Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Manufacturing might

I am amazed at how good China is in manufacturing everything that was ever to be made. Especially toys. Pretty much every toy you can buy - both in stores and foot paths, are now made in China. I bought a little plastic bird, fitted with a motion sensor, a speaker and a little 'button' cell, so that it chirps when it senses any movement near it. They can make it in a huge factory somewhere in China, ship it all the way to India, possibly Chennai, transport it on road to Bangalore, distribute to stockists, resellers and foot-path vendors and they can still sell it for a meagre 20 Rupees. What should be the cost of manufacturing the toy? At what price can they sell this toy in the town it is manufactured at? While this is terrific, what is even more amazing is that if you want to replace the battery in the toy, you will need to shell out 40-70 Rupees. Do your math now!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Bangalore? Bengaluru?

Bangalore is on it's way to become Bengaluru. There are people who like the change and there are people who don't. There is yet another class of people who cannot make up their mind either way. They spell it "Bangalooru" :-)

Thursday, December 11, 2008

A feature I wish for

I sometimes connect my laptop to an LCD monitor at work. The monitor supports lower resolution than what my laptop supports. Hence I often keep switching between two resolutions on my GNOME desktop. When I switch to higher resolution, all my windows retain their old size (pixel-wise), so they turn out to be too small. I need to manually resize each window to my taste.

What I need is a way to set the size of the window to be relative to the size of the desktop. That is, I want all my terminal windows to be around 75% of the width of the desktop and 100% of the height of the desktop, excluding the taskbars. I want my pidgin IRC client to be 50% in width and 75% in height. Is that even possible with the existing GNOME desktop? If not, is it possible with any other desktop on Linux? If not, I wonder whether any other OS has such a feature.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Weird problem with Linux file system

How big is the problem of your hard disk drive getting full? If it is anything like what happened to me, LOTS. I am still trying to come to terms with all that happened on my laptop.

Like any self-respecting geek, I run Linux as my primary desktop. In fact I have 3 Linux distros installed on my fairly small hard disk. As a result, most of my disk partitions are filled to the brim. Sometimes I need to delete stuff from my disk even to make way for even a 300MB file. On my Fedora9 partition, I have both root and /home on the same partition. On one of the unfortunate days last week, while I was compiling some code, the partition reached 100% full. I wasn't alarmed, after all, how bad can this be? But it was going to be quite bad.

The first thing that I noticed was that bash command history did not work. The next bash shell I spawned did not show a proper prompt (PS1). Little investigation showed that my ~/.bash* files did not exist any more! I frantically started looking at my $HOME to noticed that a number of small files, like my custom scripts directory, were missing. I don't know what else and how much more I have lost. Didn't I back up my entire home dir? Yeah, right.

I know, this is NOT what you expect and people will tell me this cannot happen. Unless I am trying one of the bleeding edge file systems. But I was on good old ext3. I did not find any hint about this in kernel messages. I tried googling for this, but this problem is very difficult to phrase and my attempts did not hit anything. I wonder whether anyone who reads this blog has hit such a problem or have any idea what might have happened. One more thing: I am NOT willing to try to recreate this problem ;-)

Scripts I use

These are a couple of scripts I use to convert files between media formats. The only advantage of using these is that I don't need to remember all the crazy command line options.

rm_to_wav.sh
--------------------
basename=`echo $1 |awk -F. '{print $1}'`
mplayer -cache 32 -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=$basename.wav $1


wav_to_mp3.sh
----------------------
basename=`echo $1 |awk -F. '{print $1}'`
lame -V2 $1 $basename.mp3


Usage:
-----------
rm_to_wav.sh filename.rm
wav_to_mp3.sh filename.wav

Monday, December 01, 2008

FOSS.in 2008

FOSS.in conference is over! As I mentioned in my previous post, I gave a talk there. What do I feel about how the event went?

First, the bad things.

This year's conference had an unique, unprecedented build up. It all started with this Atul's post. It turned out to be very controversial and it put off a lot of people, especially abroad. I am not guessing this. I met a few people at Linux Kongress this year, who personally told me that they felt unwelcome at FOSS.in this year and hence refrained from sending a talk proposal. The organizers provided some clarification towards the end of the year, but the damage had been done.

Next, the global economic meltdown meant finding money for sponsoring the event was going to be tough, because very few companies were willing to spend money on this. This meant low propaganda for the event, leading to much lower anticipation building up to the event. All this led to much smaller number of delegates this year. Someone who had been to FOSS.in 2007 would immediately recognize the difference.

Now the good things.

FOSS.in organizers did a lot of things right, especially as the conference approached. First, they corrected some of the misconceptions in the minds of people, especially with this post.

Secondly, they communicated effectively with the speakers to ensure the workout sessions, which was the most unique thing about this year's conference, were planned pretty well.

Third, they showed the openness to Linux kernel talks, thus alleviating one of the biggest complaints from my team at work. In fact they stepped back and let the people who know about kernel plan sessions related to this area.

They ensured that the conference ran smoothly by ensuring that a lot of little things were taken care of well. Food was good, biscuits served with tea were even better. Little things like running around and getting us more extension cords for workout sessions, ensuring that logistics at the conference were handled well go a long way in enhancing satisfaction in the minds of attendees. I also liked the "Show me the..." theme.

There was live streaming of talks from the main hall, which was another cool thing.

The talks themselves were pretty good, but I think they could have been better. I really enjoyed the closing note by Kalyan Varma. While his photos were obviously very good, it was clear that he had prepared a lot for this talk and it showed in the class his talk exhibited.

Finally, there were far too many good things about the conference than bad ones. The event was an overall success. Talks, workouts, logistics, everything was a success. Lower turnout compared to last year was expected, hence I can't say that was a failure either. I don't know what the organizers are thinking about FOSS.in 2009, but I hope they retain the format of this year and just polish up some of the rough edges. I hope the people who participated in FOSS.in 2008 will come back with much more enthusiasm next year and get their friends involved. The Linux kernel people will surely be more interested about the conference next year. I hope we will be able to advertise the event much better next year, which hopefully will bring in much more sponsorship money. This conference is surely one of the better organized FOSS conferences in the world, I hope it only gets better.