whistler’s blog

Feisty had started to cause me some problems. It started hanging, I could not trace the problem to a particular program so i think it was the kernel. My computer used to hang. Although the mouse still worked, I could not kill X with Ctrl+Alt+Bksp. So I could not wait for a few days for the final release I installed Gusty RC.  A lot of people are having problems with this new version. For me there is good and there is bad.

At first I noticed the program called Cheese, I had given up finding a program like this a few weeks back. Although I had the camera driver installed it was not of much use as there was no such program that worked for v4l2, except for a few video chat apps. Another thing good about gusty is power management for laptops. Feisty usually lasted for a little less time compared to vista, but now in gusty I can run my laptop for much longer than vista. Btw I accidentally deleted few of the boot file for this MS OS, I cant recover it unless I format my whole computer using the recovery disk that came with it. Well maybe I’ll do something about it in a few months when I want to play Age of Empires or Counterstrike. Lastly compiz-fusion makes my computer somewhat cooler than what Beryl made it. Virtualbox makes visualization extremely easy and fast.

Then the bad side. Somehow Wifi connectivity on feisty was amazing, it connected when vista could not connect to a wireless network(which btw should connect as it came preinstalled with my computer) . On gusty I am encountering problems with wireless sometimes(similar to vista), although it works totally fine at home. Suspend stopped working! Hibernate doesnt work too but it didnt work with feisty either. Even after reading all those posts in the forums I could not find a work around.

Some general problems related to Linux. No easy way of configuring s-video output, somehow the nvidia control panel does not detect my connected TV.  Card reader drivers dont work with MMC. Suspend/hibernate problems. Otherwise everything works pretty good. I dont like Ubuntu’s default brown theme.

Today was my last IB exam, and finally after months of hardship, its over. I must say although IB may have given me a little different experience, I am an A Level kind of person. My grades have been very low, reason for getting rejected at universities where I would really like going to. I am pretty sure my grades would have been superb if I were doing A Levels.

Well, I should also blame TIS for the bad grades and frustration. At my new school, EIS, it was fun and exciting, while very tough at the same time. I would really miss this place.

I have never waited for any other day as I have waited for today. I had put a counter on iGoogle and google desktop(when I used it) for this day. Finally it counts 0 days.

Now I am planning to focus on my health. Have hardly had any exercise since I moved to UAE. I’ll take up some open source project. Redesign this website. Finalize where I am heading for uni, as everyone but me knows by now.

I am very happy with my computer, running feisty makes it ultra productive and it looks amazingly cool too, with all my customizations of course.

For the senior night I took the task of editing a few songs getting one from Youtube, Ubuntu has a great set of tools which let me do this. First of all the Sound Juicer automatically started when I put in the Audio CD so i could begin the ripping process. The Audacity was pretty good to trim parts of the audio files. Although it crashed a few times unexpectedly and I had to tell it the location for LAME library it worked out pretty good. It was quite easy to learn how to do this. However there still is potential for improvement of its user interface by using right click menus to perform operations. Maybe if I read a tutorial I might not feel the need for this.

There was no need for me to install countless codecs which I had to do when working with dbpoweramp on windows. Plus it was easier to use then the method I used before. I guess Automatix must have installed them for me at some earlier time. I found the sound preview feature of nautilus extremely useful here and of course Linux comes with great tools like ffmpeg and mencoder, although they are not that hard to use, I wish they had a good GUI frontend. I loved how easily ffmpeg was able to extract audio from a flv video downloaded from Youtube, although it seems fine on low volume on my PC, running it on the powerful theater speakers would show the poor sound quality, still its better than nothing.

Again I would say, Linux is awesome for sound editing, I never tried any commercial software for this and I never want to either when I can do it for free.

This is the first timing I’m hearing/seeing this, reportedly some hail fell in Karachi last Sunday. It took me some time to believe it although the friend telling me about it never lied to me and had photographical evidence. I might put these photographs on if I find some time.
Found some more information here

Remember me talking about weather going crazy, here we have more examples. Even here in UAE, people haven’t seen this kind of weather for long.

Nice to see Shadaan blogging again, Im writing this in reply to this. Well he is mostly right, but its somewhat exageratted. How does Pakistan calls itself: ‘the supreme overlord of Islam’? Yes it should have shariah laws if it calls itself an islamic republic but does that matter much when many people do not get punished for their crimes anyway. We need major reforms and restructuring in law enforcement, thats how you get rid of corruption, bribery, murders, drugs and alcohol, etc.

Usually high society is not as close to religion as normal everyday people, the are several examples of people taking alcohol and drugs but the majority of our society does not and is strictly against it.

Thanks to the very unequal distribution of wealth in our country, conditions can be terrible for the poor . Whats more is that powerful people misuse their powers against the lower class. Poverty, mistreatment and other things make these people find relief in drugs.

According to my observations, things are getting better, except for perhaps the case of drugs and booze. Musharaff is doing a good job, atleast better than what our previous leaders have done.

I too believe Pakistan would have been better off if it were a part of India. Perhaps a loose federation would have solved all the problems, creating two nations resulted in the initial massacre, then the three wars conflicts. Not to forget that even after the partition a 13% of India’s population is Muslim.

Ok, this is the first post I am writing from my new laptop, just got HP Pavilion dv6000, liked it till now, im happy with MS Works, just in time to help me with my extended essay to be submitted on Sunday. OpenOffice was kind of bugging me, it doesnt have grammar correction.

Well windows Vista does not look that good to me, I mean after all these years, thats all they could do? I had no expectations either, did not care to look at beta’s or anything. Well they have made the user interface a lot better i must say. Still in my opinion xgl/compiz would look better. It crashed and restarted in the first 30 minutes I started using it. XP can do better than that, oh i forgot its still windows. Otherwise things seem to be smooth for now. I removed norton, it would have started bugging me more than any virus after after 60 days of subscription expires.

I dont really like the login screen very much, the circular windows start button seriously looks crap and look at that internet explorer icon, its soo ugly. Otherwise internet explorer seems much better than what im used to. But still I didnt trust it with saving my passwords.

I love the wide screen, the taskbar can show more programs so can the browser more tabs. Havnt really tried out much, just changed the mouse sensitivity to my liking and now just a blog post, then its work! I just hope linux has good support for this machine…

Well, I just finished doing my World lit essay, yaay! Have the rest of the night to complete my Extended Essay. Just got hold of how to cite, using the footnote system, its the best! Anyways my Extended Essay is gonna be really crappy. I did get a really cool new topic for an extended essay though, lol. but Its really late to change. So my extended essay is gonna suck like the rest of the theoretical ones in physics.

Well the good thing is, I finally think i’d be able to complete all my coursework and not fail ib diploma. Lol, i even say that when i have economics portfolio and business coursework due tomorrow which im not gonna hand in. I performed really poorly for exams so i donno if im gonna get in to a good uni. Inshallah the finals are gonna be great.

Doing the economics portfolios would take 3-4 days, then I have significant progress over my other math coursework. And i finally figured out what to do about my business coursework. Hamza’s restaurant would be a good thing to study. Then I have TOK essay to hand in, have to almost redo it but, it took me 2-3 days to write it anyways.

Whats left are the physics lab reports and cas(creativity) hours, hopefully i’ll be able to complete that aswell when im done with the rest of the things. Oh and what about sending out those uni applications…

My K750i joystick was bothering me for a long while. Even I had trouble using the phone, imagine people who borrowed it from me. I joked its a security mechanism that only I can use it.

I Googled and found this. I had never opened my K750i before but i succeeded in doing that without a T9 screwdriver quite easily. Although I was a bit afraid of damaging its case. I did not disassemble it completely, just removed the keypad board and the black plastic below it, then pulled out the joystick cap.

Spraying the solvent is the hardest part. A small dropper should be used ideally but if you are ill equipt like me, other things might work as well. I sprayed some WD-40 in a small bottle cap and used a triangular guitar pick to put in the solvent in the joystick module. When putting in the solvent I held the joystick in the opposite direction so that a bigger gap for the solvent is created.

Put the solvent on each side and move the joystick in every direction so that the solvent gets distributed properly and if this does not work try adding more solvent. It took me three tries before my joystick was good as new(maybe better than that). First I used a pencil tip to put the solvent in, next i sprayed the WD-40 on the module(I highly recommend not to do something stupid like this) and lastly my guitar pick method turned out to be highly successful.

There are a number of solvents that can be used listed there. WD-40 would not only dissolve dust or whatever that made the joystick so unresponsive but also would lubricate it. So I guess its better to use than others, and other than that it was the only thing I had handy.

All that would be required is: a screwdriver, a small phillips did the job for me, some sort of hydrocarbon solvent, something small and pointy which can be used to drop the solvent on the module, something flat and rigid like a plastic card to slide through the sides of the phone after unscrewing, I used a guitar pick for both the dropper and card. Some tissues and possibly newspaper so that spilled solvent doesn’t mess the workspace.

I highly recommend you see this to get the idea where to apply the solvent. And this to get an idea how to open the phone. It is highly unadvisable to disassemble the phone completely, open only two screws from behind to remove the front cover only.

And if you destroy your phone in the process, don’t come crying to me, I am wont be responsible. You should not trust a bloggers anyways.

159 days till i get out of the cage of IB, i.e. my last IB exam. I am already beginning to plan what I want to do. Firstly I want to go trekking, there are so many wonderful places out there like Nanga Parbat, Deosai, Rakaposhi and Siri paye. Trekking previous June was one of the best experiences of my life. This time I also want to do something more thrilling as well like rock climbing, repelling or rafting.

Then I am thinking of doing an internship somewhere as I have never had any sort of real work experience. I might take up some open source coding project, some entrepreneurial idea or both. And of course I want to meet everyone I know in Pakistan before I go on to university.

But before that there is the Winter break in a week, I wont be going to Pakistan. Instead I’ll have to work on my extended essay, write a world lit essay, do all the economics portfolios, get physics lab reports, do my other math coursework, not to forget the business project, get in position to be able to speak enough French to get a decent grade in the oral, send all my documents to unis, I must be missing something on the list.

The next five months dont look very good!

Computers really have to break down at the most critical moments. Right when the math coursework is due in two days, today something really weird happened to my PC. At first I thought it was windows that is causing problems, but then it seemed that one of the PCI cards are misbehaving, but after removing all them, i thought it was the CD-RW drive.

Yeah and finally it turned out that the motherboard is the culprit. So I had to replace it, I put in my sister’s which was not being used at the moment. I don’t even know where to connect the power and hard disk LED connections as I don’t have the manual for it.

Any ways the good thing is I have a minimalist working computer. The new install of windows will hopefully let me do my coursework without any worries tomorrow. I have a lot of tech junk lying around my room, have to figure out where to store it. Probably wont go back inside my pc until i need it.

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