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.
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.
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.
Read More
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.
Tuesday 04 May 2010 at 6:04 pm
As you must have noticed, the interface of the blog has changed. I just am in the middle of migrating to PivotX.
I started blogging around 5 yrs back. Having had my domain, I wanted to have my own blogging software. Most of the blogging tools had dependency on databases and stuff where as I was looking for something very simple while at the same time easy to use, feel and administer.
Pivot was my decision then. And it was the right one. Today, migration to PivotX was not that very difficult. All my blog posts were easily migrated to the new PivotX tool.
One of my pre-req was to have my blogging software _not_ use a db. It should provide a flat file interface. Pivot[X] was and is the same way today. It still supports flat file databases without compromising on any of the features.
Thank you to the Pivot[X] team from an old time user.
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.
Thursday 06 August 2009 at 3:06 pm
Given the recent switch to a stronger key by everyone, here's mine.
The old key that I'll still keep using till I get the new key signed by a good amount of people.
pub 1024D/04F130BC 2003-08-18
Key fingerprint = CF0F EDEF 1052 83D2 62A4 0549 E118 62EA 04F1 30BC
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) <rsarraf@netapp.com>
uid [jpeg image of size 52128]
sub 1024g/A876BF8F 2003-08-18
sub 4096R/5D93A273 2009-04-25
sub 4096R/7FBB6077 2009-04-25
And here's the new key, that's been duly signed with the above old key.
pub 4096R/F00A2BE6 2009-08-06
Key fingerprint = 43DE F582 F9E6 7111 CE00 8917 F2F1 1C23 F00A 2BE6
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rsarraf@netapp.com>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>
uid [jpeg image of size 52128]
sub 4096R/0B488290 2009-08-06
Wednesday 04 March 2009 at 5:25 pm
Backups
Most of the users using computers have a very high dependency on it. Day-by-Day, our data is getting digitized. Everything is getting into electronic formats (Movies/Pictures/Music et cetera). If you are one, you know how important it is to have a backup. :-)
Lately, I haven't been using Microsoft Windows on a daily basis. So I'll comment on Linux here.
The definition of Backup can be different. People like backing-up only the Important data. The problem is that the term Important is very volatile. What is important to X is not necessarily important to Y.
For my backup solutions, in the past, I've relied on a KDE Backup tool, Keep. It internally uses rdiff-backup. It was good. It allowed incremental backups. There were some hiccups here and there but overall it was pretty good. But it was very difficult to tell the application about What all it should backup. And then, it needed to do a diff verification for every file that was a candidate.
Restoration from rdiff-backup was not always great. Especially the incremental backups. If something was messed up, it was tough to recover. For example, assume that the backup was in progress. And you needed to rush for home immediately aborting your backup. Keep wouldn't play good there.
Then came LVM. I've used LVM for years but never really looked at it as a backup option. To start with, I'd say, LVM is the Best Backup Tool for my needs. I described Important above. For me, Important is my HOME dir, my /var/tmp/kdecache-rrs dir, and my /tmp/kde-rrs dir. Apart from that, my /etc/ dir, my /usr/loca/ dir. And many more that I can't recollect. If there was one simple tool to backup all without worrying of Permission, Security Labels et cetera, that'd be LVM.
And LVM allows Online Backups. So I can have my / volume online and still go ahead with the backup while I'm working.
And depending on I want, I can do a File or a Block based backup.
Recovery
So we know how important our data has become for us, depending on how dependent you are on computers for your day-to-day life. I hate thinking about it but increasing dependency on computers gets me worried about security. Yeah!! You'd say Linux is more secure. (Wouldn't want to discuss in that direction)
I really like the SELinux Security Features. Most of the people (including Enterprise Customers) I know, disable SELinux on their machines. Currently SELinux doesn't see a widespread integration into the entire Application Stack. Thus apps just fail as SELinux restricts their access.
On my Debian Box, SELinux is miles away from the kind of integration packages have through apt. That sometimes makes me run to Red Hat based distributions to see what their state is, on SELinux.
So yesterday, I wiped off my Debian setup and installed Fedora. Used it for a couple of hours and decided to go back to Debian again (More of a personal taste).
That's what I do once in a year. :-)
The thing I have the most, is to lose data. Data being - My Settings and other stuff I mentioned above.
So to recover Debian was just a couple of hours. Just had to do a Block Restoration of the Block Backed ROOT LV to the new LV. And then, a minor grub and kenrel installation. And voila, everything was back just as it was yesterday.
Nothing much to say. Thank you Alasdair and Team Device Mapper @ Red Hat
Thursday 19 February 2009 at 2:51 pm
So there was a recent thread on the Destop Architect's forum, where Dan Kegel discussed the idea of silent upgrades (for Security, at least).
I for one, am not very fond of the idea. Updates/Upgrades (Security or Features) are something which should be done with some Human Intervention. But still it is not an idea to be completely ruled out. Free Software is about choice. There definitely are use cases where Silent Updates look a good choice. With a carefully crafted policy, this could really help achieve the ultimate goal that Dan was looking after. Closing down vulnerabilities asap.
One of the concerns I had was that a mere upgrade is not what can protect vulnerabilites. Standard Package Managers will do the job of updating the vulnerable libraries with the newer patched ones. But they don't come into effect untill re-loaded. Take the browser as an example. It is vulnerable. You silently got it updated by your distro's package manager. But still it is vulnerable. For the patches to be effective, the browser needs a re-start.
In Debian, you could attain Silent Upgrades with some settings defined in apt.
apt ships a /etc/cron.daily/apt script.
So with the following in place:
APT {
Get {
Assume-Yes "true"; Upgrade "true";
}
}
So, with the above settings in place, one can achieve Silent Updates. This ofcourse comes with an assumption that you are not on a Rolling Release of Debian.
But my focus was about getting those patched libraries/binaries effective. So here's the cooled feature of Debian, which has been there for years. apt/dpkg allows you the debconf interface. And there you can set the priority of messages/questions that you'd like to see. So assume that your remote machine, that you access through ssh, has a sshd vulnerability:
Debian updates the sshd package
It'll ask you (Depending of debconf priority), whether it should restart the sshd daemon
And thus you get a patched sshd package, installed, with the patch effective.
I haven't tried but I believe, if you don't install debconf, dpkg/apt will go with the default action that is defined in the package by itself.
So with all this in place, Debian has a very nice approach to package management. I haven't come across a similar interface in any other non-Debian derived distribution.
