Wikipedia Down? -- UP NOW

Wikipedia.org seems to be down. No ping response and traceroute cannot proceed after 10 hops.

Lots of reports on Twitter from different places about this.

Update: After a few hours of downtime, it is back up @ 23:30hrs EDT.

Ironic

Logged in to Flickr account to check new photos by friends and found this "suggestion" at the bottom of the main page! What are the chances of this?

Debian/KDE 4.4.3 Upgrade

I did an aptitude safe-upgrade today and was pleasantly surprised to see that KDE 4.4.3 was finally in unstable. The only problem I had with the upgrade was that I got a black screen when I tried to re-login to KDE.

I didn't find much on Google or Debian lists but this post on KDE gave me an indication and I checked the status of the package plasma-desktop. dpkg told it was uninstalled at some point. I installed it using aptitude and lo-and-behold, I was able to login the new version of KDE.

Apple - The Gatekeeper: Bends ....once again

Bad publicity forces Apple to ask Mark Fiore (Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist) to re-submit his iPhone app which was rejected four months ago. They seem to stick to their ground using whatever whimsical reasons they want unless it gets them in soup!

While the iPhone app is being submitted and gets approved, you can enjoy Fiore's cartoons on his website.

Lucid > Firefox > Search Provider Confusion

After all the hoopla about changing search provider, Ubuntu has changed its mind and went back with Google for the Lucid release. I don't understand why this is such a big issue. Ubuntu is open source and so is Firefox. Search feature of Firefox is well known and so is the knowledge of how to change search provider or the default one. I guess Ubuntu users are getting accustomed to being spoon fed by a beautiful looking, always working, hassle free Linux distribution.

PS: This is another example of the philosophy that Apple is leading the way to make computer users dumb rather than techsavvy. I hope Ubuntu doesn't join the bandwagon.

Lucid Lynx -- Ubuntu 10.04

30.04.10 - Lucid Lynx, coming soon to a server near you. If you can't wait, you can get the beta.

Just upgraded my Karmic box to Lucid and the process was very smooth. I wish Microsoft was able to give upgrades like this ;)

Pros:

1. Fast bootup.
2. Less sluggish, faster response.
3. ......
   

Cons:

1. New theme has nice gradation and feels nice, but the color combination is a bit of an eye-sore. Solution: Change it from System > Preferences > Appearence
2. Window close, minimize, maximize buttons are on the left! Last time I checked, Ubuntu wasn't Apple's official distribution, so why is it trying to act like one? Solution: System > Preferences > Theme > Customize.
3. I had the idea that Gnome was simple, however take a look at the context menu for a USB flash disk; there are 16 options displayed and many of them are grayed out as they probably don't even apply. Unavailable options should be invisible and Format and Compress can be easily put in Properties window.
4. If that wasn't enough to cause confusion, the user gets two choices for the USB stick removal: Eject and Safely Remove Drive. Isn't Eject safe enough? Why not just have one option of Safely Remove Drive?
5. Default search engine changed to Yahoo! even though my earlier default was Google. Easy fix is to open about:config and change browser.search.defaultenginename property to Google

......will be updaed later though.

Ice Hockey: Canada v/s US

Watching the first encounter of Canada against USA in Ice Hockey. The rivalry between the teams on the ice seems exactly like the India/Pakistan cricket 1 day match.

Score 1st Pr (end): US 2 -- Canada 1
2nd Pr: US3 -- Canada 2 (3min remaining)
Final: US won 5-3

Linux Wireless Access Point - v2

After struggling with various networking issues with my older wireless card (the discontinued D-Link DWL-G520), I purchased a DWA-552 for $60+tx. I used the DWL-G520 for almost 2 years as my access point. But it never worked in WPA2 mode and always had problems with two (Windows) machines, iPod Touch and my Nokia trying to connect to it. I had to restart hostapd after either the iPod or the Nokia tried to connect as it would stop working.

I had setup madwifi with hostapd for the DWL-G520 earlier. But as madwifi was removed from Debian repos, DWA-552 was the only PCI wireless adapter supported by the linux kernel's ath9k module. That required me to update to the the newest kernel 2.6.30. ath9k works out of the box with this kernel in master mode.

Setup was easy as most of the work was already there. I had to setup my hostapd.conf to use WPA2 and changed the network interface from ath0 to wlan0. Restarting networking and hostapd gave me the wlan0 interface and both the iPod and the Nokia were able to detect the SSID.

Last but not the least, all this was accomplished with help from Robert's post. Thanks for documenting your experience with ath9k.

The next thing to do is to see if it will work in the N-mode. That is for another day, as I'm late to go to bed (...again) by an hour.