Yesterday, I went to the bookfair with Saumik-da, Ashikur-da, Samarpita-di, Tania and Tania’s (not so little sister), Sonia. Somehow, the crowd almost bearable (or maybe I’m just getting used to crowds), and after around four hours of heavy duty dust inhalation, I came back home with the following books:
.

I also bough a special edition of The Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains all the four parts.

In my other life^tm I’ve been checking out Zimbra for the mailing solution deployment at WBUT. It does seem to be a very solid and tightly integrated product, though I need to get some data on how well it scales up.

I stumbled across Steven Garrity’s blog post on using Mediawiki for normal, traditional non-wiki websites, and indeed, MediaWiki would probably be the ideal thing for the typical knowledge base cum news portal type of sites that are so common nowadays. However, the default look and feel of Mediawiki is perhaps slightly intimidating, especially for non-technical users, and I guess that a more user friendly/less cluttered up skin (like the one used for the Tango Project site) would be a good idea. Currently, I’m working on converting the Delciously Blue design from OSWD into a MediaWiki skin, and I’ll try to upload the results of my effort within the next few days.

Yes – spam me at sayamindu@wbut.ac.in.

It feels good to use the “mailto:” thing after such a long time .

I wanted to call IDG today, and suddenly, I realised that instead of dialling his mobile no., I was pressing the numbers 202… – his IP address. I badly need some help .

Hmm… I’m doing something that was almost impossible a few years back – I’m online from a train, running somewhere through Jharkhand (umm.. well, right now I’m stuck at a rail roko at Jamshedpur station – but anyway.. you should get the idea ).

I’ll be reaching Mumbai for the FLOSSWorld workshop tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow – if this rail roko persists) – I’ll try to blog on the proceedings of the workshop from there. This Reliance phone really rocks (no – I’m not paid to say this).

PS: The only thing that I’m missing badly is some kind of way to recharge my laptop’s batteries. Maybe I should write a letter to our railway minister – asking for electrical outlets at all compartments.

Went to the famous Piccadilly Book Shop at Free School Street today, and got the following books:

 

• Issue 59959: The sequence a halant ja (u0985 U09CD U09AF) should be treated as a legal combination
• Issue 59956: Incorrect rendering of bafala in Bengali (bn) documents

I’ll also be posting instructions for people who want to utilize these patches in their existing OpenOffice.org 2 installations Very Soon^tm.

Yesterday, I did a kernel upgrade (to 2.6.14-nitro4) on my Debian desktop system (which is also my main development box). After the upgrade, the sensors command is giving me the following output:


VCore: +1.67 V (min = +0.94 V, max = +0.96 V) ALARM
+12V: +12.34 V (min = +10.82 V, max = +13.19 V) ALARM
+3.3V: +3.15 V (min = +3.14 V, max = +3.47 V) ALARM
+5V: +4.93 V (min = +4.75 V, max = +5.25 V) ALARM
-12V: -14.91 V (min = -10.80 V, max = -13.18 V)
V5SB: +4.89 V (min = +4.76 V, max = +5.24 V) ALARM
VBat: +2.70 V (min = +2.40 V, max = +3.60 V) ALARM
fan1: 0 RPM (min = 39705 RPM, div = 2)
CPU Fan: 3358 RPM (min = -1 RPM, div = 2)
fan3: 0 RPM (min = -1 RPM, div = 2)
M/B Temp: +38°C (high = +2°C, hyst = +32°C) sensor = thermistor ALARM
CPU Temp: +34.5°C (high = +70°C, hyst = +55°C) sensor = diode
temp3: +43.0°C (high = +80°C, hyst = +75°C) sensor = thermistor
vid: +0.275 V (VRM Version 9.0)
alarms: Chassis intrusion detection ALARM
beep_enable:
Sound alarm enabled


Nice….

Screenshot says it all .



I’ll try to release a sane, human understandable patchset by tomorrow.

31^st was spent mostly by trying to configure Dataone connections, and playing around with IDG’s new Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Unfortunately, the router is the infamous “revision 5″, loaded with VxWorks, and hence, I could play around with the firmware. However, the coverage was pretty impressive, and we are thinking of attaching a high gain antenna to the router to find out the maximum range of the coverage.

At night, I attended the midnight Mass at St Pauls. During the Mass, I had switched off my cell phone, and when I switched it on again, I got a SMS telling me that I had 14 missed calls. Ughh!!!

Today, I’m back to my usual routine – I woke up at 10:30, had breakfast, chewed up the mail, and now I’m busy trying to figure out a solution to the A-e japhala problem that has been bugging OOo users for quite some time.