Blogs

After spending a couple of months on a dialup connection, I feel a lot relieved with my new BSNL DataOne broadband connection now!

The speed ? I must say that it simply rocks, though I must investigate a bit on the modem's (ADSL router) web management interface a little more. Just that I couldn't get connected to the internet following the instructions as mentioned in the modem's manual. The modem happens to be a UTStarcom UT-300R2. After a lot of fisting with its web-management interface, I gave up and tried the other option (running pppoeconfig command on Debian) and the connection came up in a snap!

For some (perhaps superstitious reason), I couldn't still get my Slackware box to connect using the modem. Tried running the 'adsl-setup' from the rp-pppoe package and still no luck. While connection, I keep getting the message 'Timeout while waiting for PADO packet'. Some more investigation is needed to fix this problem.

On the contrary, life on Debian seems more feasible with a stable/faster internet connection that I'm using right now. Maybe its time I switched back to Debian for mainstream work. Oh yes, I still love my good old Slackware ;-).

I was a little shocked today when I found that someone hit every single page/link possible on my website creating an immense spike on bandwidth usage. A quick whois check on the IP address (63.148.99.250) revealed the following:

root@phobos:~# whois 63.148.99.250
Qwest Communications NET-QWEST-BLKS-2 (NET-63-144-0-0-1)
63.144.0.0 - 63.151.255.255
Cyveillance QWEST-63-148-99-224 (NET-63-148-99-224-1)
63.148.99.224 - 63.148.99.255

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2004-12-17 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

Hmmm, a spam-bot scanning websites for e-mail addresses ? Another check on google revealed that a lot of bloggers and website maintainers hate this too - goes with the name Cyveillance/QWEST.

After little more google search, I found a nice website that maintains a list of bad bots on the Internet!. The site goes by the name kloth.net, and list seems well documented, perhaps I must add all these IP ranges to my website banlist. But then, maybe am not so paranoid about them right now.

Right now, I'm demonstrating the power of Drupal and of Open source CMS suite to my students. I just hope Vignesh is awake reading what I'm typing, and I also hope Shrinivasan has a clue about whats going on.

Franklin is busy with his pen and paper... So cant comment much!

Its been quite a while since I went on rounds checking for other Content Management Systems. This time, I came across two neat CMS solutions:

• Xaraya - The website was well polished and attractive, but I had a tough time getting their CMS to work on my machine. Perhaps I'll wait till it gets stable. But from what I found, it was supposed to be full-featured user friendly. But it does seem to look a bit complex.
• Etomite - This CMS was the most user-friendly, yet powerful and well-designed CMS that I've come across lately. Infact, after the initial install-and-test cycle on it, I was tempted to migrate my website onto this CMS now ;-). Okay, I think I'll spend some more time with it, understand its features and stuff well and then think about the migration part.

I get a feeling that making dynamic websites is longer a pain as it used to be (atleast on the technological front). With a lot of readily packaged solutions available for free, I guess the most crucial part of website development right now would be its design. Now this is where eal creativity kicks in - the need for creating individuality and originality. Of course, there are a lot of templates available, and most of them attractive and innovative. Adopting one of these templates would be feasible perhaps for a personal website (like mine ;-)), but for an official website, this might mean compromising on the website's individuality.
I hope this issue could be tackled too, sooner or later.

Its been almost two months since I had installed Mandrake CE 10.1 on my parents machine. I had to log on to their machine today to check for some Mandrake specific tools. To my surprise, I found my mom's folder filled with the following stuff:

• Her favourite recipe cleanly organized in a folder called 'samayil' in Tamil - all of them typed by her (of course with lots of patience, I presume) using OpenOffice.Org Writer.
• A couple of files showing off her skills on Gimp!
• A futile (albeit persistent and determined) attempt at some Rangoli sketches (or Kolam, in Tamil) in a folder by name 'Kolam'
• Downloaded snapshots of some good scenary
• Some useful notes on concepts that she learnt on her own using Gimp!, Kaffeine, OpenOffice and other tools.
• Playlists of her favourite songs

Phew... now who says GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop ?

As a test, I deliberately moved my scanned picture from her folder to a random location (outside her home folder infact), and asked her to search for my picture. She was quick at using the "Find Files" option and recovering the location of the picture. I'm sure she could make an excellent case study for proving that GNU/Linux is really ready for the desktop [Considering the fact that she's uneducated]. I was simply amazed and happy at her GNU/Linux skills now :-)

Phew... Spent the beginning of this month on Ruby trying (pretty hard) at my ruby shell project. Then came Deepavali (the festival of lights and pollution). Had a tough time trying to get things right with the Tata Indicom WLL internet service representatives, to get back my broken internet connection with not much luck. Now, I'm back online through dialup internet (BSNL netone, that is). I'm pretty amazed at the speed - 5.5 KB/sec on average... great for a dialup connection, while the earlier Tata Indicom WLL connection gave me an average of 4 KB/sec, though they claim it to provide bandwidth of 115 kbps (unlike 56 kbps on dialup)!

Seems like I'd rather switch permanently on a dialup connection now, till I find something better.

Some things I figured out while setting up Slackware 10.0 today:

• Compiled linux 2.6.9 kernel with support for all I/O scheduling algorithms that came with it. To enable a specific scheduler during system boot, I need to add the kernel parameter "elevator=cfq" or similar. Here, cfq indicates the CFQ I/O scheduler. I could replace it with Anticipator I/O scheduler using the kernel parameter "elevator=as" instead, at the boot: or LILO prompt. Other options available are "elevator=deadline" and "elevator=noop".
• Searched the Internet for a console based audio player with builtin software equalizer. I found just one project called LinuxEyes. Sadly, it never worked on my machine and I could not get access to its sources. There were other good players like mp3blaster, mjc and so on... but none had builtin equalizer. After a while, I gave up, and beautified xmms with eq-xmms plugin, Crystality plugin and WMA support for XMMS. XMMS does look sexy on a Kalak_Amp theme (available from the site 1001 Skins.
• Installed all my "currently" required tools and applications - Ruby, PostgreSQL, MagicPoint, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, J2SDK 1.4, Flash plugin, and the lot. Everything went like a breeze.

After a brief date with Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition, am finally back again to Slackware 10.0. So why did I leave Mandrake ? Well.. for a couple of reasons:

• It was not developer friendly. A lot of development libraries were
  missing. A lot of applications wont compile from sources without these
  development libraries.
• It was too slow for my machine. The machine in question is
  an AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ with 256 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard-disk, ASUS A7V266EX
  motherboard (Via KT266 chipset). This machine is being setup as a
  Linux Terminal Server running multiple instances of Xvnc server with the entire
  K Desktop Environment(!) to serve 5 old Pentium 2 boxes (with 64 MB RAM)
  configured as thin clients. After migrating the entire setup to Slackware
  10.0, I could feel significant performance improvements! The environment is now
  responsive inspite of 5 different instances of KDE running - atleast better than
  how it felt on Mandrake. Of course, a Mandrake zealot would give me a list of
  things to do in order to make Mandrake perform better, but hey! that was just one
  of my problems ;-)
• Configuration files being thrown all around. This has remained as a common
  problem to me across many distributions which include RedHat and derivatives,
  SuSE, Debian and so on. A dozen of config files for system startup services,
  located on obscure directories, and silly (rather stupid) commands to mess with
  those config files and so on. I mean, all it takes to start apache web server on
  any Linux distribution is to issue the command /usr/sbin/apachectl start
  (provided that apachectl script existed on /usr/sbin directory). But I see
  another wrapper script on Mandrake lying in /etc/init.d/ directory and a silly
  command called service to invoke that script (which was never needed). So
  on Mandrake, you'd say service httpd start to start the apache web server.
  This is exactly what I call "Layers of unnecessary complexity!". Some would argue
  that this was supposed to be some standard compliance... but I'm not impressed
  by it, anyways.
• A lot of packages do not compile! I tried compiling centericq and it
  broke. Same goes for the eq-xmms plugin, xmms-wma plugin and yes, mozilla firefox
  itself. I have no idea as to why... perhaps something really went wrong with the
  default set of libraries during my early mess-around while trying to get
  Apache+MySQL+PHP to work. Worse, I couldn't revert back to a workable
  configuration after I messed up some existing libraries. For some reason, RPMs
  have never been kind enough to me ;-)
• Not many applications (of my tastes) exist on Mandrake. I thought, what
  if source compile breaks... let me find a readily available RPM package for
  Mandrake and I was dissappointed. I couldn't find the latest RPM of centericq
  (4.11a), eq-xmms, MPlayer-1.0pre5, ruby, postgresql... and the list could go on,
  endlessly.

I'm not complaining... its just that Mandrake is not the distro for me. Its best suited for newbies. Infact, I got Mandrake installed earlier to just get a feel about how it works, so that I could recommend the same for my parents. And hey, my parents loved Mandrake 10.1! They've tried Slackware 10.0 before, then it was Knoppix for a while, and then Xandros. Now they're so much in love with Mandrake. CDROMs could be inserted as-is and opened by double-clicking on the CDROM icon (no more right-click and mount required). Pressing the eject button on the CDROM drive, ejects the CDROM (no need to right-click and umount on the CDROM icon before ejecting, anymore), and yes, Mandrake has good support for Tamil on KDE. My parents could now browse tamil websites without any hiccups. Apart from missing a couple of applications, my parents were comfortable on Mandrake 10.1. I thought its best that I left Mandrake on their machine alone, and get on Slackware on mine ;-)

After thinking a bit on patterns of question that we normally tend to ask, I have quickly derived a method by which the shell could be made to respond to queries sent to the shell as simple questions. Apart from the noise words, most simple questions have a verb and/or a noun. A noun should be parsed by a definition handler, and a verb should be parsed by an action handler.

Coming to think deep about it, English is a badly designed (and evolved) spoken/written language. Sometimes, I just feel the urge of implementing my own spoken/written language that remains perfectly consistent and easily interpretable by the computer as well as humans. Oh yes, there's Sanskrit, the ancient and unadulterated Tamil (both of which I know conceptually, but hardly indepth). But darn, most part of the world breathes English, and asking them to learn a new language isn't going to help. And yes, the most tricky issue is to get other languages to work on my machine first :-P.

On the other hand, I was just thinking of creating a subset of English with a more consistent dialect in forming phrases, clauses and sentences which could be easily adopted by us as a form of spoken language. I need to think more, think deeper to get ideas, as this can get much complex beyond my mental perception.

Sweet sound of pouring rain, with cool wind blowing - a pleasant night to sleep indeed. Hmmm, I miss the cool breeze of bangalore always... the most gentle weather that I had ever come across. Rains make me feel nostalgic - they make me think so much about my childhood when I used to wait for the first rain of the Spring (during June or sometimes during the end of May). The coming of spring were a delightful welcome after the hot months of summer. The cool breeze, accompanied with thunder, showers of hail stone and the pleasant smell of eucalyptus from the trees in my neighbourhood, all welcoming the season of spring - were some of the most pleasant memories of my childhood.

Life used to be great back then, except of course for my schooling (I hated school way too much, it somewhat killed my freedom and made my days tasteless and monotonous mostly). As I grew up, the trees were cut down, to be replaced with badly architected buildings, houses, narrow roads and cemented foot path. Time passed by, and the showers of hail stone that marked the beginning of Spring, stopped. In the recent years, I've seen hot summer during the month of July. But what still remains in Bangalore is the cool breeze.