Pros:

• Numar intr-o retea fixa in Romania, in formatul 0373-3XX.XXX
• Preturi foarte mici de sunat in Romania (aprox. 80 de minute pentru 1 euro)
• Costul de a fii sunat din Romania e la fel de mic …
• Plata in regim pre-pay
• Client SIP online (flash) care merge bine – doar ca suna foarte tare (si urat) cand primesti un apel
• Posibilitatea de a folosi orice alt client SIP (pe calculator sau pe telefonul mobil) sau orice telefon cu suport VoIP

Cons:

• Nu am folosit serviciul prea mult sa ma pronunt asupra calitatii

Digging into /var/logs/auth.log I saw:

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): authentication failure; logname=user uid=0 euid=0 tty=/dev/pts/42 ruser= rhost=

sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): conversation failed

sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): auth could not identify password for [user]

Not a very intuitive error … especially as I knew the password was right (no caps lock stuff going on). After going through the incredible hassle of reading the /etc/pam.d/ configurations, I ended up in /etc/krb5.conf where I toggled the debug switch from false to true:

[appdefaults]

pam = {

  debug = true

  ticket_lifetime = 36000

  renew_lifetime = 36000

  forwardable = true

  krb4_convert = false

}

Taking a look at the output in auth.log – the error became clear:

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): pam_sm_authenticate: entry (0x8000)

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): (user user) attempting authentication as user@DOMAIN

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): (user user) krb5_get_init_creds_password: Clock skew too great

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): authentication failure; logname=user uid=0 euid=0 tty=/dev/pts/42 ruser= rhost=

sudo: pam_krb5(sudo:auth): pam_sm_authenticate: exit (failure)

Never thought I’d get an authentication failure because my clock was off by 6 minutes!

After I updated my clock:

sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Everything went back to normal.

Conclusions: debug mode rules, error messages are never explicit and very many times overloaded, always have a backup way of getting into your system (don’t trust LDAP, trust local!)

For a long time now I have been trying to get the “perfect” working environment on my desktop (in this case, Ubuntu). My requirements for this are simple:

• Everything (well, almost everything) should be grep-able (documents, presentations, tasks, mails, chats)
• A tiling window manager – as screens on desktops tend to be large and wide, I find no reason for having windows stacked
• Multiple desktop support in the window manager (each one customized for a specialized task)
• The ability to start all my applications after login and to place each of them on predefined desktop
• Have unitary settings between home desktop, work desktop, laptops, etc

After some tinkering and time spent on getting there, I finally got to check most of the requirements. The tools of trade are the following:

1. Dropbox for sync-ing configurations, logs, to-do lists and the sorts
2. The awesome window manager
3. Emacs as text editor
4. Org-mode in Emacs for tasks, to-do lists and presentations (yes, I write all my slides in org-mode)
5. Auctex mode in Emacs LaTeX for documents
6. Urxvt as terminal
7. Finch for communication (Pidgin tends to be ugly to manage in a tiling window manager, and really – I just want to write text in my messages – why all the useless UI?)
8. Elinks for command line browsing (yes, you can open GMail in elinks without any problem)

1. Dropbox

Every script, config file or to-do list goes in here. It runs on linux, windows, mac os, iphone, android – basically anywhere you have internet you’ll get it!

Just go to their web site, download the .deb file say to ~/kits/ and install it:

sudo dpkg --install nautilus-dropbox_0.6.3_amd64.deb

Create a new account (or use your existing one) and point it to a folder of your choice – say ~/Dropbox/, and create a Configs folder in there to hold all your configurations and a Logs file for sync-ing all your communications.

mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/Configs/
mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/Logs/

2. The awesome window manager

Well – it really is awesome! Just install it:

sudo apt-get install awesome

And then set it up by creating the configuration file you want (in lua). You can start from the default configuration:

mkdir -p ~/.config/awesome/
cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/Dropbox/Configs/
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Configs/rc.lua ~/.configs/awesome/
$EDITOR ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua

Or alternatively you can take a look at the one that I’m using rc.lua (note that I also use this runonce.lua script that should also be in your config).

Final let’s make awesome start when you login:

touch ~/Dropbox/Configs/.xinitrc
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Configs/.xinitrc ~/
$EDITOR ~/.xinitrc

A very simple version of it should look like this (it will just start awesome):

#!/bin/sh
exec awesome

We’ll later add some more stuff here, but it’s fine for the time being!

3. Emacs all over the place

Both in “-snapshot-gtk” and console mode. Give it a spin – it’s one command away:

sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

Once you have it installed, you might want to update the ~/.xinitrc in order to fire up Emacs server so that you can you emacs client.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/emacs-snapshot --daemon &
exec awesome

4. org-mode for getting things done and presentations, Auctex for LaTeX in Emacs

A simple intro to what org-mode can do can be seen on Youtube as a Google TechTalk. It will cover most of the “getting things done” scenarios.

For using it as a presentation creation tool, I have managed to intertwine it with the beamer package which creates .pdf presentations out of LaTeX markup.

If you love LaTeX and Emacs, Auctex is just the normal way to do things. If you’ve read so far you probably see why I like Emacs and LaTeX!

Get everything you need for this step (LaTeX via texlive, latex-beamer, R, auctex and org-mode)

sudo apt-get install texlive latex-beamer r-base ess auctex org-mode

4.1. Setup Auctex

Place the following in your .emacs.el file (code based on www-users.math.umd.edu/~halbert/getcontent.cgi?code+emacs)

;; AUCTeX
(setq TeX-auto-save t)
(setq TeX-parse-self t)
;set up AUCTeX to deal with multiple file documents.
(setq-default TeX-master nil)
;turn on pdf-mode.  AUCTeX will call pdflatex to compile instead of latex.
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'TeX-PDF-mode)
;turn on flyspell mode - this will automatically spell check the document in LaTex-mode
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

4.2. Setting up org-mode

(require 'org-install)

4.3. The skeleton to get the beamer working in org-mode

First we need to inform org-mode about handling beamer class (the code is based on emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/10/writing-presentations-with-org-mode-and.html).

; allow for export=>beamer by placing
;; #+LaTeX_CLASS: beamer in org files
(unless (boundp 'org-export-latex-classes)
(setq org-export-latex-classes nil))
(add-to-list 'org-export-latex-classes
;; beamer class, for presentations
'("beamer"
  "\\documentclass[11pt]{beamer}\n
  \\mode<{{{beamermode}}}>\n
  \\usetheme{{{{beamertheme}}}}\n
  \\usecolortheme{{{{beamercolortheme}}}}\n
  \\beamertemplateballitem\n
  \\setbeameroption{show notes}
  \\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}\n
  \\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}\n
  \\usepackage{hyperref}\n
  \\usepackage{color}
  \\usepackage{listings}
  \\lstset{numbers=none,language=[ISO]C++,tabsize=4,
  frame=single,
  basicstyle=\\small,
  showspaces=false,showstringspaces=false,
  showtabs=false,
  keywordstyle=\\color{blue}\\bfseries,
  commentstyle=\\color{red},
  }\n
  \\usepackage{verbatim}\n
  \\institute{{{{beamerinstitute}}}}\n
  \\subject{{{{beamersubject}}}}\n"
  org-beamer-sectioning
  ("\\section{%s}" . "\\section*{%s}")
  ("\\begin{frame}[fragile]\\frametitle{%s}"
  "\\end{frame}"
  "\\begin{frame}[fragile]\\frametitle{%s}"
  "\\end{frame}")
))

;; Set up skeletons (see below) in a menu in ORG MODE mode
(defvar org-org-menu)
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook
(lambda () (easy-menu-add-item org-org-menu nil ["Skeletons" nil t])
(easy-menu-add-item org-org-menu '("Skeletons") ["Beamer Theme" orgmode-beamer-my-skeleton t])))
(define-skeleton orgmode-beamer-my-skeleton
  "inserts a simple orgmode-beamer template skeleton - use C-c C-e d to build the pdf"
  nil
  "#+LaTeX_CLASS: beamer\n"
  "#+MACRO: BEAMERMODE presentation\n"
  "#+MACRO: BEAMERCOLORTHEME dove\n"
  "#+MACRO: BEAMERSUBJECT RMRF\n"
  "#+BEAMER_FRAME_LEVEL: 2\n"
  "#+COLUMNS: %35ITEM %10BEAMER_env(Env) %10BEAMER_envargs(Env Args) %4BEAMER_col(Col) %8BEAMER_extra(Extra)\n"
  "#+OPTIONS: tags:nil\n"
  "#+MACRO: BEAMERINSTITUTE My Affiliation\n"
  "#+AUTHOR: Tudor-Ioan Salomie\n"
  "\n"
  "#+TITLE: Presentation title\n"
  "\n"
  "\n"
  "* My Section\n"
  "\n"
  "** Frame 1 \\\\ with a subtitle\n"
  "\n"
  "*** Idea\n"
  "\n"
  "#+begin_LaTeX\n"
  "\n"
  "#+end_LaTeX\n"
  "\n\n\n"
)

4.4. Using R for graphs

First we need to load the required .el-s for using org-R mode. For this modify your .emacs.el to include:

(load "ess-site.el")
(load "org-R.el")

Now we can have a simple .org file like the following one below (the sample presented is based on orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-R/org-R.php).

To create the plot from the data in the org-mode table called continuous-data, press C-c C-c on a line that starts with #+R (you can use #+RR to pass in more R commands that do not generate plots – just to setup your environment in R).

To create the final .pdf file, do C-c C-e d.

The same things can be used in the beamer mode skeleton based org-mode files above.

* My plots
#+R: action:hist columns:1 colour:hotpink
#+R: intable:continuous-data outfile:"out.pdf" title:"My Plot"

* Some sample data :noexport:
#+TBLNAME:continuous-data
|            values |
|-------------------|
| -2.48627002467785 |
|  -4.0196287273144 |
| -3.43471960580471 |
| -5.21985294534255 |
| -3.84201126431028 |
| -1.72912705369668 |
| -2.86703950990613 |
| -2.82292622464752 |
| -4.43246430621368 |
| -1.03188727658288 |
| 0.882823532068805 |
|  3.28641606039499 |
|  3.56029698321959 |
|  2.91946660223152 |
|  2.32506089804876 |
|   3.3606298511366 |
|  5.19883523425104 |
|  4.86141359164329 |
|  2.90073505260204 |
|  4.21163939487907 |

Update: As promised here is a screen shot. It shows in awesome wm, my emacs in org-mode with the “source code” of a sample presentation and the output in acrobat reader.
The presentation is all self-contained in one file (except for the beamer theme): structure, images, data for plots and plots.

Org-Mode for presentations

5. urxvt terminal

Well – I guess I have a sweet-spot for this terminal. It’s very easy to configure, it runs in a client-server mode and it does its job!

Install it:

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Configure it via the ~/.Xdefaults file:

touch ~/Dropbox/Configs/.Xdefaults
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Configs/.Xdefaults ~/
$EDITOR ~/.Xdefaults

And now you can have the following settings:

URxvt.buffered:         true
URxvt.background:       black
URxvt.foreground:       white
URxvt.cursorColor:      green
URxvt.underlineColor:   yellow
URxvt.perl-ext-common:  default,tabbed,matcher,clipboard
URxvt.title:            My Console
URxvt*saveLines:	32767
URxvt.urlLauncher:      ~/Dropbox/Configs/open_link.sh
URxvt.matcher.button:   1

Where the the ~/Dropbox/Configs/open_link.sh file uses google-chrome to open a link when you click it in the terminal:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/google-chrome "$@"

6. Finch

Yes, like Pidgin, Finch bears the name of a bird too. The cool thing is that you can get two birds with one stone! Both Pidgin and Finch rely on libpurple which makes them share the same settings, configurations, accounts, etc. They are just two different UIs for the same thing. Switching from one to the other is just starting launching the one that you want!

Install it (the libnotify-bin gives us the notify-send tool to show pop-us)

sudo apt-get install finch pidgin libnotify-bin

Relink the logs (if you have the ~/.purple/logs/ folder, move it first to ~/Dropbox/Logs/)

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Logs/logs ~/.purple/

Add a notification plugin, that will use the awesome notification system to pop-up a red box when you get a message (*)

mkdir -p ~/.purple/plugins/
touch ~/.purple/plugins/knotifications.pl
$EDITOR ~/.purple/plugins/knotifications.pl

And place in it the code from my version of knotifications.pl (customize as you want).

The changes that I did to the script are simple, I have re-routed the notification calls in received_im_msg_handler and received_chat_msg_handler functions from show_popup to show_my_popup. All other notifications were disabled in the code (commented out).

Update: And here is a screenshot of Finch!

Awesome WM and Finch (all in urxvt)

7. elinks

Many times I just want to get to a site fast, no switching to a google-chrome or firefox instance. Just hit a link and have it pop up in a terminal window.

sudo apt-get install elinks

Extra reading

[1] Autostart for Awesome: awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Autostart

Among the speakers: Bogdan Naumovici, Dumitru Popescu and Mircea Toma.

Enjoy TEDx and TED!

• Talk only of GTalk – this way I was able to get all my conversations into the gmail inbox. Well, this normally does not work out due to human inertia. Of the people I frequently talk to too few actually use GTalk…
• Use multiple transports (jabber feature). Well theory is nice, but practice proves to be different. All the tutorials and free servers out there that you can register with in order to get yahoo or msn transports in GTalk – well they work for one week (all of them) “its by design” i guess
• Use Pidgin all over the place – office desktop, home laptop, home desktop any other mobile gadget I have around. Uhmmm – it works, it logs everything in plain text, but then how do I synch this different places? Well, I use Dropbox. This works nice, it’s ok – I can even access them online, but they are not in the same place with the emails, and i can not search them online (locally grep does wonders).
• Skype? well just forget getting the logs out of Skype in a human readable form and sync-ing these over multiple machines – I gave it up.
• SMS – that’s too out there. Can’t even envision doing that today.

Now I’m at a loss – I’ll stop IM-ing and just tell people to mail me. Or I can spend endless hours coding up my own hammer that will knock out every nail, or I can wait for Google Wave maybe? Looks like it’s the hammer I could use for all these nails!

or:

E o insula micuta pe coasta Bulgariei in Marea Neagra (a mi se ierta reclama facuta turismului Bulgar, dar calitatea serviciilor e peste ce avem noi) – total atipica pentru coasta Bulgara. Nu e stil Mamaia – e vechi, cu bun gust, putin refurbrished dar in rest lasat in timpul lui! Mancare undeva intre bucataria bulgara si cea mediteraneana, oameni primitori – ce mai!, un mic paradis!

Bun, dupa ceva delectare in soare si mare si mancare, back to #zh, inceput de semestru, un curs nou – Advanced Systems Lab – System Performance Evaluation – e foarte misto, si imi place la nebunie sa ma implic!

Apoi mi-am reluat lumea in cap si m-am apucat sa scriu un paper despre baze de date, sisteme multicore, scalbilitate, replicare, distributie – the normal buzzwords care dau bine intr-un paper :) Sa vedem ce iese … fingers crossed.

[Image is taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmaritimemuseum/2843691060/]

Pentru cei nerabdatori, ascultati aici – gratie Trilulilu.

More on this can be found here:

[Cotidianul] Doi studenti clujeni campioni mondiali la dezbateri

Browsing around I stumbled over pssh – Parallel SSH. It’s actually a collection of SSH based tools designed to run over multiple hosts.

The package boasts Parallel SSH, Parallel SCP, Parallel RSYNC, Parallel NUKE and Parallel SLURP.

Awesome tools I might say!

Installing JVM and Ruby on a linux machine on which you only have rights in your home folder may be tricky.

Below I post a few hints on how I managed to have Sun’s JRE and Ruby running.

Sun’s JRE

First I installed the JVM from Sun onto a machine on which I have root privileges (running Ubuntu). At this point, you should get a folder like /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/ on your local machine which contains Sun’s latest JRE.

For deploying the JVM onto a cluster machine all you need to do is create a folder on the cluster machine in your home directory like ~/tools/java/ and copy the content of the local JRE installation (/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/) there.

Also, you need to create a folder like ~/tools/java-conf/ and copy there all the content of the /etc/java-6-sun/ directory. This contains the JVM configuration, properties, management and security related settings.

Once this is done, you need to go through the copied JRE files and change the link files in order to point in the right direction – meaning to the configuration, properties, management and security files in ~/tools/java-conf/ on the cluster machine.

Almost done, all you need to do now is create a symlink (ln -s) to ~/tools/java/bin/java in the ~/bin/ directory. Most probably this is in the PATH already.

Now you should be able to run $java MyClass on the cluster machine.

Ruby

As far as I have seen with Ruby, installing it is not as easy as with JRE. In my case I had to compile Ruby on the cluster machine and also change the location of the libraries so that they get placed in the user’s home folder.

I have followed the following steps in order to get a successful Ruby installation:

1. Create the ~/tools/ruby/ and ~/tools/ruby-code/ folders on the cluster machine. ~/tools/ruby/ will contain the Ruby installation while ~/tools/ruby-code/ will contain the code from which we will build Ruby. Once you complete the following steps, the code folder ~/tools/ruby-code/ can be deleted.
2. Download the latest Ruby code from here. When I did this, the latest recommended Ruby version was 1.8.7-p72. After you downloaded it, extract the content of the .tar.gz into the ~/tools/ruby-code/ directory
3. While logged into the cluster machine, cd to ~/tools/ruby-code/ruby-1.8.7-p72/ (the last folder in the path might look different if you are setting up a newer/older version of Ruby) and run the ./configure binary. This should generate the config.h and Makefile files.
4. Edit config.h and look for the following 8 #define statement (they should be the last entries in the config.h file): RUBY_LIB, RUBY_SITE_LIB, RUBY_SITE_LIB2, RUBY_VENDOR_LIB, RUBY_VENDOR_LIB2, RUBY_ARCHLIB, RUBY_SITE_ARCHLIB, RUBY_VENDOR_ARCHLIB. The values you place in here should be absolute paths pointing towards sub-directories of the ~/tools/ruby/ directory on the cluster machine. As an example I have values something like:
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/site_ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/vendor_ruby/1.8
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
   /home/tsalomie/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux
5. Run make in ~/tools/ruby-code/ruby-1.8.7-p72/
6. Run make test to verify
7. Edit the rbconfig.rb file, such that TOPDIR = ‘/home/tsalomie/tools/ruby’ and DESTDIR = ‘/home/tsalomie/tools/ruby’ unless defined? DESTDIR
8. Run make install
9. Create symlinks to ~/tools/ruby/bin/ruby and to ~/tools/ruby/bin/irb in your ~/bin directory
10. Enjoy Ruby!

In order to get it running, I had to go through a “couple” of steps:

• Remove the previous installation of OOo:

  > sudo apt-get remove open-office.org-core

• Download OOo 3.0 from here and choose the Linux DEB version
• Open a terminal and cd to the folder where you saved the downloaded .tar.gz file: OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz
• Extract the contents of the .tar.gz via:

  > tar xvzf OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

• Go to the DEBS foloder

  > cd OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358/DEBS/

•  In order to install i386 on AMD6:

  > sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture *.deb

• Navigate to the desktop integration folder:

  > cd ./desktop-integration/

• Install desktop integration (ie. menu support)

  > sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture *.deb

• Done!

Happy running OOo 3.0! (and you can kind of open Office 2007 file formats too – I haven’t seen yet a good pptx in OOo 3.0 – but who knows – maybe one day!)

What I don’t get is: Windows Vista supports unicode for folder names, and so does the underlying API for accessing the file system. Then why does Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 go around the API? This is the only explanation I can find for this missbehavior – it makes me feel like in the days when everyone avoided the whitespaces in the path …

• Milano – 1 day, just visiting the city between two flights
• Porto – 2 days, top notch city, good Porto wine, nice people
• Lisbon – 3 days, could have been better – nothing to comment (except for poor public transportation) but I expected more je ne sais pas quoi
• Algarve region/Lagos – 6 days, just r’n'r sun, hot, small golf-like beaches
• Sevilla – 2 days, impresive
• Sziget Festival – 6 days, no comment

When the GMail era started, I stopped using Yahoo Mail for good and switched to my Google account only. Today, a little bit late for my taste, I came across the free Zimbra Desktop by Yahoo!. It is an email client for Yahoo mail accounts, GMail account as well as any other POP3/IMAP mail servers. Part of the larger Yahoo! Zimbra Collaboration Suite (a Exchange/Outlook wannabe).

I have tried it out – but it seems a little bit sluggish, although it also incorporates Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, etc. besides Mail. Tried it out of curiosity, but I think I’ll still stick to Outlook and GMail via the Web Interface (lately storage in the cloud with high availability is no longer an issue … so I don’t feel the need to have local copies of my email anymore).

Anyway – congrats Yahoo! for reopening (up to a point) your email for free.