Haircut

Weekends are a great time for personal achievements outside of work. Like writing a kernel. Or discovering a new radioactive element. Or writing a poem. Or, as in my case, getting a haircut.

• Wanted to try this new place. It seemed to have a good ambiance, and its staff wore uniforms. Sure they spelled “Gents” with a J, but I am not expecting them to have a PhD in English anyway.
• The place was full. 6 people were waiting. “10 minutes, sir” said the barber and beckoned me inside. I walked in thinking this guy at least had a sense of humour.
• The customers seemed to be spending a lot of time on the chair. One guy in particular, got a haircut, a shave, an oil massage, a face massage and a facial done to him. I wondered whether this guy had a rich uncle who had recently died.
• Also wondered whether all these people were here because it was close to salary day. As if reading my thoughts, all  the customers started singing in that annoying Dairy Milk tune, “baal hai katana aaj pehli tareek hai!” with the barbers conducting the song with their comb and scissors. Damn it. I was hallucinating again.
• The staff ordered tea and offered it to all the waiting customers. Touched as I was with this unprecedented act of courtesy, I politely said no, owing to the fact that the floor was full of other people’s hair and the fan was on full blast.
• After an hour, my turn finally came. I turned to the other waiting customers, laughed maniacally and said, “Ha! Take that you losers!”. But not out loud.
• Meanwhile the guy with the dead rich uncle was getting his face steamed. What a girl.
• Took the chair and looked at my face in the mirror and thought that my hair was really not that long. Should have let it grow for a week longer. Oh well, too late now.
• During the water spray, a drop of water landed on my nose and it started twitching.  The barber noticed this and grabbed a tissue and wiped my entire face. I was overcome with emotion at his thoughtfulness, but held back the tears as I didn’t want to trouble the great man again.
• Very talented guy he was. With just a few snips, he made my hair look really really good. Even my parents would agree later that I looked almost human.
• Came home and blogged about it, all the while vaguely wondering why anyone would want to read this nonsense.

Script to reboot your router

How irritating it is, when you finally get the best broadband connection that your budget can buy, and then you realise that the “free night unlimited plan” is actually free only if your session begins after those unearthly hours. A few ISPs do that. Some mention it in the fine print; others don’t. Well, I found the same thing happening with my connection too. Now, it is quite ridiculous to expect someone who likes his comfort to wake up at 2 AM in the night just to switch on his router isn’t it? Not to mention insulting, if that particular someone is a Computer Science engineer.

And so I have been spending the last couple of days to find out ways in which I can get around this problem. I found a few solutions which involve using the rasdial utility in Windows to dial up the ISP and doing that after 2 AM using the task scheduler. But this involves changing some router configurations (like setting it to Bridged mode), which I was not comfortable doing, so I kept looking. My big breakthrough came when I realised that my router allows me to login using telnet and that I can restart the router by issuing the reboot command. So the next step was to put it in some script and schedule to run it at the required time. Writing a simple batch file wouldn’t work, since it would be stuck at the first telnet command, and I wouldn’t be able to write any commands at the telnet prompt. I didn’t have much luck with shell scripts. I was about to jump head first into a full blown socket programming project when I remembered Perl.

The good thing with Perl is, it has excellent support for telnet, thanks to a module called Net::Telnet, which abstracts all of the communications stuff to the background, so that you can simply login and issue commands. I found good material here to start off. Then I played around with it a little bit, and here’s the script I ended up with:

use Net::Telnet;
$telnet = new Net::Telnet ( Timeout=>10, Errmode=>'die');
$telnet->open('xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx'); #Router's IP address here
sleep (2);
$telnet->waitfor('m/Login: $/i');
$telnet->print('admin'); #Login name
$telnet->waitfor('/Password: $/i');
$telnet->print('password'); #Password
sleep (2);
$telnet->print('reboot');
print "\nRouter is rebooting now...";
sleep (30);

You’ll need to have perl on your system to execute this script. If you are using Ubuntu, in all likelihood,  it would already be present. You might need to install the Net::Telnet module (Just grab libnet-telnet-perl from your package manager). If you are on Windows, you can install ActivePerl. ActivePerl also has a pl2bat utility that can create a batch file out of your perl script, which you can put in your task scheduler to run at the specified time.

I think the code is self-explanatory. I have put a few sleeps in the code. The first one is to wait until the router finishes printing some info like make, telnet version, etc. You can avoid this sleep if you can come up with an appropriate waitfor. The next few lines cause the script to wait for Login and Password to appear, and after each, the login and password are provided using the print. The next sleep is because I couldn’t come up with a regular expression in waitfor for my prompt. The last sleep is so that the script doesn’t exit and terminate the connection before the router can reboot.

Since the code is largely from the Internet, I don’t take credit for it. So feel free to tailor it according to your needs. And don’t blame me if your router blows up or something.

I think that covers everything I want to say about this. So, enjoy!

Guess who voted this time!

Me showing the finger

Me, of course! This is the first time I’ve voted, and it felt great. I couldn’t (or didn’t bother to) vote last year during the assembly elections, but this time, when the 15th Lok Sabha elections were announced, I had made up my mind to do whatever it takes to go and vote. It wasn’t easy though. I had to make multiple trips to the Voter Facilitation Centre (VFC) and have wasted more than four hours of my life standing in the stupid queue just to check whether my name has appeared in the draft rolls. When my name wasn’t found even when I went there the second time, I had given up all hopes of voting.

But a couple of days back, I opened the Chief Electoral Officer’s site, and found that they had put up a link to the Final Electoral Rolls, and surprise, surprise, my name was there (albeit with all kinds of spelling mistakes)! I strongly believe there was some kind of divine intervention to put my name there. A quick phone call to the VFC and I found that the last date to get the Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) was over. But I could still vote using my PAN card.

So today morning, I went to the polling booth at 7.30 AM. I wanted to be there early to avoid the long queue. As expected the queue was very less and I was among the first ten people to vote in my booth. There were no objections about my identity from the officers and I exercised my franchise for the very first time! Yay!

So I guess this makes me a responsible citizen of India, and gives me all kinds of rights to indulge in serious debates about Indian politics. Maybe I should write a post sometime about how stupid Sanjay Dutt looks in khadi…

Congratulations

As some of you already know, I had been out of town for the whole of last week. I had been to my native Aghanashini in Kumta taluk. The purpose of the trip was my dear sister’s marriage. Now that I am back, I think some online wishes are in order.

So, congratulations to Sapna and Deepak. May God shower His choicest blessings on the newly-wed couple!

Sennheiser PX-100: Review

Ever since I got my iPod, I had been thinking about getting myself a better pair of headphones. And when my sis offered to get me something from Canada, I knew it had to be headphones. So after doing a bit of research on the ones available for around fifty US dollars, I narrowed my choice down to Sennheiser PX-100 and Koss PortaPro. Both have received extremely good reviews and in the end, I chose Sennheiser for its more contemporary looks and perceived comfort of wearing.

Sennheiser PX100

When folded

A great pair

I have had the PX-100 for a couple of months now and think it’s time to write a review of my own about it.

First, the obvious question: How does it sound? I can tell you, it is without a doubt the best thing that happened to my ears. Never has music sounded so rich, so complete and so powerful in any other equipment I have used. The bass is strong, but never overwhelming. The vocals sound better and you’ll definitely hear more detail in the instruments playing in the track compared to your iPod earphones, probably something that will have you amazed a long time after putting them on for the first time. Of course, you’ll notice a definite increase in quality if you feed it better input. I personally prefer 320kbps MP3 (I did try lossless audio like FLAC, but didn’t notice substantial improvement to merit such huge file size). All in all, the PX-100  sounds a lot more amazing than its size and slender frame would lead you to believe.

Among other pluses, the PX-100 is foldable, and comes in a strong plastic case, and when folded, the whole package is not a lot bigger than your average spectacle case, making it a good companion if you are a traveller. It is comfortable enough to wear, and you’ll probably forget that you have them on after a while. The cord is long enough for everyday use.

Now for some minuses. Since the cups sit on your ear rather than around it (open type), you’ll find that there is some sound leakage, so you might not want to put these on in a quiet room full of people. The headphones do tend to slip off if you bend down and do some head-banging (so don’t do that). Also, the mechanism for folding it is cumbersome and takes some getting used to.

So now for the final vedict: If you are one of those who believe that listening to music is not something you do to kill time, but an experience in itself, and have around Rs.3000 to spare, don’t think twice. Just go ahead and get these. And if you don’t have Rs.3000, then skip a meal for a couple of months, save up and get yourself these. You won’t regret it.

FTF India 2008

My second year at AllGo, and my second FTF. Freescale Technology Forum is a global event that is held annually to help Freescale and its partners showcase the latest technologies and products. In India, it is held in Bangalore. Like last year, this year too I was part of the team that represented AllGo at FTF. The venue this time was The Leela Palace Kempinski and it was held on the 13th and 14th of November. Compared to last time, the venue was better, the food was better, the freebies were better (heh heh), and even though I didn’t win a Creative Zen at the lucky draw , it made for a very satisfactory FTF for me.

We had a booth at the Technology Lab and we had one demo relating to automotive infotainment and another in home automation. We showcased Trio, AllGo’s popular multimedia solution as part of the automotive infotainment demo. We had on display support for different devices like iPod and USB thumb drives. Also on display was the Bluetooth handsfree support, which lets the user answer phone calls via his car audio system. It certainly made for a very interesting demo. As part of the home automation solution, we demonstrated a Wi-Fi and Zigbee based setup which lets the user control different electrical components of his house using his Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, no matter where he is. Needless to say, the participants were very impressed by it.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures from the event. If you want to see all the photos we took at the event, you can head to my Picasa account here.

Me at the AllGo booth (Day 1)

The AllGo Team : (from left) Srinu, me, Girish, Kunal, Yagnesh (Day 2)

Our Automotive Infotainment setup

The Home Automation setup

KDE 4.1 : First Impressions

Okay, this is something I had been wanting to try for quite some time now. Before I begin, let me tell you that I have been a GNOME fan ever since I have used my Fedora Core 3, and KDE 3.x has never appealed to me. But since KDE 4 looked a lot different in the screenshots from its predecessors, I wanted to give it another chance. And KDE 4.1 turned out to be a bundle of pleasant surprises all the way through.

Installation:

I wanted to install KDE 4.1 on my existing Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) Hardy. This softpedia article provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it. And the bundle of pleasant surprises opened up right from the installation stage. The installation proceeded without a single hitch from the beginning to end, something I admit, I wasn’t expecting at all. All I did was follow a few steps from that article and I was ready to login to KDE! It didn’t even need a reboot! Mind you, I might be one of those luckier ones here, because as the comments in the article tell you, not all of them had everything working for them. I changed my session to KDE and logged in, and was greeted by a beautiful splash screen and an unusual looking desktop. And I was on my way to start playing with a brand new approach to using my desktop.

Things I liked:

Let’s quickly get to the things I liked in KDE 4.1. First of all, the desktop looks great. And I mean really stunning. The default wallpaper’s great, the color combination’s good (some say it looks too much like Vista, but I am not complaining), there’s a new way your desktop icons show up and overall, there’s only one word to describe it: Refreshing. I quickly headed over to the start menu (or main menu or K-menu or Applicaton Launcher or whatever it is called). There was another of those surprises awaiting me. The menu is grouped into different categories with little tab-like things which switch when I hover over them. Certainly beats the hell out of GNOME’s three different menus which eat up all of my panel space. And best of all, there is a search bar waiting for me to type the first few characters of the application I want to open. Kind of like Launchy built into the start menu. Next I proceeded to try out the desktop widgets. They are very similar to Google Desktop’s widgets, except it is easier to dock them anywhere you want. I admit the number of widgets provided is not much, but it will only get better. I decided an analog clock will look nice on mine. Then I played around for a while with the desktop settings. Another surprise. Instead of an image, I can put a slideshow of images as my wallpaper. So I gave the path of my wallpapers directory and set the timer to change it every two minutes. You can only imagine how interesting this is going to make my computing experience (all the wallpapers I have are of pretty actresses). I headed towards the file manager now. Another thing that made me smile. A tabbed file manager, which looks like the Xplorer2 I use on Windows! Good God, I have had dreams like this! The run command brings up a tiny Launchy like window, and even does exactly the same things as Launchy, with the drop-down menu and all that. I can see KDE becoming a very useful and productive desktop.

KDE 4.1 Desktop (Not the default wallpaper!)

Things I didn’t like:

Having sung praises of KDE, I must admit there are some things I didn’t like. The toolbar and the titlebar of the windows look as dull as ever. Sure, you can customize almost anything in KDE, but why does such a beautiful desktop have such sad looking windows? Adding stuff to my panel and rearranging them was a major pain. The widgets moved erratically and I wondered more than once how a particular widget got there when I definitely didn’t want to put it there. I breathed a satisfactory sigh only when I got all the widgets where I wanted and locked them. I won’t dare to move them any time soon for sure! Another feature I didn’t like was how Dolphin (the file manager) insists on opening everything on single click. Hey, I come from a Windows (gasp!) background, and I like to double-click stuff, ok? How do I change it? Also the Application Launcher (or K-menu, etc) shows me gibberish for a fraction of a second before loading my menu. Is my hardware too old for KDE 4? Maybe. I don’t know.

Final thoughts:

In spite of all these shortcomings (mostly minor, as you must have observed), I have to put KDE 4.1 under the “Exceeds Expectations” category. So where does this put me, the die-hard GNOME fan? I’ll put it this way: Yesterday when I was logging into KDE, a window came up asking me if I wanted to make KDE the default desktop. I thought for a moment, and clicked on  “Make Default”.

Don’t worry, I am not saying everything is over between me and GNOME. I’ll be following its releases closely, and who knows, I might switch back if it gives me a better desktop experience!

Widget Update

You might have noticed already that First Person has two new widgets. The first one shows the articles I have shared on my Google Reader shared page. I first tried Reader some time back, and I have been a major fan of it ever since. I make it a point to check my Reader at least once a day every morning (usually more than that). The one feature that sets Google Reader apart from other feed readers is its sharing feature. Whenever I like an article I am reading, I just click on the ‘Share’ button and my friends in GMail who use Google Reader, get to read that article, and it also appears on my shared items page. This concept of sharing is great, and provides an excellent way to read good stuff and discover new feeds. But not everyone uses Google Reader, and while I have been persuading many of my friends to start using it, they don’t seem too enthusiastic. It seemed such a sad thing that only a few Reader friends could see my shared articles, until I saw that good old WordPress had a feed widget and my shared items page offered a feed! It didn’t take me long to put two and two together, and now, you’ll be able to see what I am sharing in Reader right here on my blog! That way, you’ll never be short on good stuff to read.

The second one is also an RSS feed widget. This one shows you my latest tweets. I rambled on some time back about how I wasn’t writing as regularly as I wished to, even though I had lots to say, and that’s when the microblogging concept seemed useful. I had known about Twitter a long time back, but it simply didn’t appeal to me at that time. Now however, I am giving it a shot. You can see my tweets in the widget here, or follow me. You can find me on http://twitter.com/prasannapandit.

Also, my blog, First Person completed one full year this August. So happy birthday First Person, and all that.

Can you believe this?

Well, dig this. Apparently the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI) was allowed to send only one person with the players to the Beijing Olympics, so the federation had to choose between the coach Yefremov and its technical director, some Dhanraj Choudhari. And as only an Indian sports federation can, TTFI actually sent this Choudhari guy instead of the coach.

Read the full story here:

http://olympics.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Table_tennis_manager_in_coachs_clothing/articleshow/3382180.cms

So now after Neha Agarwal lost, Sharath Kamal lost, Mr. Choudhari can come back home with happy memories of the grand opening ceremony at Beijing. But I know one way the TTFI, like the Indian Government, can make amends for its mistakes. By giving ten lakh rupees to Abhinav Bindra, of course.

I am alive and well

Since it has been over a month since I wrote something, you might be wondering what happened to me. I assure you, all is well with me. So why this long hiatus, you ask me. Have I developed an aversion to my keyboard (which is mightier than your pen and your sword)? Have I run out of things to talk about? Have I decided to not share any more of my profound wisdom with you guys? Or worse still, is it that a long forgotten foe, having raised his ugly head, has finished me off, after making me reveal my GMail password so that the despicable fiend can be online under my guise and write nice status messages? Worry not, for none of those has happened. I do admit that I have been at a loss for words. Literally. So many things to talk about and time and again when I tried to weave a nice post around that, I found myself unable to do it, and I have spent the last month-and-a-half being locked up inside a cocoon of wordless ideas, not willing to come out, not able to write. But all that is history now, and I am back at my keyboard doing what I do best (no, I am not going to write code now).

Like all good K serials, let me do a quick recap of what has happened so far. June came and went, so now it has been more than an year since good old JC unleashed its ‘07 graduates on the poor unsuspecting world.  Also came and went the twelfth of July, and with that I completed one full year at AllGo.  Lots of things have changed between then and now, but I don’t really feel like ranting about that right now. Let’s just say I have learnt a lot of new things, technical and otherwise, and leave it at that.

Now that that is out of the way, I still have this annoying question of what exactly to write about to salvage my nosediving hits. Maybe I can write about “Ten things I like” or “Ten things I dislike” or “Ten movies you should avoid like the plague” or something like that. But I seriously don’t think I can compile ten things of anything, so that’s out of question. Maybe I can write about how much I hate it when people use SMS lingo, but there is really nothing much to write about, other than what I just mentioned. Nope. None of those. I’ll just make this a frivolous post. So presenting a review(?) of the four movies I watched last week (actually I saw five, but everyone has seen Mungaru Male, so what’s the point?). Read and be amazed.

1. First up, a Telugu movie called Happy Days. Was waiting for a long time to watch this one, and I finally got a DVD print of that. The movie starts off pretty well, invoking nostalgia of those glorious college days. The first half is decent enough, inspite of those overdone ragging bits and that ridiculous cricket match. It is the second half that disappoints. What could have been an unforgettable movie about college days and friendship, turns out to be a familiar tale with four different love stories, fights and happy (or sad, depending on the person in question) endings. Still, the movie does have some memorable scenes, has an amazing music score and manages to keep you entertained. 2.5/5.

2. Then, there’s Bommarillu, another Telugu movie. Put in a nice script, throw in some comedy, have your actors give fine performances, and most importantly, include Genelia in the cast and what do you get? An out-and-out entertainer, that’s what! It has been a long time since I have enjoyed a movie so much. This one gets a 3.5/5 .

3. Jaane Tu.. Ya Jaane Na: Another Genelia movie. Saw it last weekend at Sathyam Cinemas in Chennai. Decent movie, you can watch it once. Nice story and good acting, with lots of laughter thrown in, you’re sure to come out of the theatre happy that for once your movie ticket has not been a bad investment. I give it 3/5.

4. Memento: When I was trying to choose a good movie from my collection, I remembered Vivek mentioning this one. And it doesn’t disappoint. Memento probably has the most unusual narrative I’ve ever seen. The hero has short-term memory loss, so he can’t remember anything more than two minutes ago. So how does the director decide to tell this story? Backwards, of course! It’s like a conventional movie split into a dozen pieces and all those pieces are shown in the reverse order. You’ll really need to use your brains to keep track of the story, so this one is recommended only if you are open to giving your brain some serious exercise. For sheer innovative film-making, I give it 4/5.

So that’s it. I feel my fingers deserve a little break right now, and for that matter, so do your eyes. I’ll be back.

PS: This is the first post of mine which doesn’t have a single link. A result of wanting to keep the post free of those annoying underlined words that jump up at odd moments. And lazyness on my part.