veracity

The gist:

• Test driven on Sunday October 4th.
• Driven home from the dealer’s on Saturday October 17th.

Bought a new silver Honda Civic 1.8 S MT!

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I voted for the first time a few months ago to elect an MP. On Tuesday October 13th voting was for MLAs and I voted again. The first time I cast my vote for an independent which I now feel was a waste. This time around I voted for Congress. Not because I wanted to vote for the party or for the local candidate. I voted for Rahul Gandhi, son of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

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I’d been using this multi-protocol chat program called Miranda which is for Windows and is open source. It has a nice plugin called “Webaware” which allows you to store your current chat status on your website so you can display it on your webpages.

Recently another piece of open source software which is also cross platform called GAIM was renamed to Pidgin and got a lot of publicity so I thought to try it out. It’s a fun/cute program and I decided to move to it especially since the same program works on Windows as well as Linux. The only problem was that there wasn’t (or I couldn’t find) a similar plugin as Miranda’s Webaware which was a bummer for me.

So I tried to write a Pidgin plugin myself which would do the same work as the Miranda Webaware plugin. I thought why not just make it open source, and thus came about my first bit of GPL code! I’d previously never really done programming at home, just at work, and as Larry Augustin (VA Linux Systems founder) said in the movie Revolution OS I felt that tremendous sense of empowerment working with open source

It feels good being able to easily download powerful software to which you have access to the source code. I started off by reading the C plugin HOWTO and using the helloworld.c plugin as a guide to write my own plugin called webaware.c. I later needed an easy way to do FTP uploads of my chat status data and someone suggested I use cURL library which I indeed found to be useful. The compilation was failing for me and I quickly realised I needed to provide double-quotes to the echo calls in the lib’s MinGW32 makefile and off it went.

I had earlier compiled the plugin on openSUSE Linux which came with all the tools already. This week I thought to try compiling on Windows to test that it worked on both platforms. This involved downloading software such as Cygwin, MinGW and a bunch of others which is really a pleasure to not be restricted by “free” versions or the prohibitive costs of commercial tools.

I get to do fun stuff at work but it’s been a blast actually working with open source at home. The plugin resides at http://lahsiv.net/code/ , and as they say, “it works for me” ™ !

Well, Happy Diwali!

On the slashfilm blog we have a list of the twenty most anticipated movies of next year.

They are:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2. The Dark Knight (Batman Begins 2)
3. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
4. American Gangster
5. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
6. Iron Man
7. I Am Legend
8. Get Smart
9. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
10. Charlie Wilson’s War
11. Hancock
12. Beowulf
13. His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass
14. Mamma Mia!
15. The Incredible Hulk
16. Speed Racer
17. Step Brothers
18. Bee Movie
19. Mr. Magnorium’s Wonder Emporium
20. Starship Dave

For me it’s Narnia 2 and Beowulf

There was an e-mail posted to a mailing list I’m subscribed to which asked for server co-location options in India. The poster mentioned a Reliance executive claimed that TRAI (India’s telecom regulatory authority) was controlling the minimum sale price of bandwidth!

I haven’t been able to locate any sources (TRAI website, PDFs etc.) to confirm whether or not this is true, but if it is then it’s a shame, and a shock to me, that TRAI is the cause of India’s currently poor broadband situation.

The poster mentioned the Reliance executive also stated that they would have done for the broadband market what they and other telecom companies have done for the mobile telephony market, which is vibrant competition and dirt cheap prices.

On the other hand, I have the impression (not from personal experience, but from others’) that you simply cannot rely on Reliance, so the executive’s claim may not be true.

Another person on the mailing list, in reply to my follow-up questions, suggested that even though TRAI may not be explicitly controlling minimum pricing, their narrow-minded licensing policies, which has entry fees and a percentage of revenues as license fees among other things, serve as a barrier for providers reducing bandwidth prices and spurring the growth and adoption of broadband in India to be on par with international levels.

A bunch of new GNU/Linux distributions’ releases are coming up and will coincide with my plans to buy a new desktop and a new tablet PC for home use.

OpenSuse 10.3 is coming October 4th, Ubuntu 7.10 (codename: Gutsy Gibbon) is coming October 18th and Fedora 8 is coming November 8th. I plan to install and play with each one and decide on which distro to settle. My current preference is Ubuntu even though I like KDE better than GNOME. I’m currently running Ubuntu “Gutsy” Beta on my home desktop and “Feisty Fawn” (Ubuntu 7.04) on my work desktop and am very impressed with things.

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I read this new blog post by Sysinternals’/Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich today about a file copy failure in Windows Vista. It’s not as “sensational” as, say, the File Open Dialog Delay or the Audio Networking Slowdown but it’s still interesting.

See http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/10/01/2087460.aspx

Plus, again, he’s not done with just posting a blog entry, he’s going to follow up with the Windows developers to get them to fix/improve things in Vista.  Much appreciated!

If you’re a regular blog reader then Mark’s Blog should definitely be on your blogroll

I’ve just got a couple of things to mention here:

MS is campaigning for it’s OOXML (Office Open XML) file format to become an ISO standard. I believe India recently voted (or plans to vote) against it. I too think it (the format not the vote) sucks, I hope OpenOffice’s ODF (OpenDocument Format) becomes popular and MS is eventually forced to support it and, who knows, maybe even drop OOXML . See http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/

I’ve been a fan of Windows since Windows 95 (can’t say the same for their other software) and I also think Windows Vista was released before it was ready. There are so many issues cropping up such as this network-slowdown-with-audio-playback problem. I’m just waiting for Service Pack 1 to be released which I hope will improve quality. I’m encouraged by things such as this awesome blog post by Mark Russinovich who’s the guy that brought us the SysInternals tools and is now working for MS. People like Mark keep me believing that not all MS employees are retards that just like to spread anti-Linux and anti-FOSS FUD.

I’d like to time my purchase of a new desktop and/or laptop/tablet PC with Vista being stable enough.

A number of posts on blogs and tech sites today;

Microsoft has mentioned that Linux and other FOSS infringes upon over 200 of their patents. CEO Steve Ballmer has broached the subject earlier as well.

Are they preparing to sue Linux/FOSS users for royalties/licensing fees to earn additional revenue?

I wonder what will be the response of various governments and OSS friendly companies should Microsoft go on the offensive.

I hope any evil plans Microsoft has end up like SCO’s
See Scobleizer and Engadget

PS: Microsoft’s “Live” branding, especially when spelled backwards, is “Evil” !

PPS: Here’s a post that says Microsoft is not going to sue…

News of the impending ban of hand-pulled rickshaws (on humanitarian grounds) in the city of Kolkata (Calcutta) in India appeared on local cable news channels. It’s a bill in the West Bengal state assembly.

Can you imagine? We’re in the twenty first century and we still have this around.

The online article is here.