Tech Anecdotes

Read, so that you don't end up loosing data, the first time you install linux.

2011-07-22T21:41:00.000+05:30

Have you already lost your data while installing Linux for the first time? Never mind, you are not the first one :) . Almost everybody, mostly Indians who have a tendency of trying out before reading manuals end up loosing all their data when they install Linux for the first time (I did too :P). It so happened that a friend who had taken some free advice from me on which distro he should choose, for beginning with Linux fooBaar'd his system. And I am writing this post so that I can point people to read it before they embark on the "dangerous" yet exciting path.
There are quite a few things one has too keep in mind beforehand. Primarily, one has to have a firm belief in the fact that, nothing that one does, while installing Linux, may cause serious injuries to the hardware. Also, Linux is not responsible for the loss of your data, if you select the partition containing data, for formatting / change of Filesystem - so the user has to be alert. And one more thing to be noted is, no one can become an expert in the art of installing Linux, without getting the hands dirty. So if you were thinking of reading a lot of text before setting your sails, trust me, you may as well wait for ever. However, it will be good if you at least follow the links shared in this post and skim through to get an idea.
Okay so that was a long moral lecture, now lets get down to business. First of all you need to select which distro you are going to get started with. And selecting can be a real task if you get to know how many of them are there. You can get more information about distros on Distrowatch. As for a beginner, the community generally recommends

~~Ubuntu~~ - I won't recommend because of experimental change in interface.
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) - more info
Linux Mint - more info

Take a look at article on Desktop Linux on Wikipedia for more information on GNOME and KDE.
Another thing a newcomer needs to etch on his brain is, it doesn't matter which distro / desktop environment he uses because, ultimately, all of it boils down to a personal preference. And there will be a lot of time in life for flame wars on topics like "my distro is cool and yours is crappy".
So once a distro is chosen, you need to get it's installer on a bootable medium. The installer is generally an iso file which needs to be burnt to a CD / DVD via some generic disk writing software or written to a usb drive using UNetBootIn. One can also get it along side various Tech - magazines like Linux For U or Digit. I don't think someone reading this would be n00b enough to be unable to search the Internet, visit the site of the distro, locate the ISO and download it.

Now, that a bootable installer is there, one can easily boot from it. If restarting the computer while the installation medium (i.e CD / DVD is plugged in) does not work take a look at this link. After booting, things will be as simple as custard, except for disk partitioning. For somebody who has no experience with
Next and the most important task is to create partitions in which the installation will take place. For detailed info on the directory structure and filesystem of Linux and preparing yourself to quit the clumsy comfort of C: and D: drives do go through the content on Aasis Vinayak's blog. I intend to clearly and crisply introduce the simplest and safest partitioning scheme for a dual boot system with a Windows installation.
One (or two in case of Win 7) primary partition for Windows.
An extended partition containing:
An NTFS formatted partition to be used as your D drive. (data should never be on the same partition as operating system - in case the OS needs to be re installed - data would be safe.)
An ext journaling filesystem for / (root) on linux. (essential)
An ext partition for /home (read Aasis Vinayak's blog for explanation)
A swap partition (essential - size should be double the RAM).
The process of creating partitions may differ from one installer to another but since everything is in GUI, it is extremely intuitive and self explanatory so nobody can misunderstand.
The rest all too obvious to be taken into consideration. In future if a newbie develops distro hopping tendencies wishes to setup a multi-boot environment a previous post of mine might come to the rescue.

While I was searching the Internet for appropriate links to include in this post, I came across these, which intrigued me :
http://www.vias.org/linux-knowhow/wrapnt414D24_newbie_guide.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
Linux portal on wikipedia :-
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Portal:Linux

All the best for your venture.

Interning at AmiWorks

2011-07-21T01:04:00.000+05:30

The curriculum for B.Tech (CSE) in my college, like many others, requires me to pursue industrial training in my third year. Just as my batchmates, I too was anxious to secure a place for myself in an organisation related to my field of work and my area of interest. Meanwhile, I volunteered to take a session on Introduction to Qt at OSS Camp 11.03 Lucknow and there, I met Amit Singh who offered me a place as a Summer Intern in his company, Amiworks, Pune. The offer was appealing and I accepted it.

After my exams I reached Pune and joined AmiWorks on my birthday. It took me a week to settle on a project, but once that was set, there was no looking back. I tried and developed a File Sharing and Syncing Application using PyQt. While Qt was something I was familiar with, I chose python because firstly, I wanted to learn it and second, my room-mate cum Co-founder of AmiWorks, Aman Jain motivated me enough to embark on an unknown path. I won't bore you with the details of the project, as that is to be submitted to the college in a report which is hardly read by anyone. What I intend to share is the exhilarating experience I had while interning at AmiWorks.

First of all, my residence and office were in the same three storey building. All I had to do was climb a flight of stairs to get to my office, so I was spared the travelling woes and I was able to sleep an hour extra everyday ;) . The office itself was cool, big windows, balconies, greenery all around and pleasant weather of Pune. The working environment was even more awesome - a comfortable chair, bean bags, dual monitor setup, 16Mbps Internet etc made it feel like heaven for a programmer.

Ah !! it wasn't all work and no play. We used to have musical afternoons where Advait's talent covered everybody else's musical n00bh00d. And I also watched quite a mouthful of movies in the two month span with my room mates cum colleagues, both in theatre and on Youtube ( the 16Mbps belonged to just four of us after office ;) ).

I miss - the saturday nights - anna ki idli - evenings at crossword - dinner at vaishali - ghar jaisa khana at Delhi Kitchen - morning walks and movies with colleagues / room-mates - exclamations of Vivek - questions of Ankur - Neha's comments - Aman's advice - Amit's support - programming sprints - daily stand-up meets - and the list goes on !!!

In short "I am missing my internship days" and I can't wait for PyCon 11 which is being hosted at Symbiosis Pune, which is when I will be meeting friends cum colleagues again !!

Running a program on the system accessed via ssh

2011-06-30T19:12:00.000+05:30

Controlling anything remotely is always kinda exciting and fun. And when it comes to computers its even more exhilarating. So when I became aware of ssh I was excited. Tried poking fun at people in computer lab by logging into their system and closing their programs and rebooted their computer. For a command line freak like me its even more fun to be able to actually control another computer from terminal.
But if you have tried running a program which requires a GUI you would have found that it gives an error stating

Error: No Display found.

I always wondered how that could be achieved but never knew really tried to find out. Today, however I decided to find out and blimey!! a simple internet search revealed the answer. Prefix the program with this DISPLAY=:0. So if you want to run the terminal program on a gnome system run

$ DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal

And BINGO !!!

Compiz Fusion screws up in Ubuntu 11.04

2011-06-18T14:01:00.003+05:30

A new recruit, at AmiWorks, got Dell Vostro with Ubuntu 11.04 to work on. Being new to Linux he was enjoying the experience but a little while later when he had played all the pre-installed games the excitement of a new OS started diminishing. And he was now in the state of comparing Linux with Windows. He approached me asking for something exciting to do with his Linux box and I obliged.
The most fascinating thing that boggles a new Linux user is the rotating cube virtual desktop arrangement. I exclaimed "Okay, I will show you something, that will make you forget Windows forever". And installed Compiz Config Settings Manager. Since I have not tried Ubuntu, I didn't know that Unity didn't support Compiz. So it broke and left me in a fix.
Now the guy had the opportunity of mocking my statement "Something that will make me forget Windows forever .. aha". Having no previous experience with Natty I could restore the system to the way it was, only with a little help from #ubuntu IRC.
Firstly chose restore to defaults on ccsm (compiz config settings manager) and then fired

$ unity --reset

on the terminal. This fixed the situation on that computer and should be helpful for anybody else who screws up in a similar manner.

Moral: Don't boast off about ccsm until you have yourself tried it on the new configuration.

You can't beat the shit out!!

2011-05-23T23:08:00.001+05:30

A friend with managerial background once complained that he can't withstand people making weird noise with their burps right after dinner. And that he feels like beating the shit out of them. To this my immediate and involuntary response was that "Technically speaking, you can't beat the shit out of the person who had just had food. You would more likely be immediately successful in beating the vomit out of him. :P Upon my remark he tried to justify by stating the implied meaning of his previous statement.
The third guy, a layman (in other words a genius), in our company got seriously agitated with the nature of this discourse, and screamed "Shut it, you geeks!!". And laughter took over !!!

Criticise or Change?

2011-05-08T13:21:00.000+05:30

I am sure that I won't find even one single person who has never ever criticised The System he / she is a part of. We, being humans, have a tendency to detest the present, miss the past and long for the future. So do the students. When we were in the school nothing was worse than the teachers and the school administration. When in college, the college administration takes that place and memories of the school life are cherished and we can't wait for getting a job. Then those who are working find it extremely unbearable to be there, miss the student life and long for retirement.
We ask for change in The System (Even I do). Forget being the change for a while. The thing we need to ask ourselves is are we mature enough to enjoy the change. Wouldn't we again criticise the changed environment just like a toddler who discards a toy after playing with it for a while?
Actually it isn't The System that needs change. Its our attitude. 'WE' here, means everybody who is a part of 'the system', any system, government, education etc, will have to change they way we think about The System. Because its us, everyone of us, who makes The System what it is. For instance, both teachers and students will have to have the attitude of learning something new everyday, have faith on each other and strive for excellence. The people, and the people in power will have to collaborate to resolve the issue instead of "being the issues" and playing the blame game. Once we grow up, stop criticising and demeaning others, stop wasting time on gossiping like the envious women, and strive for excellence, the day won't be far when we will be satisfied with The System and be an example for the rest of the world.

MBA after Engineering.

2011-05-01T19:07:00.003+05:30

Recently I met a would be engineer who aspired to prepare for CAT and go for MBA right after achieving his B.Tech. This brought back all the reasons I have heard from people choosing MBA after engineering.

So why do people go for MBA after engineering?

Statuary Warning: These are my thoughts and no offence is intended to anyone, if you feel offended you are more than welcome not to read any further.

Learning Managerial Skills

If it is only about learning, why not learn it the only way skills can be acquired i.e by getting hands dirty and practically doing stuff. If one can't learn to swim by only reading books and one can't learn to write programs by mugging them up for exams, I am pretty sure that it is equally impossible to learn the MBA stuff only reading books. And all the colleges will get you to do is, read, mug up, vomit and so on...

Position - being a manger and governing fellow engineers

In a system where actual learning happens only on ones own and a degree can't certify one to be a better engineer or manager against another, why do companies rely on them and promote MBAs only? Not sure if this happens everywhere, but if it doesn't then why are the engineers crazy for MBA?

Engineering was a wrong choice.

So you want to say that you were counselled and compelled by your parents because offsprings of their acquaintances were going for engineering and it was never your aim. And that this time your decision is based upon the counselling of your friends, seniors, acquaintances, you are not going in the wrong direction.

Or perhaps it was one of your "To Err is human" thingy. How can you be so sure that you won't curse MBA just like you did engineering, afterwards?

I don't know Engineering - they taught nothing at college.

Again how do you know the college would teach you something? And it won't be the same mug up and vomit cycle for 4 end-sem exams?

Money - earning more

Haven't you already spent a fortune in terms of time and money already in order to obtain a B.Tech? Can you afford to waste another such fortune?

Everything that can be achieved with more money

Hmm.. if materialistic stuff is all you desire and knowledge has no value in your eyes, you should better choose the easy way of making money, there are many successful icons even in that dimension whom you could follow to become the next billionaire overnight.

I have had enough ... I can't study technology any more?

Yes, right, you have had enough of technology haven't you? So why not go back in the stone age and promise that you won't buy the next killer phone from Apple.

Besides, we all loved 3 Idiots, all engineers embraced it as a mirror of the plights and delights of their very own lives. So how did we end up ignoring one of the many morals (http://bit.ly/9yU2hQ)? People who go for MBA after B.Tech and work as a manager are no better than Donkeys (Rancho [aka Phunsukh Wangdu], enacted by Aamir Khan, 3 Idiots).

Edit: The only case in which such a move is justified is when the person takes full responsibility of his / her own actions and resolves never to blames others.

All Hail Corruption !!

2011-04-29T18:37:00.000+05:30

We are living in a age when this word corruption has become so common that we don't even dare to imagine about a world without it. It has sunk its roots deep inside our whole infrastructure and system. Domains as diverse as education to defence are all immersed in the black sea of corruption. Not even one day passes when there is no news of corruption on the everyday-mushrooming news channels who them selves form an integral part of corrupt media. So what is corruption, how does it begin, what are the steps being taken by the corrupt authorities to stop it, how can we actually get out of this marshland?

So what is corruption? You see being a student of corruption I don't feel any reluctance in copying the definition (and much more coming later on) of corruption from the wikipedia article devoted to the topic. So this is what it goes like “The word corrupt (Middle English, from Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpere, to destroy : com-, intensive pref. and rumpere, to break) when used as an adjective literally means "utterly broken"”. So what if its a middle east word? Its prevalent in every part of the world. The scenario is such that if somebody claims to be 100% honest and far from corruption, the chances are that he / she is either a lying lawyer, politician giving a press statement or a common man in search of an opportunity. Now, I see you sighing “Not me” under your breath, but come on!, you don't have to admit it to the world. But the ground reality is that you too have it in your blood to be corrupt ... just think about it while introspection and you will realise the percentage of truth in my claim.

It starts at a very tender age, right when your parents bribe you by promising something materialistic in lieu of your good marks ( yeah I know its stolen from 3 Idiots, so what? We all are corrupt – why should I be honest and pour my original ideas?) . Every new recruit has a clear conscience but the prevalent corruption and the healthy environment created by it just makes it easy for the system to modulate him / her and head in a direction without destination. Be it the most popular and most advertised corrupt department of police or the crucial education firms, we have people who wish to be paid more than they work and also dream of becoming a billionaire overnight. So why wouldn't corruption prevail?

Everybody who blames the corrupt authorities for not eradicating it, is also corrupt, because knowing that the authorities are corrupt they still expect them to take actions against it. And aren't we happy about the presence of corruption? Ah come'on is this what we actually understand from corruption? Nah, its something that sincerely comes to our rescue in difficult times. Really, the corrupt media has defaced, demeaned and demonized corruption. In the real sense we are all happy when one of our friends at post-office gets our job done from behind the window and we are spared the wait and trouble of standing in the queue. Also don't you enjoy when you get some of our task gets easily done just by paying up? And isn't it convenient when a friend of yours does not have to spend a night in the police lock-up coz he as high-level connections or has a little-more-than-sufficient money to stuff the authority's mouth with?

So who is promoting corruption and who is letting it prevail ? Yes its us. You me and everybody who sits silently, cosy on their couch, sipping coffee, reading newspaper, and blaming everybody else for the miseries caused by corruption. ( again, I know its copied from Nayak, the movie – stop pointing at me – what did you expect me to be? Honest in an article on corruption?) .If you think that a single anti-corruption bill passed by the efforts of Anna Hazare will uproot corruption which has been there for years, either you don't want it to be gone or you are over optimistic.

Only if every single Indian becomes sincere in their duties, eg student in studies, bureaucrats in governance and housewives in home management with the limited income etc, every single problem existing in the present times will evaporate without precipitate.

Dog on the 9th Floor of Hostel

2011-04-25T22:53:00.001+05:30

The administration of my hostel is very strict. According to rules, no one except the hosteller students (not even hostellers from a different hostel) and staff can enter the hostel. Now I am sure that the administration must be having a very sound and solid reason behind creating them, but that can't stop me from pointing, smirking and blogging when dogs and rats roam freely in the hostel apart from us, monkeys.

Yet another picture of a bug !!

2011-04-23T19:30:00.000+05:30

Yet another picture of an insect ... found it on the floor and as usual couldn't resist clicking a few pictures of it.

A chameleon from my photo archives :)

2011-04-22T20:57:00.000+05:30

My answer to the question which my father asked after having watched 3 Idiots (movie) and this picture was :-
No Dad! I am not quitting engineering for wild life photography !!! Don't worry!

should we be concerned or just let it be?

2011-04-22T02:26:00.000+05:30

Spelling mistakes are common on signboards in India. They spell things just the way they want, showing utter disregard for the language. And when the respectable authorities do it ... it becomes just intolerable. I just couldn't resist clicking a stop sign which asked passengers to stop for "CHEAKING".

The only thing that this makes me wonder is if spelling and pronunciation and proper grammatical formation of your sentences are not so important in the big bad world why are children taught, punished, humiliated and graded low at school?
And if it is important, why does no body give a damn, instead of just mocking and walking?

Examination - whats the point?

2011-04-21T04:13:00.001+05:30

So what thoughts does this word "Examination" trigger? Do your thoughts have something to do with tension, anxiety, stress, pressure etc? Then perhaps you have guessed the meaning of the word I am targeting at.
I have just been over with one of the papers of my end term exam and the situation was such that, although I had gone through this subject for fun during the semester I had no clue as to what I was going to do in the examination. Approximately 20 hours before the exam I saw the syllabus then googled the terms and settled on wikipedia articles for my study. While my colleagues restlessly mugged up notes provided by faculties and called me an idiot for choosing an unconventional method for preparing in this manner. Although I did have a fair look at the notes, lexically analysing it for tokens which corresponded to subtopics that the examiner would expect to see in my answers. Its not that I am not capable of mugging up but that I do not see any point in doing so without an objective - yeah I know I am crazy.
However, during the examination I somehow managed to write something sensible in the answer to every question that made perfect sense to me and am hoping that it has the same effect on the examiner too. The fact that I am wondering and pondering on is what did I gain / learn in the past few hours? Sure, I had fun reading about Grace Hopper, the first person to have debugged a computer ever, ANWB debugging technique and some more similar stuff that was in no way related to the course. But what was the point in the relentless effort put by the students in to this? Preparing for exams? 24 hours of extreme efforts for what? Marks ? - something that the recruiter won't even have time to glance at? The things that was fed and saved in the brain has probably escaped the tired brains by now and will never ever be tried and recalled.
So what did the system succeed in teaching me? Stress Management skills !!! is that why I am pursuing a course for degree in computer science.
My question is why are the students expected, taught and trained to do something that does not have any future implication? i.e Mug up and reproduce?
And what do these examinations judge the student on ? Their ability to reproduce the stuff they have mugged up in past 24 hours?
Where is the actual meaning of education "imparting / gaining knowledge" been lost?
uff ... there are few more such examinations that I have to go through before I graduate and will continue to waste my time preparing for them. The question still persists .. WHY? WHATS THE POINT?

Paid internships.

2011-03-29T02:54:00.001+05:30

Once upon a time, interns got paid by companies for the work they did and presently its the other way round. Providing internship has become a very good business model. Just like coaching for IIT-JEE, GRE and other technical certificate examinations, this business is also booming and startups on this model are mushrooming in every nook and cranny. Their delegates boldly invade campuses and classrooms to tell students "we will teach you what your teachers could not".

Isn't even the existence of such organisations a big bold question mark on the effeciency and credibility on the educational institution and its faculties whose students have to even consider opting for it? What do the colleges charge the tution fee for if these "internship-providers can dare to make the above? What do the educational institutions stand for if the students have to look for knowledge outside its premises?

About students now. If the experienced teachers were not able to insert something substantial into your thick skull, how do you expect these money-minded-mushrooming-startup to do so? Remember !! its YOUR interest level which determines how much you learn and NOBODY can force things into your head. Why are you paying the hefty college fees if whats being taught is not reaching you? If you do not have the desire to learn, you are not even elegible for education.

If you have to pay for internship / training you should better go back to the stone age! You use internet for facebook and po*n, why not use it for what its worth? How can you forget what your best homework help, wikipedia stands for? Knowledge is freely available on the internet and if you really have the desire to learn you should look no further. Especially if what you intend to learn is computers and electronics. Others should also consider it as reference.

Since adivce is freely available in India, let me also slam one on your face. If you couldn't get an internship get yourself a computer and an internet connection and lock yourself in a room with it. Use the money you would pay for internship to get all the necessary stuff you would need for practically playing around with things. Eg microcontrollers and soldering irons if you are an electronics enthusiast or books etc.

Since you can copy homework and tutorial sheets, it shouldn't be hard on your conscience to get a forged certificate for your internship.

Here is a random list of sites which may help you get started.

www.duckduckgo.com - search the internet - nothing is better.

www.youtube.com - nothing is better than a video lecture.

www.spoken-tutorial.org - IIT Mumbai initiative

http://p2pu.org/webcraft - free online peer to peer learning - a mozilla initiative.

ocw.mit.edu - MIT initiative for free oniline learning

and the list is endless....

If you have to pay to learn, pay your internet bills.

Note: Do comment irrespective of whether you like it or not.

Bootsplash screen

2011-03-23T14:36:00.000+05:30

Hey I just changed my bootsplash screen. I remember having tried do do so in the old Grub Legacy and it was a chain of tangled steps. Grub2, i.e the one that comes with present versions of ubuntu makes it fairly simple. All that needs to be done is to edit the /etc/default/grub file and add the path of image to it. eg

$ GRUB_BACKGROUND=/path/to/your/image/file

then fire

$ sudo update_grub

on your terminal.
Upon next reboot the favourite image shall be set up as the bootloader's background.

Reference
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Splash Images and Theming

Grasshopper !!!

2011-03-22T21:09:00.001+05:30

grasshopper hopped in front of my camera :)

I was strolling away, and suddenly a grasshopper hopped in front of my camera and I couldn't resiste the temptation to click a few pictures of it ;)

Partitioning your hard drive for multiple operating systems

2011-03-16T23:21:00.002+05:30

Note: Do check out the hyperlinks in the post and use internet search for terms that you don't full understand. This whole scheme is a production of my idle brain and you can use it at your own risk.

The most crucial step while installing Linux is partitioning your hard drive. This is where most of the first time users end up loosing all their data. I had lost mine too ;). Don't worry I am not trying to scare you off. Its just that you need to be a little more careful and back up all your data before you proceed.
Most of the user friendly distros provide you with appropriate disk management tools for setting up your filesystem. What boggles the first time users is the invisibility of C: and D: drives that they have been so used to. Here they are referred to as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and some more alien symbols :P. Here is more information on the naming convention for partitions. And here is more gyan about primary and extended (or logical) partitions.
One more thing that is worth noting is that there can be a maximum of four primary partitions on a harddrive whereas there may be any number of logical partitions and most Windows OS boot from a primary partition only while Linux is capable of booting from logical partitions also.
Basic needs while installing a dual boot system may be

obviously, being able to boot into both OS at will.
access data from both OS.
have space to install and try more distros.

This is a wikipedia article on UNIX / Linux filesystem hierarchy. A bare-bone Linux installation needs two partitions to work properly: root (/) and swap. With this said and done I would like to show my own partition scheme and then explain what made me do so.

My stable partition scheme - developed after months of tampering and reinstalling.

The screenshot is pretty much self explanatory, however, what needs a little bit of introduction are the following:

Repository (NTFS) partition: One thing that the windows operating systems are famous for (apart from their baseless user-friendliness) is their proneness to crashes and viruses. One should prefer keeping data on a partition other than the one containing system files so that a reinstall of windows does not wash them away.
Swap: This partition is used by all Linux / UNIX based operating systems for the purpose of paging. More info on Swap space is available here.
Home partition: My idea of a separate and central home partition shared by all the Linux distributions is something that allows me to keep all my files on one drive irrespective of the location I OS I work from. And hence I do not have to hunt for files on different OSs when I need them.
The other partitions you see are the root partitions of different OSs that I tried followed by the free space available for me to try more distros ;)

Although its not much of a problem form me now a days but ext (or Linux partitions) can not be accessed from Windows. Although many tools are available for facilitating that, I didn't find anything that would work flawlessly. So one should refrain from storing files on the Linux partition that might be required while running Windows, otherwise switch over to Linux completely.

This is something I found to be a stable configuration for my harddisk partition scheme and the idea is an independent production of my idle brain after months of wondering and tampering and re-installations. Hope this helps a troubled soul lost in the fromatting dilemma finding peace and decide on a partitioning scheme.

There shall be more posts on easily and successfully how I configured a multi-boot system.

36 hours in a train

2011-03-09T03:45:00.001+05:30

It has been 8 hours since I got off the train which brought me from Delhi to Bangalore in 36 hours, but as I type this piece of my thoughts, I feel the to and fro swaying as if I was still in the train. Quite unusually and against the reputation for Indian Railways, the train left from Nizamuddin and reached Yesvantpuram on time.

This time I decided to travel by the non-AC sleeper class as the weather was pleasant and it just didn't seem sensible enough to pay thrice the usual fare just for being able to charge and use Laptop the whole way. To my demise there were just two charging slots working in 9 sleeper cars and they refused to charge my laptop as they couldn't take the load. This made me feed hungrily on Digit's March issue I was carrying with myself. After I was done with it I started with John Grisham's Theodore Boone which a co-passenger was trying to read. Alas that even lasted for hardly 4 hours. So what I did all the way was sleep, admire the scenery and think.
Scenery was really great but I didn't bother taking pictures because I knew from my previous experience that in such a condition (moving train) I would have to take thousands of pictures out of which only a few would turn out good. Then I thought of getting down the train and taking pictures which triggered a dream in which I was trekking along the mountains with just a d-SLR and a GPS.
I couldn't help but think about the plight of Indian Railways. Why do they assume that people travelling in sleeper won't be having laptop computers or the other way round people with laptops will not travel in sleeper class? The standard of travel in Indian Railways needs to improve a lot. I have a suggestion of creating a non AC first class sleeper in which people with proper reservation would be treated in the similar way as the AC ones so there is more sense of security more comfort and less wait-listed passengers would think of tagging along somebody. The train was almost empty the whole way so the wait-listed passenger problem was not there but I couldn't help but imagine in how many ways the standard in which the Indian mass travels can be improved. eg there is perhaps a design flow due to which water from the tank over wash-room and presence of mirrors in every compartment instead of most desired plug-points. Thoughts also came flashing by when swarms of trans-gender beggars (hijras - as they are popularly called) and asked for money as if I owed them all I had. Seriously, this problem is out of hands and needs controlling now. For most part off the journey I couldn't find electric poles which meant we were travelling in diesel, and I wondered how, if at all, were all engines going green. On the whole the journey passed with its share of daydreaming, conversing, sleeping, actually dreaming and reading.

Trust me, I have experienced the worse train journey once http://bit.ly/h6Ksh9 and nothing can strike that chord again. So this journey was a good one.

Portrait of a Rat

2011-03-01T21:07:00.007+05:30

There are rats in my hostel .. and this is the proof.

One day I requested Mr Rat to pose so that I could take a picture and post it on my blog ;) .
Just kidding !! It got caught accidentally on new years eve and I couldn't let it go without taking a few pictures :P. For the Animal Rights Evangelists, I took it far from my hostel and released it near a gutter on the New Years Day. There are still many that keep plundering my food stuff. :(

NO STOPPING NO STANDING

2011-02-28T23:48:00.000+05:30

It is meant to be followed while driving but people tend to abide by it while LIVING.

chalna hi zindagi hai ... chalte hi jaa rahe hai

NO STOPPING NO STANDING

A worthy candidate for my desktop wallpaper.

2011-02-27T23:58:00.000+05:30

I have no idea what its called, it was attractive enough to grasp my camera's attention :)

kill a non responsive process

2011-02-22T09:47:00.000+05:30

So what do you do when you a process running on your Linux box hangs? Obviously you terminate it and start it again. But how do you terminate it is the question - series of commands or few clicks in System Monitor?

Frankly this post is for those who use the terminal - the "geeks".

Until today I used to kill programs "in this case" like

$ ps -e | grep firefox

which gave me output like

2472 ?        00:00:00 firefox
2480 ?        07:16:45 firefox-bin

And I used to fire

$ kill  2472 2480

to terminate the programs.
But today it just occurred to me to automate the process of looking up the process number and killing them. So I set out to use gawk and xargs.
Using gawk I got the process numbers extracted from the output of grep like this:-

$ ps -e | grep firefox | gawk '{print $1}'
2472
2480

and then pipelined this output to xargs kill to invoke kill on each pid.

$ ps -e | grep firefox | gawk '{print $1}' |xargs kill

It kills two processes but for completely restarting the application go to a terminal and type

$ ps -e | grep firefox | gawk '{print $1}' |xargs kill; firefox &

$ firefox & # starts firefox in the back ground

This served my purpose. Terminating two processes manually is not a big task, but why not automate it and make the computer do it for you if its possible?
And don't forget to have a look at man pages of gawk xargs and grep because that is the ultimate source of knowledge :)

calculate 5000th fibonacci number

2011-02-19T12:30:00.000+05:30

This year programming competition in tech-fest at college, was organised by the friend with whom I team up for participating in competitions of other colleges. It was obviously better than previous years. I mean,questions were good, had considerable participants and most importantly, programming was supposed to be done using gcc/g++/java.

There was a question which asked to print the n^th term of Fibonacci series where 0<=n<=5000. Frankly such a large number does not fit in whatever predefined data type you can think of. Creating something like BigInteger of java would have been impossible during the competition and I am not an expert when it comes to java, so I skipped the problem. The coordinators accepted solution for 20 to 30 terms from other teams but demanded it for 5000 from me :P (being famous has its drawbacks !!!). Still I concentrated on other problems (got through this one but couldn't go to the finals because its timing clashed with another one :( ).

Later that night, after the competition was over, one of the coordinators pinged me on gtalk and asked sarcastically for the solution. This got on my nerves and I determined that I will smack the 5000th element on their face.

There was a bigint library I had created about an year ago which stored numbers in character arrays and manipulated them. I shuffled through my code directory, found it and quickly created a recursive function using memorisation to serve the purpose. The problem was that it worked fine for inputs upto 1302 but gave a segmentation fault for numbers above that. Puzzled and perplexed I resorted to Internet search and discovered that it was because of default stack size of 1MB allocated to every process. A few minutes later I stumbled upon the solution to increasing it which was as simple as adding

ulimit -s unlimited

/home/<user_name>/.bashrc

file and starting a new session. This increased the stack size to unlimited i.e now my program could use all the RAM available.

After this was done, my program successfully calculated and printed the sequence upto 7000 but ran out of RAM after this and gave Bus Error.

I redirected the output of the program to a text file, attached it to a mail and sent it to the coordinators ;)

Here is a screenshot showing a terminal window with the 7000th Fibonacci number and the state of my system while calculating it.

P.S: The code for my program is hosted at www.github.com/bhanuvrat/bigint .

misusing transport technology

2010-06-29T17:36:00.000+05:30

I have just had the worst travelling experience on my way back from Patna to Dhanbad. In a compartment meant to accommodate 8 there were at least 20-25 people stuffed like pigs and hens. Although I had a berth reserved for me, it was occupied by 5 other people. And these were not the ones with a wait-listed Sleeper ticket that did not get confirmed, they were the ones supposed to be travelling in Second Seater. The situation was worsened by the hot and humid climate. "We Indians are hairy people, we perspire a lot and then stink" - Russel Peters. Its not like I haven't travelled in DTC busses, but that is for at most 2 hours while this was a 9 hour journey ( took 11 - courtsey highly unpunctual Indian Railways). I developed sympathy for the British people whom I hated for kicking Indians out of railway carriages during British Raj, because I was feeling a similar urge. Until 12 there was no sign of any TT, and upon inquiring we came to know about incidences when these so called "daily passengers" had pushed the Ticket Checker out of running train.

All we so called tech-literates complain about is slow speed of Internet and interrupted power supply while there are people who still travel like slaves, and the middle class people are not able to travel comfortably despite having paid for it. Indian Railways boasts off about being the only successful public sector railways! But I want to ask the authorities, what do they want me to be proud of? The stinking platforms of Old Delhi where all you can see is shit on tracks or the utterly comfortable journey that I just had?

FC13 : solution to apparently all problems.

2010-05-27T18:24:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I came across a tweet which said Fedora core 13 has been released. I have been using FC12 for over a month now and hence was excited about FC13. Although I am on the verge of crossing the data limit of my internet connection, I downloaded the live CD and gave it a try. I was astonished by my findings.

FC13 has done away with most of my problems.

ACPI problem on Dell Studio 14 - solved.

No Sound - driver missing - was already solved.

Graphics driver:- mesa-drivers included in FC13 are fully compatible with my ATI Radeon 4530. I was frantically posting on forums for this post1 post

Unable to stream Video on firefox - still persists :(

I am merrily downloading the Installer DVD, can't wait for tech-magazines to ship it with them. I think most of the major distributions coming out now will be able to include the required drivers and hence work out of the box on my DELL. So in case you've been facing problems with your new laptop whose hardware was not supported by the contemporary distros, its time to switch over to Fedora Core 13

Solved the no sound problem on my dell :)

2010-05-27T16:40:00.000+05:30

It was right on Day one that I formatted my new Laptop's hard drive to create partitions on it and install Linux. Well that was in fact a failure because of the ACPI problem. But after I came to know about acpi=off work around I managed to install linux and then the most torturing problem on my system was absence of sound. I nearly spent the whole next week trying to figure out (rather google out) the solution. But it was not there. It was just day before yesterday that I stumbled upon the solution.

The problem was :

There was no sound from the inbuilt speakers, and one of the two jacks worked but produced sound which was barely audible. I lingered over forums for a very long time - meanwhile switched and tried different distros .. hoping one of them might come with a solution by default.

Attempts made by me to solve it:

Most of the times when I looked into search results that said "solved", what I found was "the audio channel was muted". I also found posts that asked me to modify the modprobe.conf and add dell-m6 after intel-hda-snd etc. but none of them worked ... in fact I found a complete list of such options that could be appended on to the modprobe.conf file and tried every one of them that was related to dell.

Recently After installing Arch Linux I came across OSS - Open Sound System and installed it instead of ALSA.. it seemed to work but I couldn't figure out how to mute the speakers while using head phones. I was determined to look for the solution in the same direction.

Solution:

The way to get it to work is to install the new version of alsa ( god why couldn't I think of it .. argh). For obtaining it follow the ***link*** to realtek's site. This is the genius post which brought me closer to the solution. And this is where I was spoon fed with it.

I am loving it :)

Linux... Ye hi hai right choice

2010-04-30T17:37:00.000+05:30

We come across various articles, blog posts and speeches in which the people supporting open source advocate about its benefits and try to attract more and more people into the brotherhood.

Being a Linux enthusiast I felt my responsibility do some thing of the same kind to spread the word a bit more.

If we think about it then the first question popping up in our fleshy brains would be what exactly is the crap called OPEN SOURCE? Many people have a misconception that all the softwares that we can download and use (legally) for free some how defines OPEN SOURCE. So lemme tell you that this is just a small aspect of the tech movement. Open source means that the source of the software is available for free and that you are allowed to modify it as per your wish or needs.

The second question would be ... Why the heck would some one make whole of his hard work available for free? How would the person or the company make profit out of it? And if there is no profit involved .. why are the people working? The answer is, its not the software but the support that is sold. Big Open Source players pay their employees with the money they get through the customer support they offer and donation they get.

So this fairly leaves the pockets of home users unaltered. The corporate people, however, have to pay for the support but this is near about to nothing when compared to the cost of lisence for using proprietary software.

For more information one can surely go and visit these pages :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

http://www.opensource.org/

http://www.gnu.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

As there are infinitely many linux distributions, a first time user is bound to get confused over choosing the BEST linux distribution for him/her self. So here is a presentation that i gave quite a few months ago as one of the OSUM sessions. :- link to google slide show

Problematic ACPI on new Dell Studio 1450 laptop

2010-04-09T21:11:00.000+05:30

The Wipro Laptop had seen its good days, but its keypad went wrong (worked fine at night, and in the morning it was screwed up) and started displaying two characters upon one key press, its lan port and memory card slot wouldn't ever work, its CD/DVD drive would get screwed up every 2 months and most recently its screen cracked ( dunno how it happened) and a vertical white line hid two characters behind it in text mode and equivalent area in graphics mode). The width of this white line was going on increasing and presently it covers area equivalent to 2 characters in text mode. These developments ( -ve sense) pushed me to get a new laptop for myself and this time I decided not to make the mistakes I had made the last time. I went for a Dell Studio 1450 laptop.

Specifications:

Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 2.26 ghz 1066 mhz, 3MB cache
4GB RAM
500 GB SATA HDD
512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 4530

The ACPI problem:

Its on this new laptop that I am facing a problem with Linux OSs. However Windows 7 that was shipped with the machine works fine. Initially i wasn't even able to boot into a live installer CD. During booting (into a live CD or hard drive) the screen would go blank right after loading ACPI module and the computer would not respond to anything including Ctrl+Alt+Del, the only option left out would be hardware power off. I went around on forums (my linuxquestions.org post) begging for help but ultimately it was a teenage linux magazine columnist (Shashwat Pant) who helped me out on gtalk. The solution was to append acpi=off as a kernel parameter in grub. This got linux up and running on my laptop but was not a permanent remedy. acpi=off ended up disabling a lot of options eg - battery was not recognized, function keys behaved in the opposite manner etc. It also caused power button to function as the ones on computers of 90s - i.e when pressed, the laptop would not ask for what is to be done rather it would get switched off ( without the process of shutdown - or holding the power button for a while) right away. And the computer had to be switched off manually even after choosing shutdown from the power menu. Here is the link to the forum I used for all my problems till then.

Attempts to resolve it:

On OpenSUSE, just for fun and learning, I compiled and installed linux kernel 2.6.32 and to my surprise the acpi problem had vanished :). However there were other problems that I had been facing on it (specifically - installing the graphics driver caused display - dragging windows or scrolling text all were jerky and without the driver compiz fusion won't work :( ). And in the process of trying to solve the graphics problem I screwed up OpenSUSE. Arch Linux seemed to be attractive enough and I reckoned that installing every thing one by one on my own might help me recognize the root cause of problems. However the new kernel trick didn't work on Arch, and I was again chasing the same problem. (My post on arch forum.)

I found that while compiling the kernel, the ACPI module can either be compiled into it or as a separate module to be loaded later. I tried both ways and what I found was really demoralizing. Without the acpi=off option the OS behaved quite randomly i.e sometimes it would boot fine and sometimes not. I also tried compile the kernel after disabling those options (in the menuconfig's submenu about acpi) which had deprecated mentioned beside them, with no luck. (i.e not specifying acpi=off causes the same problem that it used to cause initially, irrespective of the options I choose while compiling the kernel).

Recent Development

Today I found that the computer does not hang !!. its just that the screen goes off if I do not specify the acpi=off option. That is while it is booting, the screen goes off right after loading the acpi module but the boot process continues. I knew that after booting the arch installation ( which presently has no graphical desktop environment) prompts me for id and password. Although it was not visible, I keyed in my id and password and then fired reboot command ---- and --- the computer rebooted !!!.

I have not lost hope and am still pursuing the ghastly outline of solution. Any kind of help is welcome !!

links - text based web browser

2010-04-08T12:21:00.000+05:30

It was around midnight, that my room-mate (who is a budding linux geek) saw me downloading kernel files using wget from a terminal without the help of any kind of grahpical web browser. Then we wondered, how cool it would be if we could use a text based web-browser for our general work like checking mail, facebook status, attendance over college's intranet etc. I reckoned, it would be quite fast too because no imager or flash ads would be downloaded.

A few hours later I had accomplished installing xfce4 desktop manager on Arch Linux and was fiddling around with its features (which were nothing except a text editor, a terminal emulator and few configuration utilities). Just then a shortcut for a web-browser caught my eye and I couldn't recall having installed pacakges of firefox or anything. Out of curiosity I clicked it open and bang a terminal window opened up !!! there it was !! I had discovered a text based web-browser !!!
Little bit of fooling around got me familiar with its UI which is nothing except a few menus that emerge when escape key is pressed. I opened google.com (dunno why but google.com is what comes to mind even when what I want to do is just check internet connectivity). There was no limit of his excitement when I introduced Abhinandan to my marvellous discovery. Together we tried exploring a lot of sites on it. It was a new kind of experience looking at the usual web content in text mode. We searched wikipedia for the creator of "links" and checked our gmail accounts. However the intranet utility of our university wouldn't let us log in ( a few months ago we could't log in even from mozilla - only IE was supported :P so no worries). Regular facebook didn't show up properly, however m.facebook.com which is its mobile version, was wonderful, I updated my status and checked notifications.
Then my room-mate suggested how about downloading something .. so we opened an ftp site and pressed enter (which was equivalent to clicking there) on a link. A pop up menu appeared asking what I would like to do with the file ( display or a save). Actually display option opened any file in text mode and displayed its contents - which wasn't something I wanted. Upon choosing save, another popup window appeared which displayed the progress of download. This one even contained an option for continuing the download in background which seemed to be quite useful for this kind of a browser.
And now here I am writing a blog post at about 6 AM using the same geeky browser.
Its not a very impressive but is quite wonderful (atleast for a comp-geek who had never seen something similar). Links sports a download manager, bookmark manager, short history, and a very helpful user's manual:). It can come quite handy when we need to access internet while fixing up something on our linux box. For example I was using my other laptop for accessing the arch linux install guide for installing the distro and now I won't need to. I can visit forums, check facebook status, mail, search for stuff even when I am fiddling around with the OS or am trying to get it back on after screwing it up ;)

wvdial on Arch Linux

2010-04-06T23:38:00.000+05:30

Oh well.. that was a very long break from blogging, but I realized that just jotting down what I did to solve my own problems might help me too some time later. What happened was that I had successfully installed wvdial ( the ppp dialer for my Photon plus - oh yes I got one quite a while ago) on Arch Linux approximately 2 months ago. And now when I am trying to install it once again ( just for fun) I am again stuck at the same errors that had taken me whole night to sort out the first time. So I am just trying to keep a record of my own actions :)

Both wvdial and wvstreams are required to be downloaded as wvdial depends on wvstreams. I got wvdial-1.60 and wvstreams-4.6 tarballs which are probably the most recent ones.

wvstreams is to be compiled first.

# ./configure

# make

make halted with an error saying that it needs libdbus-1.so for compiling libwvdbus.so . There was some error in configure file due to which make was looking for libdbus-1.so in the root directory. After a bit of fiddling around I figured out that the configure.mk file was making it do so. So I went around and changed the value of LIBS_DBUS in configure.mk to /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so . and that made it compile fine.

# make install

# ldconfig

Now I moved to compiling and installing wvdial

It created a slight problem by asking for .pc files which I made available by copying the contents of wvstreams-4.6/pkgconfig/ to usr/libs/pkgconfig/ .

Then I came across a serious error in the source code of wvdial-1.60. I looked around on the internet and found a patch for it. Downloaded it and applied it using

# patch -p0 < wvdial-1.60-dirent.patch

this made wvdial to compile fine and run fine too.

# make

# make install

However, I had to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and fire ldconfig in order to get the newly installed libraries identified.

And there I was with my internet dialer working fine :)

Finally Up with Linux

2009-07-21T12:36:00.000+05:30

I have been interesed a lot in linux since past 3 yrs .. actually since the day I came to know about it. I tried a wide range of distros (Linux desktop environments) but found all of them insufficient (or you may say that I was inefficient) in some manner or the other. For example, the most famous distro among starters, Ubuntu did not work for me, I was unable to install some third party software on it. Similarly I could not connect to the internet (BSNL Broadband - when I was at home) from OpenSolaris. All went well with Sabayon 4 and Fedora 10 but they were extremely slow on my lappi and hanged every now and then.

Finally I laid my hands on Mandirva Spring 2009 when an internet friend of mine (he is just out of high school and writes for a famous Indian Opensourse Magazine) suggested me to. Well, to be honestI liked it, even though there were certain issues (eg. could not configure my internet, once it went into standby could not be retrieved etc). Apart from that there were a host of useful softwares available in the installer DVD itself. And it was also easy enough to install new softwares on it (just needed to download and install .rpm packages).I installed Java SE SDK, NetBeans IDE and a few more softwares. I tried a lot to get it connected to my DSL but all in vain. Later I had to replace my windows hard drive for some sensitive hard drive.

I came back to my hostel (after vacations) and wondered whether I would be successful in setting up Wi-Fi connectivity. Initially it said it lacked a package called rt73 firmware and I thought of moving over to some other distro but decided to stick around some more. Now the most astonishing thing happened. I used a friend's laptop to download the file, it turned out to be of just 3.7 KB. Well I being accustommed to windows, thought how could such an important file be so small and that there must have been some downloading error. So attempted downloaing again. But everytime the same file of the same size appeared. Well then with a little or rather no hope I ventured to install the package. Well, here i am presently, using the college's Wi-Fi to post this bit. I guess there would be only LINUX enthusiasts can understand what I am feeling presently.