Random Bits

Moved...

2006-09-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

This blog has been moved to a new domain. Please update your links/feeds to point to the new domain http://www.chandanr.net/blog

Detailed Dual Boot Configuration

2006-08-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

If you have installed windows on a linux system and are not able to boot into your linux or vice versa then this article gives details steps for rescuing your system and configuring dual boot. In this article you can read "Suse Linux 10.1" as any linux distribution. 1. Insert the bootable SuSe 10.1 CD/DVD into the drive and boot the system from the CD. If your system doesnot boot from the CD, you have to make modifications to the priority of your CD drive in your system's bios boot settings. 2. On booting from the CD, choose the "Rescue System" option. Now image from the CD will be loaded to give you a rescue shell. 3. On the "Rescue login:" prompt enter "root". Now the rescue shell is ready for repair. 4. Run "fdisk -l" to display all the partitions in your hardisk(s). From this you can know on which partition you have installed linux and windows. Suppose if you have connected your harddisk as primary master then all its partition entries will be listed as /dev/hda*. Refer to Notes(1) if your hardisk configuration is different. If you have installed windows on primary partition of your harddisk then you would find an entry like -- "/dev/hda1 * 1 1216 9767488+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)" If you have installed SuSe Linux on first logical partition then you would find an entry like -- "/dev/hda5 1217 2432 9767488+ 83 Linux" 5. After determining the partition on which SuSe linux is installed(in this case /dev/hda5), mount the partition. mount /dev/hda5 /mnt Now contents of the /mnt directory will correspond to the / directory of your installed SuSe Linux. 6. Open the GRUB's menu file(GRUB is the boot loader, which provides a choice for selecting the OS to boot into when your system is powered on) vim /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst 7. Go to the end of this file and add the following entry for windows title Windows XP rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1(hd0,0) Save the modifications and close the file. You may get the following Warning message, which can be safely ignored "Can't write viminfo file /root/.viminfo". This is because while rescuing we have booted into the readonly filesystem in the CD. 8. Open the device map file of grub and make sure an entry for your hard disk is listed there. vim /mnt/boot/grub/device.map In this case you should find the following entry listed "(hd0) /dev/hda" 9. Now we are ready for the final step - installing grub. Run the following command: grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/hda You may have to modify the above command if your hard disk configuration is different. Refer to Notes (1) for details. On successful installation you should get the following message - "Installation finished. No error reported" 10. Now we are done with the rescue. Remove the CD from the drive and reboot the system to get GRUB with newly added entry. Notes: 1. Hard disk configuration to device name mapping:- Primary Master: /dev/hda Primary Slave: /dev/hdb Secondary Master: /dev/hdc Secondary Slave: /dev/hdd 2. Partition numbers Usually a hard disk is divided into one primary partition and one extended partition. The extended partition is then divided among one or more logical partitions. Primary partition of a disk is numbered 1. (like hda1) Extended partition of a disk is numbered 2. (like hda2) Logical partitions of a disk are numbered starting from 5. (like hda5,hda6)

Desktop Mashups

2006-08-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

Scripting always fascinates me. The thing i like about scripting is the ease with which you can get do something. The final code looks really neat and simple. Though scripting is cool, its needless to say that it has its own drawbacks. Nevertheless it is fun to write scripts to solve some simple problems.

We usually associate scripting with command line interface. But in the realm of GUIs and desktops we can think of different kind of scripting - the "Higher-level scripting". Higher-level scripting involves use of some protocols, like CORBA or DCOP, to interact with high level applications. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is an old classic example of interoperability protocol, which could be implemented to communicate between different applications. But CORBA implementations are usually slow, to be accepted for inter-application non-network communications. So KDE devised DCOP.

DCOP (Desktop Communication Protocol) is a simple protocol used for communication between various KDE applications. DCOP is a simple IPC/RPC mechanism built to operate over sockets. At a high level a KDE application registers with the dcop server, exposing some interface methods. Then inter-application communication is done through the dcop server by passing data in the form of serialised qt objects. KDCOP is a very simple graphical dcop browser and client. There is also a console dcop client called 'dcop'.

To demonstrate the use of the console dcop client i have written a trivial mashup script "Speak Clipboard". As its name says it speaks the contents of the clipboard. To use it just select some text in a browser (or any application) and then run the script to listen to the selected text. For easy access, you can create a shortcut and place it on your desktop sidebar.

The code of "Speak Clipboard" is... #!/bin/bash if [[ $1 = "stop" ]] then dcop ksayit ksayit dcopStop exit fi message=`dcop klipper klipper getClipboardContents` dcop ksayit ksayit dcopSayText "$message"

In the above script I have used KSayIt, a text to speech front for KDE. KTTS (KDE Text to Speech) is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible speech. Text to speech configurations can be done in KDE using KTTSMgr application. It enables setting up various text-to-speech systems like 'festival'.

The example given is very trivial and may be done directly using already existing KDE apps. However we can create really cool KDE mashups using dcop. Just as REST (Representational State Transfer) is fueling the web-mashups, dcop can be used for building their desktop counterparts.

Useful Links: DCOP: Desktop COmmunications Protocol Higher-level Scripting KTTS - KDE Text-to-Speech System Festival Speech synthesis system Article on festival Building Web Services the REST Way

Moto4Lin

2006-08-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

Today most of the manufacturers ship their products with only Windows drivers and client applications. This has become a major stumbling block for the adoption of Linux. The gadget manufacturers feel that it is not worth their effort to provide support to Linux platform for their devices. This lack of concern on their part has made the field of linux device drivers very interesting. With more and more gadgets coming into our lives, getting them to work in Linux will be a nice challenge. Once the numbers turn in favour of Linux, the customer-driven markets will drive the manufacturers to support linux. Till that time we should encourage individual efforts in this direction, and thereby driving the aboption of Linux. This is what makes Linux fun -- trying out new things, experimenting and thereby closely learning the internal system. Moto4Lin is one such effort to provide an interface for Motorolla mobile phones on Linux. I tried this out and it works very well. The application is great but however it is not very well documented(in english), i had to rely on Google translations to get it working. Moto4Lin can be used for exploring the mobile's filesystem and thereby provides an interface for data transfer. I am still figuring out how to access the phonebook and send messages from comp. I tried a couple of KDE apps, but still haven't been able to get them detect my phone. Instructions for installing Moto4Lin: 1. Download p2kmoto and moto4lin packages from here. Moto4Lin requires p2kmoto driver for accessing the filesystem of the phone. 2. Install p2kmoto package from source by running: ./configure && make && make install 3. You may have to add /usr/local/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib 4. Connect the phone to a usb drive using the data cable and test p2kmoto by running p2ktest. This lists the files stored in your phone. 5. moto4lin is a qt appllication, use the following steps to install it qmake && make && make install 6. Start moto4lin and configure the device if required. 7. Click the "Connect" button to connect to the phone. The filesytem of the phone can be browsed using the "File Manager". Useful links 1. Instructions for using Moto4Lin 2. Moto4Lin sourceforge Project

Linux meta-Help

2006-07-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write this article for a long time. Today i have finally made my mind of inking it. When i try out something new, first thing i do is learn how to access the help system of that application. Here i would like to explore some well known ways of getting help in linux.

If you are in a shell and want to know the usage of a command you can do so by passing it "--help" option. This lists various options that can be passed to the command and its expected behaviour. Its purpose is to give a brief description of the command and list its most frequently used options. It is not exhaustive documentation.
To know more about the command you can look at its manual page. Easiest way to view the manual (man) page is by using the man command. As the name suggests this is like a manual of the command. It lists out all possible options that can be used with the command and its expected behaviour. But man pages are not very straightforward to follow. For newbies, man pages are often intimidating. They usually do not provide example usages of the command. However they serve the purpose of being precise and exhaustive manual of the program/utility/function they are documenting.
To get saner and user friendly documentation we can check the command's info page. Usually info pages are more informative than manual pages. The biggest advantage of info pages is that they usually include example usage of the command. They also have hyperlinks, so we can jump from one info page to another, getting a clear understanding of the related terms. A command's info page can be accessed using the info command.

Now given a command we know how to use it. What if we want to do something and don't know which command to use? Most of us frequently face this problem.

Google. Ah, the obvious choice to find any unknown. There is also a linux specific google search channel which can be tried. You may find solutions to your problem in either a forum, mailing list or documentation/howto site.
What if you don't have access to internet (highly improbable)? Anyways, in that can use the apropos command. It searches through manual descriptions of all the commands. This way we can find out the correct command to solve our problem.
whatis is another useful command. It gives short (usually one line) description of the command. Infact the apropos command internally uses the whatis database.

Some handy ways to access these help systems from other applications:-

From vim you can directly open man page of a command/function used by pressing 'K' on it.
konqueror has defined man and info protocols. So from konqueror we can view an info/man page of a command by typing info:command and man:command respectively. These html pages are generated using the info2html utility.

Some related links:-

BugMeNot

2006-06-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

How many times have you been bugged by a site which mandates you to register? Most of the time the registration process is painful, if not it asks for personal info like email address etc. Even though we fake these details we have to nevertheless go through the motions of creating a dummy account. With BugMeNot we need not do this anymore. It contains dummy logins for tons of sites. Yes, this is yet another Web 2.0 site. Users can post new logins, they can vote on the validity of the logins posted by others etc. BugMeNot can be accessed in many ways. There is a firefox plugin which gives bugMeNot context menu. The simplest way to use it is through this bookmarklet. Ofcourse some domains like blogger.com, google.com etc. are blocked to discourage spammers. To learn how to use bookmarklet read this wikipedia article.

Suse Linux 10.1

2006-06-17T05:15:00.000-07:00

This month's edition of Linux For You comes with Suse Linux 10.1 DVD. Going by the encouraging review in the magazine i tried this distro and was impressed by it right from the word go. Novell has packaged this very well. Most of the Linux distro installations these days are really trouble-free, so is Suse. Suse's installer is newbie-friendly. It hides all the bugging details beneath the expert menus and does a neat setup in default configuration mode. One thing which impressed me was the post-installation configuration. After installing the packages from the DVD, it configures the Internet, tests it by fetching the latest release notes from Novell's site and then it prompts for updating installed packages. On choosing this upgrade option it auto detects its package server, shows the list of upgradable packages, installs them and then optionally deletes the downloaded patches, leaving a clean updated system. Switching from FC2 i find a lot of interesting and new stuff to be explored in Suse 10.1, especially KDE 3.5 Trivia - In tribute to 42, SUSE Linux 10.1 was released on 11th May 2006 and dedicated to Douglas Adams on his fifth death anniversary.

Vim tabs

2006-05-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Recently stable version of vim 7.0 was released. TabPage is one of the notable feature additions in Vim 7.0. In the earlier versions tabs could have been (sort of) simulated using buffers. Now we can explicitly create tabs and have multiple windows within them. Some vim settings that i have done to make tabbed vimming more convenient (firefox-ish):- 1. Clicking on a file should open it in existing gvim but in a new tab For this i have created a batch file in which gvim is invoked with --remote-tab-silent option ( gvim --remote-tab-silent %1 ). Then i have associated the text files which were previously bound to open with gvim to be opened using this batch file. 2. Creating new tab using Ctrl-t Added following mapping to the vimrc file -- map :tabnew In vim we can shift tabs using [tabnumber]gt and in gvim we can also use the more familiar Ctrl-[pageUp/pageDown] shortcuts by default.

To know more about Vim's tabpage feature check out the documentation at http://www.polarfox.com/vim/manual/v70/tabpage.html or :help tabpage from within vim. A good review of some cool features introduced in vim 7.0 http://bhaskarvk.info/vim70-review-00.html

Some memorable events of my recent trips

2006-05-14T05:52:00.000-07:00

Goa drive to anjuna beach little Vagator saturday Night bazaar shopkeeper wanting to kiss shobith aka karate kid yummy Crabs dancing Dolphins Gokarna just about managing to board the Bus Power & Avs: Bus nahi mili kaa... Cool waters of gokarna, kudlu, Om & paradise beaches Dandeli (Pfunk)TiKu & Bappi: Now or Never traveling on top of Gule Irfan river Rafting Night forest trek -- spotting Tigers and lots of flying Squirels and night Jars

TiddlyWiki - wiki journal

2006-05-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

This is a very nice way to provide the power of wiki to a journal. Main advanatages of a wiki:-

Very easy to create and edit content
Neednot worry about the html syntax
Interlinking the articles in like punctuating words

One major disadvantage of a wiki is that it expects us to learn new conventions for formating and linking texts. If one is already familiar with html, this is a bit irritating untill one gets used to the new wiki conventions. Some interesting features of TiddlyWiki:-

It is purely html and javascript based, so works on any browser, best on firefox.
It doesnot depend on any server technology
All the content is in one html page

Some journal specific features of TiddlyWiki:-

One click creation of new date stamp titled journal entry
Generates xml feeds
Allows tagging of entries ( here an entry is called a tiddler )
Searching of tiddlers, including regex search capabilities
Though it is non-linear, it gives a timeline view

Paying respect to the Legend...

2006-04-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

In the wake of demise of Dr Rajkumar, fondly known as Annavaru, i would like to remember the great soul. There is no exageration when we say that Raj was the greatest thing to happen for Kannada film industry. He acted in over 200 films showcasing his acting and singing prowess. People who had gathered in lakhs over the last couple of days to pay homage to the departed soul, speaks of his popularity among his fans, whom he used to refer to as "Abhimani Devarugalu".

Some of the reasons for his popularity among Kannadigas:-

Only kannada. Though we got many offers to act in non-kannada films, he stuck to his stand of acting only in kannada films. He also played his part in Gokak Cheluvali, started to uplift the kannada language.
No politics. With the kind of fan following he had in karnataka, any person would have been tempted to join politics, float a party etc.. But Annavaru didnot succumb to this temptation. His justification for not joining politics was that, in politics one has to divide and rule, pit against others etc., these things were not of Raj's liking.
Upheld Middle-Class values in his movies and real life. As Dr Ananth Murthy noted on TV yesterday, Dr Raj's movies used to showcase the middle-class values like respecting your parents and elders, love for children etc.
Actor-Singer duo. Apart from being a great actor, Annavaru was also a great singer. It is really rare to find a leading actor also being a leading singer of a film industry.
Modest soul. When Raj was offered Karnataka Ratna award he refused to accept the honor ahead of Kuvempu, the great Kannada author. This speaks of Dr Raj's modesty.

Though he was educated only till 3rd Std, he cherished some great values, which are worth emulating. Some of the honors that were conferred to him:-

Dadha Saheb palke award
Padhmabushan
Karnataka Ratna
Honorary Doctrate from Mysore university
Many National, State and Filmfare awards for best actor and singer

All this said, it is true that there are people who question his contribution to the society. There are many ways in which one can contribute to the society. You can do it the Sir M Vishweshvarayya way by striving for people by his services, or the Narayana Murthy way by improving the economic strata of the society or the Dr Rajkumar way by inspiring people to develop good values, raising social awareness, demonstrating his strong will, determination, modesty etc.

Its really sad to see people engaged in violent activities on the demise of this great hero. There is no justification in turning their grief into violence and causing damage to public property and lives of others.

Read more about Raj at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajkumar PS: Most of the comments made in this post may be reflecting opinions expressed on TV over the last couple of days.

Motorola V3

2006-02-25T12:09:00.000-08:00

Today I bought a Motorola RAZRV3. It is sleek, solid and looks great. Some enviable features of Moto V3 --

2.2 inch 176 x 220 pixel 64K color TFT display
Sleek metallic body
Feather touch keypad
Weight: 95 grams
External color display
Polyphonic speaker with MP3 ringer support
Bluetooth enabled

There are lots of other phones which have better features ( like extendable memory, better camera ) and priced less than the Motorola V3. But these are no way close to the superlative design of Moto V3. It just rocks... When people put their brains and heart while designing a product it is sure to sell. This is very well justified in the case of iPod. iPod is prefered over other cheaper and feature-rich mp3-players because of its design aesthetics and highly intutive user interface. Motorola seems to have finally learnt the importance of intuitive user interface. PS: I hope phone manufacturers will stop naming their models using weird 4-digit numbers, and instead have some simple names.

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

2006-02-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard has a list of Keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. It gives shortcuts for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows users of Firefox. It also lists the corresponding shortcuts for Opera and Internet Explorer, provided they have the corresponding feature. Some very useful ones among them...

Previous tab - Ctl PageUp
Next tab - Ctl PageDown
Location Bar - Ctl L
Open Addr in new tab - Alt Enter
Web Search - Ctl K

vim file-explorer

2006-02-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

VIM has always been my favourite text editor. As a programmer, i enjoy the power it gives me through features like regular expression search, word completion, beautiful highlighting, auto indentation, macro definitions, system shell interface etc. vim being a command prompt tool, all these features come at the cost of getting used to some key combinations. Some people feel it is not worth to break ones head in remembering some *weird* key strokes to do things as simple as editing a text file. Such people prefer using graphical editors like kate, which also provide some of these good features in an easy to use menu option or through an intuitive shortcut. And if you are a java programmer it is always an advantage to use IDEs like eclipse or netbeans which come bundled with tons of features like object browser, method completion, syntax checker, exhaustive code formatter, debugger etc. But we all know the amount of resources these powerfull IDEs require to provide all these flashy features. But the command line tools like vim are the only hope when you are required to connect to a remote m/c through telnet or ssh and are devoid of the luxuries of graphical user interfaces. Having said all that, i still appreciate GUI tools and so i use the Gvim - a more convinient version of vim, for text-editing and eclipse for java programming. This way i can always remain in a familiar environment whether it is a local desktop or a remote ssh session. Being forced to use MS windows at work, i hate to find my explorer going for a toss every now and then for reasons beyond my comprehension. So i tried out some replacements like servant salamander but ended up using by favourite text editor also as a file browser. VIM has a very useful *file-explorer* plugin which can be used for browsing or exploring directories or files. This file-explorer plugin comes in the default vim installation. This is lauched when you open a directory in vim or by pressing :E in vim. If you are using Gvim then you can even click on the names of the files to open them. There is a preview option in which it splits the window and displays the contents of the selected file in the newly created buffer. This is particularly useful when you are trying to look at the contents of a bunch of text files. To realise the utility of this embedded vim file-explorer think of a case when you have a directory containing 100s of text files and you have to search for certain file names and examine their contents. With vim you can do a simple regular expression search for the file name in that directory, preview its contents and then move on to next matching file name. Doing the same thing using the windows explorer and an external editor is quite a task. Some basic vimrc options to customise the *file-explorer* behaviour:-

let g:explVertical=1 " Split vertically
let g:explSplitRight=1    " Put new window to the right of the explorer

To get the complete list of options type :help file-explorer in vim. Similar documentation can also be found at http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/pi_expl.html PS: I have avoided mentioning emacs - "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor", because i found it too complex to handle.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

2006-01-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

I recently read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". I liked the way Eric Raymond has effectively discussed the two models of s/w development or evolution which he aptly calls Cathedral and Bazaar models. In this essay Eric uses his own project fetchmail to substantiate how the Bazaar model of s/w development is much supperior to the Cathedral model. He also discusses about the things that need to be done to get an open source project off the blocks. I like his style of putting things accross. Some comments and extracts from this revolutionary essay

Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. He dubs this as Linus's Law
Every good work of s/w starts by scratching a developers itch
Good programers know what to write, great ones know what to rewrite and reuse
Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow -- Brooks. This essay frequently refers to the theories of Brooks discussed in his book The Mythical ManMonth. Eric very cleverly explains how the Linux's successful model of development doesnot contradict some of Brook's theory.
If you want to get it right be ready to start over atleast once.
If you have right attitude interesting things will find you
When you lose interest in a program your last duty towards it is to hand it over to a competent person
Treating users as co-developers is the most hassle free route to rapid code development & effective debugging
He discusses 2 tier model of development i) Cathedral mode core ii) Bazzar mode toolbox. Examples of such projects are Emacs, MATLAB
Release early, release often and listen to your customers
He explains the theory of Knowledge of Masses. Averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. --Delphi's law
More users find more bugs
Make distinction between stable & cutting edge versions by the version number
He talks about advantages of having source-aware beta testers.
Adding more men to a late project makes it latter.-- Brook's Law. The Bazaar model doesnot violate Brook's law because it usually has a small core group of developers
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. This one is analogous to Brook's observation
If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Exploration essentially by diffusion, followed by exploitation mediated by a scalable communication mechanism :- is applicable to s/w world aswell
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets
For Bazaar model to work well you should start from something & should be able to attract people
He also talks about Egoless Programming - developers not being territorial about their code
For the success of bazaar model "Severe effort of many converging wills" is required and not "principle of command".
More heads are better than one, if the coordinator is good and the communication medium is powerful like the internet
In closed commercial s/w development, people have to be motivated to do boring but necessary drudgework. Very True...
A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Hope my manager looks at this :-)
Enjoyment predicts efficiency
Play is the most economically efficient way of creative work.
Open source is not magic pixie dust

India Rocks

2006-01-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

I justed watched a program on CNN-IBN called India Rocks. It showcased some of the famous and upcoming music bands of India. Going by the theme of Republic Day all the songs which were aired were patriotic. This program was a bit hatke. Every song that was telecast was interlaced with the members of the band talking about the inspiration for the song and expressing their feelings of being proud of India. There were artists like rabbi, lucky ali, indian occean, euphoria etc.. Of these, the band Indian Occean was the most hatke in their music and lyrics. During the program, in between songs, people used to chant some praises for these bands and also express their deep patriotism. I am not trying to be sarcastic here, when i refer to being patriotic. I am also not expressing my angst against the innumerable patriotic movies / books / songs which are being thrown at us year after year. It always sells to be patriotic. It is one of the most touching rasa's of all. So it obviously makes sense to pluck some patriotic strings and take to the hearts of the people. After all these patriotic jibes, the program ended with a song from Rabbi in which he questions all the so called proud to be Indians what they were upto when Gujrat was burning in riots, when a man was shot dead for speaking truth... This man ( i don't remember his name) was the inspiration for this song by Rabbi and is honestly touching.

Using ipod on Linux

2006-01-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

GTKPod provides a Cross-platform multilingual interface to Apple's ipod. With gtkpod it is very easy to use ipod on linux:- 1. Create a directory /mnt/ipod 2. Mount ipod into this directory 3. Read from ipod using gtkpod 4. Add / Remove songs from the file / directory listing in gtkpod 5. Sync the new contents into the ipod 6. Unmount ipod and start listening to your favourite music If your music is in audio cds, then all you need is Grip to rip and encode it into mp3 format. Simple steps to rip a cd using grip:- 1. In Grip select the tracks to be ripped from the cd 2. In Config/Rip/Ripper tab you may choose [ grip (cdparanoia) ] as the ripper and provide suitable location and rip file format [ like ~/Music/Album/%n.wav ] 3. In Config/Encode/Encoder choose a suitable encoder

lame - for encoding mp3 files
oggenc - for encoding ogg vorbis files

4. You can also choose suitable location and Encode file format [ like ~/Music/Album/%n.mp3 ] 5. In Config/Encode/Options tab you can also give Location and M3U file format [ like ~/Music/Album.m3u ] 6. With all these settings done, from the Rip tab you can either

Rip only - to extract .wav files
Rip+Encode - to get .mp3 or .ogg files

From the ipod you can play .wav files or .mp3 files. To play .ogg vorbis files you have to choose other portable music players like iRiver... Some useful links:-

In the cockpit

2005-12-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday i attended Aero Sports Jamboree held at the Jakkur airfield in the outskirts of Bengalooru. As part of the event, joyrides were offered in Microlight aircrafts like zenair, x-air and power glidders. For the sake of getting a feel of the cockpit i decided to go for a joy ride. I wanted to go on a power glidders but because of huge demand for these glidders, i was put on zenair - a two-seater microlight aircraft . The pilot was Capt Arvind Sharma, director of Agni Aero Sports, a really cool guy. I started the aircraft just like starting a car using an ignition key, but with my left hand. It was a great feeling to start a plane. After a series of acknowledgements from the command post, the Capt steered the aircraft to the run-way. Then we did a quick take-off. For the first time in my life i felt like literally flying on my own. Once in the air, the pilot let me handle the plane closely. We shared a common handle ( like a driving school car having two steerings ) to control the aircraft, but the throtle was fully under his control. After a small circuit in the air over the Jakkur village, getting a birds eye view of Bangalore city, we lined the aircraft to the runway and made a smooth landing. After landing i expected the aircraft to cruise along the runway and slowly come to halt. But to my surprise, soon after landing, the pilot did a U-turn, like going around in a Maruti car on an empty road. When i was taking leave, the Capt said - "Never let computer fly a plane". This remark of his has left me pondering over the issues of "Our dependence on computers" and "Where should we stop with computerisation of things?". Even if it is easy to replace a human with a computer for doing a certain task, we should deliberate on the issue, because in many cases there is more to "human touch" than to "mechanical accuracy".

My new Shuffle

2005-12-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

Last week i got my IPod Shuffle. Its has 512MB storage space - thats about 100 songs capacity. After installing the s/w ( itunes player ) which ships with it, i started looking for some stuff to play on my new Shuffle. Browsing through the itunes music stores, looking for some free stuff, i ended up in the podcast section. There is a good collection of podcasts listed here. I subscribed for a few ITC( IT Conversation ) feeds. Some of the podcasts listed in the ITC Open source channel interested me. Of the few i listened to i particularly liked the talks of Paul Graham, the co-founder of Viaweb, the first Application service provider. I listened to his talk, titled "Great Hackers", delivered during O'Reilly Open Source Convention (2004). Paul Graham is a very opinionated person. In this speech he makes fun of IBM by saying, " .. no startup can think of being the next Microsoft unless there is another IBM which will be ready to bend over at the right moment... ". Seeing the way things have come along over the past few decades, this makes sense. Paul Graham looks down upon people programming in Java when compared to those working with languages like python or C. Being a java programmer myself, i don't completely agree with this. It is one thing to get the desired output and another to think of the programming language to use. I feel the choice of programming language not just depends upon personal expertise or liking but more on situational requirements.

How not to brake?

2005-12-11T08:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday i went on a bike ride to Nandi hills. It was a nice experience. I pushed my bike to its full limit, sometimes wishing it was more powerfull. On a good highway strech I managed to almost touch 100kph. The trip was marred by a freaky accident. While coming back to bangalore, I lost balance and my fierro sliped off the road. It was again due to my crazy braking, applying only front disk brakes. First time when i slipped, when in college, it was Katte who was sitting behind me, and now it was Kojesh's turn. This was his first accident on road. Probably when Katte fell it was his first accident too. So I seem to be building a great reputation here. Its only matter of days before my mom finds out about this incident, when she sees my torn pants. But for now, I have managed to keep it under covers, and hope to get their nod for my future bike trips around the city.

FOSS.in 2005

2005-12-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

FOSS.in 2005 concluded yesterday. This event was previously called Linux Bangalore. It was great to see the open source gurus in person. Events like these are surely a source of inspiration. The event ended with a Rock show by the band Phenom. The FOSS.in 2005 had a record number of talks & BOFs, second only to OReilly's open source conference. The event was studded by people like Adrew Cowie, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdof, Harald Welte, Jonathan Corbet etc. In this event, which was spread over 4 days, one speaker who caught by imagination was Adrew Cowie. His casual and open style of putting things was really cool. Only other person whom i have seen with such a distinctive style is Miguel De Icaza. Having attended all four days of the event, i fully enjoyed the conference and am looking forward for its next edition. After attending the FOSS.in convention i have decided not to - steal s/w & music. So, i deleted the pirated proprietary s/w and songs from my PC, and now have only free and open source software running on my box. It really feels good.

The great Indian site

2005-11-20T07:01:00.000-08:00

National Informatics Center(NIC) has recently released india.gov.in - the official site of government of India. Unlike other sites of NIC this one is very refreshing. It has a very good, easy to navigate template. It is no IE specific crappy asp coded pages. It is built using php and is probably running on a GNU/Linux server. Most of the pages load quickly. The site has tons of information and surely is serving its purpose of being a one-stop place for things related to India. It has links for official documents like budget, five year plan, Constitution of India etc. The "Know India" section is the one i liked the most. This has subsections like the Profile of India, National symbols, Culture/Heritege, States, Photo Gallery and also a kids section( not joking ). Going through these pages it was like reading history and geography books during school days. Reading about the history of India ( from Indus Valley Civilisation to partition of India ) and about the various geographic features of the country, brought back the memories of the good old school days. As they say "Those were the days". Apart from these educative things the portal has other useful links like directory, maps, photo gallery, who's who and also a e-greeting facility. The site has seperate section for citizens of India. This site is worth exploring.

Google Adsense Referral

2005-11-12T11:57:00.000-08:00

Google Adsense has added a new referrals feature. This allows website publishers to increase their adsense revenue by referring more people to Google Adsense. Thats the button you see at the top right corner of this page. What are you waiting for? Click the button and start making some money ;-) The interesting part of the Google Referral scheme is that it is also encouraging people to refer others to use "Firefox browser with google toolbar". Google will pay 1 USD for every such referral. This feature is currently available only for web publishers who reside in US, but it will soon be open for others as well. With Microsoft and Yahoo showing their intentions of having a tieup to counter Google's recent successes in the webservices domain, Google is trying to take both its rivals in one shot with this new referral campaign. Google's support for Firefox will go a long way in popularising the browser. Its not long before Firefox challenges Microsoft IE as the leading browser. How i am waiting for this to happen???

What a cook?

2005-11-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

I'm loving it. Having weekends off, after a long time, i have taken to cooking. Last weekend i was on a role and prepared Mutton Masala. Suprisingly it was awesome and we managed to finish it. This has given me enough courage to go on with my new found passion. Tonight i was looking for some recipes online. Karthik suggested me sanjeevkapoor.com. On this site you can find recipes prepared by Sanjeev Kapoor. Unfortunately access to most of these require annual subscription, which costs 750Rs but comes with 3 best selling books of sanjeev kumar, which actually cost 750Rs when bought. However there are around 38 free recipes to try out. I will be having a shot at Mahorba Mushroom tommorow. It looks good, let me see how i end up doing it. Apart from these recipes the site also has some interesting sections:-

Fun-n-Food - some trivia about food and quiz section
Cuisine - has fundae about various cuisines from hyderabadi to parsi, ...
Glossary - glosary of ingredients, cooking techniques etc from english to indian languages
Tips & Tricks etc.

I hope to keep this passion of mine alive, but it all depends on what i manage to do tommorow.

Windows Live

2005-11-03T22:20:00.000-08:00

With Windows Live MS is venturing into the online services sector in a big way. Though Windows live.com is not a novel idea it comes in a good package. With efforts like these they are directly competing with the Google, claiming their share in the pie. One thing Microsoft is trying to do with this is to build a "community" of users, like its rival Google. According to Microsoft the launch of live.com doesnot come in the way of its existing msn.com and its services. Windows Live.com is a site into which user can login with their microsoft .net passport. The page can be customised by adding various gadgets like Mail previewer, Horoscopes, Stock Quotes, Clock, Shopping tool etc. There are many more cool gadgets available at microsoftgadgets.com. Some of the things i have on my page are:-

TODO list
Google News Top stories
Weather forecast
Word of the day

Apart from the live.com the Windows Live includes

Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Care , etc..

To know more about these services check the site ideas.live.com. sandbox.msn.com is the MSN equivalent of Google labs. It is a place where all the cool ideas of MSN are put on display. Start.com is one such cool idea.