So, I have finally reached Bangalore. (I actually landed up sometime at around 5:40 in the morning yesterday :-P, and spent the entire day at the Red Hat office).

I have been reading up on Gstreamer, VOIP and VideoConferencing stuff lately, and spent a large part of the second half yesterday playing around with Picture in Picture support in GStreamer, and creating other weird pipelines. During my “research” (hehe), I came across a framework called Tapioca which essentially allows you to add support for IM and VOIP to your application. Right now, there’s an application included with this framework called TapiocaUI which allows you to speak to people who are using GTalk for Windows - and I plan to test it out today. Tapioca uses a framework called Farsight, which provides GStreamer elements for handling RTP, so I’ll be playing around with that too.

I’ll be going to Hyderabad on the 25th. From Hyderabad, I’ll be taking a bus to Bangalore on the 28th night, and reaching Bangalore on the 29th morning. In all probabilities, I’ll be staying in Bangalore for a month or so, and will be returning to Kolkata sometime in August.

My old 40 GB hard disk somehow got badly damaged (quite a few files in the /home partition were totally unaccessible), and so I decided to get a replacement. So on Staurday morning, Soumyadip and myself went to Chandni, and got the following items:

• A 250 GB SATA hard disk
• A DVD writer
• A PCI Wifi card (Linksys WMP54G)

I was a bit worried that the 3^rd item might not be supported under Linux, but fortunately, it was nicely detected by Ubuntu (Dapper) and worked seamlessly with the rt2500 driver. In case any one is interested, lspci gives me:

0000:02:08.0 Network controller: RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card (rev 01)

However, I still do not have a wireless access point at my home - so I have to remain content with an Ad-Hoc network at the moment. It works quite nicely for my purposes (mostly NAT, ssh and occasional NFS), so I’m quite happy. The only major PITA was to set the mode of the card to Ad-Hoc manually every time I rebooted - so after some manpage hunting - I stumbled across the manpage of wireless(7), which says:

In Debian 3.0 (and later) you can configure wireless LAN networking
devices using the network configuration tool ifupdown(8).

File : /etc/network/interfaces

Form : wireless-<function> <value>
wireless-essid Home
wireless-mode Ad-Hoc

So everything is working seamlessly now - no cluttered up wires - no cat playing around with the CAT5 cable (pun intentional) and most importantly, no mom shouting at me, demanding that I remove the wire clutter from my room. Yipee!!! Freedom at last :-).

Post title says it all. Yay!! I’m back in action once again: