Lankerisms

Ideas for Face detection application in daily usage.

2010-10-05T21:55:00.005+05:30

I had posted this idea on Feb 14 2009 halfbakery.com . After that, It has almost got a life of it's own. I just made a backup/snapshot here for people who go through my blog.

This post has been edited to remove halfbakery post actions (like edit, add, flag , etc.) . Comments have not been included as the posters might want to edit them on the site.

Face based presence sensor, Auto-brightness and tilt for laptop screen & more!!

use that integrated webcam for more than it was designed for.

[Update 6: Since I posted this, I have regulary come across stuff that uses head tracking, every time increasing my hopes that all these ideas are coming closer to reality .. See links]

[UPDATE 5: added another idea 8) ]

[UPDATE 4: modified idea 7]

[UPDATE 3: added another idea 7) ]

[UPDATE 2: added one more contributed idea and changed main title and title of 1) of so that Jutta does not get thrown off ;-)]

[UPDATE: added 2 more ideas 4 and 5. also added a contributed idea]

***** ***** Idea begins here ***** *****

Most new laptops,netbooks come with integrated webcams on the top. I can immedietely think of two really usefull ways of using this.

1) Replace input device activity detector with face detector for sensing user presence.

Instead of relying on keyboard and mouse activity, rely on availability of face for activity sensing. No face in front for more than 1 minute? lock screen, show as away on IM. Face came back ? show "unlock" password prompt. This is especially usefull if you are watching a movie or reading a long article using auto-scroll. The screen won't lock/go to screen saver mode in the middle of it.

2) Auto tilt.

I sometimes use my laptop when I sleep on my side to read really long pages. As I use GNU/Linux, I just issue the command xrandr -o 1 or xrandr -o3 depending on which side I am sleeping on. As far as I can remember many recent Windows graphics drivers, even some old ones register Ctrl+Alt+cursorkey to change orientations.

My idea was to use the web cam to detect which angle your face is on.

There are enough face detection softwares out there. Even good open source ones. If someone who can understand all the code can make it extract the angle of the face, then the angle can be fed to another piece of code which uses simple heuristics and time outs to change the orientation of the screen when the user is seeing the screen at 90 degrees.

3) Auto-brightness

At least in linux, its quite easy to change the brightness of the laptop screen, you just write your brightness level to a special file and done. if you can find out the ambient brightness from the camera, then just simply adjust screen backlight brighness appropriately through code. done.

4) Could also be an interesting input for gaming. Though it can be a pain in the neck if the game gets too continuous or fast paced. But the possibilities are interesting.. [a] In a FPS you can use it to control the head of the charector (to look around). [b] In a flight simulator, you could use it to control the pitch, roll, etc

Even better: If you look away from the screen for more than 2 seconds the game can pause itself!

5) [ok.. ideas are getting a bit crazier now]

Hands free! Use it for alternative input for dialogs.. Nod your head around x axis for yes. nod your head around y axis for no. Hands free!

Hands free browsing!. Firefox plugin and extension which can be switched on while having lunch. The plugin that knows where you are looking and automatically scrolls it to centre (very very useful if you have the habit of reading slashdot or other news while having food). A left wink can bookmark the page and position for rereading. A right wink can bookmark the page and position for commenting later on(after lunch).

6) Sleep pause

If you are watching a movie and doze off, the movie should get paused, and the laptop can go to low power mode. ( I am confused whether I should be really adding this idea in the "contributed" section as i got the idea from [bigsleep]'s nick :-)

7) Boss / kids / wife detector.

Saves a lot of embarrassing moments ;-)

8) Guesture based reading of cards (Visiting cards, barcodes(?) semacodes, etc)

If I point at an object (near the camera) edge with an index finger, it should try to find text/barcode/semacode on it. OCR it and present in a dialog. After I confirm or correct and then confirm the input, operations follow suit - URL is bookmarked/launched, visiting card info is stored in my addressbook, etc.

The cam of my EEE Pc is 1.3 megapixel and so I guess all newer notebooks carry good enough cameras.

Contributed ideas:

[2 fries shy of a happy meal]

".. detect how far a persons face is from the screen and change font size accordingly.."

[bigsleep]

".. if one of a number of faces disappears[while watching a movie] it could press pause."

[supershnitzel]

augment speech recognition with face detection. just like hearing-impaired people do.

—	kamathln, Feb 14 2009

Dual spectrum Eye Recognition dual-spectrum_20eye_20recognition
got any laptops with IR cams ? [kamathln, 25 2009]

(5) implemented by opera!!! http://my.opera.com...log/face-the-future
(seems to be april fool though :-( ) [kamathln, Apr 01 2009]

CamSpace http://www.youtube....watch?v=v0srY37kkMw
Comes close to (4) [kamathln, May 02 2009]

Sixth Sense http://www.ted.com/...he_sixth_sense.html
Comes close to 8 [kamathln, May 02 2009]

smert.net http://smert.net/20...-beta/#comment-2805
Implementation by Jason [kamathln, 02 2009]

Presence sensor *almost* baked! http://www.pcworld...._cant_get_here.html
not on sale in the US yet though... [DIYMatt, May 19 2009, last modified May 20 2009]

Mousetrap http://live.gnome.org/MouseTrap
Gaze based cursor control [kamathln, Jul 02 2010]

John Underkoffer's hand gestures demo http://www.ted.com/...with_a_gesture.html
21 Quest 's suggestion :baked? Just have to adapt it to Laptop :) [kamathln, 04 2010, last modified Jul 06 2010]

same UI Chat_20Enhancer
for text-based conversation [FlyingToaster, Jul 04 2010]

HandVu http://www.movesins.../HandVu/HandVu.html
Hand Gesture Recognition using OpenCV [kamathln, Jul 07 2010]

Auto-dimming TV http://www.gizmag.c...watching-you/15330/
[comes close to (1), but on tv and not on a computer. Samsung Bravia TV dims/switches off when you are not looking [kamathln, 15 2010]

Ubuntu getting physical http://design.canon...9/getting-physical/
[kamathln, Sep 16 2010]

Compiz head tracking http://ubuntuforums...thread.php?t=952895
[kamathln, 16 2010]

Proxemic media player concept http://www.youtube....watch?v=OHm9teVoNE8
Comes close to the string of ideas in comments that came about thanks to idea #6 [kamathln, 01 2010]

Surprising Old Tech

2010-07-13T22:24:00.006+05:30

[The theme of this collection is gadget/tech concepts that we feel "current technology", but has existed for a long time. Of course, this list is definitely not complete. If you know anything that matches the theme but I have missed, please suggest them in the comments. The main reason they are more widespread today is because of falling prices and advancements in processor speed and storage, making it more feasible. But if companies coming up with current products based on these old concepts act as though they inventted the concept, please send them a reminder.]

IBM Simon [First Smartphone. 1993 Also the first smartphone with touchscreen]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
Dont miss the Full view of the UI(big file)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/IBM_SImon_in_charging_station.png

Xerox Alto :[Desktop , 1973]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Screenshots:
http://toastytech.com/guis/alto.html

Xerox Star:[Desktop, 1982, dont miss screenshots .. search on youtube too]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Screenshots:
http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html

EO personal communicator/Penpoint OS 1991 (its 50 mins long, but its
just superb considering its from 1991, so please make time to watch.
you can skip first 8.5 mins if you are in a hurry):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9140399149118885327
The dev tool demoed in 1994 is not less awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh1yCHn8hvE

Patent of iPod like device back in 1979
http://www.kanekramer.com/html/development.htm

First hand writing recognition was partly mechanical , Nov 1914 (yes, 1914)
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/1117184.pdf

First digital camera 1975
http://www.retrothing.com/2008/05/kodaks-first-di.html

17000 mile journey on a modified cycle with a solar powered laptop back in 1983
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-across-america/

First HDTV (monochrome, 819 lines) came in 1949!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/819_line

The "mouse" demo from 1968 . [more than just the mouse, it was the data management ideas that I liked. We could probably call it one of the first crude "mashups"]
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

Disclaimer : these were a bunch of stuff I came across by searching on the internet. I have not researched thoroughly about them, nor have I confirmed these. Though these info have been got from somewhat reliable sources, I do not give any kind of assurance that the data/information is correct. I only added items here which I got impressed by the age of the claim and quality/geekery.

JqS5 Slide show and bookmarklet.

2010-06-04T22:34:00.012+05:30

I just loved JQS5 (jQuery Simple Standards based Slide Show System) for the simple beauty that it is. If you just have a bunch of points to put across, and you are fast at html, you can throw together a slideshow in about 2 minutes.

Start writing a normal html file, put the main title in <h1> tag, your name in <i> follow it by a bunch of lists of points, each headed by an <h2>, load it in the browser and you are ready to hit full screen.

"Oh wait .. dont you have to add the css and js" ?

Oh yeah!, or you could just let these 2 bookmarklets to do that for you .. drag these bookmarklets to your bookmarks toolbar:

Load JQS5

and

show

"Load JQS5" inserts the the js and css .. Dont worry if not much happens, the js is not "activated" - only loaded. Click the "show" button. and let it do the rest for you.

These bookmarks load the js and css from the JQS5 website itself, which I discourage on 2 counts.

We are using JQS5 website's bandwidth
It will be faster to load it from the local machine.

Inkjet Printer hacks

2010-02-08T23:04:00.006+05:30

Hacks are fun. Hacks are also usefull. Wierdly, I suddently stumbled upon 3 hacks back to back that use inkjet printers. So I started to list those that I find. If you know more, please leave a comment or dent/tweet @kamathln

Direct to cd printer used for printing cirquits
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/02/direct-to-pcb-inkjet-printing/

Inkjet printer used to "print" several different medical tests on paper based, postage stamp sized, "lab" (watch the whole vid, its included somewhere)
http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/8556/talk/760

Inkjet printer used to "print" out a set of living heart muscles. (watch the whole vid, its included somewhere)
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue.html

Inkjet printer used to "print" out other organs like kidney, bladder etc.
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

GIMP : 2 Layer Dialogs trick

2009-10-15T23:01:00.007+05:30

1) Locate the Dialog's special menu
2) Add a second "layers" menu. (not this is not possible from the Image's "Window>Dockable Dialogs" menu).
3) Drag resulting layer dialog tab outside.

4) Disable Auto Image switch for the dock.
5) Now use the two dialogs like you would use a split pane window manager.

Tip: You can use the scroll wheel to quickly switch images using the image selector at the top of the dock window.

Elinks, the best browser for text consoles

2009-07-13T13:15:00.003+05:30

[ This was an old email ( though still valid) that I had sent to the internal mailing list at the previous company I worked for. I used elinks in xterm, so you can skip xterm related stuff if you use it on plain text console]

I have started using "elinks" for most tasks.. It is much better than
I thought. Only a few defaults are amiss. I just feel the following
tips will make you like elinks.

Tips in using "elinks":
Note, I use it in xterm.
1: First, make yourself familiar with settings up options
manager. To get the Options manager, first press Esc on
the keyboard, or the top row of the terminal using mouse.
In the resulting menu, Go to options manager.

The points that follow start with the option to
change. When changing the following settings, make sure you
read the accomponying text.

2: Document->Cache->Ignore cache-control info from server
Set it to: 0
Description: Cache-control header item is usually set by CGIs
to hint that the content must not be cached. When it is
ignored, it ends up as a huge nuisance.

3: Document->Default color settings->Use document-specified
colors
Set it to: 2
Dont worry, in a short while we will be disabling
transparency. :-)

4: Document->HTML Rendering->Underline Links
Set it to: 1
Well, Experiement. I liked with Underlines. Though it can get
nasty in webmail.

5: Document->Browser->Forms->

External editor
Set it to: your favorite editor.
When focus is in a text area, and it is in edit mode, press
F4 to open the content in text editor.

6: Under "User interface", play as you like. I liked the
following:
i. Clock
ii. LEDs

7: Terminals->xterm->colors
Set it to: 2
Actually, the correct way would be to set TERM environment
variable before starting elinks .. But I dont want to bother
myself with that, as I dont think my X is gonna get set to
monochrome all of a sudden.

If you don't like the document specified color for a
particular website, you can always cycle through color
choosing algorithms using %. It will become second nature
sooner than you imagine.

8: Terminals->xterm->Transparency
Set it to: 0

Other than these tips, remember, the mouse works just like in firefox
for so many things.
1. Left click to open
2. Right click links to get more options
3. Right click inside document to get yet more options
4. Middle click a link to open in new tab.
5. Middle click a tab to close the tab.
6. Scroll wheel works for vertical scrolling.
7. Scroll on the tabs bar to switch tabs.

Tips for using forms:
1. Press enter on a form's entry field before typing anything
into it. You can see the the mode in the status bar.
2. Press enter again to submit the form. Again, the status bar.
3. Press dot (.) to enable link numbering .. when this mode is
on, you can type a number to go to that link. Even the form
elements are treated as elinks, so you can jump between form
elements quickly using this.

Other tips :
1. To follow elinks, press enter or press right arrow key.
2. To go back, press the left arrow.
3. To go "forward" or "unhistory" as elinks calls it, press "u"
downlaod any link target using "d"
4. Press '/' to search stuff on the page
5. Use [ and ] to scroll horizontally. Too much text off the
screen? Use 'W' to switch wrapping.
6. Use '<' and '>' to switch between tabs.
7. Press t to open new tab. c to close, Ctrl-r to refresh.
8. Press g for location dialog.
9. Type a number before a shortcut key to repeat that key so
many times. Usefull for jumping 3 steps back in history.
10. Press "h" for history manager
11. Press '\' to see source
12. Press '=' to see info about the current object loaded .. like
URL,etc.
13. Press '|' to see response header.
14. press D for download manager.

Squirrelmail and Gmail look good in elinks.

15. Press q to quit.

Web experience enhancing "semantic web", "standards" and "API"s.

2009-07-06T19:11:00.011+05:30

This is a preliminary list i could think of immedietely.. I am going to add urls to each of them soon. Please comment with any that i missed (make sure that you give a link to the standard's official descriptions page when you do, or failing that, the best page that describes the format)

It need not be specifically a data format or and API as such. Any specifications that, when adopted by the web developer, enhances the usage of the website can be listed.

rss
favicon
opensearch
open-collaboration-services
microformats
sitemap.xml
oembed
bookmarklets
blog pingback
social graph, foaf, XFN
GRDDL
APML

2009-07-01T11:27:00.004+05:30

I have been recently playing a bit with my camera these days.. And thanks to CHDK, I have been having great fun. Check out my flickr page http://flickr.com/photos/kamathln . And my videos page http://kamathln.homelinux.net/videos/ , available only if my laptop is online.

GNOME and Firefox in Kannada

2009-02-17T13:52:00.008+05:30

Just installed kannada and got basic apps in kannada. Note: openoffice is something I use once in a bluemoon so did not bother about it at all.

I am running Debain lenny recently apt-get updated and installed. I got these quirks sorted out.

1) got Kannada Unicode to render properly on Firefox, after spoiling it badly.
2) got to type Kannada properly on all places
3) got Firefox translations for kannada
4) set kannada as preferred language in Firefox ( Firefox tells websites about this. The only website that honoured the setting was google, but i was pleased)
5) Get the whole gnome in Kannada

1) Kannada Unicode rendering on Firefox :
This really should not have been a problem at all. This was my own stupidity. Even before I started out to go to some Kannada website, I airily set a few fonts too Freesans. Then i saw that pages dont render properly, after I tried different stupidities franctically and vainly , I thought I will just reset all the configuration. To do this quick, I just entered about:config and researched for freesans, and "reset"' the values to defaults. This fixed the rendering and I was back in business.

As Sans-Serif is a magic font, it chooses the right kannada fonts magically.

And obviously, before starting off with anything ttf-indic-fonts were installed.

2) Kannada typing in all places.
This was simple. After a bit of googling (I wish I hadn't erased the history of Firefox) I found a page where a Japanese guy had solved the same problem like this :

GTK_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"

in /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim .

This worked like magic, I could use SCIM in all places, after I used im-switch to set scim as my default Input module.

For getting easy Kannada typing, I needed to install scim, scim-m17n and itrans packages and these also pulled some dependencies. After that, itt was smooth sailing with kn-itrans option available under Kannada.

To get the language list, just click the little keyboard icon in the system tray. ( After first installation, you need to re-login to get it). Note:you need to Left click on the system tray SCIM icon(little keyboard), not right click, which would give you setup options.

3) Firefox kannada translation
This one was easy

$ apt-get install iceweasel-l10n-kn
$ LANG=kn_IN iceweasel

The LANG=kn_IN iceweasel can be kept in a script and the panel launcher's properties could be set to launch the script. Anyways, Item (5) must obsolete it if it succeeds.

4) Preferred web content set to kannada in Firefox.

Again, pretty Simple:

Main Menu->Edit/Tools-> Preferences->Content->Languages

Or if you already followed item (3):

ಮುಖ್ಯ ಮೆನು->ಸಂಪಾದನೆ->ಆದ್ಯತೆಗಳು->ಒಳಅಂಶಗಳು->ಭಾಷೆಗಳು

Once you add Kannada in the list of languages, dont forget to move it to the top(order indicates the priority). Once this is done, you must find that google presents itself in Kannada.

5) GNOME in Kannada

I searched for kannada packages for GNOME for a long time. Then an angel from #kannada on irc.freenode.net made me realize that Kannada was installed with GNOME
all along! Stupid me. Just checked /usr/share/locale/kn/LC_MESSAGES/ and they were all there. But LANG=kn_IN gedit, LC_ALL=kn_IN gedit, all failed to present in Kannada.Then the same angel hinted me to run

dpkg-reconfigure locales

That reminded me that I was presented with the same UI during installation, and I had neglected it. Damn! Well, it re-generated and configured the languages I chose. after that LANG=kn_IN gedit just worked. So If I am not wrong, a re-login should add Kannada to the list of languages at the GDM login screen, and all the LANG=kn_IN should be unnecessary.

I will be writing to the GNOME's Debain package manager asking to include dpkg-reconfigure locales as a menu item in system->administration :-P.

Update:
I have rebooted and here is a screenshot :

Easy Management for Debian /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

2009-02-16T18:56:00.003+05:30

Well, first things first, sorry for the misleading name for the script filenames.

The scripts can be found here.

What they do is, allow easy enabling and disabling of source definition files, just like Apache does. You put those files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d_available, which you would have otherwise put in /etc/apt/sources.list.d . then you use apt-src-enable and apt-src-disable that manages symlinks between /etc/apt/sources.list.d and /etc/apt/sources.list.d_available .

Big fat WARNING: The code is completely untested and is more meant to be read by humans than executed by code. Its more of an expression of an idea than code.

Telescopic display support for laptop

2009-02-15T17:19:00.005+05:30

This is an illustration for an idea i submitted to halfbakery. You can view the idea here.

I am not a good artist or a technical drawing guy, so please only appreciate the main idea, and don't analyze it under a microscope :-) .

The base extension is actually thinner and can be fit into a groove on the sides so that even when it is extended, the laptop will maintain a flat level.

Tagz.in same or grown ?

2009-01-07T00:11:00.004+05:30

For the uninitiated, tagz.in is a social bookmarking site by my friend Jeethu Rao. And If you already know about tagz, and visit tagz again you may find a little change visually. But don't be fooled. The engine under the hood has grown up and is a lot more mature.

For instance he just added recommendations, now that is something that I have been always wanting - it now recommends bookmarks from other people by learning your tastes once you have voted on at least 50 items. Of course .. it takes into account the tags you have saved under your bookmarks too, so dont forget to save your bookmarks.

And there are loads of tiny improvements here and there. A lot of caching etc..

Dont forget to keep a watch on the "whats new" entry. And yeah.. don't forget to register and check out the recommendation engine. It rocks!

My name is Laxminarayan Kamath

2008-12-18T17:33:00.004+05:30

[Someone had asked me about the meaning of my name. I had this in my draft from more than 3 years. The "To:" field was blank. So I have completely forgotten whom it was for. So I thought it is better I leave it here, instead of being stagnant information in some corner of gmail's servers]

My first name is Laxminarayan. And last name is Kamath. Laxminarayan is actually a combination of the name Laxmi and the word Narayan. Where Laxmi is the Hindu Goddess of wealth and Narayan means owner or Lord. So as the Hindu perception of husband as the owner, Laxminarayan means, the husband of Goddess of wealth. According to the Hindu Religious beliefs, Laxminarayan is also a God. Laxminarayan is an all loving, all powerful God. He is considered the maintainer of the universe.

Kamath is my last name. Kamath is actually in a language called Konkani. Konkani is one of several languages of India, and is the primary language of the Goa state and also several people of the west coast of India. The word Kamath actually expands to Kama and Mathi. The word Kama in the language Konkani stands for material pleasure or material duty (as opposed to spiritual pleasure or spiritual duty). The word Mathi in the language Konkani, stands for soil. So in total, the word Kamath means occupied with the duty of soil.

Last names in recent years are only legendary, and inherited from the ancestors. There are few people who actually have the same occupation as their last name indicates.

Tagz.in - Yet another (?) social bookmarking site?

2008-09-27T23:52:00.005+05:30

We got a huge number of social bookmarking sites. Is there a need for antoher one?
Well, this one is, by far one with a very clean, no-nonsense UI. It means business. Being developed by my friend Jeethu, it is mainly an experiment to see what happens when you mix social bookmarking like del.icio.us with social sites like reddit. Though it began with that in mind, Jeethu has not stopped adding usefull features http://tagz.in/help/ http://tagz.in/tagz/whatsnew/ . And knowing a bit of his plans, I can assure that several are on their way.
Oh! before I forget.. he also has a reddit page , uservoice page, and obviously a blog of his own. He likes coding in python, and as on the about page, uses django and other python stuff.
It is clearly evident from my monopolization of the website and the uservoice pages that I am really liking it. :-)

E17 wishlist

2008-08-30T09:02:00.003+05:30

Saving customizations of a theme. In "advanced" part of the theme manager, after a lot of customizations - setting different borders, fonts, etc., if you want to try out a complete new theme, you have to lose all previous customizations. This is a pain.. Allowing a simple "saving" of custom sets will help avoid a lot of frustration.
Automatic GTK/QT Color settings according to current e17 theme.
- Just like KDE does to GTK.
Restart theme setttings app along with e17 when you press "apply" in the theme manager.
Some old effects from dr16 (especially transparent move and resize ).

Corruption analysis

2008-08-14T22:13:00.006+05:30

(This is a reply given by me to the suggestion on a forum that it is now important to remove the two Indian political parties BJP and Congress.
I feel there is enough juice in it to share it on my blog too.
Text in squared brackets[like this] are grammatical correction or filled ommission.
The original thread is available here
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/India-Force/messages/14035?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1)

I am no expert in these subjects .. So don't call on details if you
want to explain me something .. My question is whether removing
Congress and BJP will really remove the roots of the problems ?

Currently corruption follows power. And a large part also follows
"power potential". If power shifts from BJP to Congress or from
Congress to BJP or any other party/ organization/ whatever, corruption
follows suite. Some corruption stays back if there is "power
potential" still remaining in the party. If there is another
party/organization which a part of corruption sees that it has "power
potential", it will move to that if circumstances affecting the
corruption's victim compulse it.

Where does this corruption come from? Citizens. Can you remove
corruption from citizens without corruption drive[ing] it's forces against
your plans? The corruption in Government( with a few lakh employees?)
does not have a chance against clean citizens (100 crore!!!). Can you
turn this growing population "problem" into a strength against
corruption (not just in the Government), thus being it's own
solution?.

The world is shrinking by the minute in terms of communication and
technology. So corruption can make it's way through those channels.
Can you make people immune to such channels of corruption? Can you
come up with an elaborate plan to block only corruption from various
channels of information exchange and then implement flawlessly all the
plans in one go? If you have a[ny] delay between to parts of plans,
corruption can slip through.

I am really sorry that I am not good at expressing everything I feel,
especially thoughts sift too quickly through my mind for me to
construct examples required to convey my ideas. May be that is where
my corruption point lies.

Can you do all the above in one go ? Then we may have a chance against
corruption.

(To this, Someone replied :)
yes sure to some extent. This is not a permanent solution but would work
miracles and help root out the problem once and for all time in near future.

(And my reply was:)

Yes. You are quite right. But unless you have the complete solution to
the problem of corruption, we must not attempt this. I will explain.

The circle of corruption is a vicious one. The Government is corrupted
because the citizens are corrupted. And the citizens are corrupted
because the government is corrupted. The citizens are supported by our
Government. So if we remove BJP and Congress, we should have something
in it's place that can fit and support us otherwise, as a society, we
will collapse. And of course, it goes without saying that it should be
able to withstand the corruption from the citizens and should be free
from corruption itself. Unfortunately, for most citizens it has become
a matter of pride to be corrupted. Any point of time where we need to
be corrupted should be a matter of sadness to us and we should not
stop at fixing our individual problems which forced us to be
corrupted. If a father died because of cigarette smoking, the son
should not continue smoking saying "My dad used to love smoking.. I am
smoking for him.". Instead he should fight against the people who
corrupt their body with unnecessary chemicals.

I completely understand that sometimes corruption becomes necessary to
avoid any glitches in the design of the Government. But instead of
being temporary, it becomes a permanent thing. Like an Asthma patient
getting addicted to the steroids. That is what we should be always
aware about and avoid.

BJP and Congress, are the fruits of such a society and thus the
corruption is concentrated there. Nothing wrong in it. They are our
own fruits. In the plan to remove it, we citizens should also include
ways of cleaning ourselves and in the mean time prepare a replacement
Government which is clean, strong and has a high resistance to
corruption as well.

Very small audio streamer ( serves only one client at a time)

2008-07-21T15:31:00.003+05:30

Serves whatever is coming from your recording source

Ingredients:

tcpserver

arecord

speexenc

Method:


#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOH
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/ogg

EOH
beep -f 3200
arecord -r 8000 -t raw |speexenc --8bit - -

"Taking granted" is a convinience.

2008-07-07T11:42:00.005+05:30

We should realize that the concept of "taking granted" serves only as a convinience. While you may label me as the "Master of the Obvious" for saying that, most people dont realize that it means, on a larger scale of time, we should always be aware that there might be other possibilities. We need to preiodically research and revise of what we have taken for granted. This is way easier said than done. It is important to be critically minded to be able to search for, go after, and dig out to view things taken for granted.

BTW, This happens to be a way of "Be prepared" strategy.

Me back, Telecommuting, Website up

2008-07-05T17:22:00.002+05:30

Its been a while.. I am back in Mangalore.. Got a job in the previous company I worked. My Laptop, and hence website is back up.

Human behavioural statistics.

2008-07-05T17:11:00.002+05:30

Human behavioural statistics stays true till the moment it published.

Me at Mumbai,website down

2008-06-16T21:23:00.000+05:30

I am currently in Mumbai, will be off to Bangalore in a few days and then to Mangalore. Till then, kamathln.homelinux.net will be down. Be sure to check back on 30th June.

Power saving on GNU/Linux laptops

2008-06-03T10:10:00.006+05:30

Forget all snazzy desktop stuff. Especially those that update the screen unnecessarily.
Try this: http://lesswatts.org .
If you have a IBM THinkpad check out this one too: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption

Then also try these tips :

In Firefox: disable prefetch. For that :
- In urlbar type about:config
- In the resulting table.. type "prefetch" in the search box to filter out those keys that have "prefetch" in them.
- In the result, set "network.prefetch-next" to "false".
  - If you have Stumbleupon installed, disable it's prefetch too. stumbleupon.somenumber.prefetch
- Unless you are a heavy user of gmail, use the simple html mode.

Use text based browsers unless the page demands a GUI browser. Elinks is an excellent choice.

Disable anything that blinks/ updates the screen. This makes X wake up the CPU on every update.
- Disable blinking cursors. Many terminals allow a way to disable the blinking of the cursor.
- Disable the "seconds" indicator on the clock. Really, are you on a race track ?

Disable "system monitor" "battery monitor" and such other applets. Configure key shortcuts that run a command like "uptime" "date" "acpi" or somthing like that and pipe it to xmessage or something like that. Also havea script that .. every 30 seconds call these commands and checks for dangerous values. If any, popout a xmessage.

Have a decent amount of RAM. This reduces the kernel having to wake the hard disk often to play with the swap.

Remove anything unnecessary. Unnecessary daemons, Unnecessary devices, Unnecessay drivers, etc..

I dont know if this works: Try using small flash based drives to store frequently used small documents, music, etc. This brings disk usage to a minimum.

Firefox div height relative to viewport works!

2008-05-29T18:04:00.005+05:30

If you were trying to set the height of a div or any other object for that matter relative to the height if the viewport, This might be a solution. [ Blogspot eats up html.. even in compose box.]

I was actually facing the same problem.. few google searches, jumping between a few IRC channels later, I was about to give up. Then just out of thin air .. I tried the above .. And it worked.

If this solution existed somewhere else, please let me know.. so that next time I can use better search params.

To think or not to think?

2008-05-22T19:33:00.005+05:30

To think or not to think? That is the question. Lot of times we do mistakes because we sub-consciously decide not to think about the consequences.
At times the consequences of not thinking seem to be less costly than consequences of thinking.

Eg: ..
[The following situation has not happened to me] You are about to meet up with a huge client who will be discussing with you about the new contract. You are about to leave office when you do a childish but irritating mistake.
You obviously realize your mistake. Stopping to ask an excuse is the same as losing the client. Not asking an excuse means weakening your relationship with the colleague.
Losing the client on the other hand means losing the colleague entirely and surely anyway .. as you may be fired to lose such a huge client and won't remain as a colleague. So the best choice is obviously to leave immediately - You can always convey the apology later.
Now the question is ..
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are on your way to client's office help ? You may not get enough time to think about how to impress and win the client.
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are discussing with clients about the contract help? Again.. you might do a mistake that may make you lose the client.
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are on your way back help ? Unless you have a personal driver for your vehicle, this is a big no too. Feeling gloomy while riding is equivalent to drinking and driving. And the consequences might be you may not remain as a living being in the first place to go and ask for excuse or forgiveness.

Now most colleagues might understand this. Replace colleague with someone from home, like parents, wife or children. "You did not even have a bit of concern. You are an insensitive clod!". Of course, you must think about your loved ones too. You cannot blame your loved ones either. They have not faced thosituations. So the question is "to think or not to think?".

If you analyze thoroughly, the mistake you did in the first place was also because your sub-conscious was in a dilemma of whether to think or not.

Back to Job Search

2008-05-19T12:23:00.008+05:30

Hi all!
Two years and three months at DeepRoot Linux and six months breather later, I am back at Job Search in my home town Mangalore. It is proving to be quite a bit of a challenge for me.
For my mom's and grandma's sake, I am limited to Mangalore. For the philosophies, principles I believe in and my technological interests, I am limited to jobs that involve active FOSS promotion or contribution, or as a fall-back, at least usage of FOSS with awareness of those principles. Though I am not sure of any companies in Mangalore that satisfy the former, there will be at least one company that follow the latter.
Though I have started active search just yesterday, I already know a few companies that use and are aware of FOSS products.
If you know of any companies that fall in these categories that would love to accept me, please leave a comment.

My Resume: http://kamathln.homelinux.net/Resume_Laxminarayan_Kamath.html

egrep -iv "(infosys)|(tcs)|(wipro)" companies.txt

My current mood.

2008-05-12T23:21:00.001+05:30

http://xkcd.com/379/

I know I know .. too much xkcd.. But that shows my mood accurately, so I couldn't help.

Useful XKCD charts

2008-05-07T14:35:00.009+05:30

http://xkcd.com/195/ Map of the Internet.
http://xkcd.com/256/ Online communities
http://xkcd.com/802/ Online communities 2.
http://xkcd.com/124/ Blogofractal
http://xkcd.com/94/ AIM Profile creation flowchart.

http://xkcd.com/773/ Intersection of what university websites contain and what people really look for.

http://xkcd.com/388/ Grapefruit varieties
http://xkcd.com/273/ Electromagnetic spectrum.

http://xkcd.com/482/ HeightChart - the observable universe, from top to bottom.
http://xkcd.com/485/ DepthChart - Size of matters on a log scale.

http://xkcd.com/526/ Converting to metric.
http://xkcd.com/394/ Kilobytes.. there are several of them.

Sudoku solver

2008-05-06T22:52:00.003+05:30

I had been working on a small sudoku solver.. Did not finish it though. It goes into infinite loops for difficult ones. You can check it here [ If my laptop is on - look at the status box at top right of my blog]. It is published under GPL license. My interest waned as I worked on it, people are most welcome on using it. At a rate of 1 to 10 for coding, I rate myself at 2.5 . So yeah, feel free to say my code sucks.

Please do anything with it under the GNU GPL.

Hurt

2008-05-04T18:30:00.002+05:30

Sometimes when you are hurt, you feel the whole world exists only to plan against you. Doesn't it?

Just venting out. Please do not bother.

Is gravity just a bug in software?

2008-05-02T18:54:00.004+05:30

[Note: Personal memory dump.. Don't waste time if you don't get.. This is not supposed to make sense except for me.]

Is Gravity just artifact of a bug in the simulation software running the universe ?

Theory:
Taking Gravity as the curvature of space time. Why does it curve at all? Simulation "for loops" might be going over every particle (though not in X, Y or Z ,time dimension exactly). And because of some atomicity problem the positions might not be getting updated at the right moment. Or It might be that there are several(mind boggling number of) threads. And updating the position of each particle might have some atomicity problem. Or may be even some optimization artifact?? Or is God using Intel's FPUs :-P .

I can't make up anything now. There is something fundamentally wrong or lacking with what I already know. So I guess I must let these things rest a while and update my basics.

Geocities.com/kamathln restored

2008-04-12T08:25:00.004+05:30

UPDATE: Its down again. doh!

... and I have now removed the timelapse video as I have linked it from outside. The problem is, If I link it form outside, they feel I am using geocities only for storage purposes. Anyway, I am afraid my blog may turn into "Geocities crash and restore" Log.

Why do people ask "What is the purpose of life?"

2008-04-10T16:52:00.003+05:30

This is a snippet of chat that happened between me and my friend.

me: have you ever debugged a program ?
friend: tell me
friend: lol
friend: joke ?
me: yes or no
friend: yes
me: and then after a long while you realized you are trying to debug a program/procedure whose purpose is something you do not know ?
friend: yes
me: and you do that and realize because you are "tracing" the stack to find where the problem is.. right ?
friend: whats the point u r trying to say ?
me: yes or no
friend: yes
me: well I just realized that when we are frustrated with life, and try to find[trace] where the fault lies, we are doing the same thing
me: and that is how many of us come to the question "what is life ? What is it's purpose?"

Promises

2008-04-10T15:58:00.003+05:30

Some promises we make personally, may not be really personal. From time immemorial when humans have been making promises to their spouses or children that they will even bring the moon to earth for them.

We have brought back at least the pieces of moon.

Similarly, spouses have also made promises to "take you far far away".

Though humans have not gone farther than the moon, the missions for "farther and farther away" are not far away in time.

I feel these promises comprise more of a dream than a promise.

If you come across more of these "promise"s please add them as comments.

Selflessness

2008-04-05T10:56:00.002+05:30

Selflessness is infinitely long-sighted selfishness.

Selfishness

2008-04-05T10:53:00.003+05:30

Selfishness is a tool. Use it wisely and responsibly.

Saying "NO" to Infosys, TCS, Wipro.

2008-03-29T09:35:00.002+05:30

http://osindia.blogspot.com/2008/03/microsoft-files-complaint-on-ooxml-vote.html

Infosys, Wipro, TCS .. I have lost all interest in joining you.

And obviously Microsoft and NASSCOM.. Hehheh.

Geocities crashes on me again.

2008-03-24T18:29:00.003+05:30

In the last post, I was quite glad that my geocities.com pageset was back. And mom tells me that lightening does not strike twice in the same place. Now I am quite sure whatever struck geocities is not lightening :-P

Geocities.com/kamathln back online

2008-03-22T11:06:00.003+05:30

My pageset on geocities is back online: geocities.com/kamathln . The apology letter from Yahoo had made it to my spambox in gmail. :-/ . Probably because of those Phishing mails with the subject
"OFFICIAL PRIZE AWARD...YAHOO /MSN LOTTERY INCOPERATION 2008" had made it think that anything with "Yahoo" in the subject is spam :-(

Hello Laxminarayan,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Geocities.

We have investigated the issue you've brought to our attention and your
account now appears to be functioning properly.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Geocities.

Regards,

Stan

Yahoo! Customer Care

46503228

For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:

http://help.yahoo.com/

Geocities.com crashed on me :-(

2008-03-18T22:58:00.004+05:30

I won't call it a good one .. But I had a personal site on geocities.com for around 4 years (at least). So one fine day like today, Geocities.com says it does not have my files. A lot of people have said they got a mail from geocities explaining what their mistake was, etc.. I did not get even that. I have even checked the spam folders. This also means the link I posted a few days ago of the sunset at Sultan Battery is down.

I hope "Microsoft+Yahoo" deals isn't somewhere in the recipe of this disaster.

Update It's Back online :-)

Reverse Engineers will stop at nothing.

2008-03-14T03:50:00.003+05:30

Or may be not even at nothing. I am too disoriented to know. I am dumb struck by the ingenuity and cleverness of these people. The below "title"s are mine. The original articles have other titles.

Canon! Show me your code!
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Porting_the_CHDK#Hardware-software_solution

Oh sweet iPod, sing your code to me!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060204000118/ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/

Time Lapse Video using CHDK

2008-03-13T18:37:00.017+05:30

As mentioned earlier, I own a Canon A570 and run CHDK on it . Using a script I took a Time Lapse Video . This is how you can do it using CHDK. This is how they turn out.

And this is how mine turned out.

You can also download High Resolution [786 x 516, 10.00 fps] [if my laptop is switched on. Look at the status box on the top right of my blog] it. It has 76 frames taken at an interval of 20 seconds and runs at 10 frames per second speed. I used mencoder to encode the series of photos into a movie.

Update:
Made two more timelapse videos

Original High resolution videos can be found here .

My goal in life

2008-03-13T10:43:00.003+05:30

Enthusiastically exercise my talents to be useful to those people who want to be useful and good to those people who want to be useful and good to ...

Baraha to UTF8 (Kannada) pre-release

2008-03-05T22:40:00.006+05:30

There is an incomplete preview of my Baraha to UTF8 converter available at http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/brh2utf8.tbz . I am grateful to Pierre Marchand of fontmatrix for providing me the space. My current logic is somewhat too generic and am falling into lot of troubles.

A session on #fonts opened my eyes to a good amount of resources on the internet on Indic text processing especially in unicode. I think I will be spending a lot of time on it for the next few days.

I will paste interesting parts of the chat transcripts down here (Resource links are available at the end if you are too busy to read the chat scripts):

kamathln: Anyone from India ?
kamathln: I want to know a good resource for parsing indic UTF8
Popolon: kamathln, fontmatrix ?
amathln Popolon: fontmatrix ?
Popolon can be used without gnome
kamathln what does that do ?
Popolon fontmatrix is a font manager
kamathln ok.. does it have a good parser ?
Popolon it works very well with every indians fonts I have installed
Popolon It classify fonts
Popolon write them well
Popolon which kind of parser ?
kamathln Popolon: your knowledge of indic scripts ?
kamathln Popolon: can you comprehense the words "half vowels" and "half charectors" "ottaksharas" ?
kamathln that kind of parsing .. :-P
Popolon limited, I know that's alpha-syllabic
Popolon scriptures
pierremarc Depending of what you want to do, look at Harfbuzz, ICU or m17n
pierremarc All deal with shaping non-latin scripts
kamathln pierremarc: already looking at ICU .. but I guess m17n might have what i want .. dont know what harfbuzz ..will check .. thx so much for your input
pierremarc kamathln: Can we know what you are working on?
pierremarc TBH, I?m in the process of preparing some Indic support in Fontmatrix
kamathln there is an old kannada encoding format "baraha". I am trying to convert from it to unicode..
pierremarc http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF - I have not read it yet but it could be of some interest
kamathln i have written a simple match and replace based converter.. but when there are multiple half consonants or half vowels attached to a main full consonant, the utf8 comes out wrong .. and i am trying to fix it using a utf8 parser
kamathln http://www.baraha.com/web_docs/glyph_codes_kan.htm
pierremarc Is it the rendering of the resulting UTF string that is wrong or the string itself?
kamathln is the baraha glyph map
kamathln unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0C80.pdf
kamathln is the unicode..
kamathln they dont match one to one
* kamathln checks http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF
kamathln pierremarc: string itself comes out wrong
pierremarc And what results give regular tools such as iconv?
kamathln pierremarc: iconv is for transliteration right ?
pierremarc encoding conversions
kamathln !
kamathln must check..
kamathln never knew about it..
* kamathln bangs head on the wall
pierremarc But since "baraha" seems to be a private mapping over ASCII, it can be possible that iconv can?t do nothing for you
kamathln pierremarc: guessed as much .. but still i must have known abt iconv which i didnt
pierremarc Here "iconv -l | grep annada" gives nothing :(
kamathln pierremarc: okie then.. my hard work is not a waste ..
kamathln i will put up my converter up somewhere and get back here ..
kamathln it will be under GPL
kamathln pierremarc: do you have indic fonts installed ?
pierremarc Yes, I must have ones :)
kamathln ???????????? kamathln pierremarc: cool.. did you see a charector with dotted circle ?
pierremarc nope
kamathln it must be the second character..
kamathln ?
kamathln this one ..
pierremarc But I can try with another font
kamathln okies.. no problem .. the point i am trying to make is my app is not generating the correct output
kamathln pierremarc: my main logic is quite straightforward ..you may find it usefull
pierremarc Have you read the paper written by Y. Haralambous about its work on Indica?
pierremarc I?s my starting point for my own work in FM
kamathln pierremarc: no.. iam kinda noobie in this ..
pierremarc Could you mail it to me and I push it on fontmatrix.net in a private area?
kamathln oh sure!
pierremarc pierremarc at oep-h.com
pierremarc kamathln: http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/indica-santa94.pdf
pierremarc http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/09-ri-indic/indic-paper.html
pierremarc http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathin/
pierremarc oops, let me change the "i" into an "l"
kamathln pierremarc: thx :-) .. I owe you
pierremarc http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/
kamathln wow.. that indic paper was really usefull.. I think I am gonna do a lot of research and coding in the next few days :-0
pierremarc kamathln: If at some point you want to participate in this part of FM, you?ll be very welcome
kamathln pierremarc: thx .. i think i will.. though not immedietely .. currently busy searhcing for a job
kamathln pierremarc: fontmatrix is somehting i have been longing for .. God bless you..
Popolon kamathln, scim too ?
Popolon it includes uim + m17 interfaces as sub methods
pierremarc I got to go now. We?re aall a gang to hang on #fontmatrix channel, don?t hesitate to come
kamathln yeah.. but scim is a monster for a newbie like me ..
Popolon I don't know if it contains itself indian methods
Popolon ok
Popolon I use it for chinese typing
kamathln Popolon: it does .. thats how i wrote that kannada word if you scroll up a little :-)
Popolon as it's definitivly the best in this domain
Popolon sorry I was at phone
kamathln Popolon: yes.. and yudit too!
kamathln Popolon: you dont need to..

Then the discussion went a little offtopic and almost came back .. but it was fun :-)

i

Popolon pierremarc: doesn't render in my xchat display window, but in my xchat input text window
Popolon kamathln, that's used in srilanka tamoul ?
Popolon isn't it ?
Popolon I used yudit too before scim :)
kamathln srilana uses a bit of tamil
kamathln SriLanka*
Popolon it's fun for this handwritten hanzi recognition
kamathln Kannada is used in karnataka .. a south west part of India .. but not as south as Kerala
Popolon because at a shop, in my street, there is a tamoul and a srilanki they both speak tamoul
Popolon ah ok
Popolon I mixed the names because of the K...a.a :)
Popolon Don't know well the names of the states of india
Popolon The tamoul is from Pondicherry
kamathln wikipedia.org/wiki/kannada
kamathln it is Tamil
Popolon sorry Tamoul is in french
kamathln you mean you call Tamil "Tamoul" in french ?
kamathln cool :-)
Popolon yes
kamathln there is a state called "Tamil Nadu" in south east of India.. If you remember the map of India, the south of india is an upside down triangle surrounded by sea..
kamathln well.. i think it is better to look at a map than me explain ;-)
Popolon yes
Popolon I remember the shape of the india, look for maps in wikipedia
Popolon I know most of chinese province, next to learn india states :)
kamathln Popolon: cool.. u r a GK guy..
Popolon GK ?
kamathln General Knowldge
Popolon Puducherry => Tamil Nadu
Popolon ok
kamathln yes.. Pondicherry is in Tamil Nadu
Popolon Not really, In fact, I like, Indian & chinese culture :)
Popolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_India#Political_geography
Popolon exactly what I need
kamathln http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/India-states-numbered.svg
kamathln is what I was abt to offer
kamathln which was wrong anyways.. :-P
Popolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:India-states-numbered.svg
Popolon hihi , that's the same file
Popolon wrong ? There are errors ?
kamathln 12 is karnataka
kamathln no.. i cant see the names of the states .. only numbers
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_of_India
kamathln 24 is Tamil Nadu
Popolon there are names in my link (en.wiki)
Popolon as this is SVG it's easy to add names in several languages
Popolon I worked at grouping svg files in SVG category tree on commons few month ago
Popolon will have to add
kamathln Popolon: cool
Popolon it's possible to add 'translation of this map' in the file page itself
Popolon this is the case in some biological svg
kamathln oh nice!
kamathln biological ? like "parts of the body " file ?
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG
Popolon yes
Popolon parts of body
Popolon animals
Popolon etc...
kamathln oh nice ...
kamathln interesting ..
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_%E2%80%94_anatomy
Popolon there are numbered SVG
Popolon empty
Popolon and with translations
kamathln cool1
Popolon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Baleen_Whale_Physical_Characteristics.svg
Popolon here an example, how to do other translations of this picture on the page
Popolon you can download SVG
kamathln nice concept .. might be usefull somewhere else
Popolon edit it with inkscape (free software)
Popolon http://inkscape.org
Popolon and upload the translated one
kamathln i know of inkscape..
Popolon cool
kamathln used it to create a few icons for my prev company
kamathln Popolon: i was wondering if we can create a new xml based font standard ..
Popolon kamathln, there is already SVG fonts :)
kamathln !
kamathln cool.. checking out
Popolon http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html
kamathln already on it
kamathln :-)
Popolon they can use several layers
kamathln WoW
Popolon allowing multi-colored fonts (as in type 3)
Popolon this could be interesting for indian languages where some shapes are reused ?
Popolon in chinese there are about 50 basics caracters
* eimai [n=eimai@49.0-200-80.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be] entered the room.
Popolon the (about 50000 ???) other are combination of these few
Popolon combining basic element with transformation matrix could save lot of memory :)
kamathln Popolon: abt Indian fonts : You have a point..
kamathln like ? and ?
kamathln and ?
kamathln all are similar
kamathln and even ? and ?
Popolon yes in french we have accents eéè
Popolon uüûù
Popolon about the same
kamathln ?????!
kamathln whups
kamathln yeah!
Popolon :)
Popolon could be 5000 not 50000 characters in chinese :)
Popolon 85 000 in some dictionnaries :)
Popolon but I think it's not 85 000 characters, but 85 000 words
kamathln Popolon: was actually wondering if "soundfonts" too could be encoded in a similar way for scripts like Indian where there is a one to one match between syllables and chars
Popolon (sometime combinaison from 2 to 4 characters
kamathln Popolon: Chinese seems to be a very complex language..
Popolon no, it's really easy language
kamathln Popolon: I wonder how they built computers at all !
kamathln Popolon: oh!
Popolon but writing is a little bit complex
kamathln Popolon: oh
kamathln lot of things happened today for me .. will be saving my chat log and blogging abt it..
Popolon there is no grammatical conjugation in chinese for example
kamathln Popolon: then ? how to percieve what is being spoken ?
Popolon the verbs are often composed of 2 simple verbs, often like in english
kamathln Popolon: ok
Popolon go in, go out, come in, come out, are the same in chinse :)
kamathln you mean one word for all of it ?
Popolon the guy that created esperanto use lot of chinese grammar because of it's simplicity
Popolon no like in english
kamathln ah! ok
Popolon 2 simple verbs to create a verb defining accent
Popolon action not accent :)
kamathln ah! simple once you catch the nack
* rahul_b left the room (quit: "Leaving(?????? ????)").
Popolon yes
kamathln hey! will svg fonts make OCRs simpler ?
kamathln can we add the "direction" charectors/ half characters are written in ?
Popolon ??= come in, ?? go in, ?? come out, ??, go out
kamathln cool .. thoise rendered nicely on my pc
Popolon :)
kamathln and what is this about "simplified chinese" and "traditional chinese" ?
Popolon ??man, ?= follow
kamathln wow! each char is a word ?
Popolon ?=arbre, ??wood, ??forest, often written ??
Popolon yes
Popolon often two chars are used together
kamathln a picture is worth a word :-))
Popolon as one char=1 syllabe, and there are two few different syllabs
Popolon this is for avoid confusions
Popolon ??arbre, ?=racine :)
Popolon sorry
Popolon ??tree, ?=root :)
Popolon the same before arbre in french = tree in english
kamathln ah!
Popolon ?=tree, ??wood, ??forest, often written ??
Popolon then
kamathln which means forest tree
Popolon ??little, ?=young
kamathln oh
Popolon in means forest, it's used if it's alone to avoid confusion
Popolon if you add some characteristic, you can use only the half
Popolon as in : ??
Popolon young wood
kamathln what if they want to write a word of another language ?
Popolon that's the name of the famous temple, ???shaolin :)
kamathln like they want to write "Laxminarayan"
kamathln which is incidentally my name
Popolon they translate it, or use prononciation similarities
Popolon Saddly, I don't know how it is pronounced
Popolon ??
Popolon I suppose rayan = something like this
kamathln LOL !
kamathln I was wondering what that is
Popolon ???? (ximalaya) = Himalaya mountains
Popolon for example
Popolon that's pronouciation translation
kamathln Hey.. I am off to dinner .. Will be back in half an hour
kamathln mom yelling
Popolon ?=happiness, ?= horse, ?=pull, ?=elegant
Popolon this is clearly for pronounciation purpose
kamathln And I am off
kamathln pierremarc: Popolon: it was a very informative chat session .. thx very much

http://www.fontmatrix.net/kamathln/brh2utf8.tbz
http://www.infitt.org/ti2002/papers/64RAGHUV.PDF
http://www.baraha.com/web_docs/glyph_codes_kan.htm
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0C80.pdf
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/indica-santa94.pdf
http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/09-ri-indic/indic-paper.html

Slightly offtopic:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html

Firefox horizontal scroll

2008-03-05T11:40:00.004+05:30

I have configured my Thinkpad's trackpoint to emulate a scroll wheel when the middle button is held down (You can find out how here).

So in effect, it also emulates horizontal scroll in addition to vertical scroll. I realized that Firefox treats horizontal scroll to emulate back and forward buttons. Which turns out to be a nuisance as you usually tend to activate them accidentally when scrolling a page vertically.

The fix is to navigate to about:config in firefox, search for, mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action and set it to 0 or 3 . 0 disables it and 3 makes it scroll the page naturally.

P.S. : I realize that this piece of info is also posted in the same article, which I had skipped.

Is Microsoft like a shaving mirror to rest of the businesses

2008-02-29T23:45:00.005+05:30

This was a dump of my thought process and is not expected to be comprehensible. If you attain any success in parsing and gaining anything from this, please leave a comment ;-) .

Most of the times, I just hate the way Microsoft's business strategies are built. But try comparing them with complete frankness to all other software companies, and to all businesses in general. Microsoft, though has so many bad business practices, most of it are just what other companies do too.

But the hatred we feel is actually not hatred, but the fear that says this : " We are a small company, and if we do this mistake, it is not going to affect the world/humanity much. But If Microsoft does the same mistake, because of Microsoft's size it is going to affect the whole world/humanity in an irreversible way.".

What we need to realize is, though the above concern is right, Microsoft somehow ends up exaggerating and being supported by the malpractices of other companies, thus being a reflection to other companies. And hence, every mistake small companies do ends up being equally effective on the world. So if rest of the companies start an effort to be more benign, the effect will be that Microsoft and other big companies will have no choice but to be more benign.

This is true not only when it comes to big companies like Microsoft, but other big organizations like governments. What you feed them is what they will be and that is what you will get back. The size of the organization matters very much. Because, as the organization keeps recruiting people, and grows, the time and attitude at which they are recruited makes, will get added to the larger "organization" it is going to form, just like the rings you can see in a tree that can tell you a complete history about the tree. Thus the "attitude restoration" in larger companies will need more effort. And if the size of a company is huge, and it's business section is headed and filled by lot of people who are chameleons, it will be a huge effort to change it. What we are afraid is it may go out of control. What can help it, as I mentioned earlier that the small companies do affect the whole ecosystem, that the smaller companies and individual must be more aware and must make the right choices. Because the larger organization know that it will be a larger effort for it to change over, it will make it's efforts to influence the "rest of the world" to slow down as well, so that they can sustain the operations.

As a conclusion, I would like to request all the people. from big and small organizations alike, to give importance to "practice what you preach" and always have a "fair fight" by giving all the advantages, disadvantages, the current situation, the future, and all such things as equal and unbiased priorities as possible. At this point, It seems that I am discouraging the "finger pointing". No. What I am discouraging is baseless finger pointing,and finger pointing in others that is your own mistake.

This was an attempt to bring Microsoft, lock-in vendors and the Indian government, who usually become my favorite punching bags under a fair and unbiased analysis. Please do not take any expressions in this article literally.

Too much time on the computer

2008-02-29T11:46:00.004+05:30

You know you are working too much on the computer when you attempt to switch off the monitor by trying to take the mouse cursor to the switch on your monitor.

CyberFoolers

2008-02-23T22:14:00.005+05:30

Warning: The link might have a virus! I don't know. If you don't want to take risk, just look at the screen shots at the end. I have taken some precautions before going to that.

I ran my FireFox browser under GNU/Linux
I had closed all http auth sessions, deleted all cache, cookies and private data resident in the browser and started afresh.

Now read on..

I was going through one of my friend's blogs. I came across a comments that said 'Hi, Look at this '. I absolutely knew this was some kind of Spam, but I was adventurous.

When I followed the link, I was amazed how hard people try to make a fool out of the end user. I also had a real hearty laugh at the example I got.

In the following screenshots, note the OS detected. It is Linux. And note that they want me to think the browser is running an activex stuff. (It is just an animation!). They use JavaScript or HTTP server calls to detect the OS and the browser, and thus try to convince you that they can tinker with your OS directly.

Though I have wine installed, I dont have any mechanism to run ActiveX stuff. And I dont think Wine renders the window borders with WinXP dialog.

In this screen shot, it tries to fool me it is scanning .. and when it is done it shows me a list of viruses it "detected" with an option to "Remove all" viruses.

When I click that I get another "dialogue" where I can say run.. It explains you how to effectively infect your machine.

They take you to be so dumb, they have not written code that can allow you to move the "dialog". But the "close button" is active. It makes the following dialog appear via the "confirm" javascript code to give you this dialog.

Well. I thought "Enough of it" and killed the browser.

WiFi Frog

2008-02-19T22:12:00.003+05:30

"WiFi Frog" is a new term I coined to refer those people who jump in and out of Wi-Fi range, thus causing continuous " logged in" " logged out" " logged in" " logged out" messages from your chat client.

Is our brain designed for fourier analysis ?

2008-02-07T19:33:00.000+05:30

I am 25 years old and have seen many ups and downs in life. Not just when it comes to mood, but also several other things like social life, interests in different subjects, the way I treat different aspects of life, etc.

Now more often than not, and as I grew , I have been able to sense sinusoidal ups and downs . Don't ask me which ones and how, but I have been able to also sense that the factors that I used to perceive when I was younger which have other forms of ups and downs like square, triangle, irregular, actually don't exist as themselves , but are further broken down to other factors that have proper sinusoidal ups and downs.

That leaves a question in mind : Does everything that happen actually just a combination of several different sinusoidal waves, which control "Macro" things in our life? Is it just that our brain actually keeps doing Fourier analysis ? Is our life actually God's "listening" process of some "music" that is being played? The music that is constituted by all those "ups and downs" that we feel ?

Another question: What are emotions? How do they affect ? Who induces "Interest"s in particular persons ?

The greatest magic show.

2008-02-06T16:31:00.000+05:30

A pile of mud. Lifeless, inanimate, simplistic pile of mud. Lying on the ground or flowing around at the whim of the wind's and gravity's wishes. Stones, rocks, rivers. All behaving exactly as simple physics could explain.

Now imagine a part of the pile of the mud thinking for itself, being able to control where it goes, or may be collect water from the ground, energy from the sun, and channel, store it for future. Now wouldn't it be the most amazing magic trick you could see?

The magic pile of mud that could be you, your pet, the moss growing on a stone in your backyard, the snail feeding on it, the bird high up in the air planning to do a "drop" on your car you just washed.

This magic show is called "Life". Life is the most amazing magic shows you can witness. Don't miss it ! And please don't mess with it.

Safer rockets

2008-02-05T17:49:00.000+05:30

Billions of dollars are spent every year to build rockets, make their payloads, and also attempts of making them safer.

But till now the most valuable(sometimes even invaluable) part of the rocket: the payload module is still extremely close to the rocket (The part that usually explodes and causes disaster). Why not make sure there is a large distance between the module and the rocket like this? :

The picture is a quick sketch and ugly. The main idea is to add a long tubular frame between the rocket module and the payload module. The distance should be enough to protect the payload from extensive damage , even if the fuel bursts into flames.

Enhance Knowledge channel experience with wikipedia.org

2008-02-05T14:39:00.000+05:30

Especially if you are seeing Discovery, National Geographic, or such knowledge channels, keep Wikipedia ready for action. When I was watching Future Weapons today, I learnt about Bangalore Torpedo, Blade, Machine gun ,etc.

Chat with Tom Riddler

2008-02-02T19:04:00.002+05:30

I like to chat with this particular bot based on A.L.I.C.E . It is hosted at panbdorabots.com and is called "The Tom Riddler's diary" . It is fashioned after the Tom Riddler's Diary from the famous Harry Potter series, which most of you might have already guess. You have to quickly type in some text, after which a small timeout later, it erases and fades out your words slowly, and then its reply appears at the same place. Now, if you are a casual user, you would be thrilled to see the effects. But if you try to chat with it more than a while, you will go nuts.

Though I was not so interested either, I hit upon an idea where i can use it's Ajax urls to directly post and get the reply using command line. I built a small tool using shell script to do that. The same technique can be used to "Command-line"ify other simple ajaxpages.

You can download the tool here [ If my laptop is on. Check the top right section of my blog]. It is too simple for even GPL.. So I am leaving it in public domain.

Device drivers that "learn"?

2008-01-31T15:50:00.000+05:30

Recently there have been advancements on emulating the processes of mammalian and other brains. If this continues, will it be one day feasible to write a general purpose device driver, that "learns" what it is supposed to do?

Here are some interesting links:

Are we mosquitoes?

2008-01-30T22:24:00.000+05:30

Ouch.. grr.. Splat .. Haaaa

I just killed a mosquito. It was sucking the blood produced by hard work from my body by piercing through my skin, giving me pain and probably even diseases.

Was the last mosquito bite a punishment from God ? Was it right of me to kill the mosquito and thus stop the punishment ? Why would God be punishing me .. Is there any time when I did something similar to someone else ? Not just as me, but as a part of the society ?

Oh God .. Are all the oil rigs causing pain to mother Earth ? Just imagine.. The oil rigs pierce through the earth's crust like a syringe.. and suck out the oil from it.. oil stored and produced for thousands of years.. Are we really doing this to mother earth?

Okay. Now pause emotions and let rationality play. Those oils are just there from thousands of years produced by beings which were alive thousands of years ago. Of use to nobody otherwise. What is wrong with us using it ?
What could go wrong?

pollution.
cavity under land
unstable geo plates

I dont know! to see if these and more problems can occur, we need inputs ..
like

how much crude oil is available
what are the shapes of it ?
how deep is it ?
how do we get it ?
how much are we spending ?
how good and strong is the skin of earth that is holding us ?
how efficiently are we spending ?

And more information for which I am not expert enough to identify. And I am not expert enough to identify whether the information available on the websites has not been modified by greed and other evil factors. So sitting and calculating is out of question.

Till then all I can do is sit and pray to mother earth. "Oh Mother Earth, the greed and laziness of millions are at work at this. I will pray to them to control their laziness and greed. Forgive me as a child, or punish me as a part of this evil supporting society. "

And I also pray to my fellow beings "Let us all analyze this truthfully, and see if we are hurting Mother Earth. Let us exercise our truthfulness and intelligence into it. And if we are hurting mother earth, let us pro-actively change to better and renewable sources of energy."

[rant rant rant] Losing concentration.

2008-01-28T16:27:00.002+05:30

Recently my interests and energies have been dancing like disco lights. One minute I feel the surge to write a particular device driver, the next moment I want to blog about some philosophy flashing in my mind. By the time I sit to write the blog, I get a crazy idea for a nice movie script! Something I have never imagined before. And before I even start, my mind is blank and I can't remember even the theme. OK . Next I try to concentrate on some XUL based project, and in 5 minutes hell breaks loose with a stunning idea that I can stream my tvtuner from my PC to my laptop I struggle and find that the software that is able to play the sound doesnt like being streamed , and one that likes being streamed, does not know how to enable sound on the card. I move back to the XUL based project and find my mind will grant energy only if I think about the scheme script I wanted to write for GIMP.

This is what happens in sample 60 minutes of my average life in the last few months. The domain of interest is even more varied.

Photography
Digital Photo editing.
TV shows
Inventions
Cooking

My mind has gone over all these and more. In the last two months. I dont sit and think about them. These ideas come to me. Most of them when I least want them. Confuse me, tease me, and run away.

And I love ideas. I feel ideas are my life. But they keep running away :-(.

Can some one help me leash this "mad bull" mind of mine and tame it?

Indian software end-user's situation.

2008-01-28T15:39:00.000+05:30

This is a modified version of my mail http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2005-June/003378.html
in the http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2005-June/003374.html thread

The [current software] scenario [in India] is such that the most people away from the s/w industry take software for granted, without considering the license [Doh! They dont even know that there is such a thing as a "license" for software]. When a non-industrial Indian installs software , they just press "next" when the License page is displayed.. Just as their hardware vendor or the next door "computer guru" had taught them.
And for those who do (may be if they have nothing else to read and bored ;-) ), they dont care because for most of them avoiding taxes and law is a matter of business and pride. It is a small percentage of "educated" population who really care about education.

As such [type of] people are more [, and] have flooded, communication between really ethical people [who have thus become sparse], with thirst for knowledge always gets either poisoned or blocked by the other "majority". As such, even for a person who is very ethical - who prays to God, you can find him using "Pirated Software" with all the good glory going on in his mind with the ignorance of Licensing.. You can find educational institution being opened up by lighting a Lamp in front of the Lord, providing IT education ... on pirated software.

In such a place where people are ignorant that ethics also apply very much to "new technology", you can find plenty of such mistakes like that of Sarath. [ And Sarath at least by my imagination, has done his work with a good mind - of bringing Free Software to the masses. And It has also been learnt that it is the ignorant media which over-glorified Sarath that he had developed a "New operating system", while Sarath struggled to explain them he only re-mastered Knoppix ]

In a different angle, there are these so called "Computer People" and "Computer scientists", upon whom other people used to look as Gods. Their word was always final. These software people or in newer terms "hardware vendors" or "computer assemblers", when questioned about the dialog they used to get about the license, just used to say "just ignore it .. press next". Their words were final. The user was bound to press next. And for the hardware vendors, they too were affected with the pride of avoiding the law. It used to (and still does) gives them the feeling "the law doesn't apply to me. I am the King". They dont realise themselves as part of the community [when thinking about being lawfull. Their brain somehow masks it]. And for those few who did, were crushed by the business of those who didnt.

Where is God?

2008-01-28T15:09:00.000+05:30

This is a rather old writing of mine and resided at http://geocities.com/kamathln
The grammar and style of writing may be unsatisfactory .. so please tolerate :-) Text in square brackets [like this] are my new comments to text in red

When an old person searches for his/her glasses with them on already, we joke about it. Well how good are we at finding things? . God is all around us, even within us. And we ask God where he is! Well, if he is already around us why don't we see him? - These types of conversation might have gone on between the common spiritualists. The main problem is they don't say it properly, which leads to confusion! - "What do you mean by he is already around us?"

Let us discuss "WHAT" this god is. He keeps track of all the good and bad of what we do. He is responsible for the judgment of every action of what we do, what each and every thing does. From galaxies in total to each atom , each particle in an atom , each quark in the particle and what not. So, what is this guy? The answer is that God is the total sum of all existence. "Now what is this again ?" you might ask.

Compare the human brain and its cell. There are millions of zillions of these tiny wonders of the nature which on their own are hardly capable of thinking or taking complex decision like we do. But we cannot and do not take lightly the power of them being together and communicating to each other. We believe that every action we do leaves a vibration that can be sensed by the stars and other heavenly objects [I would love to rephrase this as "We beleive that every action we do, does affect every other element of the universe, in some way or other, whether perceptible to the human or not. This might be the way things are communicated or 'Signalled' between objects of the universe"]. "These vibrations are be very very subtle and can be neglected" is what a usual arguer or a common scientist comes out with. But here is where our "Brain cell argument" comes into picture. The effect of the signal from one cell can reach the brain even being so little ! This is because the signal reaches many neighboring cells. Now think about the "SIGNALS" that we leave or any other entity leaves. These do not reach just one star or heavenly object. These reach more than 10^11 (that is a number with 11 zeroes after a 10)stars in our own galaxy. Now that itself is a huge number. Then just realize that the signals actually reach out to 10^22 stars in the whole universe (that is the estimate the scientists have given us). And those are not just the stars that are out there on the black canvas at night. So by comparing it to the brain, we may guess that this whole thing might be able to "think" and "decide" about the signals got. And also try to realize what would be the effect on us if all these 10^22 stars sent signals back to us or the entity about their decision? Don't you think they have the power to act their decision on us or our environment? Cant this complex structure be the actual GOD? I agree that as the sun and the other planets, our moon , all these things are much closer to us than the other thing on the night sky, the effect of our action will be signalled strongly to these. And that is why the calculation of the good astrologers is always almost correct. But as they neglect the effect of the other heavenly bodies, their calculations can never be so perfect! Let us finally come to the answer. For the answer to be clear, let me change the question a bit: "Where are we?". The answer is ,"We are inside God".

Linux is not the end of being "Open source"

2008-01-19T00:33:00.000+05:30

Most people have the feeling that using or just installing GNU/Linux is both the beginning and end of the Free Software and "Open Source" philosophy. But if you see their businesses, you will understand that they are anything but "open".
One or more of these usually show that the other end has no clue about "Free and Open Source" philosophy. or they are afraid to give you the real clue about the philosophy :-) .

1) They "use" GNU/Linux and other FOSS products, but their product itself is closed and proprietary. In other words, it runs over "Free and Open Source Software", but is not "Free and Open Source Software" itself. This also includes plug-ins and extensions for existing "Free and Open Source Software".
2) It keeps consuming and spewing data in an extremely non-standard and non-flexible format.
3) All development is done in-house and other developers are warded off if they come into their "territory", at all times
4) All the source code is available, but you can compile it and use it only if you have proprietary compiler/ toolkit.
5) The product is not a complete software, but is a value addition.
6) They build a custom software for you , they tell you it is open source, because the OS it runs on, any server it runs on, The interpreters it uses , the compiler they chose everything is "Free and Open Source Software". But they are not ready to give you the source of the custom Software they built for you.
7) They don't have a proper "copyright" and "license" section anywhere in the Source, and /or don't give credit to those people from whom they got code snippets, and/or the libraries where due.

Copywrong

2008-01-15T15:40:00.000+05:30

There is nothing like a Copyright. There is either a Copyleft or a Copywrong.

Lunch

2008-01-15T14:11:00.001+05:30

Truth, Beauty and Justice

2008-01-13T01:53:00.000+05:30

A lot of people try to convince me that I am too much "alone". I would like to quote this from Albert Einstein.

"Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation". - Sir Albert Einstein

Stop fighting for this speck of dust.

2008-01-13T00:59:00.003+05:30

I have always argued that compared to the universe, the earth is just a speck of dust. And for this speck of dist we try to fight for land, power and everything that our human mind can think of. Isn't it simply stupid?

I wanted to write down analogies which can help people perceive how small our earth is, and hence how small and powerless we humans are in front of the universe, how insignificant we are in comparison to the universe.

As I was thinking of analogies, it suddenly occurred to me that someone on the net might already have done that. I went ahead and searched, and I got almost perfectly what I was expecting. Please read http://www.astrosurf.com/benschop/Scale.htm and realize how stupid it is to have hatred based on religions, caste, occupation, nation.... skin colour ! (ROTFL) hohoho!.

Here is one more:
http://members.aol.com/falconmaster29/universe/sage-3.htm

and if you have still not closed the window from allthe philosophical boredom, this google search might help you get bored properly:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sun+earth+milky+way+size+comparison

Update:
YouTube - How big is the Universe?
The universe - How big are you?
YouTube - Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)
YouTube - Large scale simulation of the universe

PlayTV PixelView Pro2 from ProLink. working under Debian Lenny AMD64

2008-01-10T23:45:00.000+05:30

I always had my "PlayTV PixelView Pro2 tv tuner from ProLink" working under Debian i386 32bit. That was not out of the box. I had to remove the'bttv' module and add it again with some parameters my tv tuner likes.

I have a script which goes like this:

rmmod bt878 bttv
modprobe bttv bttv_verbose=1 bttv_debug=1 card=72 pll=28 radio=1 tuner=38 audiomux=1
modprobe bt878
sleep 1
$@

But after I installed Lenny, I could not get the audio to work consistently. I always had to change PAL audio decoding method every time I change the channel. It did not matter from which to which!

In the 32 bit Debian (Etch in my case) I had got the module params by trial and error. But after it started to act up in Lenny, I got wiser. That, I accidentally hit upon

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/peripherals-hardware/65797-video4linux2-bttv-configuration-parameters-k-world-xpert-tv878-pci-tv-card.html

So I opened the case, pulled out the card and saw that it was a Connexant 787 Chipset. I used the parameters from it, and it Failed to even show up video!!!

So I just replaced the tuner and card parameters with the older ones. And it worked like a charm! And my chair was delighted it became a Garfield throne again! Alas the radio and the IR input devices still dont work :-(

modprobe bttv card=78 tuner=38 radio=1 pll=28 gpiomask=0x000007 audiomux=0x000001,0x000000,0x000002,0x000002,0x000001 automute=0

Afternoon Lunch

2008-01-10T17:09:00.000+05:30

Finally. Finally I remember to snap a pic of my lunch.,

Time for a break

2008-01-09T16:02:00.000+05:30

It is a long time since I took break from my project. It has been a long week sorting through hundreds of command line image processors. It is time for me to fill in http://clipsmaster.wikia.com . If you are wondering what it is all about , wait for me to fill in the wiki. It is supposed to tell you exactly that. And more.

I just thought it would be a great time to take a break just before that. So I went hunting for games on Debian, which I have not done for a long time. Some of my picks till now:

* Beneath a steel sky.
bloboat
cultivation
Billard-gl
* xmoto

* == played before

I am still at "c" in "apt-cache search game|less ". So let us "c" what more I will get. Also spent some time customizing KDE.

Today's breakfast

2008-01-09T10:56:00.000+05:30

Rice Sevai

Yesterday Evening's Snack

2008-01-08T12:10:00.000+05:30

Ragi Sevai baath.

Lenny amd64 installed.

2008-01-08T12:08:00.000+05:30

With Lenny Amd64 installed, I can move on to my project "CLIPsMaster".

Lenny Debian amd64 being installed!

2008-01-07T12:53:00.000+05:30

Duh! It was that easy! (check the title's link)
The hd-image solved my problems!
Basically, instead of searching for a cdrom drive it searches for the cd image in the top directories of all partitions of the hard disks and mounts it on /cdrom of the installer.

BreakFast

2008-01-06T11:49:00.000+05:30

Today's morning breakfast: Idli

Evening snack

2008-01-05T17:23:00.000+05:30

I plan to keep a log of everything that I eat for breakfast, lunch , evening snack and dinner,

Today's Evening snack:
Konkani: Panpolo.
Kannada: Neerdosa.

Ingredients:
Rice, coconut gratings and salt. Ground properly to a fine paste. Then follow standard method to make dosa from paste.

I promise to include pictures from my next "food log".

Installing 64bit Debian from 32 bit Debian Try 2: Failed

2008-01-04T21:46:00.000+05:30

This method failed exactly with the same error as before. duh.

On to Method 3:

Get the kernel and initrd from the businesscard CD
Configure grub to boot from it.
Modify initrd to boot the iso image.
Enjoy the benefits of my pathetically slow but unlimited net connection.

Wish me luck!

Installing 64bit Debian from 32 bit Debian Try 1: Failed

2008-01-04T00:07:00.000+05:30

I am running a 32 Debian right now. Want to install the 64 bit OS without a CDROM : I am out of empty CDs and I am too lazy to get a new one. I downloaded Debian for AMD64 and started the installation using qemu. It failed with lot of synchronization issues. May be because the hard disk I had given to qemu was a real one and other partitions, on the same hard disk was being used.

Next try: install to USB portable hard disk using qemu. And then use that to deboostrap my SATA disk.

CHDK Firmware: Unleash the Power in your 'PowerShot'.

2008-01-03T18:54:00.000+05:30

Today, it is not a surprise if you find GNU/Linux that can run on something which you wouldn't guess even in your dreams.. So I set out on searching if there is a GNU/Linux that can run on my Canon A750 IS. I was disappointed when I found that the only result I felt was right, turned out to be an April fool joke.

But my search was not entirely useless though. In fact, It was more exciting than just getting a shell on the camera. I stumbled upon a Free and Open Source firmware add-on for several Canon A750. The project is called CHDK (http://chdk.wikia.com). It gives amazing number of possibilites including some standard features like raw CCD dumps and video compression unfortunately not provided by Canon.

As a precaution, I suggest you wear a seatbelt and have a glass of water/ friend ready before you read the entire feature list.

Making Images seamless horizontally or vertically only.

2008-01-01T15:35:00.000+05:30

I needed to take a scenery and tile it horizontally ( the "Make seamless" plug-in would only make it seamless both vertically and horizontally at the same time ), after 2 tries I got the right steps to to make an image seamless horizontally or vertically only.

These steps are for The GIMP, for making images seamless horizontally. You can guess the steps to make a vertically seamless image easily from this.

1) Open the image in GIMP . (Lets call the default layer the "base")

2) Select and copy the left 1/3rd of the "base" layer.

3) Paste it in a new transparent layer (let us call it "left on right") at the right 1/3rd of the image

4) Select and copy the right 1/3rd of the "base" layer.

5) Paste it in a new transparent layer (let us call it "right on left") at the left 1/3rd of the image

6) Add white layer masks to both the new layers.

7) Select the "blend" tool - use the "Foreground to background" gradient, linear blend mode.
(make sure the 2 colors are black and white)

8) On the layer mask of "right on left" layer, draw a gradient from exactly 1/3rd of the image, all the way to the left boundary of the image.

9) On the layer mask of "left on right" layer, draw a gradient from exactly 2/3rd of the image, all the way to the rightmost boundary of the image.( or you can also copy "right on left"'s mask and paste it on "left to right"'s mask and flip it horizontally)

10) Flatten the image (if necessary.. I haven't)

11) Crop away 1/6th of the image from left and right each.

becomes

With these, the image will now be seamless horizontally, retaining the nature of the image vertically.

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You can use other portion sizes too instead of 1/3rds and 1/6ths if you have got the logic.

The spirit of Wikipedia / FOSS and Sir Albert Einstein

2007-12-30T20:11:00.000+05:30

The spirit that drives Free and Open Source Software and Wikipedia is based on that of the knowledge as a property of humanity and "sharing knowledge" the essence of human life, thus making it a duty of every human being. I always felt it as necessary for the current generation of students of all fields and grades to cultivate this spirit.

My thrill knew no bounds when I read an address to students made by my favorite scientist of all times - Sir Albert Einstein :

" My dear Children,
I rejoice to see you before me to-day, happy youth of a sunny and fortunate land.
Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance, in order that you may recieve it, honour it, add to it, and one day dutifully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things we create in common.
If you always keep this in mind you will find a meaning in life and work and acquire the right attitude towards other nations and ages. "

It is this address that kicked me out of my laziness, and urged to create a blog - so that I can share my knowledge and ideas, and care the other steps : "add"ing and "dutifully hand"ing, in addition to the "reciev"ing and "honour"ing that I have always done.