Planet FLOSS India

Sarath Lakshman: Wireless LTSP

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:44:48 +0000

It is miniproject time for every Sixth semester B Tech students. I would like to update about my miniproject.
I am implementing a Wireless Linux Terminal Server project, Which is an extension to LTSP project.

Basically LTSP as quoted from wikipedia “Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source add-on package for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client (also known as an X terminal) handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.”

LTSP facilities to use a powerful machine shared by many users from different terminals or thin clients. Thin client machines actually don’t do any processing rather than setting up a minimal system to run an X server. Basic principle of an LTSP system are as follows.

There will be a server machine which is having considerable ram, processing power and attached to a network. The client machines are low end machine with few megabytes of ram, low processing power and attached to the same network over LAN through ethernet card. Ethernet cards come with a special chip socket. We can actually flash a chip / ROM containing a minimal OS. We flash a minimal OS in it and call it PXE ( Preboot Execution Environment).
This ROM will setup a Linux kernel and an initial ramdisk atmost of 10MB. Thus the minimal OS will boot and detect the required devices, like ethernet card. The it loads nfs kernel module and establishes network connection through DHCP and remote root filesystem is mounted via NFS as read only. It places symbolic links to the core parts of root filesystem structure like /bin , /sbin, /lib, /usr and other directories are created in the ram and copies from the readonly directory. The system switches the root to the new root filesystem, sets up a minimal system that can run X. Now it remote login to the server machine using XDMCP.

I am implementing a similar version of LTSP with wireless support. The limitation of Wireless card is that it does not have a facility like PXE to boot the minimal OS. So we have to look at some other ways to boot the minimal OS. So I decided to use either a CDRom or USB pendrive to make an equivalent setup like PXE. I am basing Pardus 2009 for my project though Pardus 2009.1 has recently released.

I have been hacking around Linux distros over 4-5 years. My first tryst with hacking a distro was with Knoppix in 2005.
My first task was to hack around the Pardus initial ramdisk scripts. Basically to boot a Linux OS, we need Linux kernel and a filesystem to support it. We use a bootloader like GRUB, Lilo, Syslinux. GRUB is the most advanced one among them now. I will be using syslinux as my client bootloader since we need something very light weight.

A custom compiled kernel or native Pardus 2009 kernel ( 2.6.30-123), an initrd file to act as base filesystem for the WLTSP client. My aim is to implement wireless support and reinventing LTSP with Pardus. I was more enthusiastic to see how it would work such that a client boots from a 10MB ROM and runs a full fledged OS. I wrote a small script to decompress and compress the initrd.img file.

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$1" == "extract" ];
then
	mkdir fsroot;
	cp initrd.img fsroot/
	cd fsroot
	mv initrd.img initrd.gz
	gunzip initrd.gz
	cpio -i < initrd
	rm initrd ;

elif [ "$1" == "bake" ];
then
	cd fsroot;
	find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > ../initrd.cpio
	cd ..
	gzip -c initrd.cpio > initrd.img
	rm initrd.cpio
	rm -rf fsroot
fi

I customized the init script to add few more features, I cut off some of the unnecessary things from the script. Basically an initrd.img file consists of a Busybox filesystem. Busybox is a commonly used initial ramdisk base. There are a lot of interesting things about Busybox. Busybox looks a small real Root filesystem as most GNU/Linux operating systems has. Firing an ls inside initrd would look like this.

slynux@slynux-laptop:~/miniproject/initrd_bake/fsroot$ ls
bin  bootsplash  dev  etc  init  lib  newroot  proc  sbin  sys

/bin and /sbin contain lots of binaries. There are many common utilities that comes along it including ifconfi, grep, sed, awk etc. I thought they are similar to real elf files, like they are individual binaries. Interestingly, in Busybox there is only one elf file. All other binaries are hardlinked to the same It actually checks for argv[0] and finds its name and does its function. That is, suppose if i rename /bin/ls to /bin/ifconfig. It will work as ifconfig rather than showing ls ouput. It is done to keep the system really small. You can also put your own binaries to the busybox environment. But it should be noted that dynamically linked binaries won’t work. You have to compile as static. For that, use -static option for gcc while compiling.

The initrd that came with pardus had no wireless extensions since no kernel modules required to fire up the drivers were present. I looked to to /lib/modules/2.6.30-123 and went through .ko files, modprobe.dep, modprobe.alias. I went to my Pardus 2009 installation, looked into lsmod and figured out some of the required modules and their dependencies. I hacked the initrd again and added the dependencies, required kernel modules. I booted from the minimal system I had. I am using intel wireless card, so I tried to load manually modprobe iwl3945. It worked fine, but no wlan0 interface comes up. I looked into dmesg and found some errors related to crypt auth etc. I troubled me a little to figure out what was happening around. Finally I understood that some more kernel modules are required to make it work. The culprit were “arc4 and ecb”. I added those modules. The wlan0 interface came up. Next task was to port some of the wireless utilities to busybox environment. I decided to use klcc, which klibc compiler to make it small and simple. I tried to port iwconfig first. I failed to do it since it required lots of changes to make it suit for klibc. After trying out for some days, i left it and went through new set of wireless utils called iw. After few tweaks with Makefile, I got iw compiled with klcc. But the problem is that I couldn’t make it static. I fired up ldd to check the dependencies and found that it is dependent on lib-nl (netlink lib). So in order to make it static, lib-nl is also made to be static as libnl.a. So went tweaking libnl Makefile also. Finally i got iw as static bin having huge size around 1MB. It was the first time I was encountering with iw. A funny thing happened, I found iw being very experimental so it was not working as I expected :P. I went back to iwconfig and tweaked the Makefiles to get a static version. I placed iwconfig and iwlist in /bin of initrd and executed a shell to check the wireless. Everything went fine. But when I used ifconfig to set IP or making the wireless interface up, it hangs up. I got clueless. After going through enough googleing and mailing lists, I learned that it was problem with firmware loading. Devices like wirless cards require firmware to work, when they are first used, the kernel will look for a specific location, /sys$DEVPATH/data for firmware data. It is to be made available at request time. Usually, it is handled by Linux hotplug daemon. Currently in most distros, udev is the device node creation and management backend. udev handles the firmware loading. In busybox environment, there is no udev available, so I have to manually do the firmware loading somehow. /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug can be manupulated to run a hotplug application so that, when the kernel does some requests it executes the file that is set as hotplug with some environment variables like $SUBSYSTEM,$ACTION,$FIRMWARE.

So I setup a script to handle the firmware loading to act as firmware loader.

if [ "$SUBSYSTEM/$ACTION" == "firmware/add" ]; then
    [ -e "/sys$DEVPATH/loading" ] || exit 1
    DIR=/lib/firmware
    [ -e "$DIR/$FIRMWARE" ] || exit 1
    echo 1 > /sys$DEVPATH/loading

    cat "$DIR/$FIRMWARE" > /sys$DEVPATH/data
    echo 0 > /sys$DEVPATH/loading
    exit 0
fi

passed it path to /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

# echo /bin/hotplug > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

Required fimware are placed in /lib/firmware. For iwl, its iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode.

Now everything went fine. iwconfig and ifconfig tuned well and wireless connectivity is up.

I setup another machine with Pardus-2009 to act as the server. Installed NFS server.

Next thing to be done is to get connectivity from client, mount an NFS share from the server. Build the newroot and switch to it. I needed to build a small and custom version of Pardus that just requires to run an X server. Pardusman, my GSOC-2009 project came for the help. Oh. I didn’t upload any videos of Pardusman yet ? I will do it in a couple of days. Using pardusman, I built a small iso having size around 130 MB. I extracted the pardus.img squashfs and exported via NFS share. The client could now mount the share using mount -o nfs, nolock, ro 192.168.1.100:/opt/pardusroot /newroot/mnt/client. Now some of the required directories to be writable are copied from the ro filesystem. The init script is setup to handle all things. I added a little configuration parser so that init script will read a .conf file and perform the actions like wifi ip, nfs server etc.

After a couple of days of effort i could setup the minimal system with X server support. I used XDMCP to remote login. So the remote login worked pretty well. Now the client can login to a beatiful KDE 4 desktop

It wasn’t that slow as I expected through wifi. It was working considerably well. Now it does everything from the server. Now as the final task, I need to forward the sound and device discovery. Since it logs into the server, once you play some music, it plays it at server. No sound comes out of client. Similarly devices plugged in the client are not shown, it shows the storage devices from the server only. Pulse audio came to help for sound forwarding. Pulse server is an awesome sound server that can be used to reroute sound. I also added pulseaudio server to the base pardus.img. Pulseaudio is very advanced so that it can run in session mode and system wide mode. We need system wide. Enough configuration tweaks are to be done in /etc/pulseaudio/system.pa to allow the tcp via authentication over a network. In the server side, /etc/X11/ a script is added to setup the PULSE_SERVER env variable to IP address from $DISPLAY. Now the X will be started by passing the environment variable PULSE_SERVER=client_ip:port. Hence sound will be rerouted.

Next and final thing to be done was forwarding devices ~/Drives directory is created in user home directories. lbuscd and ltspfs came to help. ltspfs is a fuse extension like sshfs which and remotely mount a filesystem. lbuscd can handle a pseudo fstab so that it can listen and mount,umount devices as it comes. lbuscd is a daemon that listens to /tmp/lbus.fifo, which is a first in first out file. A udev rule is setup such that once devices like [sh]d[a-z] or [sh]d[a-z][0-9] appears their dev path is notified to another script so that it can update the fifo. The lbusd which listens to it handles the mounting and umounting. ltspfs updates the availability of devices in ~/Drives and synchronises the changes.

Finally the 11MB Client is ready it boots to a full fledged KDE 4 powered desktop in a couple of minutes. I check out the free -m and found that it is taking atmost 150 MB ram usage for caching all the remote readonly filesystem.

Right now I am tweaking it more to make it lightweight. Probably using desktop like XFCE4 will scale down the memory usage to very minimal level. KDE is a heavy desktop environment.

I will push the WLTSP code to github soon.

Happy Hacking.

Kushal Das: Trying out the upcoming version of lekhonee-gnome

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:51:20 +0000

Testing the upcoming version of lekhonee-gnome frontend.

Status:

One can write post in the direct view mode
Still one can edit the html by clicking the view source button
Spell checking is only working while working with raw HTML source
Supposed to work properly with any unicode string like কুশল দাস

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8.1

Sankar P: Forking Evolution ?

noreply@blogger.com (Sankar) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:12:47 +0000

Someone, who probably has no idea of what it takes to maintain a large codebase, suggested that Canonical/Ubuntu should fork Evolution. He also sensed a non-existing Microsoft conspiracy. These days we seem to hear more about conspiracies by evil corporations than about technology/user-needs ;-)

Interestingly, it has generated some replies from my engineering inspirations - NotZed and Fejj. Fejj's comments in the original post here. The reply blog post of NotZed, in his typical to-the-point-style here. (There is a section about India as well, which I found interesting to read)

For Enterprise Desktop users on Windows, Outlook is the single-most indispensable and attractive software, that slows/stops people from migrating to Linux. The reason why it has so many passionate users, is because MSFT invests a lot of people for this product development/QA. For Evolution to seamlessly replace Outlook, what it needs is not-a-fork but more-resources (people not resources like memory ;-)).

A saner and practically more useful suggestion, to Canonical, would have been, to sponsor for few programmers to work for Evolution; Just like how RedHat has increased their contribution to Evolution, in the last two years or so. Copyright assignment is a stop-energy. To make it is easier to contribute to Evolution, it is LGPL, for a while now.

There are people on Canonical who are far more business-aware than me, who will just laugh and ignore at this fork-suggestion. But this post and the replies rekindled some old memories and thus this post.

On an unrelated note, I believe IMAP4 has outlived its time. I wish to see something on the lines of reMAP to gain popularity and interest. A new, open protocol that is REST-driven, conversation-based, http-cacheable/shareable, internal-cloud-host-able etc.

Parthan: This Blog Is Not Dead

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:08:25 +0000

This blog is not dead, it’s just me who doesn’t post.

I still get an occasional thanks for a very old post and am happy that I could help someone looking desperately for an answer, like I once did.

Life has changed a bit but priorities have changed a lot, what I found curious then have become the way-it-is now and hence my attention have turned towards other things, especially those which have come new into my life. Those who know get the clue, and those who don’t I just hope that I’ll be able to come back in sometime, may be not as much as I was but better than what am.

Till then, singing off…

Rajeesh K Nambiar: ExMan 0.4.5 released!

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 08:54:09 +0000

The new release of ExMan – 0.4.5 – is packed with shiny new features. Source code, RPMs and DEB for Ubuntu can be found at the sf.net project page.

Features added in this release are:

Support for Formula: I’ve been looking for a simple expression evaluator which could do the purpose. I looked into KOffice source code et al, and they were all complex because they were supposed to handle such complex things. I had a pretty old expression tree evaluator C++ class which I had written when I was in college, but it was literally building a tree of expression and then evaluates it. So I had this option if I couldn’t find anything simpler and cleaner. Thanks to the dvisvgm program which is also part of the LaTeX source code, found a simple expression evaluator implemented as a Recursive Descent Parser (which I guess is the most suitable one for arithmetic expressions), and the credit goes to my friend Deepak Lukose for pointing me to dvisvgm.
Note: The grammar rules of a recursive descent parser is pretty simple and straight forward, and it is appropriate for the expression evaluation.
expr: [+|-] term {+|- term} term: prim {*|/ prim} prim: [ident|number|(expr)]
Status Bar: Well, it took me a while to get this incorporated, because the main window of ExMan is not a QMainWindow class, but a QWidget. And there’s no option to drag and drop a QStatusBar in QtCreator. So, just edit the exmanwindow.ui file to add the tag <widget name=”statusBar”/> inside the ExManWindow QWidget. This will make the status bar to appear in the ui design section of QtCreator, and then it can be arranged appropriately.
What’s Next? I couldn’t find a way to make the QFrame to adjust its size automatically when the parent QWidget is resized, even though the sizePolicy is set to {Preferred, Preferred}.

Tagged: deb, hacking, linux, rpm

Ravishankar Shrivastava: एमएस हिन्दी ऑफ़िस में वर्तनी जाँच हेतु कस्टम हिन्दी शब्दकोश जोड़ें

raviratlami@gmail.com (Raviratlami) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:14:00 +0000

आपकी हिन्दी भले ही अच्छी खासी अच्छी हो, पर लंबे व बड़े पाठों की वर्तनी पर निगाह मारने के लिए व गलत वर्तनी को पकड़ने के लिए कम्प्यूटर आधारित वर्तनी जाँच का कोई सानी नहीं है.

एमएस ऑफ़िस हिन्दी 2003 / 2007 के संस्करणों में वैसे तो हिन्दी की वर्तनी जाँच अंतर्निर्मित है, मगर वर्तनी जाँच की सुविधा हेतु प्रयुक्त हिन्दी शब्दों का डाटाबेस बेहद ही अपूर्ण क़िस्म का है (क्या कोई कम्प्यूटर आधारित हिन्दी वर्तनी जाँचक कभी परिपूर्ण बन भी सकता है? और व्याकरण जाँच?), जिससे यह आपको वर्तनी जाँच के समय हिन्दी के सही शब्दों को भी लाल रेखा से रेखांकित कर गलत बताता है और कई मर्तबा अच्छे जानकारों को भी धोखा हो जाता है. कई मर्तबा गलत सुझाव देता है (चूंकि डाटाबेस में सही शब्द शामिल ही नहीं हैं).

ऐसे में अपना स्वयं का हिन्दी शब्दकोश डाटाबेस बनाना व उसे जोड़ना बहुत ही आवश्यक व महत्वपूर्ण हो जाता है. इसके लिए सही हिन्दी शब्दों पर दायाँ क्लिक कर शब्द कोश में जोड़ें का विकल्प चुना जा सकता है. आप देखेंगे कि कुछ दिनों के प्रयोग के उपरांत आपके पास एक अच्छा खासा डाटाबेस तैयार हो जाता है. तो यदि आपके पास ऐसा अच्छा डाटाबेस है तो आपसे आग्रह है कि उसे साझा करें. कुछ दिनों पहले तकनीकी हिन्दी समूह में यह बात मुखर हुई थी और सुधी जनों ने अपने कस्टम डिक्शनरी को साझा करने का वादा भी किया था.

इसी वादे के मुताबिक मैं अपना एमएस ऑफ़िस हिन्दी 2003-2007 में काम करने वाला हिन्दी का कस्टम डिक्शनरी अपलोड कर रहा हूं, और आपको इसे अपडेट करने का तरीका भी बताता हूं.
इस डिक्शनरी (custom.dic) को आप यहाँ - http://cid-60eace63e15a752a.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/CUSTOM.DIC से डाउनलोड करें. इसमें सामान्य प्रयोग के कोई 4 हजार शब्द हैं.
इसे नोटपैड में खोलें. देखें कि कहीं कोई गलत वर्तनी वाला शब्द तो इसमें शामिल नहीं कर लिया गया है, यदि ऐसा है तो उस शब्द को मिटा दें, या सुधार दें. अन्यथा यह आपके दस्तावेज़ के गलत शब्दों को भी ठीक बताने लगेगा.

अब आपको अपने एमएस ऑफ़िस हिन्दी के कस्टम डिक्शनरी में इस डिक्शनरी की सामग्री को जोड़ना होगा. इसके लिए आपके ऑपरेटिंग सिस्टम और ऑफ़िस के संस्करण के मुताबिक भिन्न डिरेक्ट्री में जाना हो सकता है. आमतौर पर कस्टम डिक्शनरी नाम की फ़ाइल (custom.dic) इन डिरेक्ट्री में मिल सकती है – (ध्यान दें – यूजर नाम यहाँ पर है – RaviRatlami, तो आपके कंप्यूटर के यूजर नाम भिन्न होंगे )

$\Users\RaviRatlami\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof
$\Documents and Settings\RaviRatlami\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof

आप इसके लिए विंडोज सर्च का सहारा भी ले सकते हैं. अब आप इसमें से किसी भी डिरेक्ट्री में उपलब्ध custom.dic फ़ाइल को खोलें व डाउनलोड की गई custom.dic की सामग्री को अपनी फ़ाइल के अंत में कॉपी पेस्ट कर दें, व इसे सहेज लें. ध्यान दें कि कॉपी पेस्ट करते समय पाठ एक लाइन में एक शब्द हो, अन्यथा मामला बिगड़ सकता है. इस फ़ाइल को एमएस वर्ड अपने अगले प्रयोग के समय स्वयं ही दुरुस्त कर लेगा, शब्दों को छांट लेगा व दोहरे शब्दों को निकाल बाहर करेगा. तो इस तरह से आपकी कस्टम डिक्शनरी बन गई है अब पावरफुल.

यदि आपके पास एमएस ऑफ़िस हिन्दी की बढ़िया, और बड़ी कस्टम डिक्शनरी है तो आपसे आग्रह है कि कहीं इसे अपलोड करें व हमसे साझा करें.
---
डिस्क्लेमर (अस्वीकरण) – उपर्युक्त कार्य करने से पहले अपने कार्य सहेज लें तथा अपने कार्य, डाटा व custom.dic का बैकअप बना लें.

अद्यतन: # फ़ाइल का नया संस्करण जिसमें कोई 1.2 लाख शब्द हैं, तकनीकी हिन्दी समूह में अपलोड किया गया है. इनमें निहित शब्दों में कुछ वर्तनी की गलतियाँ हो सकती हैं. फ़ाइल यहाँ से डाउनलोड करें -
http://groups.google.com/group/technical-hindi/web/CUSTOM.zip?hl=hi

Shrinivasan: Ubuntu 10.04 gets new Brand – logo

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:11:38 +0000

Ubuntu 10.04 is to to be released with a new brand – logo.

New Splash Screen

Read more about it here.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand

Shrinivasan: OpenOffice 3.2 Install Error and Solution

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:29:43 +0000

Got the OpenOffice 3.2 Deb packages for the DVD given by Linux For You Magazine.

As the OpenOffice is improving drastically in every release, I wanted to try the 3.2.
My ubuntu 9.10 has already OO 3.1

Uninstalled it from Synaptic.

Copied OOo_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-GB_deb.tar.gz from thew DVD.
Extracted it.

The folder has many deb files and a folder called desktop-integration

Installed all the openoffice deb files.
To create the menu entries, have to install openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb
inside the desktop-integration folder.

Oh My God. It throws error.

shrinivasan@shrinivasan-laptop:~/Desktop/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-GB.9483/DEBS/desktop-integration$ sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb
sudo: unable to resolve host shrinivasan-laptop
dpkg: regarding openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb containing openoffice.org-debian-menus:
openoffice.org-common conflicts with openoffice.org-debian-menus
openoffice.org-debian-menus (version 3.2-9472) is to be installed.
dpkg: error processing openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb (–install):
conflicting packages – not installing openoffice.org-debian-menus
Errors were encountered while processing:
openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb

Googled for this and found the solution.

Go back into Synaptic and remove all traces of Openoffice.org. You’re previous menu integration apparently remained and so probably conflicted with the new installation. Double check you’ve removed all traces of any installed openoffice.org base packages and try again.

Yes. Now, the package installed peacefully.

Opened the brand new OpenOffice 3.2.
hmmm. It looks good. The speed also improved.

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.2/ has the new features in 3.2
Reading this and testing it now.

Santhosh Thottingal: Predictive text entry with ibus

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:39:37 +0000

A few days back I came to know about this project :Text Prediction on GNOME based on GTK+ Input Method context. Basically it is an input method with text prediction feature.

I had a similar project idea during 2009 May and had done some amount of coding for that. The project was to have an IBUS input method which can do letter prediction as well as word prediction. The prediction is based on ngrams. Since it is based on ibus, it works on all desktop applications. You can see the screenshots of prototype from here, here and here

The core code was ready. It was written in python and use ibus-python. Unfortunately I did not get time to spend on this project for a long time and currently this project is not there in my top priorities. Since I see many people interested in auto-completion or predictive text entry, I uploaded the code here http://github.com/santhoshtr/ibus-sulekha . It is not in a working state as of now, but I would be happy if anybody interested in taking it forward. I wrote a small documentation on algorithm here, and feel free to contact me if any help is required.

Swaroop C H: How to get funding from Government of India

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:30:44 +0000

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply.

I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

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Debarshi Ray: Gnote 0.7.2 released

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:37:47 +0000

0.7.2 “Thursdays should not be free” – 2010/03/12

This is the third of the new 0.7.x series and has new features and minor bug-fixes.

Gnote is a C++ port of Tomboy. It is a desktop note-taking application, which is simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day.

New Features:

551097 – Search for phrases
584789 – Allow user to decide if links are updated when renaming a note

Fixes:

603925 – Fix boost.m4 to work with Autoconf >= 2.64
609864 – Fix implicit linking

Translations:

Arabic (ar)
Bengali India (bn_IN)
Chinese Simplified (zh_CN)
Czech (cs)
German (de)
Hindi (hi)
Lithuanian (lt)
Malayalam (ml)
Oriya (or)
Polish (pl)
Slovenian (sl)
Spanish (es)
Swedish (sv)
Telegu (te)
Thai (th)

Thanks:

Ankur Sinha
Aurimas Černius
Daniel Elstner

Download, Home Page, Support:

Tarique Sani: Pale-billed Flowerpecker

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:53:12 +0000

Pale-Billed Flowerpecker

This bird is rather plain looking, it not is endangered or rare but still getting a full frame photograph was a thrill!

Pale-billed flowerpecker (Dicaeum erythrorhynchos) is a tiny bird, 8 cm long, and is one of the smallest birds occurring in most parts of southern India and Sri Lanka. It is reportedly common in the southern India but in Nagpur we get to see them seldom and that too very high up in trees, so when last week in Pench I saw this individual a few feet away I was ecstatic.

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

R K V S Raman: Prayer of a contented mind

noreply@blogger.com (RKVS Raman) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:04:10 +0000

I do not know
what I shud wish for
life and You
have given all that I vied for

But as I stand with
my eyes closed and hands folded
let me convey to You the images
that have now and then occured and faded

Let my friends know me as a nice man
as somebody who picked up the phone when they gave a call
let people who think of me as foe find me more forgivable
as somebody who was just frank not harmful at all

Let my dear ones when they have to go far
not go in hatred
let them remember that before they left
"I will always love you" I had said

Let me be in a position where I can
resolve conflict and not create
put me in a condition where I can
receive anger and not retaliate

Let me earn more
than what I can spend
and let me spend less on me
and more on loved ones and friends

I welcome all the opportunities
that You provide me to serve
but do pace it well and even
cos that lets my interest preserve

I ask not for a long life
for frail body becomes dependent
I ask though for a quite and quick death
whenever it happens without pain and experiment

I wudn't have listed all these
but then You might doubt me
have a look when You will
or You can just let it be.

Kartik Mistry: Debconf 10

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:33:13 +0000

* Unfortunately…

(with apologies to GIMP)

Jaladhar Vyas: 7DRL Challenge - day 4-5

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:31:29 +0000

So I've got combat, I've got basic potions that restore health and I've got items such as weapons or shields which can affect your combat stats. Try as I might, I cannot get ncurses to give me a yellow background for some unfathomable reason. It just comes out brown no matter what. Ironically, in the next Konsole over, I have the alpine ncurses-based mua taunting me with a yellow background. I'll look in its source (yay open source!) to see how its done sometime but for now brown will have to do.

C++ is proving a joy to work with as always. Ok It's probably just me; I use it so infrequently, I keep having to relearn how to do multiple inheritance and abstract base classes each time. I am rather proud of figuring out how to access class members from a signal handler without having to look it up.

Now if I can quickly tie up some loose ends, I can spend the last two days maybe making the dungeon generation more roguelike.

Swaroop C H: isbn.net.in – One Place to find the best online price for a book in India

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:37:48 +0000

I had an itch – I wished there was a simple way of deciding whether to buy a book and where to buy a book. So I created http://isbn.net.in

The initial idea I had was to make a bookmarklet that will do everything – it will figure out the unique book number (the ISBN) from the current book page (whether a publisher’s site or any ecommerce site), and then search on all the potential Indian online book stores. I then realized that you can’t fetch from other domains because of the same-domain policy of AJAX (I could’ve used YQL or something like that, but I felt it was a slippery slope).

So I had to create a web backend that will do the searching on behalf of the bookmarklet and changed the idea to simply show a jQueryUI dialog showing the sorted list of prices.

Then I chanced upon http://isbn.nu and immediately said to myself: “I want that with Indian prices”. Since I was half-way there already, it took a few additional steps of buying a good domain name and configuring to use the simple URL format they used.

There was one major problem with the bookmarklet – on sites which already have jQuery, it used to conflict, and although jQuery itself can live with multiple versions side-by-side, I could never figure out if jQueryUI was loaded properly or not. I tried various things but had to give up in vain.

Finally, I decided the pop-up overlay thing was not important, and the bookmarklet can just simply take you to the correct isbn.net.in page directly.

So the “where” part of the question was answered.

I still had to answer the “whether” part of the question – that’s when a friend told me about Amazon ECS using which I was able to get the very useful Amazon ratings. Then I was able to get the image of the cover of the book and other details.

Then I came across bookseer.com which makes great book recommendations, so I included an automatic link to that on the book page.

So, after much ado, I present http://isbn.net.in to you. All the instructions are on the homepage.

If you have any feedback, please read the disclaimers on the homepage and the About page, and then send me feedback.

Implementation was a lot of fun – I used Ruby, Sinatra, HAML, Mechanize, amazon-ecs, jQuery, Blueprint CSS. It was the first time I had really used any of these.

Disclaimer: I created isbn.net.in because I needed a tool like this. This has nothing to do whatsoever with my employer. It is just a personal side-project.

Update: The site was down for a few minutes because I had to add caching to overcome the traffic

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Steven Fernandez: Peeking into the linux loader

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

This post is as much as a tip as a demonstration on how beautifully simple it is to "look-neath-the-hood" when working with linux. This is the reason why linux programmers are happy programmers. Anyways, on with the details.
If you have ever seen errors like ...


error while loading shared libraries: foo.so: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory

when you know that foo.so exists, or have see something like ....


java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no foobar in shared library path


java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /some/module/soandso.so: libstdc++.so.6: cannot handle TLS data

you may use the LD_DEBUG feature to zoom-in on the problem.

The linux loader (/lib/ld-<version>.so) looks at the environment variable "LD_DEBUG" to print out interesting debug information as it loads libraries and resolves symbols. What exactly is printed out depends on the value that the variable is set to. You may get the list of valid values by setting LD_DEBUG=help. For example:


$ LD_DEBUG=help ls
Valid options for the LD_DEBUG environment variable are:

libs        display library search paths
reloc       display relocation processing
files       display progress for input file
symbols     display symbol table processing
bindings    display information about symbol binding
versions    display version dependencies
all         all previous options combined
statistics  display relocation statistics
unused      determined unused DSOs
help        display this help message and exit

To direct the debugging output into a file instead of standard output
a filename can be specified using the LD_DEBUG_OUTPUT environment variable.

What you make of this info. and how much it helps depends on the specific problems you are facing but all in all this is a useful thing to know when you are facing ^library issues^. More detailed information about working/writing libraries on linux is available at the Program Library HOWTO

Steven Fernandez: Why I use the 'noatime' mount option.

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

Well, I'm back to posting. Hopefully, I shall continue this. The next few posts, I plan on jotting down all the little tweaks and configuration changes I make after every linux install that I do. The first of these is adding the mount option 'noatime'.

To understand this, you need to first understand what 'atime' means. Traditional unix filesystems keep track of three 'time' attributes for every file on the system. These are:

mtime - The modification time (The time the file was last modified, duh!)
atime - The access time (The time the file was last accessed)
ctime - The change time (The time the inode of the file was last changed)

These attributes (along with others) can be viewed using the command "stat <filename>". Among these three, having the system maintain the 'atime' attribute is by far the least useful.

Most applications that care about access times prefer to use the 'inotify' mechanism, instead of repeatedly polling the file. So, in other words, the system maintains a record that hardly anyone would look at. That, by itself, is not such a bad thing, however, if you consider the fact that the system has to write to the file's inode every time the file is accessed ! you'd agree that having the 'atime' record is not only useless but also quite expensive.

So, how do you stop the system from doing this ? Well, use the 'noatime' option:

Edit the file '/etc/fstab'
Add the option 'noatime', separated with a comma, to the fourth field of every disk based filesystem entry
Save the file and reboot (or remount all the filesystems corresponding to the modified entries (using the command: mount -o remount ))

Well, all that said, here's the article that inspired me to start this series of posts: Replacing atime with relatime

I always knew it made a difference, I just never did realize, nor care to measure how much of a difference ! Well. now I know, so do you. Thanks for reading.

Steven Fernandez: I <3 vim !

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

I've been a vim user for a long time. I've always liked vim, because the modal interface fits my brain and the keybindings, my wrists (which never really liked emacs).

Now, although I have used vim for a long time, I often tend to use a small subset of the power that this awesome editor offers.

I would like to say that this is because "what I know, is all that I need to know", but the simple truth is it's because I am too lazy to read the docs.

That said, I *do* sometimes feel the urge to become more productive, which leads me to invest time into really understanding my basic tools (vim, firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, windowmaker, aterm/xterm/rxvt).

Today, I decided it was going to be vim. Here's what I learned:

Since version 7.0, vim has a builtin spell checker (":help spell"; I was using the vimspell plugin all this while).
The '-x' option [1] ! Look it up !
vimgrep (":help vimgrep")

Since I was so impressed with what I learned today, I'm listing down some of the things that I do know about. Some of these, you might already know, and if you don't, I think you should.

Note that I'm not explaining any of these. This is more like a quick-n-dirty, see-and-do, reference. So, I'd suggest open up a decently large text file (something with more lines than your window size) and try out what's listed. If you like what you see, the vim doc is beautiful, just pull out the help topic mentioned to learn more.

Note also that most of these refer to 'command' mode, ie: You need to press 'Esc' before trying any of these out.

visual mode (":help visual") - Not spectacular, if you already know about it. If you don't, do a 'v' and move around the text, yank-n-paste, you'll get the idea.
visual-block (":help visual-block) - Now, this one, I've seen a lot of 'old' unix guys didn't know about (which is a bit strange). Anyways, do a 'Ctrl-v' and move a couple of characters left/right and then up/down, yank-n-paste, you'll get the idea .....neat huh ??
folding (":help fold"). In visual mode, select a few lines, do a 'zf'. To open, do a 'space' or 'zo' on the fold.
Editing an entire block - Using a visual-block, select a set of lines. Now, without pressing Esc, try some editing commands, like type in 'I' followed by #. Now, press Esc.

Inserting special characters in your search-and-replace patterns: An example is best for this one. Do this:


Create a file with the contents:
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>42</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>The answer is</BODY></HTML>
Do a ":1,$ s/></>Ctrl-v+Enter</g"

See what I mean ?

There is so much more, but now I am bored ...and I think at least for those who have not invested time in learning vim by reading the docs, at least some of this stuff would be new.

Maybe, I'll post about vim again later. Till then though, here's something that you could possibly use -- My vim files. Just untar, rename the contents correctly (ie: mv {dot_,.}virc && mv {dot_,.}vim) and copy them to you $HOME. The .vimrc is written from scratch and mostly well commented.

Thanks for reading.

[1] wtf !! ...and I've been breaking my head over getting an nice, easy to use and small tool for storing sensitive stuff (like account numbers, login/passwords, etc) and was left unsatisfied with all the fancy GUI tools and the CLI one's I'd have to install separately on each new system)

UPDATE: The default encryption algorithm used for the -x option is breakable. It is the same as that which Pkzip uses (and has documented). So, -x is probably not a good idea for ultra sensitive stuff, but good enough and convenient enough for short lived files which don't need high level of security. For proper encryption support in vim, I would recommend using Noah Spurrier's OpenSSL vim plugin. . (Now included in the vim files link above).

Steven Fernandez: Mozilla Ubiquity -- They weren't kidding when ...

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

I use firefox (who doesn't ?) and every once in a while, i look for extensions that might be useful, or may improve my browsing experience, or just be plain fun !.

However, this last time I did that, it was a completely different experience. I saw something which reminded me that firefox is not just any ol' browser. It is the browser.

The good folks at Mozilla are not kidding when they encourage you to "recalim the web", they aren't just advertising when they ask "Can a browser really make the Web better?" and they definitely are not being unrealistic lofty idealists when declare that "The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings."

Here is proof -- The Mozilla Ubiquity extension.

I do not want to even attempt describing this extension because I know, I'll fail miserably. Instead I urge you to watch this introduction.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I seriously think, things like this will affect the way people interact. It is not just about this particular extension, but what will follow when mash-ups like this become common place. We will take control and truly relaim our own personal web.

Mozilla is doing to the web, what linux did to Operating Systems ! What do you think ?

Steven Fernandez: So here I go ...

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

...just created yet another blog that I may soon abandon !

Well, the motivation for creating this one tho' is pretty strong though. I frequently stumble upon cool tech stuff or discover new hacks or learn new tricks to increase my productivity and each time I do, I feel like telling everybody about it ...so there - that's what this blog's for.

Furthermore, I also know this, while some people may be interested in some of the stuff I write here, nobody is interested in reading about my life (marvin has a better life than mine) or about my travels (zaphod's are more exciting) or my deep, interesting views on life, the universe and everything. If that last statement left you feeling confused and lost you might as well move along ...there's nothing to see here.

Steven Fernandez: On reading code efficiently

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

As someone who learned to program the non-traditional way (ie: by reading and hacking on already written code) rather than ground up (ie: by writing hello world and progressing from there on), I feel the ability to read code is often under-stated when people offer advice on good programming practices. Especially considering that any good programmer, in her entire programming career would end up reading more lines of code than writing !

I have thought a bit about this subject (and also observed good programmers read code). While there are many tools which can be used to efficiently read code, I'd like to share my thoughts on the methodology.

Good programmers read code the same way most of us read a newspaper

They'll look at the main entry and exit bits (the headlines) to get a 'feel' or overview of the nature of the application. This might also involve reading any design docs or UML diagrams or even badly drawn out bunch of boxes. The better that people are at looking and understanding the big picture, the less they have to look at to get it.
After that, they might jump into the bits that interest them (in our analogy -- the sports section, the comics or *shudder* page 3). So, coders interested in just using the API will start exploring the headers. Those interested in hacking on the code, will start looking at the source files that are possibly named according their area of interest (that's why naming and source file layout also is important while writing code). This is where cross-referencing tools help.
When looking at the code itself, for example, when tracing through a function, some bits are more or less taken at face value (as we do with phrases like 'from reliable sources' or 'an independent study') ...at least during the first reading. In other words, faced with a statement like this:
devices = probe_for_devices(args)
...good programmers would only dive-into the definition of probe_for_devices() after they have a general enough understanding of why doing that is necessary in the caller (unless of course, /that/ function was what they were interested in looking at all along)
Now, when the time comes to not just passively reading but /interacting/ with the code, good programmers would first look for tell-tales signs on making such interactions easy (ie: what kind of logging/debugging facilities does the code provide ? can sub-components be built and tested independently ? Are there any compile time options available to assist this effort ? Can we get an intern to figure all this stuff out[1] ...etc)

Doing all of the above of course is fun only if (again like natural written language), the quality of the code you are reading is good. Bad written code is also badly read code.

Now all that said, knowing how to use your tools well (ie: your editor, code cross-referencing tool, the man pages, API docs ..etc) improves the efficiency with which you read /immensely/. That's how good programmers are able to 'walk' through the source in the same manner as the system would during execution.

FWIW: My tools of choice are, vim, cscope and a decently fast internet connection

Thanks for reading. Your views and comments are welcome.

[1] That's where I usually came in :)

Steven Fernandez: Bash command line editing for lazy, vim users

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

Here's a list of shortcuts I use frequently to make my time on the bash command line prompt a bit more efficient. Some disclaimers ...

Although, I am a vim user who never quite attained the precise finger deftness demanded by emacs and yes, I do know about the vim command line editing mode for bash. However, I have realized that the vim mode is even more painful than most of the emacs-inspired (or rather readline specific) shortcuts listed here.
This is not a comprehensive list of shortcuts for bash. These are just the ones I find useful but have difficulty remembering sometimes due disuse (which causes muscle memory loss).
Some of these are not required if you are using a capable terminal (for example, if the terminal maps the Home and End keys correctly, those can be used instead of C-a and C-e respectively ... however, this is what causes the muscle memory loss mentioned earlier).

Note: C == Ctrl, M == Meta (or Alt)
Misc:

Tab for command and filename completion
C-l to clear the screen
Up and down arrow keys for browsing command history one at a time

Moving about:

C-a or "Home" to move to start of line- C-e or "End" to move to end of line
M-b to move a word backward
M-f to move a word forward

Deleting:

C-k to delete till the end of line
M-backspace or C-w to delete a word backwards
M-d to delete a word in place

Searching and inserting:

C-r begin searching backwards for matching string
C-M-y insert argument from last command here
M-. cycle through last arguments of previous commands

if ...
$ echo foo bar
$ echo xxx yyy
then
$ echo "M-." yields yyy, another "M-." yields bar

Major editing:

C-X C-E to edit the current command using $EDITOR

Well, that's about all I can remember right now ! Thanks for reading.

Steven Fernandez: keyword search in firefox

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

Firefox is a great browser (you already knew that, right ?). Firefox's nice keywords facility can be used for a neat search trick. IMHO, It is best used for a directed search engine that digs specific data (For example, a bugzilla search, imdb search, lxr search ..etc). To make use of this ...

Go to a site which offers a simple search facility (eg: imdb, lxr, your local bugzilla)
Place the cursor within the search box
Right click and select "Add a Keyword for this Search..."
Give your new search shortcut a name
Give your new search shortcut a short keyword (for example, I use bz for my bugzilla search, lxr for lxr)

You are done !!

To try out your new keyword search shortcut, open a new tab (Ctrl+T), place the cursor at the location bar (Ctrl+L), type out your keyword followed by the search term(s) (For example, assuming you added keyword "bz" for the search at bugzilla.mozilla.org, then, typing "bz 95849" in the location bar will show you this).

Steven Fernandez: vim as a syntax highlighting capable pager

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

Just thought I'd share what I learned sometime back.

Do you ever wish that you could "cat" a file and have it displayed on the terminal with syntax highlighting ? Well, "cat" is a tool for concatenating files. It does not know (or care) where it is cat-ing to (for that matter, it does not know or care, where it is cat-ing from either)

OTOH, Pagers (like 'more' or 'less') are tools to view files on the terminal. That said, vim also behaves somewhat like a pager when invoked using the command 'view'. However, this does not do syntax highlighting, nor does it take input from stdin (ie: executing "cat /some/file | view" does not do what you expect). So what do we do ?

Well, we use a little a vim trick:

Look for the file /usr/share/vim/vim<version>/macros/less.sh

create an alias for that script:
```
$ alias vless='/usr/share/vim/vim/macros/less.sh'
```
(you may also save the alias later in ~/.bashrc if you like the way it works)

now use vless as you would use less


$ vless foo.c
$ cat /some/file | some_filter | vless

Nice huh ?

Steven Fernandez: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03) on Fedora 8

noreply@blogger.com (lonetwin) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:11:33 +0000

Ok, I accept that I suck at updating a technical blog.

Anywhichways, here is a quick and dirty howto on configuring the "Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)"[1] PCI wireless card on Fedora 8 using ndiswrapper.

# make sure you have added the livna repository to your yum configuration
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

# install the ndiswrapper package
yum install ndiswrapper

# get the windoze drivers for the Marvell card
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/marvell/MRV8335NT.sys
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/marvell/MRV8335XP.sys
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/marvell/mrv8335.cat
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/marvell/mrv8335.inf

# Install the driver
ndiswrapper -i mrv8335.inf

# Make sure the driver is installed correctly
$ ndiswrapper -l
mrv8335 : driver installed
device (11AB:1FAA) present

# Create the configuration for modprobe
ndiswrapper -m

# Configure the card
$ system-config-network

beyond this, use your head.

Hope this helps someone out there. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

[1] This is what I am talking about:

$ lspci -v
....
05:04.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
Subsystem: Netgear WG311v3 802.11g Wireless PCI Adapter
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18
Memory at 50020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at 50010000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: ndiswrapper
....

Ankur Shrivastava: Weekend Project

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:52:34 +0000

In Dec 2009 at foss.in at the maemo stall i saw a guy control a small toy car through accelerometer on his N900, i thought of replicating that but it just remained in my mind, so last Saturday i finally decided to implement it and went straight to a toy store and bought a toy RF car, one hour of hacking and i was able to control the small car through by phone (Nokia E61i) here is the video of it working.

the concept is simple, i send commands through my phone over wifi to my laptop which controls the car remote, controlling a toy car remote is very easy with a Parallel port and few transistors but laptops don’t have parallel ports, so i used a micro-controller in between to sort that out, so now micro controller controls the car remote by acting on signals received over UART from laptop.
the working is Phone —(WiFi)—>Laptop —(USB/UART)—> Micro controller —(Relays)—> Car Remote —(RF)—> Toy Car
will post details with code sometime later

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: A web-calendar for events – does that sound nice ?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:43:32 +0000

For as long as I can remember I have found the LWN.net Community Calendar very useful. It would perhaps be nice to have a similar web-based calendar for Fedora events across the world. Currently, the events are tracked by this page. That is nice but doesn’t give the visual representation of a month full of events world-wide.

It would be nice to have a calendar that integrates with FAS and, allows someone to post the details of the event. Another group of folks, can take a look-see at the posting and approve it to be listed. The original poster could choose to be the event owner or, add someone who is the actual owner. Since Events etc fall under the ambit of FAmSCo, perhaps they might consider this stuff.

Gopal V: The Importance of Being Wrong

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:25:00 +0000

Don't trust me on this ... I've been wrong before.

The difference between good friends and bad shows itself when you're wrong - when you're wrong and you don't know it. Sure, misfortune is a true test, but it hardly comes around every day and I'm glad it doesn't. But try being wrong about something. And you'll notice a strange fact.

These days friendships are too shallow. We're too independent to really need them. No, I'm not decrying the current times from the chair of age. I'm talking about the way my life's taken. And I notice that I've stopped being wrong - there was no wrong way to live my life. For a while, I thought it was because I finally had life figured out.

And I was wrong. Wrong on both counts. And people have noticed. I've been insulted. Told off by people that I was an idiot. But I didn't care for insults. They've never been a way to make me comply with anything. People have tried shame on me for years and failed. I've rarely got anything to prove to anyone but me.

A friend would've told me why. Felt comfortable enough to sit me down and outline the flaws. Because I'm not my mistakes, I'm more. Friends have got stuff to salvage, the snipers from afar don't seem to. There's a world of a difference between "He's such an idiot!" and "Don't be an idiot". And I react very differently to both.

Like I said, I've been wrong before. And I see no reason to stop now.

Well, you know what to do. Also, bring popcorn.

--
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
-- Albert Camus

Ravishankar Shrivastava: महिला आरक्षण विधेयक पास नहीं करने के उम्दा # 10 कारण

raviratlami@gmail.com (Raviratlami) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:21:00 +0000

चहुँ और चिल्ल पों मची है कि महिला आरक्षण बिल पास होना चाहिए/नहीं होना चाहिए. आपके अपने टेक हो सकते हैं कि महिला आरक्षण बिल पास होना चाहिए या नहीं. मेरे विचार में महिला आरक्षण बिल किसी सूरत पास नहीं होना चाहिए. कदापि नहीं. शीर्ष # 10 कारण जानें कि क्यों –

1. महिला आरक्षण बिल पास हो गया तो शहाबुद्दीनों, पप्पू यादवों का क्या होगा और राजनीतिक पार्टियाँ चुनाव जीतने के लिए महिला-शहाबुद्दीनों, स्त्री-पप्पू यादवों को कहाँ से लाएँगे?

2. मंत्री/सांसद जो देश/राज्य को छोड़कर सिर्फ और सिर्फ अपने चुनाव क्षेत्र के लिए काम करते हैं, योजना बनाते हैं, बाकी दूसरे क्षेत्र की और आँख मूंद लेते हैं उनको अब दूसरे क्षेत्र की और भी जबरिया देखना होगा. क्योंकि क्या पता अगले चुनाव में उनका क्षेत्र महिला के लिए आरक्षित हो गया तो उन्हें कहीं और से लड़ना पड़ेगा. ये कहां की तुक और कहां का न्याय है. ये तो प्राकृतिक न्याय के खिलाफ है.

3. महिला आरक्षण बिल पास हो गया तो देश में राबड़ी और माया जैसे देवियों और वतियों का राज होने की संभावना प्रबल है – जिसके बारे में सोचकर रूह कांप जाती है.

4. देश के कुंवारे राहुलों को शादी करनी पड़ेगी – क्योंकि जब अगली बारी में उनके चुनाव क्षेत्र महिला के लिए आरक्षित घोषित कर दिए जाएँ, तो क्षेत्र हाथ से न निकले, घर ही में, पत्नी के पास रहे.

5. 33 प्रतिशत पुरुष सांसद चुनाव जीतने के बाद अपने क्षेत्र के लिए कोई काम ही नहीं करेंगे, क्योंकि उन्हें संभावना में ये दिखाई देता रहेगा कि अगली बारी में उनका क्षेत्र स्त्री के लिए आरक्षित हो जाएगा तो फिर फोकट में सिर फुटव्वल क्यों?

6. 50 प्रतिशत मामलों में महिला आरक्षण का कोई अर्थ इसलिए नहीं होगा क्योंकि इन संसदीय क्षेत्रों में एक बार पति चुनकर आएंगे तो अगली बार पत्नी. सांसद पति रहे या पत्नी क्या फर्क पड़ता है? कई मामलों में मां-बेटा, बेटी-बाप, बहू-ससुर का बढ़िया, उदाहरण योग्य कॉम्बीनेशन भी बनेगा.

7. महिला आरक्षण बिल के पारित हो जाने से भारतीय संसद की नित्य गिरती गरिमा (सांसदों के आपसी जूतम पैजार और आपराधिक पृष्ठभूमि वाले सांसदों की वजह से) में ठहराव व उलटे गरिमा में उत्थान की संभावना है जो भारतीय लोकतंत्र के लिहाज से कतई स्वास्थ्यवर्धक नहीं है. इसीलिए इस बिल को किसी सूरत पास नहीं होना चाहिए.

8. भारतीय संसद तो बेकार की लफ़्फ़ाजियों, थोथे भाषण, धरना प्रदर्शन, अकारण विरोध, जूतम-पैजार इत्यादि के लिए है. काम-धाम का वहाँ क्या लेना देना? 33 प्रतिशत स्त्रियों को अकारण ही इसमें झोंके जाने की साजिश मात्र है यह बिल.

9. सुखराम और मधु कोड़ा बनने के सपने पर अब तक पुरुषों का ही अधिकार था. महिलाओं को भी ऐसे सपने देखने की सुविधा प्रदान करने वाला है यह बिल. स्त्रियों को फंसाने की साजिश है यह बिल. ऐसे सड़ियल स्वप्न दिखाने वाले इस बिल का स्त्रियों को स्वयं पुरजोर विरोध करना चाहिए.

10. आपको क्या लगता है? आम स्त्री के लिए है यह बिल? दरअसल यह बिल खांटी, जमे हुए राजनीतिक नेताओं के मां-बहन-बेटी-बहू को (इनकम्बेंसी फैक्टर की वजह से अपनी हार से बचने के लिए,) अगले चुनावों में सांसद बनाने की राजनीतिक चाल है यह बिल!

आइए, जी जान से विरोध करें इस तथाकथित महिला आरक्षण बिल का.

VaibhaV: Dinner

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:47:50 +0000

Dinner

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

Originally posted at http://vsharma.net/616.

Nirbheek Chauhan: Random observations about Communication

noreply@blogger.com (nirbheek) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:41:08 +0000

So, this post is not really technical, but I'm posting it to the Gentoo planet anyway because it applies to the social part of Gentoo. I see a lot of people making the same mistakes that I once did, or saw people make while interacting socially within Gentoo. This post is not in response to someone in particular; more like in response to the "feeling" I get.

Communication Problems (technical): when communicating over inefficient media such as email or IRC, keep in mind that the other person has no way of knowing what you meant, or felt, when you said something. Due to this, it is easy to cause insult, and even easier to be misunderstood or misquoted. No one knows your mood when you type on the net.
Solution: Make ample usage of smileys; make it clear what you mean, in as few words as reasonable. When on the receiving end, give the other person the benefit of doubt. It's quite easy to misunderstand what someone said. When in doubt, re-read and re-interpret.

Communication Problems (social): I've personally found that the root cause of 110% of arguments that escalate is a severe and dire lack of proper and clear communication. People are just unable to express what they mean, what they want, and what they are thinking in clear, easy-to-understand terms. Part of the problem is that "clear, easy-to-understand terms" vary among people. The other part is that different people think in different ways, and English is usually not their native language.
Solution: To be able to communicate effectively with someone, you need to understand how they think first. This is obviously too much work to do with everyone you meet, but if you're going to be working with or around someone; take the time out to empathize with their world-view. If you want to convince someone of your opinion, put yourself in their shoes and see it through their eyes.

Communication Problems (length): This is one problem that seems to plague people a lot, and often they don't even know it. Writing 4 paragraphs when 1 would've sufficed is a bigger problem than just writing one cryptic word. A lot of analogies are coming to my mind right now to explain this, but I'm going to go with this: 'tl;dr'.
Solution: When you write something, keep in mind that time is a precious commodity, and by writing a long mail/response, you will waste their time if they choose to read it. And hence, most people will not read it. If you want them to read it; spend some of your time and make it easier to read. Make it short.

Communication Problems (rage): E-mails written and IRC conversations conducted in anger. You read an email, see someone make a commit, or just something they said on IRC; and you go into RAGE mode. It makes you furious. You don't understand how the guy can be so bloody stupid. Maybe it's the last frickin' straw. You flip off and start shouting. The other side may be oblivious to your distress; or worse, they flip off as well. When the dust settles, pandas and kittens make sad faces at your blood pressure and the decisions you made.
Solution I've been on both the rage-side and the rage-causing side, and I can tell you this: It doesn't help anyone. If you get angry at someone on the internet, stop. Stop and get off the computer. Come back later. If you cause someone to get angry, pause. Pause and figure out why. Think to yourself; maybe you're wrong, maybe they misunderstood you, maybe they had a bad day. But first off, calm the other guy down. Stop arguing, and take a walk. Come back later and try to reconcile your differences. Fact: 149% of arguments lead to burnout and heart disease.

Now, I don't expect people to keep all this in mind all the time. Hell, I'm writing this now, but I know I'll never be able to stick to this 100%. The point I'm trying to make is that You're Fallible. Everyone is. Just keep that in mind all the time, and just remember the above things vaguely (you can bookmark it for reference!). I'm sure we can all do better than we're doing right now.

Vidya (svaksha): gesellschaft

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:10:00 +0000

At the recently concluded pycon2010 in Atlanta, there were some discussions about diversity, women etc... I suppose, much of my energy would have been saved if I had published this mail earlier or even blogged about some individual sexist behaviors. Nah, its not fear, rather I try to avoid talking about evil creepy stuff on my blog which is personal. But during various discussions realized that many folks dont know what you experience on an individual level on *random-list in the floss community, unless you talk about it...its the first step.

Hi $PersonsName,

As i write this mail the words "Out the creeps publicly" uttered by a devel (who shall go nameless) comes to my mind and hence i'd prefer to not be anon and back my words under the pseudonym 'svaksha'. $PersonsName, do feel free to suitably trim my long train of thoughts and I wont be offended if it does'nt make it to your article as /self is too late in all probability -- my mental resources are wound up around a lexical parser atm.

Initially when i used to hear all the women speak about their experiences i took comfort in the fact that i am not alone in hoping for change. But i had not factored in the possibility that change is tougher when "clueless new idiots" follow in the steps of "sexist old timers". Over the years the attitudes towards diversity still remains sexist, especially within the Indian community where cronyism is normal.

My observations are largely India-centric salted with some experiences on international lists and sans a timeline ...

The usual personal mails asking for personal details under the guise of "i want to volunteer" or guised as a personal interview (since when did marital status become relevant to floss contribution?). Another peculiar one was a guy writing emails in different scripts despite my requests that i didnt understand them. It was when i requested a friend to translate them that i realised why -- personal questions in a non-english script meant fewer people would know he was asking personal questions.

Then there was this instance of a jerk trying to crack into my server when he became aware of my gender. I was happy with the anonymity --- Very very few folks (i trusted) knew my location and real name but that changed when I founded the Ubuntu-Women project, was termed a "militant feminist" (a pejorative term for Feminazi). This pejorative was echoed in the Indichix (LC-India) mailing lists in 2008 to avoid answering the question of 'controlling a woman's group by proxy' - cronyism and elitism is gender-neutral The personal attacks descended into personal life queries (hint:: the coffee, splenda thread) by one Indian male who subscribed to grrls-only mailing list by pretending to be a woman. Gah, so much for the "cultural_Indian" !!

Other experiences include an smtp header spoof of my mail id to send a sex-related email ; an indian devel in his interview wanted to be stuck in a lift with me even while he admits to never having met me. Another was the death threats from "mikeeeeusa" on DW which went off-list ~~ IIRC around 5 women were the initial targets but Clytie (an AU contributor) had threats sent to her teenage daughter too.

http://eaves.ca/2009/07/06/structurelessness-feminism-and-open/ has a point I could relate to viz.elites and cronyism -- both of which are true as far as the local Indian floss community is concerned. I've heard past incidents of getting cronies to use social engineering (a bully's crony will pretend to be your friend and find out where you work, etc..) and use pressure tactics (complaining to your superiors/boss@work --the easiest way to bully an individual who fears losing his/her livelihood) to silence disagreeing voices -- This may probably not be sexist as it happened to an indian male (who shall remain anonymous) floss volunteer, but i'm writing this to highlight a deeper and more serious problem within the fragmented Indian floss community.

Pretending to support women racks up the positive Publicity Karma (hence commercially lucrative) while one can continue to be being elitist and deny decision making power via "cronyism" (the elites will use red herrings and out-shout the newbies who disagree under the cries of "show me the code") on the side. A very subtle game that is hard to decipher on a superficial level.

However, when subtle aggressiveness is reserved for the local community members only very few folks outside that circle are aware of it. This small subset of highly aggressive Indian men will never exhibit this negative attitude on the international project lists and irc channels where they do participate, because it will permanently damage their reputation which is never good for business or landing a job in future. Also, international lists/irc/etc... have lesser bystanders[0] taking care of SEP[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem]

If readers are thinking its a malaise with the whole Indian community or a cultural baggage, its not. There is a lot of positive stuff happening thanks to many individuals who are polite and respectful and dont feel threatened by (wo)men. There are many men and women who continue their good work on an individual basis but unfortunately they are relegated to the back-burner by pompous self-promoting jerks. I'm personally hoping to see a truly open community initiative like LCA or debconf (and others like it) happen in India.

Regarding including links and threads, i am undecided. The marketing gimmick "bad publicity is still free publicity" is another reason why I prefer to avoid blogging too much about negative behavior as it can acquire a cult-like halo and an easy way to fame for other men or newbies, especially when they see peers getting away with it. While technical (like a ddos attack,...) misdemeanors are punished quickly i've not yet heard an a$$hat being ostracized or boycotted from the community and this despite there being discussion and more discussion and protests about the said negative behavior.

Besides, the online world is so small that there is the danger of forming a mental picture of an individual and getting over-familiar via blogs, twitter, irc, lists, etc... Its possible that judging folks during real life meetings based on these preconceived assumptions is another cause of social behaviour problems.

I dont have any magic answers and have always believed that community action is the best way to solve the problem. Yet, getting women to speak-up openly against the negative attitude is a lot harder, especially when they feel they will not get any support as the lone voice, statistically speaking. Few folks will want to waste their time tackling a regular barrage of red-herrings and logical fallacies. Ex. using the term "we" is (sometimes purposefully) misunderstood as taking over control and using "I" is interpreted as "the problem is singular in nature" and _one_ person is statistically too small to figure in change -- hence the status quo remains. This tactic works very well in situations when no change is desired.

Y'all probably are aware of all this so i'll stop as i've got to leave now.

ciao,
-vid

As you've probably guessed, the above was my mail sent to an unarchived women's list. I'm also reproducing (with permission) an exchange with another floss contributors who wrote after he read the above e-mail:

Devel: And you cant have a community of human beings and donkeys right? That's why I refuse to believe most of the Indian FLOSS communities are communities at all. I dont care and I dont bother.

Me: That is the scary bit...everybody stops caring. When I stop caring its just downhill then. Somewhere we have to make an effort to build the community, sustain it and grow.

Devel: You have to make sure the community is worth it.

Wow, that last line really hit me hard and brought me to my senses. His thoughts were echoed by another person, "dont beat your head against a wall, it will bleed". Words that I cannot forget.

Do some people behave differently in public and in private? In my (Indian) experience, YES. Pretense is an individual's negative attitude and India is not exactly famous for the way it treats its women-folk. That these negative social attitudes magnify themselves on the internet is not at all surprising because evils minds will learn to use tools like tor and fake email id's/online profiles to stalk women online. They dont have the courage to do it in the open with their real identity and face the ensuing repercussions.

One should not expect women to say *Stop harassing/stalking*. Given the low female participation, women are an even smaller number in the existing scheme of things and the lack of space to speak up within projects is another crucial point that gets overlooked. Instead of telling women how to adjust to sexist bullying, men within a project must learn to speak up if they wish to see change. Most times that action is taken against those who manage to offend those in power, else in floss communities sometimes one can get away with any negative behaviour with zero repercussions.

In my years within most Libre software projects, the common thought that surfaces is the expectation that "change is slow" because positive results with respect to reducing sexist behaviour takes time. I disagree. Is it that women have to be offended with negative attitudes or sexism for action to be taken? Why cant a lone individual (irrespective of gender, nationality or any other criteria) say "stop being a jerk" and get tons of community support. If there is a lack of community support, its due to apathy and a lack of firmness and strong action with low tolerance to negative behaviour by every person involved in the floss community. This is not as easy as typing this blog entry was, since it needs impartial and strong leadership qualities.

We need an attitudinal change on an individual level if we dont want a gesellschaft instead of a community where people care for others. FLOSS Communities are still made up of individual people who use the same technology they create. Women (add foo-group of choice) should not be the diversity tokenism card for spin doctors trying to prevent a PR disaster!

Arky: Skype Video Chat on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

noreply@blogger.com (Arky) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:31:00 +0000

Took a short break from Ubuntu accessibility work to try out the Skype 2.1.0.81 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). We used the Static build of Skype client on my Ubuntu Lucid laptop, while Kaprie Kanu used Ubuntu Jaunty laptop across the room. Downloaded and extracted the compressed archive to /opt/skype-version location on both the computers. First I faced few issues with my external web

Ravishankar Shrivastava: सबकुछ बिकता है यहाँ…

raviratlami@gmail.com (Raviratlami) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:10:00 +0000

सिर्फ न्यायालय ही क्यों श्रीमान?

गुजरात उच्च-न्यायालय का मानना है कि वहां की ज्यूडिशियरी में किसी को भी खरीदा जा सकता है. बजा फरमाया योर ऑनर! पर सिर्फ ज्यूडिशियरी की बात क्यों, भारत में ऐसा कोई इन्टैक्ट तंत्र बता दें जहाँ किसी को खरीदा नहीं जा सकता.

आप बता सकते हैं?

---

व्यंज़ल

---

हर कोई बिकता है यहाँ लेवाल चाहिए

सोहनी के देश में एक महिवाल चाहिए

जवाब तो हर किसी के पास है इधर

यहाँ तो बस एक अदद सवाल चाहिए

मुरदों के शहर में हमारा क्या काम

हमें तो रोज एक नया बवाल चाहिए

मेरे मोहल्ले के बाशिंदों को दोस्तों

खिड़की दरवाजे नहीं दीवाल चाहिए

मामूली से रवि को कोई पूछता नहीं

सब को अब हर तरफ कमाल चाहिए

----.

(समाचार कतरन – साभार टाइम्स ऑफ इंडिया)

Santanu Sinha: Ugly Goats on your desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Santanu Sinha) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:51:10 +0000

Heh!! Heh!!
When in GNOME, press Alt+F2. In the run box type "gegls from outer space" and enjoy...

Jaladhar Vyas: 7DRL Challenge - day 2-3

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:25:39 +0000

I am still being plagued by the burdens of real life so most development is taking place after the kids ("It should have mermaids! And Spiderman!") have gone to sleep. By the time I finished up yesterday, I was too tired to blog so this is is a combined report on the last two days.

I decided not to bother with Javascript as I want to try a different project for the plasmoid competition. So I'm back to C++ and ncurses. At this point my '@' can move across the dungeon which at the moment a very simplistic 10×10 grid where every space is a 'room'. Rooms are populated with monsters, treasure and items though at the moment only the monsters can do anything and by anything I mean fighting. My combat system is based on Solo Dungeon Bash and pretty challenging I think. Hopefully by tomorrow, A Lively Fisting will be playable though I really need to pick up the pace if I want to finish on time.

Gopal V: Taking the We out of Weblog

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:36:00 +0000

You & I both know there's no We here.

As I write down blog entry after the other, I've come to realize that there's only one person I can talk about with any sort of clarity - me. I can't speak for anyone else. Everything is as I observe, as I experience and as I feel - all mixed up into a general pile of nothing. To draw out a clear & coherent thread of thought out of that requires me to unravel a bit of myself in the process.

Self reflection leaves its own smudges in my thoughts. The searchlight of my mind leaves shadows, of contrasts & comparisons with itself. The similarities just merge into the backdrop, the differences stick out like a sore thumb. The edges & cracks appear, just like on a lake in winter, when the fluidity of thought is frozen into something solid.

And the words, like charcoal rubbing on paper, merely picks up what stands out. Everything in black & white, clearly marked out. Makes for a pretty picture, but is hardly what really exists.

Frame it up, hang it up and sign my name. And call it a blog.

--
My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely.

Shrinivasan: DFD 2010: Free your documents, save your information!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:19:49 +0000

Will you be able to read your documents 20 years from now? Every day, millions of computer users like you edit text and spreadsheets, take pictures and record audio and video. What if you couldn’t read your private letters anymore, or even open that album with pictures from your honeymoon? What if you couldn’t exchange those files with friends, because the software used by each one of you can’t talk to each other? To help you make your documents future-proof, we celebrate Document Freedom Day on March 31.

Any person can save documents in open document formats, which are based on Open Standards, and be sure that people will be able to read those files, independently of the software they use. Anyone can build applications that read and write files in these formats. The Internet was built upon Open Standards, and that’s why you see so much innovation online.

On Document Freedom Day, we will raise awareness for Open Document Formats and Open Standards by organizing activities all over the world together with partner organizations and volunteers.

During the whole month of March, we will spread the word on open document formats and Open Standards. We will publish information, talk to the press, tell our friends about it, and spread the DFD logo all over the Internet.

There are many ways to take part on this campaign, so pick one and join us:

Put a banner in your website, linking to DFD website. You can find banners in our Artwork Website.
Publish a blog post on Document Freedom Day, or Open Standards, and spread the word about the campaign. Send us a link, and we’ll include it in the DFD website.
Use your microblog to spread DFD news and articles! Tag them using !dfd or #dfd2010
Organize an activity in your city on March 31st. For ideas on activities, check the Document Freedom Day website.
Donate money to DFD. Your contribution makes Document Freedom Day possible!
Become a partner organization. Contact our Campaign Team on how to do that.

Want to find out more about Open Standards?

Document Freedom Day is about helping you to really own your data. You shouldn’t be tied to particular applications for living your life in the digital world, and you shouldn’t have to use any specific software to deal with your government, your school or anyone else.

For more information on Document Freedom Day, visit our website: www.documentfreedom.org

Contact:

Fernanda Weiden
DFD Campaign Coordinator
Email: weiden -at- fsfeurope.org
Tel: +41 76 4021866

Tarique Sani: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:51:14 +0000

@twilightfairy Hey nothing compares to bhaang!! in reply to twilightfairy #
Happy birthday @swatisani http://flic.kr/p/7GPUkm #
SANIsoft: blog : GNUnify 2010 – My view http://bit.ly/a7pXLc #
@ajuonline well it is much better than "you look gorgeously retarded!" #
So Canon finally catches up with Nikon on off camera flash! http://is.gd/9vGsV #
Whoa! Swati's portrait has hit explore…. <a href='http://flic.kr/p/7GPUkm

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Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.