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.

My name is Laxminarayan Kamath

[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.

My current mood.

http://xkcd.com/379/

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

Sudoku solver

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]. (Will upload to github when I Can)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

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.

Geocities.com/kamathln restored

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.

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.

My goal in life

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 ...

Too much time on the computer

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.

WiFi Frog

"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.

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.

[rant rant rant] Losing concentration.

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?

Time for a break

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:

1. * Beneath a steel sky.
2. bloboat
3. cultivation
4. Billard-gl
5. * 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.
Update: The above mentioned project, as well as searching for games have been dropped 

Lenny amd64 installed.

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

Lenny Debian amd64 being installed!

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.

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

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






On to Method 3:

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

Wish me luck!

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

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.