Planet dgplug

Mukti’10

2010-02-08T08:49:18+00:00

Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2010 was held on 5-7th Feb. Students from various institutions in and around Durgapur and many FOSS enthusiasts were present through the three days and AFAIK, for the first time, the registrations crossed the 1000 mark! The first

golf tournament software

2010-02-05T07:42:21+00:00

Today I released djangogolf - golf tournament management software. The scoring module is ready, draw and handicapping to come. The demo is here: http://greenchilly.in/

Codecracker 3.0 stats

2010-02-02T15:09:41+00:00

Codecracker 3 was a major success among the three seasons of codecracker. Firstly, we went ahead to support four programming languages C, C++, Java and Python and secondly I was the admin . This time we broke all the records of the past with the number of registered teams which rose exponentially to 195 [...]

An introduction to Linux Device Drivers – #1

2010-01-29T10:49:39+00:00

An introduction to Linux Device Derivers

GSOC 2010 IS ON

2010-01-29T10:37:59+00:00

29.01.2010 As declared by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager – Open Source Google Inc on 27th january 2010 that GSOC 2010 will be there. The various information can be found at links 1) http://socghop.appspot.com/ 2)http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2009/faqs 3)http://delicious.com/gsoc2009 4)http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2009 The accepting application for would-be mentoring organizations will be beginning March 8th at approximately 19:00 UTC, with applications closing on March 12th at 23:00 UTC

change in status

2010-01-29T03:12:52+00:00

I will be moving from working at NRC-FOSS more or less fulltime to working part time remotely from Ooty.

new foss books

2010-01-26T07:31:39+00:00

just saw the new foss books brought out by http://fsm.co.in - good work by Ramadoss and his team - although their order form sucks big time! Well worth buying the books.

spamhaus

2010-01-26T06:34:06+00:00

and now my id is blocked by spamhaus and mails to ilugc are being rejected. Why do these people use stupid services like spamhaus?

2010-01-26T00:59:36+00:00

travelling: http://thedownstownchronicle.in/reportfull/72/

After long time #success

2010-01-24T22:01:38+00:00

Its been 2 months since I blogged, was much busy in my final presentations of DSD (Distributed Software Development). A very nice final demo, in which all the prof’s were very pleased. Expecting excellent grades from this subject.

After the completion of that subject marked the end of Semester 1. A very happy smiling faces all through every people, with the temperature also shooting to bit more higher level at -12 degree C (Earlier it was -30 degree C ) adding cherry on the frozen cake

Good things doesn’t last long and again thesis (the main hurdle) comes forward. Its a thesis at Ericsson and the topic is also quite interesting. For the first part of it I was trying hard from the last few days to recompile the kernel to install LTTng. Presently working on a Ubuntu 9.10 virtual box (as because it is same as Uni lab) and after 3 days of kernel panics, clock synchronization errors, blank screens while booting finally and successfully installed LTTng kernel and Control packages. Excellent tool to use and seeing the trace results makes you feel more good.

At present LTTng happily, am working on the document for LTTng Installation along with the problems faced by me, and also use of certain kernel patching tools like quilt.

Will blog soon taking time from my hectic but awesomely interesting thesis work , ciao

sql import script

2010-01-22T06:55:25+00:00

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

def checkparms(parms):
    """checks all the input parameters
    format: partialtableimport.py -i infile.sql -o outfile.sql -t tablename -c oldcol=newcol,oldcol=newcol,...
    """
    b0rked = 0

    if len(parms) < 8:
        sys.exit('userdump takes at least 8 parameters, you have given %s parameters'
            % len(parms))
    if parms[1] != '-i' or parms[3] != '-o' or parms[5] !='-t' or parms[7] != '-c':
        sys.exit('format: userdump.py -i infile.sql -o outfile.sql -t tablename -c oldcol=newcol,oldcol=newcol,...')
    infile = parms[2]
    outfile = parms[4]
    tablename = parms[6]
    colnames = parms[8]
    #check if infile exists
    try:
        ifile = open(infile,'r')
    except:
        sys.exit('cannot open %s' % infile)

    #check if outfile has sql extension
    tfile = outfile.split('.')
    if len(tfile) < 2:
        sys.exit('output file needs an extension')
    else:
        if outfile.split('.')[1] != 'sql':
            sys.exit('output file should have a .sql extension')
    #check if columns are correctly formatted
    pairs = parms[8].split(',')
    for pair in pairs:
        if len(pair.split('=')) != 2:
            sys.exit('column parameters not formatted properly')
    #check if we are over writing the outfile
    try:
        ofile = open(outfile,'r')
        b0rked = 1
    except:
        pass
    if b0rked:
            sys.exit('file %s exists - choose another file name for output' % outfile)
    ofile = open(outfile,'w')
    return ifile,ofile,tablename,pairs

def createsql(ifile,ofile,tablename,pairs):
    """creates the sql"""
    parsed = False
    for line in ifile.readlines():
        if not line.startswith('INSERT'):
            ofile.write(line)
        else:
            if not parsed:
                parts = line.split(""") VALUES (""") #split on values

                keys = parts[0].split('(')
                keylist = keys[1].split(', ')

                # find the keys you want.
                newkeylist = []
                for n,k in enumerate(keylist):
                    for p in pairs:
                        x = p.split('=')[0]
                        if x == k:
                            newkeylist.append((n,k))
                leftside = ','.join([x[1] for x in newkeylist])
                parsed = True

                #now to generate the right side
            parts = line.split(""") VALUES (""") #split on values
            valus = parts[1].strip(""");""") #strip trailing ) and ;
            vallist = valus.split(', ') #separate the values
            rightlist = []
            for k in newkeylist:
                rightlist.append(vallist[k[0]])
            rightside = ','.join([x for x in rightlist])
            sql = "INSERT INTO %s (%s) VALUES (%s);\n" % (tablename,leftside,rightside)
            ofile.write(sql)


    ofile.close()
    ifile.close()

if __name__=='__main__':
    ifile,ofile,tablename,pairs = checkparms(sys.argv)
    createsql(ifile,ofile,tablename,pairs)

old article

2010-01-20T09:30:15+00:00

just published an article I wrote long ago:
http://thedownstownchronicle.in/featurefull/1/

Adieu Durgapur

2010-01-18T16:44:46+00:00

So. today is my last day in Durgapur, I will be moving to Ahmedabad for next two months. Having some mixed feelings as this is the first time I will be out of my home town for long, best song suiting the mood now is Tanha Dil by Shaan Posted in life, wow [...]

Train-the-Trainers principle is flawed

2010-01-17T15:00:40+00:00

FOSS is making its way to schools and colleges in India in a big way. There are Govt sponsored projects that are working towards replacing proprietary software being used in labs and introducing FOSS technologies in college curriculum. Notable mentions are the FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay, IOTA in West Bengal , DSERT initiatives in [...]

seat_of_pants programming

2010-01-14T11:05:37+00:00

I had occasion to import data from a table in a database and import it into another table on another database on another server. pg_dump with -a, -D, -t options gives the table data as a set of INSERT statements. The thing is that I needed to insert into a table with a different name, with only selected fields which were named differently. I tried massaging the dump in a text editor, but soon gave up. Then decided to do it with a python script - no problem, took about 10 minutes. Then I go ambitious and decided to make a generic script that would work on any pair of tables - as this use case could arise frequently. Good to do this kind of stuff occasionally. As I do not write code every day, I tend to forget simple usages like enumerate, strip, split, join and list comprehensions. So I went into it seat of pants style - thought it would be done in 20 minutes - took nearly 3 hours!

money laundering

2010-01-11T02:59:57+00:00

today I put on a newly washed crsiply ironed shirt and found the pocket full of fresh laundered and ironed currency notes

user stats

2010-01-09T02:30:24+00:00

just discovered that livejournal has user stats - pretty decent stuff, now I know how many people read my journal. Of course I do not know who they are! But it is nice to know that the world is full of jobless people ;-) And may my readers never get jobs.

Goodbye

2010-01-06T21:58:00+00:00

I am moving over to Wordpress. The main reason for this is that Multiply makes it really difficult to leave comments by asking people to create accounts. It is also strange that they offer to import from other blogging services but I am unable to figure out how to export the contents from Multiply.

if no one else writes for the dtc, I will!

2010-01-06T07:27:55+00:00

http://thedownstownchronicle.in/memoryfull/1/

Best photo of 2009 (new meme)

2010-01-05T08:56:47+00:00

This was taken in March in the colorful festival known as “Holi” . I played holi after 5 years. The kids from the society building already started by the time I came down with my camera. I was really tensed about the camera as they were throwing colors in all directions. Withing few minutes, putting the colors in the fountain and using it as a big tank full of colors became the main attraction for them.

The idea for this meme came from sankarshan.

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The small lane

2010-01-02T17:30:02+00:00

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Gnote 0.7.0 released!

2010-01-01T09:09:00+00:00

0.7.0 "The end is near" - 2009/12/31

This is the first of the new 0.7.x series and has new features and bug-fixes.

New Features:

* 590589 - Add a Note of the Day addin

Fixes:

* 579359 - XDG directory spec conformance
* 597307 - Addins can't be disabled
* 604367 - Bugzilla addin doesn't work

Translations:

* Updated translations:
- Arabic (ar)
- Spanish (es)
- Portuguese Brazil (pt_BR)
* Added translations:
- Bulgarian (bg)
- Danish (da)

Download, Home Page, Support:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnote/0.7/
http://live.gnome.org/Gnote
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnote

tribute to my mother

2010-01-01T08:55:40+00:00

I thought I would launch 2010 with a tribute to my mother: http://thedownstownchronicle.in/personfull/1/

Stuff that I have been up to

2009-12-30T17:19:08+00:00

December turned out to be a pretty busy month for me – here are some of the stuff I have been involved in/working on:

FOSS.in: As always FOSS.in ‘09 turned out to be an amazing affair. Being someone who works remotely, this event is probably one of the best opportunities for me to have “real” interactions. It’s a place where I can simply sit down, have long face to face conversations, come up with new ideas, be inspired, and most importantly, have fun. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the people behind the event for making this possible. I have some photos in this Flickr photoset.
Book reader: This month’s priority has been stabilizing the Sugarlabs/OLPC book-reader code, and a large number of important bugfixes landed during the last few weeks. More in this status report.
Arduino: At FOSS.IN, thanks to the efforts of the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, I managed to get hold of an Arduino clone board (it is terribly difficult to get hold of one in Kolkata). I had heard of Arduino before and wanted to get one, and the session on it at FOSS.in by Russell Nelson finally served as the “kick” which made Kushal and me call up the local distributor and get a couple of boards for ourselves. I have been playing around with sensors support in Sugar for sometime (I helped make the Measure activity work on XO 1.5 hardware), and realized that this would be yet another interesting way to connect Sugar with the “real” world. So after a couple of weekends worth of work, I got Arduino support in Turtle Art.
XO keyboards: There may be a new AZERTY keyboard for the XO laptops very soon. See this wikipage for details.
Pootle: The Pootle developers have released version 2.0, which is a vastly improved edition compared to the previous releases. I have been testing it out with plans to upgrade the Sugarlabs/OLPC translation server soon. While testing, I added a quick (and ugly) hack to implement msgfmt –check style syntax checking in Pootle. This would definitely make the process of integrating the translations with the upstream code much less painful – and here’s a screenshot (click on it for a larger version):

Solang: new bug tracker

2009-12-29T11:40:00+00:00

From now on, we will be using bugzilla.gnome.org for bugs, feature requests, etc..

Sony’s hi-def camcorder - Handycam HDR-XR500E plays nicely with Fedora 10

2009-12-28T09:35:41+00:00

I had borrowed my friend John Bose’s expensive new toy, the Sony Handycam HDR-XR500E to record Devdas “f3ew” Bhagat’s lecture at WBSU (Barasat) on the 26th of December, 2009.

The specs of the device was *nice* - 1080i, 120GB HDD, 5.1 Dolby recording etc. It was a last minute arrangement. I didn’t like this! There was no time to tinker and see if the device was compatible with Linux and Kino for post-recording stuff.

It was set for 1080HD AVCHD or Advanced Video Codec High Definition. The camcorder was easy enough to handle. Most of the controls being easily accessible via the touchscreen. After coming back home that night, I was eager to see the results. So, with some trepidation I decided to plug in the mini-USB cable (that had came with my trusty old Canon PowerShot A610) into the mini-USB slot on the side of the HDR XR-500E.

Immediately the standard tail -f /var/log/messages routine threw up the following details:

Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=054c, idProduct=0346
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: Product: HDR-XR500E
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Sony
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 0C59300C6CC1
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
Dec 27 00:24:49 localhost kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Sony Camcorder 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 234413857 512-byte hardware sectors (120020 MB)
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 234413857 512-byte hardware sectors (120020 MB)
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Dec 27 00:24:54 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Dec 27 00:24:55 localhost kernel: sdb: sdb1
Dec 27 00:24:55 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
Dec 27 00:24:55 localhost kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
Dec 27 00:25:24 localhost hald: mounted /dev/sdb1 on behalf of uid 500
Dec 27 00:25:24 localhost gnome-keyring-daemon[3043]: adding removable location: volume_part1_size_120019828736 at /media/disk

Sweet!!! Camcorder’s being correctly auto-detected with it’s 120GB HDD storage being propering mounted and being made accessible. Going by the AVCHD file / directory structure, using Dolphin, I browsed to the STREAM folder and found the video recordings from the day, present in MTS format. The files opened nicely using the VideoLAN client (vlc) on Linux, except for the some spots of interlace combing (for an example, see this link). Oh well! we *are* working with 1080i here.

Right now, I’m using Kino 1.3.3 to import the .MTS file by converting them to raw DV files needed by Kino for its own workflow. So far, FFMpeg seems to be working nicely.

Input #0, mpegts, from ‘/home/stephanie/Desktop/wbsub-vid-raw/00017.MTS’:
Duration: 01:09:09.0, start: 1.040000, bitrate: 4096 kb/s
Program 1
Stream #0.0[0×1011]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1440×1080 [PAR 4:3 DAR 16:9], 25.00 tb(r)
Stream #0.1[0×1100]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 448 kb/s
Output #0, dv, to ‘/home/stephanie/Desktop/wbsub-vid-raw/00017.MTS.dv’:
Stream #0.0: Video: dvvideo, yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 25.00 tb(c)
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, stereo, 1536 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1

Right now FFMpeg is about half way through conversion process. I’m already looking at a ~7 GB file. Let’s hope I do not run out of space!

We have lift-off

2009-12-25T15:35:00+00:00

I just published Solang's tracker branch a few minutes ago.

Now I can celebrate Christmas!

Solang: the move to Tracker (and Tumbler), etc..

2009-12-24T14:17:00+00:00

For the last so many weeks I have been planning to use Tracker as the meta-data store for Solang instead of the "import your stuff into my own SQLite/XML store" approach that almost every photo manager that I have come across uses. Last week after my exams got over I started to actually try to implement this idea, experimentally. From where I am right now, I think it would be possible to actually pull this off. Since I anyway had to replace all blocking calls in our internal API to asynchronous ones, I thought this would be a good time to give our thumbnailing code a bit of a face-lift too. Enter Tumbler. Tumbler is basically a session service implementing a standard interface over DBus which applications can use.

Nothing of this is available publicly yet. Mostly because the experimental tree on my laptop is completely messed up. I have restored a part of it to a state where it can result in a meaningful commit, but there is still some cleaning up left to do.

In the sky

2009-12-24T10:32:45+00:00

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Upcoming - “System Administration Reloaded” a lecture by Devdas Bhagat on Dec 26, 2009.

2009-12-24T07:28:43+00:00

What : A lecture by Devdas (f3ew) Bhagat, who will be passing through town and was coaxed into giving this talk.

Where : Dept of Physics, West Bengal State University, Berunanpukuria, Barasat.

When : At 12:30 PM on Saturday, 26th December 2009.

Lecture Synopsis - “Most people who end up being system administrators are self taught. There is little formal theory in this field so far. System administration also involves very different sets of tasks, ranging from helpdesk issues to management reports, from wiring to software.

A very large number of people also start off with small numbers of machines to run and few issues to troubleshoot. As the number of machines grows, keeping pace with troubleshooting becomes impossible. Sysadmins spend time firefighting, and then burn out. Hiring is often very limited due to budgetary constraints or simply due to lack of available labour.

This talk deals with the constraints sysadmins work under, and how to work around them so that they aren’t as big a bottleneck. We take a look at the mindset required to do this work, and how to convince management that the solutions you are implementing are cheaper than the alternative. We also take a quick look at some of the solutions available for sysadmins to reduce their workload.”

Speaker Bio

Devdas Bhagat is just another recovering sysadmin, and is currently playing database administrator for a large domain registration system. In his copious spare time, he works with other business units at his workplace to help tune their systems, add business benchmarks and other general monitoring stuff. He has spoken at the sysadmin miniconf at LCA’09 (Linux Conference Australia) on system automation and on DNS benchmarking. He has spoken at various network operator group (SANOG) conferences on spam control, DNS, operational issues, large scale email systems, etc. He has also been a speaker on databases at FOSS.IN and it’s previous avatar, Linux-Bangalore. When not busy working with computers, he spends time in the hills trekking and photographing.

Organised by : West Bengal University of Technology in association with Kolkata Linux Users’ Group (ILUG-CAL.ORG)

certification launched

2009-12-19T04:13:41+00:00

I have launched my long dreamed-of certification. Lets see what happens now. http://certificate.nrcfoss.au-kbc.org.in

no more windoze bashing

2009-12-19T03:36:53+00:00

it is axiomatic that one should not talk about things one does not know of. I have suddenly realised that the last time I seriously used windoze was in around 98. After that, I have used windows to browse in net cafes on a couple of occasions and in a friends house once or twice. So I know nothing about windoze - so am not competent to talk about it.

Tracker 0.7.12 provides Nautilus extension

2009-12-18T19:44:00+00:00

Few weeks back I had spent some time on a Nautilus extension to interact with Tracker. Thanks to the marvellous enthusiasm and support from the Tracker developers -- Philip Van Hoof, Martyn Russell (who cleaned up some coding errors on my behalf among other things) and Adrien Bustany it was merged into master today and is available in the Tracker 0.7.12 tarball that was released few hours ago.

Student,Contributor,Ambassador

2009-12-11T17:19:02+00:00

I often hear good things about the strength of the Fedora Ambassadors in India. With a 110+ group of people, it does allow one to look at upsides and, areas of improvement. But more importantly, what it stands as testimony to is the tough work that is put in behind the scenes by various individuals and, groups within Fedora to make that happen. (Hint : some of the said individuals are also mentors for the Ambassadors in India, so, if you chance onto them on IRC, be sure that you thank them for doing a job well and, doing it with a passion that is unique to folks within Fedora.)

This year we have been able to reach out to a number of events and groups which helped us take the message of the Four Foundations to them. That has been good. We have also noticed that a larger number of those signing up to become Ambassadors are students or, are dipping their feet into the FOSS way of doing things. So, here’s the area in which we need to work our hardest.

Earlier I wrote:

Additionally, if during the initial days, the new Ambassadors are encouraged to actively participate in any other part of the project, it should lead to greater involvement and appreciation of the Foundations. This of course has the advantage of helping them build the social connects and network across projects/amongst individuals which is an invaluable part of being an Ambassador. It also builds up the required confidence in the Ambassador to go out and evangelize about contributing back to various projects and upstream. Because, if one has already drunk the Kool-Aid, talking about it is dead simple.

And, it is true. An Ambassador is the face of the project to the external world. It requires people skills but more importantly, it requires an intrinsic knowledge about the project that takes time and effort to build up. Unless an Ambassador takes a keen interest in the various projects within Fedora and, contributes to at least one of them, it is an uphill climb for most. More so for a student who is just learning the ways of FOSS and, gathering experiences via Fedora.

In the coming months, the plan is to put in place a stronger coaching plan for these student contributors so as to tap into their huge talent and, the capacity to produce stunning results. We have always been surprised by the sheer amount ideas that come up when students are gradually pointed to a direction.

Stay tuned. Exciting stuff is going to happen.

FOSS.IN 2009 in a total

2009-12-11T12:01:26+00:00

5 days of full of excitement and fun. This year I tried to break/arrange my times in few things I wanted to work on. So the first decision was not to take many photos , I tried to keep my camera inside my bag only. The idea worked, I found more time on hand than last few years. From the speaker’s list I already knew who else is coming so fix up my mind according to that.

On the first day we took charge of the Fedora booth. Kital, Heimanshu sat on the table, /me and Sayamindu sat on the ground behind the table and started discussing many things. Next table was full with KDE-IN team with many swags. Day 1 I spent mostly meeting old friends and talking. It was nice to meet Kital once again

I managed to find Girish Ramakrishnan in a table in the first floor. So asked for his help to have a long waiting feature in pony. I wanted to view images with a semi-transparent background just like picasa does in windows systems. While working on it Prashanth Udupa also joined and helped to visualize what I was trying to achieve. Finally it was done with 2 lines of code

I also had a plan to sit with Sayam and discuss two of projects , Jukebox and Lekhonee. Got couple of unknown areas cleared in sugar activities. In lekhonee-gnome I tried to have a WYSIWYG editor using gtkwebkit and later also tried libabiword. This work is not completed yet. Will see which one comes out better.

Meanwhile 2nd day of the event was Fedora Project of the day. Mether, Kiltal, Kedar, /me, Shrink, Susmit, Ankur, Heimanshu many others were there. I gave a talk on python-newt module and tried to show how easy to use that while developing console based applications.

This year was again special as Milosch and Brita came again to FOSS.IN. Russ Nelson also joined along with his talk on arduino boards. /Me and Sayam bought two boards from a Bangalore based firm in the same day. Milosch gave an inspirational talk on how one should start working hardware based projects. He bought me couple of cool gifts so that I can start working of my own. He and Russ had great workshop on 8 bit and 32 bit (OpenBeacon) small computers. I spent the last two days of the event with them only learning small small things. One of the biggest outcome of the event is computerclub.in (not ready yet), a group to work on hardware-software related stuffs. We have our initial mailing list and sf.net project created. Please join if you are interested. The Bangalore group already fixed their first physical meeting.

The event ended with a great performance trdp. Enjoyed the show too much, never took out my camera

All shots can be found here.

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Solang

2009-12-10T23:59:00+00:00

From now on one can directly commit translations to Solang's Git tree through Transifex.

Fedora logo in LED

2009-12-10T15:43:46+00:00

While it is off

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Moving to wordpress

2009-12-07T23:30:42+00:00

I have moved my blog to wordpress. Please update your bookmarks to arunsag.wordpress.com . Thanks :-)

Do we need to look for new software ?

2009-12-06T01:46:22+00:00

In an unguarded moment of misguided enthusiasm (and, there is no other way to put it) I volunteered to translate a couple of my favorite TED talks. The idea was simple – challenging myself enough to learn the literary side of translating whole pieces of text would allow me to get to the innards of the language that is my mother tongue and, I use for conversation. Turns out that there was an area that I never factored in.

Talks have transcripts and, they are whole blocks of dialogue which have a different feel when undergoing translations than the User Interface artifacts that make of the components of the software I translate. In some kind of confusion I turned to the person who does this so often that she’s real good at poking holes in any theory I propound. In reality, it was my turn to be shocked. When she does translations of documents, Runa faces problems far deeper than what I faced during the translation of transcripts. And, her current toolset is woefully inadequate because they are tuned to the software translation way of doing things rather than document/transcript/pieces of text translation.

In a nutshell, the problem relates to the breaking of text into chunks that are malleable for translation. More often than not, if the complete text is a paragraph or, at least a couple of sentences – the underlying grammar and the construction are built to project a particular line of thought – a single idea. Chunking causes that seamless thread to be broken. Additionally, when using our standard tools viz. Lokalize/KBabel, Virtaal, Lotte, Pootle, such chunks of text make coherent translation more difficult because of the need to fit things within tags.

Here’s an example from the TED talk by Alan Kay. It is not representative, but would suffice to provide an idea. If you consider it as a complete paragraph expressing a single idea, you could look at something like:

“So let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this. And, so the first idea here is just to how you the kind of things that children can do. I am using the software that we're putting on the 100 dollar laptop. So, I'd like to draw a little car here. I'll just do this very quickly. And put a big tire on him. And I get a little object here, and I can look inside this object. I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior car forward. Each time I click it, car turn. If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again, I just drag these guys out and set them going.”

Do you see what is happening ? If you read the entire text as a block, and, if you are grasping the idea, the context based translation that can present the same thing lucidly in your target language starts taking shape.

Now, check what happens if we chunk it in the way TED does it for translation.

So let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this.

And, so the first idea here is

just to how you the kind of things that children can do.

I am using the software that we're putting on the 100 dollar laptop.

So, I'd like to draw a little car here.

I'll just do this very quickly. And put a big tire on him.

And I get a little object here, and I can look inside this object.

I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior car forward.

Each time I click it, car turn.

If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again,

I just drag these guys out and set them going.

Get them out of context and, it does make threading the idea together somewhat difficult. At least, it seems difficult for me. So, what’s the deal here ? How do other languages deal with similar issues ? I am assuming you just will not be considering the entire paragraph, translating accordingly and then slicing and dicing according to the chunks. That is difficult isn’t it ?

On a side note, the TED folks could start looking at an easier interface to allow translation. I could not figure out how one could translate and save as draft, and, return again to pick up from where one left off. It looks like it mandates a single session sitdown-deliver mode of work. That isn’t how I am used to doing translations in the FOSS world that it makes it awkward. Integrating translation memories which would be helpful for languages with substantial work and, auto translation tools would be sweet too. Plus, they need to create a forum to ask questions – the email address seems to be unresponsive at best.

it could not have happened to a better guy

2009-12-05T10:00:36+00:00

http://nibrahim.net.in/journal/?p=268

In the company of a ninja

2009-12-04T02:11:02+00:00

It looks like watching the Ninja Assassin hasn’t done Shreyank any good. Else, he would have figured out that it is easy-peasy for a Founder and Chief Ninja like Dimitris Glezos (who is also known as DeltaGamma) to be at Bangalore and, elsewhere. Dimitris paid a surprise visit to Pune yesterday and it was fun. It isn’t always that you get a CEO of a startup provide you with an in-person repeat of his keynote with added wisecracks and side-talks that are too scandalous for a “keynote” And, that too, at a fairly crowded Barista. It was awesome.

In fact I wanted to talk with him about how massive the momentum built up by Transifex has been. Just two years ago, in 2007, Tx was a GSoC project within The Fedora Project aimed at looking at managing translations from a developer’s perspective. Today, it is a start-up which is hiring employees, relocating to newer offices, has a foot-print across a significant portion of upstream community projects and, most importantly, has clients willing to pay for customization services and, developer services. Tx isn’t only helping translation communities by allowing them to craft their work in peace – it is keeping developer sanity with the fire-n-forget model of the architecture. I hear that PulseAudio, PackageKit developers are strong supporters of Tx. That is tremendous news. The provocative nature of Tx is also based on the charm that it has been bootstrapped. That should provide hope to developers thinking along the “product” route.

I would say that these two years have done Dimitris good. His focus on the road Tx should take has become more vivid and, he has a deeper insight into the changes he wants to bring about via Indifex. There’s nothing more exciting than keeping a close watch on his team and his company for news that would come up soon. Tx is coming up with a killer set of features in the upcoming releases. That should get the attention of a couple of clients too.

Throughout the afternoon we ended up talking about getting youngsters up to speed to think beyond patches as contributions and, starting tuning their thoughts to products. Dimitris opines that patches are excellent jump-off points but in order to become a valuable contributor, one must start thinking about “architecture”, “design”, “roadmap”, “milestones” and all such issues that form part of the theory classes but never see implementation in real-life scenarios. In addition, there is also the need to inculcate the “CC thinking” in everyday work of creativity – be it code or, content or even be it hardware and standards (the “CC thinking” is a fancy short-hand towards thinking about Open Standards, Open Protocols and so forth. In a somewhat twitter-ish way, we compressed it to a meta-statement we both could relate to and agree with).

Dinner and post-dinner with a couple of us was another story. Having a bunch of hard-core “Fedora” folks in the room creates a passion. Sitting back to savor the flames of discussions and, interjecting with a leading viewpoint to keep the debate flowing is the best way to get action items resolved. Nothing wasn’t touched upon – from the way to get best out of *SCos to mundane stuff like getting feature requests into Tx, OLPC and Sugar, or, talking about the general issues within the IT development community in Greece. And of course, the frequent checks on Wikipedia to validate various points in the argument. We could have done with an offline Wiki Reader yesterday

I think I finally went to sleep at something around 0200 today – which is impossibly past my standard time. There are photos aplenty, though I don’t know who will be uploading them. There was food, there was coffee, cakes, and, there were friends – in short, a nice day.

Fedora Project day in foss.in started

2009-12-02T06:01:46+00:00

Kital is giving the first talk on Fedora Security Spin. The room is not full yet, people are still coming in slowly. Kital just a very nice example of robbing bank and how one should go ahead to plan and execute that

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Foss.in day 1

2009-12-01T17:45:30+00:00

First day was fine. Met Kital after long time. Was really happy to find a Fedora booth which was assigned to Rahul Sundaram. Girish helped to me get one of the long waiting feature in pony.

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how to write code?

2009-12-01T06:33:37+00:00

the other day I was working on integrating an online payment portal with a site. The code supplied was in PHP - obviously insecure unusable crap. I worked the whole day and got nowhere - I could understand the code and workflow, after all I have done it before! But translation from PHP to python will not work. Mostly my code is seat-of-pants - I write the comments first and the code follows easily. Not this time. I am informed that one should first write documentation, then tests and then write code until all the tests are passed - at which stage stop writing the code. I wonder if anyone actually does this? I know a lot of people claim to do it. But I bet they cheat. So this time I am going to start with sketching out the thing with dia. Then write the tests, and see if the claim that the code will write itself is true.

Sunday

2009-11-30T10:21:00+00:00

Had one of those mapping-face-to-IRC-nick things when I met with Daniel Kitta (danielk in GIMPNet's #c++) in Helsinki yesterday. We met at the Aleksanterinkatu tram stop near Kaisaniemi and then walked to Daniel's apartment on the waterfront. Chatted about random things, drank juice, watched South Park and signed keys. Basically had a nice time.

shut up and hack - the unofficial fsck.in faq

2009-11-29T09:40:31+00:00

I recently made a comment that no self respecting Indian member of the F/OSS community would be found dead in fsck.in. I was asked to explain - I have explained in the past, but for those who are too lazy to scroll through my blog, I will repeat myself.

fsck.in is run by Kishore Bhargava and Atul Chitnis who are arguably the biggest loudmouths in the Indian FOSS universe. After hijacking the highly successful linux-bangalore conferences they have been casting around for a formula to get mileage for their event. Having never contributed anything (be it code, documentation or translation) to the FOSS community they have torn a quotation from linus out of context and are projecting themselves as the saviours of the Indian FOSS community.

basically they are doing this by trying to create an elite caste among the community. L33t h4x0rs. People who own laptops. I have nothing against people who own laptops - I own one. But I see the 3 most prolific contributors to FOSS in my lab - they do not own laptops - on the salaries they are paid, they cannot even dream of owning laptops.

I write code, I translate, I contribute to documentation. I even appear on IRC and mailing lists and offer solutions (at least 50% of the time I am right). But I do not run around telling people to shut up and hack.

To me, the greatest thing about the FOSS movement is that it has blurred the distinction between enduser and developer. Every end user is also a contributor (except Bhargava and Chitnis). fsck.in works against that trend - it has created swollen headed monsters - some of whom used to be my friends. Frankly with friends like this I do not need enemies.

nuff said.

Gnote 0.6.3 released!

2009-11-28T12:58:00+00:00

Gnote 0.6.3 "The days are short" - 2009/11/28

This is a bug-fix release of the 0.6.x series.

Fixes:

* 586541 - Crashes on hitting enter twice before URLs
* 596138 - Better tooltip for panel applet

Translations:

* Updated translations:
- Bengali India (bn_IN)
- Chinese Simplified (zh_CN)
- French (fr)
- German (de)
- Italian (it)
- Kannada (kn)
- Punjabi (pa)
- Russian (ru)
- Swedish (sv)
- Tamil (ta)
- Telugu (te)
- Thai (th)
* Added translations:
- Galician (gl)
- Indonesian (id)
- Oriya (or)
- Polish (pl)
- Portuguese Brazil (pt_BR)
- Slovenian (sl)

Download, Home Page, Support:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnote/0.6/
http://live.gnome.org/Gnote
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnote

Pleasant experiences and project loyalty

2009-11-28T04:33:56+00:00

As a general case, my experience with most of the FOSS projects whose products I consume or, contribute to, have been very pleasant. Feedback has generally been well received, requests listened to. So, what I am going to write is not very special. But, they are striking by themselves.

Sometime ago, I was shopping for an off-line translation tool. I was fed up with Lokalize’s issues and, the fact that it wasn’t letting me do what I wanted to do at that point in time – translate. Additionally, I wasn’t in the mood to actually install a translation content management system to do stuff. Face it, I am an individual translator and, calling in the heavy shots to get the job done was a bit silly. So, I turned to virtaal. Actually, I think I was goaded into giving it a try by Runa.

Virtaal was, at that point in time, not really a good tool And, you can figure from the blog link above that I wasn’t interested in it too much. However, since I ended up giving it a chance (you cannot simply ignore a recommendation from her) I ended up running into two issues. One was predominantly more annoying than the other and, in effect was what was putting me off the tool. However, the developers took interest to get it fixed and, in the latest release have resolved it.

The other bug was resolved in an even more interesting way – over IRC with hand-holding to obtain the appropriate debug information and, then on to editing the file to put in the fix. At the end, the fix might be trivial. But the level of interest and care taken by the team to listen to their users is what makes me happy. In this aspect, the other development crew I can mention is Transifex. I haven’t met most of them and yet they keep taking suggestions, reports via every communication channel they are on – blogs, micro-blogs, IMs, IRC and trac. That makes them visible, gets them into the shoes of the users and, I am sure it earns them invaluable karma points.

Yesterday, while helping (I just did the file editing while Walter did all the brain muscling) to close the other bug, I felt incredibly happy to be part of a system where it isn’t important who you are or, where you are from. What is important that you have a real desire to develop better software and, make useful artifacts for all.

As it goes – “Your mother was right, it is better to share” link to video.

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Will be offline for the next few days

2009-11-27T09:16:01+00:00

Will be offline for the next few days, will be available on phone

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New photoblog for /me

2009-11-26T10:42:08+00:00

With great help from Nicu, managed to start my new photoblog.

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featherbed wickets

2009-11-25T04:54:59+00:00

given the wicket for the match I would not be surprised if Mahela broke Lara's record.

GSoC and beyond…

2009-11-24T06:59:14+00:00

Karsten has a nice blog post and, an even nicer report on GSoC 2009 from the perspective of The Fedora Project-JBoss umbrella organization. If you haven’t already gone through it, it would be good to read it up and, provide feedback.

An immediate benefit of any project participating in the Summer of Code is the ability to get exciting extensions or, innovations via a group of highly talented individuals – both mentors and, contributors. Having had the opportunity to look at the projects from fairly close quarters over a period of years, there are a couple of things that stood out. Some of them are listed on my wiki page. I’d say that the most important thing is to “have a plan“. A stage of proper planning which sets the expectations and deliverables for a GSoC proposal goes a long way in becoming a successful proposal. That, coupled with a scheduled update-review cycle makes it a proposal that has a constant communication channel. I was reminded of the this fantastic mentoring how-to today while reading the latest issue of The GNOME Journal (as an aside, you should read this issue).

If you look at the wiki page I pointed out earlier, you’ll note that I mention an “annual round-up”. This by itself is very trivial to do and yet very important.. It provides an yardstick by which to measure the success or, failure of a GSoC experience of being able to generate sustained and relevant participation. For example, if projects did more of this kind of “where are they now ?” series, it provides upcoming and potential contributors with role-models they can look up to or, be like.

That single act of being able to have role models makes for a tremendous motivation to become a sustained contributor to Free and Open Source Software.

Trek to Sankshi fort

2009-11-24T06:20:59+00:00

After a long long time I got a chance to go trekking again on 22 Nov. Sankshi fort is located near Alibag, off the Mumbai Alibag highway. Difficulty level is easy to moderate, but it involves about an hour of walking.

Article on Sankshi fort from Maharashtra government website.

The name Sankshi is said to have been derived from a chief named Sank who is traditionally believed to have been the lord of the fort. See below.] (T. Pen) also known as Badr-ud-din, or Darghaca Killa from a tomb or dargah of the saint Badr-ud-din at its foot, lies within the limits of Nidivali village about five miles north-east of Pen. read more...

We assembled at Panvel ST depot at 7AM, waiting for others to join in, and finally left Panvel at 9:15 after having breakfast at a restaurant across the road. Since the bus started from Panvel, everyone got seats, and I dozed off to sleep.

We got down at Balavali Phata and marched towards saint Badr-ud-din's dargaah. The route is cool and covered with dense trees, but full of giant spider webs. The photographers among us took half an hour to capture the arachnids and buffaloes on camera.

We reached dargaah in less than 2 hours, relaxed and moved towards the Sankshi hill. There's a GI water pipe that runs to dargaah at the base of the hill from a water cistern at the top of the hill. Some walk in the jungle, struggling with the itchy bushes, a rock patch and we were at the top. After exploring for half an hour, we came back down to have lunch at the old dargaah structure that looked beautiful and wise in white color.

It was a nice little trek (microtrek ) and we were back to panvel around 6PM, without feeling tired at all! Complete pictures from trek to sankshi fort are available in my flickr set.

golf in god's own country

2009-11-24T05:33:23+00:00

Was in trivandrum to referee the South zone junior/subjunior match there. It was held in the Trivandrum golf club - a spot of mindblowing beauty. It was built by the Maharaja in 1851 - which makes it the oldest golf course in the world outside the british isles. The club house is a heritage building - built in the old kerala stye - even the wells on the course look like mini palaces! Two days of golf played in light drizzle. Competition was keen and the hospitality great. One thing Malayalees know about is looking after the stomach. No butter chicken here! Traditional Kerala food - and cooked real well.

But the club is in trouble - the government feels that golf is a rich man's game and wants to convert the course into a housing colony. (I forgot to mention that the club is situated in the most espensive area of the city). Golf *was* a rich man's game - but now many of the top earners in the Indian tour are ex-caddies. The two top juniors, Chikkagangappa and Rashid Khan are both caddies - their parents are course workers. And another caddy, Muniyappa was recently paired with Tiger Woods in a tournament. India has only 3 people in the top hundred of the world, but that is changing and changing fast. Even Japan, the golf super power of Asia has only 5. India has only 200 golf courses whereas the US has over 35,000. That is also changing.

In Trivandrum of the 8 local participants, 4 were caddies. This is the first time a zonal level tournament has been held in Kerala. So it was a good chance for publicising the plight of the club and course. The course had been handed over to the club by the state government in 1951 and maintained by them since then. And well maintained, no encroachments. So the sports minister was invited to be chief guest and give away the prizes. The function was a bit tense. Minister turned up. President made a speech about the history of the club, the progress of Indian golf and the huge potential of Kerala in the scheme. The IGU representative also emphasised the fact that caddies are reaping riches and India is doing well in world golf. Then the minister spoke. First surprise was that he spoke in english. (Ministers in the South rarely speak in english in front of their home crowds, although they do so when they are out of the state or abroad). I suppose since the parents and players were mainly from outside the state he realised this and wanted to be understood. Anyway he thanked the club for inviting him, congratulated the players and wished for more success at state, zonal, country and international events. He frankly stated that there is a dispute between the government and the club - unlike most ministers he did not make any false promises. But I have a feeling that a seed of doubt has been planted in his mind, as he *did* say that he wishes that the trivandrum leg of the south zone junior tour would grow bigger in future. Let us see.

oops, and I forgot, this is the only golf course in the world with women caddies wearing sarees.

G++ on FreeBSD

2009-11-23T02:20:00+00:00

The following version of GCC shipped with FreeBSD 8.0-RC3 is reportedly unable to compile this C++ code.

g++ (GCC) 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD]Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NOwarranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

It is trying to copy parameters being passed as constant references.

Training place

2009-11-22T16:26:52+00:00

A place which brings smile to many faces. Some come with pain though.

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Context,subtext and inter-text

2009-11-22T05:50:24+00:00

There are two points with which I’d like to begin:

One, in their Credits to Contributors section, Mozilla (for both Firefox and Thunderbird) state that “We would like to thank our contributors, whose efforts make this software what it is. These people have helped by writing code and documentation, and by testing. They have created and maintained this product, its associated development kits, our build tools and our web sites.” (Open Firefox, go to Help -> About Mozilla Firefox -> Credits, and click on the Contributors hyperlink)
Two, whether with design or, with inadvertent serendipity, projects using Transifex tend to end up defining their portals as “translate.<insert_project_name>.domain_name”. Translation, as an aesthetic requirement is squarely in the forefront. And, in addition to the enmeshed meaning with localization, the mere usage of the word translation provides an elevated meaning to the action and, the end result.

A quick use of the Dictionary applet in GNOME provides the following definition of the word ‘translation’:

The act of rendering into another language; interpretation; as, the translation of idioms is difficult. [1913 Webster]

With each passing day innovative software is released under the umbrella of various Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. For software that is to be consumed as a desktop application, the ability to be localized into various languages makes the difference in wide adoption and usage. Localization (or, translation) projects form important and integral sub-projects of various upstream software development projects.

In somewhat trivial off-the-cuff remarks which make translation appear easier than it actually is, it is often said that translation is the act of rendering into a target language the content available in the source language. However, localization and translation are not merely replacing the appropriate word or phrases from one language (mostly English) to another language. It requires an understanding of the context, the form, the function and most importantly the idiom of the target language ie. the local language. And yet, in addition to this, there is the fine requirement of the localized interface being usable, while being able to appropriate communicate the message to users of the software – technical and non-technical alike.

There are multiple areas that were briefly touched in the above paragraph. The most important of them being the interplay of context-subtext and inter-text. Translation, by all accounts, provides a referential equivalence. This is because languages and, word forms evolve separately. And, in spite of adoption and assimilation of words from languages, the core framework of a language remains remarkably unique. Add to this mix the extent with which various themes (technology, knowledge, education, social studies, religion) organically evolve and, there is a distinct chance that idioms and meta-data of words,phrases which are so commonplace in a source language, may not be relevant or, present at all in the target language.

This brings about two different problems. The first, whether to stay true to the source language or, whether to adapt the form to the target language. And, the second, as to how far would losses in translations be acceptable. The second is somewhat unique – translations, by their very nature have the capacity to add/augment to the content, to take away/subtract from the content thereby creating a ‘loss’ or, they can adjust and hence provide an arbitrary measure of compensation. The amount of improvement or, comprehension a piece of translated term can bring forward is completely dependent on the strength of the local language and, the grasp over the idiomatic usage of the same that the translator brings to the task at hand. More importantly, it becomes a paramount necessity that the translator be very well versed in the idioms of the source language in additional to being colloquially fluent in the target language.

The first problem is somewhat more delicate – it differs when doing translations for content as opposed to when translating strings of the UI. Additionally, it can differ when doing translations for a desktop environment like, for example, Sugar. The known user model of such a desktop provides a reference, a context that can be used easily when thinking through the context of words/strings that need to be translated. A trivial example is the need to stress on terms that are more prevalent or, commonly used. A pit-fall is of course it might make the desktop “colloquial”. And yet, that would perhaps be what makes it more user-friendly. This paradox of whether to be source-centric or, target-friendly is amplified when it comes to terms which are yet to evolve their local equivalents in common usage. For example, terms like “Emulator” or, “Tooltip” or, “Iconify”being some of the trivial and quick examples.

I can pick up the recent example of “Unmove” from PDFMod to illustrate a need to appreciate the evolution of English as a language and, to point to the need for the developers to listen to the translators and localization communities. The currently available tools and, processes do not allow a proper elaboration of the context of the word. In English, within the context of an action word “move” it is fairly easy to take a guess at what “Unmove” would mean. In languages where the usage of the action word “move” in the context of an operation on a computer desktop (here’s a quirk – the desktop is a metaphor that is being adopted to be used within the context of a computation device) is evolving, Unmove itself would not lend itself well to translation. Such “absent contexts” are the ones which create a “loss in translation”.

The singularity here is that the source language strings can evolve beautifully if feedback is obtained from the translated language in terms of what does improve the software. The trick is perhaps how best to document the context of the words and phrases to enable a much richer and useful translated UI. And, work on tooling that can include and incorporate such feedback. For example, there are enormous enhancements that can be trivially (and sometimes non-trivially) made to translation memory or, machine translation software so as to enable a much sharper equivalence.

(The above is a somewhat blog representation of what I planned to talk about at GNOME.Asia had my travel agent not made a major mess of the visa papers.)

Restore Windows Xp from Linux

2009-11-21T06:56:55+00:00

I use windows xp rarely.I primarily use archlinux. I have an analog dial-up modem which is propietary, meaning it is not supported in Linux.So when my Broadband goes down, i have to boot into windows to access internet through dial-up.The following method is a way to quick install windows for that moment where i need it absolutely but don't want to install it from scratch.

1.dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/xp-backup.img

2.To restore xp at a later time,

1>create a partion size equal or bigger than the xp image.
2>change the system id of the partition from Linux (0x83) to NTFS(0x7) using fdisk.To do this,

* sudo fdisk /dev/sda

You will get a similar output:
"The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)"

Command (m for help):"

3> type m for help.

Output:

"Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition's system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)

Command (m for help):"

4>type t to change id of the partition.

output:
"Partition number (1-4):"

5>select the partition asnd type L.

output:

"Hex code (type L to list codes): L

0 Empty 24 NEC DOS 81 Minix / old Lin bf Solaris
1 FAT12 39 Plan 9 82 Linux swap / So c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
2 XENIX root 3c PartitionMagic 83 Linux c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 40 Venix 80286 84 OS/2 hidden C: c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 41 PPC PReP Boot 85 Linux extended c7 Syrinx
5 Extended 42 SFS 86 NTFS volume set da Non-FS data
6 FAT16 4d QNX4.x 87 NTFS volume set db CP/M / CTOS / .
7 HPFS/NTFS 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 88 Linux plaintext de Dell Utility
8 AIX 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 8e Linux LVM df BootIt
9 AIX bootable 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba e1 DOS access
a OS/2 Boot Manag 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 94 Amoeba BBT e3 DOS R/O
b W95 FAT32 52 CP/M 9f BSD/OS e4 SpeedStor
c W95 FAT32 (LBA) 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux a0 IBM Thinkpad hi eb BeOS fs
e W95 FAT16 (LBA) 54 OnTrackDM6 a5 FreeBSD ee GPT
f W95 Ext'd (LBA) 55 EZ-Drive a6 OpenBSD ef EFI (FAT-12/16/
10 OPUS 56 Golden Bow a7 NeXTSTEP f0 Linux/PA-RISC b
11 Hidden FAT12 5c Priam Edisk a8 Darwin UFS f1 SpeedStor
12 Compaq diagnost 61 SpeedStor a9 NetBSD f4 SpeedStor
14 Hidden FAT16 <3 63 GNU HURD or Sys ab Darwin boot f2 DOS secondary
16 Hidden FAT16 64 Novell Netware af HFS / HFS+ fb VMware VMFS
17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 65 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fc VMware VMKCORE
18 AST SmartSleep 70 DiskSecure Mult b8 BSDI swap fd Linux raid auto
1b Hidden W95 FAT3 75 PC/IX bb Boot Wizard hid fe LANstep
1c Hidden W95 FAT3 80 Old Minix be Solaris boot ff BBT
1e Hidden W95 FAT1
Hex code (type L to list codes)"

6>type 7 to change id.

output:

"Changed system type of partition 1 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS)"

7>Lastly type w to write the change to the disk and quit.

3.Restore the image.

dd if=/media/xp-backup.img of=/dev/sda1

4.Make an entry in grub like the following:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

5.Reboot and boot into windows !

Solang: Brasero integration

2009-11-21T01:04:00+00:00

I spent some time today writing a CD/DVD exporter for Solang using Brasero's new libbrasero-burn API. It is to be noted that we are not spawning a new Brasero process, but embedding some widgets in Solang's own ExporterDialog and making a few API calls here and there.

I wish they had exported the BraseroMediumProperties widget also.

Unfortunately, the code will not easily compile because of silly reasons like some of the libbrasero-burn headers having missing G_END_DECLS. And yes, the dialogs do have misleading titles. Will fix those soon.

Dhunuchi Dance (ধুনুচি নাচ)

2009-11-20T07:44:39+00:00

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