Suramya’s Blog

Open Source Living has a great list of the various Open Source Software’s (OSS) that are available out there on the web.

It addresses one of the biggest problems with the OSS: the lack of knowledge about the various alternatives that are available. It is classified into various subsections like “Graphics & Photo”, Video, Audio etc. With a great listing. It is being migrated to another CMS (Content Management System) so while thats going on the creator is not making any additions to the site.

The advantage of OSS is that its free to try and its free to use. So instead of spending big money on proprietary software check out OSS . You just might find something that you like and save a few bucks.

In an earlier post I had talked about various Open Source Project Management software. Found this post that reviews the various Project planner software. Check it out if you are looking for a Project Management software:

- Suramya

I have spoken a bit about the Vista WOW factor in a previous post and in my last post I had mentioned that I had the opportunity to play some more with Vista on Gaurang’s laptop and had promised to log my ‘WOW’ experience in another post… So here it is. Without any further ado the Vista ‘WOW’ factor.

Gaurang had bought a new Sony Vaio laptop with is almost the top of the line, dual core, 2GB RAM and looks great. Unfortunately he got it with Vista pre-installed. I had mentioned the issues I had with Vista to him so he told me that it works ok and the automatic trouble shooter works great. According to him if a program crashed it would connect to the internet and would find a solution for the crash. So his Vista install was supposed to be very stable…. Yeah Right.

We wanted to share files between our computers so I enabled SAMBA on my Linux system and shared the folder in XP on my Laptop. I could share files without any issues between both my computers and the connection was pretty fast too. (We were both on a LAN) When I connected to my Linux box using its IP address I would get the password prompt within 2-3 seconds on Vista it would take almost 20 seconds for the password prompt to show up. WOW!

Then once he finally connected he started to copy files over but accidentally selected the wrong set so I asked him to cancel the copy and start again. It refused to cancel the copy. Once we clicked on cancel It said ‘Canceling Copy’ and sat like that for almost 5 mins… (This happened to us multiple times.) We tried killing the process but that killed explorer and we had to log out and back in so that we could see the Desktop again.

Then it kept freezing a lot. In the 1 1/2 days he was here we had to forcfully reboot his system about 10 times (Maybe more). When we applied patches and it asked us to reboot, Gaurang’s comment was “This is the first time today that I am rebooting the system normally” (This was after we had rebooted the box 5-6 times already). WOW!

Vista takes forever to reconnect to the net if you accidentally unplug the network cable. Noticed this because we had cables running all over the place and invariably one of us would pull the wrong cable and disconnect one of the laptop’s. On XP if you unplug the LAN cable and then replug it, it connects back to the net immediately. If the system is set for a dynamic IP it usually gets it within a few seconds. But Vista… If you unplug it, it took it atleast 10-15 seconds to get back on the net and this is not that we unplugged the wire and waited a min and then plugged it back it, It was me tripping on the cable and pulling it out for 1 or 2 seconds max. Talk about annoying.

Also Bit defender is one of the most annoying software ever made. Its like the Bonsai Buddy. Keeps popping up everytime making a nuisance of itself.

The best part was that my laptop is older than his, and is slower with less RAM but it is more responsive compared to his. On Vista without him running any additional programs (Except Antivirus and Firewalls) his system was using ~ 850 - 900 MB of RAM. On my system with me running 4-5 programs together the RAM usage was aprox 400 - 500 MB of RAM.

So after using it for a day I have decided that I am very Happy with Linux and if I have to use Windows I would rather use XP instead of driving myself nuts by trying to use Vista.

Have any of you had any similar experiences with Vista? Do share.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

Cya,
Suramya

Today I finally fixed a problem that I have been having with my Vonage phone. Basically what was happening was that everytime the power went out and the inverter (Sort of a UPS for the entire house) kicked in the phone would stop working. All I would get was a lot of static on the line and no incoming calls would come though. If I switched the UPS powering the router off so that it was running on internal power the line would clear up. Couldn’t figure out why this was happening so I moved the UPS to a outlet that wasn’t connected to the inverter so when the power went out it would kick to battery backup, but this wasn’t a good solution as the beeping would get on my nerves.

Today I found that the phone was having the same issue even when the inverter wasn’t running so I thought that the issue might be the power supply for the router. I tired plugging it directly to the wall but the issue persisted so I tried running it off the UPS with the main turned off and it worked fine. Then I dug out the extra power supply I have for the router and then the problem was magically fixed.

The weird part is that I still can’t figure out why the thing worked when the UPS was running off battery power but didn’t work when the UPS was running off the mains power.

Oh well. Atleast the stupid thing is working again.

- Suramya

I am not a big cricket fan (Understatement of the year…) but this is something really interesting. As some of you might know the cricket World cup is currently going on and is a big craze in India/England/Australia/and a lot of other countries.

Now Sky Television has the exclusive rights to broadcast the matches live so if you want to watch the show live you have to pay them for it. There’s nothing wrong with it but in places that don’t have SKY TV it becomes and issue. There are websites that broadcast the matches live but they are illegal and usually very slow with horrible picture quality.

There is a website called cricinfo.com that solves this issue in a very unique way:

Cricinfo 3D is based on public domain information gathered by our scorers who record a number of factors such as where the ball pitched, the type of shot played and where the ball goes in the field,” said a Wisden statement. “That data is then fed as an xml to anyone who has Cricinfo 3D running on their desktops and the software generates an animation based on this data.”

The match coverage is delayed by between 3 and 12 balls during the match and its still in Beta so might not work perfectly. But still Pretty cool eh?

Check it out: http://www.cricinfo.com/3d/

Thanks to OpenDotDotDot for the link.

- Suramya

Here’s a different twist of the usual mod where users modify their computer case so that you can look into the innards of the CPU. In this version, instead of creating a window looking inside we put in a LCD monitor in the CPU. Which looks really cool. Below is a pic of what it might look like.

I have a flat screen sitting under my desk from an old system I bought a couple of years ago so maybe I will try to set this up sometime in the near future when I get some free time.

The site has some other really interesting projects also. Check it out if you are interested in DIY projects.

Source: Inventgeek.com - LCD Window Kit

- Suramya

Interesting… I think I need one of these

Flashlight Slippers

- Suramya

Good list of Open Source Freeware. Most of these software work on both Windows and Linux desktop systems.

Check it out..

Thanks to nixcraft for the link.

- Suramya

This is a really interesting idea. It uses the power of open source/wiki/group efforts to create a free map of the planet. Now you might ask why do we need a free map of the world? Can’t we just use Google Maps or Yahoo Maps to get a map? After all they don’t charge us for access…

Well yes and no. In the open source world there are two kinds of free: “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. Google Maps are free as in beer, not as in speech.

Basically since Google has to pay for the mapping data it can’t make it available for free. So even though I can access it for free online and get directions I can’t export the map data and create a map to be used on a GPS from it. That would violate Google’s copyright. You can’t copy it to your local system and fix a street name that they got wrong or add new items to the map.

To fix this issue OpenStreetMap was born. It uses GPS coordinates fed to it by users to a Wiki like system and allows users to fill in information like street names etc. Which gives us surprisingly accurate and upto date data as whenever anything changes (e.g. a new street is added) anyone can edit the map and make the changes.

Check it out here: OpenStreetMap.

I think I will be using my GPS on my trips from now on and upload the tracking data collected to the site.

Thanks to TechRepublic for the link.

- Suramya

I like the concept of realtime collaboration over the web and I have used a couple of tools for this earlier but didn’t find any that I really liked. Until now. I really like Thinkature as its pretty easy to use and intuitive.

Thinkature has a couple of features that I really like:

• Its free. (Duh..)
• It doesn’t use Flash. (I am not a fan of flash, I know it lets you do stuff that you couldn’t do without it but I still don’t like it.)
• The interface is simple and clutter free.

The parts I am not a big fan of are:

• Its a visual collaborative tool, You cant use it to collaborate on coding or development. Though you can use it for designing presentations and flow charts.
• There doesn’t seem to be any official privacy policy (That I could find…) on the site. Who owns the content I create on the site? Do I still maintain ownership?

  I have emailed their support about it, lets see what they say,

• They don’t have any export/import feature (Though it looks like they are working on it.)

Over all a good tool. Check it out over here: Thinkature - Real-time collaboration for the web

Thanks to OpenDotDotDot for the link.

- Suramya

A couple of days ago I had a slight problem with my internet connection, basically what was happening was that I couldn’t access google.com and associated sites (Orkut, gmail etc) but I could access everything else with issues so I spoke to a Comcast representative and she told me to run the following command on my Windows XP laptop (I told her I was using XP because I didn’t want to get into an argument with her that the problem was because I was using Linux.):

regsvr32 softpub.dll

I ran the command and it didn’t fix the issue. So I decided to un-register the dll using the following command:

regsvr32 /u softpub.dll

as I wasn’t sure what this dll did and didn’t want to register random stuff on my system. I ran the command and everything was fine for a couple of days, I could browse the net without issues and everything seemed to work.

Then all of a sudden after a couple of days I get an error message stating that my version of windows could not be validated so I must be running a pirated version of XP. The funny part was that I had installed WGA two months ago on the laptop and it had validated the license and the license is valid. So I went to the Windows update site and tried to validate my copy but ActiveX refused to run. It told me to try a manual check where it downloaded the ActiveX and then tried to run it but that also failed… Finally I tried a check using an executable I downloaded but that validated my license as valid. Now I was confused and tried to force a validation test but every time the system would refuse to run ActiveX and the validation would fail.

After beating my head on the issue for a little while I finally remembered the dll that I had unregistered a while ago so I went through my command history and found the command to re-register it and went ahead and registered it. Then I had to reboot the box and when it came back up I was finally able to run the online validation tool which verified my version of windows was valid. After it verified it I had to reboot again and that fixed the issue.

Moral of the story: If you don’t know what a dll does then don’t uninstall it.
Second Moral of the story: Its a good habit to keep a log of all the commands you run, and any changes you make to the system. Having this will save you a lot of time an energy when something gets messed up.

This is all for now, will post more about my experiments with computers and the messes I caused later.

- Suramya