Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Three Race ban For McLaren

Published on April 30, 2009 in Sports. View Comments

But guess what ! The ban comes with a string attached. The ban is hereby “SUSPENDED” unless any mor fresh evidence against McLaren is revealed or if McLaren makes a smilar fiasco in the next 12 months. Is this a joke ! FIA should have made this announcement on the 1st of April instead, at least there would have been a few takers.

After all the speculations and debates as to what would be a just penalty for a team that thought lying is a better way to achieve glory, this was a shameful anti-clmax. A general sentiment echoed by most of the fans was of a constructor points deduction or of a single match ban. The earlier option was a better one as it sought to punish the team McLaren for instructing Hamilton to lie and yet allow Hamilton to maintain his stake for the world championship.

But as declared, McLaren are free to race with no punishment what so ever. However, if any fresh evidence becomes public showing McLaren scheming to grab the third place by lying, then they will be handed the three race ban. Ridiculous ! How many more reasons does one need to conclude that the pair were lying in the face of the stewards. And what other motive can there be except to gain an advantage. A second criteria for the suspended ban to become active is if McLaren indulges in any wrong doing in the next 12 months. This looks like a mother telling her child not to be mischievious, unless he wants to fofeit his chocolate for a day.

The FIA took a stance that mcLaren had brought the sport into disrepute by lying. Its intentions were always to punish McLaren. A mild pnishment for the constructors would have done. but showing complete leniency in this regard invites other teams to use unfair means too.

What the FIA chose to do was play politics. Yes, nothing but politics. The intended target was always Ron Dennis. He eventually succumbed to the overall pressure and had to throw in his towel. Mosely should now be feeling quite relaxed with Ron out of the way.

I personally did not want the McLaren team to he handed a heavy penalty. Afterall, the diffuser row was enough to distract the atention from the main agenda of the sport, and these court ruling should be kept to bare minimum. But why make all the fuss and then shy away. FIA has got no balls. Ferrari has always ruled the sport. FIA has been afraid of Ferrari breaking away. Now McLaren joins the rank. Welcome to a New World Order wherein the organisation chosen to govern the teams is being governed by the teams themselves.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Printing The Last 50 Lines Of A File

Published on April 29, 2009 in Coding. View Comments

Having completed the coding of my BTP, I had to test the program. I wrote down a simple C program to do this and generate the outputs in log files in a specified folder. However, I messed it up big time. The actions included creating temporary files, catenating them and then moving them. I did it horribly wrong and ended up with lots of garbage in each log file. Only the last 50 lines of each file were the results, rest garbage.

I needed a way to retain the last 50 lines of each file and discard the rest. This is when I stumbled across the tail command. It does exactly this ! All you have to do call tail -50 <filename> for each of the files. Sweet !

A simple recursive loop, calling the tail command for each file, and yay I am done with my work. Now it is the time to analyse the results.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Amarok 2.1 : Managing Collections in Mounted Partition

Published on April 26, 2009 in Tech. View Comments

I have a huge collection of songs stored in my 500 GB USB drive. Now this partition is accessible from /media/Songs/audio [I mounted the partition with label Songs]. The problem I was facing was that Amarok 2.1 failed to remember the location of audio folder. As a result, whenever I would close and restart Amarok, I would lose all the collection information. And if I build the collection again, the information such as number of times played and etc., would not be remembered.

However, Amarok auto-detected ~/Music/ as containing all the media files. This is the default location where Amarok would look for the collection of songs. This gave me an idea to solve my problem.

I created a link for my audio folder in the Music folder. To create a link in ubuntu, grab the folder, press and hold CTRL+SHIFT, and drag the folder to the ~/Music/ location. And we are done.

Now all my songs are remembered and all the folders watched for collection.

So, as I understand from the bug report filed, Amarok fails to remember the collections if they are either not in $HOME or not on the same hard drive. Well, this should help. Thanks Mark Kretschmann.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Lastfm Makes Radio A Subscriber Only Feature

Published on April 25, 2009 in Miscel. View Comments

This is the message I received from the lastfm today morning

Lastfm Radio Message

Lastfm Radio Message

I am heartbroken. I never expected such a thing to happen. I was becoming fond of their radio service. But to pay $ 3 per month to just listen to songs I have in my hard disk is just not worth it. Looks like the end of the road for me and lastfm. Its a last goodbye.

Popularity: 3% [?]

My Plans/Wishlist After Moving To Bangalore

Published on April 24, 2009 in Anu. View Comments

Well, everybody has plans regarding what they would want to do with their first salary. I have mine too. Here I list them in no particular order. And most probably, I sill do most of the things. So here’s my wishlist -

  • I crave for a Dell XPS. And the machine needs to be powerful enough to render all of the eye-candy effects of compiz. It goes without saying that I shall be using ubuntu as the operating system. No windows for me. I think a 4 Gb RAM should do. It would help if I could get a graphics card. Hmm .. lets see.
  • I want a domain of my own. Not like this one. Here I am required to show ads from the people whose server I use. I want a reliable ad-free domain and hosting. Also this one’s a bit slow and always has some sort of problems. The latest being a problem with WP Super Cache plugin.
  • I want to become a subscriber of last.fm. And this is something I will definitely do as it is the cheapest thing. A subscription costs only some Rs. 500. The positive of becoming a subscriber are lots. Mostly you can make many playlists. Also you can listen to your loved songs. And as it is, I am starting to like the last.fm radio. I dont care for 500. In light of recent events, this has become a necessity rather than luxury.
  • I want an Ipod touch. Nothing else will do. Just imagine … Sony Ericcson Xperia X1 + Ipod Touch … awesome :D :) .

Can’t think of more now. Shall keep adding here :) .

Popularity: 3% [?]

Liargate Issue Blown Out Of Proportion

Published on April 23, 2009 in Sports. View Comments

No, I am no fan/supporter of McLaren F1 team and neither do I like or have any sympathetic feelings towards anyone working for the Woking based team. Yet the latest events – the Liargate issue – makes me sit up and feel sorry for McLaren.

A season already in torubled waters, thanks to the double-diffuser row, does not need another fiasco. Although three races have been raced already, the most engaging actions have taken place out of the race track. The latest of which is the hearing coming up later next week to decide a punishment for McLaren. And the rumours don’t help either.

Talks about McLaren being banned for the championship or being fined heavily is doing rounds. But taking such stern actions, is it really the need of the hour. A season which was hit by withdrawl of Honda, does not need to see the grid size reduced to 18 cars. Also, taking note of the recession, a heavy fine would cribble McLaren for the season and might perhaps leave them short of sponsorers.

Rules are not meant to be observed in words, but are just general guidelines – is what I believe in. FIA needs someone to stuff some sense into themselves to make such a big issue out of a lie. What should have ended with McLaren being banned from the Australian GP has now moved to courts and requires hearing to settle the matter. All this negative publicity has already a few fans away from the sport.

It’s high time for both Berlie and Mosely to leave their office and take a not-so-well-earned break. That’ll perhaps be the best thing they could do for the sport. It’s time for the focus to shift back to the racing grid where the bulk of action takes place.

Man proposes, God disposes – seems to be so true in this context. With the McLaren issue not out of way, Flavio has stirred up another unrest in FOTA regarding the payment of travel compensation to BrawnGP, More on that later.

Ohh, how I wish things get back to normal.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Amarok 2.1 … Now We Are Talking :)

Published on April 18, 2009 in Tech. View Comments

Amarok 2.0.2 lacked many a features of the earlier 1.4 edition, and was largely a disappointment.

For one the playlist was displayed differently, and it was not easy getting used to it. I used to have my playlist sorted in the order of rating or last played or play count, but that was missing here. Also the playlist was cramped to a side, hardly revealing anything.

More than a half of the sreen was covered up with applets or scripts. I found only two useful ones – Current Track and Lyrics. So this was basically a waste of space for me. The earlier Amarok made a much better use of space.

Then there was this nagging issue of scrobbling under proxy. Last.fm was being detected, I could see all my neighbours listed and all, but streaming would not work. Also the played tracks would not scrobble, even though I had manual proxy configured in the kioslaverc file.

All in all, I stayed away from Amarok. I installed Exile for the time being and used last.fm client to listen to radio. This was until I stumbled across Amarok 2.1 yesterday.

The Kubuntu has a download binary file, but to install for ubuntu you have to download the source file and compile it. And it wasn’t easy. There were quite a few dependencies that needed to be taken care of. Also it took me hours to get mysqld working. The funny thing is that I am not sure how I managed to do it. I remember having given up trying to install Amarok. Later on I thought of giving one last try and the installer detected mysqld ! Anyways, I got Amarok compiled and ready to go.

This edition is wonderful. I will soon fall in love with it. Though it looks just like the earlier one, it has quite a few newly added features. Firstly, here’s a screenshot of Amarok 2.1

Amarok 2.1

Amarok 2.1

One of the first things I noticed was the ability to modify the display of the playlist. It can now be configured to show informations as chosen by the user. It is very easy to make these changes. Towards the right hand bottom corner there is a icon labelled Playlist Layout. Clicking on it pops up an easy-to-use editor. Just drag and drop the required information tabs in desired order. Simple ain’t it. Now I can display the rating of each song with its name.

Also the last.fm is scrobbling now. Yay ! I have the proxy manually configured in kioslaverc. All my songs are getting scrobbled. I think that amarok scrobbles the songs a bit late, because sometimes a song is displayed as now playing, and after it is finished, it shows up as played only after a few minutes. Doesn’t matter. I’m happy as long as it scrobbles.

The radio service didn’t work for me. Sadly. But its not much of an issue as I have last.fm client to cater to my radio needs.

The now playing display has changed in look. It looks better now, when compared to the 2.0.2 version. The lyrics are fetched without any problem. Also I noticed that this time around the songs get an initial rating of 50 compared to 75 that they used to in 1.4. I have 120 gb songs in the collection and no problems.The On Screen Display looks cool. The cover manager was easy and intuitive to use. Also the sound can be configured from within Amarok itself.

Although this edition has everything I need, there are a few additions I shall like to see. For one, in this edition you can only select files and not folders, to import into the playlist. If you want to recursively inport a folder, you have to drap-and-drop. Earlier Amarok 1.4 allowed importing folder.

Its not easy moving up and down in the widgets pane. You have to click individual tabs to see them. I am used to my mouse tracker ball for moving up and down.

Most importantly I want to see the amarok 2.1 in the repositories of Ubuntu Jaunty.

All in all, this version has all that I need of Amarok.

But the most impressive fact that I stumbled across about Amarok was that this version is just the beginning of a new journey. There are a lot of features planned to be built into Amarok quite soon. The one that I read about was having a amarok:// url to be able to play amarok using custom urls. Now this is an exciting and something I am quite looking forward to. Till then, chillax and enjoy the cool Amarok 2.1.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Diffuser Dispute Ends

Published on April 17, 2009 in Sports. View Comments

The Diffuser-Three have it their way ! The verdict of the court is out – and they have decided to uphold the steward’s decision. The diffuser used by the BrawnGP, Toyota and Williams have been declared legal. Its now up to the remaining seven teams to spend millions on a new design to catch up these three, else drop any chances of poduim finish.

After months of speculaitons and arguements, the matter was presented to the court on the 14th of April. 8 hours of deliberations followed. The court announed its conclusion the next day ruling in favour of the Diffuser-Three.

The news must have been a relief to Ross Brawn. It is learnt that he had brought to notice of the officials last summer a few rules which, unless clarified, could be used by a few teams to gain advantage. The officials thought otherwise, the outcome of which is the devision in the field 3-to-7.

As the designer of Red Bull said, it is extremely important to spend money designing the new diffuser without which there are no chances of survival.

And adding a new diffuser isn’t simple either. A lot of aero chances have to be made to incorporate the new design. It will need to be tested too. Needless to say, the teams will have to spare a lot of resources to get the new design. Realistically speaking, the teams might not be able to come up with the new design fitted into their cars before the Monaco GP.

McLaren though have got a head start. They are already racing the Chinese GP with an intermediate-diffuser design. And it seems to be working. Atleast Hamilton managed to stay at P1 for the first free practise. Though the afternoon wasn’t good enough, he could manage only 12 in the second free practise.

We have already seen how quick the BrawnGP is. It is foolish to race against these cars with the present diffuser. All the teams will have to switch to the new diffuser as soon as possible. Until then, Button will continue dominnating the field. We might be able to watch proper races only when the grid moves to Europe. Until then, all the Ferrari fans – hang on.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Lull After The Storm

Published on April 12, 2009 in Anu. View Comments

Yabba Dabba doo !!! My Grand Viva is finally over. And I cannot express my happiness over it in any definite words. This is the one time professors get to mock at their students, though I must add a few are very helpful, and try their best to point the students to the right answers. Although I did not do as well as I was hoping to, but no regrets over there. As it is, I have never cared for my CG. Marks are for the lesser mortals :D .

So now with the grand viva out of the way, it is time to resume working on my BTP. But not without a well deserved break for the weekend. Yeah, a well deserved one, really. Only the BTP presentation is between me and my graduation :D .

The last 40 days at Kharagpur ! I am glad to be leaving this place. Not because I got bored of it, but because I want to start a new chapter of my life – a different story, a different person, a different place. I am eager to move into Bangalore, and start afresh. There was a lot I could have done at Kharagpur itself, but my introversion prevented that. It shall not any more. I am determined to present a new picture of myself, a changed self. I am deviating from the topic.

Well, to sum up, now with the grand viva over, things have really calmed down. There is not much to do, except BTP and chilling out with friends. Its time to make the last few days at Kharagpur memorable. There shall come a day when I’ll feel nostalgic, and wish these days – the best of my life – never went away, but it is not that day yet. Today is the time for party.

Popularity: 1% [?]

My First Impression Of Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on April 4, 2009 in Tech. View Comments

I just couldn’t wait for the 24th of April and decided to upgrade Intrepid to the present Alpha version of Jaunty yesterday. After downloading some 1300 mb’s and then taking up another hour to complete all the modifications, my computer restarted.

Apparently Jaunty is supposed to boot up faster. I did not notice any difference though. A possible reason could be that I had installed Intrepid using WUBI, so the disk access are going to be slow. Also I do not know if this speedup in boot time is for all the partitions or just ext4. Unfortunately, I still am running the older ext3. To make a change to etx4 probably I might have to format and do a clean install. I am only guessing. Not much funda here.

The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3, making it possible to mount an ext3 filesystem as ext4. Not only this, but also the ext4 filesystem is forward compatible with ext3, that is, it can be mounted as an ext3 partition. However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (one of the major new features of ext4), forward compatibility and therefore the ability to mount the filesystem as ext3 is lost. Extents are not used by default; the “extents” option is explicitly required. You might want to have a look at the following two articles: Converting ext3 partitions to ext4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ext4: HowTo. Thanks to Gen2ly for pointing the way.

Music is what I love the most. So amarok was the first application I tested. Yay, Amarok 2 fired up. But my joy of having the new Amarok was quickly turned into dismay. The new look darker theme of Amarok looked disgusting. Earlier editions had a small left hand sidebar, and a wide informative playlist area. Amarok 2 features 3 bars. The leftmost one lists all the collection and last.fm service and all. The artist info and lyrics are all moved into the mddle bar while the playlist has been compressed into the smaller rightmost sidebar. Also very little information is shown in the playlist area. I liked the earlier Amarok’s feature of being able to sort the playlist by score or last played. It is lacking here. Or atleast, I did not find a way to do that. And the biggest disappointment was incompatibility of last.fm scrobbling. The application fails to scrobble if you are behind a proxy server. I tried everything, using manual proxy settings in kioslaverc, setting system-wide proxy, but with no luck. Apparently there is this bug in Amarok which prevents it from scrobbling from behind proxy. We’ll have to wait for a later release.

Next came on the messenger. Jaunty has implemented this notifications thing. The idea is that all the notifications could be sent to a single application which will display them to the user. Earlier it was a bit distracting. Any friend logs in and a black patch appears on the top right corner of my screen. However, after a few hours, I learned to filter it out. I am not distracted by it any longer. The notification doesn’t interfere with what one is doing though. If you move your mouse over the notification, say to close an application, the notificaion fades into the background. So far, I have only seen pidgin and rhythmbox notifications appear. But I am sure, very soon all the applications will use this feature and start deploying their notification in this manner. I feel options needs to be provided to the user making it possible for him to filter out few types of notifications. I certainly do not want to be notified when any of my friend comes online.

There is this Libnotify Popups plugin which dictates the notifications that is shown on the right hand corner top. You can check/uncheck the events you want to be notified about from pidgin itself.

New themes have been introduced in Jaunty. I love the New Wave theme. It is considerably darker than the customary orange human theme. Below is a screenshot of my Jaunty desktop.

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

I have had no problems so far yet, except a few applications crashing unexpectedly. But those instances were few and rare. One of the main goals of Jaunty was to improve user experience. So far it has been good. Only Amarok has disappointed me. But on the brighter side, my last.fm client is working once again. It wasn’t in Intrepid. Apart from these, I haven’t really tried much. Shall write again if anything comes up.

Popularity: 6% [?]