Friday 03 December 2010 at 12:45 pm
It was unfortunate when Sony decided to pull out the Other OS support from PS3. One of the reasons of convincing myself to buy it was this feature. With that feature gone, the PS3 stood as nothing much but mostly a media center and an occasional game box.
But with the Move, I think they have compensated it. It is a greatly engineered product with very good accuracy. It has been a week and I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I liked the packaging too. One single compilation of Sports Center contains like 5 games in it. Just the Table Tennis alone is worth it. But there are more that I need to try.
Another surprising factor was pricing. United States pricing for the starter pack is expensive than at what I got here. This was something I didn't expect at all.
Thank you Sony for creating a good product.
Monday 08 November 2010 at 06:55 am
Hello World.
I am very pleased to announce apt-offline, version 1.0.
This release adds a Graphical User Interace to apt-offline.
Big thanks to Abhishek Mishra and Manish Sinha who did all the development work to make this GUI happen.
Help: I was wondering if there is a logo for APT that I could use in the big blank space on the main window.
Apart from the GUI, there are a bunch of bug fixes in this release (which have already been made available for the Squeeze release also).
Read More
Sunday 07 November 2010 at 09:46 am
My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.
With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.
I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it.
Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:
Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information.
Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove.
And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well.
So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.
Thursday 08 July 2010 at 2:08 pm
The latest kernel upload (2.6.32-16) brings goodies to SystemTap in Debian. This version has added support for kprobes, on which systemtap has a major dependency, for many of its features.
Most of the systemtap instrumentation should work now and all of this will be part of the Squeeze release. Instrumenting the kernel modules still needs some work (DBTS: #555549) but can be done.
Monday 10 May 2010 at 11:50 pm
Just uploaded tomoyo-tools and is waiting in the NEW queue.
Thanks to Moritz Muehlenhoff, tomoyo kernel support should be available in Debian with kernel 2.6.32-13 and above.
What is Tomoyo ?
Description: Lightweight and easy-use Mandatory Access Control for Linux
TOMOYO Linux is Lightweight and Usable Mandatory Access Control with
- "automatic policy configuring" feature by "LEARNING mode"
- administrators friendly policy language
- no need libselinux nor userland program modifications
.
TOMOYO Linux consists of patches to Linux kernel and administrative
utilities, and this package contains its audit daemon and tools.
Description: Lightweight and easy-use Mandatory Access Control for Linux
TOMOYO Linux is Lightweight and Usable Mandatory Access Control with
- "automatic policy configuring" feature by "LEARNING mode"
- administrators friendly policy language
- no need libselinux nor userland program modifications .
TOMOYO Linux consists of patches to Linux kernel and administrative utilities, and this package contains its audit daemon and tools.
Monday 10 May 2010 at 11:46 pm
I just uploaded apt-offline version 0.9.8 to sid. Hopefully this is the one that would be part of squeeze. For those who still arent aware of apt-offline, it is an Offline Package Manager for apt.
I wrote a small howto that can give more details about it.
Wednesday 05 May 2010 at 03:02 am
Finally, I am proud to be officially part of one of the most successful and well organized Free/Open project, the Debian project.
I would like to thank everyone who have worked with me. I would also like to thank my Advocate Giridhar and my AM Pablo. It was and is really awesome working with you guys.
Wednesday 30 December 2009 at 10:10 pm
It is holiday time and so finally time to installing Debian onto the Sony PS3 box. The installation was smooth as most of the stuff is already documented. The Debian Installer has all the support needed, to install onto the Sony PS3. As of now the only thing not working perfectly is the boot loader. It seems to be taking default is the kernel that was booted last. Even if I change the default in /etc/kboot.conf, it still boots into the kernel that was booted last time.
Wednesday 14 October 2009 at 12:15 pm
It all started long back when I worked for a giant computer manufacturing company. Certain IT policies led fo the need for an Offline APT Package Manager
While I got it working for a long time, I didn't have the aggression to polish and push it for general usage. Thanks to my friend appaji, apt-offline (a.k.a pypt-offilne) is now part of Debian.
Saturday 04 April 2009 at 02:41 am
Once upon a time CPU power was low. In those days, what we have today, was termed to be Super Computers.
Thanks to tough competition and great engineering, we now have CPU in the range of Gigahertz and multiple cores. But on Destkops/Laptops, do we really have applications that utilize the ability of these processors ?
So I thought about making these powerful CPUs to do some work.
There are different views about Backups. My preference has always been that my backup should be an identical image of my entire OS. That'd include the cache, the packages installed, my personal data, my mail spool et cetera. Given the requirements, my preferred choice of Backups has been LVM Snapshots.
And now to add to that is this
rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso | bzip2 -v > /tmp/bzip.test
(stdin): 965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 291.708 s, 1.7 MB/s
1.058:1, 7.559 bits/byte, 5.51% saved, 494178304 in, 466933711 out.
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.test
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
446M /tmp/bzip.test
rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=/tmp/bzip.test | bunzip2 -dc | dd of=/tmp/bzip.uncompress
911979+1 records in
911979+1 records out
466933711 bytes (467 MB) copied, 135.861 s, 3.4 MB/s
965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 136.115 s, 3.6 MB/s
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.uncompress
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
472M /tmp/bzip.uncompress
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum
md5sum md5sum.textutils
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum /tmp/bzip.uncompress
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 /tmp/bzip.uncompress
Now, the thing I need to verify is is wether D-I ships bzip2 utils on the CD.
