News, tutorials, tips and tricks about Free Software

Atlast I got wireless working in my Acer Aspire 5050’s Atheros 5006 under the newly released Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron with the madwifi drivers. (BTW the upgrade to 8.04 from 7.10 screwed up my X server and I reinstalled from scratch). Previously I was using the ndiswrapper drivers and they would only work the first 5 minutes. Anyway here is a tutorial on how to get WiFi working if you have one of the Atheros cards.

1. First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
2. You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
3. Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
4. Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules

   ath_pci
   wlan_scan_sta

5. Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
6. Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.

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Whenever you type in a website, the domain name is converted to the IP address and sends the request to the machine. You can have a DNS cache which will speed up the domain name resolving time. I get a boost up of almost 250ms.

You just have to install a package called dnsmasq.

First install it by running (you need to enable the Universe repository)

$sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Then, open this file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and uncomment(remove the #) the line listen-address=127.0.0.1

After that edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and search for a line prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; and uncomment it. What this does is, whenever you get a new dhcp lease, the dhcp3 client tool on your computer gets the new lease and updates the /etc/resolv.conf file with the right values for the DNS server.

Using the prepend option, we make sure that 127.0.0.1 appears before the other DNS servers. So, if the details of a domain are already in the cache, it retrieves it fast - else it looks for the other DNS servers.

Now open /etc/resolv.conf and you can see that it doesn’t have 127.0.0.1 now.

search yourisp.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 192.168.1.1

The last line may be different for you. I have a router which is configured to use OpenDNS, so my entry points to it.

To check whether the cache really works, execute the following command.

$dig google.com

You will get something like ;; Query time: 252 msec

Executing the command again will get you ;; Query time: 1 msec.

Congrats, you have saved about 250msec by caching the DNS.

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Now I can post to my twitter account from emacs (my favorite editor). Just install twit.el and you are ready to post to twitter, check recent tweets, etc. Download the twit.el file to some directory in your home dir (I have it in my .emacs.d directory) and then add the following line to your .emacs file present in your home directory.

(load-file "/path/to/twit.el")

After doing it and restart your emacs, just press M-x and twit-post and type in whatever you want to and press enter. It will then ask your twitter id and password - which gets saved for the entire emacs session. It is a very basic authentication and is not secure.

By the way, FSLog too has a twitter feed. You can follow this feed to get updates when I post here. Thanks to Srid for this tip.

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For people who have been using Turbogears, Catwalk is an excellent tool to manage the database models and for populating the data into the database. But the footer which displays “Turbogears under the hood” is irritating as I couldn’t select items in which lie directly below the div. So I thought of writing down a quick userstyle where the display property of that div is set to none.

Find the Turbogears Catwalk - Remove footer userscript here. You may need to install the Stylish firefox extension for it to work.

Popularity: 63%

NRCFOSS has released a online tamil language learning tutorial called Arichuvadi. It is nicely thought out which has the english version of a sentence with its equivalent in written tamil and spoken tamil. All the voices are in ogg format. They now have partial alphabets in 3 languages. People can also come forward and add lessons.

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Blogrush is a new traffic exchange program which promises to bring in targetted reader to your blogs. All you have to do is register for the program and you get a widget that can be pasted on your blog. Everytime a visitor visits your blog a credit is added to your account - which means that your blog will be showed on other blogs. The interesting thing about this is there is a great affiliate program which goes down to 10 tiers deep. Early adopters of this program are sure of benefiting from the exponential growth.

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On day 2 of BarCamp Bangalore, it was a bit too boring and I attended only a few sessions which were interesting.

The first session was Rules to break in a startup by Mr.Ashwin which was quite interesting. I also met Sagaro during that session. Then we headed off to a session by Preethan about Branding on the internet. Then I sat down in the bloggers’ collective again where someone was supposed to speak about corporate blogging - which he greatly misunderstood and talked about how bloggers blogged about corporates. Then someone else made a impromptu session on corporate blogging.

After lunch and TShirts, two people were talking about bringing metro bloggers into print media. They were thinking of a startup where bloggers can get their content published on a paper which is distributed across a city.

When the afternoon sessions started, I sat down for a interesting session about Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which was cool. Then in the startups collective, there was a hot discussion started off by Vaidhy which was about the lack of good developers in India and why starting a startup in India is difficult.

We started by 5 and didn’t wait till the end. However I have uploaded the pics to my flickr.

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After Infogami and Reddit, Aaron Swartz has a new startup called Jottit along with Simon Carstensen under bitbots.net. It is similar to Infogami and is a plain vanilla wiki. You can easily create a page for yourself by visiting the site and typing out some content. You will be given a random page which you can claim later and also change to a sub-domain. It is written using web.py - and excellent python web framework. I wonder what will be business model for this and whether it will be able to stand up against spammers who brought down Infogami.

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I typed out this post long time back and was lazy in posting it. So here is the post about BarCamp 4 day 1. I will post about day 2 tomorrow.

This is an account of my first BarCamp at Bangalore IIM. I thought of
live blogging the event, but I couldn’t get WiFi get working on my
Acer. If anyone has made wifi working with an Acer Aspire 5050, please
do leave a comment. Anyway, this can be thought of as a pseudo-live blog of the event.

Continue reading →

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This is my first non-FOSS post and I hope that atleast now I could post more often than once in a month or so.

It has been more than a month since I got my Nokia 6300 and today thought of trying out some iPhone theme. I got this pretty neat one which works perfectly. It must work with all Series 40 phones.

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