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.

How safe are you?

I came across this interesting news item today, that made me sit up and take notice. A 22 year old Orkut user was arrested in Pune, here in India for posting “derogatory” messages against Sonia Gandhi in an Orkut forum. You can also read the IBN news article here. It seems that people from the Congress party lodged a police complaint against this guy, and the police contacted Google, which in turn was only happy to give out personal details of its offending subscriber “in compliance with valid Indian legal process”.

This is an excellent example of what I was talking about in one of my articles about online privacy. I haven’t read what the accused had posted on Orkut, so I can’t really talk about that. But one thing is for certain. If you write something which can be deemed offensive to someone, all it takes is a simple police complaint to land you in prison - don’t expect Google or any service provider to protect you. Because they won’t.

I repeat, constant vigilance!

More on Slackware

Like I had mentioned in my last post, here’s the second article which continues with my thoughts on Slackware. We’ll start with the package management first. Just as RedHat/Fedora packages come as RPM files, and Debian based packages have a .deb extension, Slackware packages come as .tgz files. Slackware provides utilities like installpkg, removepkg, upgradepkg (called pkgtools) to manage packages. But dependency resoution is manual, which can be a big pain sometimes, especially if a package you so urgently need depends on dozens of other packages. That’s why most major distros have tools for automatic dependency resolution. For example, Fedora has yum and Debian based distros come with apt-get. Thankfully, a tool similar to apt-get has also been written for Slackware. It’s called slapt-get.

Slapt-get is very similar to apt-get in how it works. If there is a package you need, you can do a slapt-get –install <something> and the slapt-get utility searches for the appropriate packages in its repository and downloads it for you. If that <something> depends on <something-else> then that <something-else> is also downloaded and both are installed for you. It’s simple enough to use and it has options to remove and upgrade packages like apt-get does.

Now, Ubuntu users, having used the point-and-click Synaptic package manager will probably wonder why anyone would use a command line tool for package management. It is true that some people will not like to use command line utilities and so using slapt-get might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, there is a GUI tool for package management in Slackware as well.  It’s called GSlapt and it provides a nice front-end to the slapt-get tools.

Finally, Slackware ships with KDE and while KDE has its share of fans, I personally prefer GNOME. I just think it has a more user-friendly interface. There are some GNOME packages for Slackware available, which means you can install GNOME, even though the distro doesn’t ship it. I decided to try out GNOME SlackBuild. The install instructions are fairly simple and you’ll need slapt-get to install it. I followed the instructions and downloaded and installed GNOME SlackBuild on my system. Everything seems to work fine, although on my machine, GNOME is definitely not as fast as KDE, and in fact I noticed a delay of almost half a second in loading the menu-icons, which I found a major irritant. Whether the problem is with GNOME SlackBuild, or with GNOME itself or if my hardware is too old for 2.22, I don’t know. There are also other Slackware packages for GNOME like Dropline, but I haven’t tried them.

Some final thoughts: While Slackware is a pretty good distro, it scores very poorly on the GUI front. When you are using KDE, for instance, you are very aware that it is just an application running on top of the kernel, and the tight integration of the GUI with the rest of the OS like in Ubuntu, is just not there in Slackware. I know it is a conscious decision to keep things simple, but for desktop usage, you would want a much more functional GUI. The other thing is that after I installed Slackware, I realised that I prefer GNOME over KDE and Slackware doesn’t ship it. Installing GNOME-for-Slackware builds just isn’t the same as GNOME being shipped with the distro. Your menus become messy and you end up getting software which you don’t really need, and in the end, you have yet another desktop package that feels like it was put there as an afterthought, not something that came with the OS.

So in the end, I still maintain that installing Slackware was worthwhile thing, simply because I learnt many new things, and even though I might go ahead and install Ubuntu on my machine, any new command or script knowledge will certainly come in handy in future.

Hello Slackware!

Well, it was due for a long time and I finally did it a couple of weeks back. My old Fedora Core 3 was way too old and was begging to be replaced. My experience with Fedora, while enjoyabale enough, was far from perfect. So I didn’t want to upgrade it to Fedora 8. Since it was a long time since I tried something else, I decided to go for a completely new distro. The next question was which one. The most popular of these distros are the ones which claim to be highly user-friendly, with Ubuntu, SimplyMEPIS, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS etc competing in this category. While this has been a wonderful thing in the GNU/Linux world, I decided to go the opposite way. I decided to go for Slackware 12. I spent a good deal of time reading up about the distro, and while everyone agreed that it was a good distro, the general opinion was that it was not for Linux newbies and ranked very low on usability. Since I did not consider myself a Linux newbie, I decided it was time for a little playing around with Slackware. HowToForge.com provides an excellent installation guide on Slackware here, and I strongly recommend reading this. And here’s what I think about Slackware:

Installation: The way Slackware does things is, the DVD first boots to a live prompt and you have to use fdisk/cfdisk to edit your partitions and then type setup to get started on the installation. Since I’ve never used command line tools for editing my partition (and because I am scared of messing things up),  I downloaded a liveCD version of GParted, and used it to edit my partitions before I even touched my Slackware DVD. Slackware is one of the very few distros which still uses a curses-based installation, which means you can’t point-and-click your way to a shiny desktop. That said, the non-graphical installer isn’t difficult at all, and I, for one, found it very intuitive. It even detected my Windows partitions and made entries into /etc/fstab, which I found a most pleasant surprise, since I had prepared myself to manually add entries to fstab first thing after installation. Since the full installation of Slackware is nowhere close enough to the full installation of Fedora Core 3, and becuase I had a 13+ GB of partition waiting patiently, I went for a full installation. After installing the packages, it asked me a couple of other questions and finally took me to the bootloader section. Here’s where I made my first mistake. I selected the simple option and let the installer (or liloconfig) take care of installing the bootloader for me. That was a bad move, since the generated lilo.conf wasn’t correct (I’ll elaborate the reason later) and so the installer reported that lilo couldn’t be installed properly. The next few screens asked me about some network settings and then finally I was done. I rebooted my system.

Problems with install: With the botched bootloader installation, you’d think that the system would boot into Windows, but that didn’t happen. You see, the MBR still had the GRUB bootloader from my old Fedora installation, and since I had formatted the whole thing, there was no grub.conf remaining. Which meant I was stuck with the GRUB prompt which takes possibly the world’s most cryptic commands, and a “help” command that is anything but that. So now I somehow had to boot into Slackware and reinstall lilo with just the man pages to help me (I didn’t expect my network to work anytime soon). Thankfully this isn’t the first time I have messed up the bootloader and so I knew a few things about live CDs, chroot etc. After spending a frustrating one hour with different versions of Knoppix, I finally remembered that Slackware DVD itself boots into a live prompt. So one simple chroot later, I was inside my installation. When I opened my /etc/lilo.conf, I instantly saw what the problem was. It had an entry called boot=/dev/hda, whereas I didn’t have an hda. I only had an hdb (a result of having two hard disks some time back, one of which went down in a blaze of glory). I changed the offending line to /dev/hdb, ran lilo again and rebooted. This time I had my lilo.

Post-Install: HowToForge goes pretty deeply into the post-install configuration, so I won’t waste our time saying the same thing. For me, the next steps were clear: get the sound working, tweak the X settings (for instance, Slackware uses VESA by default) and finally get the network working. I went by the tutorial, and ALSA configured my sound card beautifully. Running xorgconfig let me choose my settings for X. My network card was a problem though. eth0 didn’t seem to be present, which meant my ethernet card wasn’t detected. I have one of those cheaper LAN cards (some Hong Kong based company) and it says it uses a Realtek 8139D chip. I went through the rc.modules file and uncommented the modprobe for the 8139too driver and ran netconfig again. Still, no luck. Finally I gave up and used a USB cable to connect my cable modem (Scientfic Atlanta Webstar) to my computer bypassing my LAN card and uncommented the line which did a modprobe for the USB modem driver. I set up my IP address, gateway, DNS etc. using the GUI that KDE provides and finally, my network was up and running.

First Impression: So what were my first thoughts about Slackware? Certainly not the easiest to install and setup, so you’ll need to spend considerable time on getting things running. If you are the kind of guy who expects everything to run out of the box, then you should probably consider Ubuntu. That said, Slackware runs very fast on my old hardware and I am happy I spent some time with it. If you are someone who is looking to learn how Linux works (which was also a big motivation for me to go for Slackware), then I highly recommend this distro.

And since the reader’s patience is inversely proportional to the length of an article, I’ll end this here. But I still have a lot to say about Slackware’s package management, slapt-get and GSlapt, and the solution to the “Where is my GNOME?” question, so I’ll be back soon!

Chamundi Betta at midnight!

It all started on Saturday morning when I reached Mysore and told Nikhil, “How about Chamundi Hills today?” Nikhil instantly agreed. So the plan was on. As for the timing, I suggested evening, but Nikhil thought playing table tennis was better and so favoured a night visit at around 9. And as it turned out, we ended up played TT well beyond that time. But somehow we still had the energy for a ride to the hills. And so we made a post dinner plan. Dinner was a modest fare at a roadside eatery (delicious though) and then at around 10:45 PM we set out towards Chamundi Hills, after picking up Deepak on the way.

The road was deserted, the weather was cold enough for an adventure but not uncomfortable, and the bike ride was awesome. We stopped on the way up for a couple of quick photographs (to prove that we actually did all that stuff, you know).Here they are:

With very few vehicles to disturb us, the view of the city below was absolutely breathtaking. Needless to say, the photo doesn’t do any justice to the sight we saw.

We did a quick about-turn when we reached the top and while coming down, we stopped at another view-point (this one was on the right side of the road) and devoured the fried rice parcels we had brought with us. The whole thing got a little more exciting when I reminded the others that cheetahs were spotted in the area. Of course when the others went on about how the cheetahs like to go for pillion riders, I was a lot less amused (I was riding behind Nikhil, you see). Anyway, since the road was mercifully devoid of pillion-rider-eating-cheetahs, we reached the foot of the hills at around 12:30 AM, safe, sound and dog-tired.

I have been to Chamundi hills more times than I can count, but this midnight trip turned out to be very special indeed!

What a trip!

Take a bus, and throw in a bunch of long-parted maniacs and what do you get? That’s right - loads of fun! That’s exactly what last weekend’s Chikmagalur trip was like. Whether it was trekking through Kallathigiri, visiting temples in Amruthapura and Belur, devouring delicious food at Kaari’s place, or simply the ride in the bus, there was never a dull moment. Since a picture is worth a kilo-words, I’ll just let some of the pics do the talking.

This one was taken in Kaari’s uncle’s place in Lingadahalli, day 2. Guess who’s missing! (Hover the mouse over the photo for answer.)

Food like you’ll never have, day 2.

This is at Belur, day 3.

Beating the pulp out of Arun, day 3. (This was done under the supervision of experts. Kids, don’t try this at home.)

The magnificent architecture of Belur, day 3. Taken in my5610.

Same as above, day 3.

At Kallathigiri, day 1. Now you know the photos are not in chronological order.

Here’s Pavan in murderous mood, day 2:

It’s been a week now, and we are yet to come out of the trip mood. Well, here’s hoping there will be more of those and more frequent at that!

It’s raining gadgets!

The last month of 2007 turned out to be a “Gadget Month” for me. After iPod, I have yet another gadget to keep me busy. This weekend I exchanged my Motorola L6 handset for a new Nokia 5610 Xpress Music, and to describe it in one word, it’s absolutely stunning (wait, that’s two words). It’s black and red, just like the one in the pic, and it cost me a good 13k.

The designers at Nokia sure have done an excellent job on this one. It’s a slide phone, and it is certainly one of the most stylish handsets in the Nokia lineup. When I had gone to the store, I had mainly two things on my mind: a good camera and a stunning display. 5610 has both. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, and it has a 240 X 320 display with 16 million colours. Add to that a sufficiently bright screen which is clearly visible even in sunlight (I have a feeling the in-built light sensor may have something to do with it). I also got a 512 MB memory card in the package, so that’s enough memory for me, at least for now. On top of that, it is a music phone, so the audio is mind-blowing, to put it in simple terms. The unique slide button (is it called a button?) lets me go to the radio or the music player with just a slide. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, something we take for granted with a Nokia phone.

So does my old L6 beat this one in any aspect? Surprisingly, it does. The alarm in 5610 comes nowhere close to the one in my L6. It doesn’t even have multiple alarms. And the battery cover is very difficult to remove, although it might be a blessing in disguise in the long run. Indeed, these are very minor drawbacks in a phone that comes so close to perfection in terms of what I want from my phone.

If you want to know more about this handset, you can check it out on the Nokia webpage here. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to playing with my phone again…

iPod and the ml_ipod alternative to iTunes

I know I should have written about this long ago, but anyway, here it is: I now own a stunning 8 GB third generation iPod Nano, courtesy my dear sister. Everyone knows how great the iPod is, how easy it is to use and how good the sound sounds and all that stuff, so I won’t waste precious keystrokes on that. I’ll just tell you that it is something I have started taking with me almost everywhere I go, so I always have my entire music collection with me, in a device that fits snugly in my palm. The new ‘Apple‘ of my eyes if you will. To make you more jealous, here’s a pic:

Though the iPod and its legendary user interface have become synonyms for simplicity, you can’t say the same about iTunes, the software used to transfer data to it. Within five minutes of using iTunes, I knew I would hate it for as long as I live. For one, I hated how complicated it is to do such simple things as adding songs to playlists, and for another, I was more than put out by the fact that iTunes will let you sync your iPod with only one library, and so for a guy like me who has half of his music collection in one system and the other half in another, this meant a big problem, since trying to sync with the second library would erase music which were synced with the first. So, for the next few days, I was found searching for iTunes alternatives.

Here’s a good post from Simple Help. Since MediaMonkey seemed to have been recommended by most people in different forums, I decided to try that one. Everything seemed to be working fine when I connected my iPod (the songs on my iPod were being displayed and all) and it also seemed to be transferring songs perfectly. But when I disconnected the iPod, it seemed to think there was no media inside. I finally realized that MediaMonkey didn’t have support for third generation nano yet. I tried using Winamp 5.5, which comes with a plugin called pmp_ipod bundled with it, but it didn’t show any of the songs in the device as it was supposed to, so I concluded that pmp_ipod didn’t support my iPod either.

I then read somewhere that another Winamp plugin ml_ipod has support for my third generation nano. I tried it, and it worked like a charm. The songs and the album art transfer without a hitch. And since Winamp doesn’t insist on erasing my existing collection to put in new ones, I don’t have to worry about syncing my iPod across multiple libraries. Photo transfer still seems a bit buggy, but since I use my iPod mainly for my audio collection, that doesn’t really bother me much. Winamp, like many times before, has proven to be the only player you’ll ever need, at least as far as audio playback is concerned. And in the process making at least one iPod user very happy.

Oh, and happy new year, all of you!

Superfast application launching with Launchy!

Picture this: You are in the middle of typing something in your editor and suddenly you realize the whole thing would be a lot more pleasant if you had some music on. So to open Winamp, you minimize all your open windows and then you find there’s no Winamp shortcut on your desktop because you didn’t want to clutter it. And so you take your hand off the keyboard, move it all the way to your mouse, then click on Start > Program Files, and then start searching for the entry which says Winamp. Way too much trouble to do all this whenever you want to launch anything, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type, say Win + W and have Winamp come up? Launchy may not be able to do that, but it certainly makes application launching a lot less painful.

Here’s how: Launchy indexes all your installed programs and starts during your system start-up, so when you want to launch an application, all you have to do is press Alt + Space (or any other key combination of your choice) and type in the first few letters of your application. Press enter and voila! Your application has been launched!

Launchy also comes with a bunch of plugins that help you do more. For example, the installer comes with plugins that index control panel applications and let you use launcy as a calculator, browse files and more. Lifehacker provides good articles on Launchy here and here. It comes with a bunch of skins too, though I think the default one is good enough for me.

Happy Launching!

The end of online privacy?

The Internet is well known for the anonymity it provides. All of us have enjoyed this anonymity at some point of time, haven’t we? There’s this feeling of privacy, of being secure as long as we are not foolish enough to divulge our personal details. Everything, from searching for illegal stuff to finding maps of frowned-upon places in your town - it’s all okay as long as it’s done on the Internet, right? Or are we falling prey to our own complacency as we spend those long hours on the Internet? How many of us end up leaving a trail of all our online adventures?

I usually wonder about this when I see companies like Google and Yahoo providing a host of services all under the umbrella of a single account. Let’s take Google for example. Let’s say you have signed in to your GMail account in your Firefox browser (as we all are, at some point during the day). And you want to do a web search, so you open a new tab by clicking on the web link at the top. The funny thing is, your Google session is still active (you can see your GMail ID at the top) and all your web searches are being recorded. In fact, you can see your past searches and trends at the web history page. That includes all kinds of searches - web, image, blogs, books, products - you name it. You frequently chat with your friends and family on GTalk. You open Google maps to find the route from your home/office to different places. You have all your photos tucked away in your Picasa account. Your Google Reader feeds give you your daily reading material. Your credit card info is in your Google Checkout account. Your orkut account lists hundreds of your friends. Your plans this week are in your Google calendar and your documents on Google docs, some potentially confidential and possibly incriminating, I might add. And have you ever wondered how the “relevant” text ads in GMail get their “relevance” from? Isn’t it a script that scans your personal mails looking for keywords for their text ads? So what’s wrong with all that, you ask me. But there is. All your personally identifiable information is on Google’s servers and all your search escapades can be mapped to a single account - yours. Anonymity on the Internet, anyone?

Don’t get me wrong - I am not saying that Google is out to cash in on your personal information. Not at all. I am one of the many people who remain grateful to Google for all these wonderful products. Heck, I use Google services as much as anyone else does and I can’t imagine my day without it. All I am saying is, a truck-load of your personal data is there on someone else’s machine, whether or not someone takes advantage of it. And that data is only as secure as the company wants it to be. I am sure we all agree that there will always be people in any company who will have the clearance to look at all the data residing in their company’s servers (those are the people with keys to the fabled executive washroom). Is it so darn difficult to imagine someone (the government, the terrorist who has kidnapped the CEO’s niece, the dictator who has nursed hatred towards you ever since you beat him in ping-pong back in high school) who arm-twists that company to trace and divulge details about you? I am not saying switch off that modem and cut yourself off from the world. All I am saying is you need to be careful, and see where you are putting all your data. Just do a bit of a background check on the company before you trust it. And decide what data that company can be trusted with. Never give away your passwords to any of your existing accounts (for those of you who just said “duh!”, here’s an example : a particular social networking site asks for your GMail password when you sign up, presumably to invite people on your contact list. And you can’t skip the step. I get invites from my friends every other day!). And of course, when in doubt, just say no thanks, or log off.

Constant vigilance!