GIMP : 2 Layer Dialogs trick

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

[ 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.

CHDK Fun

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

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 :

Power saving on GNU/Linux laptops

1. Forget all snazzy desktop stuff. Especially those that update the screen unnecessarily.
2. Try this: http://lesswatts.org .
3. 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 :

1. 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.
2. Use text based browsers unless the page demands a GUI browser. Elinks is an excellent choice.
3. 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 ?
4. 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.
5. Have a decent amount of RAM. This reduces the kernel having to wake the hard disk often to play with the swap.
6. Remove anything unnecessary. Unnecessary daemons, Unnecessary devices, Unnecessay drivers, etc..
7. 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.
   

Saying "NO" to Infosys, TCS, Wipro.

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.

Time Lapse Video using CHDK

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 .

Baraha to UTF8 (Kannada) pre-release

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

Chat with Tom Riddler

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.

Indian software end-user's situation.

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.

Linux is not the end of being "Open source"

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.

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

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.