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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

powered by performancing firefox

Today a friend, Saad told me that Flickr in UAE is ublocked which turned out to be true, I also tried orkut.com which works as well. I don’t know of many other sites filtered by the Etisalat proxy so I have no clue if all has been unblocked. Surprisingly I did not find anything mentioning this change when I searched on google. As expected Skype is still not working. I just hope they don’t block flickr again and unblock VOIP soon too, I have no idea why they would do that but I just want that to happen. I guess our prayers are being heard during Ramadan.

Just today one of my friends sites got defaced by someone, the page the guy left on the server was quite surprising it had a msn messenger contact email given and whats more it started with the name of Allah and asked to go to an Islamic site al-sunnah.com. Now all the hackers out there would be whining that these script kiddies give them a bad name but this one is doing the same for Muslim’s and even his country KSA was mentioned on the page!

Taking a look at the html source of the page quickly revealed that it was made in frontpage, a windows user. The page even had a animation script from dynamicdrive.com, which for some reason did not render on firefox. Googling the provided email i found there were more sites which had the same fate as my friend’s. Most of the sites had been changed back to something else but google’s cache contained the defaced version. The sites seemed quite random, this dude named Arsalan must have got some exploit script from the net and would be feeling very proud being able to use it. What a loser!

If you’re intrested in seeing the page, then just search ‘hho@host.sk’ on google and it’ll hopefully have a cache of it.

As I would be leaving for my CAS trip very soon, I decided to clean up my K750i memory stick so that I have enough space for pictures. I had only 15MBs left even when I had removed all the pictures. My Mp3s were only 20MB so what was taking rest of the memory? The file hierarchy of the phone had always confused me before, but today I found out most of the folders were junk.

The system folder was taking the most space so I checked it out, I previously thought that this folder would have critical files, essential for running the phone. But it turned out that most of the stuff is useless, the ams folder contained what seemed to be some program data of applications I dont use at all, or were removed from the phone long ago. Interestingly the muvee folder in ams had some .mrp files which turned out to be bitmap images. Just rename them to .bmp and you’ll be able to view them. This was where most of the memory was going. I also removed the SKINS folder, which seemed to have pictures aswell but I could not find any way to open .mbm files. I tried a tool mbmbmp but I guess SonyEricsson uses a different method to store data in these files.

I also removed some useless sound recordings and some .jar files I had in ‘others’ directory for the purpose of distributing them to others. I really like this feature of K750i that you can send out files in that directory using bluetooth and infrared, even if it is a jar. After only 25MB was used on my memory I decided to defragment the chip, yes it may sound surprising but phones can also be defragmented. This can increase the performance of your phone if you have a large memory chip.

If you have ever used Linux, the idea of running Linux and Windows together must have occurred to you at some point. The good news is that there are better methods to do this than simply configuring a boot loader like Grub or Lilo to be able to load only one of the operating systems at a time.

There is a great software called Wine which can help by implementing Windows API on Linux. It lets you run a lot of Windows applications on Linux but some of the applications require wasting time on configuration, some have minor display problems and other bugs. However most of the light-weight windows programs seem to run perfectly without any configuration.

Commercial software like VMware enable you to run multiple operating systems at the same time by creating virtual machines. You boot in to one operating system then use this software to install another OS in a virtual drive and boot the new OS on top of the running OS. This method gives usable environment but the speed of the system is slowed down to a great degree. Part of this software, the VMware player has now become free. I used this for some time to run the few windows programs that do not have a substitute in Linux.

Sadly the newer Linux kernels and distributions do not support my modem very well and there are other pieces of hardware which are really hard to configure in Linux such as my TV tuner card. Somehow Linux applications could not detect a DVD-R in my DVD-RW drive and thought it was a CD-R. All these things made me shift back to windows. But soon I realized that I was too dependent on Linux so I started running VMware on Windows. But the slow speed was not tolerable so I had to find another way.

CoLinux happened to be the way I was looking for. It runs Linux on top of Windows but not by emulating a complete machine like VMware does. It runs like a server in the background and you can connect to it using VNC or Xwindows client. VNC was not good enough for me but running Cygwin/X the speed of KDE seems just like when booting Linux the normal way. Although I have not tried this but you can also boot the same Linux installation from the bootloader as well as CoLinux. The sad part is that it is not easy to configure and the documentation is also not very good.

I am now running Debian and liked its idea of providing really stable applications. I do like new features in the software coming to me as soon as possible but then I can manually install these software whereas the core remains stable as possible.

What kind of a rare bird is that? Let me explain, today I was at Technorati, for those who don