SP3 Changes Preferences

Just installed Service Pack 3(SP3) on a Windows XP install. The upgrade took about half an hour in total but went fine. After the obligatory restart, I have noticed at least one annoyance: the SP3 install changes your default browser to IE7. I had it set to Firefox Beta and saw that SP3 reset it to the native browser! When will MS stop messing with user's personal settings?

Canadiens Win

I confess that I don't even know the basics of Ice Hockey and just today came to know that a game consists of 3 periods at least. However, I do know for a fact that the Canadien Habs won the Easter Conference quarterfinals series tonight because their fans are honking and making all kids of noises sine the last 45minutes. Fans in cars are honking, fans on foot are shouting and drinking and all traffic is almost at a halt on St. Catharine and De La Montaigne.

Good Luck to them for the semis.

Massa and Kubica

The Bahrain Grand Prix is today and Kubica is up front on pole for the first time. Massa, who unfortunately hasn't scored a point this season, is second and has another chance to prove himself. A very interesting grid for Bahrain. Hoping for an entertaining race.

Update: Woohooooo .... Massa won in Bahrain again. It was an entertaining race as I read the news report. The title hunt is getting interesting with Kimi Räikkönen leading the points tally and Kubica and Massa being good challengers to Kimi and Hamilton. The BMWs are going to be an important force this season.

Adblock Plus and BBC

Adblock Plus has been efficiently blocking advertisements for me in Iceweasel (Firefox). But it was today that I noticed that the ABP icon was green while reading news items on BBC. It wasn't blocking the advertisements on BBC pages. On further checking I found out that ABP has whitelisted BBC! That is what was causing the adverts to appear.

A simple disabling of the whitelist entry for bbc returned the page to its clean form. What would we do without ABP?

Update: As Wladimir pointed out, the filter list was automatically updated to solve the above quirk. So if you happen to see those adverts, update your filter.

GMail inside and outside

After the recent news of Google increasing the rate of increase of the GMail quota I noticed that the quota had indeed increased from about 2900MB to 2770MB. Today I found out something new regarding GMail quota: GMail's main page shows higher value for the quota than when you are actually logged into the system. Below are the screen captures from the two states: without login and after login showing a difference of a full 100MB. I wonder why there exists the disparity!

No Words Necessary

Photo from BBC

Massa Drives for McLaren?

Am I understanding it in a wrong way or did BBC make a mistake in the news item. The screenshot is from the first day report of the practice session at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. The relevant part is highlighted in the screenshot. Shouldn't it have been "Kimi Raikkonen pipped Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa" ?

Anyway, its Monza ..... Go Ferrariiiiiiiiii

The iPodTouch

Now this is something which made me drool over it. The wifi should have been there long ago. The best thing about it is that it doesn't require activation through AT&T. Does it sync with iCal, iPhoto, etc.? Also, what about its battery? Is it hard to change as it is with the iPhone?

Yahoo! Mail Storage

Saw this today on Yahoo! Mail. \0/\0/\0/ No storage limits \0/\0/\0/. Take that Gmail :p

Camera RAW editors for Linux

Consider this: You have a camera that can shoot in RAW format and you are a Linux user. How do you manage/edit your RAW images on your Linux machine? Below is a quick rundown of RAW editors for Linux(I have tried only a few of them yet) which I have found over the last few days (add comment if I missed any).

Rawstudio is an open source software based on the GTK+ interface and reads all RAW format images supported by dcraw. It can export you RAW images to TIF, PNG and JPEG formats. It also supports colour management using Little CMS. Currently available version is 0.5.1 along with nightly subversion checkouts. From the releases the project looks around year old.

blueMarine is also an open source project available under an Apache License. Requires Java 5 JDK. It supports Nikon .NEF, Canon .CRW and .CR2, Adobe .DNG, Pentax .PEF, Minolta .MRW, Olympus .ORF, Sony .SRF and support for other RAW camera formats is in the plans. The latest release is 0.9.EA9.1768 and they also warn that blueMarine is in beta status. It is not intended yet for production. Please check out the project status before proceeding. Supports OpenRaw.

Qtpfsgui is basically an HDR imaging workflow GUI software. It also supports various camera RAW formats, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and PPM formats. Qtpfsgui is an open source project made available under the GPL v2 license. Uses dcraw(?).

Raw Therapee is a freeware but is uses dcraw(OSS) in the background to read camera RAW formats. Being based on dcraw it supports all formats supported by dcraw. Although loading RAW images isn't too intuitive the first time, practice to use the software brings out its features. The best thing I like about it is that changes to the raw images are listed on the left sidebar. You can always "go" to an earlier stage of the RAW image by double clicking on one of the changes in the sidebar change list.

Bibble, the much acclaimed camera RAW editor runs on Linux too. It isn't free but you can download a demo version which is supposed to work for 30 days. Full versions costs $129 (Pro) and $69 (Lite). It supports most major camera RAW formats and features fast RAW conversion, noise removal by Noise Ninja technology, multithreaded processing support, work queues, and a whole gamut of other features. Supports OpenRAW.

Just like blueMarine, Lightzone is Java based but isn't open source. Version 2.4 is available for free (latest release is v3.0) although the company does not offer any support for Linux whatsoever. I don't know if it is the Java or my machine (PIV 2.0GHz) that Lightzone had a bit sluggish response to my actions. Loading the application takes its time and so does loading a RAW image (.crw - Canon RAW). Feature wise it offers all the basic ones available in a decent RAW editor application. It also supports various colour profiles but I wasn't able to point it to my hidden color profile folder from the preferences. Its file picker doesn't seem to have a way to see hidden folders. Seems to use dcraw to read various camera RAW formats.

There are other applications which do support reading camera RAW but are either not full featured or do not focus on the single goal - camera RAW editing.

digikam, the main KDE photo library software, supports camera RAW and also supports colour profiles using Little CMS. It is able to give fast previews of RAW images (uses dcraw) but its RAW image editor is quite basic in that one has to click on the preview button to see what the effect of the changes just made was!

f-spot also supports camera RAW images and its versioning feature makes it easy to make edits without changing the original (ala a real RAW editor application).

Google's Picasa is also known to support camera RAW formats. However, as it uses Wine and Mozilla technologies to run on Linux, I wasn't even bothered to give it a try.

krita, gimp support camera RAW formats (gimp needs dcraw plugin) but they are both more photo editing applications than RAW editors. I would place krita and gimp inbetween full featured RAW editors like RAWstudio, RawTherapee, blueMarine, Bibble, etc. and photo management applications like digikam and f-spot.

I have tried RawTherapee, Bibble Pro and Lightzone2.4. Bibble looks good and I don't know if Lightzone is offering version 3.0 for Linux users. RAWstudio seems to be developing into a decent application too. dcraw looks like the library of choice with RawTherapee, Lightzone, and RAWstudio using it for camera RAW support.

state.gov oblivious of Firefox?

What happens if you are a Linux user with Firefox and have scheduled a non-immigrant visa for the U.S.A? Well, you end up unable to fill up the DS-156 visa application with your computer running Linux!

After you get your appointment date fixed (online) you are informed that you need to fill up the DS-156 form (no handwritten versions allowed). But if you go to evisaforms.state.gov and you are using anything other than IE or Netscape as your browser, you are out of luck. I used Firefox (both Debian's Iceweasel and mozilla.org's Firefox) to access the page and was warned that my browser does not meet the minimum requirements. Below you can see a screenshot of the warning window.

As a matter of fact Firefox does support 128bit encryption (actually much more than that) and I also have the Acrobat Reader plugin installed (version 7.0). The problem here is the sniffing code on their website. The code just checks for IE5.0SP2 or later and for Netscape 6 or later. There is absolutely no sniffing going on for Firefox (neither Windows nor Linux) which is used by more than 10% of web surfing users (> 15% in the USA). The Acrobat plugin code is written in such a way that it will never say that your Firefox has the plugin installed.

If you carry on and fill up the DS-156 form, you will be taken back to main page without any of your form data being processed for the final pdf file. I tried to fill the form twice thinking that the first time there might be some session time limit which I over ran. Finally, I had to borrow someone's laptop with Windows OS on it and used Internet Explorer to get the form in pdf!

The result of the low quality code used for the site results in Firefox users not being able to get the .pdf for DS-156 after filling up the form. Windows users can still use Internet Explorer but Linux users are left completely helpless. How is it that US Department of State is oblivious of the existence of Firefox and that there are other operating systems than Windows too?

I wonder if Matt Frei used Firefox to setup his visa renewal appointment.

Addon of the Week

In an effort to increase the awareness of Firefox Addons, Addon of the Week has been started. There are already a couple of addons featured on AOTW. Initial plans are to have one addon of the week featured on AOTW. Smaller addons can be featured in between the regular AOTW publishing cycle. If anyone wants to write an article for AOTW, signup there and leave a comment.

Google changes search interface?

Google changed its interface? The new look is only on the google.com site for now. The .ca, .fr, .co.uk, etc. are the usual blue bands. Update: The new interface is due to their combining of various search types they had e.g. web, images, news, etc. They are also supporting a toolbar at the top for various services.

Its so polished that it looks too shiny to me. The shiny bar gives a very Web2.0 feel than the earlier more pleasing colours. Blue band felt plain and simple.

Digg makes HD DVD key famous

Digg did something they probably thought would be a one time thing and removed some story someone submitted on their system. But hey, they kind of forgot that Digg is basically a site which is powered by user submitted content. And after a while they have every chicken raising its head and speaking out some weird number in decimal, hexadecimal, binary, and other formats. The topic has become so popular on Digg that 8 of their Top 10 in Technology stories are about the hot topic. The other two are about Joost and the beautiful Posh Suicide. Screen capture added for your convenience. Update: While writing the post, Joost and dear Posh's stories have fallen from 5th and 6th to 7th and 8th position respectively. Update2: Withing half an hour after writing this post, all top 10 are about the same topic! New screen capture added.

So what I can gather from this is that Digg itself is making the HD DVD key famous. So much for taking out a story due to what ever reasons they had for doing that!

Update: Whole of front page is full of stories about the newly famous hex combination. The whole thing has snow balled into stories with header like Jesus has "the key",Digg deleted my hard drive for posting the HD-DVD KEY!, and the most hilarious one is Secret Code To Remove Lara Craft's Clothes in Tomb Radier Legends!. Very ingenious titles to get user's attention.

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Is this is prime number? Looks like one.

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Just a simple string ;)

Update: this story was dugg more than 180 times and now has been axed off Digg system!! Didn't last for even a couple of hours on Digg.

Debian on MacBook Pro - Docs

The first draft of the procedure for installing Debian on a USB disk connected to a MacBook Pro is up. You can find it here. Leave a comment for improvements and pointers.

I haven't had the time to setup the hardware e.g. mousepad, wireless, backlight, etc. to work in Debian yet. But that information can easily be found on wiki.d.o. The page will be updated as I try the tricks.

Debian/Lenny on MacBook Pro USB

I had been trying to install Linux on a 1GB USB flash drive connected to my MacBook Pro (MBP) since the past few months. Although there are several places describing how to do it using either Boot Camp or by resizing the hard disk partitions, my sole requirement was no changes to the Mac OS X installed on the hard disk.

Boot Camp was out of question as its main aim is to help install Windows by providing drivers for the Mac hardware. The other option was using rEFIt and resizing the hard disk. I had tried this earlier with mactel-linux patches for the kernel and was able to get a login prompt but no video. That process involved several steps using debootstrap and compiling the kernel with the patches.

However, with the release of Debian 4.0 (Etch), the debian-installer also got a lot of attention and installs a relatively new 2.6.18 kernel. So armed with a netinstall d-i CD (23 April build, 26th doesn't recognize network card) I was able to install Debian Testing (Lenny) on the USB disk with XFCE4 as the desktop environment with 130MB of swap space partition and 157MB to spare after installing dillo web browser.

The installation of Lenny on the USB flash disk has not required any change on the internal MBP hard disk and the Mac OS X installation is completely oblivious of the Debian install. If I don't press the "Option" button at boot time, Mac OS X boots up, otherwise with the USB connected it asks which OS to boot.

Next post gives the link for installation steps. The process was based on information gathered mainly from the Debian wiki's Macbook and Macbook Pro pages, and also here.

Basilica de Notre Dame

Merry Springmas

Current forecast shows light snow and so does the view in my window. And it is 16th of April today! Merry Springmas™ everyone.

Historical data says that maximum and minimum temperatures in April are 11°C and 1°C with a mean of 6°C. The current deviation in temperature isn't huge then. However, on the snow and rain front the weatherman says that there will be around 10-15cm of snow and 10-15cm of rain from Sunday overnight to Monday overnight! Historically, 10cm of more rain happens in April for only 2 days whereas no day sees more than 5cm of snow in April. In 2007, there will be at least 1 day recorded with around 10cm of snow.

Checking Firefox Version

I am trying to write a script in Javascript* which would inform a visitor's using Firefox if they are running an older version. Although Firefox does automatically check if there is an update and informs the user, I have seen visitors with versions like 0.8, 1.0.x, 1.5.y (y<11),>

Automatic updates are helpful for home users at least as corporate users might not have the rights to upgrade their software without administrator access. However, informing them with a visual warning on a web page could help in avoiding potential problems of using vulnerable versions.

Presently, the script checks the CVS branch tag i.e. rv: value with a hard coded value and prints a warning for users with older versions. Is there any way that the hard coded value(s) can be acquired automatically from say mozilla.org server and checked with visitor's user agent information? I don't know much about AJAX but would it be helpful in this case? No AJAX compatibility issues as the only browser we are checking is Firefox.

* - using Javascript because it runs client side, is available to all Firefox users and those who have disabled Javascript would most likely not need the warning to know it.