Post Avanoo

It is sad to see that my last post in my own personal blog talked about me switching from wordpress to avanoo.

And here I am, having to switch back to wordpress.

Well, I’m not giving up this easy. I am working on a post-avanoo project. It will be slow in the making, and it won’t be avanoo. That has a special place in my (and probably yours) heart.

Be seeing you!

Avanoo

As time passes me by, I find that my browsing habits have changed drastically. I had initially promised myself to blog at least once a month, as I was sure I would not be able to post, realistically, good stuff more frequently. Of course, I am not managing to even keep a monthly-post promise.

However, I don’t feel guilty. I have found a new haven on internet that finds me there more often than I really should. The point is, I find myself attracted to a website. Wait, what did I just say?

The way I see it is this. The problem with personal blogs is that, no matter how good the writing is, they will always revolve around the author. As much as the author thinks highly of her/himself, or as much as excellent and valid her/his posts are, one person’s viewpoints will never be that powerful. Unless you are a really destined for something great; in which case you wouldn’t need a blog in the first place.

 What if one could, instead, read a whole community’s viewpoints? That is Avanoo. And that is why I am attracted to Avanoo. It is more than blogging. It is a community that believes its viewpoints do matter. And maybe, with a community behind you, your individual viewpoint will matter too.

I spend more time reading, than contributing. Not because I am selfish. Many times I do not feel confident in my ideas, viewpoints, abilities etc. So I would rather post my thoughts here in this blog (which is practically ‘read’ only by search engine spiders) rather than clutter Avanoo with my mumblings.

 I never pronounced or wrote down the phrase “I like meeting new people”. I never felt that. This changed with Avanoo. I hope I can meet you there!

 Ossequi

You do miss Windows, sometimes?

So now you are a Linux convert, but find that certain tasks are still a bit difficult to do in linux? You really want to design some nice flash intro for a website, or you just cannot bother to install an alternative IDE to Visual Studio for writing your .nET framework applications.

No worries at all! rdesktop comes to the rescue :)

You are surely aware that you can connect to any Windows machine through RDP, short for Remote Desktop Protocol. This cute protocol can be called from our favorite Linux distribution. Oh yes baby! rdesktop is the solution. Be warned, it may not come installed by default with your distro. But extorted managed to install and connect to a Windows machine. Here are the details:

• Go to Sourceforge, search for rdesktop, and download to hard-disk
• The download will typically be a .tar.gz file (Linux’s version of .ZIP and .RAR)
• In a terminal window / shell, create a folder rdesktop under /usr/local
• Move your dowloaded .tar.gz into this folder
  • Make sure you are root, or other privileged user from this step onwards, otherwise Linux will not comply
• Untar (unzip) by running “tar -xf rdesktop1.x.x.tar.gz” (without quotes of course)
• Type “./configure” – Wait a bit
• Type “make” – Wait a bit
• Type “make install” – Wait a bit
• You are done!

Now you can RDP into any Windows machine that has RDP enabled. Just type “rdesktop 127.0.0.1:3389″ et voila!

The 127.0.0.1 needs to be replaced with your Windows machine IP address, the 3389 represents the default port at which RDP listens. This may have been changed, so if you get some nasty error, be sure that RDP on your Windows machine is listening there.

Enjoy!

Ossequi

Devildoll, Linux and The Prisoner

My friend Alfred introduced me to the weird, yet talented music of Devildoll, which happens to be a project by a mysterious individual who likes to call himself Mr.Doctor.

The main inspiration for his work is from old and spooky television series, too many too mention; you can always visit his (un?)official website here. One series which caught my attention was The Prisoner, a British production of the 60’s. One of his works is entitled “The Girl Who Was…Death”, which happens to be one of the episodes of the aforementioned TV series.

I had watched a couple of episodes in the past, and I had liked them extremely. I never got to watch the whole series and I forgot about it.

Where does Linux come in?

Well, one great website happens to be streaming the series. I tried to view through Mozilla Firefox but I was informed I was missing a plug-in. Searching for the plug-in failed (of course). I tried going the MPlayer way, but being an utter newbie, I did not manage to stream through it. I found a post on http://ubuntuforums.org/ which explained how to go on about viewing Stage6 DivX content on Ubuntu, through Mozilla.

The solution required the installation of multiple plug-ins and some configuration of these. It was way simpler for SUSE. I installed the excellent “Media Player Connectivity” Mozilla plug-in, and set all media to be opened by VLC. I tried streaming again, and WOW, it worked immediately. Nevermind the warning that says the video is broken, it’s not. So do not bother clicking on the “Yes” to repair, just click “No” and streaming will start.

Et voila! My first contribution to the Linux Community :) Hope this helps someone. Even one person would be enough.

Linux has also made its appearance in a new gadget in my room. I just got a GP2X hand-held console. It is brilliant, and I am not exaggerating here! More in the next post.

Ossequi

My new desktop OS

As reported in my last post, I had recently ordered a boxed SuSe Linux 10.2. Two days after my order, SuSe was in my room. On May 5th, I installed it. The installation was quite straight forward, and took something less than an hour. Lengthy, agreed, but I installed a multitude of apps (which I will probably never use).

I had been trying to configure ADSL on Linux a couple of times before I went to SuSe (Fedora, Kubuntu) and was unsuccessful. Kubuntu was the most disappointing, as its core download did not even have all necessary packages to configure DSL. SuSe was not very much more intuitive. Granted, there is a cute wizard to configure DSL, but that did not work for me. Thus I sought the advice and help of a Unix/Linux administrator who has been at it for the past 14 years (my brother). It took him two sessions to figure it out.

I am happy to be blogging for the first time through Linux. It is certainly a let down that connecting to Internet was not as straight forward as with Windows. Admittedly, I did not use Novell’s 90 day installation support, but I doubt that would have helped me solve my problem.

I hope to be able to upload some screenshots of SuSe, as well as a post on DSL configuration that may help those who get stuck at that particular step

Ossequi

Linux (Is there life beyond Microsoft?)

When it comes to information technology, I have pretty much always conformed to the major trends. So when it comes to operating systems, Microsoft has been my preferred choice for many years. My only encounters with UNIX and Linux were limited to scholastic projects and as server operating systems for Informix database environments.

Thanks (?) to the conservative ways of my previous employer, the Microsoft way became ‘the way’. After all, why should I struggle for the sake of being different? I wasn’t even allowed to be different! I started dreading change and information technology is the wrong place to be if one is not willing to embrace continuous change.

Things are about to change for me. I am imposing it on myself. Not to be different. Because I am up to a challenge. I am welcoming change again. My Linux adventure starts today. I may fail, of course. But at least I will have tried.

I have thus ordered a boxed version of Suse 10.2 (Release). Isn’t Linux supposed to be free, you might ask? Yes indeed it is. Purchasing it is the result of 3 things: a ‘broken’ cd after a 3.5gB download, a 90 day installation support promise from Novell and a psychological characteristic of the human brain that will not tolerate waste – have you ever eaten around moldy pizza leftovers? Anyone? Ok then, must be me!

My struggles and achievements with respect to Linux as a desktop operating system will be documented here. I will also try to blog on other open source software that I am increasingly making use of both at work and privately at home. Keep tuned and in touch, please!

Ossequi

Apologies to Sigismondo (The Battle Aftermath)

If
Sometimes
I shed a tear
Or
A bit of humanity
Transpires
My apologies
I deal with it

Everyday

Ossequi

Music Musings

Nature is so amazing especially because of its ability to produce original life forms, patterns and the like. Nature never runs out of “faces”. If this was also applicable to music, this art would not be in the sorry state it is at present. It looks like humans stopped churning out decent, if not unique tunes.

They are not to be thoroughly blamed though. The domain is so limited. How many more genres can we come up with? How many new instruments, software synthesizers and false excuses for artists can we possibly produce? With only 7 notes at his disposal, the human is looking for other ways to present and enhance music. This is necessary evil, but it should never take precedence over music. Is it too late to fix? Probably.

For every new and good artist, another ninety-nine mediocre and/or crappy ones are getting air-time. Because they have better producers, bigger boobs, rounder asses, never-ending funds, fouler language, tougher looks, fancier websites. Not better music! Sad. So sad.

Thankfully, technology has come to our aid, again. Were it not for fantastic services like those offered by Pandora.com, our main source for new material would be STV, also known as shitty TV. Video did indeed kill the radio star. Let us hope the web kills the blubber behind music television as we know it.

We should be choosing quality over quantity. We should hand-over ownership of the music industry back to the musician, to the home brewed, self-made and true artist. Otherwise, music as it once was will succumb to an indecorous death.

 Ossequi

P.S. This post is my first to be published in Avanoo. Here it appears in its unedited version.

My greatest fear

One self-awareness question I always try to avoid is:

“What do I fear most in my life right now?”

I know perfectly well what I fear most in my life. Not just now. I strongly feel that this fear is almost innate in me. I am so afraid that I have refused to think about, discuss or admit it. As if that will help.

It is the fear of death; not my own but that of relatives and friends. I live in perennial anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is not so strange a phenomenon. It can even be useful, as it can be used by the person experiencing it to better deal with the loss of a loved one. Perhaps by discussing it with the person about to die.

What is strange in my case is that anticipatory grief usually occurs when death is looming (terminal illness / serious accident), not when there are no signs of imminent death.

Now that I have written this, I know I have to do something about it. Before posting, I researched the “fear” topic and the first notions that struck me are some Buddhism teachings. The below excerpts are from Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:

“Thus, all fears
And all infinite sufferings
Arise from the mind.”

On the same lines,

“. . . it is not possible
To control all external events;
But, if I simply control my mind,
What need is there to control other things?”

I tend to agree that the mind is the culprit. Mastering one’s mind is no easy task. Man has been at it for immeasurable aeons. Look at us today! Do you see a distant light? All comments welcome

Ossequi

An interesting work day

In a month I have learnt more than in a year at my old work place. Information technology is dubbed as the most dynamic industry. Unfortunately this was not so apparent at my old work place. That may have contributed to my back-then wish for a radical change in my life; one that did not include I.T. in it.

I thank my stars that did not happen.

Installing a Dell Server

I am the software buff, not the hardware techie. Not any more :) I get to do some new cool stuff, like installing the actual server where my application will live. Today I must have worked on the most expensive computer I have laid my hands on yet (keep them coming please!). It was a rack mountable Dell PowerEdge 2950. The trickiest part was getting the frigging thing to recognize a keyboard.

• Problem 1: PS2, please?
  • I thought this to be quite a standard feature. Proof of the dynamism of computing, Dell have dropped PS2 and given us USB. Nothing a converter could not solve.
• Problem 2: What’s in a keyboard?
  • We use a 4 port KVM switch for our servers. I hooked the PowerEdge to the KVM. I got video, no keyboard, and just could not determine whether the mouse was available. The server came OS free – installation starts with a rudimental, DOS-like, click-any-key-after-reading-loads-of-standard-terms-and-conditions type of screen. The pity was I could not “click any key”. After 1.5 hours of combination scenarios (different KVM port, no KVM, alternate USB ports, PS2-to-USB converter tests, etc.) I changed the keyboard. I still do not know why a seemingly standard keyboard that worked perfectly with our servers failed to work with the Dell. Especially considering I used a dumped multimedia keyboard to get it to work. Bleh!

Surprise Meeting

I have been through my fair share of meetings at my old work place. They were usually scheduled weeks, if not months, beforehand by my manager or by myself. That left me time to prepare. This is no longer applicable. Thanks to a tip by a colleague, and Captivate 2 (a cool application by Adobe), I got a nifty and interactive presentation in 2.5 hours. Sweet!

 Ossequi