Patent-Freeing software

Thank you Poland!

Donate for a cause.

Not many people read this blog, but those who do, I request you to contact the nearest Tsunami Disaster Relief agency and chip in whatever you can afford. Every penny counts. This is the time when the social resposibility towards other humans requires us to do as much as we can to help the survivors of the South Asian Diasaster. I'm sure we can forego our daily cup of tea/coffee and contribute to the cause.

I did my part by donating to Red Cross. Here are a few other agencies you can donate to:

• UNICEF
• American Red Cross (1-800-HELP-NOW)
• Care USA 1-800-521-273
• Indian Red Cross Society
• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
• The Hindu Relief Fund a national daily
• Google listing Ways to help Tsunami victims.
• United Sikhs GHANIA - Tsunami Relief Project
  

Tsunami Blog

Superpower??

There is only ONE superpower - Nature. No nukes, patriots, or even cruise missles can provide the defence to anyone from it. The best defence is to repect nature.

Futureshop.ca Woes

Just like last year, I braced up myself to buy a bit of computer hardware during the Boxing Day (BD) sale at Futureshop(FS). Last year, I was just plain lucky to to actually get the rebate as Futureshop completely refused to honor the Mail-in-Rebate as I had made the purchase 5min before midnight PST! Do they open their stores in the East coast according to their store times for the West coast? However, Western Digital was considerate enough to understand the problem and send me the MiR.

This year(BD sale started at 0000hrs 25Dec05), I was expecting more rush for the online BD sale with more and more people subscribing to high speed internet. So as expected, the site was almost unreachable till 0200hrs 25Dec04. When I was finally able to login(FS asked me to quote one of earlier order numbers, nice security if you haven't ordered something for some months), I selected the 256MB Kingston USB key drive and added it to my basket. Trying to checkout was futile because all I was getting was VB Script errors. When I got through about half an hour later, it again asked for my login and password!! Why did they ask me a second time? OK, fine. I assume that my session expired. But then I had to tell them an older order number from my record again. On submitting the info again for the second time, I got to a page telling me that the site was very busy. Didn't they know that the website will be busy during their boxing day sale? They should have taken appropriate measures so as to provide the users a pleasent experience.

I finally got to the point of providing payment information. Typed it in, and clicked confirm payment info button. That went in allright, but the confirm page had a message at the top that the product I was trying to order was already soldout! It was just like someone took stuff out of your basket while you were still shopping in an actual store.

And that was not all, worse happened the next night. I wasn't even able to login between 0000hrs and 0200hrs 26Dec04!

A better system would hold the item for the user for a few minutes or so. They could alert logged-in users just before the holding time expires, or keep the item if the user has initiated the payment process. They need to update their systems or atleast lease more computing power for the few days when they know it will be very busy. Not all systems need additional power, even increasing the computing power for the login and payment system would be of great help. I think it would be a good idea for Futureshop to spend sometime on improving their own Future by working on their customer dealing methods.

After Browsers and WWW Search, Desktop Search is heating up

With the ongoing wars between different search engine companies and internet browser companies going on, a new front is opening up: The Desktop Search. Yes, its time we got good destop searching softwares. Its getting hard to find stuff on such huge hard disks we are able to get these days!

• Goolge has just recently released their Google Desktop Search Tool.
• Microsoft will soon release their MSN Toolbar Suite (possibly in December 2004), which will be configured to run in Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and as Deskbar Toolbar. Report and Screenshots. This is probably something to fill the void of a delayed Longhorn release which initially was advertised to the have Microsoft's revolutionary file system WinFS.
  
• Yahoo! is too planning to release their own desktop search system and make a niche in destop search field. The major difference in Yahoo! destop search will be that it won't employ a browser to show the results.
  
• Copernic, which already offers a wonderful desktop search system, just recently announced the integration of their desktop search software with Firefox.

It will be interesting to watch the big players fight to get their share of the desktop pie in the coming few months. I just hope that we, the users, get the best possible software for our desktop searches.

The French err... Swiss Connection...

After a long time I have heard good news about Chandigarh, one of the creations of the famous architect, Le Corbusier. Two tapestries from the courtroom of Punjab and Haryana High Court Chief Justice were restored by the National Museum. The process of restoration took almost 2 months. Of the 12 tapestries created by Le Corbusier(woven by the then East India Carpet Company), 11 remain and the National Museum team will taken on bigger ones of the 11 for restoration. This was reported in The Tribune.

A little bit more about Le Corbusier: He was born in 1887 in the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-fonds and later adopted French nationality. In 1951 he was appointed the Architectural Advisor to the Punjab Government to design their new capital, Chandigarh. More detailed biography of LeCorbusier can found at the Foundation Le Corbusier website.

For a good introduction to Chandigarh and Nek Chand's Rock Garden, visit Carl Lindquist's Carl Lindquist's web site and Nek Chand Foundation website.

Ubuntu Linux CDs

After a long wait the Ubuntu Linux CDs I had requested finally arrived today. Canonical Ltd. is doing a very good job at spreading Linux to the masses by providing FREE, pressed CD sets of Ubuntu (Live CD + Ubuntu "Wharty" 4.01).

Now that the CDs have arrived, Canonical's part has finished and now my part of distributing the CDs starts.

If anyone wants to order Ubuntu Linux CDs, visit www.ubuntulinux.org as they are still shipping the CDs free of charge to where ever :)

Help needed for NvuHelp

Due to the unavailability of a Mac OS based machine we are not able to verify the correctness of the MacOS "keyboard shortcuts" for NvuHelp. We need to know if any of the keyboard shortcuts have been wrongly documented. As NvuHelp is packaged in Nvu 0.60, the current keyboard shortcuts as documented right now are available in it.

If you have a MacOS based machine and are interested in helping please check if all the keyboard combinations work for you or not. If there are errors, write down the command and the correct keyboard shortcut combination and send the list to me.(Email at "kdsDOTsahambiATgmailDOT com" or just add the list as a comment to this post.)

XHTML query

Can anyone help me with this?

I need to have an hyper-link in an XHTML document. The link contains a few & symbols for variable separation. If I use it directly, & is considered as a start for special entity and is not validated (browser shows an error). And if I use its Hex code %26 in its place, clicking on the link does not open the intended page.

Any suggestions?

For the timebeing I am using tinyurl.

OOoFf calculations.

Recently, Linspire announced that they were going to sell a software package consisting of OpenOffice and Firefox in retail stores and online for US$29.95. There has been a lot of heated exchange of words between mozillazine community members and at other places too.

People have complained that selling the "open source" softwares which are available for free from the web, would be equivalent to cheating the customers. I think provinding the information that the softwares can also be downloaded from the web free of cost would be playing fair with the customers.

However, the question of legitimacy of selling the open source softwares still remains. The licenses under which the softwares are provided might allow users to sell the software under certain conditions.

But is it justfiable to actually sell the software which is free? I would say YES (in majority of cases), if you consider the following analysis. Consider the people who just have a dialup modem connection available and pay their phone company by the amount of time of phone use rather than a lumpsome. (Its sad that today's average high speed internet user assumes that everybody else is also using a high speed connection!!) Simple calculation* would result into a total time of a little less than 3hours(2h57min) to download OpenOffice(44MB) and Firefox(4.7MB) for Windows (other OS distros are much larger). Is it justifiable to spend so much time and money to download the softwares which one could get by paying a few extra dollars(or whatever unit of money) from a nearby retail store? I would definitely go with the second choice. And in effect would end up getting some exercise by going to the retail store rather than resting my bum on the chair in front of the PC!! Moreover, Linspire's funding of various open source projects makes the money go the complete cirle :)

If you still don't agree, I would suggest you advise the parent open source organizations to concentrate on marketing themselves.

* assuming a sustained transfer rate of 5kBps (I get something about 4.3kBps).

Linux Discoveries ....

Linux IS fun to play with :)

kds@localhost:~$ hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: MAXTOR 6L040J2: drive is sleeping
kds@localhost:~$ hddtemp /dev/hdb
/dev/hdb: WDC WD800JB-00ETA0: 32 C

Finally....

Lt. Gen J.J. Singh to be the country's first Sikh Chief of Army staff.

We should learn form them...

Just read this news article on BBC News. Although, Man has progressed so much but I still think we have to learn a lot of stuff from our other friends on the planet. Had we learnt this earlier, we wouldn't have 9/11, Darfur, Iraq, etc happening here on Earth.

Let there be peace.

Edit: Minor spelling corrections.

Paris aime le Bollywood?

It looks like Bollywood is spreading. The latest in the news is the fashionable and romantic capital of France, Paris. After the hits like Bend it like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding and more lately Bride and Prejudice, Paris will be the center of stage for the upcoming movie "One Dollar Curry". Read the report in Times of India.

The only thing which comes to mind is: Why are they pricing using "$" in France? Didn't it use to be Franc or Euro? Ah......probablement l'influence de bollywood ;)

Interruption in serving web pages

After getting some annoying advertisements, I had moved the couple of pages I had on geocities to my own machine. Off lately, actually in the last two days, I have been trying to get some hardware to work in Linux and had to reinstall the Windows part of the machine. Not that I boot my machine in Windoze too often(last time was a couple of months ago), the decision was made just because the bloddy $OS$ refused to do an update and was giving errors.

So in case you were trying to view the couple of pages I host myself (for the time being), and couldn't get to them due to machine downtime, please accept my appologies. The machine is working fine now and you should be able to view the pages any time (barring any unforseen reboots!).

Who killed Firefox?

Ah, so Firefox 1.0 is finally out. I couldn't load the Mozilla.org website in the morning, and heard similar complaints from a couple of people who have it as their homepage. I'm sure the Fire is out there burning $ome and hope it doesn't burn its own servers!

But my Firefox(Debian build 0.99+1.0RC1-4) and Mozilla(Debian/1.7.3-5) were both killed today. And guess who was responsible for that: www.spreadfirefox.com. Seems kind of ironic to be killed by one of your own!

Bookmarks with Delicious and Firefox

I have been thinking of a way to make all my important bookmarks available to me when I am browsing the net. One way was to copy the bookmarks.html file to all the machines I work on. But that meant that I would have to update the file on all other machines when I added another bookmarks. And what about when I am at a friend's place using his computer?

So the next idea was a webserver with WebDAV enabled. This idea was also scratched as I neither own a domain nor have a web host. And the internet connection at my place is pretty unreliable.

Third option, a USB key drive. That would be ultimate option as I could carry around the Firefox installation and run it off the drive. Doesn't matter where I go, I would only need a USB port. But I don't have one yet, and I'm hunting for a nice deal for a 1GB USB drive under $50. I'm sure I'll be able to buy one with these contraints by January.

So, for the time being I am using delicious for my bookmarks. Firefox's latest release has RSS support for bookmarks and they are called "Live Bookmarks". Delicious provides RSS feeds for all categories for my bookmarks. I added the categories as Live Bookmarks in a Personal toolbar folder. Below you can see a snapshot of Live "Delicious" Bookmarks in action. The last Live Bookmarks in the folder is for all categories.


Ain't got Firefox yet. Get the 1.0 release on Tuesday, 9 November.

Satisfaction.......Ahhhh

For a long time, I had not fiddled with an home appliance. Today, a friend of mine called me up and said that the new antenna he bought from the $$ store did not give any performance boost to his TV reception. So off I went to his appartment and saw that he was right. But it was surprising that not even the free PBS channel was being picked up. Then I noticed that he was using the AV cable from the VCR to the TV. And there was no way I could find out to start the VCR channel tunning.

Then I thought why not try to hook the antenna straight to the TV. Here was the problem, the jack for the antenna cable was broken :(. No probs, I have worked with tuners earlier too. I opened up the TV, and the tuner, soldered two cables to it and connected the antenna cable. Lo and behold!! Upon tuning we were able to catch about 8 channels, with 5 of them crystal clear (although 3 were French :( ). But the best part was the Butter Chicken his wife cooked for us....yummy.

This guy is lucky for me. Keeps my hands in technicals stuff. Last time I had ended up opening and soldering his partly broken old laptop. It still is running happily :)

Built PC all by myself.....Yeah

As the title says, I built a PC from scratch. Its a bit hard to get the processor assembly on the board, everything else can be marked as a medium difficulty task. The machine was at my part-time job so I had to be really careful to not to mess it up. As a result, I am now confident enough to buy a PC in parts and assemble it myself.

Gotta get some money in the bank for the parts then.......

Once burnt, never cautious!!

I don't think I will ever learn!! Today while making tea, there was not sugar in the sugar pot. I checked the storage and found a jar with sugar in it. Made tea, took first sip, yuck!! What the f***!!

The one spoon of "sugar" I had added was actually salt. Damn it, when will they learn to have sugar and salt granules of different sizes.

Thats one of the reason I luv Indian sugar.