jw@l@nta's weblog

LinuxMint Debian and adjustments

2011-12-26T13:34:00.005+05:45

I recently moved to Linux Mint Debian after using Ubuntu for since quite a while. (Reason: Like many, I'm not so much fond of Unity)

However, Debian is not as polished as Ubuntu. Here are some of the fixes I made:

Installing 686-pae kernel

LM Debian comes with 486 kernel, which has support for single CPU only. The first thing to do is install 686-pae kernel

# apt-get install linux-image-686-pae

Reboot and choose the new kernel.

Installing Virtualbox

Virtualbox is available in the repository.

# apt-get install virtualbox

However, virtualbox wont work because of the newly installed 686-pae kernel, so we need to rebuild the vboxdrv modules. This requires linux headers for 686-pae kernel.

# apt-get install linux-headers-686-pae

This should rebuild the vboxdrv modules automatically, post installation. But if it doesnt, do the following:

# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms

Installing Wine

Unfortunately, Wine is not available in the repo. Use the repo at http://www.lamaresh.net/

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list, or via Synaptic - Settings - Repositories - Other Software - Add

deb http://www.lamaresh.net/apt squeeze main

Then update and install.

# apt-get  update
# apt-get install wine

Fixing Mint-X themes

There are two Mint themes, Mint-X and Mint-X-Metal, which are very soothing and greenish. However there's a little glitch with expander plus (+) signs (eg, visible while installing software using Synaptic). To fix, open /usr/share/themes/Mint-X/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file (as root) and remove the following line:

GtkExpander::expander_spacing = 16

Do the same for /usr/share/themes/Mint-X-Metal/gtk-2.0/gtkrc too.

Also, if you want to change the font size for panels, look for font_name variable in this gtkrc file.

Few other changes

You might also wanna install ttf-devanagari-fonts and ttf-mscorefonts-installer. Also download the latest Firefox (currently 9.0) and install it to /opt/firefox/

# tar -jxf firefox-9.0.tar.bz2 -C /opt/

RIP Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011)

2011-10-13T21:14:00.003+05:45

My life revolves around tools and technology, the foundation of which you laid. I've loved and enjoyed The C Programming Language more than any computer text so far. May you rest in peace..

#include <stdio.h>

main(){
  printf("RIP, Dennis Ritchie!");
}

Gosaikunda Trek

2011-10-10T05:01:00.018+05:45

Travelogue after a long time. Not that I haven't been traveling, but have been too lazy to write. However recently I went to Langtang trail upto Gosaikunda, the memoir of which is worth mentioning. The scenery along the trail is just superb and the Gosaikunda and other lakes around are just magnificent!

We (Rajendra, Subash and me) started from Sundarijal and ended up at Dhunche via Gosaikunda. Took 5 days (29th Sept - 3rd Oct, 2011) and trekked up to a height of 4730m.

Day 1
We started from Sundarijal. Actually the plan was to go to Dunche / Syabrubesi first and start from there, but since the bus tickets were hard to get due to Dashain we decided to start from the opposite end.

The Sundarijal - Chisapani was quite familiar trail. We started around noon and reached there by evening. Apart from few downhills, the trail is all the way up.

Elevation: 2194m

Day 2
Headed towards Chipling Danda. But first we went all the way downhill to Chipling Phedi then a *tough* climb to Chipling Danda. Stayed there for a while for lunch and for much needed rest.

Then towards Kutumsang, the next stop. Not as tough climb as before but still it was all the way uphill. Finally reached Kutumsang. Had some noodles there.

It was already getting late so we were in a dilemma whether to head towards Magengoth or not. But we still thought to give it a shot.

However we got caught on the way due to magnificent scenery of sunset along the way. By the time we were done taking snaps, it was already dark. Plus met a women who was the owner of a hotel at the next stop. Even she advised us to return back to Kutumsang.

Night at Kutumsang. Elevation: 3630m

Day 3:
Chilly morning, but the cute little daughter of the owner of the hotel made it interesting. She was perky, talkative and fun.

After breakfast we headed towards Magengoth. And it was tough climb. Took 3 hours to reach there. Rested for a while and we had Dhido there, which I regretted as the curry was too chilly and burned my stomach later.

Headed off to Tharepati then. Little elevated road but not that tough. Took 2 and half hour to reach there. The view of the mountains was supposed to be amazing from there, but unfortunately it was raining when we reached there. Stopped by a hotel there and had some tea.

Then off to Ghopte. The trail was all the way downhill and rocky. It was so steep we wondered how the trekkers taking the opposite route would climb that. On the way you come across a spring and a giant boulder you cannot miss.

Finally Ghopte. Had no energy to move beyond. Elevation: 3430m

Day 4:
Chilly and shivering night. We moved early in the morning. What was ahead was perhaps the toughest road we've encountered so far.

Ghopte to Laurebina Phedi was a series of tough ups and downs. The hotels at phedi are visible from quite a distance, but it took us almost 3 hours to reach there. Even the pass at the top starts being visible, but is yet too far.

Finally reached Laurebina Phedi (elevation: 3700m). Had some lunch and prepped for the final climb. We were climbing upto 4700m next so had the garlics and chocolates ready. It was supposed to take us 3-4 hours to climb. And if we're not careful enough, we might even catch altitude sickness!

Toughest climb so far! The landscape started changing rapidly, from greenish to barren rocks. Even noticed Danphe (Lophophorus) along the way. And since the air was getting thinner, it was a slow and steady climb. Sounds of own footsteps, long breaths and wilderness. Thankfully the air was misty. Also met couple of tourists returning from the pass. Stopped by a hotel along the way for some tea! Cant believe there was a hotel in that altitude (4100m). The owner was extremely nice and the tea was cheap.

Started walking again. We all started getting headache due to cold and altitude. Finally reached the top. Frozen snow of the mountain!! And all of a sudden, the sky cleared up and it was sunny. Played with snow and took lots of photographs. Then crossed the pass (~4700m)!

Then another wonder happened. As soon as we crossed the pass, it got cloudy again and it started snowing!! Amidst the snowfall, we walked along Surya Kunda (lake), Ganesh Kunda and several others. Finally reached Gosaikunda. It goes without saying, the lake and surrounding is beautiful.

Stayed for the night there. Elevation: 4300m

Day 5:
Took a lot of snaps around Gosaikunda early in the morning. Some breakfast and then headed towards Dhunche, all the way downhill.

Took us a whole day to reach Dhunche via Laurebinayak and Sing Gompa. Having walked uphill for 4 days, the downhill walk was knee-aching. Reached Dhunche in the evening. Elevation: 1950m!

We were supposed to stay there for the night and return Kathmandu the other day, but due to festive season the buses were hard to get. Fortunately we got a jeep returning back to Kathmandu and we jumped in. Returning Kathmandu the same day (although hurriedly) seemed wiser to us than staying there for the night and getting lost the next day)

Reached Kathmandu by 10pm. Elevation: 1400m :)

Other Useful Links:
1. Few photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwalanta/sets/72157627858559272/
2. Map: http://www.explore-himalaya.com/photo%20gallery/maps/lantang_&-Helumbu-trek.jpg (although I suggest you buy a paper map with contours and all, if you're planning to trek)
3. Detail Guide: http://www.yetizone.com/Langtang/Trek/langtang_trek.shtml

Reprojection to EPSG:900913 using MapServer

2011-09-11T06:59:00.011+05:45

If you are embedding a map on some web page (read: OpenLayers) and need to add layers from some third party GIS server, you're most likely to come across the word "Mercator" and its myriads of standards. Web based mapping services use Spherical Mercator, however commercial GIS services (like, Esri) might use some other standards like EPSG:4326. This incompatibility leads to a lot of trouble as OpenLayers only accepts Spherical Mercator.

From OpenLayers Docs:

Spherical Mercator is a de facto term used inside the OpenLayers community – and also the other existing Open Source GIS community – to describe the projection used by Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, and other commercial API providers.

This term is used to refer to the fact that these providers use a Mercator projection which treats the earth as a sphere, rather than a projection which treats the earth as an ellipsoid. This affects calculations done based on treating the map as a flat plane, and is therefore important to be aware of when working with these map providers.

In order to properly overlay data on top of the maps provided by the commerical API providers, it is neccesary to use this projection. This applies primarily to displaying raster tiles over the commercial API layers – such as TMS, WMS, or other similar tiles.

In order to work well with the existing commercial APIs, many users who create data designed for use within Google Maps will also use this projection. One prime example is OpenStreetMap, whose raster map tiles are all projected into the ‘spherical mercator’ projection.

Projections in GIS are commonly referred to by their “EPSG” codes, identifiers managed by the European Petroleum Survey Group. One common identifier is “EPSG:4326”, which describes maps where latitude and longitude are treated as X/Y values. Spherical Mercator has an official designation of EPSG:3857. However, before this was established, a large amount of software used the identifier EPSG:900913. This is an unofficial code, but is still the commonly used code in OpenLayers. Any time you see the string “EPSG:4326”, you can assume it describes latitude/longitude coordinates. Any time you see the string “EPSG:900913”, it will be describing coordinates in meters in x/y.

If you are to overlay third party GIS layer, which is not in spherical mercator, you'll have to reproject the layer.

One of the reasons that the Spherical Mercator projection is so important is that it is the only projection which will allow for overlaying image data on top of commercial layers like Google Maps correctly. When using raster images, in the browser, it is not possible to reproject the images in the same way it might be in a ‘thick’ GIS client. Instead, all images must be in the same projection.

There are several tools for reprojection, but the popular (and free) one is MapServer. The process is explained here. The process works like this:

However this doesn't work. It turned out, MapServer doesn't reproject to 900913 properly (even after adding the 900913 reprojection line to /usr/share/proj/epsg). Maybe a bug.

So here's the hack: MapServer does reproject to EPSG:3857. But EPSG:3857 and EPSG:900913 are same thing. So we need to write an intermediate proxy which takes WMS request for 900913, replaces the 900913 to 3857 in the WMS request URL and redirects the request to MapServer.

Here's the PHP script (reproject.php) to act as proxy:

<?php
header("Location: http://{mapserver_address}/cgi-bin/mapserv?" . str_ireplace("epsg%3A900913","epsg%3A3857",$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']));

1. Install MapServer. In Ubuntu,


sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 cgi-mapserver mapserver-bin

for verification, check http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserv

2. Put the reproject.php file to web root (/var/www)

3. Write a configuration file (say, wms.map) and place it in the same folder as mapserv (usually at /usr/lib/cgi-bin/)

MAP

NAME "reprojected_wms"
PROJECTION
"init=epsg:3857"
END

WEB
IMAGEPATH "/var/www/docs_maps/"
IMAGEURL "http://{mapserver_address}/docs_maps/"

METADATA
"wms_title"    "Reprojected WMS
"wms_onlineresource" "http://{mapserver_address}/reproject.php?map=wms.map&"
"wms_srs" "EPSG:3857"
"wms_server_version" "1.1.1"
END
END

EXTENT 8865484.246776307 3016430.900654626 9864020.0791919 3587377.91450212

LAYER
NAME "My Layer
TYPE RASTER
STATUS OFF
CONNECTION "http://{GIS_Server}/WMSServer?"
CONNECTIONTYPE WMS
PROJECTION
"init=epsg:3857"
END
METADATA
"wms_title"           "GIS Layer"
"wms_srs"             "EPSG:3857"
"wms_name"            "1"
"wms_server_version"  "1.1.1"
"wms_format"          "image/png"
"wms_cache_to_disk"   "1"
END

END
CONFIG "PROJ_LIB" "/usr/share/proj"

END

Now use the WMS URL http://{mapserver_address}/reproject.php?map=wms.map& wherever needed.

Many thanks to Prabhas for devising the steps and helping me with this blog.

File upload over web is broken!

2011-09-10T14:49:00.004+05:45

XKCD had a nice comic on 'File Transfer' yesterday.

The comic neatly illustrates the woes of transferring files. However this makes one realize another side of the story:

File upload over web is broken!

Have you realized that every browser now has more-or-less functional download manager and features like pause/resume. Even almost all web servers support partial file download, and the feature is exploited by myriads of download accelerators out there.

But how about file uploads? You choose the file, hit the Upload button, and wait! No such thing as progress bars, upload pause/resume and, obviously, upload-accelerators are out of question.

This was okay some years back, when the web was mostly one way business. Not anymore! Nowadays we upload videos, photos and a lot of other large sized files. And how the browsers support the process?

And that's it! Some versions back, there wasn't any such indicator available altogether.

There are workarounds though, like using Flash or Java. Or even better using HTML5. But the whole upload process needs some serious overhauling.

Weird behaviour while rotating image in C#

2011-09-03T19:54:00.011+05:45

I was working on an image processing code in C#. Had to rotate an image by few degrees around a specified point. This can be done either by transformation or matrix method.



private Bitmap rotateImage(Bitmap b, int x, int y, float angle)

{

   //create a new empty bitmap to hold rotated image

   Bitmap returnBitmap = new Bitmap(b.Width, b.Height);

 

   //make a graphics object from the empty bitmap

   Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(returnBitmap);

 

   Matrix m = new Matrix();

   m.RotateAt((float)angle, new PointF(x,y));

 

   g.Transform = m;

   g.DrawImage(b, 0, 0);



   return returnBitmap;

}

However this wont work properly. It rotates the image, but strangely enough at the same time scales it down too (on larger images).

After some digging into MSDN, found this page, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1bttkazd.aspx, which says:

GDI+ may automatically scale an image as you draw it, which would decrease performance. Alternatively, you can control the scaling of the image by passing the dimensions of the destination rectangle to the DrawImage method.

So to avoid scaling, the above DrawImage line should be changed to



   g.DrawImage(b, 0, 0, b.Width, b.Height);

I have no idea why any function would have "automatic" behaviour. But this is how it works. Weird.

Obfuscated awesomeness in C

2011-07-11T07:43:00.004+05:45

Recently I've been bumping into obfuscated tiny C codes that does magic. Codes that are couple of lines in length but require pages of explanation on how it works.

There are lots of these in The International Obfuscated C Code Contest page, but here are some of the cool ones I've found in other places. (I'll update this list as I bump into more)

Yahoo! Logo ASCII Animation in six lines of C
20fps, antialiased ASCII art animation of the Yahoo! logo in six lines of C.

Donut animation
Donut animation with, well, donut shaped code. More impressive version here.

Spelt Number to Decimal
Spelt number (like, one, four, etc) in four lines of C

Brainfuck interpreter in 2 lines of C
For those who didnt know Brainfuck is a programming language.

NTC PSTN Number to Name

2011-06-14T07:53:00.006+05:45

NTC's website has a nice feature called Telephone search. This is particularly handy when you get a call from landline (PSTN) number and have no idea who's calling. Ofcourse you can go to the site and search, but the following bash script makes it faster.

#!/bin/bash

#
# Nepal Telecom PSTN Number to Name search
#

if [ "$1" == "" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: " $0 "phone_number"
    exit
fi

# Prefix 01, if not provided
if [[ $1 =~ ^01 ]] ; then
    NUMBER=$1
else
    NUMBER="01$1"
fi

wget -q http://ntc.net.np/telsearchRes.php 
--post-data "searchFor=name&telno=$NUMBER&submitted=Search" -O - | html2text | grep "$NUMBER" | tr '_' ' ' | sed 's/ [\ ]*/ /g'

Save the file, chmod it as executable.

To use,

./telsearch 5544132
| 1 |015544132|Ntc |Cellular Mobile And New S|Jawalakhel|

Fixing overused touchpad with sticky note

2011-05-14T06:54:00.003+05:45

If you're like me who spends more time with laptop than anything/one else, you'll end up with touchpad like this:

Due to overuse, the outer coarse layer wears off and touchpad starts acting funny. Plus it's difficult to slide your finger over it.

Fix? Stick a sticky-note over the touchpad. This surprisingly works!

Grub2 recordfail FAIL

2011-05-10T08:18:00.003+05:45

I have this headless, keyboardless server running on Ubuntu 10.04. Runs fine, but once in a while while there's power cut off the server still remains dead when the power is back. I connected monitor and keyboard and found that the problem is with Grub2.

Turns out there's a variable named recordfail which is set to 1 during next boot whenever there's some problem with the computer (like due to power failure).

Now if you see /boot/grub/grub.cfg file, it has the following lines:

if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
  set timeout=-1
else    
  set timeout=10
fi

Which means, the timeout counter is disabled whenever the recordfail variable is set. This is nice for desktop environment, which has a monitor, so I can see the Grub countdown is disabled so I can proceed with Repair option if I have to, but for headless servers the computer just sits idle at Grub screen, puzzling the poor sysadmin.

Fix? I changed the timeout=-1 to timeout=10.

Nepal Map API

2011-03-19T17:50:00.004+05:45

District-level Nepal Map PHP API. Generates variable-sized map of Nepal with user defined colors for districts.

Source and example:
https://github.com/jwalanta/NepalMapAPI

Demo (with maphilight jQuery plugin):
http://diyaalo.com/nepalmapapi/

Thanx a lot to Jitendra for providing the GIS map of Nepal.

Javascript Deselect on Focus

2011-02-08T18:09:00.006+05:45

Here's the scenario: you've got two text input, userid and email address. For email address field, I want to have the domain part pre-filled (say, @example.com). Now when the user enters the userid and jumps to email input, the browser selects the whole text as default behavior. But I want to append userid to the beginning and select only the userid part. Using jQuery, the usual code would be like this:

However, THIS DOESN'T WORK!!

To make this to work, you need to set the selectionStart and selectionEnd values after a while the inputbox is focused.

Fixing resolution for bigger external monitor

2011-02-03T14:20:00.003+05:45

If you happen to connect our Linux laptop or netbook to an external monitor, you're likely to get into resolution trouble. For smaller resolutions (<=1024x768), it's not a bigger deal but once you try higher and unusual resolutions, like 1440x900, things don't turn out that well. Here's how to switch to such resolutions under (Ubuntu) Linux. I'm connecting my laptop (Intel 845GM chipset) to an external monitor (1440x900 native).

Fire up terminal and run the following command; first calculate VESA CVT mode lines

$ cvt 1440 900

Output:

# 1440x900 59.89 Hz (CVT 1.30MA) hsync: 55.93 kHz; pclk: 106.50 MHz
Modeline "1440x900_60.00"  106.50  1440 1528 1672 1904  900 903 909 934 -hsync +vsync

Now, lets see my card's supported resolutions out of the box.

$ xrandr

Output:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 800, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA1 connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
1360x768       59.8
1024x768       60.0
800x600        60.3     56.2
848x480        60.0
640x480        59.9     59.9
1440x900_60.00   59.6
LVDS1 connected 1280x800+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
1280x800       59.9*+
1024x768       60.0
800x600        60.3
640x480        59.9
TV1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

In the above output, VGA1 is the external monitor and LVDS1 is the laptop's LCD panel. Now use the modeline information to create a new custom resolution and add it to VGA1

$ xrandr --newmode "1440x900"  106.50  1440 1528 1672 1904  900 903 909 934 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --addmode VGA1 1440x900

The changes are temporary though. If you want it to make it permanent, add them to ~/.xprofile

Now go to System > Preferences > Monitors. The external monitor's list of resolutions should show 1440x900.

Some more info:
Connecting to external monitor has two options, mirror or extend. Choosing mirror gives the same output to both monitors. Extend, well, extends the display over both monitors. But it has a catch: for Compiz to extend over external monitor, the maximum possible horizontal resolution (see first line of xrandr output above, in my case 4096) should be at least double of sum of total horizontal resolution of two monitors.

In my case, if I try to extend my 1280x800 to an 1440x900 external monitor, its not gonna work as 2*(1280+1440)=5440 > 4096. So mirroring is the only option. However if you set the resolution while compiz is on, it's gonna be "confused". Here's the workaround:

1. Add the custom resolution as described above
2. Disable Compiz (System > Preference > Appearance > Visual Effects > None)
3. Change Resolution, and set the laptop's output to off
4. Enable Compiz again

Load Balancing LTSP clients using Ethernet Bridging

2010-12-25T07:18:00.009+05:45

Typical LTSP setup has the following configuration:


          +-------------+
          |    Server   |
          +-------------+
          | eth0 | eth1 |
          +------+------+
          /         |
         /          |
   Internet       Switch
                    |
       +---------+-------------+
       |         |             |
     Client-1   Client-2 ... Client-n

              LTSP Clients

The problem with this is that the network card bottlenecks the performance. Once the number of clients increases (usually >5), even though the server is capable of handling the load, the network card (usually, 100BASE-TX) can't provide the throughput.

There are two solutions to this:
1. Use 1000BASE-T (gigabit) ethernet cards and switches
2. Use load balancing

Using gigabit ethernet cards solves the problem but they are expensive. The switches are expensive too. Plus there are flow control problems if the clients have 100Base-TX cards, which is usually the case.

Load balancing is an easier and cheaper approach. Although this can also go fairly complicated, here i'm going for the simplest one using ethernet bridging.

The trick is to use multiple NICs connected to multiple switches. Then bridge the cards to provide a common interface. Here's what it looks like:


          +--------------------+
          |       Server       |
          +------------------- +
          | eth0 | eth1 = eth2 |
          +------+------+------+
           /        |        |
          /         |        |
   Internet     Switch      Switch
                    |        |
       +----+-------+        +----+-------+
       |    |       |        |    |       |
      C-1  C-2 ... C-n      C-1  C-2 ... C-n

        LTSP Clients          LTSP Clients

Lets say, there are three NICs: eth0, eth1 and eth2. eth0 is connected to internet. eth1 (say, 192.168.0.254) is connected to LTSP clients. eth2 is unused and is supposed to be bridged with eth1.

First install bridge-utils

# apt-get install bridge-utils

Create a bridge (br0) and add eth1 and eth2 to it

# brctl addbr br0
# brctl stp br0 off
# brctl addif br0 eth1
# brctl addif br0 eth2

Now release the IP addresses of eth1 and eth2

# ifconfig eth1 down
# ifconfig eth2 down
# ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 up
# ifconfig eth2 0.0.0.0 up

Assign the LTSP IP address to bridge.

# ifconfig br0 192.168.0.254 up

Now connect eth1 and eth2 to separate switches, and each switch to (equal number of) LTSP clients.

Tiny Issue Tracker

2010-12-21T19:37:00.006+05:45

I find most issue trackers bloated for most of my requirements. I usually need a simple issue tracker to communicate between couple of persons but most issue trackers available have plethora of features, usually with full blown database.

So here's my solution: Tiny Issue Tracker. A PHP/SQLite based, single-file issue tracker.
Source: https://github.com/jwalanta/tit

Features
- Super Lightweight (currently ~17KB, ~500 lines of code)
- Multi-user
- Email Notifications
- Auto DB creation on first run
- Issue Priority (High, Medium, Low)
- Comment on issues
- Throw and run!

Installation is as simple as it can get:
- Modify configurations in the file (tit.php)
- Upload to webserver (rename if necessary) & load from browser

Demo
http://diyaalo.com/tit
username, password = demo, demo123
Check email notifications at http://demo123.mailinator.com/

PS: The acronym is a complete coincidence though :P

HackJatra v0.1

2010-12-14T16:22:00.008+05:45

Jitendra started the discussion, but i wouldn't be wrong if i say we all had the itch. A hackathon was in everybody's mind since quite a while. So we started a email discussion among fellow hackers, mostly Pulchowk Campus BCT'ians. We had few projects in mind - ATM Locator, Khanchuwa and Online Nepali Donation system. All we needed was a date for the event. But before we could finalize that, we coined a term for the event.

HackJatra. For non-Nepalis out there, Jatra means festivity. Later the term was also informally understood as "Hack by day, Jatra by night" :P. More on that later..

Finally, we fixed the date and venue: 11th December, 2010 at IT Park Banepa, starting from 9am.

The project we did were:

1. ATM Locator
Map enabled app to list and search ATMs in Nepal.
Team: Abhinav Singh, Bibek Shrestha, Jitendra Harlalka, Subodh Satyal, Sushil Shilpakar

2. Khanchuwa
Community based delicacies listing portal. The idea was discussed at BarCamp Kathmandu 2010.
Team: Jwalanta Shrestha, Abhishek Singh

3. Tweet NEA
Automated twitter accounts to tweet the loadshedding schedule.
Team: Manish Modi, Suraj Sapkota

More on the projects in the wiki.

Needless to say, the event was extremely fun. The joy of hacking for fun with extremely talented fellow hackers is indescribable. The projects we started are almost done; few more hours of collaborations and they'll all be ready to launch.

Future plans:
1. Do some branding of HackJatra; create a logo, have a website and make the projects more accessible and sharable.
2. Encourage other teams to do similar HackJatras
3. Do another HackJatra ASAP

O BTW, we even had booze party by night (Jatra :P)

Generating Tag Cloud the Unix way

2010-11-12T07:10:00.009+05:45

UPDATE: I've modified the script to add color and transparency :)

Ushaft's this tweet on creating tag cloud caught my attention. While there are better tools available online, i decided to give it a try in Linux :)

First we need to generate a frequency list of words out of a file. No brainer. I used the GNU/GPL license as source text.

cat /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL |
tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' |
sed 's/[^a-z ]//g' |
sed 's/\s/\n/g' |
awk '{if (length($1)>=3) print $1 }' |
sort | uniq -c | sort -nr  > freq.txt

Explanation (per line):
1. Print the license
2. Convert to lowercase
3. Remove punctuations
4. One word per line
5. Discard words with 2 or less long
6. Grab frequency and write to freq.txt

freq.txt needs some editing to remove irrelevant words like "the", "but", etc.

Now to create tag cloud, i wrote a simple awk script that outputs svg file. Saved this as gentagcloud.awk (Please change the width, height and scale variable to your taste)

#!/bin/awk -f

BEGIN { 
    WIDTH=1000
    HEIGHT=600
    SCALE=1
    
    OFS=""
    
    print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" 
        encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"no\"?>"
    print "<svg width=\"",WIDTH,"\" height=\"",
        HEIGHT,"\" version=\"1.1\" 
        xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\">"
}

{ 
R = int(rand()*9)
G = int(rand()*9)
B = int(rand()*9)

print "<text style=\"fill:#",R,G,B,";opacity:0.75;
    font-size:",$1*SCALE,"px;\" 
    x=\"",rand()*(WIDTH-100),"\" 
    y=\"",rand()*HEIGHT,"\">",$2,"</text>" 
}

END{ print "</svg>" }

Now to create tag cloud,

awk -f gentagcloud.awk < freq.txt > tagcloud.svg

Tada! Tag cloud generated, view tagcloud.svg in your browser or image viewer

If you have ImageMagick installed, you can convert it directly to png too. (Transparency isnt handled properly. If you have workarounds, please comment)

awk -f gentagcloud.awk < freq.txt | convert - tagcloud.png

BTW, the tag cloud was like this: (lil' ugly, but WTH :))

Internet Connection Sharing in Linux over Ad-hoc Wireless

2010-02-25T23:58:00.004+05:45

Laptops are common these days and so is wireless networking that comes with it. Almost all of us use Wireless Router for wireless networking and internet sharing. But most of us might not be familiar with ad-hoc mode that works in every wireless card and can eliminate the use of router altogether. Here's how:

To setup ad-hoc wireless, you basically set two or more wireless cards to same ESSID in ad-hoc mode and different IP addresses.

Setting the wireless card in ad-hoc mode

Generally iwconfig is used to set the wireless mode, but if you have madwifi drivers (see this too), the commands are slightly different. Go to terminal and type,

iwconfig

If you see interfaces named wlan0, wlan1, etc iwconfig will work. If you see interface names similar to ath1 and wifi0, then madwifi specific commands are to be used.

For general wifi cards:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc

Replace wlan0 with the interface name as listed by iwconfig

For cards using madwifi driver:

sudo wlanconfig ath1 destroy
sudo wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc

Now set essid. Pick some name like 'adhocwifi'

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid adhocwifi

If required, to set encryption key

sudo iwconfig wlan0 key 1234567890

Now set IP address:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1

Follow the above steps for another wireless card and set IP address in same subnet, say 192.168.0.2, and ping each other.

The whole ad-hoc mode setting can also be done using GUI network-manager, but since i'm not so much fond of graphical interface i'm not covering it. It should be simple.. :)

Internet Connection Sharing

Now to share the internet over wireless,

sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

where ppp0 is the connection you want to share (PPPoE connection in this case)

You also need to enable IP forwarding:

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"

Or, to enable permanently add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Some ISPs might limit the TTL so that you wont be able to share the internet. Fix:

sudo iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -j TTL --ttl-inc 1

Using the shared internet (in Linux)

Now to use the shared internet on another computer, set it to ad-hoc mode and assign IP address in the same subnet as described above and perform the following:

1. Set the IP of computer sharing internet as gateway

sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.1

2. Set DNS server. We're using Google's DNS.

sudo sh -c "echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> /etc/resolv.conf"

You can also use IP and DNS Masquerading to ease the task.

Using the shared internet (in M$ Windows)

If you want to use the shared internet on M$ Windows,

1. Connect to the Wireless Network (in this case 'adhocwifi')
2. Go to Network Connections
3. Right click the Wireless Connection
4. Select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties
5. Set IP to 192.168.0.2 (or accordingly in the same subnet as set on Linux box), gateway to 192.168.0.1 (as set on Linux box) and DNS to 8.8.8.8

Overriding extension compatibility check for FF3.5+

2010-02-19T11:46:00.003+05:45

Disabling extension compatibility check for Firefox was easy. Go to about:config and create a boolean value named extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Until Firefox 3.5!

(More specifically, products that are based on < Gecko 1.9.2)

Newer Firefox requires you to append version number to the variable. This will ensure the extension override wont work forever as FF is upgraded to next version. For example, in Firefox 3.6, the variable would be extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6

Explained in detail here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.checkCompatibility

Converting Latex document to HTML / ODT / DOC

2010-02-17T06:58:00.003+05:45

I do all my documents in Latex. Actually i usually use emacs org-mode first and later convert it to Latex, but when it comes to using bibtex, it's all latex. It works great and the output dvi/pdf files look so professional. However recently i had to submit the file in .doc format, and i had a real hard time finding good tools to do that.

There are no direct Latex to .doc converters, so the best bet is to go Latex -> HTML -> DOC. There are lots of Latex to HTML converters like latex2html, tth and hevea, but most of them either don't produce good HTML or mess with bibliography references. But after some research i found the best: TeX4ht

TeX4ht is available in ubuntu/debian repo, so to install

sudo apt-get install tex4ht

Conversion is simple:

htlatex document

(please note, there is no .tex suffix)

This will generate document.html, css and bunch of .png files.

Now to convert it to wordprocessor files (odt, doc..),
1. Open the html file with OpenOffice.org
2. File > Save as
3. Choose the format you want to save it in (odt, doc)

If you have images in the document, they will be linked instead of embedded in the document. To fix this: (source)
1. Edit > Links
2. Click "Break Link" for each image link

mpg123: Lightest mp3 player in Linux

2010-02-04T10:26:00.006+05:45

If you are in search of the lightest barebone mp3 player in Linux, nothing can beat mpg123. Unless you want flashy visualizations and playlist management and such, mpg123 can save you a lot of memory and cpu horsepower.

Installation is easy. In Ubuntu,

sudo apt-get install mpg123

Mpg123 comes with loads of options. Check out the man page for details. Here I'm gonna share a few usage tips.

Shuffle-play a directory of mp3s:

mpg123 -CZ /path/to/mp3/folder/*

-Z option is for shuffle, -C is for control. From man page:

-C, --control
  Enable terminal control keys. By default use ’s’ to
  stop, ’p’ to pause, ’f’ to jump forward to the next
  song, ’b’ to jump back to the beginning of the song,
  ’,’ to rewind, ’.’ to fast forward, and ’q’ to quit.
  Type ’h’ for a full  list  of  available  controls.

Equalizer:

Don't fall off your chair! Yes, mpg123 also comes with 32-band equalizer. But there's no inbuilt graphical UI for that, you need to create the plain-text file. There's an editor though if you like, but creating one is not hard either. From man page:

-E file, --equalizer
  Enables equalization, taken from file. The file needs to
  contain 32 lines of data, additional comment lines may be
  prefixed with #. Each data line consists of two floating-
  point entries, separated by whitespace. They specify the
  multipliers for left and right channel of a  certain
  frequency band, respectively. The first line corresponds
  to the lowest, the 32nd to the highest frequency band.
  Note that you can control the equalizer interactively
  with the generic control interface.

I've made one with party feel: party.txt

Usage:

mpg123 -CZ -E party.txt mp3_file

Songs again and again:

Plus if you kind of person who listens to couple of songs again and again for weeks (instead of shuffled huge playlist), then hi5! :) and here's how to do that with mpg123:

mpg123 -CZ song1.mp3 song2.mp3

Making DLink DWL-650+ PCMCIA Wireless card work under linux

2010-02-03T08:02:00.003+05:45

The DLink DWL-650+ PCMCIA Wireless card doesn't work on recent Linux distros (I tried Ubuntu Hardy to Jaunty). After plugging in, the system hangs with CapsLock flashing.

Turns out the card is handled by acx module and the support is broken for this card. So use ndiswrapper instead.

First blacklist acx module. Open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file and add the following line

blacklist acx

Now install ndiswrapper

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common

Now get the Windows driver for the card from here. Extract the file, go to the winxp folder and,

sudo ndiswrapper -i AIRPLUS.INF

The card should work now.

NTC's GPRS in Linux via Bluetooth using Nokia phone

2009-05-31T22:55:00.004+05:45

The following guide explains how to connect to Nepal Telecom's GPRS service from Linux via Bluetooth using Nokia phone. This guide is based on Linux GPRS Guide. The steps have been tested on Nokia 6600, 6630 and 5300 but should work on all Nokia phones.

NTC's GPRS is *really* slow so I won't recommend it for everyday use. However simple mail checking and tweeting ;) should do just fine.

Requirements
1. Nokia Phone
2. Nepal Telecom GPRS Account
3. Bluetooth Dongle (if not inbuilt in your PC/laptop)
4. Linux (the following steps were tested on Ubuntu)

Steps
1. Download ntgprs.tar.gz and extract (ntgprs, ntgprs-wvdial.conf and ntgprs-disconnect)
2. Copy the files to /etc/ppp/peers/ (you need root or sudo access)
3. Turn on Bluetooth on your Nokia phone
4. Plug in Bluetooth Dongle to PC or enable it (if inbuilt)
5. Fire up terminal (the commands to be entered are in bold-face):

Make sure the bluetooth is running on PC:

$ hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
BD Address: 11:11:11:11:11:11 ACL MTU: 672:3 SCO MTU: 48:1
UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
RX bytes:149397 acl:1046 sco:0 events:764 errors:0
TX bytes:40320 acl:628 sco:0 commands:74 errors:0

The following command will find bluetooth address of your phone

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:0E:6D:C2:99:42       Nokia

Create a RFCOMM port and bind it to phone's Bluetooth address.

$ sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 00:0E:6D:C2:99:42 1

Please note that the bluetooth address in the above command should match the address found by 'hcitool scan' command.

Check if the port has been created

$ rfcomm -a
rfcomm0: 00:0E:6D:C2:99:42 channel 1 closed

Now dial.

$ sudo pon ntgprs

--> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.60
--> Initializing modem.
--> Sending: ATH
ATH
OK
--> Sending: ATE1
ATE1
OK
--> Sending: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet","",0,0
AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet","",0,0
OK
--> Sending: AT+CBST=0,0,1;+CHSN=6,0,0,0;+CGDCONT=,,"ntnet"
AT+CBST=0,0,1;+CHSN=6,0,0,0;+CGDCONT=,,"ntnet"
OK
--> Modem initialized.
--> Sending: ATD*99#
--> Waiting for carrier.
ATD*99#
CONNECT
~[7f]}#@!}!} } }2}#}$@#}!}$}%\}"}&} }*} } g}%~
--> Carrier detected.  Waiting for prompt.
~[7f]}#@!}!} } }2}#}$@#}!}$}%\}"}&} }*} } g}%~
--> PPP negotiation detected.
Serial connection established.
using channel 9
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/rfcomm0
sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
rcvd [LCP ConfAck id=0x1 ]
rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x0   ]
sent [LCP ConfAck id=0x0   ]
sent [PAP AuthReq id=0x1 user="user" password="pass"]
rcvd [PAP AuthAck id=0x1 ""]
PAP authentication succeeded
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1   ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x0 ]
sent [IPCP ConfNak id=0x0 ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfNak id=0x1   ]
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2   ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
sent [IPCP ConfAck id=0x1 ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x2   ]
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local  IP address 10.1.4.101
remote IP address 10.0.0.1
primary   DNS address 202.70.64.5
secondary DNS address 202.70.64.15
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up started (pid 9902)
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up finished (pid 9902), status = 0x0

To disconnect

$ sudo poff ntgprs

Easy bandwidth shaping in Linux

2009-04-07T06:08:00.011+05:45

There is an extensive and nicely written HOWTO on this topic but here I'm talking about some really easy to use bandwidth shaping tools -- wondershaper and trickle.

Wondershaper
This is the easiest tool I have found to limit bandwidth of a particular interface. All it takes is,


$ sudo wondershaper {interface} {down} {up}

the {down} and {up} are bandwidth in kilobits. So for example if you want to limit the bandwidth of interface eth1 to 256kbps uplink and 128kbps downlink,


$ sudo wondershaper eth1 256 128

To clear the limit,


$ sudo wondershaper clear eth1

Easy, eh?

Trickle
Unlike wondershaper, which limits the bandwidth to an entire interface, trickle is user-space bandwidth limiting tool. The syntax is,


$ trickle -u {up} -d {down} {program}

Both {up} and {down} and bandwidth in KB/s. Now if you invoke it as,


$ trickle -u 8 -d 8 firefox

It will fire up Firefox, limiting the bandwidth to 8KB/s. This is very useful specially if you are a web developer and want to test your application under various bandwidth conditions.

Furthermore, you can also run trickle as daemon (trickled) which can limit the bandwidth to several programs.

Fixing Nepali Unicode in Ubuntu

2009-04-03T16:29:00.008+05:45

Setting up to type Unicode Nepali in Ubuntu is easy (just add Keyboard Indicator applet and add Nepali Layout). For more, follow this article in Ubuntu Nepali wiki. However there are few glitches.

Incomplete keyboard layout
The Nepali Romanized Keyboard layout shipped with Ubuntu (located at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/np) is incomplete. The definition for the whole upper row (1-0 keys) are missing. Also, more importantly, zero-width joiner (ZWJ) and zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) characters are wrongly defined (ref: standard layout map).

You can find the working version here: http://www.nepalinux.org/input/ne. So lets, fix it. Fire up your terminal


$ cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/
$ sudo mv np np.bak
$ sudo wget http://www.nepalinux.org/input/ne -O np

Glyph missing
The devanagari fonts included in the standard Ubuntu installation has few Nepali specific glyphs missing. Most notably, 'pareli ra' or 'samyukta ra' (whatever it is called, the one you use in the word 'paryo').

Well, the fix is to install a font file which has this glyph. My recommendation is Lohit Nepali, available at http://nepalinux.org/fonts/. At terminal,


$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
$ sudo wget http://nepalinux.org/fonts/Lohit-Nepali.ttf
$ sudo fc-cache -fv

Now if you want a specific font file (say, Kalimati) to be used as default devanagari font file, follow the following procedure.

Create a file in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/


$ sudo gedit /etc/fonts/conf.avail/64-ttf-nepali.conf

and paste the following content


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
   <alias>
           <family>serif</family>
           <prefer>
                   <family>Kalimati</family>
           </prefer>
   </alias>
   <alias>
           <family>sans-serif</family>
           <prefer>
                   <family>Kalimati</family>
           </prefer>
   </alias>
</fontconfig>

Now, create a symbolic link to it in /etc/fonts/conf.d/


$ sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/64-ttf-nepali.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/64-ttf-nepali.conf

You might have to restart X to see the changes.

Firefox Nepali Dictionary now public

2009-01-27T13:45:00.002+05:45

Firefox Nepali Dictionary Plugin has been approved for public status. The plugin is now also listed at Dictionary and Languages page at Firefox Addon site.

For more on the plugin, see this blog post.

Using wget and dd to download file segment

2009-01-13T18:09:00.007+05:45

Prasanna's this tweet caught my attention:

what would be sweet is if I could download segments from a file using wget ... any ideas?

Well, dd can help.

Suppose we need to extract 889th byte to 1298th byte of GPLv2 document, located at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

1. Create a file (gpl_partial.txt) containing 888 bytes (i.e., the portion to skip)


dd if=/dev/zero of=gpl_partial.txt bs=1 count=888

2. Download the rest of the file and save it to gpl_partial.txt. (Assuming the server supports Range header)


wget -c http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt -O gpl_partial.txt

wget interactively shows the download byte count. You can stop the download (Ctrl+c) after required bytes have been downloaded.

3. Now extract the required segment from gpl_partial.txt and save it to gpl_segment.txt (889th byte to 1298th byte = 410 bytes)


dd if=gpl_partial.txt of=gpl_segment.txt bs=1 skip=888 count=410

Update:
If wget is not a requirement, you can use cURL to get rid of all the hassles. To achieve the above mentioned segment,

curl -o gpl_segment.txt -r 888-1297 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

Or, if you wanna do it in Python way, use httpheader Python module.

No Wifi to Master-mode

2009-01-05T04:11:00.007+05:45

Linux recognizes my wifi card as AR242x and there's no out-of-the-box support till now.

$ lspci | grep 'Wireless'
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

However compiling the latest snapshot from madwifi.org works. (Instructions here)

$ wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
$ tar xvf madwifi*.tar.gz
$ cd madwifi*r*

$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci
$ sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Cool. But the problem is no other modes except managed-mode seem to work.

$ sudo iwconfig ath1 mode ad-hoc
Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device ath1 ; Operation not permitted.

I was little curious about this as every wireless card supports at least ad-hoc mode if not managed. So I did a lil' diggin into madwifi's source code and found out that it supports all modes including master (or ap) mode too. This was quite startling to me coz i've been told that Master (or AP) mode is only for dedicated Wireless APs or expensive wireless cards.

Madwifi comes with nice wlanconfig tool.

$ wlanconfig
usage: wlanconfig athX create [nounit] wlandev wifiY
       wlanmode [sta|adhoc|ap|monitor|wds|ahdemo] [uniquebssid]
usage: wlanconfig athX destroy
usage: wlanconfig athX list [active|ap|caps|chan|freq|keys|scan|sta|wme]

Now to start AP mode,

$ sudo wlanconfig ath1 destroy
$ sudo wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap

Now set the ESSID for the wireless network and IP for the interface

$ sudo ifconfig ath1 192.168.0.1
$ sudo iwconfig ath1 essid 'TestAP'

Voila! It worked and I can connect to this AP from another computer, set the IP to 192.168.0.x range and ping too. Now I'm wondering if AP mode is available in every card but is restricted by software so that ppl are forced to buy expensive APs.

Battery charged notification

2009-01-01T06:10:00.005+05:45

Load-shedding is driving us nuts! My solution is to move all my works to laptop and buy a spare battery. I think this is more cost effective and energy saving than buying expensive inverters. I've got an extra 8-cell battery for my laptop and altogether I have 6+ hours of backup.

But the problem is I keep forgetting to charge the batteries. The one in laptop starts charging when light is back but when it's done charging I forget to switch battery.

The solution lies at /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state

$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          discharging
present rate:            1342 mA
remaining capacity:      2201 mAh
present voltage:         11432 mV

Our line of concern is 'charging state:' which can have one of three values - charging, discharging or charged. So here's a simple bash script to monitor this file for charged state and pop a message to switch the battery.


#!/bin/sh

charged=0
while : ; do
   if grep -iq 'charged' /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
   then
      # nofify if previous state is uncharged
      if [ $charged = 0 ] ; then
         zenity --info --text "Battery charged. You might wanna charge another."
      fi
      charged=1
   else
      charged=0
   fi
   sleep 5m # wait for 5 minutes
done

Now put this program to System > Preferences > Sessions > Startup Programs.

Null function pointer trick

2008-12-25T21:57:00.005+05:45

Few days ago Ayush posted the following code to our class' mailing list. What does the following C code do??


unsigned char *virus;
virus = (char *)(((int) virus + PAGESIZE-1) & ~(PAGESIZE-1));
((void (*)())virus)();

Cracked me a while, but here's the explanation:

Line 1 is pointer to unsigned char, straight forward..

Line 2 looks a bit confusing but is a brilliant technique for 'ceiling'ing integers. This converts the address of virus to next multiple of PAGESIZE. The code is working with memory location, so I assume PAGESIZE is some power of 2. Suppose say if PAGESIZE is 1024, then for

*virus = 123 => 1024
*virus = 2000 => 2048
and so on..

Hope u got the point. Just some bit-arithmetic to change the location pointed by virus to next memory page (assuming PAGESIZE = size of one page)

Line 3 involves simple null function pointer. From line 2, variable virus contains location to start of a page (the page might contain virus code, written by some means like buffer overflow exploit ;)). Now (void (*)()) is null pointer to function. so the above code will execute the function at memory location pointed by virus with no arguments.

Gnome: drag text to file

2008-12-25T21:46:00.003+05:45

Got this one by accident. In Gnome, if you drag some text and drop it to desktop or nautilus, it creates a file with the dragged text in it. Simple, but might come handy sometimes..

Drag the text

After dropping, you land into file rename mode :)

The init Magazine Issue #3

2008-12-16T05:52:00.004+05:45

The third issue of The init Magazine is out. Grab your copy now!

Direct Link:
http://ioefoss.ioelive.com/theinitmagazine/theinitmag03.pdf

Old Issues: http://ioefoss.ioelive.com
Mirror: http://meronepalma.com/initmag

Please send your feedbacks/suggestions at ioefossnewsletter_at_gmail.com

Enjoy!

Nepali Spell-check Dictionary for Firefox

2008-12-14T04:26:00.001+05:45

Under Linux, if you have Nepali Spell-check enabled for OpenOffice.org (instructions here), Nepali spell-check works in Firefox as well. But for those who want it just for Firefox (or, Thunderbird), I've created a small extension which does the job.

Installation Instruction

Download the installation package here or from Firefox Addon Page.
Drag and drop the file to Firefox and follow the instructions
For Nepali spell-check, right click in the textbox and select Languages > ne_NP

Choose ne_NP from Languages menu

The extension is currently experimental at Firefox Addon Page. Please drop your valuable review/comments there.

URL Validity

2008-12-04T19:48:00.012+05:45

Few days ago NewsFromNepal was asking me for some help on some URL validation code. The task was to verify a list of URLs and print the title of the page if it's valid/working. Here's a simple Python script to do that. The URLs are stored per line in url.txt


#! /usr/bin/python
# URL Validity

import urllib2
import re

urls = open('urls.txt', 'r').readlines()
badurls = []

print "Working URLs:",
for url in urls:
    try:
        handle = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        html = handle.read()
        match = re.search("<title>(.*)</title>",html)

        print "\n", url.strip(), " -> ",
        if match:
            print match.groups()[0],
    except:
        badurls.append(url)

if badurls:
    print "\nBad URLs:"
    for bad in badurls:
        print bad.strip()

Fedora Lucky Draw Code

2008-11-29T22:12:00.006+05:45

The lucky draw for t-shirt and pendrive distribution for Fedora 10 Release Party was done using a software. It's a mere ~100 lines of code written in Python using wxWidget. The participants' name is kept in a file participants.txt with one name per line. Get the original code from here (a total hack but it works :)). It was further modified by Ankur for use in the event.

Lucky Draw interface

Fedora 10 Cambridge Release Party

2008-11-29T21:24:00.004+05:45

Last Tuesday (Nov, 25th) marked the release of yet another edition of Fedora (v10, Cambridge) and today we gathered at IOE, Pulchowk Campus to celebrate the Release party.

We had several events to mark the celebration. Apart from the introductory and 'formal' stuffs, we had a race (yup, a real one), lucky draw for Fedora t-shirts and pendrives (which fortunately I didn't win, that obviously would be against nature's will) and a candlelight display of Fedora logo. It was awesome!

Although Ubuntu is the distro of my choice nowadays, I was a loyal Fedora user from the very first to the sixth edition. The one thing that still fascinates me about Fedora is the incredible and vibrant artwork it has. Provided a good marketing and more easier installation methods (like wubi), I believe Fedora has the potential to be the ultimate killer-distro!

From Fedora 10 Release Party

Merging PDF files in Linux

2008-11-27T11:41:00.002+05:45

Sometimes you might have to merge two or more pdf files into one single pdf document. While there are commercial softwares like Adobe Acrobat or something similar to do the job, it's much simpler in Linux using commandline. There are several softwares for the job and most of them require simple one line command!

The following commands merge first.pdf and second.pdf to merge.pdf. You can also merge more than two files using similar command.

Using Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a PostScript and PDF language interpreter and previewer. You can do quite handful tasks related to ps and pdf files with Ghostscript; merging happens to be one of them.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH first.pdf second.pdf

Using ImageMagick
ImageMagick is basically an image manipulation software but it also handles pdf files.

convert first.pdf second.pdf merged.pdf

Using PDFTk
If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a command-line tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

pdftk first.pdf second.pdf cat output merged.pdf

Using pdf2ps and ps2pdf
pdf2ps and ps2pdf comes with Ghostscript. The former converts pdf file to ps and latter the reverse. We can use them to first convert pdf files to ps format, merge all ps files and then converting ps file back to pdf.

pdf2ps first.pdf first.ps
pdf2ps second.pdf second.ps
cat first.pdf second.ps > merged.ps
ps2pdf merged.ps merged.pdf

If you are looking for some GUI version, there's a Nautilus script which acts as frontend to PDFTk. If you are on KDE, Kommander script is also available (also depends on PDFTk)

NOTE: To install Ghostscript (already installed in most distros by default), ImageMagick or PDFTk in Linux,

sudo apt-get install ghostscript
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install pdftk

FOSS Nepal wins SFD 2008 Best Event Award

2008-11-27T09:24:00.004+05:45

FOSS Nepal has won Software Freedom Day 2008 Best Event Award among over 500 teams in almost 90 countries for second consecutive year. Congratulations and hats off to all FOSS enthusiasts who made this possible. Also, kudos to Bibek for such a wonderful report.

The winning entries were selected for the scope of their SFD activities, the number of people reached (particularly from the wider, non-technical community) and the quality of the reporting. The other winning teams were SFD Nicaragua and DabaweGNU.

Although this time SFD was celebrated with much less preparation, we had an incredible event. We had a FOSS Awareness Rally, Candlelight vigil and SFD main event. Hope this award will bring even more enthusiasm to the FOSS movement in Nepal.

From Software Freedom Day 2008 Rally and Candlelight Vigil

Computer trouble? Try pulling the plug!

2008-11-21T19:32:00.003+05:45

Let me refresh this very well known joke:

Three people had carpool: a mechanical engineer, a electrical engineer and a Computer engineer. But the car suddenly broke down.

Mechanical engineer said: "Hey! It has to be the fuel injection. Lemme fix it."

The electrical engineer didn't agree: "It's magneto probably. I'll fix it."

Computer Engineer shoke his head and said: "Hey guys, I have a simpler idea: Let's just close all the windows, get out of the car, then get back into it, and it should run!"

Well, it's very common to turn your computer off and on (or restart) if you ever encounter any problem. But don't you think that's the traditional method?? Better try pulling the plug while computer is ON!!!

You think I'm joking?? I have two situations where this always works..

1. kacpid eating all of my CPU

This happens time to time in my PC's Linux installation. The CPU is almost exploding at 90% load and it turns out that it's kacpid process eating all the CPU. Passing the kernel option to turn off the acpi altogether solves the problem, but it also turns off the hyperthreading.

After a lot of googling, this came up..

After booting windows when boot linux kacpid starts, to stop it just cut the power supply to your PC including UPS if any , without shutting down (obviously after saving data) when linux desktop is active. yes i am saying that take the power cord out.

Now switch on the power of ur machine & boot linux, kacpid will not appear.(hopefully)

Yup, when you hear the fan shouting too loud, just pull the plug!

2. CDboot memory overflow error

Recently i also got this one out of the blue. I was trying to install Windows in a machine and while booting from CD, i got the message, "CDboot memory overflow error". Googled again and found a wonderful solution:

.. Don't laugh but it turns out that somehow the power plug came loose (I had a fan plugged into the cd prongs and then the power supply plugged in behind it.) so I took it out and plugged the power supply directly into it and viola.

Yup, pull off the plug again!!

Reminds me of this 'Magic' with MIT AI Lab's PDP-10. Computers are crazy machines.

Gmail Themes rock!

2008-11-20T08:04:00.005+05:45

Seems like I'm one of few lucky ones (atleast for few hours/days to come perhaps). I'm getting Themes Tab under Gmail Settings and they are awesome. Currently I'm using Mountain Theme with Kathmandu as location. Sweet!

No more boring standard Gmail interface.. finally!

The init Magazine Issue #2

2008-11-15T21:22:00.000+05:45

The second issue of The init Magazine has been released.

You can download this (and past issues) from here: http://ioefoss.ioelive.com/

Direct link: http://ioefoss.ioelive.com/theinitmagazine/theinitmag02.pdf

Mirror: http://www.meronepalma.com/initmag/ (Thanx to Dhruba Adhikari)

Facebook deactivated, i'm on Twitter

2008-11-14T20:07:00.004+05:45

Finally i managed to gather some guts to deactivate my Facebook account. I'm most of the time infront of computer and internet is always on and I cant resist checking out the stuffs that happens there.. Not exactly a 'Facebook addict' (I've seen extremes) but it sure was wasting a lot of my time.

It's been more than a week now and I'm feeling much productive now.

However, I'm much of a Twitter user now. It's simple, short and is really effective. Aint a time waster like Facebook too.

follow jwalanta at http://twitter.com

But Facebook Deactivation aint permanent though, I'll be back on it if I get less busy. Facebook was good for killing time when I was hell free some time back.

(Psst.. this was the main reason, i felt like real unlucky.. :D)

Source: http://xkcd.com/300/

Muktinath Trek Journal

2008-11-13T05:18:00.003+05:45

Prajwal and Mahesh have published the journal of our Muktinath - Thorang Pass Trek in D2's blog site EverestUncensored along with all the photos. Have a look..

http://www.everestuncensored.org/3351/2008/11/12/muktinath-thorang-pass-trek-journal/

PS: My Flickr gallery of the trek is here.

GNOME auto-dim timeout

2008-11-12T23:16:00.003+05:45

Since version 2.22.2 GNOME has introduced a new feature in power management - Autodimming the screen after some inactivity. Although this feature is direct copy from MacOSX, it's a really nice one. But the default timeout of 30 sec seems too short for most cases. I was wondering how to increase it and here's how:

Run gconf-editor. (Press Alt+F2 and enter 'gconf-editor')
Go to /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight
Change the value of idle_dim_time. It's in seconds, 60 seems to be reasonable.

BTW, gconf-editor is like regedit in Windows. A lot of system tweakings can be done through this.

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party

2008-11-12T22:45:00.004+05:45

Last Monday we celebrated the release party of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) at IOE, Pulchowk Campus. Although the most of the participants were from Pulchowk Campus itself, the program was fun in overall. We even had a candlelight vigil and lucky draw. Release party as good as the new version of Ubuntu!

Details of the party here. Photos: Shankar's Gallery.

Movie Mania

2008-11-12T02:45:00.005+05:45

Lately I've been watching some of the best movies Hollywood has offered and I've missed to watch. It's not like I'm watching movies all the time, but I've been digging the Oscar winners and Best-Movies lists and taking out time to watch the best listed ones. Here are some of them (with no particular order, they all are the best in their respective genre).

Babel
This movie is in five languages. English, Japanese, Japanese Sign Language, Mexican and Arabic. Story of different lives connected together.

The Departed
This one finally gave Martin Scorsese an Oscar. Perhaps one of the best in its genre (crime-thiller).

Love Actually
This movie is like Best-Collection CD. The best of love stories all in one. Makes you wonder the different ways ppl go 'stupid' together. :)

21 Grams
Sean Penn is my fav and I love non-chronologically edited movies. And now I wonder how did I miss this one.. I also didnt know this movie is from the same director (Alejandro González Iñárritu) who directed Babel too and is a part of his 'Death Trilogy'.

They say we all lose 21 grams... at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into 21 grams? How much is lost when do we lose 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained?

When Harry met Sally
This one is classic. But I still feel like they shouldn't have married.

Ratatouille
I usually take animation movies from comedy perspective. But this movie is so full of soul. And yes, 'anyone can cook'. That includes me too. (But plz dont taste my soup! ;))

Crash
Kundan had recommended this movie to me long time back saying this is perhaps the most accurate portrayal of America. Donno if it's true, but if it is, America is a horrible place to live..

The Kite Runner
This movie is straight on to my all time favorite list. Didnt know it's based on an award winning novel of the same name by Khaled Hosseini (should have read the novel first). But still it's a brilliant movie and the cinematography of kite flyings are simply breathtaking! If i had to choose the best one from all the movies i have mentioned, i'd choose this one.

For you, a thousand times over!

On my to-watch list:
Goodfellas
Se7en
No country for old men
Juno
.
.
(Please recommend..)

Getting out of Failsafe mode

2008-11-02T17:57:00.002+05:45

Few days ago, for no implicit reason my GNOME installation refused to start. Failsafe mode worked but normal login would throw me back to login screen. Online forums recommended me to check my session scripts and all. But lazy me, i did the following in the terminal.

cp -r /etc/skel/* ~/

What i did was recovered the skel(eton) home folder files and it worked! I lost few settings related to Compiz but rest were all in place.

Muktinath Trek

2008-11-02T17:23:00.005+05:45

Last week I went to the trek of my lifetime, the Muktinath Trek. It was the first time I trekked beyond green mountains towards the Himalayas and I was startled to witness the wonderful world out there. It's no green but is full of colorful vegetation. Red, yellow, and orange trees, the barren mountains and Himalayas you can almost touch. If you wanna see Nepal, don't miss this.

Check out my Flickr Photo Set.

The init Magazine Issue #1

2008-11-02T08:38:00.001+05:45

I was in such a rush that i even didn't get time to blog about the release. Well, if you (still) haven't grabbed the first issue of The init Magazine, get it (and upcoming issues) from here.

Scribus was used for layout designs, and i must say that this software really rocks. Although not as fast as its proprietary counterparts like Adobe Pagemaker, this one is really stable. I never encountered a single crash while designing the whole thing (Pagemaker crashes like hell). If only this software gets little responsive, I'd be recommending it to everybody.

The next issue will be out on 15th of November, so keep tuning..

Hike to Duguna Fort and Tatopani Visit

2008-08-04T00:30:00.000+05:45

Making long story short, Shankar, Bibek and me went to Duguna Fort Hiking on last friday (thanx to Prajwal for recommending, D2 team had gone there last week) and to Tatopani the next day.

Took a bus to Barhabise, then to 8 kilo - 3 hrs hike to Duguna Fort through Yarmasing village - met a nice Buddhist nun on the way - reached the Fort at the top of hill - back to the village - had tea and potatoes - to another home for the night stay - awesome local wine - unforgettable smoking and guffs on veranda - next day to Tatopani - soothing hot spring water shower - crossed Miteri bridge - stepped on China!

Longer version? Well, pictures say thousand words..

The day i felt like Neo..

2008-07-26T23:06:00.012+05:45

Ok, by Neo i mean The One in the movie 'The Matrix'. If you havent watched this epic movie, i suggest you do. This is one movie you surely dont wanna miss. Well, what happens in this movie is that this hacker aliased Neo lives in a virtual world called 'Matrix' and the people from real world try to contact him by sending messages to his computer.. 'Wake up, Neo. Follow the white rabbit!' [trailer]

Similar kind of message had started to appear my computer since yesterday. I was away from computer n when i came back, there was a libnotification popup message saying 'haha', 'happy birthday.. ' n like that.. i felt like being hacked coz my computer is always connected to internet. More worried than being hacked, i was interested on how it was done.. Read everything from libnotification api to hacking dbus through tcp/ip. I shared this situation to Ankur and Shankar too, and they too were quite puzzled.

But what happened this morning was out of proportion. The message appeared again! I woke up at around 8 in the morning, unlocked the screen to see if there's any new mail. No messages. Then i went to wash my face, and when i returned back, there was this popup message:

"The milk is on the table. Go and get it."

I was clever this time to take the screenshot.

The message..

You can see that the internet is disconnected. Surely, it hasn't come through the network. But lets not go into how it was done, lets focus on the message. I took a look at the other table, there was no milk cup too. But still i was confused about the message. Then i got up, turned around, n WTF, THERE WAS A CUP OF MILK ON THE TABLE NEXT TO THE WINDOW!!!

Are you kiddin me? I had this run over my spine but still i tried to control myself. Okay, "Go and get it." I was still confused. But i went and drank it (without coffee). Was something to happen to me? Well, nothing happened (but i sure had a terrible headache).

Then there were these plethora of questions that ran down my mind. Is 'somebody' 'watching' me? BTW, also look at the fortune cookie quote on the desktop. Does that imply anything? Also note the SETI satellite wallpaper!

The fortune cookie..

I was scared to death for a while and shocked till evening. What the hell happened? Also checked if i have dual-personality thingy too ;) Checked all logs, shell history.. nothing! Also wrote a mail to Shankar and Ankur explaining the situation. Ankur was already busy reading books on Conspiracy theory n what not (he always does :)). The whole thing went over-heated among us.

And finally during dinner i was asking mom n my sis on who touched my computer during morning. Mom def has nothing to do with my computer. And there was my sis, at first was playin cool but later on was goin like 'haha..' She was the one playing all the pranks with me!

Whenever you lock the screen in Linux, there an option to leave a message n i didnt know that.. Seems like she knows more linux functionalities than me.. She was the one behind yesterday's strange messages too..

The whole day i was like, 'OMG, i'm being contacted.. this Matrix thing DOES exist..' haha.. Felt like a total moron later on.. damn! My sis pranked me on my own computer, n i still didnt have a clue about it.. :) But nevertheless, feeling like being a Neo for the whole day was really cool!

debugfs and rdump

2008-07-08T13:46:00.004+05:45

If you have broken ext2/ext3 filesystem, these two commands can be your lifesaver. Atleast it brought my friend Abish's HDD 'out of coma' ;)

He had his important files in an ext3 filesystem which wasnt being mounted. It turned out that it had its journal broken. Did everything from disabling the file system's journal to trying out alternate superblocks. Even tried to convert it to ext2 format. fsck.ext3 didnt seem to repair a thing and hacks using tune2fs also didnt turn out good. We were on verge of finally letting go of data and formatting the hdd.

Then i found debugfs. The man page reads,

debugfs - ext2/ext3 file system debugger. The debugfs program is an interactive file system debugger. It can be used to examine and change the state of an ext2 file system.

Surprisingly debugfs seemed to list the files and folders of the filesystem. Cool enough, it also has a tool called rdump which recursively dumps a folder to another mounted disk.

So after invoking

# debugfs /dev/sda1
debugfs: rdump /home/ /mnt/externalhdd

and all the files were dumped to the external hdd safely. Simple, yet awesome!

PS: Me, Abish and Tushar were together when the recovery happened. Abish was so happy he took us all for a tea party right away. But no shops were open. Can you guess why? It was 2 at night!

Dharan FOSSification

2008-07-06T13:15:00.001+05:45

The day i was supposed to go to Dharan, it was terai bandh and i was at Biratnagar. Really got numb on how to reach Dharan. But fortunately, Prahmod (of PUSET) managed a bike. Dilip (also present at FOSS Orientation Program) dropped me upto Itahari. From there took a bus to Dharan.

Coming from a week long stay at Biratnagar, Dharan was a heaven for me. Clean and cool. Abish and Tushar had managed me a room at BP Koirala Institute of Health Science (BPKIHS)'s Boys' hostel. Again impressed by the size of the college. And another impressive thing: no mosquito!

I'd already met with Tushar and Abish previously in Biratnagar and had infact known Abish since a long time, so no introduction required. During dinner we talked about the FOSS Training to be conducted the next day. I kept babbling about FOSS and stuffs. Tushar was especially interested on LTSP and Freedom Toaster. These guys were already making up their mind of taking LTSP to schools and cyber cafes.. Especially i found Tushar to be hyper-excited about all these stuffs.. We all stayed late night preparing for the training the next day.

BTW, one thing about Abish. He's a medical doctor and a computer geek. Multiple personality disorder, as he admits.. haha. We've been online frens since quite a while and even if there was no FOSS Training program at Dharan, i'd have gone there to meet him.

Well, about training, it was supposed to start at 10am, but there was power cut-off. So had to get a generator. And then again a voltage stablizer. The program finally kicked off at 11:30am.

We were to cover the following topics:

Introduction to FOSS
FOSS in Nepal
Linux Installation (Ubuntu, using Wubi)
Linux Desktop Basics
FOSS Softwares
LTSP Introduction
Shell Basics

The linux distro for installation was Ubuntu and it was done through Wubi. Previously we also had plans to teach partitioning and other hells but later thought it'd jus scare the newbies. We also demonstrated the whole installation process and it went smooth. Nobody even had a hint of how hard it used to be to install linux couple of years ago..

Linux Desktop Basics basically dealt with general functionality of Linux Desktop (Gnome). It was fairly easy for the trainees to grab the concept. Not much different from Windows when it comes to GUI. Jus point and click. And we should really appreciate the latest distros, who have worked hard to make the shell as obsolete as possible.

About FOSS Softwares, almost everybody were familiar with Firefox and VLC. Few of them also had used Openoffice.org before. Lots of them seemed to like Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab).

Each topic was followed by a query session. There were questions regarding security of FOSS to how to hide files in Linux ;). Each query session went soo long, we had to cut off the final topics on LTSP and Shell Basics. Everybody were so hyper-excited! There were just one or two guys who knew about FOSS before, but i think they are pretty much ignited now..

I think the training went pretty good. Everybody present there got a copy of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 -- the CDs we'd burned during Ubuntu release party. Some of them took Fedora 9 CDs too. And ofcourse, i strongly encouraged them to SHARE the software and the CD.

During evening, the organizing team also had a meeting on forming a FOSS Dharan Community and they are going to register it very soon too. We at FOSS Nepal, Kathmandu now need to discuss on how to give affiliation to FOSS Dharan (and others that may form in near future) in a legal way..

In overall, i should say that FOSS Training at Dharan totally rocked! Finally, thanx to Dharan FOSS Team for the beautiful token of love.. Special thanx to Tushar's mom and sis for the wonderful food!

More photos are here.

Terai and Rickshaw

2008-07-04T13:09:00.004+05:45

There are few things i really dont like about terai. The first one being the heat. I was brought up in a cool weather (of Baglung and Kathmandu) so cant tolerate heat. The second thing being the dirt and the foul smell. Not all but most places in terai has a peculiar smell that doesnt cope well with my nose. ;) I can point out few others but nothing beats my dislike for rickshaws.

I agree that rickshaws are convenient means of transportation on flat lands of terai and has provided employment to a lot. But dont u think they are inefficient and inhuman??

Yup they are environment friendly but what about efficiency?? It takes ages to go from one place to another. Most people think rickshaws are fastest means of transportation in terai but how fast is 10km/hr??

And i think rickshaws are jus too inhuman. A human or two enjoying the ride in the shade while another human pulling them sweating his breath out in that scorching heat for such a low fare.. how human is that? You ride a rickshaw and the whole time you see sweat dripping from the rickshaw-puller's face, it makes you wonder - what's the price of sweat, BTW?

FOSS Orientation at PUSET, Biratnagar

2008-07-03T12:33:00.002+05:45

I was at Biratnagar for a workshop/training from my job and for FOSS Training program at nearby Dharan. But since guys from Purwanchal University, School of Engineering and Technology (PUSET) were interested, i ended up giving an orientation presentation on FOSS there too.

Prahmod from Third year, Computer Engineering took the lead. The date was set for 2nd July, Wednesday. Actually they were having their final exams running and also had an exam on Wednesday. The exam was to be over at 4pm, the program was scheduled for 4:15pm.

Despite exam, the turnout was nice i should say. Around 30 students were present in the program and were mostly computer and electronics engineering students. There was no projector so i had to display the slides directly from my laptop. The conference hall was also small for the number of participants present there. Most of them stood the whole time.

One funny thing though, some guys already knew me. When i told them my name, some guys were like, aren't you the one from Kantipur FM? They were refering to the Cybertime program on Kantipur FM where i used to represent FOSS Nepal some time back. Felt like a celebrity ;) Really weird! Didn't like it..

Okay, back to presentation. Very few had heard about FOSS before and they were more interested on Linux than FOSS. Maybe the flashy Compiz effects did the trick. But nobody had used linux before. There was a guy named Ranjit (the geek there, as others told me later) who was familiar with Linux theoretically but never had used before. He was skeptic about Linux on being harder to use and softwares being difficult to install. But i showed him the friendliness of Ubuntu and how desktop environments have become simple to use.

The presentation went one hour long and despite exam fatigue and the heat, most of them managed to stay and bombard me with questions. Again, more interest was on Linux than FOSS. FOSS - they kinda get it, but they wanna try out Linux ASAP.

Gave them few CD/DVDs of Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenCD and Nepalinux. Also encouraged them to SHARE.

I think the students are really excited and have shown a strong commitment to form a FOSS Community in the Campus. They are also planning to organize a FOSS/Linux training workshop as soon as their exam is over. Some guys really came forward to take the responsibility of forming the community, namely Prahmod, Himalaya, Parbat and Madan.

I also talked with other computer professionals and found out that computer literacy is pretty good in Biratnagar (I was amazed with the number of cyber cafes here, they're almost everywhere). But nobody knows about FOSS or Linux. I hope the FOSS Community at PUSET works to change this..

More photos are at here.

Nepal Bandh, FOSS and the walk to remember

2008-07-01T12:46:00.005+05:45

Despite New Nepal promise, Nepal Bandhs (strikes) are here to stay. And the long walks during strikes have become a common devoir. But the walk last thursday is worth remembering and sharing.

I was to go to Biratnagar the next day (friday) and i was supposed to take the last flight of the day. But unfortunately due to bandh and some other reasons the ticket was confirmed for the morning.

And i had to rush.

I had promised the Ubuntu and Fedora CDs to the guys in Biratnagar and Dharan so i had to get them anyhow. Got outta house. Previously arranged gtg with Shankur was cancelled too. I had to collect: Fedora CDs from Prabin, Ubuntu CDs from Suraj, Nepalinux CDs from MPP and Ubuntu Apt-on DVD from Surmandal.

Four people to meet and it was already 5 in the evening. I was freakin out already but still started walkin. Met Shankur in Old-baneshowr; we three went to New Baneshowr to meet Prabin. He was with Fedora CDs (from Fedora release party). Prabin gave me a lift upto Shankhamul Bridge on his scooty. Walked from there upto MPP. Met Dayaram dai. Nepalinux CDs were already out of stock so he'd burned me few DVDs. Got that from him and also few Open CDs. Called Suraj and asked him to come to MPP with Ubuntu CDs.

APTonDVD remaining. Called Surmandal but the DVD was still not done. Waited for him for a while. Almost dark, we finally met. Still had to burn the DVD. And can you believe? We did it on the footpath of Pulchowk with a super-stinky dog sleeping beside us.

Surmandal dropped me upto New Baneshowr on his bike. Walked from there again. And then it rained! It was already 9pm i guess, so no question of stopping. I jus tried to enjoy the rain. Back home totally wet and tired but i had a bag full of CD/DVDs to distribute at Dharan and Biratnagar.

Guys from Dharan / Biratnagar, if you are reading this, i jus wanna let you know that i've done my best to help u guys. You better adore FOSS and spread it all over your place. Plz dont let me down.. ;)

My Firefox family

2008-07-01T12:12:00.005+05:45

It does feel good that to say that everybody in my family uses Firefox.

My mom n sis share a laptop which i maintain, so obviously has Firefox. I wonder if my mom even knows whether any other browsers exist! But i had no idea about my dad.

But turns out he's also a Firefox user. I'd suggested him Firefox long time ago, but had no idea whether he was using it or not. But last time he downloaded Firefox 3 (thanx to my own blog), it screwed up Flash on his laptop and he was askin me for help.

And then he revealed that he uses Firefox all the time. Out of curiosity i asked him why.

"It's fast", he said.

I've always believed that it's the quality that makes FOSS so ahead of others and now i have a pretty good proof too. I still have a long way to go to convert the OS in my dad n mom's laptop to Linux, but at least Firefox is also a big feat to me.

Download Firefox 3, be the part of World Record

2008-06-16T22:21:00.004+05:45

June 17th. Yup, tomorrow! The day Mozilla has set as Firefox 3 Download day to set the record of most downloaded software in 24 hours. And you can be a part of it!

Can it be any easier than this? No eating glass or juggling 50 bowling pins. Jus click the link below and download Firefox 3. Besides setting the record, you know what the best part is? You'll get a brand new Firefox browser - the best internet browser in the world!

PS: While you download, i suggest you listen to Coldplay's new album Viva La Vida or, Death and all his friends which has jus been released. My current favorite!

Rafting @ Trishuli

2008-06-01T05:08:00.005+05:45

The adventure i wanted to do since a long time. Didn't get chance till 20th Annual Rafting Festival. Trishuli it is.. Everything was in a rush. Got ticket in the last hour. But the point is - we did it.

The team members were - Shankar, Ankur, Suvash, Rajiv and me. At the river, a Dutch couple joined us - Jan-Jaap Van Den Hoek & Tamara Jochemsen.

From Trishuli Rafting

Our rafting team. A Dutch couple joined us - Jan-Jaap Van Den Hoek & Tamara Jochemsen.

From Trishuli Rafting

Take me to the river, Dip me in the water..

From Trishuli Rafting

Shankar jumps..

No doubt, rafting was hell lot of fun. Our captain Katak dai led us to the scariest splashes in the rapids. But at the end, we all felt like we deserve even more rapids. Bhotekoshi or Kali Gandaki next??

From Trishuli Rafting

Rafting's over. And everybody's exhausted and HUNGRY! Lunch time..

The Dutch couple were really cool. We had a really nice time talkin to them. These guys were on world tour for a year and after rafting they were touring Nepal on motorbike! They taught us some Dutch too.
- Huth Khatet Khut? (How are you?)
- Meth Meh Khatet Khut. (I'm fine)

Photos are at my Picasa Album.

UPDATE:
- More photos are at Shankar's Album
- Rajiv has a more elaborate blog here

Ubuntu Hardy Release Party on Full Circle Magazine

2008-05-31T22:17:00.004+05:45

Issue #13 of Full Circle Magazine is out now! Bibek, Nepbabu and I had written an article about the Ubuntu Release Party that we celebrated sometime back. The article has been published too. :)

The party's photo also made to the cover page..

Download the magazine from here:
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2008/05/30/issue-13-out-now/

Flavors of Entanglement

2008-05-29T21:26:00.003+05:45

Some off-topic this time. My addiction lately. The latest album of Alanis Morissette -- Flavors of Entanglement. Well, this album is supposed to be released on 2nd June worldwide and on 10th in US. But what can i say, it got leaked over internet! And here i am listening to it on n on. When it's out, i'm sure gonna buy the CD too.

I've always liked Alanis Morissette songs, but i believe this is her best album ever. Her previous albums were more focused on lyrics accompanied by usually melancholic piano music. But this is different. Lyrics are strong as always, this time even the music is soo well arranged (Guy Sigsworth ??). Lyrics also have subtle changes. Songs like 'Citizen of the Planet' and 'Underneath' have more global feeling than her signature self-oriented songs. The point is, i'm hooked..

My favorite song in the album: 'In Praise of the Vulnerable Man'. At first i didnt get the lyrics, but later it occurred to me - this song is about her ex! Under similar situation, songs on previous albums would have been more of whine and curse. But this time she seems soo calm.

This is in praise of the vulnerable man
Why won’t you lead the rest of your cavalry home
This is a thank you for letting me in
Indeed in praise of the vulnerable man

How to get your own personal .com.np for FREE

2008-05-29T16:36:00.007+05:45

Actually this was originally an e-mail but since a lot of my frens have been asking me about the procedure, i thought it would be helpful to others too to put it here.. The following steps apply to personal webpages, but can be followed to obtain a .com.np for other purpose too..

First of all, some background. The official registrar for .np ccTLD (country code top level domain) is Mercantile Communications and it provides it for FREE! The official website for the registration is Register.com.np. However there are some paperworks involved too.

Most importantly, you need to be a Nepali citizen and you need to submit the photocopy of your (Nepali) citizenship ID to get the domain.

Keeping that in mind, here are the steps to get a .com.np:

First of all you need a webspace ready. It's good if u have a webspace already, but since here we're talkin about getting a .com.np for free, lets opt in for some free ones. You can choose any but make sure it supports domain parking facility. Awardspace and 110MB are some good ones that i know. (But as you know free are free. If you want a solid and reliable hosting, i recommend paid ones).
Register for the webspace and get the DNS addresses. Look somewhere in the settings of the hosting site. It usually has ns1, ns2, etc as prefix. For example, for awardspace.com, the DNS addresses are ns1.awardspace.com and ns2.awardspace.com.
Now you also need to get the IP addresses of the DNS server. To get that, go to shell (command line) and enter something like 'ping <address>'. It'll give you the IP address..
eg, ping ns1.awardspace.com
Get IP addresses for all the DNS servers of your host.
Now the registration part, go to www.register.com.np and check the availability of domain. Remember, you can register only the name that corresponds to your actual name. For example, i can get www.jwalanta.com.np or www.jwalantashrestha.com.np but not anything else. So be careful while choosing name. Put it exactly what your citizenship says. Anything different and chances are your application is gonna be rejected.
Ok back to registration form (http://www.register.com.np/form.asp). Enter all the details. In the primary and secondary name server, put the DNS addresses that we got from step [3]. No need to fill up ternary name server. Or if you want, just copy secondary name server.
Submit it and the name will be reserved. (It's only reserved, not registered).
Now put the domain name you just reserved in the domain parking option of your webhost. [important!]. For example, if i reserved the domain name jwalanta.com.np, i'd put that in the domain parking option.
Write an application, get your citizenship photocopied and take it to Mercantile Communication's office at Durbarmarg, Kathmandu.
It'll take around 2 days to process the application and perhaps 1 more day for the DNS servers worldwide to be updated about your domain.
Congratulations, you've got your personal .com.np!

BTW, don't forget to visit my website: http://www.jwalanta.com.np :)

M$ bashings? Well, they deserve it

2008-05-06T04:02:00.002+05:45

We at FOSS world care so much about co-existence. Every Linux installer includes the existing OS in its boot menu. We even have Wubi. I can't believe they have a page like this: How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP

Ubuntu Hardy Party

2008-05-04T06:20:00.004+05:45

Things really move fast in Free and Open Source world, huh. Umm.. let me check my mailbox, the first mail related to ubuntu-np was on March 15th and it was an announcement by nepbabu about the #ubuntu-np IRC channel at irc.freenode.net. In less than two months, we had couple of IRC meetings, pages mushrooming in our wiki and we even set off for the Hardy Release Party / Gettogether. The gettogether was very much nepbabu's idea and he had some serious fortifications going around. ;)

The basic ideas for the party was discussed in our very first IRC meeting. The date and venue were,

Date: Friday, 2nd May, 2008
Venue: Institute of Engineering, ZeroEnergy House
Time: 4 - 6pm, Nepal Standard Time

ZeroEnergy House at IOE was chosen because the building is self sustained, i.e. it takes no energy from outside sources. Perfect for us in this loadshedding laden country!

Shishir with Ubuntu Introduction

Besides presentations and tutorials in the program, we'd one very important task - distribution of Ubuntu and Extra Packages CD/DVD. Ubuntu CD was no big deal, but Extra Packages CD was something we had to work on. Basically this CD/DVD was an APTonCD consisting of all the useful packages (including restricted plugins). This was very important for us to lure people to use Ubuntu coz bandwidth is a big problem in Nepal and IMHO Linux without proper internet connection is like getting stuck at purgatory. ;)

Ankur with Ubuntu and Wubi demo

Saroj (aka Surmandal) was selected for this task. He works at WorldLink ISP and has enough bandwidth to create the Extra Packages CD. The procedures to create the Extra Packages CD was like this:

Get a Ubuntu DVD ready
Install a fresh Ubuntu (either from CD or DVD)
Go to Synaptic, set the source to Ubuntu DVD, select all the packages and download them to local repository. This would download all the packages in the DVD minus packages in Ubuntu CD to the harddisk.
Now download other useful packages (listed at Extra Packages CD page)
After the download, the local repo contains a DVD worth of Packages. Write them to a DVD using APTonCD

Neat huh! ;)

But we seriously needed money for replicating the CDs. Thankfully, Young Innovations Pvt. Ltd. agreed to sponsor NRs. 4000 (thanx Bibek). We called up the CD Replicating guys, the rate was Rs 15 for CD and 25 for DVD. So the plan was to replicate 100 CDs and 100 DVDs (100x(15+25)=4000). So far so good.

But things didn't go as we'd planned. Saroj got the Extra Packages DVD ready, but due to some misunderstandings, the CD Replicator ppl replicated something else. APTonCD became JPTonCD :D. CDs were good however.

We had quite a participation

Finally the big day. The program started right on time. We were to do the following:

Introduction to Ubuntu / FOSS
Ubuntu Demo
Wubi Demo
Tutorial on Getting Ubuntu more useful
Participating ubuntu-np

First one was handled by Shishir. Ankur did 2nd and 3rd. I did the rest. We had around 40+ participants. It was actually more than we'd expected. Although we had a some advertisement about the event, i seriously wasn't expecting that huge number. The program was short and sweet, i guess. Nobody was caught yawning during the program for that sake.. :D

After the program, we had a brief CD sales session. The CD was tagged Rs. 15 to recover the cost. Most of the participants bought the CD too. Lets hope they'll follow the spirit of Ubuntu - 'Pass it on'.

Subir dai with Ubuntu CD

Light refreshment followed. Tea and Cookies. This also gave us time to mingle up with each other and finding out the real person behind the IRC alias. Everyone was like, "OMG that's you?" It was fun..

Now we've still got some money left previously allocated to burn DVDs. We've decided to use it to burn some more CDs and distribute them at FOSS Stall in Locus Tech Fest. It's a huge event and i hope we'll reach more people there..

Thanx to Surmandal and Shankar for the photos.

Shutdown day? I celebrate it everyday!

2008-04-21T05:43:00.005+05:45

Last time during our ubuntu-np IRC Meeting, we were planning on organizing Ubuntu Hardy Release party. Some of us wanted to do it on 3rd of May coz it saturday, but unfortunately the date happened to be Shutdown Day!

It first came to me as a good idea. But wait a minute, i do it everyday! Shutting down computer. But i dont do it myself. Why would i do that? Computer provides me air to breathe ;) Well, this does it.. http://nea.org.np/Load_Shedding_Schdule.pdf

I shutdown computer almost 7+ hours a day and 40+ hours a week. Isn't that enough to get a free pass out of this shutdown day crap? Plus it's on saturday, the day there's no power cut-off the whole day at my place. So plz not me, hell no!

Why IT development is so slow paced in Nepal

2008-03-31T05:42:00.007+05:45

Last few days i've witnessed some events which have been really agonizing me.

The first was on saturday. I'd got call from Manish who with Jitendra and Suraj have been developing a software similar (but not limited) to APTonCD but their version is more like APTonUSB too.. The software they are developing is really superb IMO, especially in our context where we dont have fast internet connection, but still want to use linux and want to be up-to-date. They have also publicly announced their software.

So we all were there to have a look at the prototype n give feedbacks. The 'program' went good. Everybody was excited.

Total cost of organizing the event: Few phone calls
Productivity: Super High
Problems: Lack of fund / resources to setup a package repo (n nobody seems to be helping too)

The next day (sunday) i was at Himalaya Hotel, Kupondole to attend a program (representing OLPC Nepal, along with Shankar). "Demonstration & Interaction Programme on Rural Information Gateway Portal." Big words huh! But actually it was about a website named www.telecenters.org.np. Previously i thought it was the launch of the website, but later on found it was just feedback collection.

WTF! Lunch at luxury hotel, jus to gather feedbacks? Wait, the website building process is even more interesting..

Some askings, and i found out that the project was initiated by USAID and it handed over the development works to HLCIT. But ofcourse HLCIT is a governing body, so did a bid which Mercantile Communications won. Mercantile Communication further did a bid which was won by Winrock International. Winrock again did a bid n finally Magnus Consulting got the job of developing the website. The result - the website is not even Web2.0 and i bet, with Drupal, i can create a better site in ONE day!

Now think of the cost.. I get nothing but frustration. There's so much money being poured into IT development currently. Is this how they spend the money? Expensive hotels, lunch n dinners?? The program was about the telecenter website. And we all know telecenters are a complete failure in Nepal. Is there any way this website gonna last then?? I estimate maximum life-expectency of this website not more than a year!

Productivity: NONE

The final one was again back on saturday. Outside Pulchowk Campus, there was an endless line of people ready to enter the campus to attend examination for their employment in Korea. And everybody looked under 30.

Where are we heading??

Lets have an overview. The guys who wanna work aren't getting proper funds / resources. The big guys who have it are busy with lunch n dinners at five star hotels. Rest of the potentials have no options but go abroad. And the rest of us are still fighting.

F**k!

OLPC Pilot starts

2008-03-31T05:27:00.003+05:45

I did a lot to OLPC's Blog, but forgot to mention on my own. Last week, OLPC Nepal launched first ever pilot distribution of the laptop. The 4th grader students of Janajyoti Lower Secondary School, Kavre were the lucky ones. The distribution was in coordination with Department of Education. The project was codenamed 'Sunrise'.

From OLPC Nepal Pilot

Last week had been very stressful. We spent most of our nights working at OLPC Nepal's Devel0pment Lab. Guys have even decided to call our office 'gudh' (home). It was wonderful being/workin with you all..

But our real work has jus begun. Distributing laptop was jus the end of the beginning. Now the monitoring of usage of laptop and the effect of this 'little wonder' is our primary task.

Translation Fun

2008-03-23T09:39:00.002+05:45

Translation had never been fun like this. At OLPC Nepal, we played holi, stayed overnight and completed OLPC XO Activities localization. The whole event was named Translation Nite-out.

The statistics of translation are here. More details are at OLPC Nepal Blog.

From Holi @ OLPC Nepal Office

The real price of oil

2008-03-18T15:43:00.002+05:45

Source: pixdaus.com

Lakuri Bhanjyang Hiking

2008-03-02T23:08:00.000+05:45

After a long discussion on where to go n when to go (guys have gone really busy), Prajwal came up with a post late saturday that said lets go hiking on sunday to Lakuri Bhanjyang. Initially the route was Lubhu-Lakuri-Lamatar but we found that it wasn't quite a route for hike eventually. But who could stop us from havin more fun?

We were to meet at Sahidgate. 6 mentioned, 7 arrival. We were Chetan, Madhav, Mahesh, Lekhnath, Prajwal (Paul), Pushpesh, Rajiv and me. Dinesh joined at Lagankhel. Jeti-puri-chiya at a sweet shop nearby n we kicked off.

From Lakuri Bhanjyang Hiking

Got some snacks n fruits at Lagankhel bus park. But we'd come to know that there are lots of restaurants at Lakuri Bhanjyang, so why be a jackass? (But there were none, so does that make us jackass??) Moreover everybody wasn't carrying bag, so the uneven distribution of load got me quite reluctant.. ;)

Bus to Lubhu ghumti nira late bhayo, literally. We reached there around at 9 and the hike began. But unfortunately it was over long before we were heating up. We got there around at 10! Moreover we took the shortcut, although there was motor-road (with one inch thick layer of dust though) to Lakuri Bhanjyang. Chetan panting and gasping all the way - it was his first hike with us (but he caught up soon).

From Lakuri Bhanjyang Hiking

Ok now what? The planned hike was already over. This got us thinkin about the Electronics guys who had come to the same place some time back and luring us with their adventure (?) stories. Lakuri Bhanjyang is an hour walk, what were they thinkin?

But still we walked to the highest point we could find at LB. The whole Kathmandu valley was visible from there, or i might say invisible - the air was jus too hazy. Gosh, we breathe that..

From Lakuri Bhanjyang Hiking

It was 12 when we left that place. But there was no way we were goin to declare the hiking over. We caught another road which led to Godawari, as the locals explained. There trail we took led to a cave as a signboard said, but as we went we didnt met any cave but instead an hour of adventure we'd never forget in our life. We had to grab the trees to climb up the hill. There was literally no trail, we were actually doing a vertical hill climbing. One slip n we'd be up the hills. But luckily no one took that route. :)

From Lakuri Bhanjyang Hiking

There was one funny incident. Few minutes before we reached a nicer trail, we met a rather elderly couple who were a resident nearby n were there to look after their cattle graze. They were quite surprised that instead of taking a easier way (vehicle) to Godawari we were taking our breath out and climbing the hill to reach there.. They mus have thought us as a total moron. Irony huh, they long for vehicle, we long for hike.

After that it was an easier trail. We also encountered few Laligurans trees, n had some photo sessions too. Finally reached Godawari around at 3. Went to Siddheshor temple there and the first thing anyone could think after a day's hike was putting the feet in the icy cold water there. Trust me dude, it was soo relaxing. I forgot all the exhaustion.

From Lakuri Bhanjyang

And now the important part, noone had eaten a thing till then. Yes there were fruits, but thats nothing compared to the long hike. We went to a restaurant nearby n ordered food. Typical dal-bhat-tarkari.

While returning also entered Godawari Park. Donno about others, but i was totally nostalgic.

In overall, the hiking was one of the best i ever had. The previous hikings were like - the next day you couldnt move your butt. This one was cool. Non-exhaustive but still full of adventure.

InfoTech

2008-02-10T04:28:00.000+05:45

Little outdated stuff, but worth sharing. CAN InfoTech 2008 Photos. With Comments!

http://picasaweb.google.com/jwalanta/CANInfoTech2008

CAN InfoTech is always a piece of disappointment. I never can calm my urge to go there n always return back with 'nothing interesting there..' The top disappointment this year were 'Ju Ju Dhau' (Yogurt) and Cybersansar models. What the heck were they doin in a tech-show?

Nitrogen cooled motherboard supporting upto 4 graphics card was the coolest hardware i saw there.

Cheap pendrives were common. Rs 500 for 1GB. And since loadshedding is killin us all, Inverter Companies also did a great business i guess..

FOSS Nepal at CAN InfoTech 2008

2008-01-30T06:16:00.000+05:45

After final hour meetings and planning, we finally were at CAN InfoTech 2008. Please visit us at stall P-8. Thanx a lot to CAN for the complimentary stall.

This is the first time we're at CAN InfoTech and this definitely is a great opportunity to all of us to reach a large mass. This is not like Software Freedom Day; we're gonna have a big impact if we perform well here.

Btw, OLPC Nepal is also in CAN InfoTech. Details here.

Anyway, here're some photos from the first day..

Our Stall

Getting started..

FOSS Logos and poster collection..

On the display..

What did you have for breakfast?

2008-01-30T04:36:00.000+05:45

Nepbabu's this post got me speechless for a while. Jus couldn't believe my eyes. EXTREME poverty is forcing Haiti's poorest people to eat mud-cookies (made from dirt, salt and vegetable shortening). Can't even call them cookies. They're not cooked, they're jus sun dried!

Some googling got me to this.

For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years.

Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger.

I jus showed the mud-cookie photos to my lil' bro. He asked, does that taste good? I dont care what it tastes like, but it definitely tastes frustration, anger.. (i'm short of words)

Yipee, laptop wireless finally working!

2008-01-14T18:13:00.000+05:45

Finally, my laptop's wireless is working under Linux. Hi5!

Well, my laptop is Acer Aspire 5103WLMi. It came with Windows Vista, but the moment i got it, installed Linux (Ubuntu) and never have used Vista (actually it's in Japanese so no question of using it even if i liked it.. ;))

Every piece of hardware worked fine except the card reader and wireless. Card reader worked as Ubuntu Gutsy came along, but still my Atheros AR5007EG wireless was causing trouble.

But thanx to this post of Ubuntu Forum, i finally got the wireless working! Actually i'd gone through this post before, how come i missed it then?

Now the only thing remaining to work on my laptop is Microphone. It's ATI Technologies Inc SB450 HDA Audio. Do any of u have any idea how to make the mic work?

Gedit Makeover

2008-01-14T00:52:00.000+05:45

The default Gedit installation at first feels like a lousy text editor which comes by default with Gnome and often compared with MS Windows' Notepad. But that's the lamest comparison ever.. Gedit can be extended outrageously with the help of plugins. Gedit has become my default Python editor. I sometimes also do C/C++ in it.

The plugins i use most:

Class Browser - Tree display of classes in the code
Embedded Terminal - Nice little embedded terminal at the bottom
Python Console - Python Console at the bottom
Python outline - Python code outline
Symbol Browser - Uses ctag, similar to Class Browser

Gedit has loads of cool plugins. Edit > Preferences > Plugins

Gedit with Class Browser and Embedded Terminal.
Also note the shell output and Python Console tab at the bottom

Besides this, there are some other cool hacks that can turn Gedit into a Web Developer's IDE and Python IDE among others..

If you want to write your own Plugin, it's not that hard too.. You can do that either in C or Python (i'd go for Python). Further instructions here.

The Himalmedia Group Blog

2008-01-14T00:45:00.000+05:45

Lil' out of topic this time.. My fren Chetan provided me the link:

The Himalmedia Group Blog (http://blog.himalkhabar.com/)

It's in Nepali so might not make sense for any non-nepali readers. But for all Nepalis out there, check it out.. Most of them are political humor/satire. This is the coolest politically oriented Nepali language blog i've ever read.

The Art of Computer Programming

2008-01-10T19:03:00.000+05:45

After two days of download from torrent (thanx to Nepal's internet speed), i finally got (the great) Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (e)books. I know it's illegal to download that way, but jus wanted to have a glimpse of the epic monograph before i actually buy it.

Needless to say, it's quite impressive. Words cant describe.. No wonder it's among the best twelve physical-science monographs of the twentieth century!

Along with the books, there were two more books in the torrent - Concrete Mathematics and The TeX Book. Both of them are classics in their area. I'm currently goin thru the former..

Finally into Facebook

2008-01-06T06:09:00.000+05:45

Had been quite reluctant, but thanx to my good old fren Kundan's suggestion, i finally got into Facebook. Check out..

Which file extension are you?

2008-01-02T02:30:00.000+05:45

Got the link from nepbabu's post. Took the test and found out that i'm .mp3. :)

Which File Extension are You?

UPDATE:
I also took OS and Programming Language test. It showed that i'm OS/2 and Perl. The interesting part is, i dont know both.. LOL..

Which Programming Language are You?

Which OS are You?

2008 Resolutions

2008-01-01T07:45:00.000+05:45

2007 rocked for me! But unfortunately signs are building up for the 2008 to be very hard and struggleful for me. College will be ending in a few months too. So lets do some planning, here are my primary resolutions (in no particular order).. ;)

I'm gettin lots of job offers but no matter what, full time job - No nO! Part time home based ones - okay.
Join masters within this year. Not gonna waste time. Gonna try US for ME (preferred). If not, MBA in Nepal.
Tests and Certifications: GRE, RHCE and Cisco (all with flying colors :D)
Travel and Adventure: Atleast i'm gonna go for rafting and bungy.
Read a lot: Last 4 years of college didn't let me study anything truly out of study course. So anything that comes my way. Philosophy, journalism, photography.. maybe even porn novels ;).. anything..
Programming Languages: Atleast i'm gonna learn LISP
Skills: Linux Device Drivers (and lots n lots but writing all'll take eternity, :D)
FOSS: Complete some softwares that i have started/are in my mind
OLPC: This year would be for OLPC Content/software development
Blog/Write More: Write everything that comes to me..
Save Money: I know this is something i cant control, but i gotta try. Plus, i cant ask my dad for help for my further education.
Stay busy: As college's gonna be over in a month, if i dont get busy i'll go mad..

-- And for private eyes --
This year is for you. We're gonna be together again..

Bye bye 2007, you rocked!!

2007-12-31T21:43:00.000+05:45

The year 2007 got really incredible. Perhaps i never had a year so packed with fun and achievements.

The fun began right from the start. January, went to Dang as a coordinator for setting up the first LTSP based e-Library of Nepal. The same deployment brought a chain of LTSP installations in Nepal.

A month later, won the LOCUS Open Software Competition with Shishir. Also won third prize on LOCUS Paper presentation Competition with Ayush. Few months later also made it to finals in the CHC60 Competition organized by IEEE. Sad that we didnt win, but atleast making it to finals in IEEE Competition is a pretty impressive thing. ;)

Few months after that starting working for Flash Project of Department of Education as Lead Developer. Also traveled to Pokhara, Nepalgunj and Bardia for training sessions of the same. Got a nice paycheck too -> new laptop!

FOSS stuffs got nicer too.. We celebrated the Software Freedom Day 2007. I was in Public Relation and Documentation team. The final report i wrote/compiled got us the Best Event Award. By the way it's not fair to say that we won just bcoz of the report, as the event was incredible in the first place. We had such level of extravaganza in 2006's SFD too, but we didnt win due to lack of proper documentation. This year i'm proud to be a part of the award..

Talkin about FOSS, i also started volunteering at Kantipur FM on behalf of FOSS. The program is Cybertime airs every saturday, 8:30-9am. I prepare and anchor FOSS related report and news everyweek.

College life was cool too. Forth year, so not much headachie techie classes and lots of off classes. Actually it's not nice from academic point of view, but still was a relief after three years of rigorous techie studies. And it's always fun to go to canteen n having tea with frens.

Also went to Ghorepani hiking with college frens, which itself is one of the most memorable thing that has happened this year.

And the most important of all, i started blogging. Aint still a regular blogger, but atleast i do. And seems like it counts.

Well, there are some bad moments too, but why repent over?

Dear year 2007, you've been really nice to me. Dear Life, plz be like this year for the rest of you.. ;)

Getting rebellious against M$

2007-12-31T02:44:00.001+05:45

Devils_r_here, originally uploaded by mailzico.

My fren and active foss-nepal group member Zico and his squad from Bangladesh have gone quite rebellious. They wore a (debian) linux t-shirt, went to a M$ event and stayed there whole day long. Have a look http://www.flickr.com/photos/mohibsshot/

He told me that the M$ guys were askin them why do they prefer open-source? What's the bug in Vista?

C'mon we all know Vista IS the bug!

== UPDATE ==
I'd also posted this thing in FOSS-Nepal google groups, and the thread got really heated. Infact i'd asked Zico before posting as it was sure to be flamed but he said okay ;)

LTSP Training of Trainers

2007-12-15T19:26:00.000+05:45

LTSP Training of Trainers started today at Kathmandu Engineering College, Kalimati. It's a two day training jointly organized by FOSS Nepal Community and Help Nepal Network. First day is about Linux, second day is about LTSP.

The trainers and the gonna-be-trainers

Update:
Prabin has uploaded the photos of TOT here.

Compact GNOME buttons and menus

2007-12-14T19:56:00.000+05:45

If you are GNOME user, you'd agree to me on the fact that GNOME buttons and menus take too much space. While this looks cleaner and spacey, some might feel this the waste of space. Atleast i do. So why not fix it?

Go to /usr/share/themes (or, /home/you/.themes
Find the folder of your current theme (eg, Human, Tango, etc)
Inside the folder, there's a folder called gtk-2.0 and inside it a file named gtkrc
Open gtkrc with your text editor (ofcourse, make a backup first)
Search for every xthickness and ythickness in the file and set the value to 1
Save the file and restart X

There's also a theme named 'Clearlooks Compact' having similar attributes. You can find it here.

Furthermore, if you need more space, you can turn off text display on icons.

System > Preferences > Appearance > Interface tab (or, System > Preferences > Interface)
Set the 'Toolbar button labels' to 'Icons only'

Geeky desktop with conky

2007-12-09T22:41:00.000+05:45

Conky's man page says,

Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on the torsmo code. Since it's original conception, Conky has changed a fair bit from it's predecessor. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in it's own window. Conky has many built-in objects, as well as the ability to execute programs and scripts, then display the output from stdout.

Apart from system variables, I've configured conky to display fortune cookie and random jokes from jokes4all.net (via RSS). Wrote a program to display RSS data in plane text. You can find it here. It's in php.

My ~/.conkyrc file is here.

My desktop looks like this..

Another trick using ImageMagick

2007-11-18T23:36:00.000+05:45

Last blog was about batch resizing images using ImageMagick. But ImageMagick is more than just a resizing tool. It's kinda Adobe PhotoShop (or GIMP) for command line. You might be thinkin - what might a commandline photo editing tool be possibly use of? Well, think of resizing, watermarking and putting a nice frame to images. And to make matters worse, there are around 3000 of them and are in different formats (ie, gif, jpeg, png, bmp, etc..). Well, ImageMagick can do them all in a single command line!

ImageMagick has lots and lots of cool features. I already said, it's Adobe PhotoShop for command line and I mean it! More on ImageMagick can be found on its website www.imagemagick.org.

Okay now lets get down to the Magick.. Here's the problem:

Sometimes photos taken by digital cameras are just seem faded out.. Jus like image below.

How do we fix it? Well, the simplest answer is overlay.. This can also be done in Adobe Photoshop (or GIMP). I got this idea from here.

1. Duplicate the image layer
2. Apply layer blending mode as Overlay for the upper image.

But who does the hard work of opening Photoshop (or GIMP) and all the mess when i can do it with a single command using ImageMagick. We use composite command of ImageMagick (single line).

composite -compose overlay 
<faded_image> <faded_image> <output_bright_image>

(plz note that there <faded_image> is mentioned twice as the image is overlayed upon another instance of the same image)

eg,

composite -compose overlay colorless.jpg colorless.jpg bright.jpg

Here's before and after..

Before: Faded Image

After: ImageMagick Trick

Now who says commandline is boring?

Magic of ImageMagick

2007-11-18T23:09:00.000+05:45

Sometime back i'd written a blog about batch image resizing in linux. The basic concept of doing that was combining djpeg/cjpeg command in linux. But, well, screw that! I've a better alternative - ImageMagick.

The main drawback of using djpeg/cjpeg command was that it didn't retain the image metadata, aka EXIF (Camera name, date, Exposure, etc). So as a better and flexible alternative, Imagemagick is our tool of the trade here..

To install Imagemagick in linux,

   apt-get install imagemagick

Imagemagick is also available for Windows, Mac, FreeBSD and any platform you can think of as it is Open Source. Go to www.imagemagick.org for more.

Now the command to resize an image is (in single line)

   convert <original_image> -resize <resize_value>
    -quality <resize_value> <output_image>

where
<resize_value> can be like 50% or 800x600.. hope u got the point
<quality_value> can be like 75, 85 (ie, 0-100). This whole quality control can be taken off, in that case ImageMagick automatically sets the best value.

To resize all the images in a folder, we use the following script


#!/bin/sh

mkdir resized

for i in *.JPG
do
   echo -n "Converting $i... "
   convert $i -resize 50% resized/$i
   echo "Done"
done

When this script is run in a folder containing images, it creates a folder named resized and puts all the resized image there, plus the EXIF data are retained too.. Cool huh?

Ghorepani Hiking Day 4: Back Home

2007-10-19T23:21:00.000+05:45

17th October 2007, Wednesday

Got up early, we'd to go to Beni. We couldn't say a word to the owner about what happened last night. But when she found out about the mess, c was kinda really mad. Had tea n we left that place. There was nothing left there..

Took a jeep to Beni. The road was bumpy but there were some cool sceneries on the way.

Reached Beni. The cell phone was finally working. Called home. Took a microbus to Kathmandu. This time again there was some cool view on the way.

Kaligandaki as seen from microbus. From Ghorepani Hiking

Five of us got off at Pokhara. Me, Rajiv and Babins were to go Kathmandu directly.

Reached Kathmandu at 5, but Kalanki ko jam caused 2 hours delay.

N ya, there was one funny incident. Rajiv n me were waiting for a bus at Swayambhu to get back home but we didnt get anything. Later on we were jus makin fun waving hands to each n every vehicles that passed by us. Suddenly we happened to wave a scooter, n holy shit, it stopped n waited. We were confused what was that about.. Somewhat excited coz there were gals waiting for us. But scared too coz we didn't know what they were upto..

But before we could make a move, a bus arrived n we got into it. The bus moved n we could still see the gals (there were two of them on the scooty) still waiting.. I was still out of my mind!

Ghorepani Hiking Day 3: Rain ruined the day

2007-10-19T23:11:00.000+05:45

16th October 2007, Tuesday

We were to wake up early as we'd to go to Ghorepani to see the magnificent sunrise over the Annapurna range. But when the 4am alarm struck, we realized it was raining. Damn! rain totally ruined our day. We walked so hard to see the himalayas, n it rained the day we were going to see it.

No question of moving, we slept again. Woke up at 8.

Had breakfast and moved towards Ghorepani. Jus took one hour. If it wasn't raining, we'd have gone to Pune Hill, but rain ruined it all. We went to a hotel and had the lunch. One interesting thing about that place was that there was television with major Nepali Channels. Cool!

At Ghorepani. It was raining, else it would have been a wonderful shot from here.. From Ghorepani Hiking

We decided to split. The guys from Pokhara – Rajendra, Sanish and Ravindra were taking the same path we took to reach Ghorepani. The rest of us had no intention of goin back to Pokhara sooner. So as per the advice given by the local policeman, we decided to go to Beni through Myagdi. He'd told us that we can reach Tiplang in around 6 hours. From there we can take a bus to Beni. And from Beni there's bus to Kathmandu.

We started at 12. The first place we reached was Chitrey. We stayed there for a while at a local Mela. We'd been hearing about this Mela since Ulleri, but didn't find anything special. Maybe the fun was beginning, but we'd no time to spare.

Annapurna Range began to appear as we left for Beni! From Ghorepani Hiking

Reached another village called Shikha. From there we took a scary road towards Tiplang. The whole journey was much better than before. It was in a true sense hiking. There were villages on the way, n there always was beautiful himalayas as we walked. We felt like we did a great job not taking same path we'd come from to return back.

At Sikha. From Ghorepani Hiking

Top of the world :) From Ghorepani Hiking

Nepal is indeed beautiful.. From Ghorepani Hiking

Beautiful waterfalls were all around. From Ghorepani Hiking

The final road was really scary. It was down the hill and the path was really steep. I felt like i lost my knee cap as i walked down the road n had to take a rest on every turn. Really tiring. We were supposed to reach Tiplang by 4 or 5 but it was already 6 when we reached there.

It was already dark when we reached Tiplang. From Ghorepani Hiking

Prajwal, Mahesh and Babins were really ahead and had reached Tiplang around half an hour earlier. And had also taken a hotel room. Interestingly the hotel was run by two young gals. You can tell why they chose that hotel. Guys r guys!

Lots of flirting with those gals but clearly no sign of anything 'special' happening. In that hotel too, jus two rooms for 8 of us. No, we weren't miser this time, but that hotel jus had two rooms left.

Things were goin ok. Some of the guys were playing cards (call-break). I was jus the spectator coz i didn't have enough member to form a team (of four). Mahesh were still in the kitchen 'flirting' with the younger of two gals. Prajwal joined soon and both of them were drinking local wine. I went there too, but returned back soon coz 'something else' was goin on there n didn't want to interfere..

But not for too long. Prajwal started shouting. Holy cow, he was totally drunk! Mahesh returned back n he was kinda upset but i donno why.

We brought Prajwal back to room and we tried to sleep. Me, Prajwal and Umang. N by da way, Umang was already sick – he'd tried the wine and vomited too. Prajwal was totally drunk and still shouting. I tried to make him sleep and myself tried to sleep. Other guys were in another room playing cards.

A few minutes later, Prajwal started to spit on the floor. Soon i realized he was goin to vomit. I got up n tried to pull him out of room, but holy mother of all craps, he vomited in the room!!!

Goddamnit. I got totally numb for a while. Didn't know what to do. Called other guys in next room. Threw Prajwal out of house but had no idea what to do with the mess. It was getting smelly already n the guys in next room (guests) were spraying air-freshener. Narendra n other guys got buckets of water n tried to clean the room, but it wasn't goin away.

I was really really mad at Prajwal n didn't care if he stays outside the whole night. But other guys called Prajwal back n made him sleep in the same room. He was into sleep instantly.

There was no way any of us sleeping in that smelly room. Five of us shared a double bed. Rest two slept outside of room (kinda lobby). Later on i also went outside coz five in a double bed was really gross. I'd to literally sleep on floor with almost no blanket!! Darn u Prajwal..

Ghorepani Hiking Day 2: Hiking turned Safari

2007-10-19T22:59:00.000+05:45

15th October 2007, Monday

It was first time in Pokhara for some guys so they went to Devis' Falls in the morning. They promised they'll be back at 8. Me, Rajiv and Prajwal were left back at hotel, so we also decided to take a short walk. But on the way we found a shop to hire bicycle. Rs. 20 per hour. Cheap, we went for a short trip around Pokhara. Dam side, Prithivi chowk, Chiple Dhunga, New Road and the time we were back at hotel, it was already 10 i guess. And we were already late for starting hiking.

Some food and we left. We were 11 – Rajendra, Sanish and Ravindra (Electrical Dept.) were also going. Some this n that, it was already noon we left the hotel.

Some breakfast before leaving. From Ghorepani Hiking

And ya, we decided to go to Ghorepani. Our first plan was to go to Annapurna Base Camp, but since we came to know it takes a lot of days, we switched to Ghandruk. But later on we came to know that the scenery is much better at Ghorepani than Ghandruk, our destination was Ghorepani at last. But first we had to go to Naya Pul to start the hike.

Going to Naya Pul was a mess again. We changed three buses. The first one to go half the road to New Bus Park. Second was a van where we stood on the carriage. The third was a bus, where we sat at the roof half the road, back inside as it started to rain and again back to top coz inside bus it was boring, although Jiwan was havin a gr8 time flirting with a gal next to him in the seat.

On the way to Naya Pul. From Ghorepani Hiking

Our hiking finally started. It was 2 already when we started walking. We were almost sure we wont reach destination on time. But so far so good.

Hiking got better with view of himalayas. From Ghorepani Hiking

There were a lot of sheeps n chyangras on the way. We liked to call them 'Dashain'. The road was along the river and although it was hot, the road wasn't harsh to walk.

Dashain.. From Ghorepani Hiking

But things got really bad as we reached the steep hill to Ulleri. O god the road was so steep and so tiring. Soon, the fast moving guys got really ahead n the rest of us couldn't walk faster. But why bother, we walked slowly. Afterall our destination for today was Ulleri only n we can reach there anyhow. We were me, rajiv, rajendra, jiwan and umang in the slow walking team.

There were some cool people on the way. The first was the 'charko' didi. She had a shop where we stopped to have tea. She was really flirty and funny. The guys who were ahead of us had also stopped in that shop for some cold drinks. While we were there, there were other ppl from kathmandu. They were also staying at Ulleri.

View from Ulleri. From Ghorepani Hiking

We finally reached Ulleri but there was no sign of other guys. The locals told us that they moved towards Birethanti, another village one hour ahead. It was getting dark but we decided to go and catch them.

We met them finally at Birethanti. But they were getting ready to move forward towards Nangethanti and still ahead to Ghorepani if possible. It was already 6 then. The locals told us that it takes 2 hours to reach Nangethanti. We had to cross the forest named Banthanti to reach there.

And then our trekking turned into Night Safari. It was pitch dark and we were in the woods. To make things worse, i was at the tail of line. And o god, i cant explain how scared i was. I always had the feeling that someone was coming from behind. After an hour of walk everybody started to get frustrated coz it was dark n we didn't know where we were goin. And there was no sign of appearance of Nangethanti.

Trekking turned Safari. From Ghorepani Hiking

I didn't know this first but there was another reason to be scared among other guys. Some villagers told them that some kinda 'Churelni' (female ghost) scare people in the woods. Similarly 'Top' (male ghost) scale gals. I would have been even more scared if i'd known it coz i was at the back.

Two hour of hopeless walk and we finally heard noise of dogs shouting – we've reached Nangethanti. We found a hotel but the owner told us that they dont have enough rooms. But we requested coz we'd nowhere to go. Finally she agreed.

Was warm there. We also had meal with delicious meat of chyangra.

Bed time. We took jus two rooms! 11 guys in jus two rooms. We're hell miser so to speak but infact we were tight of budget. Moreover, it was cold too. In one of the rooms were the ones who were having 'toop', rest in another.

N ya, there was a funny (but scary) incident. The place had no electricity so i went to other guys room to borrow a lighter, in case we needed one. It was dark n i was staring the darkness outside through the pitch dark passage as i knocked the door of another room. Suddenly somebody came nowhere out of darkness with a candle. O god, i was almost scared to death! But thanx god, it wasn't any 'churelni' or something alike. She was the hotel owner, bringing the bill :P

Ghorepani Hiking Day 1: First Times

2007-10-19T22:39:00.000+05:45

14th October 2007, Sunday

We were all set for the hiking and so were to meet at buspark at 6:30. But being a Nepali it's obviously against our morals to be on time :). I reached at 7. Rajiv and Rajendra followed. Babins and Jiwan were already there. Had some arguments on whether to take a bus or micro. Finally took a bus at around 7:30.

Few minutes on the road and we got stuck again at Kalanki aka Kalanki ko jam. Some yawnings, roaming around and cursing government for not broadening the road, we finally hit the highway at 11.

Bored at Kalanki ko Jam. From Ghorepani Hiking

The other guys – Prajwal, Narendra, Mahesh and Umang were on bike. Their plan was to go to Manakamana first, reach Pokhara in the evening and meet us. Our plan was to go the Pokhara directly first, have some sight seeings and meet the biker guys later in the evening.

But unfortunately due to delay at Kalanki we reached Pokhara later. The biker guys were already at Sanish's place. We finally met at Prithivi chowk.

Most of the guys were for the first time in Pokhara so we went directly towards lakeside and Phewa tal. It wasn't my first visit to Pokhara (infact i was in Pokhara for a week few months ago) so wasn't interested at all. But other guys were really enjoying the place. We stayed in a hotel at Lakeside. It was Prajwal's friend's.

In the evening, again went for some walk. Our plan was to get dinner and go to a disco. But the club we went only had a concert. There was a snooker table too, so some guys went to play. Rest of us stayed outside.

We roamed around but it only got boring and boring. I was sleepy of day long bus ride. Finally we found a club. We all decided to go there, have some beer, jump around and go back to hotel room.

But WTF, it was a dance club. I mean only a real gal dancing at the front. Not kinda disco as we all had imagined before entering. It was the first time most of us had ever gone to a dance club. And it was embarrassing. At least i was.

Things got lil okay later on. Some guys even went to the front seat and some started talkin with the dancers. But nothing 'special' happened. I came to know later on that some cops had also arrived at the bar but obviously nothing wrong with that. I had few glasses of beer. Bar closed at 11.

From Ghorepani Hiking

Free Burma

2007-10-04T09:56:00.000+05:45

Use GNU Octave instead of MATLAB

2007-09-21T08:15:00.000+05:45

Especially engineering and technical people out there, you might have used MATLAB. How did you get it?? Bought it?? Commercial version costs $1900. Even the student version costs $99. Or got it pirated? Well it's not good either..

Here's the alternative: GNU Octave. It's more than just alternative. Good thing is that it is fully MATLAB compatible, that means every code written for MATLAB also runs in Octave.

GNU Octave

The most important of all is that GNU Octave is Free and Open Source Software. It also runs on Linux so everybody who wanna move to Linux but holding back due to MATLAB, well, we've a catch here..

GNU Octave's web address: http://www.octave.org/

Watching Youtube (and other online videos) full screen

2007-09-09T08:44:00.001+05:45

The best OS to have in your computer is Linux. In Linux, one of the best software to install is CompizFuzion (previosuly, Beryl). Well, I normally don't like to have flashy graphics as it gets boring and counter-productive with time, but the screen zoom feature always rocks!

Zooming screen?? Where could this be useful?? This feature is targeted for people with poor vision so that they can magnify part of screen. I do have good vision (after wearing glasses though) but this feature comes handy when watching videos from sites like Youtube.

Online video sites like Youtube and Google Videos have small sized videos. Now if you have CompizFusion, just press Win Key and rotate the scroll wheel and zoom it to full screen..

Normal Screen

Zoomed a bit

Zoom More..

Full Screen

Firefox font fix

2007-09-01T06:45:00.000+05:45

My last post on decreasing dpi got my Firefox fonts so damn small. Tried a lot of ways to fix it, even changed /chrome/userContent.css and userChrome.css but nothing worked.

I later installed a plugin named NoSquint which permanently changes the zoom level for individual or all sites. While this worked fine for me, i was lookin for a permanent solution.

Finally i found out that firefox tries to sync it's dpi with system's dpi, which i've already set low. Now the fix for that is as follows.

Go to address bar and type about:config
change the layout.css.dpi value from -1 (or whatever) to 0 (zero)

My Firefox now shows normal fonts.

2007-06-01T01:24:00.000+05:45

Linux fonts too big?? Try decreasing dpi

Every time i install any Linux distro, the first thing i do is decrease the size of font. I use GNOME in which the default font size defaults to 10 which i feel is quite large given the fact that i use the resolution 1024x768 over a LCD.

But instead of decreasing the font size, here's the alternative that works better. Go to System > Preferences > Font > Details. Now change the Resolution to 72 dots per inch (dpi) (or more if u dont like too small fonts). I chose 72 because it is the actual dpi present on the screen. The smaller fonts look sleek and provides more space too..

Give it a try..

2007-03-19T04:44:00.000+05:45

Batch jpeg image resize in linux

The (jpeg) photos we take using digital camera are just too large so to save space and bandwidth, it's better to resize them before uploading them to online photo sharing sites like Picasa or Flickr. Here's how i do it in linux..

Basically two commands are used here.
1. djpeg - decompress a JPEG file to an image file
2. cjpeg - compress an image file to a JPEG file

So to resize, i run this script on a folder containing the image files.

#!/bin/sh

mkdir resized
for i in *.JPG
do
echo 'Resizing image..' $i
djpeg -scale 1/2 $i | cjpeg > resized/$i
done

After script is done, a folder named 'resized' is created containing the resized images..

EDIT:
Both the program djpeg/cjpeg isn't installed by default, they're part of libjpeg-progs package. Under Ubuntu you can get it by

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-progs

(thanx subir dai for pointing this out)

2007-03-19T04:42:00.000+05:45

Is fate written on your palm?

Today we'd a surprise treat from Ashay. He had his birthday yesterday so we all were insisting on him to give us a treat. We weren't expecting, but he agreed!

We went to Jazz-a-bell cafe after the FOSS Essentials. There Ashay revealed one of his talents. He can so elegantly read palm. Especially Kebina n Monika were eager to have their read (Why gals so badly wanna know their future is out of my mind..). Whatsoever, Ashay told a lot of things to Kebina n Monika (about themselves) through their palm.

Whatever happened there is quite irrelevant here, one question always hunts me - Is there anything like fate? What i strongly believe is that the lines in the palm don't determine the fate.. Instead it's the fate which determines the lines. And fate is something you can control. The more harder you work, the better will be your fate and better will be the lines on the palm.

Here're few lines from 'The Matrix' movie, i'm really influenced of..
(Conversation between Morpheus and Neo)

- Do you believe in fate?
- No
- Why?
- Because that's not the way i wanna control my life..

2007-03-18T23:34:00.000+05:45

FOSS Essentials Training - Second day

I'd meeting at some other place in the morning so couldn't reach MPP on time. When i reached there it was already time for lunch. As soon as i reached the hall, i got the food coupon! How embarassing..

But i was full so didn't go for lunch. Instead we jus stayed in the hall and started a movie on the projector. Yesterday we were talkin about movies and we'd also talked about 'The Matrix'. Prasanna had recommended another movie 'V for Vendetta' by the same director. This time he'd brought the DVD. Unfortunately, Ashay was first to grab it. My chance is tomorrow.

Well, we put the movie on, but obviously we didnt have time to watch the full movie, so we just turned it off and went for lunch. Lunch was better than yesterday. And one special thing to mention, this lunch is costing us a lot. We're using Yala Maya Kendra's hall, so we were compelled to order all the food from Dokaima Cafe. But this cafe is kinda 10 star'ed. The simple lunch we're providing to the trainees is costing us Rs. 300 per head! Way too expensive..

But lets not get concerned with food, what concerned me today was Roshendra dai's camera. At first i thought it was a SLR, but later on found out that it wasn't. But still, the camera was 8mp with 8x zoom and the photos were outstanding. Moreover, it looked more like SLR, i totally got stuck with it.. Shot everything that came infront of me..

The program continued. This time i also had a presentation on 'How to start blog'. But mine was scheduled at the last. So i took some time off to go to MPP office and had a look on my presentation. There wasn't anything i could add. My time was limited so the slides were more than enough..

From FOSS Essentials Training 2007

Back to the training hall. Shishir was giving presentation on LTSP. Prasanna's Drupal was next followed by Shankar's presentation on Wiki. Mine was at the end..

Finally the program was over. And the fun parts were just beginning - certificate distribution and photo session. It was real fun (especially the photo session)..

One more thing i need to mention. All the gals got 50% of their training fee waived, courtesy of BellaSAP. Wish guys also had such fortune..

Anyways, FOSS Essentials Training was a gr8 success. Hope the trainees also learned a lot.. The sad part is that i again have to go to MPP tomorrow to rearrange the computers.. ;)

From FOSS Essentials Training 2007

2007-03-17T13:27:00.000+05:45

FOSS Essentials Training - First day

Woke up at 5:30 in the morning and i'd already overslept. I had to reach MPP by 6:30 so i'd to rush. But when i reached there, i was the first. Other guys soon joined. Yesterday the training hall was occupied so we couldn't setup the computer. Now it was time to rush.

We'd quite a taskforce, so it didn't take much to manage the training area. The opening ceremony was scheduled for 9am. Everything was ready by then..

The program started with some speeches n all.. There were two Japanese guys from CICC. I really had problem understanding their english. Then there was a funny speech by Kamal Mani Dixit (the day before there was a disastrous typo on his name on the schedule sheet but was fixed immediately!!!). Similarly there were speeches from NITC Director Subarna Shakya and CAN President Biplab Man Singh too..

After the training started, we (volunteers) stayed in the hall for a while. The first presentation was by our very own Subir dai about FOSS. It was followed by Hempal sir's presentation on licensing issues. I was really overwhelmed by the number of licenses available. There was a slide where he'd put the logo of all the licenses available. The whole screen was cluttered by the logo. So many licenses, you need to be a lawyer to understand 'em all.. But i love GPL, it's widely used, simple and has full FOSS spirit too..

Lunch break and the training continued with Linux installation. We all volunteers were to assist the trainees so that they wont wipe out the existing data in the computers. I had the responsibility of total four computers in first and second row. There was this didi in the first row named Sushmita whom i thought had seen somewhere else before. Later on we found out that both of us know a same person..

Linux installation was a breeze. But in one of the computer, CDROM wasn't working properly so we had to abandon the installation.

The next session was basic linux commands, so we all volunteers got out for some chit chats. Yesterday Ankur, Prasanna, myself and other guys were planning to have a program on 'how to write code on Open Standards'. So we sat down to talk on it. My plan was to organize a one week long session with one hour each day. Later on we also discussed on how to work on understanding others' code as this is the first step to work on open source collaborations. It was decided we'll take next one week to design the program and the actual program need not be continuously one whole week.

We also talked on starting a project 'JotPad'. Basically this project will be used for OLPC laptop. This would be Nepali Notepad with handwriting recognition. Some kinda ambitious project, but we all are excited and
interested to work.

Besides there were talks on various topics like Google Summer of Code, OLPC and sometimes even on movies. Ujwal is still tryin to make some pace on his project Neprogra. His concept is awesome. Actually he is trying to make an universal microcontroller programmer, with all controllings from computer. I think i'm getting his idea but donno why electonics projects dont perk me much these days..

Finally OLPC laptop, there was a presentation on it by Ankur and Himali dai. This little laptop is really amusing.. The thing that most shocks me is the resolution of the screen. In such a small size, they've managed to squeeze a resolution of 1200x900 pixels. Moreover, it also works with sun's light. These days i'm really getting interested to work on the development stuffs of this 'sano sathi'.

In overall, the day's program was great. Although i didn't spend most of my time inside the training hall, i suppose the program was great from Geshan's blog. Tomorrow we again have the second day of the training. Lets see how it'll be tomorrow. Tomorrow i also have presentation on 'How to start a blog'.