After behaving weirdly for almost a month, my BSNL broadband connection finally died today. And while trying to switch to my backup, I discovered that I have left my Reliance CDMA mobile’s data cable at college. So right now I am only left with a very slow GPRS connection from Airtel (though thankfully it’s unlimited),ie no bar on data transfer. Reply to mails, messages, etc will be slow till BSNL restores my broadband connection.

Today is পয়লা বৈশাখ, or the first day of the Bengali year 1414. সবাইকে জানাই শুভ নববর্ষ। (a very happy new year to everyone).

..and in SoC related stuff, I have HTML-ified my proposal, and uploaded it here. Comments/suggestions/brickbats are welcome :-).

Planet FLOSS India was down for the past one day due to some configuration file related goof ups. Things should be running normally now. If you see something odd, or if your blog has vanished from the subscription list, or if you want to get into the planet, please mail me at sayamindu at randomink org.

Debarshi posts about FC 6 DVDs on sale on the pavement near the Mumbai CST railway station. I’ll just copy paste the conversation with the shopkeeper (with added translations):

BG: “CD ka key kaha se milega?” Where do I get the CD key/license?
Man: “Puch ke ata hun…” (goes away) “Andhar sare chiz milega, crack kiya hua hai.” Let me find out…(goes away) You’ll get all the stuff inside, it’s already cracked.
DR: “Yeh kya cheez ka DVD hai? Movie?” What’s inside the DVD - movie ?
Man: “Ekdam latest hai.” It’s the latest stuff
DR: “Lekin hai kya?”But what’s inside ?
Man: “Linux hai.” It’s Linux
BG: “XP me chalega?” Will it run on (Windows) XP
Man: “Bilkul chalega.” Yes of course

In other news, the work on equalizer support in Exaile is progressing nicely, and here’s a screenshot. Expect a patch by the end of this weekend.

I’m back at Kolkata after almost a eight from Jakarta to Kolkata (including a 2 hour break at Singapore). In the flight watched A Good Year and played Dr Mario (but mostly slept).

Came up with a patch for Sabayon issue 397742 - next job is to figure out how to move Pessulus into the same tree as Sabayon and merge the two.

Will start uploading the photos tonight (unless I fall asleep - still pretty sleepy).

Just wanted to mention that I’m back from a volcano/tropical rainforest trip (still in Indonesia though), and will be back in India on the 31st. Internet connection here is not very good (too many people on a slow link), and will be posting photos, etc once I’m back at Kolkata. There’s a nice picture of the forest at WikiTravel though…

Based on suggestions from quite a few people (thanks everyone!!), I made a few changes/tweaks to the Planet FLOSS India theme. Things should render slightly more gracefully on screens with width < 1024px ;-). I'm also working on a few Javascript hacks for the site and also on a customised search engine for the subscribers of Planet FLOSS India, and hopefully they will be implemented by the end of next week.


In other news, I’m going to attend Asia Source II to be held at Yawitra Resort, Sukabumi, Indonesia. I’ll be participating in the FOSS Implementation and Migration track and will be leaving Kolkata on the 20th of this month and will be returning on the 31st. Asia Source I at Bangalore was a great experience, and I really look forward towards attend this camp as well. I got my Visa today - the only thing remaining is to get a ECNR stamp on my passport which I plan to do tomorrow.

Finally, we have completed shifting RandomInk to a new host, and I took advantage of this shift to do a few things that have been pending for quite a long time:

• Upgrading all Wordpress installations to 2.0.6
• Getting rid of the abandoned subdomains
• Cleaning up the comment spam in all the blogs hosted at RandomInk
• Changing the look and feel of my own blog
• Cleaning up Planet FLOSS India - I would really love to have more hackergotchis in the site. If you are on P-F-I and if you have a picture that you want to turn into a Hackergotchi, just mail it to me. I’ll do the GIMP-ing for you.
• Rejuvenating Blogs @ RandomInk - if you want a wordpress.com style blogging account for you at Randomink, mail me at sayamindu randomink dot org, and I’ll create one for you.
• Getting an instance of Trac running for my coding related stuff (more on this in a later post).
• Installing Tracks to do task management.

I tried to make this shift as transparent as possible - but if you notice anything odd (missing files, dead links, PHP/Python/Ruby errors), please mail me or ping me in IRC/IM, and I’ll try to sort it out.

To all users of Randomink.Org mail:

We will be shifting the email hosting of Randomink.org very soon. If you use the services at randomink.org email, please get in touch with me at my gmail address asap so that I can help you with the transition.


# cat cpuinfo
Processor : Intel XScale-Bulverde rev 7 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 291.63
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementor : 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0x411
CPU revision : 7
Cache type : undefined 5
Cache clean : undefined 5
Cache lockdown : undefined 5
Cache unified : harvard
I size : 32768
I assoc : 32
I line length : 32
I sets : 32
D size : 32768
D assoc : 32
D line length : 32
D sets : 32

Hardware : Motorola Ezx Platform
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000


…I bought the Motorola A780 :-).

My old Motorola E398 phone is dead, and I’m thinking of buying a new GSM phone. The candidates right now are the Motorola A1200 (MotoMING) and the Motorola A780 (both Linux based). Probably I’ll end up buying the Motorola A780, since it has got support for EDGE (though I completely fail to understand why the Motorola A1200, which is newer than the A780 does not support EDGE). I’ll try to swap the 256 MB memory card which comes with the A780 for a higher capacity card (1 GB or 512 MB) - and as for the rest of the features of the A1200 which are not present in the A780 (FM Radio, 2 megapixel camera, business card scanner, support for the Bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP profiles, etc), I’m simply not interested. One more advantage of the A780 is that it has got a physical keypad, while the A1200 is entirely touchpad/stylus based. Knowing myself and my phone usage pattern, the keypad is going to be a major screensaver :-).

After doing some Googling, it also turns out that most of the directories in the A1200 is locked using SELinux, (yes - right, you have got SELinux on a phone) while the A780 is comparatively less restrictive (you can telnet into both the phones, and you also have a 3rd party terminal emulator program which runs natively on the A780). Someone also managed to get Debian GNU/Linux to run on the phone, and there is also an unofficial SDK which lets you develop native apps for the phone (the official Motorola recommendation is to go the J2ME way).

I’m looking for some feedback from people who have actually used the A780 - if you have any issues with the phone please do let me know.

Durga puja was spent mostly at Maddox Square (I’m too lazy to do pandal hopping) and meeting up with old school mates. Took a few pictures - will upload them when I get some time.

I need a haircut…



..and I’m getting addicted to the Mac

Comments/flames are welcome:

Yesterday night, while uploading some of the GPLv3 conference photos to Flickr, I noticed that somehow, magically, my account had been upgraded to a Pro one. It turns out that someone decided to give me a birthday gift one month in advance :). Thanks SM :D.

…..
Biraha ke aansoon kab ke,
ho kab ke ponch daali
Phir kaahe dard jagaao
…..