Website Move
Saturday 29 January 2011 at 4:02 pm
I am in the middle of moving my website to a new CMS.
Most data is migrated. Big pending items are organization and beautification. Will appreciate if visitors put comments there instead.
One week with the move
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.
apt-offline - 1.0
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 MorePomfret and Sardine
Sunday 07 November 2010 at 11:05 am
A noob's fresh attempt at Pomfret and Sardine
Icedove
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
- Organization
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.
Samsung Galaxy S and Samsung Kies
Thursday 21 October 2010 at 02:57 am
Well most must be knowing by now that Samsung is rolling out the Android 2.2 FROYO update in phases. And it would be available through Kies.
There have been numerous reports of Kies not detecting the Samsung Galaxy S phone.I think I have a pattern and know what has been causing the trouble.
Samsung Kies, by default, is set to auto-start and reside in the System Tray. The Kies application auto-detects the phone when plugged-in and starts up the applications. I guess this is where the problem lies.
In Windows (at least on my XP), when a PnP device is connected, Windows:
- Detects the device
- Loads driver and initiazlies the device
- Executes appropriate action related to the device (Like open a folder if it is a flash stick)
The phones, when connected, are also detected by Windows as storage devices. So, if we can make Windows have 1st access to the Samsung Galaxy S phone upon connect, it can follow the above steps and detect the device.
This is where the catch is. On typical installations of Kies, it is already running. So as soon as the phone gets plugged in, Kies tries to access the phone first. I have no idea how bloated Kies is. Does it also hinder the driver initialization of the phone ? From the looks of when Kies is running and phone is plugged, yes.
So, simple steps to get your Samsung Galaxy S detected on Kies
- Kill Kies
- No Kies instance in System Tray
- Connect Phone and select "Samsung Kies"
- Let Windows detect the phone and initialize the device
- Let Windows pop-up an action Window
- After all this is done, now start Kies.
Leave a comment on the blog is this works for you.
Old GPG key finally revoked
Thursday 02 September 2010 at 8:34 pm
Just revoked my old GPG key as I do not use it anymore.
pub 1024D/04F130BC 2003-08-18 *** KEY REVOKED *** [not verified] Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com> Ritesh Raj Sarraf (Ricky) <rrs@researchut.com> Ritesh Raj Sarraf <ritesh@cyberspace.com.np> Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@fastmail.fm> Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs_rhwlist@softhome.net> Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) <rsarraf@netapp.com> Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net> [user attribute packet] [user attribute packet]
The Automatic Equalizer for Android
Wednesday 01 September 2010 at 12:13 am
When I wrote the autoEqualizer plug-in for the Amarok (1.x) media player, to the best of my knowledge, there weren't any media players with this feature nor were there any plug-ins.
Recently, I came to know that the Samsung Galaxy S's media player looks to be having the Automatic Equalizer functionality. Not sure if this player is specific to Samsung Galaxy S or the Android Platform in general.
SystemTap in Debian
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.
Fuck you Sony!
Sunday 06 June 2010 at 01:38 am
First you go unethical by forcing users (stating security concerns) to upgrade to a newer firmware. And then, you don't even do a good QA on the firmware you release. It clearly looks you were in a hurry to strip off the "Other OS" feature.
I lost all my gameplay in the firmware upgrade.
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