Jitu

If you want to say good-bye to your relatives or welcome them at an Indian train station, you might ending up wasting the whole day. Especially in the case that you forgot to buy a platform ticket. Platform ticket? It is a little slip which allows you to enter the platform area of the train station. The higher the importance of the considered train station, the higher is the price for the ticket. It should be between 2 and 3 Rupees. The fine of getting caught is around Rs.500.

But this is not the worst problem: If someone gets caught and the culprit is not able to bribe the police at the station, he or she has to wait the whole day till the magistrate arrives and listen to the case. Anyway the fine needs to be paid additionally. So, next time if you enter the train station to say good-bye to your beloved ones, do not forget to buy a platform ticket at the usually well hidden counter.

Oh, and one more tip: It might be tempting to avoid the under- and overpasses to take the shortcut to the train. If you get caught, you will spend the night in jail. This happened to a friend of mine in Chennai. And the best thing: To go to the police station, he crossed again the tracks, but this time he was escorted by the police.

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In foreign languages names given to towns, states, persons, etc differ a lot from the names someone is used to. For Westerners it is quite easy to remember “Washington”, “Berlin” or “Steve”, “Paul” and “Mercedes”. But if a foreigner visits a different country, it might be difficult not only to pronounce the names correctly, but also to remember them in the first place. In addition towns are being renamed in India currently, making it necessary to remember two different names for the same place. For instance: Madras became Chennai, Bengalore -> Bengaluru, Calcutta -> Kolkatta.

Usually I cannot recall names of persons. If someone greats me with “Hi, Alex!”, I usually reply with “Hey, man!” to avoid embarrassing moments. This happens even if I know this person for years. Personally I maintain a hit list of the most difficult names for persons and towns that I can remember.

Just recently a new name entered the rank number one in the list for persons:

1. Kasireddy Jayaprakashreddy (Fortunately I am allowed to call him JP. Thanks, Madi)
2. Prof. Dr. R. Bhakthavathsalam

and for towns:

1. Thiruvananthapuram (in Kerala, India)
2. Mamallapuram (Tamil Nadu, south of Chennai)

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Many linux users currently suffer from a bug while using Compiz: the resize issue. If the terminal window is resized while running Compiz, it takes some time, till the window is displayed. The delay is quit annoying especially if you work mostly with terminals. The bigger the final window, the longer the delay. It is around 2 to 3 seconds, if the terminal is maximized. However many people came up with workarounds and tips, which may work more or less (e.g. the one here). Even nVidia developers came up with some technical explanations.

However, some observations may help:

1. If Compiz is not started by default, but in a terminal by typing compiz --replace, this terminal responds as expected to any resizing request. However if another new terminal is started, same delay can be observed.
2. If xterm instead of gnome-terminal is used, there are no issues at all and it behaves correctly.

I think this behavior is somewhat strange, especially if the same driver and Compiz version are used. Why does the resizing of the terminal work, if Compiz is started within the same terminal?

Anyway I replaced the properties of the terminal launcher and use xterm -fa monospace -fs 10 instead of gnome-terminal. Have a look at man xterm or Configuring xterm in Linux to change the font. So far I do not have any problems and I definitely do not miss the menu bar of gnome-terminal. I am using the following program versions:

• Compiz and Emerald: 0.7.9git2
• xorg: 7.3+18
• kernel: 2.6.28 (self built – my .config)
• nvidia driver: 177.82
• gnome: 2.22.3
• xterm: 235-1

For an overview of my hardware, have a look at this post.

[Update 07/03/2009]

With the newest nvidia drivers (180.29) in the experimental branch of Debian, the resize issue has been solved. Compiz works flawlessly after applying one of these tricks (see Klaus Reimer’s trick from 19/01/2009), if you experience problems that the screen is not updated, after its content changes; e.g. black lines in the terminal or the browser still shows the content of the old, just closed, tab. This bug only occurs in single screen mode. If the external VGA port is used by another monitor (dual head), it does not show up. As mentioned in the bug report, it is unlikely that the bug is fixed in the near future (too many dependencies). I prefer the “Paint fire on screen” option. After applying a little bit (invisible) fire somewhere, the content is displayed normally at the cost of permanently CPU utilization (5%) and hence power consumption. Anyway it is adviceable to switch off compiz, if the laptop runs on battery power.

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Today the next kernel version (2.6.28) has been declared stable. Configuration (make menuconfig) and compilation (make-kpkg kernel-image modules --append-to-version -5) went through smoothly. However I was not able to compile the nvidia kernel module by following this guide step by step. On Trausch’s Little Home a solution was published, which allows to compile the kernel module. Unfortunately this did not work either: When the new kernel was booted and the x-server came up, the screen was still black and blank. In the background I could do anything I wanted (e.g. rebooting and clicking etc), if I knew, where the buttons were.

Even switching the terminal did not show anything on the console. In a thread of the nvidia forum, a patch was released for 177.80 and later on also for 177.82. After application and recompilation of the nvidia kernel module, it worked without any trouble.

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In 10 days is Christmas. How can it be? Usually it should be cold and frosty outside, the night should become longer and longer, the shop windows and houses have been decorated months ago and the customer browsing for an gift idea and attracted by the latest offers, is lulled into the spheric melody of Christmas songs. The smell of mulled wine and cookies from the Christmas fair is in the air and everybody is busy looking forward for the festive season.

This year I missed it and was quite surprised when my aunt called from Berlin and told me about the preparations. I was distracted not only due to the work, but also the non-festive mood, the sunny days and the pleasant temperature of about 25°C which did not make me think about the upcoming season. Although the Indians usually celebrate everything regardless of the religious origin, all occasions of non-Hindu (In India the majority belongs to Hinduism) festival seasons are given the same importance. This degrades the huge festival of Christmas in Europe to a one day holiday on the 25^th of December. The idea of baking cookies for the office and friends is somewhat strange. Having an ice cream in a coffee shop is a more attractive one.

I should get used to it, but currently it looks as strange as to expect the Santa Clause at the beach in e. g. Australia.

Merry Christmas

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Yesterday I was eagerly searching for a very specific file. However I forgot the filename and could only think about some possibilities abouts its content. And I knew, it is an Openoffice document.

Well, as my standard operating system is Linux, the first try was using command line tools such as find and fgrep or zgrep. Openoffice saves the documents as zip file, which can be unzipped as usual. So it should be easy to find the file, decompress it temporarily, search for the keyword in it and proceed to the next file. However both tools are very powerful and just to figure out the necessary parameters took some while. In the end running a test did not give satisfying results and I decided to look for alternatives.

Google Desktop

Help could be provided by a so called desktop search program. First I tried out Deskbar by Google. Unfortunately it comes with lots of gimmicks that have nothing to do with the search itself (at least in the Windows). In addition I wanted to find the file, but the indexer used by Google, was not convincable to consume all its resources it could get to built the index. It ran only, when the computer was idle. So I waited for more than one hour (went for dinner) to find out, that the files where I suspect the searched content was yet to be searched in the next 2.5 hours of idle time. But I wanted to have the file now!

Google Deskbar will send data to the Google server and as soon as I connected to the Internet I got the latest news, weather report etc. In addition I am concerned about my privacy, since the content of my files is nothing for third parties. I aborted the indexing and removed the program again. So far I did not find the file.

Summary:
+ easy and well known interface
+ free of cost
+ available for multiple operating systems
+ extendable with plug-ins
- comes with lots of gimmicks
- very slow indexer which has a strict interpretation of idle time.
- does not search Openoffice documents (despite the plugin)
- send data to the Google server to identify you
- privacy issues (e.g. allows to store the index on the Google server to search your network drives)

Copernicus

The next try was Copernicus which is also free of cost. Fortunately it is a program that does exactly what it supposed to do. The indexer was quite fast and in the preferences I could define the drives and directories that should be processed. Simply this setting gave a tremendous speedup. The indexer was not as careful with the resources as the one in Deskbar. Whenever the computer was idle, it took everything what it could get. However there is no Linux version of this program available.

Summary:
+ free of cost for non-commercial home use
+ fast indexer
+ search can be limited to drives/directories
- only available in Windows

Beagle

As a alternative running in Linux is Beagle. Many repositories have ready made packages to install Beagle on the Linux machine. It provides a intuitive and easy-to-use graphical interface.

Summary (not yet complete):
+ free of cost
+ open source, so no misuse of sensitive data
- requires mono which could be a huge overhead

Others

Maybe you also want to have look at:

• Searchmonkey (http://searchmonkey.sourceforge.net/index.php/Main_Page)
  Hides the functional power of grep, find, etc below a GUI.
• Recoll (http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/index.html)
  Should be very light weighted; no server, daemon, etc necessary; extendable by helpers to index PDF and other files; supports stemming

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Recently a few friends bought several laptops. Beside the limited standard shareware, also my favorite operating system was installed: Windows Visa. After the excitement about the purchases has passed by, complains started about the size of the partitions and the slow systems. Fortunately Windows Visa includes a partition manager which is even able to resize the partitions. However when it comes to resize the partition on which the operating system resides (namely “C:\”), the partition manager capitulates. It seems that it expects a minimum size of around 60 or 80GB (cannot remember). Out of this space already 21GB is occupied by Windows itself and the preinstalled and mostly useless shareware.

Fortunately the Ubuntu LiveCD booted flawlessly on those systems and allowed to change the partitions in any way the users wanted to do. Even the C-drive preformated with NTFS, could be resized by GParted, which is included on that CD. Well, obviously the partition must be a little bit bigger to hold all data on the drive (marked with the yellow shadow) and lesser than the overall disk space.

After resizing, Windows Visa complains about some errors on the partitions and wants to perform integrity checks. After the checks completed, everything works fine and normal without any loss of data. However before you start, please consider the following:

• You have to shut down Windows cleanly and completely. Otherwise GParted will not alter anything on that partition. So do not hibernate or suspend your system, before changing the sizes.
• Resizing will take lots of time. Make sure that you attach your power supply, if you alternate the partition sizes of a laptop. Data loss is imminent otherwise.
• If you use an extended partitions to hold logical drive, it must be the only one or the last one on the drive. Do not let a primary partition follow any extended partitions including logical drives. This is not accepted by Windows and it will crash with a blue screen while booting. At least that is my experience.
• Please backup your data. Nothing is more frustrating than to recover documents and holiday photos from a failed operation. Although it looks easy and partition alternating is just a few clicks away, it is a major change and reallocation of data, which might result in data loss./li>

To execute GParted on Ubuntu, download an iso image file and burn it on a CD. For a one time use, any CD type will work: CDR oder CDRW. After the image has been written, boot from the CD which takes almost the same time than booting Windows Vista from hard disk (Sorry, could not resist ). Select the first option in the menu (“Try out Ubuntu” or similar). Wait till the graphical interface comes up, go to “Applications” (top left) -> “Accessories” -> “Terminal” and type “sudo gparted” at the prompt.

GParted will come up, analyzing your current configuration of the hard disk. By right-clicking on the partitions, you will see all available options. The next questions that might come up is: What partition number is what drive letter in Windows? Usually the first readable partition by Windows on the first drive is C:\, the second one is D:\ etc… Readable are partitions when they are either formated in NTFS or any FAT file system. E.g. in the picture sda1 is mapped to C:\, sda2 and sda3 are not readable by Windows (ext3 and linux-swap) and hence do not have a drive letter. sda5 till sda7 have D:\, E:\, and F:\ respectively (FAT32). It is also possible to work with labels. If you label a disk in Windows, the name is also displayed in GParted.

The big advantage of using GParted: It is totally free of cost and available in the net compared to commercial product such as PartitionMagic. In addtion it provides almost the same look-and-feel and mostly needed functionality.

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