My new Nokia n810 Internet tablet

Posted February 21, 2009, under Linux, Technology, nokia
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Me holding my n810

As of this week I am the proud owner of a nokia n810 internet tablet, or as I would like to call it ‘Linux in my Pocket’. I bought it from CDON.se last week and like any thing which has to arrive through Swedish postal system it took a whole week 9even though the warehouse was in the same county).

My first impressions of this device are kind of ok. It does every thing as expected. The first thing I did was to charge the battery. i did play around with a bit of the pre installed os2008, but then decided to not waste time and update to the latest version. It was very easy to use flasher available from maemo.org (the community site behind os2008).

The thing which has disappointed me is the bad GPS receiver. I knew about the bad GPS performance, but for me it has only worked only once. Perhaps its because it’s been cloudy all week and I have not been able to get a clear sky. What’s a GPS useful for if you are stuck in a bad weather? Another almost show stopper for me is that I have been unable to work Gizmo (a skype clone)with 2-way video for now. On the forums there are reports of it working. I guess its because of the way I have routed my Internet at my place.

I have tried various applications on this device and for now am satisfied with the applications ecosystem (availability and diversity of the ports of linux apps for this device). Ofcourse I don’t intend to run openoffice of any heavy duty java apps on this machine. I have the intention of trying out Android OS on this machine (once I get some free time, which seems to be impossible.

As for the good, skype works perfectly and so does the hand writing recognition. With my mammoth laptop in my room I can now easliy roam around with mobile interenet. I may get an unlimited GPRS plan and bind my n810 with my nokia phone using bluetooth for 24/7 internet access.

Here is the flickr set to my n810.

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My misadventures with C++

Posted February 20, 2009, under Programming, Rants, c
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I have never really mastered what C++ really is. It’s an overly complex beast as far as I am concerend. Neither could I ever get streams/STL right nor hever ever I really worked on a real big C++ project (C is a different story). During the course of the prsent quater I went through a course which covered lots of advanced C++ and OOP topics. Needless to say after trying my best I still was not able to grasp most of them. Perhpas is psycological, that I have this fear that I would never be able to learn C++ for the rest of my life.

But so what? I can always persue a different path. I don’t really need to be an expert in DataStructures or Algorithms or any thing to do with Realtime systems (all of the things which I was once very interested in). I am also not very fond of ‘Compilers’ and ‘Language Theory’ as a subject. I am actually not interested in Computer Science as such any more, but more into Business and Legal aspects of IT. There are some CS areas (AI/Speech Interaction) which still have some attraction for me but probably not to the extent that I would be doing any thing serious (in C++).

I will try to console my self by posting links to articles from the web which say that C++ is a dying language, disregarding any Bias :)

Edit:

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread8386.html
http://www.softwarefrontier.com/2006/06/c-is-dying.html
http://4thmouse.com/index.php/2008/02/17/why-c-is-a-dying-language/ (he is a ‘Rocket Scientist’)
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=61112
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/09/1152215&tid=156&tid=8

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Lyx and IEEE.cls

Posted February 18, 2009, under Linux, Technology, latex, lyx
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For my term paper in on of the courses, not only I have to review atleast 15 different research papers but I also have to submit my answers in IEEE format. I am not a big fan of getting into the world of publishing research papers and books, but beatifully typograpphed works are some thing I really admire. Since I don’t have the time to meddle with LaTeX or TeX, I would instead be using LyX.

To get ieee.cls working with LyX, I  found a  nice link from university college Colorado Springs (same Colorado Springs where they have Stargate Command in the fictional universe of Stargate). But there were other missing components in my ubuntu box (with which I wresteled for a while reading log/messages of lyx from command line). In the end I copied all the lyx layout and template files in ~/.lyx and change preferences of paths within lyx (I probably followed this suggestion from here). The default template of ieee has smoe missing elements (pictures in the very end) but it works after removing them giving a nice looking IEEE style paper.

Unfortunately I forgot to save the name of the extra packages I needed for my lyx to work so instead I am posting a list of all the current packages which are associated to word ‘tex’ and are instlled on my system (in the hopes that some one may be able to find a missing package from their system)

  • dvipng_1.11-1_amd64.deb
  • acheck_1.26-11.1_amd64.deb
  • latex-xcolor_2.11-1_all.deb
  • libgtksourceview-common_1.8.5-1_all.deb
  • libgtksourceview2.0-common_2.4.1-0ubuntu1_all.deb
  • libhyphen0_2.4-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  • libkpathsea4_2007.dfsg.2-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  • lmodern_1.010x-5_all.deb
  • lyx_1.6.1-1~intrepid1_amd64.deb
  • pgf_2.00-1_all.deb
  • tex-common_1.11_all.deb
  • texlive-base_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-base-bin_2007.dfsg.2-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  • texlive-base-bin-doc_2007.dfsg.2-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  • texlive-common_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-doc-base_2007.dfsg.1-1_all.deb
  • texlive-extra-utils_2007.dfsg.2-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
  • texlive-fonts-recommended_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-fonts-recommended-doc_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-formats-extra_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-generic-extra_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-generic-recommended_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-humanities_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-humanities-doc_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-base_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-base-doc_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-extra_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-extra-doc_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-recommended_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-latex-recommended-doc_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-pictures_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-pictures-doc_2007.dfsg.1-2_all.deb
  • texlive-pstricks_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-pstricks-doc_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-publishers_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • texlive-publishers-doc_2007.dfsg.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb
  • tipa_1.3-12_all.deb

 

Let’s see how this paper turns out. I have a rough draft due in 5 days :S

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Site going down and up again

Posted February 7, 2009, under Linux, Technology, crash, opennms
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I cannot believe that I let my blog go down for more than two days. It’s really silly, because usually I have a script in place to restart my mongrel_cluster for typo, but since I updated my (VPS) machine(linode?) to latest installment of Ubuntu, I have not placed that script in init.d.  But as of now it’s atleast up and running.

I also have no alarms in place for monitoring the site. I will be looking into some simple email alarm based solution (If I had a big production machine I would use OpenNMS for monitoring, but alas I don’t). I am also considering moving away from VPS and getting my own full time linux box instead.

I am also looking into alternatives to my linode hosting plan as I feel the need for a full scale hosting solution.

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OpenSource Conferences (in EU) for 2009

Posted January 28, 2009, under Conference, Opensource, Technology, europe, opennms
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One of the advantages of living in EU is that I have the opportunity to go to all sorts of open source events/conferences. Since I am a student, I prefer to go to free (as in beer) events for now. I have plans to invest into interesting opensource conferences which require a little fortune to attend when I start working.

Last year’s FSCONS was my first ever conference. One of the organizers for that event was a guest lecturer in one of my courses and while chatting with him after the lecture he told me about FOSDEM. If I had known about this event in bit advance I probably would have planned things out. So for this year I am probably not going to FOSDEM even though there are many interesting talks happening.

But I will be attending the first ever OpenNMS user’s conference (and the first major openNMS event in EU).  I have found at least one link which lists conferences relevant to software engineering. As for the OpenNMS conference I have already booked cheap flights on Ryan Air. I also have plans to take this chance to do some sightseeing in Germany (I will be booking YouthHostels or searching for places to crash along the Rhine river).

Two regional conferences which I can think of at this point(other than FSCONS 2009 in which I might be participating as an organizer) are opensourcedays  in Copenhagen and The 5th Internatinoal Conference on Opensource Systems in Skövde, Sweden.

Edit: (Feb 25 ,2009)
I may be attending the following conferences as well,
INTERACT 2009 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction
The 2009 IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI’09) Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’09)

 

 

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Starting my third quarter at CTH (Spring 2009)

Posted January 23, 2009, under LifeLog, chalmers, studies
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It seems that last semester was over ages ago and I have been so lazy that I have not blogged since. I just got all the results for the previous semester and have passed in all of them. But I may be persuaded to retake an exam Second quarter was a bit difficult and it seems that third quarter is even tough. It’s only been a working week for me and I am already feeling the pressure.

I am taking two courses for this quarter. First one is System Development in teams. Like first quarter this is one course which is totally team based work. Besides this there is a term paper which is due in next 5 weeks. The project of System Development in teams is an E-commerce application which has to complement a retailer with already built payroll and other IT system get up and running with an e-business. I was just reading in the Economist that the predictions for e-commerce is quite sunny for 2009.

quoting from World in 2009 (page 124) 


Online retailing will continue to grow, but not as quickly as off line purchases based on web research. eMarketer reckons web-influenced store sales in the US will grow by 19% to $667bn in 2009, while retail e-commerce will expand by 12% to $170.6bn. Combined,the two will account for 28% of all retail sales by 2012.

Like any university project in software engineering, a lot of focus will be paid on the process and very little on the actual results. Still I am very interested in the resulting code. We may be looking in to using AppFuse for rapid prototyping of a JavaEE based web application (with underlying Spring/Hibernate arche-type). There is a possibility that we may be looking into some thing more advanced (along the lines of osCommerce)

The other course ,Software Constraints is more  programming theory oriented and has weekly assignment session and some lab sessions. There is some focus on advanced C++ in this course which is some thing which concerns me as I have never really advanced much in C++. Perhaps now would be a good time (even though I thought I had left it far behind). It also has a poster presentation (again in group, surprise surprise) at the end of the course in which we would be presenting one of tips from C++ Coding Standards

Let’s see how this quarter turns out. All in all I think there would be a bit more work load as compared to the last two quarters.

 

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Dumping BrainTel (VOIP) for CallWithUs.com

Posted January 7, 2009, under Internet, Technology, voip
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I have been using BrainTel inbound DID (direct inward dialing) since September 2008. I have been trying to get it’s outbound calling working (by asking my friends and family to help me in Lahore) but I just decided to give up for the following reasons.

  • The voice quality is really bad
  • They don’t have an online billing system
  • They ask for a huge security deposit for activating outbound calling
  • From their website and their service, it seems they are not really sure how to run a VOIP service.

I just became fedup and went to voxilla forums to see how i can get braintel to work better. Instead I found a better service from callwithus.com and now I have acquired a new DID from them instead. Their site is easy to use and accepts payments from credit cards. I think for a DID service it is absoluetely necessary to accept payments online. One thing which is not very good about their site is that apprently it does nto work on Linux firefox (but I can use it on internet explorer with wine, even though all of it is made in PHP, so I guess bad design of presentation layer in the website)

But I am glad that I don’t have to deal with brain tel any more.

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Battle of Rich Internet Application Clients

Posted December 19, 2008, under Java, Technology, ria, trends
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Most of us who were on the web in the 90s have some experience with the browser wars and those of us who are in the tech community are probably familiar with platform wars (.NET vs Java vs Other mumbo jumbo). I think for 2009 tech companies are perparing for another battlefield;Rich Internt Application Clients. Ofcourse I am not the smartest person to figure this out first, there are so many others who have already hinted about this impending battle.

There are many competitors in this field the biggest one being Adobe. With acqusition of Macromedia, Adobe is the leader in rich internet media. Their new venture Adobe Air promises to bring even flashier experience to the Desktop. I installed Adobe Air on my Ubuntu 8.10 system after it was declared stable this week. I was not able to run it out of the box on my 64 bit system as apprently one has to make a symlink of libadobecertstore.so which is in the /usr/lib folder in the /usr/lib32 folder. So for the naieve you have to do the followingas root

ln -sf /usr/lib/libadobecertstore.so /usr/lib32/

I tried out the Ebay application and I am failry impressed with the offering. But one thing which I don’t understand is that how does it differ from a JNLP application. Perhaps in the way it’s built and being more flash centered (which gives a richer user experience), but essentially the same thing could be done with a Java Webstart application.

The other big player in RIA game is Sun (or should I say Java). They have a new platform called JavaFX which tries to bridge the gap between programmers and artists to give richer media centered application on the java platform.

To check JavaFX I first installed 64-bit open source JRE as well as the 32-bit Sun JRE to get JavaWebstart and Java Plugin working in my firefox (I think the Ubuntu’s Sun 64-bit JRE will be shipping soon with Java Plugin as well as it has been released). I Then tried JavaFX. Although the technology looks promising, but it’s not yet production ready (it’s samples page is painfully slow atleast on my ubuntu box)

Silverlight in my opnion is not a contender for the RIA War but can be a stepping stone for Microsoft to get into the RIA War. I also came across smaller names like Curl and Mozilla Prism which I was not familiar with before today. But what’s interesting to see is that Google is not participating in this war the same way as other corporates. Google rather focusing on promoting it’s own way of connecting people with Android and Chrome (backed by the Google cloud of applications, with offline capabilities and what not). Let’s see where 2009 takes un in the RIA field.

Personally I would like to see smaller overhaead downloads and faster application peroformance and would not like to worry about where or on which platform I run the RIA/Desktop application.

Edit: (Mar 5, 2009) I came across moonlight which is the mono implementation of silverlight. It implements silverlight version 1.0 and was a no brainer isntall on my linux box. I tried some samples(Page-Turn, Sprawl) of Silverlight 1.0 and am impressed. It is not much different from flash but there is a chance that it may get some traction afterall.

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Applying for BEST courses

Posted December 15, 2008, under LifeLog, Movies, contests, fun
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Yesterday was the last date to apply for BEST courses. These are short courses offered by universities in EU as weeklong fun/learning activities and mainliy offered by Engineering Universities. Event though there were many courses to choose from one could only apply for three courses.

I applied to two courses, PARobotIcS and Rome against the Machine. The results of selection will be in by Jan 15th 2008. Let’s see how I fare in the selection process. I thogh I share a question from one of the applications on my blog. The question and it’s answer as follows

We know that you have the exact quantity of plutonium needed to activate our DeLorean time machine, you have to find a way to bring it to us in Rome, avoiding security. Please use your fantasy and let us smile!

"(I am )Assuming that I have masted Dr. Brown’s (Doc’s) design of the flux capacitor and the plutonium based reactor I can easily make changes to the time machine. But with exact amount of plutonium for one temporal jump I have the potential problem of not have 2.1 gigawatts of electricity to jump back to the present. So I have two options at hand, first I have to come up with the same plan which worked on Oct 15, 1955 in Hillvalley for for Doc and Morty. But I have to find precise lightning strikes with in the city of Rome. I tried to look it up but didn’t find any thing precise enough. So instead of running towards a lightning strike, why not run and make the lightning strike on the DeLorean. This would need a bit of change in design as lightning could strike any where possibly on the surface of the car. Then I would need to drive back in time lets say 1929 (so I still can get fuel if I need and still have some roads to drive up to 88 m/h) and drive around in Rome at night hoping lightning strikes the DeLorean. Of course this plan has a very big flaw that in 1929 there will not be Internet so I would get bored to death in the case I have to drive for a longer period of time.

Second option is to befriend James Bond and convince him to get my DeLorean fixed from ‘Q‘ branch in the same way as he had his Lotus Esprit fixed (one which would convert as a submarine). So all I would need is to load the car on a ferry bound to some where near Rome and dive it in the sea when shore comes near and surface at an appropriate time and place. So I guess I would have to wait till the next time James is in town here in Gothenburg.Sweden (he must have some Swedish girlfriends I suppose). The only variable here is tracking his Swedish girlfriend. I think I can attract lightning more effectively though"

I did the mistake of not looking up what was actually happening in 1929 in Rome as I just guessed a year and planted it in. But atleast in the 1920s lead added gasoline was available.

I remember that I first saw back to the future in 1994, renting from Officers Mess Movie club in Wah when me and my sister were visiting our Dad. Actually in that one week we saw all kinds of Trilogies including Aliens and StarWars for the first time. That was perhaps my SciFi media frenzy.

I look back and realize that at that point I really wanted to be like Doc. Aloof and always in his world, accomplishing scientific things and not worrying about other matters in life, where as Marty was the normal kid with social life, taste for music and fashion sense. But in the end travelling through time Doc finds his own sense of normalcy (and a family). There are some real life lessons which one can learn in this movie.

  • Your parents were perhaps way lot cooler in their time (before you were born)
  • than they are now and it’s actually sort of good for you (they nag you and scold you, because they love you)
  • You can do what ever you want to do, you just have to believe in your self.
  • It doesnt matter what your destiny is, it’s the journey that makes you the person you are

Do I still want to be Doc, perhaps no, but I love his transformation.

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Updatig my Linode to latest Ubuntu 8.10

Posted , under Rails, Technology, Typo, ubuntu
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I had been running on Ubuntu 7.10 since Feb 2008. After my typo svn instllation hit a road block I had an opportunity to move to latest Ubuntu and do things right from scratch. So I made a new installation and I am loving it now. The following tips may help any one who would like to run a Ubuntu server with postfix email and any ruby on rails application.

First I just installed Ubuntu 8.10. Unfortuntaley the 64 bit version was not supported on the Xen box on which my VPS currently runs so I had to be content with 32 bit for now. I followed part of an excellent HowToFourge The Perfect Server – Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) guide (for Postfix and IMAP)

Next up was the installation of RoR 2.2 on Ubuntu 8.10. Based on a recomendation I first did the following two

 sudo gem install rubygems-update
sudo update_rubygems

(since update_rubygems is a ruby gem it’s self, it has to lie in a directory which is under you $PATH (or you can directly ./ it. On my Ubuntu 8.10 box it is at /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin )

But I did run into trouble when apprently the currently installed rails version had some conflicts. I couldn’t simply gem uninstall it. So after some searching I found a simple solution as recommended here (basically give the gem it’s installation directoy). So I uninstalled the rails gem and after that installing different gems including rails, mongrel and mongrel_cluster was a piece of cake.

To install mysql gem one has to have libraries of mysql as well as all essential buld tools (like make, gcc etc).I also needed nginx for being the proxy front (in case i want to run other server like php or jetty) The following takes care of these dependencies. 

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev libmysqlclient15-dev build-essential nginx

I had already taken database dump of my previous typo installation through mysqldump and had gotten typo from it’s git repository. I didn’t notice it firstly but one has to git-pull some submodules of typo as well. One thing which I always forget in doing a rake database migration without specifiying the environment. So if you are running a production website in RoR this is some thing to watcch out for.

 rake ENV="production" db:migrate

Then I only needed to replace my previously tweaked mysql configuration file and I was good to go and start my nginx cluster. I did the following two in the typo folder

mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e production -p 8000 -N 10 -a 127.0.0.1 --user www-data --group www-data mongrel_rails
mongrel::start -p 8000 -n 10 -e production

So right now the clutser is started in screen instead of with /etc/init.d script. That’s next on my task. I will also try to post configuration files for mysql and nginx (I basically reroute http://name.com/blog/pages/home to http://name.com/ and some other fancy proxy stuff)

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