Check out what’s new in this version in the video here, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/firefox-3.5.html

Happy foxing…

When I queried about this on #archlinux on freenode, I was told to install openntpd. I did that abd voila! scrobble works fine now. IRC rules.

About my health, the reason I have been away from blogging (again)… I have been having a constant stomach ache (much like I used to get back when I was 10). Nothing else, no other symptom. Only the stomach ache… like someone has kicked me hard Once I get over it (which may be in a day or two), I will be back again. I have also been working on an article I am trying to get published in Linux PRO magazine about using an old computer as a download slave. That also has to be completed before 22nd of this month…

Seeya!

In another event, I finally joined twitter as adibis (www.twitter.com/adibis). It looks fun. Not sure how long it will be able to keep me engulfed in there.

And lastly, my laptop has gone kaput again. This time it were those hinges that secure the screen to the keyboard that broke. It’s a plastic part and is not covered under warranty. So, I have to pay. First those morons made me pay 300 bucks to give the quotation about the matter. Then they took 3+ days to give the quotation and now they tell me I have to spend 27K on a freaking old laptop and get the entire screen changed (which I mind you is NOT damaged AT ALL). They really are morons aren’t they. /me makes a mental note to ask about hinges change while buying new laptops from now on.

I will be back with some good posts in a while. Finally convinced mom to let me install openSUSE on her desktop. I am using it now. Until the final word about the laptop is reached. Just installed SUSE yesterday. So, I am in update + additional S/W install phase. Will see ya all later, maybe with review of SliTaZ…

#!/bin/bash
 
dbus-send --session --dest=org.gnome.ScreenSaver \ 
--type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=20000 \ 
/org/gnome/ScreenSaver org.gnome.ScreenSaver.Lock
 
xset dpms force off

It may NOT work for everyone. Many old monitors and few CRTs are not supported by xset. Try giving

sleep 1; xset dpms forse off

as a normal user and see if your monitor allows this.

Note :- This does NOT work as root. DO NOT LOGIN AS ROOT.

Marks obtained by slavish submission are NOT worth it…

The college is starting to suck more and more again and again. Every teacher, as usual (except for a few exceptions, as usual) has started giving the submission now. I mean, COME ON ALREADY. It’s the last week of the college. We are supposed to appear for our final viva’s in next week and instead of studying for them, we are forced to do clerk work of copying last year’s journal and assignments. Because, as it is, the time is so short that one cannot hope to read the book, prepare assignment answers by himself/herself and then write them down.

So, I ask the readers of my blog, (if there are any left, since I don’t get much time to write here these days) to please tell me why most of the teachers behave like this. I am sick and tired of all the submission.

On an ending note (high) my third article in featuring in this month’s Linux for You magazine. Please read it and do send in your comments and suggestions. The article is about Wireless Intrusion Detection, need and scope under Linux. Problems faced and the current situation in general.

Back to clerk work….

I have been feeling like I have not been doing anything but do the dirty college submission stuff for a little too long. There has not been any practical work done in a LONG time, electronics or computer. Though there has been a LOT of heavy workload in the college about Electronic System Design subject. We are currently designing Frequency Synthesizer circuits during practical hours and I have written yet another article for the Linux for You magazine. This will be my third article published in an international magazine if they chose to accept it. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

With all this, I have been feeling a little off paced with electronics right now. So, I had been thinking of actually doing something to come out of the phase and come up with some creative idea or project.  I was stumbling through the subject ‘microcontroller’ to see if anything triggers my mind when I came across ucHobby. It is a blog about ideas and articles related to microcontrollers and project ideas as well. I was lucky and found some interesting posts there.

I have decided to make a gyroscpoe based air-mouse project in the holidays. There are a lot of articles and source code lying around about the air-mouse with accelerometer. Which use the tilt based motion tracking. Gyroscopes can be used to make the mouse angular position based tracking system. I was looking for more information on this when I found an article about microcontroller classes at cornel unoversity. One of the best sites for AVR based projects to get your ideas flowing. This is another interesting article, about generic array logic. To all my classmates, GAL is the younger brother of the FPGA and CPLD we are learning these days. The most important point from students point of view is, they are much more low cost than the FPGA or CPLDs, but then again, it does not understand VHDL unless someone writes a parser that converts GAL code to VHDL or Verilog for easy transfer. Moving on…

So far I had been just doing some timepass on that site, but then I found what I was looking for. Articles about the air mouse. Using WiiMote with an explanation of the code, using accelerometer inside your normal mouse and PIC <<- interesting from the point that I might not have to build a mouse protocol look-up table in my controller… I am going to use AVR though.

Looks like all the designs, whether using accelerometer, wiimote or gyroscopes, make use of similar principle and that is, Analog output of the sensor is converted to digital by the controller. Displacement is calculated based on initial calibrated value and finally the values are converted to the serial/ps2/USB pointer interrupts to make it move on the screen. I am on the right track, so you might soon see the usual posts about, I burned an LED and I burned an SCR just for the fun of it.. or was it I forkBombed my college lab computer??  I need more caffeine, kudos!