Frustrated of getting tonnes of spam on the Granular Package Archive everyday, I finally fixed the issue today, once and for all. This had been a long time pending task. I did this by integrating reCaptcha.

Saw Toy Story last week. Loved it! My favorite dialog? – “To infinity and beyond”.

India’s Cricket tour of West Indies starts just three days from now.

I am missing Granular development a lot; hopefully I’ll be able to continue development within a week or so. Meanwhile, the artwork team (Granuminati) had been doing some great stuff.

Still reading The Fountainhead (by Ayn Rand) since months now. I am a sloooow reader when it comes to philosophy novels. Anyway, I have started with the part 3 of novel based on Gail Wynand.

Finally did the dreaded Drupal update for granularproject.org.

Power cuts here, in Punjab, are getting worse day-by-day. 7 hour cuts are a norm these days.

One more thing. You see only the Granular logo at the left and no logo of Unity as it’s still being finalized. But I am sure the creative artwork guys there will come up with something interesting pretty soon.

Just recently, some one at the Granular forum put forward a question asking whether we owned the .co.uk domain of Granular Linux, perhaps the British community of Granular (no, we don’t own any such domain)? On checking which link he was referring to, we were quite surprised to find out there indeed existed a .co.uk domain of Granular.

Check it out for yourself. Rest is self-explanatory. Boy, what a way of expressing his regret. Let me assure you Tom, all your apologies are accepted. And all our doors are still open for you.

In the introduction to Granular Package Archive post I wrote on the Team Granular blog, I explained the various features it has to offer. My personal favorite is the ability to leave comments on individual RPM pages. Other than that, I am quite satisfied with the overall look-and-feel too. In another of my Team Granular blog post, I explained the working of this package archive system, and the way to use it with any other repository of RPM packages.

Some guys at the Unity Project are also contemplating the idea of using this package archive system with their repository too.

In a bid to help save Tasmanian Devils from extinction, Linus Torvalds decided to release the latest Linux kernel with the “Tuz” logo as the console image at the LCA 2009 conference. Tuz is a name perhaps derived from the popular Linux mascot Tux, plus Tasmanian Devil (Taz – as it was known as a Looney Toones cartoon character). So Tuz replaces Tux as the console boot image for the kernel release 2.6.29.

So 2.6.29 isn’t quite out yet, but I’ve merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.
- Linus Torvalds

In another news, GMail gets support for writing emails in Indian languages. The Google Transliteration technology had been around for some time now (through Google Labs), and this support for Indian languages in GMail was built using Transliteration.

We currently support five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.
- Google Blog

Ratan Tata striking a pose with Nano (Image courtesy: bradstinyworld.com)

It’s finally out. The world’s cheapest car is up for the taking now, thanks to the hard working guys at Tata Motors who made the launch possible without much delay (which was being expected due to the shift in manufacturing plant location). Touted as the “one lakh-worth car”, it’s price start from Rs. 1.3 Lakh and goes upto Rs. 1.8 Lakh. Well, that’s a decent price for an entry level car, taking in consideration the various features it has to offer.

This cute little car can speed upto 105 km/hour; pretty decent speed within a city and some highways. It also promises to offer a modest economy of 23 km/litre of petrol. As the engine has been shifted to the back of the car, it makes for huge leg space for the front seats; comfortable driving, you say?

It will be made available in 3 models – Basic, CX and LX – mentioned in increasing order of prices. Don’t expect air-conditioning system in the basic model, and the center-locking system is available only in the LX model. Being a really small and light-weight car, power steering has not been made available in any of the three models. Wikipedia is probably the best source to explore all its features and specifications further.

An interesting thing related to the launch of this small car is that initially it will be made available to only 1 lakh customers until the manufacturing capacity is increased further or more factories are setup. Obviously, the initial bookings are set to exceed this1 lakh mark, so the Tata people came up with a plan. Each potential customer will have to book the car by sending a form to Tata Motors. Out of all the applications received, a draw will be held to select the lucky 1 lakh guys! Whoa! And the forms come at a price – Rs. 300 each. Another money making scheme by the Indian giant conglomerate?

One this is sure – the car is poised to begin a new era of small & cheap cars, and will spark a new revolution in a country where not even every middle-class family can afford a car.

And finally, there are software that initially create waves, catch all the attention due to the wonderful concepts they are based upon, attain significant fan following, and then… disappear! In this article, I am going to talk about just these kind of software, err, that were. These are such software that I would have hoped to see flourish till, at least, a couple more years. And yes, all these softwares were free.

Microsoft Reader

MS Reader was Microsoft’s noble attempt to change the way ebooks were read. Reader offered an actual book-like interface that was easy on eyes. It had two other advantages. First, the ebooks created in Reader format (.lit) were considerably smaller in size than an equivalent PDF. Second, it introduced text-to-speech in ebook reading (it would read the book word-by-word with adjustable voice speed).

In my opinion, MS Reader was a novell software. Many popular ebooks were published in “lit” format, but as time passed, such ebooks also disappeared. Today, the most ebooks we see are in PDF format.

Last Updated: May 2005
Download: http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/pc.aspx

Microsoft Reader

Dev-C++

Just when Turbo C++, the most used C++ IDE in its time, was getting older, there came out an open source IDE that changed the way C++ development used to take place. The last known release boasted of features like C++ projects, tabbed interface, auto syntax completion, and a modern compiler (GCC). Coding in Dev-C++ was sheer pleasure, and its easy-to-use interface was very easy getting used-to. It was a brilliant alternative to the paid Microsoft Visual C++, and as useful as it at that time. And it surely gave most of us respite from that boring blue screen of Turbo C++.

Dev-C++’s last version was 5 beta (4.9.9.2) which came out in 2005, and it has remained in beta since then.

Last updated: February 2005
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10639

Dev-C++

LG3D

Short for Project Looking Glass 3D, this was an excellent attempt by some innovative guys at Sun Microsystems to bring a truly immersive 3D environment to the desktop. Built purely in Java, LG3D could act as a desktop environment, much like the popular KDE & GNOME, or could be run from within another desktop environment. It was rich with 3D effects, and the environment also gave 3D illusions (for example, the wallpaper could be scrolled in all 4 directions to get a better view of the surroundings). It came with a host of built-in 3D applications – a media player, a CD rack, an application dock, 3D menus, games, educational software, and more. Another notable feature was the ability to take notes on the back of an open window! Now that was true 3D. One could also arrange windows in tilled fashion on either left or right side.

According to Wikipedia, LG3D was initially written by a Sun programmer in his spare time, but later Sun decided to assign a dedicated team to the project realizing its potential. Being platform independent (due to Java), LG3D was made available for Windows, Linux and Solaris in binary format for downloading.

All-in-all, it was a beautiful desktop environment which could have grown into a serious DE had it been given more attention by media and the developers. The last stable release was made on 19th December 2006, but the daily builds kept coming out 3-4 months after that.

Last updated: February 2007
Download: https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/binary-builds.html

Project Looking Glass

CheckInstall

This was one software, for the Linux platform, that helped developers and packagers easily prepare the binary packages of their own software in distributable forms – RPM, DEB, etc. Say, one wanted to create a RPM of a corresponding source package, checkinstall would help create the spec file for that RPM and compile the source package to generate a RPM. So in a way, it was a beginner packager’s best friend, but unfortunately, like many other great software, it has not been updated since long. Even then, the version available for download is good enough to generate basic RPMs from source packages.

Last updated: November 2006
Download: http://www.asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/download.php

f4l

Macromedia or Adobe have never released a native Linux edition of the very popular Flash MX/Studio which is used to create flash animations and objects.This is similar to the case of Photoshop, which is available for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux. To run these applications, one either needs to have Windows installed, or has to try to run them under Wine in Linux. f4l was a free and open-souce, light-weight alternative to Flash MX, to create flash animations natively in Linux. Although it was deprived of many heavy-weight features found in the original Flash MX, it had all the basic tools to create flash objects.

Last updated: December 2005
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=87799

f4l

mklivecd

This was yet another software for Linux to create Live ISO images out of installed Linux systems. Originally created for use with Mandriva, it was later ported over to PCLinuxOS too, in whose community it became immensly popular. PCLinuxOS (a very popular Linux distro) and all it’s derivatives started using mklivecd to create Live ISO images of their distros fastly, neatly, and efficiently. Later, PCLOS developers themselves started maintaining it and development in the original team almost ceased. But mklivecd it still out there, though in an old version, and does its job very well.

Last updated: December 2007
Download: http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1149

Duke Nukem Forever

I wind up my article with the mention of Duke 4. Now, this is the only non-free thing I am talking about here. And for a reason. This is supposed to be the next iteration in the popular Duke Nukem game series, which was very popular in its days. The most interesting part of this game is that it has been under-development since 1997! That is about 12 years. The developers themselves say that it will be release “when it is ready”. Huh?

Whatever be the behind-the-scenes story, looking at the development progress, it sure seems like a good game. And it is one of the most awaited game in the gamers community too.

Duke Nukem Forever

• Been busy recently with making certain important decisions about the future of Granular Project.
• My temporary obssession of packaging RPMs has returned. Packaging updates and new RPMs since a few days now.
• I try to start each day with studying, but miss it. The I try again to study after returning from college, miss it again. Completely frustrated because of that.
• Playing table tennis (TT) continuously since past two weeks. Beginning to realize excess of everything is bad. :Sigh: why TT is so addictive?
• Trying to complete all tasks in my long to-do list. Completed quite a few (and got some satisfaction), but most of them are still pending. God knows when I’ll be able to finish them.
• March ‘09 has been quite a happening month till now for me. Expecting more to come in next few days.
• Changed the blog’s theme to iNove.

Monoalphabetic cipher is a way to encrypt data (convert data into a secret form) by substituting each alphabet of the message to be encrypted with some other alphabet such that the substitute alphabet chosen for each alphabet remains constant throughout the message.

Accourding to simonsingh.net:

The ciphers in this substitution section replace each letter with another letter according to the cipher alphabet. Ciphers in which the cipher alphabet remains unchanged throughout the message are called Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers.

Suppose we want to encrypt the following message:
Meet me today at twelve

If we choose to substitute the letter “e” with, say, “u”, the letter “m” with “a”, the letter “a” with “c”, the letter “t” with “n”, and so on…, we’ll get the encrypted text like this:
auun au nyxcz cn npukbu

When you pass this message to your friend to let him decrypt it (convert it back into the original message), it would be assumed that it’s only you and your friend who knows the letter mappings – as to which letter was substituted for which. It seems pretty efficient way of sharing secrets? But, nope, it isn’t that efficient as it can be easily broken.

The most common and simplest way to break a monoalphabetic cipher is by guessing each alphabet in the encrypted text by using the help of a table/graph containing the relative letter frequencies in English language. Consider the frequency chart as follows:

As you can see from the above figure that the most used letter in English language is “e”, followed by “t”, then “a”, then “o”, then “i”, and so on…

Now looking at out encrypted text “auun au nyxcz cn npukbu”, it can be noticed that:
the letter “u” occurs 5 times (most times)
the letter “n” occurs 4 times (second-most times)
the letter “c” occurs 2 times (third-most times)

So, the first guess would be:
“u” was substituted for “e”
“n” was substituted for “t”
“c” was substituted for “a”

Using this much analysis, we try to decrypt the text as:
_eet _e t__ay at t_e__e

So you see, it wouldn’t be hard from here on to guess the original message as “meet me today at twelve”.

But this task of breaking the cipher (cryptanalysis) could have been made more difficult for the “hacker” by using SMS English. Suppose we wanted to encrypt this message:
come for tea at club see you there

Now before encrypting this message, you first convert it into SMS English:
cm 4 t at klub c u dere

With this converted text, proceed with the normal monoalphabetic substitution, and make sure your message target (probably your friend) already has the letter mapping. The encrypted text would be very difficult to break as mere guessing of letters using letter frequency table would lead to revelation of utter gibberish. And there are no letter frequency charts (or at least none I could see) for SMS language.

So all you SMS addicts, worry no more. You can finally utilize your skills for some good cause.

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