VT’s Tech Blog

I’ve been tinkering around with Python on the N900 and this one one phone hackers will love. You can make the phone do almost anything you want if you know a little bit of scripting. I picked up a bit of python to try making a call blocker which was missing for the N900, and this is what I came up with. You can read how to do that with Python in the article I wrote on MyNokiaWorld – Block Unwanted calls on your N900. You can even configure the Notification lights on the Phone by editing a configuration file.

Now how about a script which detects if the phone is in your pocket and automatically turn on the vibrate mode? I found someone who wrote up a Python script which does this for the N900 here – http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44484

I’ve just begun exploring this phone in my free time, but it’s a great phone if you’re looking for a customizable phone and you do know Python or some Linux programming.

Here’s another article from our Guest Blogger Dr. Abhishek Puri on Opera. You can read his previous article here and here

Ever since I have shifted to Ubuntu, Open Office has remained static in it’s appearance; I am counting over 6 years of “free open source software use”. The ideological underpinnings not to use closed source software ever has not yet blinded me to the eye candy and the functionality of other systems. This is not a gripe session but Open Office is found wanting in it’s approach. It’s good thing to be standards compliant, it’s good to have cross platform availability but it sucks to have a jaded look because one doesn’t really have a choice. Indeed a paradoxical situation.

Downloading and installing to use K office is a pain because they have implemented the product in a manner which throws out user friendliness out of the window. I am not a KDE fanboy but clearly having few default “settings” that works also makes sense most of the times. It feels buggy and bloated and clearly not in the best of the “open source implementation”.

Contrast to this is perhaps the only product from Microsoft that works to some extent is their Office platform. It has been criticized ad nauseum because of the “additional options” it provides but it works and is a huge money spinner for the company. Another notable mention is Apple’s Keynote software that consistently gets scored high on usability, themes and transitions.

Why is that the developers from Open Office have not been able to innovate? In retrospect, it seems as if they are trying hard to emulate the previous versions of the closed source systems and bring out a functional product. Truth be told. Open Office is definitely a vast improvement over the previous versions. I use Impress heavily and I can testify clearly that ability to add tables and images has vastly improved over the previous versions. Animations and slide transitions are more or less static in their development but they deliver the goods specially when over the top eye candy is not required.

The difference in the approach is for other software. I had the opportunity to see Keynote in action recently and was totally wowed by the implementation. It is not even surprising that Google spews out thousands of results to turn the computer into a Mac lookalike. The usability is definitely a concern but Apple does provide a fresh perspective to it’s operating system and it’s various tightly integrated components. Ubuntu is inching closer but yet too far off for practical purposes.

This is not to say that anything free cannot compare to closed source alternatives. The debate usually centres on individual perspectives. It is all about choice. Yet, I do feel let down because my Ubuntu Box cannot match the best in the world for Office Applications.

It is no wonder that Ubuntu wanted to let go of Open Office for it’s netbook edition. It is bloated, eats up huge amounts of memory and would definitely be a pain for underpowered processors. They wanted to settle in for Google Docs with Gears implemented; it would have been a huge commercial spin off for them too. The idea is to implement Open Office as a lean mean application with eye candy and extensibility.

Interestingly, on their ideas implementation Wiki, Open Office does aim to “ape” Apple’s keynote. Unfortunately, there is no “out of the box” idea to justify this.

I am typing this out on Google Docs because it would let me email this presentation in couple of clicks. All the more practical approach. I can also collaborate with others to edit it and it works for me if I don’t demand anything extra from it. Very soon Google would be streaming advertisements too. It keeps a back up of all my past write ups although this is unhealthy reliance on cloud computing.

As I had mentioned, this is not a gripe session but an earnest need to improve upon open office beyond it’s jaded interface. This would bring in more “respectability” as well as more users, in my opinion. Ultimately it’s about increasing the user base and claiming 100 million users on the website is not going to help. Most of them, on any given day, would still want to use addictive eye candy.

This article is written by a friend of mine, Dr. Abhishek Puri. He’s a doctor who’s a technology freak on the side. He dabbles around with Open Source software and is a strong advocate for the Open Source community. Here is his experience with setting up Ubuntu 9.10 on his latest laptop.

My search had been on for a system that would work on Linux flawlessly. For the past few years, I have come to love the reliability and the stability of Ubuntu and with it’s more frequent updates which give me the “best” in the desktop appearance. With an anemic RAM in the previous version, I could ill afford to run multiple applications, turn on anti aliasing of Open Office or even risk the opening up of multiple tabs while running Opera. At risk of a system freeze, it was still a workable and a usable laptop. The present day era is of 64 bit processors and it’s hard to justify their routine use for a casual user. Nevertheless, it has never been the user’s prerogative to choose.

A search in most of the electronic showrooms was quite disappointing. Most of the laptops on display were infested and infected by bloated crapware called as Windows. With jacked up prices for fancy video cards, it drove me away as I had a limited budget. I went running to my old trusty vendor who showed me a nearly perfect laptop for my needs with preloaded DoS. More than that, it had a great combination of a motherboard, an Intel chipset and integrated Wifi.

The Live USB version of Ubuntu worked great and after a quick lspci command in the terminal, I put down my hard earned money for a Compaq system.

The first thing was to format the hard drive, load up Ubuntu, apply the updates and viola a nearly perfect system was ready to use. After the mandatory load in of plug ins to ensure playback of restricted formats, it was all set up.

The only major issue surprisingly was with Opera 10.10. It used to crash the X randomly with the screen freezing up and an unresponsive keyboard. In any case, there was no solution from the forums except that I could try out Qt4 version. I decided to chuck it in favor of waiting for Opera 10.5 which promises to be a fab release due out for Unix in couple of months. I was indeed sore that the Windows version would be released first as they have huge amount of resources dedicated. This is because, Microsoft has been forced to give an option to consumers regarding the choice of browsers and Opera had been behind this landmark anti trust case. It only goes on to prove that Unix platform does offer a choice; but Opera has “cold shouldered” the Unix community as a whole since any reported bugs get scaled down on a lower priority till the new version comes out in the beta or the final release.

There is a plethora of browsers to choose from in Unix; yet I settled down on very remarkable and wonderful Google Chrome. It’s one of the most exciting software to have been released in recent times and although it doesn’t have the functionality as Opera in it’s default form, there are numerous extensions available for the same. Frankly, I have never been too happy about the extensions per se because I feel that the browser ought to have the key features built in. In any case, it all boils down to a personal choice though. For my mail and RSS feeds, I found that Evolution is a good alternative to Opera’s both inbuilt mail as well as RSS reader although the format has not really changed in the past few years. Yet, it works the works and I do miss Opera.

The icing on the cake is perhaps oodles of RAM being able to support Compiz Fusion and it’s brilliant and awesome effects. It’s sheer eye candy customisable to the nth detail and a great execution of details. Full kudos to the developers who have developed various plug ins; my favorite is the “burn” effect which burns down the window when you close it. You Tube is full of videos on this and it is indeed a school boy’s fantasy come true to own such a thing. Day in day out, I am fascinated by various effects and Mac Os looks pale in comparison in many respects.

It would not be feasible to run a full scale comparison with other platforms; this write up only details my purchase, the customization, the software and of course, the choices made. Your own experience may vary or some of the readers would want to defend the “latest” Windows 7. Yet, my arguments stay in place that “free” open source software can outperform the “closed” systems by a mile.
Ubuntu 9.10 is a great option; admittedly, there are tons of other distros that would have their adherents too. But then Open Source is all about the choice.

I just came across a great tool for transcoding videos in Ubuntu. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. They’ve also got Ubuntu installers which make it easy to install this available in a GUI and a commandline version. Using handbrake you can convert your DVDs or most other video formats to the following outputs:

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
• Audio: AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

To install Handbrake you can either download the deb installer for Ubuntu from their download page. You can also add this to your apt sources so you get updates to the program automatically. To do this, type in the following into the terminal (works in Karmic)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:handbrake-ubuntu/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

For more information on Handbrake, head over to their site handbrake.fr.

via WebDevOnLinux

If you’re using Linux as your primary OS, here’s a useful too to check for broken links on your websites. gURLChecker is a simple tool to check for broken links on any website. It can work on a whole site, a single local page or a browser bookmarks file.
If you’re using Ubuntu, it’s quite easy to install this tool, just head over to your Terminal and run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gurlchecker

Once the application is installed, you should be able to access it from Menu>Internet>gurlchecker

If you’re on another version of Linux, you can build from sources. Here’s how you can build gurlchecker for other version of linux by downloading the source from their svn:

svn co svn://labs.libre-entreprise.org/svnroot/gurlchecker/branches/stable
cd stable/
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
su -c "make install"
/usr/bin/gurlchecker

You can learn more about this software over at the project page at: gurlchecker.labs.libre-entreprise.org/

Last week I was searching the net for a program or application to  move some of our .htaccess directives into Apache’s configuration files. The reason I was looking for this is to improve the performance of the site. When we have directives in the .htaccess file, the performance hit on Apache on when it serves each URL is accessed.

If you have a .htaccess file in your web folders, Apache will have to parse the directives in this file and see if there are any .htaccess files in the parent folder. All this happens before your html or php file is hit by Apache. You can read more about the overheads of .htaccess in  this article. This article .htaccess vs httpd.conf by Dawid Golunski shows that he saw apache served about 6.6% less requests/second when .htaccess was used.

A quick Google search landed me on Paul Reinheimer’s blog where he’s created a php script just for this purpose. His htaccess to httpd.conf script parses all the htaccess files from the current folder and all sub-folders and creates a configuration file with the directives for you to place in your Apache’s configuration file.

Just download his script from this link, and place it in your web-root directory which you want to generate the Apache configuration file and run the following command from the command prompt:

php htaccess.php >~/site.conf

After you run that command, you should have a file site.conf in your home folder. You can open this file to get all the directives for you to place in the Apache configuration file. Once you’ve placed this in the apache configuration file, you’ll need to restart Apache for the changes to take effect. Before you restart, make sure you remove your .htaccess file from your web folders.

When I converted a Wordpress’ .htaccess file using this script, here’s the output I got

<directory var="" www="" blog="">
	<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">
	RewriteEngine On
	RewriteBase /
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
	</ifmodule>
</directory>

I just put this into the apache2.conf and restarted it, removed the .htaccess from the webroot in /var/www/blog and all the rules worked as they should. As with any script, if you have more complex directives in your .htaccess, test your sites thoroughly before pushing your changes into the production server.

The only (minor) disadvantage I found with this method is that the apache server has to be restarted to make changes to your rule-sets you put in the configuration files. It seems apache just has to be reloaded and doesn’t have to be completely restarted to get the changes to the configuration to take effect (thanks Keleo for the tip). Also this conversion will not be possible if your site is running on a shared webhost where you don’t have access to the apache configuration files.

Links:
Paul Reinheimer’s Article .htaccess to httpd.conf
Paul’s htaccess.php Script
htaccess vs httpdconf – Benchmarks

Here is a plugin for Gimp which gives you a “Save for Web” option in GIMP. This plugin gives you the option of preparing your images for the web by optimizing it, adding additional compression, stripping EXIF information from the images to reduce it’s size. You can preview the resultant image before you save your final image.

You can get the deb files for this plugin over at GetDeb.net:
http://www.getdeb.net/app/GIMP+%22Save+for+Web%22+plugin

Just download the deb file for your version of Ubuntu and double click the deb file once downloaded to start the Package Installer.

Here’s a software you’d need to clear the unwanted files hiding around your Ubuntu Installation. BleachBit clears up files from your trash, tmp folders, application specific temporary files from Firefox, Java, Open Office  and more. When I ran this on the system the first time, Bleachbit ended up clearing around  188MB of space, pretty good.

This application’s UI is simplistic, allowing you to preview the files which are going to be deleted before actually deleting them. One crib I have is inability to  select individual files to delete or not to delete. You can only remove an application from the delete option.

Download the current version of  BleachBit for your Ubuntu Version and double-click on the downloaded deb file to install. If you want the command line instructions, here they are for Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid ibex):

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bleachbit/bleachbit_0.3.0-1_all_ubuntu810.deb
sudo dpkg -i bleachbit_0.3.0-1_all_ubuntu810.deb

Once you install it, you can access BleachBit from the Applications>Accessories menu.

Link: BleachBit Project page

If you’re starting off or planning to start off on using Ubuntu, here’s something you should refer to. Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is one book you should check out.

The book is an easy to follow guide which starts you off with how to get and install  Ubuntu on your PC and then goes on to guide you through the basics of the GUI and command line usage. After that you get to learn about how to manage software on your Ubuntu install and securing your system using firewalls and anti-virus. The best part of this book is that you don’t have to be a linux expert to understand it – everything is laid out in simple language.

Here’s the Table of Contents of this book:

1. Installing Ubuntu
2. Configuring Ubuntu
3. Getting to grips with the desktop
4. Users and the filesystem
5. Hands-on at the command-line
6. Software management
7. Securing the system

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is now available! Written by award-winning author Keir Thomas, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a totally unique and concise guide for everyday Ubuntu use.

• Focuses on core competencies and background knowledge needed to be an expert Ubuntu user;
• Readable, accessible, and easy to understand—even if you’ve never used Linux before;
• 100% new and original! Written from the ground-up to cover Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10.

If you need another excuse to read this book, you can get a free download of the PDF version from the book’s site. If you prefer the print version you can get it for just under $10 from Amazon – Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference: A concise companion for day-to-day Ubuntu use

There no more reason for you not to try out Ubuntu now !!

Link: Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference Sites

There is a small utility in Ubuntu called Gnome Blog which allows you to blog directly from your desktop. If you are running firefox on Ubuntu, click on this link to install the package or enter the following command in your terminal

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

Once installed, right click on an empty area on your panel and add “Blog Entry Poster”. Once you’ve added this click on it to start the app. First time you run, you’ll be prompted to enter details about your blog.

First select your blog type – Blogger, Wordress, LiveJournal and MovableType are all supported here and a few more. For Wordpress blogs, enter your blog’s URL and username and password and you’re all set to go.

Once you’ve set it up properly, you can start your blog post by just clicking on the Blog button on your panel.