ALSA sound: my hack

I have had problems with ALSA sound whenever I install and start using a new kernel. Here is what I do to make it work each time. It is here mainly for my records and help for others.

1. Run alsaconf to reconfigure ALSA for your soundcard and loading of appropriate kernel module.
2. Stop ALSA: ~$ /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop
3. Delete the file asound.state: ~$ rm /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
4. Restart ALSA: ~$ /etc/init.d/alsa-utils start

This makes ALSA behave normally and sound is back again.

Best Wishes...

Couldn't get you on phone, so I thought I should document my "fecilitation" for your day. Happy anniversay Pinder and Simi. May you have a wonderful new year and enjoy the best of everything. Hugs and kisses....

Christmas Weekend

The last weekend, Christmas weekend, was the weekend of the year when you didn't have a problem finding parking spots in downtown around the place you want to go. Otherwise one usually has to drive around for about half an hour to find a parking spot on the street and it is usually far away from the place you want to go!

That was just magic...

Opera - 1

Hmmmm.....just noticed that the "News Clips" feature in Gmail does not work in Opera. Not that I use the feature that often, but if it is not present, something looks amiss on the page. Google, make it work fast with Opera too.

IE & Firefox

While browsing the net I saw this rather interesting image. The text written besides it said "changing relationships" ;)

Christmas Pics.....:(

I was ready with the first 15 pictures of christmas lightings today and by mistake I uploaded the full versions to flickr. Just uploading 5 pictures used up 90% of my allocated free bandwidth :(.

Now I have the following choices:

1. upload very small versions so as not to cross my monthly bandwidth.
2. upload tiny versions to blogger instead, with only one size and without flickr features
3. wait till Jan ....... no I can't do that.
4. ....or I can pray someone gifts me $25 for a pro membership on flickr ;)

Thinking about what to do now. Suggestions welcome.

Christmas Decorations

I will be doing a series of pictures of various decorations we have around here during the Christmas season. I was going to start on 1st of December, but could not due to some technical glitches. The ones till 3rd Dec should be coming up in the morning and after that it will be a regular feature till year end.

I hope viewers enjoy it.

Yahoo! Mail Search Bug?

I was searching my Yahoo! Mail(tm) yesterday and got a surprise as search results. Before that I want to get it in records that the search feature of yahoo mail sucks! It takes a lot of time to get back the results unlike the popular Gmail.

Back to Yahoo! Mail search results. I did a search for a string in my inbox for some messages in the last month. The results yahoo gave me looked foreign to me (see image above). On closer inspection none of the emails listed in the results belonged to me! Out of curiosity, I did another search and got the results I wanted. Attempts to recreate the original problem did not give me results from other users though. But the possibility of the mixup happening during search of yahoo mail indicates that they have a bug in their search system(atleast). I hope the performance is much better with their new email-client like interface they are developing.

10 Degrees

A friend sent me this poem when told her about the first snow of the season.

10 Degrees

How beautiful the sun as it skims
across the air in the hush of ten degrees,
disc of palest yellow hope along a sky

of circumstance; how beautifully we watch it fall,
the random tern, forgotten mole,
the infant tree inside rough winter bark.

How beautiful this frost, female fingers
tracing down the glass, how beautiful
this world too cold to criticize itself;

how beautiful Earth's creatures are, happy
and forever safe from the only perfect tragedy,
which is of course to never have been born.

A big thank you to you.

Poem: "Ten Degrees" by Tom Chandler from Sad Jazz.© Table Rock Books
2003. Lincoln, Rhode Island. Reprinted with permission.

down!

The webserver is down for maintenance. Should be up by 2300hrs ET 8 Nov.

Update: Server back up. Everything running fine and dandy!

Saving the Environment - 1 Step at a Time

With the increasing use of plastic in our daily lives and it not being bio-degradable I had an idea in my mind which could result in reducing the amount of plastic we use.

Ever wondered how many bottles of bathroom cleaner you use in an year? How many bottles of perfume are sold with the spray attachment? Most of the simple devices for spraying some liquid can be redesigned to use less amount of plastic than they currently use. All these containers consist of is a tank and a spray mechanism. The spray mechanism has a tube below it which goes to the bottom of the tank. The tube is usually made of plastic and that is what we can do away with to save plastic.

Losing the tube would require almost nil or a little redesigning of the tank in order to be easily held by our hands. Removing the tube will render the apparatus unusable in its current position. To use it without the tube all that is required is to invert the container and use the pumping action to spray the liquid. Changing the shape of the place where one holds the container so that it is easy to hold would be the only required change in order to use this design. The principal on which the spray works still works would still be valid for most of the non-viscous liquids.

Neat, isn't it? I hope people would use this idea and help save the environment.

Casio Watches

I have been using the Databank wrist watches by Casio since last few years. I have had two models and repeated the second one. The thing I liked about them was that they had telememo and schedule (50 in older model and 150 in the one I have now), world time and a timer in addition to regular features. Telememo and schedule really helps when one doesn't own a cell phone.

However there are a few things I don't like about those models especially the DBC-150 (warning: Macromedia Flash required). I have had to replace the battery after about 6months of purchasing all of them. After the change the battery runs for atleast one year. I know that the watch is there on the dealer's show case till it is bought and is always running but 6months for all three of them is a bit over the top. The second grudge is the low accuracy of time. The product page states the accuracy of the watch to be +/- 30 seconds! And that for today's standards seems to be quite a big error. I'm not that much concerned about this as I can refer to my PC's time for a more accurate estimate.

The third and the worst problem has been the wrist strap. I have had the databank model with the rasin straps but they become brittle and break after around 12-18 months of usage. This behaviour has been consistent for all three databank watches I ever bought. The interesting point about the strap problem is that no dealer carries the replacement straps. Every place I have asked has shown me options of Timex replacement straps (even they don't have one which matches the DBC-150). Why can't Casio either make better straps or provide the replacement? In case I plan to buy new one (as I did the last couple of times) there is the data problem: I have to transfer each phone entry and permanent schedules individually to the new watch.

So my advice to others is to stay away from Casio watches with rasin straps as they are going to break in around an year and a half or even earlier if you were swimming with them. What good is a watch if it not going to last for atleast 4-5 years!

</rant>

Planet Mozilla

It looks like Planet Mozilla was down today for some time. I could not access it via the browser and was getting a request timed out error. Trying to ping also resulted into a 100% data loss!

Update: It seems to be running fine now. I wonder what happened!

Update 2: More infomration: the whole mozilla.org was down for 15minutes

Install Google!

I was setting up a computer account for a new hire today and she requested me two things. The first one was to remove that Word icon from desktop and the second one was to install Google! A bit surprised, I asked her to explain what she meant by "install Google". She said "Well I use google a lot and I don't want to type in the web site address every time I want to use it."

With then I understood what she meant. She wanted me to install the Google Toolbar in IE(yuck) for her. I told her that we used a new browser and google comes in it. She could just type in her search query and the results will be displayed in the window. She was a bit surprised watching me do it, and then I also did a demo similar yahoo, and amazon searches. In the end she seemed to be pretty satisfied.

But "install google", that seems to be a really vague term taking into consideration all the things google is doing or planning to do!

OSS and L10n

I just finished updating my Debian(unstable) box and got a shiny new version of Openoffice.org 2.0. While selecting packages when updating I also noticed that various language packs were available for it, especially Hindi and Punjabi. It is getting so common these days that one gets a choice of interface in their local language. In Linux changing to your local language is as easy as logging-out and then logging-in again in your preferred locale.

Software that I use and have several localizations include but are not limited to Seamonkey(earlier Mozilla Suite), Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera (Opera Hindi & Punjabi release), etc. Opera released its browser's version in Hindi and Punjabi for about 800 million people speaking these languages.

Not only do open source softwares offer your local language but desktop suites like GNOME (l10n status 2.12) and KDE (l10n status stable version) also offer full desktop interface in several languages. Thus increasing the reach of OSS to the furthest corners of the world.

Just last week someone asked me if it was possible to have Japanese version of Windows XP on his laptop. He had only two options: buy Japanese version of Windows XP (costs around $700) or ask a friend in Japan to buy a laptop for him and courier it here! I informed him that Linux was available in most languages for FREE :) in case he wanted to use that instead of Windoze.

Article: Awstats setup on Debian

I had a bit of hard time setting up awstats on my Debain GNU/Linux box running apache. Awstats generates statistics for web server, ftp server, mail server, etc. by parsing the respective log files. The statistics can be viewed in a browser and are presented in a nicely layed out design.

For my own reference, I had documented the process of setting up awstats on a Debian box and making the process automate without the common problem of losing some statistics everytime apache rotates its log. The document is now available publicly under a GNU Free Documentation license on its own page.

Suggestions and corrections would be highly appreciated as comments to this entry.

Yahoo! Mail

Since the last 15minutes I haven't been able to send a couple of important email messages because I can't access the address book on my Yahoo! Mail account. The request for viewing the address book times out after a few minutes. I wonder what Yahoo! is doing with their email system! Is the new beta already being pushed in for general use?

FEMA in Pakistan??

Tonight on "World News Tonight", anchor Elizabeth Vargus started with There is no such thing as FEMA in Pakistan.... referring to the earthquake in Pakistan last weekend and the state of relief for the affected. Well there better not be another FEMA in any other country, becuase it is no use if it is just sitting on its a*** just watching the weather reports before, during and after a huge hurricane!

Postage Delivery

I have had a letter lost which was sent as registered post via Canada Post to Germany. Also, if you don't write the "From:" address on the top left corner of the letter, the officials point out that the from address should be above the "To:" address and on the left side of it. And you must have the PIN/ZIP code written down clearly. Some of the letter addressed to me arrive with a black mark on the bottom of my address with the "Write PIN" written below it. I know it all helps to keep the high-tech postal department work flawlessly. But wonder how they will react if they read this news!

HP Color Laser Printers

I got an HP flyer today in the newspaper. I was checking out their exhorbitantly priced laser printers with networking capability. Surprisingly all their color laser printers(in the flyer) are designed to look like the belly of an obese person. I wonder what is the reason behind that.

PS: The top 5 in the list are the ones listed in the flyer.