Suramya’s Blog

Augmented reality, the words bring to mind a science fiction world where people wear glasses hooked up to computers that give additional information on the item being looked at. I have read scores of novels where this technology is in use by humans (both in a positive and negative sense) but till date this technology was still in the realm of Science Fiction.

Now this has changed. ThinkAnApp studio based in Buenos Aries has developed specialized software that allows them to create a tattoo that when viewed through a camera gets transformed into a flying dragon. Or anything else you want. Pretty cool eh?

Here’s what the Tattoo looks like when viewed through a camera:

Check out the video demoing the tattoo in action here.

This is just a prototype and isn’t released for public use yet. But it is a step in the right direction and slowly but surely we are moving closer to the day when the virtual world will overlay the real world and open up all the awesome possibilities that entails.

Source: ThinkAnApp – Augmented Reality (tattoo).

- Suramya

grep is a really powerful tool that allows you to search for specific string/data within a given text. This text can be a list of files or the content of a given file, even a list of programs running. Basically it allows you to filter the required text from background noise.

As you can imagine it is a very powerful tool but most people don’t really learn to use it well. Zahid Irfan wrote a very nice blog post on ‘Why grep almost never yields something productive‘ for new Linux users and has some great examples that explain grep usage quite well for all users both new and experienced

Check it out.

- Suramya

Since I have been using KDE (even in v3.5) I have noticed that Gnome applications look ugly in KDE. (see screenshot below) In KDE 3.5 I had to install the Gnome theme controller application and apply a theme and it fixed the issue. (I can’t recall the name right now, but it was something gnome-theme-something) but in KDE4 that didn’t work so well.

Firefox without GTK Themes

Did a little research and tried various options but none of them worked that well and caused loads of issues. Finally I found a way to get the applications to use the current GTK theme in KDE even after I rebooted the system without any manual intervention.

Once you do this all running GTK applications, as well as any more you launch, will switch to your GNOME theme and will look a lot nicer (See screenshot below)

Firefox with GTK Themes

As you can see the program looks a lot less ugly with the themes applied. However if you reboot the system without configuring the gnome-settings-daemon to auto start, the applications will go back to the default no-theme state.

To set the daemon to autostart create a text file called theme.desktop (Actually This can be anything you want as long as you keep the .desktop extension) in the ~/.kde/Autostart directory with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=gnome-settings-daemon &
Name=GNOME Settings Daemon
Type=Service
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false
OnlyShowIn=KDE;

Once you create the file and save it, KDE will start the Gnome settings daemon everytime it starts.

Note: On some systems the autostart directory is located in the ~/.kde4/share/autostart folder.

Hope this helps.

Source of the tip: Tombuntu.com

- Suramya

After reading Vinit’s response to my post about Google Calender Notification (and talking to him) I finally went ahead and installed Mail for Exchange on my N95.

The configuration was easy, however the interface I got and the settings the system requested were different than what the Google Help site showed. Initially when I was setting up the profile it only asked for my username and password and the domain (which it didn’t let me leave blank as the Google site recommended).

After I saved this info and tried to exit from the configuration screen that’s when it told me that I hadn’t filled out all the required information and asked me for the remaining information (like the exchange server name etc)

Once all that was done, I initiated a sync. Even though I had told it to sync calender entries and included events up to two weeks ago it didn’t sync all my events. So I told the system to sync all calender events and that’s when it downloaded all my entries from the Google calender to my local phone.

The only problem I see is that the events that my phone got from the Google calender don’t have any alarm set for them even though I have an alert set up on the calender for them. Though this could be because I only have the SMS and email alerts configured on all my events but not the pop-up alert. Maybe setting that alarm also will give me a phone alarm. But its not that big a deal.

Now I have to sit and clean up all the double entries I have ended up on my phone and calender for the same events… Basically on my phone I had the alert configured for a different time than the alert on the calender so I have to sit and clean that out. Will do it when I have some spare time when I am not doing anything…

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

- Suramya

While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.

For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome

Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.

The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.

The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.

Source: blogoscoped.com

- Suramya

I found an easy way to crash Windows 7 RC 2 when working on Gaurang’s computer. He has VMWare installed on his computer that is currently running Ubuntu so that he can learn Linux. We were playing around with it by trying to see if we could connect to it over the network using VNC.

First we ran the VNC server on the Linux instance and then connected to it from Windows using the VNC client and it worked great. Then we enabled Remote Desktop on Windows 7 and tried to connect to it from the virtual linux computer on the same system. Basically we were remote desktoping to the the same computer. As soon as I ran the command from the Linux system the entire windows OS crashed and I got the Blue Screen Of Death!

This is not good. There is no way that a remote desktop look like this one should crash the OS, at the worst it should have crashed that process (VMWare)…

Found it interesting that a small thing like this can crash the entire OS.

- Suramya

I use Amarok to play music and I really like it, however my Playlist was created in Winamp/XMMS which I initially thought that Amarok couldn’t read. So all the new music I got since I switched to Amarok was no longer being added to a playlist, I just added the new songs manually then used the select 50 random songs option to play music.

Yesterday I figured out that Amarok does indeed read .m3u files (Winamp Play lists) so I wanted to add all the new music I have to the top of the old playlist. So basically I needed a list of all music in my system sorted by date. If you have been using Linux and are reasonably familiar with it then I think the first thing that came to your mind must have been: “Why can’t we just use ls -lRrt”? That’s pretty much what I thought. But unfortunately this command doesn’t work very well for what I wanted to do.

After playing around for a while I finally managed to get the system to show me a list of all music files in my system sorted in reverse chronological order. The command I used for this is:

find -name "*.mp3" -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format '%Y %n'|sort -r

Now the explanation:

• find -name “*.mp3″ : returns a list of all mp3 files in the current directory and any subdirectory under it.
• -print0: This tells find to use the ASCII NUL character instead of space to separate the filenames. If we don’t use this then xargs chokes on the spaces in file names.
• xargs -0: This tells xargs to use the ASCII NUL character instead of space to separate the filenames.
• stat –format ‘%Y %n’: This runs the stat command on every file returned by find. This command returns the Time of last modification as seconds since Epoch followed by the name of the file.

  e.g.

  suramya@Wyrm:~$ stat --format '%Y %n' unison.log
1251802152 unison.log


• sort -r: sorts the list using the first column (the creation time) and displays the result.

——-

Example execution result in my Scripts directory:

suramya@Wyrm:~/bin$ ls -l
total 2648
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      77 2009-01-10 04:30 bookfixer.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      76 2009-01-10 04:30 cardDesigner.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     548 2009-01-10 04:30 change_wan.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     478 2009-01-10 04:30 compare_entire_dir.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya    3462 2009-01-10 04:30 delay.pl
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      66 2009-01-10 04:30 EditPlus
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      88 2009-01-10 04:30 export_xterm
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     203 2009-01-30 04:29 extract.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya   82558 2009-01-10 04:30 lit2html
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     320 2009-01-10 04:30 makedir.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      49 2009-01-10 04:30 mapsql
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     369 2009-01-15 02:11 MuteUnmute.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya 2350194 2009-01-10 04:30 pdftohtml
drwx------ 2 suramya suramya    4096 2009-01-10 04:30 Poet
drwx------ 2 suramya suramya    4096 2009-01-10 04:30 Remote
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     109 2009-02-08 19:47 resize.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya      48 2009-01-10 04:30 rootscan
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     397 2009-01-10 04:30 S41firewall
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     111 2009-02-21 20:15 sync_website.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     116 2009-01-10 04:30 text2img
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya     122 2009-01-10 04:30 uncompress.sh
-rwx------ 1 suramya suramya  180580 2009-01-10 04:30 vcdgear


suramya@Wyrm:~/bin$ find -name "*" -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format '%Y %n'|sort -r
1235227520 ./sync_website.sh
1235227520 .
1234102660 ./resize.sh
1233269990 ./extract.sh
1231965676 ./MuteUnmute.sh
1231542033 ./vcdgear
1231542033 ./uncompress.sh
1231542033 ./text2img
1231542033 ./S41firewall
1231542033 ./rootscan
1231542033 ./Remote/StarFlight
1231542033 ./Remote/Firestorm
1231542033 ./Remote/CyberNibble
1231542033 ./Remote
1231542033 ./Poet/poet.tar.gz
1231542033 ./Poet
1231542033 ./pdftohtml
1231542033 ./mapsql
1231542033 ./makedir.sh
1231542033 ./lit2html
1231542033 ./export_xterm
1231542033 ./EditPlus
1231542033 ./delay.pl
1231542033 ./compare_entire_dir.sh
1231542033 ./change_wan.sh
1231542033 ./cardDesigner.sh
1231542033 ./bookfixer.sh


As you can see, the ’sync_website.sh’ script is the latest script in that directory.

Hope you find it useful.

- Suramya

As most of you know, once anything is posted on the web its literally impossible to get rid of. Lets say you post a picture on your blog, it will get archived by any number of sites like the Way Back machine, Google Cache etc etc or anyone can copy it to their system and repost it. So even if you remove it from the blog someone with time and patience can find it again.

To counteract this University of Washington has developed a system called Vanish, which will (according to them) will allow users to create a self-destruct system for information posted online. According to the site:

The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,” on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

Ok, so according to them the data at the original source will get deleted. What I don’t get is how they are planning on getting rid of data copies that were made by caching services (Google etc) and archive sites (Wayback machine etc).

Lets say I have encrypted the data and a little later the archive spider runs and creates an image of the post. Now if I access the site image I will see the encrypted data which should expire correct? Nope. These spiders usually function like a normal webbrowser i.e. they will do a normal http call to get the information. So if the creator of the spider adds the code to decrypt the data using whatever logic Vanish uses (keep in mind that this info will be available so as to allow people to create plugin’s etc for regular browsers) they will have a snapshot of the clear text message/image/whatever as long as the spider runs before the message degrades to much.

In all its a pretty cool concept but I wouldn’t be using it for any really secure communications.

Source: A tool to make online personal data vanish
Vanish Details and Paper: http://vanish.cs.washington.edu

- Suramya

I want one… This is such a cool idea. One way to recharge would be to put the battery in the charger and stick it on the windshield of a car when you are driving somewhere so that by the time you reach your destination your batteries are all charged and ready to use.

Check it out: Febot Recharges Batteries

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