Its been a while that I am searching for a good service that can host my photos and give a nice gallery for viewing pleasure. I toyed with the idea of buying space in Flickr, but for $25 a year for an unlimited space would be a waste of money if I don't post enough.. which I don't. A lazy ass, thats what I am. Picasa would have been cheaper, $5 for 20 GB wasn't a bad deal taking into consideration that the extra space would be shared with Gmail too. But then again, Picasa's slideshow is horrible. I wanted nice gallery badly. Even thought of getting a hosted space too.
Today, a post comparing tumblr and posterous caught my attention and found me researching what is best. Posterous had me hooked with the idea of automatic galleries when you send multiple photos in an email. That.. coupled with the fact that Posterous is on cloud granting me an unlimited space to host my photos did me in. And now i am a posterous user :D. Find my photo blog at http://sajesh.posterous.com/. The blog name "Rang Barse..." was suggested by my dear friend, Avinash. Will soon be moving posterous to a custom domain and filling up with pics. Stay Tuned....
January 21, 2010
January 7, 2010
Outlook Poem
Our office was moving from Lotus notes to MS Exchange and the process started way back in November last year. Given a choice I personally would have chosen some open source options like Zimbra but the policies are made by the higher ups not me so MS Exchange it was. And since the migration started happening around me I had been waiting for one. Between Lotus notes and MS Exchange, I would gladly choose MS Exchange as notes suck big time. But well, the technical team kept the migration on hold for few people, which included me, and i kept on asking them when. Last monday i was all set to ask them a query again . This time coupled with a poem :D. But my bad luck decided to shake things up and before i could finish the poem, i got an email from the technical team saying it shall be done this friday! and they did it on monday itself!.
anyways, i completed the poem and sent them this later. I reproduce it here for public consumption.
pichle saal ka waada tha
jo aapko nibhana tha
lotus notes hataana tha
outlook ko bithana tha
remind kiya baar baar
request bheje the theen chaar
kaha jald aa raha hai sarkaar
aur thoda karo intezaar
gaya november, gaya december
din badle calendar par
fwd mails aate hain outlook se chaaron pehar
dekh nahi paata images lotus par
outlook ki raah take hai mera mann.
dhanyawaad doonga main har kshan,
agar kar do hal mera yeh prashn
kab aakhir kab karoge mera outlook migration?
anyways, i completed the poem and sent them this later. I reproduce it here for public consumption.
pichle saal ka waada tha
jo aapko nibhana tha
lotus notes hataana tha
outlook ko bithana tha
remind kiya baar baar
request bheje the theen chaar
kaha jald aa raha hai sarkaar
aur thoda karo intezaar
gaya november, gaya december
din badle calendar par
fwd mails aate hain outlook se chaaron pehar
dekh nahi paata images lotus par
outlook ki raah take hai mera mann.
dhanyawaad doonga main har kshan,
agar kar do hal mera yeh prashn
kab aakhir kab karoge mera outlook migration?
December 29, 2009
Ubuntu 9.10 and some issues
and so finally i got my harddisk back from my friend and decided to upgrade my machine to the latest Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala. For the Jaunty release I had problems with the Live CD. It wont boot properly. It would most often boot into a black screen and the LED on the CD drive will show no activity. I finally ended up doing a direct install without trying out the Live CD.
The Karmic Koala was no different. It refused to boot into the Live CD environment. Black Screen came up a couple of times. Tried Direct Install and that too failed thrice in between the installation. The machine would just hang up! Luckily my roomies had laptop which helped to check online about these CDs which refused to boot. Found some boot parameters noapic and nolapic which i had to pass in order to get the Live CD working.
The Installation was successful with the parameters but then the hard disk installation started behaving exactly like the Live CD. I should have passed the boot parameters but tried a reinstall once to see if that fixes it. No go. the noapic and nolapic parameters where handy when i passed them from GRUB and i got the desktop running fine but the parameters passed that way are only temporary. I had to make them permanent. It was then that i found out how much they have changed in GRUB2.
There is no easy menu.lst file which you can edit and hack your way into GRUB. There are atleast 3 different files I needed to work upon to get this thing going. GRUB2 works like this. Instead of a menu.lst we have a grub.cfg in /boot/grub. This file is readonly and is updated by sudo update-grub command. The settings related to GRUB file is in /etc/default/grub and there are some files in /etc/grub.d which are read during the grub update. A fix on ubuntuforums.org suggested to modify the 40_custom file and issue an update-grub command. I did that but ended up my custom entries below the main grub ones. to get them on top i will have to change 07_custom. That doesn't help of course as grub just picks up the first one in its path. besides there was always the problem of updating my list with every kernel change. so i was searching for something like the menu.lst file where you give in the parameters to the kernel. on scanning the grub parameters in /etc/default/grub i came across "quiet splash" value for one of the parameters. I gave in my parameters just after the "quiet splash", saved the file and issued an update-grub. I could see in grub.cfg that the kernel got appended with my values. This time around the machine booted into the desktop just fine.
Installation of all the necessary apps took almost one day. Everything was fine but the suspend and hibernate still refused to work. I suspect its something with the noapic and nolapic i passed but I have left them for time being as i dont use them on a daily basis.
One issue that i faced yesterday was with VLC. The sound output was flaky and choppy a bit. As if i am trying to play an old vinyl cassette. The files were fine in other players. Upon a little investigation found out the culprit. Pulseaudio. Seems ubuntu developers had done a shabby job of integrating it with ubuntu. I tried removing vlc-plugin-pulse but lost my sound in VLC. I tried few other things and in the end what worked for me was this. I removed the vlc-plugin-pulse and set the audio output in VLC to Unix OSS sound. then closed the VLC and installed the vlc-plugin-pulse again. This time around i didnt change the audio output to pulseaudio but kept the Unix OSS sound and voila! no jerks and tears from VLC. Audio is working fine now on VLC.
Another victim of Pulseaudio was my fav game Urban Terror. The sound kept irritating me like hell. It would start and stop and feel jerky all around. luckily found a solution for this too. installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio solved the sound troubles with UrT. This apparently works for Quake games too.
There is one thing i haven't tested yet and that is Skype. I hope the sound in Skype just works fine. Will test it today :).
update: Skype works. beautifully.
The Karmic Koala was no different. It refused to boot into the Live CD environment. Black Screen came up a couple of times. Tried Direct Install and that too failed thrice in between the installation. The machine would just hang up! Luckily my roomies had laptop which helped to check online about these CDs which refused to boot. Found some boot parameters noapic and nolapic which i had to pass in order to get the Live CD working.
The Installation was successful with the parameters but then the hard disk installation started behaving exactly like the Live CD. I should have passed the boot parameters but tried a reinstall once to see if that fixes it. No go. the noapic and nolapic parameters where handy when i passed them from GRUB and i got the desktop running fine but the parameters passed that way are only temporary. I had to make them permanent. It was then that i found out how much they have changed in GRUB2.
There is no easy menu.lst file which you can edit and hack your way into GRUB. There are atleast 3 different files I needed to work upon to get this thing going. GRUB2 works like this. Instead of a menu.lst we have a grub.cfg in /boot/grub. This file is readonly and is updated by sudo update-grub command. The settings related to GRUB file is in /etc/default/grub and there are some files in /etc/grub.d which are read during the grub update. A fix on ubuntuforums.org suggested to modify the 40_custom file and issue an update-grub command. I did that but ended up my custom entries below the main grub ones. to get them on top i will have to change 07_custom. That doesn't help of course as grub just picks up the first one in its path. besides there was always the problem of updating my list with every kernel change. so i was searching for something like the menu.lst file where you give in the parameters to the kernel. on scanning the grub parameters in /etc/default/grub i came across "quiet splash" value for one of the parameters. I gave in my parameters just after the "quiet splash", saved the file and issued an update-grub. I could see in grub.cfg that the kernel got appended with my values. This time around the machine booted into the desktop just fine.
Installation of all the necessary apps took almost one day. Everything was fine but the suspend and hibernate still refused to work. I suspect its something with the noapic and nolapic i passed but I have left them for time being as i dont use them on a daily basis.
One issue that i faced yesterday was with VLC. The sound output was flaky and choppy a bit. As if i am trying to play an old vinyl cassette. The files were fine in other players. Upon a little investigation found out the culprit. Pulseaudio. Seems ubuntu developers had done a shabby job of integrating it with ubuntu. I tried removing vlc-plugin-pulse but lost my sound in VLC. I tried few other things and in the end what worked for me was this. I removed the vlc-plugin-pulse and set the audio output in VLC to Unix OSS sound. then closed the VLC and installed the vlc-plugin-pulse again. This time around i didnt change the audio output to pulseaudio but kept the Unix OSS sound and voila! no jerks and tears from VLC. Audio is working fine now on VLC.
Another victim of Pulseaudio was my fav game Urban Terror. The sound kept irritating me like hell. It would start and stop and feel jerky all around. luckily found a solution for this too. installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio solved the sound troubles with UrT. This apparently works for Quake games too.
There is one thing i haven't tested yet and that is Skype. I hope the sound in Skype just works fine. Will test it today :).
update: Skype works. beautifully.
October 26, 2009
why?
when you don't have any kind of commitment to the job, no passion to drive you forward and no incentive to stick to it, why the hell are you still hanging on?
June 28, 2009
Terminator Salvation
Like any other die hard fan of Terminator series, i went to watch Terminator Salvation yesterday. Terminator Salvation begins the story many years after the Judgement Day where the Resistance is fighting the machines. This is the future where Skynet controls the world as was told in the previous Terminator Series. John Connor is one of the resistance leaders looking out for Kyle Reese, his father, who technically is still a teenager. There is one more significant character introduced in this movie and that is of Marcus. Marcus was a criminal sentenced to death in the past with the agreement that his organs will be donated to a cancer patient. He resurfaces again in the future with a mechanical body but with a human heart. His objective is to locate Kyle Reese and John Connor and deliver them to Skynet, although he is not aware of it. He believes he is human and behaves like one. Even when his skin and muscles are blown away and all the internal clockwork is revealed. He even fights for John Connor in the climax and donates his heart to Connor to save his life. Arnie also makes a sort of comeback in a digitized form. Watch the scene where he turns his head slowly. You cannot deny that its Arnie.
The movie is a well made action movie and sadly nothing else. The underlying tone being, what makes us human? The action of Marcus, Connors and the Resistance leadership speaking in volumes. I was kinda expecting some answers to the questions the previous Terminator movies had raised. First and foremost is this - In the second Terminator movie, Arnie is sent back by Connor to protect him as a child because the Skynet sent another Terminator to kill John Connor. Why didn't the Skynet send the second Terminator back in time to the point where Sarah Connor was targeted, i.e, in the first movie? Likewise in the third movie T3 where Judgement Day happens and Arnie was sent to protect Connor. My theory is that there was a glitch in the Time Machine where it could send someone back to a certain point back in time only, say 50 years back. Or it could be that John Connor and his men were fighting to prevent the second Terminator being sent back in time and they somehow managed to mess with the time set on the machine and the said Terminator's objective were changed by Skynet accordingly before the Terminator went time travelling. An explanation would have been much better in this movie but the producers stuck to telling the story even before the time travel was possible in the movie timeline. In the first Terminator movie, Kyle Reese says the time machine was destroyed after he was sent. Nobody can come in and Nobody can go back, he says. Skynet wasn't even created at that time. And in the future, there was no way of Skynet knowing Kyle Reese went back in time unless the event happened. That brings to my second question, How did Skynet prepare a hitlist with Kyle Reese as its no: 1 target when he hasn't even travelled back in time yet? How was Marcus programmed to capture Kyle Reese and John Connor? One possible explanation can be that the Skynet got its information from the first Terminator sent back in time. After all, the future Terminators only provided the means to create the Terminators in the past.
These doubts remaining, there were some things shown in Salvation which were quite questionable. Why on earth would Skynet create motorbike killing machines which can be captured and ridden by man? Ridiculous. Why is there a touch screen control and display in Skynet? The machines can very well communicate over Shortwaves or can jack themselves up the old fashioned way. But a touch screen control seems like an invitation for some human to come and mess with the Skynet. Even if its there for Marcus, remember that he is still a machine. The reference to John Connor as some Messiah in the beginning also spoiled the fun a bit. It was so Matrix like but with a Neo who knows what needs to be done.
The movie was made loose enough to allow further sequels. The Time Travel is yet to happen. Kyle Reese is yet to fight along with John Connor. Connor is yet to give Sarah's photo to Kyle Reese. If I were to write the FINAL Terminator series, I would write the story which looks like a prequel to the first Terminator movie. In that John Connor and Kyle Reese are fighting the Skynet and its machines. Both discover a Skynet plan to terminate Connors by killing his mother in the past. They attack the Skynet base to prevent it. Both fight their way to the Time Machine but its too late. Arnie is already back in time and the whole base is gonna self-destruct in 1 minute. Connors know what is to be done and sends Kyle Reese back in time. The whole Skynet blows up as soon as Kyle Reese is gone and John Connor tries to escape but is buried in the rubble. He emerges later and walks away limping in the night. And the movie ends with the last line of the Terminator Salvation - There is no fate but what we make...
The movie is a well made action movie and sadly nothing else. The underlying tone being, what makes us human? The action of Marcus, Connors and the Resistance leadership speaking in volumes. I was kinda expecting some answers to the questions the previous Terminator movies had raised. First and foremost is this - In the second Terminator movie, Arnie is sent back by Connor to protect him as a child because the Skynet sent another Terminator to kill John Connor. Why didn't the Skynet send the second Terminator back in time to the point where Sarah Connor was targeted, i.e, in the first movie? Likewise in the third movie T3 where Judgement Day happens and Arnie was sent to protect Connor. My theory is that there was a glitch in the Time Machine where it could send someone back to a certain point back in time only, say 50 years back. Or it could be that John Connor and his men were fighting to prevent the second Terminator being sent back in time and they somehow managed to mess with the time set on the machine and the said Terminator's objective were changed by Skynet accordingly before the Terminator went time travelling. An explanation would have been much better in this movie but the producers stuck to telling the story even before the time travel was possible in the movie timeline. In the first Terminator movie, Kyle Reese says the time machine was destroyed after he was sent. Nobody can come in and Nobody can go back, he says. Skynet wasn't even created at that time. And in the future, there was no way of Skynet knowing Kyle Reese went back in time unless the event happened. That brings to my second question, How did Skynet prepare a hitlist with Kyle Reese as its no: 1 target when he hasn't even travelled back in time yet? How was Marcus programmed to capture Kyle Reese and John Connor? One possible explanation can be that the Skynet got its information from the first Terminator sent back in time. After all, the future Terminators only provided the means to create the Terminators in the past.
These doubts remaining, there were some things shown in Salvation which were quite questionable. Why on earth would Skynet create motorbike killing machines which can be captured and ridden by man? Ridiculous. Why is there a touch screen control and display in Skynet? The machines can very well communicate over Shortwaves or can jack themselves up the old fashioned way. But a touch screen control seems like an invitation for some human to come and mess with the Skynet. Even if its there for Marcus, remember that he is still a machine. The reference to John Connor as some Messiah in the beginning also spoiled the fun a bit. It was so Matrix like but with a Neo who knows what needs to be done.
The movie was made loose enough to allow further sequels. The Time Travel is yet to happen. Kyle Reese is yet to fight along with John Connor. Connor is yet to give Sarah's photo to Kyle Reese. If I were to write the FINAL Terminator series, I would write the story which looks like a prequel to the first Terminator movie. In that John Connor and Kyle Reese are fighting the Skynet and its machines. Both discover a Skynet plan to terminate Connors by killing his mother in the past. They attack the Skynet base to prevent it. Both fight their way to the Time Machine but its too late. Arnie is already back in time and the whole base is gonna self-destruct in 1 minute. Connors know what is to be done and sends Kyle Reese back in time. The whole Skynet blows up as soon as Kyle Reese is gone and John Connor tries to escape but is buried in the rubble. He emerges later and walks away limping in the night. And the movie ends with the last line of the Terminator Salvation - There is no fate but what we make...
June 26, 2009
Conky Desktop
Weather finally worked in conky!. This is a newer version of conky-colors with temperature of HDD and CPU cores. I actually went through lots of wallpapers before settling on this one as I wanted conky colors to be white to match the letters in the toolbar above. And only a dark background would go with the white text.
The only minor problem as I see with this dual setup is that no items can be placed on the desktop. The conky would cover it up. But thats something I am ok with as I normally don't keep anything on the desktop.
With the conky conquered, i am looking out for some nice themes to dress up my ubuntu.
wallpaper courtesy: interfacelift.com
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