Planet Ubuntu Nepal

Ishwor Gurung: Bound vs. Unbound Erlang variable, posted Feb. 28, 2010

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:56:54 +0000

A pretty decent definition of bound vs. unbound variable. A very good Erlang book is at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/; the author of the book hangs around at #erlang@freenode and overall, he's a great guy who helps folks with problems in Erlang.

On that note, Erlang is a powerful functional language with the following features:

Shared-nothing memory architecture - we don't have to worry about resource locking scheme (deadlock/livelock) since nothing is shared. If you need to name a variable twice use a different variable name.
Asynchronous message-passing - means decent performance on multiple cores within an Erlang cluster and worry free variables (they don't need supervisory locks to monitor their state because again it's not shared! :)
Functional language properties - A high-order function for control abstractions, anonymous functions and lambda expressions(in spirit of Python)
OTP and libraries - Running network applications with about 10 lines of server code and about 6 lines of client code is awesome. I've never seen something like it honestly; Or what about full-on binary IP packet matching (what some folks call packet sniffing) in less than 10 lines?
Full-on Exception model - try/catch/throw semantics (like Java)
Hot-swappable code on live systems - That code path shouldn't excecute after these conditions are met. Instead load a new set of code that I am updating right-now (say a new set of beam files).
Mnesia - Database for Erlang. It was actually called "Amnesia" but Joe's boss at the time in Ericsson didn't particularly like a database name that forgets things so they renamed it.
Networking - It's convenient to write BSD-style socket apps in Erlang.

During my university days, I did a bit of Prolog and Lisp too, so i've found that it fits really well with my mental model especially the concept of head and tail while running pattern matching on an function argument classic. It's like saying - "oh well, i did that at school but i almost completely forgot. Why didn't I think of that before?". About a year ago, an Erlang programmer said to me something like this on the #erlang@freenode - "You know you've found Erlang at an early age, you're lucky!". I think I somewhat know why now. I have yet to learn the "fault-tolerant" part of it as I am still going through the book but surely in due time I'll have figured out this as well.

Joe Amstrong's example on Concurrency from the Erlang book is:

We don't have shared memory. I have my memory. You have yours. We have two brains, one each. They are not joined together. To change your memory, I send you a message: I talk, or I wave my arms. You liten, you see, and your memory changes; However, without asking you a question or observing your response, I do not know that you have received my message.

I think Joe is proving more right. Erlang is coming up quickly as the top 20 programming language on TIOBE list and the reasons are pretty clear - we can not just keep adding more hardware and expect a sane performance with concurrency and management. Even with that hindsight in mind, not all the programming languages support running code on multiple cores. Python has trouble with threads deep within it's core - the GIL or the Global Intepreter Lock and I think Ruby even resorts to native threads (oh no!). Contrast that with Erlang - a nice set of green thread that run on VM (like Java). You want 1,000,000 threads? No problem. How about 2,000,000 threads? Yep no problem either! I am not an SQL guru but it seems a lot could be weilded if Erlang was met with NoSQL. I have no experience whatsoever in that department so i'll leave it upto fellow readers of this post.

888: Worth Reading 'Funny Hacker Story'

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:46:00 +0000

shut up i hack you

ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are ^^

tell me your network number man then you’re dead

Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1

or maybe 127.0.0.1

yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack

in five minutes your hard drive is deleted

Now I’m frightened

shut up you’ll be gone

i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead

say goodbye

to whom?

to you man

buy buy

I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you

* bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)

More is in here.http://whatthehell.eu/hacker-story

Bibek Shrestha: Don't think

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:31:13 +0000

Don't think

Thinking makes you weak,
thinking makes you strong,
thinking makes you unhappy,
thinking brings you joy

And if emotion is the drunk husband, thought the cunning wife.

Bibek Shrestha: No title

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:22:17 +0000

"Good Night" is sufficient to her. She's doesn't ask for more or does she complain. She is like a small drizzle, its enough for her. For me, I want to love the drizzle but if she knew I thrive on a heavy downpour. I want to get wet, no I want to drown. I wonder if the drizzle will ever fullfill.

I wouldn't judge myself, or so I think. I am unhappy and unsatisfied. Wishing for the monsoon, only if life a cyclic season.

Jwalanta Shrestha (jwala): Internet Connection Sharing in Linux over Ad-hoc Wireless

noreply@blogger.com (Jwalanta Shrestha) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:28:14 +0000

Laptops are common these days and so is wireless networking that comes with it. Almost all of us use Wireless Router for wireless networking and internet sharing. But most of us might not be familiar with ad-hoc mode that works in every wireless card and can eliminate the use of router altogether. Here's how:

To setup ad-hoc wireless, you basically set two or more wireless cards to same ESSID in ad-hoc mode and different IP addresses.

Setting the wireless card in ad-hoc mode

Generally iwconfig is used to set the wireless mode, but if you have madwifi drivers (see this too), the commands are slightly different. Go to terminal and type,

iwconfig

If you see interfaces named wlan0, wlan1, etc iwconfig will work. If you see interface names similar to ath1 and wifi0, then madwifi specific commands are to be used.

For general wifi cards:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc

Replace wlan0 with the interface name as listed by iwconfig

For cards using madwifi driver:

sudo wlanconfig ath1 destroy
sudo wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc

Now set essid. Pick some name like 'adhocwifi'

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid adhocwifi

If required, to set encryption key

sudo iwconfig wlan0 key 1234567890

Now set IP address:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1

Follow the above steps for another wireless card and set IP address in same subnet, say 192.168.0.2, and ping each other.

The whole ad-hoc mode setting can also be done using GUI network-manager, but since i'm not so much fond of graphical interface i'm not covering it. It should be simple.. :)

Internet Connection Sharing

Now to share the internet over wireless,

sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

where ppp0 is the connection you want to share (PPPoE connection in this case)

You also need to enable IP forwarding:

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"

Or, to enable permanently add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Some ISPs might limit the TTL so that you wont be able to share the internet. Fix:

sudo iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -j TTL --ttl-inc 1

Using the shared internet (in Linux)

Now to use the shared internet on another computer, set it to ad-hoc mode and assign IP address in the same subnet as described above and perform the following:

1. Set the IP of computer sharing internet as gateway

sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.1

2. Set DNS server. We're using Google's DNS.

sudo sh -c "echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> /etc/resolv.conf"

You can also use IP and DNS Masquerading to ease the task.

Using the shared internet (in M$ Windows)

If you want to use the shared internet on M$ Windows,

1. Connect to the Wireless Network (in this case 'adhocwifi')
2. Go to Network Connections
3. Right click the Wireless Connection
4. Select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties
5. Set IP to 192.168.0.2 (or accordingly in the same subnet as set on Linux box), gateway to 192.168.0.1 (as set on Linux box) and DNS to 8.8.8.8

Surmandal: Phishing, A small note

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:39:07 +0000

PHISHING

Phishing is not a Security Flaw, not even you got Hacked/screwed. This is just a trick phishers use to steal/collect the username/Password, Credit card information and Other crucial information from Victims. This is a technique of online identity theft. and this is totally preventable but you have to be more careful. phishers can infect computers with viruses, bots, malwares, spywares and convince people to participate unwittingly in money laundering. The most Reliable source of Phishing is spoof email. This message looks like it came from original source. it looks like very authentic and make people to reveal them to disclosed their personal information. Although there are many way, which phisheres used to process, to collect the data, Initially they decide the target company, business house and collect the email address of customers who are associated with that business house. mostly they use mass-mailing and other address collection technique, which adopted by other Spammers.
Then after they setup a method to deliver the message to collect the data. often, this includes email(html based mail), web-site, DNS poisoning, tempering HOST file, pharming and many others technique, but email is most reliable technique to the date.

In third Phase, Phishers send a fake/phony message that appears to be from a authentic source. Then they start to collect the data/information which victims enter into website/pop-up and whatever the link sent in steps 3.

Last but not least, Phishers use these information as they want to. there has been many changes phishing technique since 1996 (I believe the term “Phishing” was mention in 1996 in 2600, A security newsletter). Nowadays URL shorten service like bit.ly play the role of catalyst to spread the phishing scam. user can not figure out, where the link is redirecting to.

Phishing Vector: To accomplished the phishing attack successful these are the method that is used widely
• Man-in-the-middle Attacks:- For man-in-the-middle attacks to be successful, the phishers must be able to re-direct the user to their proxy server instead of the real server. This may be carried out through a Transparent Proxies,DNS Cache Poisoning,URL Obfuscation(As I mention earlier Bad domain names,Friendly login URL,Third-party shortened URL,Host name obfuscation). This is a scenario of MITM Attack

User <–> Attacker’s Proxy <–> Real Website

• Cross-site Scripting/XSS Attacks
• Pre-set Session Attacks
• Observing Customer Data
• Client-side Vulnerability Exploitation

Above technique are the methods/way of, how Phishers Attack and collect the information from victims. I have been involved some Phishing fraud cases in Nepal. after investigation, what I found is all the source was not from Nepal but phishers used Nepal based server to host the Fraudulent site. and interesting fact is all the server was Linux based distribution. I am not saying that Linux is easy to screwed but during the investigation, I found these is lack of strong System administration, lack of auditing, lack of regular monitoring.

Treatment/Preventing method

To prevent from phishing, I have chopped it in 3 parts

1. Client End:- End User Computer security is more poor that enterprise/corporate Workstations. however we can make it more secure. Use of Local Anti-Virus/Personal Firewall/Personal IDS/Personal Anti-Spam/Spyware Detection software, although these software may cut your budgets. and yes installing Anti-Phishing Plug-ins on internet browser would be another good idea.User application-level monitoring solutions,Locking-down browser capabilities,Digitally signed email is yet another secure way to get rid of phishing email and lastly End User awareness. If you get an email that warns you that an account of yours will be shut down/suspend unless you reconfirm billing information, Please Please do not reply that mail or click on the link
in the email. If you get such mail, you can contact the company instead. Never respond the HTML based Email. before submitting the financial information to/from web, always look on “LOCK” sign, that sign refers that your transaction is secure. you can also click on that icon and review the SSL certificate that has been received and issued by a trusted certificate authority. last but not least do not forget to review the bank statement, credit card statement after any financial transaction.

2. Server End:- From the server end, we can implement intelligent anti-phishing application to secure the web applications. always update the message to user/customer how phishing can be done and how to prevent them. post the pages/email address so that users/customers can send the abuse report if they found and do quickly response to them. post the message that company will never send HTML based email and ask them to do not response it, also ask customer to forward that type of mail to the company. you can go for your own customized web application, of-course, for that you need skilled manpower and budget. never forget that security is major concern. another things that should be take care is never used IP address as a URL. always use fully qualified Domain name. for example use www.sarojlamichhane.com.np instead of 202.79.32.251.

3. Enterprise End:-Business house and Internet Service Providers may lead the leading role to prevent the phishing scams. from ISP, their security model works in client side and server side security mechanism. use of digitally signed email, proper monitoring of corporate domain, its expiry date and registering similar type of domain. Business houses should implement Gateway Anti-virus, Gateway Content filtering, Gateway anti-filtering to scan all the traffic.

By implementing a multi-tiered approach to client-side, server-side and
enterprise, organisations can easily manage their protection technologies against today’s and
tomorrows threats. Phishing is just a part of Hacking culture, So only preventing phishing is not enough way, so implement the secure way to prevent other criminal attack vector. be on safe side.

Ishwor Gurung: Write assembly in Python!, posted Feb. 24, 2010

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:00:15 +0000

Multiple things have happened over the last couple of weeks and few months I spent not blogging.

First, I picked this wonderful post by Robert Kern on python mailing list today that made me blog in the first place; Much thanks owes to him for enlightening mere mortals like me. I am still to play around with it but reading the docs is half the battle done. It is all documented at http://www.corepy.org; if you flip over and start reading the "hello world" side of things at http://www.corepy.org/wiki/index.php?title=CorePy_Basics, it looks ridicolously fun and easy again! I think assembly just became fun again :-)

I'll leave it upto you as to basically what you can do them but essentially to do anything substantial you'd have to pump out a lot of asm using CorePy. One could implement some native assembly code in it and use other python libraries to do some really neat stuff. If you only dabble in Assembly like me and wish to not leave the comfortable rear-view seat of Python's high-level world, then CorePy is for you!

Take a look at this snippet:

  import corepy.lib.printer as printer
  import corepy.arch.x86_64.platform as env
  import corepy.arch.x86_64.isa as x86
  from corepy.arch.x86_64.types.registers import *
 
  code = env.InstructionStream()
 
  x86.set_active_code(code)
  x86.mov(code.gp_return, 11)
  x86.add(code.gp_return, 31)
 
  printer.PrintInstructionStream(code, printer.x86_64_Nasm(function_name="foobar"))

The code above prints x86 instructions (intel style- "x86_64_Nasm" plugin) and assigns them to a "foobar" function. See below for output. More documentation on CorePy are available at their website.

BITS 64
SECTION .text
global foobar
foobar:
 
PROLOGUE:
        push rbp
        mov rbp, rsp
        push r15
        push r14
        push r13
        push r12
        push rbx
 
BODY:
        mov rax, 11
        add rax, 31
 
EPILOGUE:
        pop rbx
        pop r12
        pop r13
        pop r14
        pop r15
        leave 
        ret

If you are really into Assembly and Python, I'd recommend you give CorePy a go; do drop a line how it goes. If you're an Assembly/CorePy/Python hacker then please enlighten me :-)

Secondly, I have been working on my Djangle blog engine for the last couple of months on an irregular basis; I'd love to work more on it but due to my day job as a Perl hacker, it's quite hard to find the time commit code. It's also quite a bit of a concern for me as some days I feel utterly tired while the other days I feel exactly the other way around. Anyhow, the things that are on my list to make this a bit more "developer" friendly in near future are-

Pingback and Trackback
Management page
Integrating video, audio, pictures
Media library - Photo, Audio
Social web integration - Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Openid, Wave, Buzz etc..
XML-RPC API for "push" and "pull" (this is a big "maybe" at the moment though)
URL pagination for permalinks (the current URL scheme kind of sucks)

Do drop a line if you feel something must exist in a blog engine; If it's reasonable and challenging enough, I might skip few of the ones above to implement them :-)

Thirdly, I have been reading a lot of books recently that encompass multiple programming languages, theories and whatnot. I buy using http://www.booko.com.au which is by far the best place to find cheaper books in Australia. Theyt essentially aggregate the price of an item across several stores and sorts them in descending order for you by price! The books I am reading simulaneously for essentially reference purpose, educational learning etc. are -

Programming Erlang
Coders at Work
Definitive Guide to Catalyst
Programming Collective Intelligence
Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment
Secure Programming with Static Analysis
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks

They are all very interesting but it's kind of hard to squeeze them all into a 24-hour day so, I read them at a very gradual pace using some of them as a good reference on a subject matter.

Fourthly, I have been visiting and meeting some of SyPy, GTUGers at Google for various talks and social gatherings. Some of the talks and hackfests I've been to are:

Python game under 5 minutes - Tim Ansell => An amazing Python hacker and my project mentor for a brief period at UniSA
GeoDjango - Peter Marks
Go - Rob Pike
Closure - Daniel Nadasi
Project Bondi - Adrian Dries
Django usergroup meetup - Digital Eskimo
PlanningAlerts.org.au - Matthew Landauer
Creating a CC machine learning dataset - Chris Neugebauer

There were lot of other talks and social "lubrications" I went to that I can't recall. Things of interest though - if you live in Sydney and are into python, linux, opensource software, then do join Sydney Python usergroup, Sydney Linux usergroup, Sydney django usergroup (there are only a table-full people at the moment but given Django's growing popularity, I reckon it will see an increase) and GTUG if you are into Google stuff (I just rocked up for Go! talk by Rob Pike). Go talk was an interesting event but I'd rather stay away from it for the moment. The reason I'd stay away is because firstly, I don't enough time (I have Erlang on my plate!). Secondly, I have too many hobbies (AVR, Software Security, Heavy mathematics yada yada.. on my plate!!). So, sorry Go, you'd have to wait. The language itself is cute though. You can use a C compiler to generate native binaries from Go code (from Ken Thompson and Ian Taylor respectively), do all kinds of funky stuffs with Functional-style programming, do threads and lot more. If you're interested Go is at http://golang.org (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s for videos, http://golang.org/doc/ for slides)

Lastly, this blog. My blog runs on my own hand-crafted Python blogging engine still in its infancy and named "Djangle". Named so because it rhymes with Django and Angle - "Angle" because the a blog is an angle of a mind; We project our thoughts into it and make sure it's got an angle to just sufficiently mean the things we want it to mean, to convey something to the inhibitants in our own words and to cover just about enough people's satisfaction like a right-angle ;-)

The source is at http://github.com/ishwor/djangle and if you are good at Python and feel like taking those fingers for a small ride, please by all means join my effort to create a simple, elegant and functional blogging engine using Django; This can be a good experience for us! :-)

Surmandal: Many way to securing Linux Box

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:37:44 +0000

Some security tips (Linux)--there is more to go but for this time Please bare with it :D

Encrypt all the data communication using password/keys/certificates. Use sftp/scp/rsync and sshfs/fuse (http://surmandal.livejournal.com/2244.html) to mount your home directory remotely.
Use of GnuPG, it allows to encrypt and sign the data.
Openvpn is another ssl vpn tools to connect your office/corporate LAN from outer Network.
Avoid using FTP/TELNET/Rlogin like tools, using these tools; anyone can view/capture the packet using sniffer tools.
Do not install any application until and unless it required. To minimize the Vulnerability, list the installed package (dpkg --list Ubuntu/debian), list out the necessary application and remove others. Remove the X, in server you don’t need X window, it will increase the server performance.
Use one machine for one application/service if possible for example install Apache and mysql service in different machine so that if attacker rooted to web server, there will be less chance to tooted mysql server. Virtualization will be another good application to reduce this thread.
Offcourse, update regularly kernel/software, installed patch.
SElinux ---- see how to guid ;)
Use of Strong Account/password policy, in existing system, use the john the ripper tools to find out the week password and make it strong( using alpha numeric/upper-lowercase/special character).
Disable the root login/find out any user has UID 0, if yes make sure that s/he is allowed by you else remove it.
Use of packet filter/ tcpwrappers, Do not forget to use IDS, there is a software called AIDE, I highly recommend it to use in your system.
Strong physical security, use of Bios/GRUB password, disable the CD/DVD Drive, also USP ports
Try to change the default service port, i.e. open shh server runs in 22 port, change it to 2010 (as your wish)

Jwalanta Shrestha (jwala): Overriding extension compatibility check for FF3.5+

noreply@blogger.com (Jwalanta Shrestha) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:58:47 +0000

Disabling extension compatibility check for Firefox was easy. Go to about:config and create a boolean value named extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Until Firefox 3.5!

(More specifically, products that are based on < Gecko 1.9.2)

Newer Firefox requires you to append version number to the variable. This will ensure the extension override wont work forever as FF is upgraded to next version. For example, in Firefox 3.6, the variable would be extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6

Explained in detail here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.checkCompatibility

Jwalanta Shrestha (jwala): Converting Latex document to HTML / ODT / DOC

noreply@blogger.com (Jwalanta Shrestha) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:18:14 +0000

I do all my documents in Latex. Actually i usually use emacs org-mode first and later convert it to Latex, but when it comes to using bibtex, it's all latex. It works great and the output dvi/pdf files look so professional. However recently i had to submit the file in .doc format, and i had a real hard time finding good tools to do that.

There are no direct Latex to .doc converters, so the best bet is to go Latex -> HTML -> DOC. There are lots of Latex to HTML converters like latex2html, tth and hevea, but most of them either don't produce good HTML or mess with bibliography references. But after some research i found the best: TeX4ht

TeX4ht is available in ubuntu/debian repo, so to install

sudo apt-get install tex4ht

Conversion is simple:

htlatex document

(please note, there is no .tex suffix)

This will generate document.html, css and bunch of .png files.

Now to convert it to wordprocessor files (odt, doc..),
1. Open the html file with OpenOffice.org
2. File > Save as
3. Choose the format you want to save it in (odt, doc)

If you have images in the document, they will be linked instead of embedded in the document. To fix this: (source)
1. Edit > Links
2. Click "Break Link" for each image link

Bibek Paudel: How does Leadership work

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:40:04 +0000

Posted via web from Tutorial Universe

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Ruby vs Python Battle to Death

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:00:10 +0000

This is a pretty interesting talk by Gary Bernhardt about the good and bad things about Ruby and Python. Here's the blog post Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to The Death from Gary Bernhardt on Vimeo.

888: Gmail and OpenID

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:51:00 +0000

Q. Can I use Gmail as OpenID ?
A. Yes.

Q. How can I use my gmail ID as OpendID ?
A. Use the url http://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Userscript to remove read news

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:00:13 +0000

So, I've been dabbling with Javascript in a very serious way right now. For one, I'm taking the Advanced Web Programming class where we are officially learning the language. I have to admit, I am getting to learn new ways of doing things and realizing what a jarhead way of ...

888: Google History

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:07:00 +0000

With Web History, you'll be able to:

View and manage your web activity.
You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.

Get the search results most relevant to you.
Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on the things you've searched for on Google and the sites you've visited. You might not notice a big impact on your search results early on, but they should steadily improve over time the more you use Web History.

Follow interesting trends in your web activity.
Which sites do you visit frequently? How many searches did you do between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.? Web History can tell you about these and other interesting trends in your web activity.

http://google.com/history

888: Upside Down Web Cam Simple Fix

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:37:00 +0000

Many laptop put their webcam upside down resulting in flipped images in Ubuntu. There were fixes for some but for some you had to physically remount the camera. The webcam that comes with Lenovo Ideapad Y510 is also mounted upside down. Unluckily there wasn't any simple fix for this. (some people rotated the camera physically).

Fortunately Hans de Goede came with a beautiful solution.

Open Terminal and add libv4l ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libv4l/ppa

Update your software list

sudo aptitude update

Install libv4l

sudo aptitude install libv4l-0

You have to use the following command to open any application that uses webcam

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so application_name

If you use 64 bit system, use the following command

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so application_name

Bibek Shrestha: His story

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:58:49 +0000

He wants to go away. Among people who he knows and who knows him, life will always be an unjustice. Full of complaints. They pin point your flaws but he already knows them. He asks them Why? They remain silent. He knows the "Why?" is a power yet meaningless questions. Whenever you feel like not making a conversation, just ask "Why?". If only they also knew they could complain less, he thinks.

Bibek Shrestha: Using custom php.ini in a cPanel server

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:33:22 +0000

Recently in our office at YIPL, we needed to increase the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size of one of our clients. We run on a virtual private server with WHM and cPanel.

The default php runs as a FastCGI with suexec enabled.

Here is how I configured apache to run custom php.ini.

1. Know where your existing php.ini file exists.

Just create a phpinfo.php file in your public_html or www folder. Use the phpinfo() function know the current location of default php.ini.

/home/username/public_html/phpinfo.php

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Access the file with http://www.sitename.com/phpinfo.php.

2. Copy the file inside your cgi-bin folder

$ cp /usr/local/lib/php.ini /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin

3. Create a custom cgi executable to run php.

$ vim /home/username/public_html/php.cgi

Add following lines

#!/bin/sh /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5 -c /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/ # Note, the parameter after -c is the location of new php.ini

Allow executable permission to the new php executable

$ chmod +x /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/php.cgi

4. Modify .htaccess to run php with our new executable by adding the following lines at the top

$ head /home/username/public_html/.htaccess Action application/x-httpd-php5 /cgi-bin/php.cgi

#.. other commands

5. Make sure new configuration is loaded.

The http://www.sitename.com/phpinfo.php file should now show /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/php.ini as the loaded setting file.

6. Remove phpinfo.php for security purposes

$ rm /home/username/www/phpinfo.php

References

Jwalanta Shrestha (jwala): mpg123: Lightest mp3 player in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Jwalanta Shrestha) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:15:35 +0000

If you are in search of the lightest barebone mp3 player in Linux, nothing can beat mpg123. Unless you want flashy visualizations and playlist management and such, mpg123 can save you a lot of memory and cpu horsepower.

Installation is easy. In Ubuntu,

sudo apt-get install mpg123

Mpg123 comes with loads of options. Check out the man page for details. Here I'm gonna share a few usage tips.

Shuffle-play a directory of mp3s:

mpg123 -CZ /path/to/mp3/folder/*

-Z option is for shuffle, -C is for control. From man page:

-C, --control
  Enable terminal control keys. By default use ’s’ to
  stop, ’p’ to pause, ’f’ to jump forward to the next
  song, ’b’ to jump back to the beginning of the song,
  ’,’ to rewind, ’.’ to fast forward, and ’q’ to quit.
  Type ’h’ for a full  list  of  available  controls.

Equalizer:

Don't fall off your chair! Yes, mpg123 also comes with 32-band equalizer. But there's no inbuilt graphical UI for that, you need to create the plain-text file. There's an editor though if you like, but creating one is not hard either. From man page:

-E file, --equalizer
  Enables equalization, taken from file. The file needs to
  contain 32 lines of data, additional comment lines may be
  prefixed with #. Each data line consists of two floating-
  point entries, separated by whitespace. They specify the
  multipliers for left and right channel of a  certain
  frequency band, respectively. The first line corresponds
  to the lowest, the 32nd to the highest frequency band.
  Note that you can control the equalizer interactively
  with the generic control interface.

I've made one with party feel: party.txt

Usage:

mpg123 -CZ -E party.txt mp3_file

Songs again and again:

Plus if you kind of person who listens to couple of songs again and again for weeks (instead of shuffled huge playlist), then hi5! :) and here's how to do that with mpg123:

mpg123 -CZ song1.mp3 song2.mp3

888: Multiple profile in Google Chrome in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:06:00 +0000

I'm talking on basis of Ubuntu. This may or may not work in other OS.
You can use Google Chrome with multiple profile to:

Open different email address at once. For eg: open abc@gmail.com in one window and xyz@gmail.com in another
Separate personal stuff and your work stuff
Allow your family member to login without you signing out

These are the main reasons I use multiple profile in google-chrome. If you don't want to go through this hassles, you can always open multiple browsers.
For case in point you are browsing facebook.com and your sister wants to open the same site for quick check, you can either open different browser or open the same browser that has different profile. (or open in private mode too)

Both my favorite browsers Chrome and Firefox supports multiple profile. For now I'll write instructions for Chrome:

Right click your panel, select add to panel and select custom application launcher (if you want to add in panel)
or
Right click the menu, select edit menus and click new item (if you want to add to menu)
Fill it as:

Type: Application
Name: Google Chrome Profile A
Command: google-chrome --user-data-dir=/home/userName/.config/google-chrome/newProfile (the text in picture isn't correct)

Click close
Thats it folks.

Jwalanta Shrestha (jwala): Making DLink DWL-650+ PCMCIA Wireless card work under linux

noreply@blogger.com (Jwalanta Shrestha) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:19:33 +0000

The DLink DWL-650+ PCMCIA Wireless card doesn't work on recent Linux distros (I tried Ubuntu Hardy to Jaunty). After plugging in, the system hangs with CapsLock flashing.

Turns out the card is handled by acx module and the support is broken for this card. So use ndiswrapper instead.

First blacklist acx module. Open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file and add the following line

blacklist acx

Now install ndiswrapper

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common

Now get the Windows driver for the card from here. Extract the file, go to the winxp folder and,

sudo ndiswrapper -i AIRPLUS.INF

The card should work now.

Ishwor Gurung: Eclipse, Pydev, Epic, Java, ErlIDE all in one, posted Jan. 23, 2010

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:06:11 +0000

Eclipse IDE, Pydev, Epic, Java IDE, ErlIDE is bundled up and available to download (117Mb) from here . Kindly note, that all the packages and the dependencies were strictly downloaded and tested on Ubuntu 9.04 only. The versions includes:

Eclipse IDE- Galileo 3.5 SR1
Pydev Release: 1.5.4
Epic - Testing: 0.6.35
ErlIDE - 0.7.3

All software belong to the respective projects. Kindly use it at your own risk. I am providing it merely because of convenience.

[ishwor@muffin:~]$ sha256sum eclipse+java+pydev+epic+erlide.tar.bz2 8249ae3a489f00f2418b8c6d79d936e98d7d4dfc271093bfa52bf7515ea237e8 eclipse+java+pydev+epic+erlide.tar.bz2

Happy hacking!

(update: re-posting because of typo in my RSS template. Apologies)

Ishwor Gurung: First post!, posted Feb. 27, 2010

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:06:11 +0000

New post using Djangle blogging engine :)

Bibek Shrestha: Periodic monitoring connection to certain port of certain ip address

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:39:39 +0000

While running a kannel server, I need to make sure certain connections to telcos are up. And here is a simple technique taiyal from ##linux suggested me. It is pretty simple though.

$ netcat -z -w 2 192.168.10.1 5020 -v -n

Netcat is a very simple utility command to connect to a certain ip at certain port. The parameters are as follows.

-z zero-I/O mode [used for scanning] -w 2 timeout for connects and final net reads in our case try to connect for just 2 seconds -v verbose [use twice to be more verbose] -n numeric-only IP addresses, no DNS No need for dns resolution

Add this to a cron and redirect the output to log file and we're set.

Here is my crontab

$ crontab -e

# m h dom mon dow command */5 * * * * /home/monitor/bin/checksmsc.sh

And here is my checksmsc.sh code

$ cat /home/monitor/bin/checksmsc.sh #! /bin/bash datetime=`date` log=`netcat -z -w 2 192.168.10.1 5020 -vn 2>&1` echo $datetime $log >> /home/monitor/log/connection.log
Make sure you make the log folder

$ mkdir /home/monitor/log

Output is in the format as

Sat Jan 30 14:25:02 NPT 2010 (UNKNOWN) [192.80.10.1] 5020 (?) open

Besides netcat, you could also use nmap command

$ nmap 192.168.10.1 -p T:5020 -oG filename.txt

Where -oG specifies output in Greppable format and writes out to filename.txt

Simple tcp monitor :)

Bibek Shrestha: Where do you find brilliant ideas?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:10:16 +0000

Seriously, where do you find brilliant ideas? Do you have to brilliant, creative, active, thoughful, ..., ?? to get the ideas? Well it might be that being brilliant or creative or thoughtful is just a bi-product of having great ideas.

I have been in search of a great idea, a great *Product* idea to be specific. Last week I saw the video from David Heinemeier Hansson (http://www.loudthinking.com/) where he speaks about creating a profitable startup company. See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY . It is pretty impressive, thanks to Geshan (http://twitter.com/geshan). He talks about the small challenges startups face and the why not to fear for not being successful. It is not necessary to target to be the next facebook or twitter or google or microsoft and a startup should just focus on getting your own product up and build your own small client base and keep them happy. I've seen few other products, small but quiet useful. I think they should have a mediocre client base and have good revenue stream.

Take the mockup tool Balsamiq for example. It costs 79$. That isn't much for a tool of such good use and a lot of people will actually prefer to pay for it. If you build something useful, people will pay for it. The same goes for the online source code hosting website github (http://github.org). Pretty awesome right?

A lof of these ideas aren't the very first time people have come up with. There must have been a lot of mockup tools before Balsamiq and a lot of source code hosting facilities other than GitHub, and there will be others too. The idea it seems is to not to focus to beat the other guy, but to start delivering products to your clients. If you focus on 5 clients today, it is very much possible to have 10 clients tomorrow if you have a good product. To constantly deliver and innovate should suffice one to stay in the business. Why not you stay in the business and let others do their own business. Take it small I guess.

And to once again come back to topic, it seems when nurturing a concept, its more of a we than I, when coming up with ideas. I alone might come up with 3 ideas and only one of it might actually be good enough, but when there is a group, innovation starts to flow. Two person with three ideas each will be six ideas to start of. Take one good idea from it, work on it, brainstorm and modify to make it better. Sounds interesting.

And to have the *we* thing, ie to build a good team there needs to be communication. That is where this post comes in. I have been lacking enough creativeness to really start blogging till now. And shall I now start blogging just to get my point out to open, no matter how small or how insignificant it is.

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Removing editor swap files before commits in git

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:00:06 +0000

I use git a lot. And I use just about any text editor in my system to edit files. And they tend to come with baggages of their own. Albeit useful, the swap files tend to linger on and eventually end up in my git repository. Here's how to avoid ...

888: gnome-shell In Karmic

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:05:00 +0000

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new ways for the user to find and open applications and documents, switch between various activities, and view incoming information such as chat messages or system notifications. Later, it will introduce a framework for creating custom extensions. The GNOME Shell replaces functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

In short its cool!

This will be included in Gnome-3.0 which is going to be released in September 2010. Nevertheless gnome-shell is already available as package in Karmic Koala. You can see the new look of gnome very easily.

In terminal type:

sudo aptitude install gnome-shell

This will install gnome-shell. Now to try it press ALT+F2 and type:

gnome-shell --replace

To get your regular gnome-desktop, press ALT+F2 and type:

compiz --replace

If you like gnome-shell and want to make it default while opening your computer, open terminal and type:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager --type string gnome-shell

To get rid of this, open terminal and type:

gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager

888: 'Pages' Available In Blogger Draft

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:44:00 +0000

Blogger pages let you to publish static information on stand-alone pages linked from your blog. For example, you can use pages to create anAbout This Blog page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a Contact Me page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location.

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=165955

You can only have 10 pages. The guide above has instruction to enable page in custom template too.

For this you have to enable your blogger draft. This is some kind of beta version of blogger and new updates are rolled through this.

888: Install Firefox 3.6 In Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:19:00 +0000

Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 few days ago. It is fast to start and fast to do js things. More in release notes here.

Installing Firefox 3.6 is same as installing Thunderbird 3 which I have already covered here.

I'll just copy pate those things here. So to update your Firefox follow the steps below:

Open Terminal
Add Mozilla's sources by:

For Karmic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

For version older than Karmic:

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 247510BE

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install firefox-3.6 firefox-3.6-gnome-support firefox-3.6-branding
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade (just in case you've missed anything)
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-mozilla-daily-ppa-karmic.list (Otherwise your update manager will show new updates each day)
sudo aptitude update

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Building a simple Google Chrome Extension

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Building a simple Google Chrome Extension

18 January 2010

Google Chrome for Linux is my browser of choice for many reasons including speed and overall feeling of being “snappy” in comparison to Mozilla Firefox. I was going over the documentation for extension developers and realized it is fairly easy to build simple extensions. However, what makes developing Chrome extensions so much fun is the support for features like HTML5 local storage which provides persistent data storage of key-value pair data. This makes it possibly to conveniently store and retrieve data for you Chrome extension.

I decided to build a simple extension called H2O that you can download from this link to help you remember to drink eight glasses of water everyday by displaying an icon along with a counter next to the URL bar in Chrome. I was only experimenting and trying to build something vaguely useful, however the positive feedback and comments I have received from the users who bothered to install my extension have prompted me to further develop this extension with more features. I am considering adding features like displaying “graphs” of daily/weekly fluid consumptions.

I have also put up the source code for my extension @ Github for those interested in taking a look at it.

888: Install Thunderbird 3 In Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:37:00 +0000

I am never the fan of mail client. They are difficult to use, slow and ugly.

Mozilla recently released 3rd version of their popular email software, Thunderbird. As said earlier, I wasn't much excited. Nevertheless I gave it a try. Thunderbird has made major changes in its UI. They have added new features like tabs, archive, smart folder and so on. More here http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.0/releasenotes/#

After using this for few days I must say they have made definitive improvement on this software. I highly recommend everyone to update to this version. There was some problem with 'lightning' extension but this is already fixed.

To install follow the steps below:

Open Terminal
Add Mozilla's sources by:

For Karmic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

For version older than Karmic:

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 247510BE

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install thunderbird-3.0 thunderbird-3.0-gnome-support
sudo aptitude remove thunderbird-2.0 thunderbird-2.0-gnome-support
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/thunderbird-3.0 /usr/bin/thunderbird

888: DockBarX - Windows 7 Like Task Bar For Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Many People liked the new task bar introduced in Windows 7. If you don't believe me you can see this lifehacker's poll on "Best Application Dock".

There is similar bar in Linux by the name "DockBarX".

I have been reading about it from long time back but I was very lazy to give it a try. Also I never believed it would be very smooth and bug free.

However, I decided to give it a try and believe it or not now I am very big fan of it. It is a powerful program in a sense that you can configure multiple options like grouping, pinning applications, themes, click actions and so on. It has worked flawlessly for me.

If you also want to give it a try install it by:

Open terminal
Add the dockbarx source:

If you are using Karmic

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dockbar-main/ppa

If you are using older version than Karmic

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dockbar-main/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 38BD81CA

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install dockbarx
killall -9 gnome-panel
Now right click in the empty area of your gnome-panel and click 'Add to Panel'
Select docbarx from the list
You may wan to remove your window list by right clicking on the far left and selecting remove

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): My presentation on ZSH basics

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0000

My presentation on ZSH basics

14 January 2010

Click here to view my presentation on the basics of the Zsh shell which I will be presenting next week at the local Linux User Group at my university. You can use arrow keys to navigate the slides which are displayed in the browser created using the magic of Slidedown

Follow @zshtips on Twitter if you are further interested in Zsh and various hacks/customizations for it posted by me occasionally.

888: How To Change Mac Address In Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Q. How can I change the mac address of network card in my Ubuntu box ?
Ans. Changing mac address is very simple. You only need the command ifconfig. Follow the steps below:

Open terminal
Find the name of your interface, for example eth0
sudo ifconfig eth0 down hw ether aaaabbbb where aabbccdd is the required mac address.

888: Gnome Typing Break

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:54:00 +0000

If you use too much computer you may be risking your health. I use computer around 7 hours in 8 hours' office. Before leaving office around 2 and after office around 5 hours. In total that is 17 hours i.e. around 71% of my day. I am sure I don't follow ergonomic principal. What I have started to do is take three minutes break every one hour. For this I use the 'typing break' option in keyboard preferences. After using this for some time I have concluded the following cons and pros:

Pros:

Nice system tray that blinks few minutes before the break making us ready for the break
Option to post pone the break
Option to change work interval and break interval
If you sit idle the timer automatically resets. That means you have to work continuously in the work interval to be illegible for the break. You leave your computer for few minutes and bang the break is gone.

Cons:

Screen doesn't lock during the break. So you can't leave your computer in the break for privacy reasons. There already is a bug report in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128381
Due to transparent lock screen, other people can study your screen.

Now if you also want this option, goto:

System>Preferences>Keyboard>Typing Break

If you find yourself stuck in typing break and don't have the option for postponing the break, you can kill the break by:

Go to virtual terminal by pressing ALT+CTRL+F1
Log in
killall -9 gnome-typing-monitor

If you are much more health concerned then you probably would like to try apt://workrave . This is a very good software that makes you take break and also helps stretch out. It will guide you through series of exercise to perform during the break.

Bibek Paudel: Welcome back to reality !

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:06:28 +0000

I’m sure you had almost started thinking of yourself as a global citizen as you wished each other “Merry Christmas” and partied well over the weekend. Especially to those in Kathmandu and cities. I’m sure some of you had already made plans for the New Year celebration. Life was sailing all right. You had those usual complaints and ideas on how to improve the system in the country but even without them, things seemed to be working just fine. At least they weren’t getting on your way. The crippling strikes (bandhas) and road-blockades wouldn’t deter you from doing your work or enjoying your leisure (Read: Nation of Strikes). Who cares about Nepalese politics anyway?

That was until I read the news today that next week onwards, we’ll have eight hours of power cut every day. Another 15 days, and the duration will be ten hours. Soon, it will be sixteen-hour a day.

Well friends, welcome back to reality ! I think power-cuts should be a part of our national priority and policy-agenda. Nothing, not even strikes, has as strong effect of grounding the unruly youths of the nation, as the power-cut schedule has. To those guilty of thinking of themselves as competitive and capable-of-anything generation of energetic youth, nothing is as humbling as this schedule. Back to where your belong, fellas!

Source: The BG Experience

It was about a year ago that I wrote a couple of posts on the same topic. I just went through them, and found some points worth repeating:

I challenge you to contemplate – really stop and think for a moment - what your life would be like if you had to live 10 hours of each and every day without electricity.
- Jules West on Kura Kaani and Jai Nepal
It’s gonna be 82 hours/week from tomorrow. 12 hours for 6 days and 10 for the one remaining day. More reason to celebrate the glorious darkness in the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.
- ShutUp, commenting on More Darkness
Oh BTW, I heard some stats that said the city with the most load-shedding (least electric power) – major city that is – in the world is Kabul, Afghanistan. Kathmandu is #2.
- sirensongs, commenting on The Load Shedding Conspiracy
Life, so blissed to be so utterly ignorant and so happily incapable of any voice and resistance, of anything at all beyond frustration, dejection and surrender. Of course, in Nepal, all this and more go on as if this is the way things should have always been. (from The Load Shedding Conspiracy)

With an predicted economic crisis (triggered by a liquidity crunch) in six months, and a foreseen political crisis in four months, load-shedding was just the missing ingredient for a wonderful new year gift for the population.

Ankur on Load Shedding:

अँध्यारोमा जन्मेको थ्यौ, अँध्यारोमै मर

घुस खाको पैसा बाँकि भए, जेनेरेटरमा भर ।

Meanwhile, I recently read about people like us declaring independence from Nepal and forming a separate country.

And, oh yes – Happy New Year 2010.

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): My Termtter plugin to post output as a gist.

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

My Termtter plugin to post output as a gist.

20 December 2009

Termtter is the best Twitter client I have ever used for the command line.

It was created by @jugyo and has many useful commands that let you perform common Twitter operations. The best introduction I found for this unique twitter client is the Rubyconf 2009 presentation by @ujm

View more presentations from ujihisa.

However, the other really neat aspect about Termtter is the support for plugins! Since Termtter it written in Ruby, the plugins are simply code. The official Termtter website has a page describing the three different types of plugins which are: commands, hooks and filters.

I decided to create a simple plugin that adds a “gist” command in Termtter to run a command and then post the output to Gist (Github.com’s pastebin) The plugin uses @defunkt’s http://github.com/defunkt/gist and thus needs to be installed before the plugin works.

My first attempt at writing a simple plugin for Termtter was a very pleasant experience and only a quick hack:

The plugin in action:

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Eclipse has block selection? Awesome! err.. finally

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:09 +0000

Just noticed this "block selection" feature in eclipse. What this lets you do is select a block of text instead of just lines. Suppose you wanted to copy 1 class Hello: 2 def __init__(self): 3 ...

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Broken by Seether

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:00:17 +0000

This is currently my (okay, one of my) favorite song(s). httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQb6T-Pm3N8 I think the chorus is great :) I wanted you to know I love the way you laugh I wanna hold you high and steal your pain away I keep your photograph and I know it serves me well I wanna hold you high and ...

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): How to use Ant to build Android applications

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:00:07 +0000

I was trying to add (re-add) the feature to let users generate their very own POSIT versions. It used to be there when I was working on it initially and I'd completed it reasonably last summer. The idea was chucked away as we moved on. But, now we wanted it ...

888: Google Chrome Browser for Linux in Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:01:00 +0000

Google has finally released the beta version of their chrome browser for Linux and Mac. Previously it was only available from early access channel. Chrome though in beta works very very well and I'm highly satisfied with what I have now.
http://www.google.com/chrome

If you have installed any pre-beta version of Google Chrome, you need to uninstall it before you can install this beta version. To do so, in terminal type:

sudo aptitude remove google-chrome-unstable

After that simply double click the downloaded .deb file to install.
Also Mozilla Thunderbird has released Thunderbird 3 with tab support.
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

888: USB Support In VirtualBox

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:20:00 +0000

Too often I encounter people having hard time enabling USB support in any version of virtualbox. One main thing that many people don't know is there are two editions of virtualbox

virtualbox
virtualbox-ose

virtualbox-ose or virtualbox open source edition is what all the linux distro installs if installed from package manager. Unlinke virtualbox, virtualbox-ose lacks many feature one of which is usb support.
Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server and USB over RDP are other two missing features.
Click here for more up to date and detailed list:

You must be clear by now that you need to remove virtualbox-ose and install virtualbox to enable usb support. But remember it is not open source edition.

Now, to enable USB support:

Remove virtualbox ose if installed

sudo aptitude remove virtualbox-ose

Install virtualbox

You can install by adding virtualbox PPA. Advantage is you'll always get the updates.
Or install it by downloading from here.

You might require to run sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup if guets OS fails to run.

You don't need to reinsatll or reconfigure the guest os.

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Are e-books soulless?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:00:09 +0000

Before we get into a philosophical discussion, here's what I mean. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0 Produced by the New Zealand Book Council, this ad kinda makes me feel good about cancelling that Kindle order I made a while back :) Here's the quote from gizmodo article This stop-motion ad by the New Zealand Book Council makes me ...

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): Distances between planets

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:00:09 +0000

Bill Nye demonstates the distances between planets. This is nice for two reasons: 1. Shows the actual astounding scale of the solar system 2. Shows what modeling really is. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8 I feel like this should be used in of the Society of Physics Student meetings.

888: [Solved] No|Choppy Sound In SDL Games (Urban Terror)

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:20:00 +0000

I sometimes play Urban Terror which is a SDL game.

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), a cross-platform software library abstracts platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on many operating systems.

While playing the game yesterday, the sound would start choppy and stop. Also the game wouldn't quit, instead hang at 'Closing SDL audio device...'

Turns out for some reason I had installed libsdl1.2debian-alsa which was causing the problem. To uninstall it I installed libsdl1.2debian-oss

sudo aptitude install libsdl1.2debian-oss

After this the game played all fine. In case you don't know, urban terror is free and multiplayer FPS game and works in Linux, Mac and Windows. Click here to know more. If demo doesn't work check this out.

Bibek Shrestha: Living in Kathmandu

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:36:32 +0000

Living in Kathmandu is really weird, one day you could be full of cash and another day you have a hole in your pocket. You really need a money management strategy to have a peace of mind. On a typical day, I see people spend around 250 Rs and that too on daily items like food, transportation, telephone etc. A decent mid day meal costs anywhere from 100 Rs to above. Add a cup of coffee in a good restaurant and that jumps to 150. And an occasional friday night out for some quality time at bars would mean I have the shelve out 500 to 1000 rs.

888: Gobby - Google Wave Like Collaborative Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:55:00 +0000

Gobby is a software for collaboration. It is similar to Google Wave but with its own taste. It supports multiple users and multiple documents along with a chat.

What's best, it runs in Linux, Windows, Mac and Unix.

It transmits changes character by character and highlights according to user's color.

In terms of security, the transmission is encrypted and the session can be password protected.

Chat support, Unicode support and syntax highlighting are its other features.

Enough said, better check it out yourself http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
Click here to install in Ubuntu.

Bibek Paudel: Solved: Plone installation Strange Error

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:40:59 +0000

Problem:

After installing Plone 3.3.2 as a standalone server from the Unified Installer in Ubuntu 9.04, adding a new plone-site (from the ZMI) produced strange error. I have been facing this for quite sometime now.

The Error Message:

Site Error
An error was encountered while publishing this resource. Error Type: KeyError Error Value: ''

Here’s the error log taken from the file instance.log.

Solution:

In the instance section of the buildout.cfg file, add the following (replacing your own timezone if necessary):

zope-conf-additional = <environment> TZ Asia/Katmandu </environment>

Run the buildout again, start the Zope Server and the problem will be gone.

What happened:

For some strange reason, Python couldn’t pick up the timezone of my machine. We fixed that by explicitely providing one in the buildout.cfg file.

Matthew Wilkes told me on IRC, “when Zope creates a date object it uses the timezone of the local machine, if not otherwise specified. Every object gets a creation date, which is then stored in the portal catalog so it can be searched for. The catalog tries to normalise the timezones so searches don’t have to take account of the fact that 1pm EST is the same time as 6pm GMT. Zope couldn’t find my machine’s timezone for whatever reason, so used the timezone ”, which caused a key-error when the date-time machinery tried to look up what the offset from GMT is.” He said that they will have to work on making the installation process adress this strange problem.

Matthew has added a ticket for this bug: #9857.

Thanks, also to cbess (I guess he is Christopher Bess) of the #plone IRC channel.

More Help:

How to install Plone with the Unified Installer and managing projects with buildout. The later link also explains how to install Plone using paster, which I’m told is the ‘advanced’ way to do the thing

I’d prefer installing from my Package Manager. But there also seems to be some problem in Jaunty’s plone3-site package as attempting to install plone3-site from synaptic gave this error:

Setting up plone3-site (3.1.7-1) …
dpkg: error processing plone3-site (–configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 10
Errors were encountered while processing: plone3-site

Posted via web from Scribbles

888: Virtual Barber Shop

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:58:00 +0000

Guys this is really a cool video(audio actually). Just close your eyes and use headphone as said in the video. There is no prank or scary things. So, don't be afraid to make your headphone little louder than usual. Sit back, relax and listen. This will blow your mind!

P.S. Check related videos too.

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Notes for Ubuntu 9.10 on Dell Vostro 1500

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Notes for Ubuntu 9.10 on Dell Vostro 1500

15 November 2009

The following is my steps for setting up the desktop and development environment on my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop running Ubuntu 9.10. However, most of it also applies to other versions of Ubuntu and variations of hardware.

Install and set zsh as default shell
$ sudo apt-get install zsh; chsh -s /bin/zsh
Go over : http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2009/09/top-things-to-do-after-installing.html
Install vim and gvim
$ sudo apt-get install vim-gnome
Install git
$ sudo apt-get install git-core
Install dot files and configs
$ cd /tmp && git clone git://github.com/himanshuc/mydotfiles.git
$ cd mydotfiles && chmod +x install && ./install
Solve overheating problems for Dell laptops
$ sudo apt-get install gkrellm-i8k gkrellm
$ sudo modprobe i8k force=1
$ sudo echo “i8k force=1” >> /etc/modules
Ruby Version Manager
Use RVM to install multiple versions of Ruby and the ability to switch easily.
$ git clone git://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm.git && cd rvm && ./install
Fixing RVM issue
Forcing Tweetdeck to open links in Chromium

888: Use Ssh Tunnel For Internet Browsing

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:55:00 +0000

You can use your ssh account to browse with following advantages:

Anonymise your browsing (not 100% because of DNS)
Your internet traffic will go to your ssh server where it will request page as if the server is browsing and finally deliver to you.
Use bandwidth of remote network
Many ISPs cap only international bandwidth. Atleast in my place. So I can ssh to remote server which has high bandwidth than mine.
and may be few others that I can't remember atm.
Can you help me ?

Now to do high five browsing from ssh tunnel:

Open you terminal and type:

ssh -C2TnN -D 8080 username@host
Now Open you browser and setup the proxy as

Manual Proxy Configuration
SOCKS host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 8080
SOCKS v5

Now all your internet traffic will go through your ssh tunnel.
You can also use Multi Proxy firefox addon to easily switch proxies.

888: Giving Out Google Wave Invitations

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:03:00 +0000

One of our generous reader is offering seven Google Wave invitations. So please put your email address as comment. You can use scr.im to protect your email address from spammers.

To get the invitation you don't need to be my regular reader nor you need to be my RSS subscriber. Its not necessary that you have posted comment in this blog. It doesn't matter if you hate me or have kicked me. Invitations will be sent on first come first serve basis.

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Most frequently used tools and shortcuts

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Most frequently used tools and shortcuts

13 November 2009

I originally posted this while replying to a discussion about my most frequently used tools and shortcuts in a Linux environment. This isn’t a list of everything that I use but has stuff I find myself using on an almost daily basis these days.

Most frequently used zsh/bash Shortcut : Ctrl + r

Most frequently used Gnome Shortcut : Ctrl + Alt + Arrow Keys to switch workspaces

Quicksilver like launcher for Linux with numerous plugins : Gnome-Do

Version Control : git

Text Editor : vim

Managing multiple remote ssh sessions : screen

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Displaying system tray icon in GTK using Ruby

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Displaying system tray icon in GTK using Ruby

12 November 2009

I was experimenting with Ruby’s GTK bindings and did not find any example code for displaying a system tray icon. This could be handy for building something like an email notifier for the Gnome desktop. Below is a simple example which displays a blinking robot icon indefinitely :

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): This blog is now powered by Jekyll

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

This blog is now powered by Jekyll

12 November 2009

There are many different tools, platforms and mindsets for blogging. I was inspired by Tom Werner’s blog post titled Blogging Like a Hacker to use his Ruby powered creation Jekyll for this blog over Wordpress which I was using earlier. Jekyll lets me use the lightweight Textile markup to write blog posts in a text editor such as vim. Then I simply run jekyll in a local directory which crunches all the templates and markup to generate plain old vanilla HTML. As I am also using git for version controlling the blog, I can use git’s post hook feature to deploy the blog remotely to my web host. Another alternative approach to deployment is by using rsync.

When I tweeted about the reincarnation of this blog I received a question from @socialectnepal regarding my reasoning behind this switch and my reply below summarises my decision :

888: Ask Mark Shuttleworth

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:37:00 +0000

888: Simplest Http Server

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:02:00 +0000

888: [How To] Install Ubuntu in Can Coke

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:44:00 +0000

888: Minimize Xchat To Tray In Karmic

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:20:00 +0000

888: Multi Touch with Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:15:00 +0000

888: Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Released

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Yet another simple app built using Sinatra + deployed on Heroku

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Yet another simple app built using Sinatra + deployed on Heroku

19 October 2009

I have been fooling around with building mini web apps with Ruby lately. The latest toy being a web app to check the weather by entering the zip code utilizing Yahoo’s weather service. As usual the project resides on Github and deployed on the lovely Heroku.

Source code repository

888: Thunderbird Minimize To Tray

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:02:00 +0000

888: Shipit Karmic Koala

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:28:00 +0000

888: How To Open VirtualBox Guest OS Directly

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:39:00 +0000

888: Beautiful Karmic Koala Desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:32:00 +0000

888: Beautiful Horizontal Conky

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:55:00 +0000

888: [Solved] couldn't open demos/TUTORIAL.dm_68

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:19:00 +0000

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): My ssh/.config file

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:00:06 +0000

So, I have been having to look this up almost every time I need to update ssh stuff on new machines that I'm just going to put it here now. Host gprasanna User xxx HostName gprasanna.com.np Host mycomputer.cs.trincoll.edu User test Port 30045 Host ubuntunp User xxx HostName ubuntu.org.np Host *.cs.trincoll.edu ForwardX11 yes Host * Compression ...

888: Internet Monitoring With SARG and Squid On Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:00:00 +0000

888: Squid On Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:41:00 +0000

888: Google Chrome Update Keeps Appearing Even After Removing From Application Sources

noreply@blogger.com (Techs Palace) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:12:00 +0000

Ankur Sharma (anks): Data Visualization Guideline

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:11:33 +0000

I created this data visualization guideline for a company which needs regular data visualization for printing and presentation purpose, their requirement specially demands different charts and graphs. This visualization guideline is not a complete solution but contextual one rather, I am very thankful towards the company for letting me post this guideline publicly.
I hope this guideline will be of some help to starters.
Please Download here

888: Install Firefox 3.5 on OLPC XO

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:27:00 +0000

Prasanna Gautam (SR71-Blackbird): A better shell for cygwin

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:56:49 +0000

So, I’ve been using cygwin for a while now and I am not impressed at all by the default shell for the following reasons: 1. It’s clumsy. I can’t resize properly. 2. Doesn’t take NUL character apparently 3. Backspace is acting weird so far. 4. cmd.exe looks ugly! However, putty is pretty amazing in terms ...

888: Fixing small bugs in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:03:00 +0000

888: Ubuntu Developers Week, don't miss

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:48:00 +0000

888: Use localepurge to remove unnecessary locales

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Simple Ruby web app (Hpricot + Sinatra + Heroku) to check domain name availability

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Simple Ruby web app (Hpricot + Sinatra + Heroku) to check domain name availability

30 August 2009

I built a simple web app check domain name availability built using the awesome things I have been experimenting with lately : Ruby, Sinatra, Hpricot and deployed on Heroku

It all started with a quick and dirty Ruby script to check for domain name availability:

Converting it into a web app was very easy using Sinatra and deployment to the Ruby hosting service / platform at Heroku is conveniently done via Git. The web app resides on Heroku at : http://domchkr.heroku.com The source code repository is available at Github.

888: ManiaDrive - Car Game for Linux

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:16:00 +0000

Himanshu Chhetri (r11t): Hello world!

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Hello world!

18 August 2009

Welcome to my blog which will serve as a means of sharing my thoughts mostly on technical subjects that I am interested in. Stay tuned for regular posts!

Bibek Paudel: Has the SRK detention story been overblown?

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:50:10 +0000

Recently, bollywood superstar ShahRukh Khan (SRK) was detained for a little over 1 hour (according to the US authorities, 2 hours according to Indian news sources) in an American airport when he was travelling to perform in a show. It has been attributed to his Muslim name and is said that the Indian government had to apply diplomatic measures to release him. A lot of furor has been created since and heated comments from SRK and his supporters have been coming.

Profiling people based on their names, religion, country of origin, race etc is totally wrong. Worse is the unlawful detention, extra-judicial powers to law authorities, surveillance and the increasing attack on freedoms and civil liberties. This escalated after 9/11 and has been continuing unabated since. Many other countries have joined the league and freedom of people all over the world is being restricted day by day.

SRK isn’t an isolated case. On 15th August, a similar fate met Bob Dylan. Though SRK mighet be more popular than Hollywood actors, Dylan’s personality and role in the rights-movement some decases ago and in the protest of Vietnam war are stuffs legends are made of. A few years ago, a famous singer Cat Stevens who is a Islam-convert was deported after being denied entry to the US, also because of his Muslim name. Unlike SRK, he’s one of “them”, the western world. Studies by civil liberty groups claim that more than 5% of the American population itself is kept on a possible terrorist-suspect list and are subjected to harrassment at airports. A foreign minister of Hugo Chavez was “threatened and shoved” by airport officials, even after informing them of his identity. Even Nelson Mandela was (there have been reports that his name has since been removed) on a terrorist watch list prepared by the FBI which contiues to grow longer and longer every day. Similarly, names of many American leaders and people are also there. Forget America, former Indian president Abdul Kalam was also frisked in April at an Indian airport. “But I admired the calmness with which Abdul Kalam dealt with the issue himself and displayed so much humility. I expect Shah Rukh to do the same as I am sure he will. Only he can defuse the situation,” Times of India quotes Shekhar Kapur.

IndiaTimes blog has an entry that requests not to make a big deal over the SRK case. In my experience, South Asia in itself is a very racist place with the North-Indians in India and the residents of Kathmandu being the most frequent offenders I’ve seen. Sometime ago, a racist slur was made on an Indian Idol from North-Eastern India belonging to a Nepali-speaking community by a Mumbai FM RJ. In my observation, such behaviour is common, especially in the Indian capital, to North-Eastern Indians, Bhutanis and Nepalese of mongolian origin. Dinesh Wagle echoes my observations in a recent article. Kathmandu-residents are very intolerant of anybody from outside the valley and especially the Terai.

In my opinion, racism in any form, any where is deplorable. Such activities remind of colonial days. It is a good thing that India has risen to the capacity of defending its citizens even at the world’s sole superpower – maybe this reckons of days when it will stop being the sole-superpower. However, the basic flaw is in the state of civil liberties worldwide. Unless this realisation dawns, getting emotional over SRK issue may be benefitial to his upcoming movie that is said to be based on similar issues, but it will make no significant change on the way things are. They were never different. Just because SRK is SRK, expecting them to change is only stupid. The issue has been overblown.

The last two lines of the third paragraph were added on 17th Aug, 2234 (local time)

Posted via web from Instincts

Bibek Shrestha: Converting .wav files to .mp3 files in Ubuntu 9.04

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:31:22 +0000

The process is a two step process:

First,
Install the required packages
$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52

Second,
Use proper command line tools for the conversion
$ ffmpeg -i source.wav -acodec libmp3lame -ab 64k destination.mp3

Now although it looks simple, I wasted two hours trying out different tools lame, mencoder, etc and wrong options with ffmpeg. Unnecessary bheja fry!

Cheers

Bibek Paudel: Is a day job necessary for a startup owner?

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:12:33 +0000

Whether or not to keep a day job while venturing out on a startup is a key question for many entrepreneurs. Startup owners, in my opinion, should find/keep a day-job until investors are found or the startup starts becoming expectedly profitable. Some good reads on the web:

10 Reasons to Keep Your Day Job
20 Things Not to Do Before Starting A Busines
Entrepreneur – You don’t have to quit your day job
Pearls or Wisdom – You Dont Have to Quit Your Day Job
Dan Grossman – Go to college and get a job
Business Start-up Success – launch your business on a part-time basis then go full-time when profits will sustain
TrackSuit CEO – Entrepreneurs: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
To make your startup a success, keep your day job
MoneyAside – Don’t Ditch your Day Job at Business Startup
Tony Wright – Half-assed Startup – How to Start your Company and Keep Your Day Job
Venture Hacks -Half-Assed Startup: Start your company and keep your day job
Ron Conway Thinks You Should Keep Your Day Job
Stack Overflow – When should you leave your day job to open a start-up?
Paul Graham – How not to Die
Guy Kawasaki -Nine Questions to Ask a Startup
Why do most new start-up businesses go bust ?
BootStrapMe -Don’t keep your day job?
GapingVoid – Ignore Everybody (keep your day job) , The Sex and Cash Theory (keep your day job)

Bibek Shrestha: RTFTR came second in OSCN Competition

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:29:38 +0000

After a year of work put into the project and lots of ups and downs during the development, RTFTR has finally won second prize in the "Open Source Competition Nepal" organized jointly by D2HawkEye services and Pulchowk Engineering Campus.

The environment during the event was quite entertaining and exciting. Everyone in the d2provided TShirts were already hacking into their softwares for the final day demo.

Bibek Shrestha: The patient people

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:49:01 +0000

Some people have too much patience. I went to the doctor today. Having lost my Record Book with all past histories I was feeling guilty because we grown ups are supposed to be more careful about our stuffs. I went to the hospital, waited outside doctors room. Wasn't sure if the doctor will see me. The nurses couldn't put me in queue since I had no RecordBook.

The doctor came out of his room hurriedly, he must have thought no more patients. Saw me, Oh ur still left.. humm come in and took me inside, got me a new Record Book, couple of questions regarding my history and everything is good.

888: Hide Menubar and StatusBar in Virtual Box

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:40:00 +0000

888: scp with resume

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:03:00 +0000

888: Nudge in Pidgin

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:37:00 +0000

888: Pidgin and Google Apps Email Account

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:48:00 +0000

888: Pulseaudio Perfect Setup

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:08:00 +0000

888: vimtutor

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:21:00 +0000

888: Animated Gif In Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:25:00 +0000

888: Google Wave Check It Out

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:39:00 +0000

888: Bash Quick-Reference, Great Shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:45:00 +0000

C-n means control-n
M-x means escape-x (few keyboards have a 'meta' key)

Finding a line in history:
C—p Move to previous line in history
C-n Mcve to next line in history
C-r Reverse search

Moving in the current line:
C-a Move to start of the current line
C-e Move to end of the current line
C-f Move forward (right) one character
C-b Move backward (left) one character
M-f Move forward one word
M-b Move back one word

Editing the current line:
del Delete the character under the cursor
bs Delete the character to the left of the cursor
C—k Kill the characters to the right of the cursor
C-u Kill the characters to the left of the cursor
M—d Delete the word to the right of the cursor
M—bs Delete the word to the left of the cursor
M-u Convert the next word to upper case
M-l Convert the next word to lower case
M—c Capitalize the first character of the next word
C-vx Insert x literally, even if x is special

Kill ring and previous line:
C-y Yank (paste) the last deleted characters
M-y Immediately following Yank, remove yanked text and replace with previous deleted text
M-. Paste the last word of the previous line
C—o Execute the current line, then present the next line in the history

Redhat

888: Hide Channels From Whois In Freenode

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:55:00 +0000

If you are a geek you must be hanging on lots of irc channels. I like to hide my details as much as possible. So I prefer to hide the other channels I've joined. To do so, the command you type is

/quote mode user_name +i

Also you can get cloak to hide your IP.

888: Run GNU Screen Directly

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:41:00 +0000

Whenever I have to start screen, I have to start a terminal and run screen manually. Now to run the screen automatically without first opening a terminal you can use the following command

gnome-terminal -e screen

This opens screen in gnome-terminal directly.

888: Simple And Powerful Command To Take Screenshots

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:54:00 +0000

I often take screen shots. So I need a simple applications that loads fast, is easy to take screen shots, is powerful and saves file directly to the location I want. And the best thing I found is the command import .

For example to take a screen shot I can simply press ALT+F2 and type

import -frame /tmp/my_screenshot.png

888: Gateway Brightness problem solved

noreply@blogger.com (TechsPalace) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:12:00 +0000

I encountered a problem with Gateway laptop. The brightness level can't be changed neither from keyboard shortcut nor from gnome-power-manager.

If you encounter the same problem, open terminal and type

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL legacy

To make this fix permanent add the above line in your startup(From Menu, System, Preferences, Startup Applications).

Bibek Shrestha: Choosing a senior year project.

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:51:24 +0000

I've listed myself at Technorati. Technorati Profile

The senior-most year at our college, IOE (http://www.ioe.edu.np) has a course that requires everyone to complete a Project. We call it Major Project, reason being the junior year has similar but small scale project thats called Minor Project. A lot of students I've seen are really confused as to what topic to choose to do their projects in.

Now that I've completed my undergraduate and am working as a full time employee, let me share my experiences.