in ending this at once. He sends Stillwell and Ike Clanton to Railway Station to kill Earp brothers. But Wyatt is ready for them and kills Stillwell. This scene I liked particularly. At the start of movie in mass killing when Cowboys kill a Spanish priest he says something in Spanish before dying. Jonny Ringo explains that he was referring to Bible, "A man will come soon and hell will follow him".
When Wyatt kills Stillwell, Ike drops his gun and begs for his life. Wyatt says to him, "Tell him I am coming. I AM COMING AND HELL IS COMING WITH ME"

Wyatt then takes his revenge and finishes the Cowboys gang. Jonny Ringo, supposed to be fastest gunman, throws Wyatt a challenge for one on one fight. Doc Holliday replaces Wyatt without his knowledge and then you find that Jonny is not fast enough to beat Doc.

The movie though made in 1993 has a fresh look. Almost every character in movie is played perfectly. Kurt Russell is damn good. I also liked Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. According to what I read at IMDB, out of 8 movies related to this story, Tombstone stands above all (as it sticks to reality).