Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

December 24, 2009

The Data Liberation Front from Google

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:06 PM

The Data Liberation Front is a website started by Google a while ago but I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about it yet. In fact I only found out about it today while searching for something else on another blog.

According to the site their mission statement is:

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

This is an awesome move by Google and one which I would love to have other sites (like Facebook) follow. Right now any data uploaded to Facebook is stuck there and as far as I know not that easy to export to local computers or to other sites. But on Orkut you can export your entire data set (except photos, which is in the works) to your local computer.

This site explains how you can export data from Orkut, Blogspot, Google Calendar, Contacts, Google Docs, Gmail etc etc. Check out the site for a more detailed list.

I always prefer having my data backed up on a local system even when its uploaded to the cloud. That way I have access and control of it even if the cloud goes down or I loose net access.

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

– Suramya

December 23, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Clean install and clean removal

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:39 PM

As I have posted earlier I have been using Ubuntu for the past few months and was reasonably satisfied with 9.04. When 9.10 came out in Oct I upgraded to it using the built in upgrade and since then I have been having issues with the install. (Most of them caused by the upgrade process according to forums)

The first issue I got hit with (which I never really solved) was that my desktop no longer allowed me to put icons on it. Basically the Desktop work area (or whatever they are calling it in KDE4) disappeared. It wasn’t that big a deal because I hardly use the desktop icons anyway (I use the ‘quick bar’ to start most programs) but still irritating.

The main issue I found really irritating was that the fonts on Gnome applications (X-Chat, Thunderbird, Synaptic) were not controlled by the KDE control panel, plus every time I rebooted the fonts would reset to the default settings (size 6 for the gnome apps) and I would have to run the gnome-control-panel and then click on the Appearance link and then close the application (without making any changes) to set the fonts to a normal size.

Then I guess I made some changes to the system before my last reboot. The reboot was after 5 days and I had been fiddling with the settings, so I don’t know exactly what I changed but the end result was the the entire display would dance around everytime I moved my mouse (or tried typing). Now since I had been meaning to do a clean install of 9.10 since I had upgraded I took this chance to backup my system and do a clean install instead of troubleshooting.

However the problem with the fonts is still there. Another irritating thing is the way all the tools/programs (like vim, gcc, ssh server) that I have come to expect to be pre-installed on a system are not installed. So instead of installing all these packages again, then fighting with the fonts issue and then removing all the eye candy and special effects I am going to remove Ubuntu from my system and go back to a plain Debian install. I will be installing the Testing or Unstable version but it will be a plain install.

I am not saying that Ubuntu is a bad system. Its just not the right system for me because I happen to find a lot of eye candy to be very distracting when I am working. I don’t want the entire window to show when I am tabbing through them, just the name and the icon are fine. Plus the wiggly window border is really annoying for me.

You might have a different criteria than me and might like it better. Although, for a new user Ubuntu is certainly the easiest to setup.

– Suramya

December 22, 2009

Finally sync’d my Phone to my Google Calender

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:54 PM

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

December 21, 2009

Watched Avatar yesterday night

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:20 PM

Watched Avatar yesterday night in 3d. Went for the 10:45 pm show and it was worth the wait to watch the movie in 3D. The effects were really good and the fact that the movie was in 3D made it even better.

In the future when going for 3D movies I think I will try to sit closer to the screen, that way I believe that the immersion into the movie will be more complete. This time I was about 1/2 way up from the screen and I could still see the theater which kind of spoilt the illusion. If I am closer to the screen then it would take up more of the viewing space thus make everything more real.

They should release more movies in 3D in India. This was the 1st 3D movie that I have seen in India, and it was a good experience. For a change even the Nacho’s were good (For some reason the Nacho’s at the Big Cinema’s in TGIP have been pretty bad the last few times I have been there)

If you have the time, watch this movie in the theater. Its worth it, just to see the effects.

– Suramya

December 20, 2009

Audio Visual Exhibition

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:59 PM

Went to an Audio Visual Exhibition with Tarini yesterday. Atleast that’s how it was explained to me. I was an interesting experience, ’cause I am no artist and this exhibition was all about art. To an untrained eye (me) it looked like a guy playing a guitar with a screensaver running on the projector. The music was decent and some of the abstracts were great.

The part I really liked was the show before the one we had gone to see, where they were showing short movies about various topics. There was this movie about the road access issue in Palestine. Basically they showed this woman who gets hit by a car and the guy is trying to get her to the hospital but is unable to do so because he is not allowed to go through any of the roadblocks set up by the military. Quite an interesting movie.

The one before that one I didn’t really get, but it showed this pair of drinking glasses being kicked around a subway station. I guess it was supposed to have a deep meaning but it kind of went over my head. What can I say… I am no art person.

Overall the show was interesting and I enjoyed it. Might do it again some time.

– Suramya

December 18, 2009

Google adds Text to Speech capability to its translation service

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:01 AM

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

December 17, 2009

I am now an Official RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer)

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,My Life — Suramya @ 2:40 AM

I gave my RHCE exam yesterday morning and today I got the email confirming that I have cleared the exam and am now a Red Hat Certified Engineer. Go me 🙂

Now I can put this image next to my name and everything: red_hat_cert_eng_logo-clr

Next I am thinking about going for the Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS) exam sometime early next month. Still have to plan it out though, ’cause I want to go scuba diving also. Lets see.

– Suramya

December 11, 2009

Google Calendar Notifications/Issues

Filed under: Computer Software,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:12 AM

Google recently made a change to its Calender service that I had been waiting for a long time. Actually they might have launched it a while ago but I only noticed it recently.

You now have the ability to send the reminder for an event to a mobile phone as a SMS. The best part is that it even works with my cell phone in India. So now I get reminders even when I don’t have access to my email (which I admit is pretty rare).

The only issue I have found so far is that the reminder via SMS is set about a day before the event no matter what setting I put in the interface. I have set the system so that I get a reminder 15 mins before any appointment set in my calender but I keep getting the reminder a day before, i.e. if the event is on the 8th I get the reminder on my cell phone on the 7th. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

The other issue I hit on the calender is that it seems to be impossible to change the date for an existing event. I wanted to change the date and time for a reminder but it refused to let me change the date. It did change the time to the new time but kept the event on the old date. I finally had to delete the old event and create a new event.

Now if I can get it to sync with my Phone it would be great. I got the phone to sync with my system but still need to get Google to sync to evolution. (The connection keeps timing out for some reason).

Other than these minor issues I really like the Google Calender.

– Suramya

December 3, 2009

Cool Birthday Cake

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 12:01 AM


Source: eatliver.com

December 1, 2009

A Christmas tree

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:39 PM

If I am ever going to have a Christmas Tree at home its going to be this one:

Source: Mountain Dew Christmas tree

Update: (11th Dec 2009): Courtney mentioned in the comments that the tree was Originally created by people at the following site: mdewtree.com. Thanks for the heads up. The tree really is pretty impressive.

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