DO NOT WANT! Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:50:11 +0000

Well the reason why I had to resurrect my old and unmaintained blog is that apparently, I have been nominated for the “Great Indian Developer Awards” in the “Top Committer” category.

I had no idea about this until now as I have received no communication from the organisers regarding the awards and I have no idea how I got nominated.

And I think this is completely Bullshit.

I don’t see any reason how I can get nominated even though I haven’t been active in the Free Software community since the last year or so.

I think there are many other people who deserve this much more than I do. Hell I don’t think I would even feature in the list of top 100 Indian Free Software developers.

To name a few, I would rather nominate the following (in no particular order):

• Gopal Vijayraghavan (PHP APC, DotGNU)
• Sayamindu Dasgupta (GNOME, OLPC)
• Kartik Mistry (Debian, OOo)
• Kumar Appaiah (Debian)
• Ananth Narayanan (Gentoo, PHP, Plan9)
• … and many others

So, the organisers, please don’t humiliate me like this and kindly take down my name from your God damned website.

I am just a Free Software enthusiast … I don’t need no award.

And in any case, I think this whole event is bullshit, just look at the other nominations and you will know. But that’s another story …

A reward from Sir Donald Thu, 17 May 2007 18:53:08 +0000

Dear Mr Ghose,

Many thanks for your extremely helpful note. [...]

I owe you the customary “reward check”, because these corrections
affect pages of The Art of Computer Programming. To what snail-mail
address should the check be sent?

Cordially,
Don Knuth

w00t!

Update: I received the cheque today! Check my flickr page for a scan of the cheque.

GNU Emacs with XFT goodness Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:56:48 +0000

Personally I have been using the emacs-unicode-2 CVS branch of GNU Emacs for a long time now. This branch will become Emacs 23 in the future and it contains better Unicode handling code in addition to some cool features like antialiased fonts (courtesy XFT and FreeType), copy to clipboard, etc.

I usually build a custom version of the emacs-snapshot package with source from the emacs-unicode-2 branch and some simple customisation to enable the antialiased fonts. Some of my friends are using those packages and I thought it’d be good if share those packages with a larger audience.

So I have set up an APT repository with those packages which you can install on your Ubuntu Dapper machine. To do that, first add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list –

deb http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt/ dapper main
deb-src http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt/ dapper main # for source

Then do sudo apt-get update to fetch the package list and then sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk to install the customised GNU Emacs package.

If you already have the vanilla emacs-snapshot installed then only sudo apt-get upgrade will upgrade your current installation to the new one. And yes, this package can co-exist peacefully with your emacs21 package.

Now to enable antialiased fonts, add the following line to your ~/.emacs –

(set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-8")

Now launch GNU Emacs as emacs-snapshot-gtk --enable-font-backend and enjoy the awesomeness

Leave a comment if any of you need Ubuntu Edgy packages, I will build them and add to the repository.

Update: I have added Edgy packages too ! Just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list and the rest is identical to the instructions for Dapper.

deb http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt-edgy/ edgy main
deb-src http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt-edgy/ edgy main # for source

Move over Compiz, welcome Beryl Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:19:48 +0000

One of the coolest things about Free Software is that no one person can really control the direction of a project by dictatorship. While I agree that having a benevolent dictator has helped many projects like the Linux kernel and Python, sometimes the ability to fork a project proves to be a boon.

This is what has happened with Compiz and its friendly fork Beryl. The compiz community led by ace programmer Quinn Storm was doing an awesome job enhancing compiz and writing new plugins. They also wrote cgwd (later Emerald), a custom window decorator for GNOME based on the proof of concept gwd by David Raveman. But apparently David Raveman (author of Compiz & XGL) had some issues with accepting patches from Quinn and was not cooperating with the community. As a result, Beryl was born which is mainly Compiz + patches by Quinn Storm and the community.

I moved from Compiz to Beryl today and I was awestruck. Beryl seems to be way ahead of Compiz in terms of features (like Emerald) and sheer eye-candy. The beryl-manager application is an extremely useful and awesome little thingy. It simply rocks! Here is how you can switch from AIGLX + Compiz to AIGLX + Beryl on Dapper –

1. Remove all compiz packages from your system but keep the aiglx packages.
2. Remove all old compiz repositories from your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following

   deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ dapper main aiglx

3. Do a apt-get update and then apt-get dist-upgrade.
4. Install the meta-package beryl and you are done!
5. Restart the X server and run beryl-manager. Enjoy the awesomeness.

With Beryl the previous issues with missing window borders are also gone. So you can do away with apt-pinning which I was doing to keep my AIGLX from breaking. More documentation is available at the Beryl project wiki.
You can watch the following movie on Youtube.com to get an idea about Beryl and its advantages over Compiz. Enjoy

Goodbye, Rob Levin Sun, 17 Sep 2006 08:56:53 +0000

Rob Levin, better known as `lilo’ on Freenode was hit by a car when he was riding his motorcycle on September 12. He suffered head injury and was in coma. He passed away today early morning when his family decided to take out the life support. Though many people considered him obnoxious and irritating, Freenode proved to be critical to many Free Software projects. Adieu, my friend, and thanks for all the fish.

The Bliss of Free Wireless Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:12:44 +0000

I am at the Barista in Koramangla, Bangalore at this moment. Though they don’t have WiFi at their premises, I am getting 5 cells from a nearby Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. w00t! I will write about the 4th International Conference on GPLv3 and my experience with rms later, when I reach my den …

Do you know this guy? Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:08:19 +0000

I was watching The Codebreakers and I saw a person (in a split second frame) who looked very familiar to me. So is the person below Mahendra M? If he is indeed Mahendra, then I’d like to know how he got into the movie, and if he isn’t then it’d be all the more interesting

Honey, I screwed up your laptop! Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:01:48 +0000

Something very odd happened just now. I noticed that Dapper was unable to keep correct time on the BIOS and was basically hit by bug #43661 which is OK compared to what happened next. I just went to the BIOS settings and fixed the time, and now it doesn’t boot at all! So what now? Oh well, it’s bug #43745 at work here

My options, either send the laptop back to Dell, or take out the BIOS cell to reset it. I will try the latter now, as sending the laptop back to Dell might be quite a PITA and I need this laptop now.

/me off to taking the laptop apart, wish me luck!

N.B - Somebody else had the exact same problem as me …

P.S - The actual owner of the laptop sounded very calm over the phone, either she didn’t understand the issue or she has too much confidence on my mad hardware skillz

Update: I fixed the damn issue, w00t! I took apart the whole laptop only to realise that the BIOS battery is just under the keyboard, hehe. The XPS is a true engineering marvel, extremely tiny parts everywhere, so better send it back to Dell if you are not experienced enough in taking things apart and putting them back in. One tip to Dell users, stay away from the rtc kernel driver, in fact, better blacklist that bugger.

Check GMail the Python way Mon, 31 Jul 2006 21:05:21 +0000

Swaroop posted a nifty Perl script to check GMail. The script basically parses an Atom feed of the latest 20 mails provided by Google. Since a Python hacker like Swaroop is dabbling in Perl, I thought it was my duty as a Python evangelist (or is it Pythangelist?) to show the people that the same thing can be achieved using Python with equal ease The main code is around 50% of the total code. A large portion of the code is used for the pretty printing. Here it is —

## check-gmail.py -- A command line util to check GMail -*- Python -*-

# ======================================================================
# Copyright (C) 2006 Baishampayan Ghose <b.ghose@ubuntu.com>
# Time-stamp: Mon Jul 31, 2006 20:45+0530
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
# published by the Free Software Foundation.
# ======================================================================

import urllib             # For BasicHTTPAuthentication
import feedparser         # For parsing the feed
from textwrap import wrap # For pretty printing assistance

_URL = "https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"

def auth():
    '''The method to do HTTPBasicAuthentication'''
    opener = urllib.FancyURLopener()
    f = opener.open(_URL)
    feed = f.read()
    return feed

def fill(text, width):
    '''A custom method to assist in pretty printing'''
    if len(text) < width:
        return text + ' '*(width-len(text))
    else:
        return text

def readmail(feed):
    '''Parse the Atom feed and print a summary'''
    atom = feedparser.parse(feed)
    print ""
    print atom.feed.title
    print "You have %s new mails" % len(atom.entries)
    # Mostly pretty printing magic
    print "+"+("-"*84)+"+"
    print "| Sl.|"+" Subject"+' '*48+"|"+" Author"+' '*15+"|"
    print "+"+("-"*84)+"+"
    for i in xrange(len(atom.entries)):
        print "| %s| %s| %s|" % (
            fill(str(i), 3),
            fill(wrap(atom.entries[i].title, 50)[0]+”[...]“, 55),
            fill(wrap(atom.entries[i].author, 15)[0]+”[...]“, 21))
    print “+”+(”-”*84)+”+”

if __name__ == “__main__”:
    f = auth()  # Do auth and then get the feed
    readmail(f) # Let the feed be chewed by feedparser

And here is a sample output —

ghoseb@trinka:~$ python check-gmail.py
Enter username for New mail feed at mail.google.com: foo.bar
Enter password for foo.bar in New mail feed at mail.google.com:

Gmail - Inbox for foo.bar@gmail.com
You have 20 new mails
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Sl.| Subject                                                | Author               |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 0  | Strip Whitespace Middleware[...]                       | Will McCutchen ([...]|
| 1  | [FOSS Nepal] list of free alternatives to windows[...] | Manish Regmi (r[...] |
| 2  | json serialization[...]                                | Gábor Farkas (g[...] |
| 3  | editable=False and “Could not find Formfield or[...]   | Corey (coordt@e[...] |
| 4  | IronPython 1.0 release candidate[...]                  | Jeremy Dunck (j[...] |
| 5  | django server tree organization[...]                   | Kenneth[...]         |
| 6  | Project when using multiple sites[...]                 | Jay Parlar (par[...] |
| 7  | [FOSS Nepal] Neprog (nepali version pogrammer for[...] | ujwal (ujwal2@g[...] |
| 8  | Bug#379789: wrong keymap on Intel MacBook Pro[...]     | Frans Pop (elen[...] |
| 9  | debconf is Level 1?[...]                               | Clytie Siddall ([...]|
| 10 | Weird slowdown with dev server behind nat[...]         | Akatemik (tpiev[...] |
| 11 | Database API question: I am not able to return a[...]  | DavidA (david.a[...] |
| 12 | Bug#379120: lspci present on i386, verify on[...]      | Eddy Petrişor ([...] |
| 13 | New levels of D-I[...]                                 | Eddy Petrişor ([...] |
| 14 | Installed Apps in settings.py[...]                     | limodou (limodo[...] |
| 15 | where u at man … where can i call you ??????[...]    | Sanjeev[...]         |
| 16 | unable to runser ?[...]                                | Geert[...]           |
| 17 | Bug#380585: debian 3.1 install FD[...]                 | as_hojoe (as_ho[...] |
| 18 | Re: Translated packages descriptions progress[...]     | Michael Bramer ([...]|
| 19 | Loading an url takes 60 sec.[...]                      | and_ltsk (andre[...] |
+————————————————————————————+
ghoseb@trinka:~$

Well, the code is obviously pretty rough. It’s just for showing newbies how to use feedparser and urllib, two very powerful Python libraries. Improvements, patches are welcome

The text source can also be downloaded.

The Dell XPS m1210 — a mini review Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:36:25 +0000

After a lot of research, I recently got a Dell XPS m1210 for my girl friend. It’s a cool 12.1″ WXGA laptop with pretty much cutting edge features. It has an Intel T2300 Core Duo processor and came with 1 GiB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and a 80 GB SATA HDD. It also has the usual embellishments like DVD RW, Intel Pro Wireless, 9 cell battery etc. All this weighs just around 2 Kg and costs around 1500 USD. So it’ll neither break your back nor will it burn a hole in your kitty

It came with something called Dell Media Direct which is some kind of embedded DVD player and would run without an Operating System. I clean formatted the hard drive and tried to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” on it. But I was struck by a known bug in the Ubuntu installer which frustrated me a lot. I installed Ubuntu on it finally by avoiding the bug somehow and everything went just fine afterwards. I thought that I’d need to compile and install the Wireless drivers myself but I was pleased to see that Ubuntu included the binary firmware in its restricted modules package. So everything worked just “out of the box” It was pretty amazing to see great support for relatively new hardware in GNU/Linux. The only thing that I had to fix by hand was the display resolution. X.org could detect only 1024×768 resolution which not only looked bad, but due to the different aspect ratio things looked a bit stretched horizontally. I fixed the problem by using 915resolution to over-write the display BIOS. I added an entry for 1280×800 in an unused slot and that fixed the problem just fine.

As far as the performance of the laptop is concerned, it’s just amazing. It’s very fast considering its size and I am sure it will beat any laptop in its class. It takes only around 25 secs for Ubuntu to boot, and < 30 mins to rip a DVD. What else can I say, I can’t really complain. At last, a really portable as well as usable laptop. I am really feeling like keeping it for myself and handing over my 3 year old Toshiba to her.

Though almost everything works fine by default I guess it’d be good to have a comaptibility matrix. So here it is –

1.	Processor (Intel T2300 Core Duo)	Works	Needs SMP kernel
2.	DVD RW Drive (Sony)	Works	-
3	SATA Hard Disk (Hitachi)	Works	-
4.	Ethernet (Broadcom BCM4401-B0)	Works	Needs b44 module
5.	Wireless (Intel 3945abg)	Works	Needs ipw3945 module, firmware, etc.
6.	Display (Intel 950)	Works	Needs 915resolution to get high resolution
7.	Sound (Intel 82801G)	Works	Needs snd-hda-intel module
8.	Firewire (Ricoh)	Works	Needs ieee1394 module
9.	Modem (Intel)	Haven’t tested, but should work	Most probably will work with the snd-intel8×0m module
10.	Card Reader (Ricoh)	Somewhat works	Works with SD, doesn’t work with MMC
11.	ACPI	Somewhat works	Suspend to RAM doesn’t work yet

The things that don’t work at the moment will start working soon as and when newer kernels are released. The hardware is very new, so small issues can be expected. Over all, it’s a very nice laptop to buy. I haven’t faced any quirks with it and seems to be very stable. Final verdict — great buy, very good hardware and very good value for money.

Toufeeq has also written a nice review of his XPS m1210, though his configuration differs slightly with mine it’s very useful.