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Reconfigure

Notoriously resistant to (for practical purposes, afraid of) change.

No news

Apr 20, 2008 [10:24]

Nothing to report other than the fact that nothing is there to report other than the fact that ther is nothing to report.

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Synce and TyTN II

Mar 22, 2008 [11:52]

Got my TyTN II (aka Kaiser) a week ago inspite of bad feeling about the driver and performance issues it is believed to have. The reason I bought it is that it has lots of the connectivity options (not that I use all of them all the time), GPS, more RAM, more stuff to 'tweak' (than symbian) (well I could have done with openmoko but dunno when and how to get it to my country, later perhaps). If you ask me again its just bad habit.

With linux

There are some things you can half-do, with SynCE.

  1. Connecting and listing files: It works fine, plus gnomevfs plugin makes the phone appear in the file browser (nautilus) like in windows (BTW, did not see that in Thunar - the one that comes with xfce).
  2. Syncing : Using Opensync. SynCE folks have written a 'synce' plugin to it. I could see syncing between the phone (synce plugin) and evolution plugin as well as 'file' plugin. However contact and calendar field mappings are screwed up (I'd rather back up before I try something stupid).
  3. Internet on phone using net connected PC: It works when you have 'sync-engine' running (which is like the application layer part of activesync).
  4. Internet on PC using net connected phone: Not tried it yet.

Gps

Sloppy part

So why not other phones ?

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The cake is a lie

Feb 27, 2008 [10:13]

The cake is a lie.

The cake is a lie.

The cake is a lie.

The cake is a lie.

More about about the cake and the lies.

Official Site http://orange.half-life2.com/portal.html

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HDR pictures

Jan 13, 2008 [11:20]

Thought it might be better to try and photograph something like lot of my kind do these days - outdoor. Wake up and try hit a lake nearby to find lotza plastic bottles in it. No useful pictures.

What was really useful was QtPFSgui and PFS library. It can operate on a few HDR image formats. Checkout my first HDR picture (cliques the pique). Actually a tonemapped form of the picture (well, almost everybody calls it HDR). To be entirely true its the second attempt at multiple exposure, and second time I ran it through the software.

The first one had 3 pictures (just like this one) used continuous mode to take it (in my mind trying to wish away any shake blur) but just like most wishes it did not function well and the 3rd frame was way too off the first and second to avoid ghosts (as they call it). The second time (a.k.a the one which worked) it might look more like weapons training.. Attach a table top tripod, plant it on the wall (essentially leaning on it), aim, press and hold shutter release till you hear 3 pics taken.

Once you have 3 pics its simple, load them in the tool (QtPFSqui), align frames if needed, check the exposure levels indicated (if needed, normally exif tag does it for you), make the hdr image, apply tonemapping to make ldr image. The tonemapping function (or operator) in the picture shown is called Fattal operator.

Learning: Should buy tripod and remote control thingy.

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Warrior Within

Dec 23, 2007 [11:36]

Yeah... after for long time running away from The Dahaka I've killed him. Though I had the first taste of the game around 2 years ago, managed to finish now. First time I tried I had gotten as far as fighting the Empress of Time the first time. Made use of IGN walkthrough occasionally (just to make sure I didn't miss anything). This game is one of the most frustrating ones I've played till now due to the kind of fighting it involves. Found myself pulling out a lot of hair in beating the bosses. That makes it all the more rewarding to finish it and let off that 'phew'. This game is like a nice 'time travel' movie dealing with paradoxes fate and the related mish-mash except that its a game and you 'play' it. I'd say this one platforming class game I really like. Check the wikipedia page for some info.

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Dive Slash Backslash splurt ..... Yuck!.

Dec 16, 2007 [03:21]

Being bad at writing and notorious for being cryptic and clumsy with English I'd rather continue to be so. So just for the heck the keywords are : Prince of presia Warrior Within, Half of Quake 4, cold weather, change in work, external hard disks, sata, usb, linux, lkml, back to biking, movies, friends buying laptops, getting old, no drawing or painting or modelling, 'usual' annual sickness, too many social portals, some photography, friends getting expensive camera, dollar, hcoop new server, AFS, friend come down for vacation.

Ok, the title is about 'Prince of persia: warrior within' and kind of stunts the prince can do plus the amount of gore. Its too much of tension playing that game with the 'Dahaka' chase and all.

If you haven't heard about assassin's creed check it out now.

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The hero packet - Interesting times.

Sep 18, 2007 [13:16]

Long time since I told you anything (serious or otherwise). We live in interesting times.

  1. A picture (finally) got a positive rating on PhotoSig.
  2. Fixed a bug in my 6 year old game-let.
  3. Removed my homepage URL from work mail signature on request from a colleague. It kinda made sense.
  4. GPS phone + Google earth is cool.
  5. Got Quake 4 as B'day gift; But I've hurt my hands playing too many game (s***ed at CS last week).
  6. Two of my old friends are married (friend #1 and #2).
  7. I goto office by Office Van (reminds me of school days).
  8. Cooperation of geeks in 'cooperative' organization is put to test.
  9. Quantum computers are the next big thing for Hollywood .. to make films on.

Check out the new set of pics in my album (In case you have not noticed the old album has been replaced with a 'Picasa' based one).

As I write this my telephone is dead; Complaint has been registered and 'is pending at indoor' is the status. Checked the voltage - its between 1 - 2 volts (as opposed to 48 V). A ring causes 5V A.C. instead of 75-100V. Why am I checking this ? - I freaked out when I saw that the ADSL link is working. Hero packets.

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HDD problems overdose.

Jul 22, 2007 [11:30]

HDD problems love me a lot. Now I have my old HDD getting 'hot - unplug' events from nowhere. I've no idea why that should come in. This 'unplugging' causes a momentary freeze and the drive being reset. Googling did not help too much except that I now know people had problems with getting 'hotplugging' to work with the nForce sata (sata_nv driver). The resetting happens quite unpredictably. Smartctl says the disk is OK. Now how do we get a 'hot unplug' event without unplugging it. Tried moving the cable around (the SATA cables feel a bit loose) dont know if that is going to help. I've not heard the 'reset-clicking' in windows though which makes me feel that it might not be the hardware. But then it appeared first without any reason when running 2.6.19.2 (which does not give any detail on whats going). 2.6.22.1 tells me that its a hot unplug event that preceds the hard reset. The good part is that you get to do some learning surrounding this. For me the next good thing in sata is the AHCI (well, actually it is here, just not in my home computer though).

Let me know if you can figure out what is happening from this fragment of kern.log:

... Jul 22 15:22:01 localhost kernel ...
15:22:01 ata3: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1810000 action 0x2 frozen
15:22:01 ata3: (ADMA status 0x00000502: hot unplug)
15:22:01 ata3: hard resetting port
15:22:07 ata3: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0x80)
15:22:11 ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
15:22:11 ata3: hard resetting port
15:22:12 ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
15:22:12 ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
15:22:12 ata3: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
15:22:12 ata3: EH complete
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 156301488 512-byte hardware sectors (80026 MB)
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled,
doesn't support DPO or FUA

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Kerberos and fun

Jul 15, 2007 [12:02]

I run a local svn repository and it was adrenaline pumping action the time I discovered you could use the Windows Active directory as a kerbreos KDC for authentication. Some helpful links:

What these leave out (at least when it comes to educating a n00b) is that active directory is needed only for setting up the service principal not necessarily in creating the keytab. I could create the keytab with ktutil on linux with the command:

bash$ ktutil
ktutil: addent -password -p 'serv/yadayada@REALM' -k kvno -e <enctype>
ktutil: wkt xyz.keytab

The info needed here is the password to the user account to which the service principal is mapped, the kvno for the key given by KDC (which you can find using 'kvno principal' after getting authenticated). The enctype is the same as the one reported by ktpass while creating (or if you have specified one, then that one) it was des-cbc-md5 in my case. The kvno should match the one sent by KDC (for mod_auth_kerb in apache to work). The Active directory server I was dealing with would increment the kvno if I so much as sneeze while thinking of the user account involved. Looks like its a Win 2003 behavior.

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Hard disk woes.

Jun 17, 2007 [04:33]

After a month since the first error popped up on dmesg I got a few more error messages. This time the disk was serious. Last Sunday morning when I was planning to experiment with ffmpeg and x264 this comes up. Callup shop. For them I was just another guy and emitted a standard lecture on how to return the Seagate hdd. They wont give me a spare hard disk to copy my stuff temporarily. So I go get another hard disk for backing up (I've really lost it, right ?) an SV35.2 (foolishly) which they were selling as 250GB Seagate SATA HDD. What I did not see was that it was cheap because it was cheap and used as on surveillance video storage racks.

When I get home my machine decided to have some fun with me. I've got 3 Hard disks and 2 operating systems and one BIOS. The 2 OSes and BIOS decide to give these 3 hard disks 3 different names. Grub (the boot loader) decides it should also try calling the hard disks something different from what BIOS and the OSes do. So they all have fun watching me sweat. After a couple of combinations my linux installation boots up. Now, there is no way I can safely handle plugging and unplugging of HDDs with the upcoming trip to service center and still have linux work without much effort.

Labels

I recollected my RHEL installation at work using volume 'labels' to mount partitions. Never thought that would help me. It did. Now I use volume labels to mount partitions. The thing is quite simple:

Use the e2label and reiserfstune programs to add volume label to your current partitions (and mkswap to set a label for swap partition). Use LABEL=<label> instead of device special file names in your fstab. A funny thing that happened was that a tool called blkid uses a cache file (/etc/blkid.tab) to remember the label to block device map. Another funny thing is that putting 'LABEL=' on the kernel command line does not seem to work for the (while specifying root). Apparently that was only for Redhat patched kernel to understand how to read the 'LABEL=' command.

Thing remaining: After a long time I tried booting my 32 bit installation. It fails to get the console among lot of other with /dev/ devices. It has something to do with udev. Let me try figure it out.

Another cool thing is that udev (I think) now has trees with symlinks that look like :

/dev/disk/by-label/<lablel>
/dev/disk/by-uuid/<uuid>
/dev/disk/by-path/<subsys-bus-unit thingy>
/dev/disk/by-id/<symbolic subsys-bus-unit thingy with product and serial number>

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