Open View

A stage for inner voices, opinions, ideas and experiences

Intrepid Ibex is Here!!

Posted by Harish at Thursday, October 30, 2008
0 Comments

I can't wait till the time is 12:00 to start the download of Ubuntu 8.10. Yes! That's right, the next version of Ubuntu is here! (finally! ;-)). After the four alpha releases we can now try our hands on the final release on 30th October 2008. This is how Ubuntu's is version numbered 8.10 means 10th month of year 2008. The looks are pretty cool with dark themes and most of the work has gone towards the internals of the OS. It seems that the booting time of the OS is like magic! Today after updating my machine with Intrepid Ibex, I will post a detailed first look of the OS. Till then, c ya!

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Syncronizing your mobile with Ubuntu

Posted by Harish at Monday, September 1, 2008
1 Comments

Every time I ask my friends to change to an open sourced operating system like Ubuntu, one of the first reasons I get is Ubuntu doesn 't support PC Suite. How can I syncronize my mobile with this? Today I have an answer to all these questions. There is a software called Wammu which is the front-end for gammu engine. Gammu is an amazing package to connect your mobile by various methods like bluetooth, IR and data cable. It can syncronize your contacts, messages, calender and todo list and also lets you to edit, create new and delete entries. Gammu is very powerful but the problem with it is that it can be used only via the terminal. Here Wammu comes into play. Wammu is a front-end for Gammu written in python. Using this, you can transfer files also. It is very much similar to Nokia PC Suite but can support plenty of mobile phones. Being open sourced, it is available for all platforms. To visit the wammu site click here. Do comment about your experiences with Wammu.

Harish.R.

http://openview-harish.blogspot.com

Don't design your character as a garden where everyone can walk
Design it as the sky where everyone will aspire to reach

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Boot screens for Ubuntu

Posted by Harish at Sunday, August 24, 2008
1 Comments

Every time you boot your machine, the logo of Ubuntu comes up with a loading bar. This is called the boot screen. This can be changed and also recreated (if you are ready to spend some time with it). 
1. To change the boot screen, you need a software called 'StartUp-Manager'. You can get it using Synaptic. 
2. Use GOOGLE and search for usplash themes. I would suggest you to visit http://www.gnome-art.org where you can get some really cool usplash themes. Once you have downloaded some themes. 
3. Extract them to a folder and you can see the files with extension .so
4. Copy all the files to /usr/lib/usplash.
5. Open up System -> Administration -> StartUp-Manager and select the Appearance tab.
6. Here you can choose your favourite splash screen using the drop down menu.

Enjoy!!!

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Installing GOOGLE Apps and SKYPE

Posted by Harish at Saturday, August 23, 2008
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The common myth that GOOGLE Apps and Skype aren't available for Linux is now broken! That's right. You can install GOOGLE Apps and Skype right from your package manager after you add these two repositories. For addding a repository, goto System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager -> Preferences -> Repositories and follow the instructions in the links given below

For the GOOGLE Apps use this link

http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/ubuntu704.html

For Skype, use this

http://www.medibuntu.org

Medibuntu means Multimedia, Entertainment and Distractions in Ubuntu. It's repositories has softwares which are not included in Ubuntu repos for many issues like copyright, security etc. Also these aren't supported by Ubuntu community. So any bug found cannot be reported to them. However, I would recommend you to give it a shot :-)

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Desktop Managers. Window Managers. What are these?

Posted by Harish at Friday, August 22, 2008
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Desktop Manager
These are responsible for presenting your Desktop to you. In simple terms, it does the function of explorer.exe in Windows. There are many types of desktop managers. Some popular ones are GNOME, KDE, CDE and XFCE. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Window Manager
The window manager is responsible for the looks of your Desktop. It is like the theme manager in Windows. Every window manager has its own unique feature. Some like compiz and beryl are definite eye candies. They have several inbuilt features like animations etc.

Ubuntu uses GNOME Desktop Manager with Compiz Window Manager. However, these can be changed to our need.

To know more about any desktop manager or window manager do a simple GOOGLE search. I will post a list of the popular desktop and window managers along with the link in my next blogs. Till then, c ya!!!

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Download Manager for Ubuntu!!!

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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I was often wondering whether we have download managers in Ubuntu like those in Windows. A download manger should be capable of resuming broken downloads, have retry facility, and try mirror downloads. Windows has many of these download managers. So I searched for similar ones in Ubuntu and found that a download manager is pre-installed in Ubuntu! It is wget. So I searched for a GUI version of it and got gwget. Now I need to integrate it with my firefox. What best addon I will I use other than FlashGot :-). So now I have installed gwget and flash got an my download managers are working like a charm. Here is how you can configure these in your UBox.

1. Get FlashGot form here
2. Open up terminal and type sudo apt-get install gwget
3. Once everything is installed open Firefox and try downloading something
4. Your download window should provide an option for downloading with gwget using Flashgot
5. In Gwget, many columns wont be displayed first, to activate them goto Preferences -> Columns and add whatever you want
6. Enjoy downloading! :-) 


Harish.R.

http://openview-harish.blogspot.com

Don't design your character as a garden where everyone can walk
Design it as the sky where everyone will aspire to reach

 

An Interesting Thing To Note in Package Installation

Posted by Harish at Monday, August 18, 2008
0 Comments

Have you ever wondered what happens when you install a software in Ubuntu using Synaptic? You see some extra files also getting downloaded along with the software you want to install. What is the mystery behind these? Even after downloading so many packages why hasn't my harddisk space reduced much? Well, here is the answer to all of these questions!
When ever you install some software like VLC Media Player using Synaptic, here is what happens
1. The object file of VLC Player which is the raw compilation of the source code is downloaded. 
2. In order to get the object code functioning, it needs to be linked with the essential libraries. So they are also downloaded. These are the extra files you see.
3. Now during the installation, the required libraries are searched for in the computer. This is called 'dependency checking'. Once all the essential libraries are found the object file is linked with the essential libraries and the package is installed in your computer.
Now you download some other software which uses the same libraries as VLC Player. Guess what will happen? Only the object file will be downloaded and installed using the libraries available already. So there is literally no file will be present more than once. This increases the storage efficiency and the efficiency of the OS. Ubuntu Rocks!!!

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Installing Fonts in Ubuntu 8.04

Posted by Harish at Saturday, August 16, 2008
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Linux operating systems are popularly known for the poor font collections and also for the lack of facilities for installing fonts directly. You may have a collection of over 2000 fonts but without knowing how to install them is pathetic. Here are a couple of methods for installing fonts.
Method 1: 
1. Log in to your account and press Ctrl+L.
2. Now type gksudo nautilus.
3. Enter the administrator password.
4. In the address bar type fonts:// and press enter
5. Add whatever fonts you have to this and your new fonts are installed!
Method 2:
1. Log in to your account and open the home folder.
2. Now create a folder called 'fonts' (without the quotes).
3. Copy all your font files to this folder.
4. Open up terminal and type mv fonts .fonts and press enter.
5. Restart the applications you are using and viola!!! Your fonts are installed!!!
That's it for now folks!!! Ba bye!!!

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Installing Fonts in Ubuntu 8.04

Posted by Harish at
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Linux operating systems are popularly known for the poor font collections and also for the lack of facilities for installing fonts directly. You may have a collection of over 2000 fonts but without knowing how to install them is pathetic. Here are a couple of methods for installing fonts.
Method 1: 
1. Log in to your account and press Ctrl+L.
2. Now type gksudo nautilus.
3. Enter the administrator password.
4. In the address bar type fonts:// and press enter
5. Add whatever fonts you have to this and your new fonts are installed!
Method 2:
1. Log in to your account and open the home folder.
2. Now create a folder called 'fonts' (without the quotes).
3. Copy all your font files to this folder.
4. Open up terminal and type mv fonts .fonts and press enter.
5. Restart the applications you are using and viola!!! Your fonts are installed!!!
That's it for now folks!!! Ba bye!!!

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Happy Independence Day!!!

Posted by Harish at Friday, August 15, 2008
0 Comments

Happy Independence Day!!! This is what a nation of over 100 million people
shout today. 61 years ago, many brave Indians sacrificed their lives for us
their future generation to breathe in an independent country. Today is the
day we stand proud among all the other nations as the world's largest
independent democratic country, the country whose work force fuels every
country in the world, the country which is developing in every field and
also the country where bomb blasts still prevails, the country where the
power hungry leaders prevail,  the country where untouchability and caste
discrimination still exist, the country where uneducated people form a great
percentage of the population, the country which is struggling to win even a
single gold in the Olympics and the country which is rated in the top ten
for corruption. Today my friends I request you all to promise yourself. To
our country. To contribute to its development by spreading the knowledge we
have to fellow Indians and make them educated, to prevent corruption at any
cost and to make our country a clean and a better place to live. Let us
contribute to our motherland first. We the students, the future of our
nation have the power to change the present course of our country and show
how big a super power can be when we, the 100 million people become one.
Only then we can proudly say "Happy Independence Day!" Jai Hind!!!

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Changing the Logon Screen

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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As I said, I will posting some cool customizations for Ubunutu. So lets start with something very simple and primitive as changing the logon screen. Open up System -> Administration -> Logon Window. It will ask for the admin password. After it loads up you can see some good logon screens which you can choose from. The best part is you can choose multiple boot screens and Ubuntu will choose one randomly everytime from your list. For getting more logons do a simple GOOGLE search or try www.gnome-look.org and download GDM Themes. Put all the logons you downloaded in some folder and do not extract them. Open up Logon Window (System -> Administration -> Logon Window), select the Local tab and press Add. Now select the files you downloaded one by one and enjoy an array of cool logons. :-) Here is a screen shot of how it looks

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My First Day with Ubuntu

Posted by Harish at Saturday, August 9, 2008
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This is my first day with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron in my laptop. For the entire day, I did not use Vista. Anyways, the day started very early for me at 6 AM!!! I got up from my bed with bubbling with enthusiasm to try out the new OS. So I just roamed around the OS. The first thing I tried was to change the wallpaper. I got only four wallpapers along with the OS out of which 3 are amazing and the other is a plain colour. Then I tried to use wifi. Because of poor connectivity, wifi was very slow. But anyways, I tried to install some packages in the evening using the package manager and things worked out fine. Here some of my points which can be improved in the OS
1. More wallpapers need to be given.
2. Try bundling Combiz and Wine with the usual setup
3. Firefox 3 (Onyl Firefox 3 Beta 5) is available with the installation
4. VLC Media Player and some codecs for mp3 by default.
5. Open Office suite
6. Audio is very low in my Inspiron 1525. This definitely needs to be improved.
I will post more blogs on customizing the OS by installing various cool softwares and making some small tweaks in the following days. Till then, c ya!!!

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Finally I Installed Ubuntu

Posted by Harish at
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Finally I installed Ubuntu 8.04 in my Dell Inspiron 1525 yesterday. Now I can dual boot Vista with Ubuntu. Installation is very easy. Here is how
1. You just need to save some space (4 GB atleast) by shrinking some volume and make sure its a free space partition.
2. Put the Ubuntu CD in and reboot from it.
3. The installation process will start and you can easily navigate through it. When it asks for the partition check whether it shows your HDD with the used space for Windows Vista/Longhorn and some space for Ubuntu. This means all is ok and you can proceed with the installation.
4. The partition manager should start and press manual in it and select the longest continous free space (which obviously will be your new volume)nt.
5. Now press Install and and Ubuntu will get installed in less than 15 mins! This is seriously faster than Vista. :-)
6. Reboot your machine without the CD and it should display the GRUB bootloader and it should show both Windows and Ubuntu. Log in where ever you feel like and enjoy!!!

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Popups Inaugral

Posted by Harish at Saturday, August 2, 2008
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Today Popups (the club for first years under SCANIT) was inaugrated. We had two sessions of orientations. One for the ITC group and the other for other branches. Ashwath, Sandhya and Komal went to every non ITC class in VDV and announced for the inaugral while Harish S and myself were putting up the posters for the event. Today, the turn up for both the sessions were good and specially the response from the other branches was humongus!!! People were sitting everywhere. Right from the stairs in TIFAC to the stage! We had nowhere to walk on stage! Both the Harsha's were entertaining the crowd throughout the session and I also got a chance to do the same for sometime at the end. I felt like addressing a crowd in times of war where people gather in small places which is super overcrowded. Then we distributed the registration forms, made a couple of people sing and also selected the class representatives. After the session was over we had a good interaction with the juniours. To sum up I would say thanks to the efforts of Sandhya, Ashwath and Komal an amazing crowd with full energy and enthu turned up and both the Harshas for keeping them entertained. Lets see how the response is in the next sessions. :-)

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GLOSS Website and Geek Speak

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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Finally I am coming online after two weeks because of the poor wifi connectivity in my hostel. Anyways, in these two weeks, a lot has happened in GLOSS. The first is GLOSS has a new website which is linked to the SASTRA website! The site was developed by Abhishek and has many cool features like Forum, scrapbook, add friends, blogs and many more!!! One more sneak peek about the site is that we will have a blogger in the site who has won even an award from the President of India for blogging!!! The site will be inaugrated by the Dean, Mr. Vaidysubramaniam very soon. I will post the link here after it is inaugrated. The other one is Geek Speak.

Geek Speak is the show of GLOSS in my college radio 7Cube. It is hosted by Abhishek with Vikas and myself helping him with the show. The show will be on air every Tuesday from 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM. Today in the show we had loads of fun. Many dedications started pouring and we gave away some cool facts on technology. We announced a contest too and a first year won it. We asked two questions and she answered both of them. She wins an OpenSolaris tee shirt which will be presented to her soon in the next GLOSS session for first years. Her name is Akshaya and she is from my branch (ICT!!! :-)).

If you are in SASTRA open up VLC Media Player every Tuesday evening by 8:30 and Press Ctrl-N. Now enter the address http://172.16.20.201:1234 and tune in to Geek Speak!


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GLOSS Kicks Off For First Years!!!

Posted by Harish at Sunday, July 13, 2008
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Finally, yesterday GLOSS was inaugrated for first years. By morning 10, the event started in TIFAC CORE. Sanjeev designed a registration site for the first years and hosted it on the wifi. Some 108 students registered for it and there were a good mix from almost every branch. Abhishek, as usual, welcomed the freshers and gave a talk on OpenSource. The video which Guru Prasad made was also screened. I will post lots of pictures and the video also in my next blog. The session was a bit long (3 hours :-)) but many first years enjoyed it. There were a lot of funny happenings during the last session when they asked questions to Abhishek. That's it for now. Bye guys!!!

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First Virtual Conference in SASTRA!!!

Posted by Harish at Friday, July 11, 2008
1 Comments

Finally we did it!!! The first virtual world conference in SASTRA was successfully held this Wednesday! The conference started at TIFAC for boys and in Nirman for girls. We logged into the two avatars of Abhishek and we sat in the very first row of the Andromada Theatre at Sun Microsystems Islan (SL). They tried out some new technology this time it seems and it failed badly resulting in an audio failure. So we shifted to a text chat. After the initial chat by the big guns we started asking questions. The session was very interactive and we learned a lot of cool stuff. The session got over by 9:00 and we planned to roam around in the virtual world for some more time. When we were roaming around we saw Jonathan Schwartz!!! He just logged in and left somewhere so we couldn't talk to him. Then we went to IBM office and some Desi club and a Hanuman temple too. Overall, it was a cool experience in the virtual world for all of us :-)

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Firefox record and GLOSS for First Years

Posted by Harish at Thursday, July 3, 2008
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Finally it's official now, Firefox 3 has made the Guinness World record for the maximum number of downloads by any software in 24 hours. It was an amazing count of 8,002,530 downloads worldwide which made this record possible. That settles the first two words of the title. As for the remaining words, read further. GLOSS will be launched for first years on 12th of July 2008. Unlike our plan on 5th, we decided to give them some time for settling and also, our planned chief guests have some problems with coming here. So, on Saturday the 12th of July, we will start the GLOSS sessions for first years at JVC. Since Dwarakanath is the new campus ambassador and Abhishek has become the coordinator, he is no more in the organising team of GLOSS. So, we guys and Dwarakanath have to take care of organising the events. Already the preperations have started. I will keep you guys updated about the latest happenings. Bye for now!

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GLOSS Inaugration and Cluster Computing

Posted by Harish at Tuesday, July 1, 2008
2 Comments

Yesterday evening, we inaugrated GLOSS for this semester with a session on Cluster Computing by Abhishek. In this blog, I m going to explain in detail the concepts of Cluster Computing to my knowledge.so Im am not going to write much about the session but I will definitely tell something cool about the session. screened a movie in the session! What's special about the movie is that its an Open Movie! Yes, we at GLOSS seek out for such wonderful products. The movie was completely rendered using the Super Computer service offered by Sun Microsystems through http://www.network.com. Also, this movie was completely created using an open source animation software named Blender. I will try to upload the video here as soon as I can. Enough of the general talk, lets get down to business and learn about Cluster Computing shall we?

Cluster Computing and High Availability

Consider yourself to be running a big service provider like GOOGLE or Microsoft. You have your server running at your office, suddenly one day, the server crashes for unknown reason or some natural disaster strikes and your office gets demolished (sorry for being so optimistic! :-P). Your services like mail, chat video sharing will stop suddenly and users will not be able to access it until you correct the problem. This may take a very long time but your users cannot wait so long. They will migrate to some other service provider and your business will end up craching down hill. Here is a scenario. You have a server running some application connected to a storage device where the entire data of your serivces are stored. Now, if the connection between the server and the storage or the connection to the server is cut, imagine the kind of damage your business can suffer. This is where Cluster Computing comes in for the rescue. You have some servers spread across geographically running for your services. If disaster of any form strikes at any of these nodes, in cluster computing, the node fails over some other node. In plain English, the services running on that node will be copied to some other node and the service will continue running almost immediately. So the user will not know about the server crash and he will the service uninterrupted as usual. This powerful concept is called Cluster Computing. Most people confuse it with Grid Computing. In grid, you have more than one computer running as a single computer. Here you have individual computers running individually. If any node crashes, the service will be shifted to some other node. Lets get more technical in cluster computing.

How the Cluster is Formed and Maintained?

Clusters are formed by using some cluster creating tools like OHAC, by writing stuff called agents and distributing your servers. Each node in a cluster gives out some signals similar to hearbeats. So, they are named Heartbeats. The nodes and the cluster tool identifies the other nodes in the cluster by this heartbeat. If a node fails to give out heartbeats, it is considered to have been dead and its services are shifted to some other node.

Components of a Cluster

Now that you know how a cluster works, lets look deeper into them and understand the different components that are essential for a cluster to work.

1. Quorum : You need a minimum of n/2 +1 nodes for a cluster to work.

2. Cluster Infrastructure : The cluster infrastructure is the software which is used to run the cluster like OHAC and also the servers and the storage devices which are all interconnected. Now, the cluster software decides to which node the service running should fail on in case of a disaster.

3. Agents : Usually, we use applications which we use are not meant to be run on multiple computers in the same time. For instance, your real player is not meant for a multi computer usage. These agents take care of this problem and make such software run on multiple computers. These programs act as a communication bridge between the cluster infrastructure and the service. In case of a disaster, they pick up certain parameters from the service application and pass it to the cluster infrastructure which will take care of the rest of the stuff.

4. Application : This is the service which is running on a server. Eg: Mail service. In case of a disaster, the cluster makes sure that this application keeps running safely for the user by failing over some other node.

A Special Case of Failure

Consider this case, your servers are running fine but then suddenly, the network cable for one of your node gets cut but the server which got isolated from your network can still access and write data to your storage device. We don't want this do we? So to tackle this problem, there was another concept introduced called Data Fencing. By data fencing, you can protect your storage devices to be accessed and changed only by the nodes in your cluster. This Data Fencing is a very big and interesting topic which will be dealt in some future session of GLOSS.

Getting OHAC

You can get the source code for OHAC here http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/haclusters/ohac/ Download it, build it and create your own clusters. When you start using OHAC, try to contribute to their project using the same link as above.

I have tried my best to explain the concept of Cluster Computing in a simple way and also I have explained only the most important components of this area. My advice is, not many people in this world are into cluster computing so its better to act fast and make your moves in this field.

My sincere thanks to

Kumar Abhishek (for the session on Cluster Computing and for giving me his presentation slides)
The Photography Wing of GLOSS (trust me, they have did a really good job this time)
and to you! (for reading through my blog :-))

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My Blog is Licensed!

Posted by Harish at Sunday, June 29, 2008
0 Comments

Today I am licensing my blog under the Creative Commons licence. Lets kill the jargon and put in simple words what it means. It means that you can copy the works in my blog, even edit them if you want and use them where ever you like for non commercial purposes. But you should give credits to me and provide a link to my blog. To license your blog too visit the site http://www.creativecommons.org. Simple but effective this licence is. Use it in your blogs too. I got this idea from my friend Mano Ranjan. Thanks to him. To visit his blog, click the link on the left.

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GLOSS Inaugration

Posted by Harish at Saturday, June 28, 2008
0 Comments

Hi folks!!! Today, this is going to be a really small post as my SXDE download is about to be completed and I am dying to try it :-) As I said already, GLOSS DTSi is scheduled for the 5th of July only but we thought of inaugrating GLOSS for the seniors even before that day (talk about the power of becoming a senior :-)). So, we have planned to have the inaugration day after tomorrow itself! That's right, on June 30th, GLOSS will be inaugrated for this year. With the aim to become the biggest contiributor to the open source community in India, we are inaugrating GLOSS amidst the presence of the deans of SASTRA and also, Abhishek will be discussing OHAC for this session. We have lots of plans to organise the event and this time, we are planning to try out the new videography team of GLOSS! If things are successful with the new team, GLOSS can release video newsletters, video tutorials, documentaries and many more frequently. I will post many pictures of the event and if possible some videos too here on Monday evening. Till then...bye!!!

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My Laptop is Virutally OpenSolarised!!!

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, June 25, 2008
2 Comments

My laptop is virtually OpenSolarised because I use OpenSolaris in a virtual machine. I used Virtual Box for this. Virtual Box is extremely good and easy to work with. I installed Open Solaris in this virtual machine. I configured wifi and everything is working fine except the audio. OpenSolaris still doesn't support my laptop's hardware. Anyways, I advice anyone interested in trying out a new OS safely to try it out in Virtual Box. You can get Virtual Box here. I have installed OpenSolaris to take up new projects on OpenSolaris and contribute to the community. Another interesting thing to note is GLOSS has taken up Open Solaris as its operating system. So we got special OpenSolaris wrist bands from Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park for all the GLOSS members! Here is a pic of it :-)

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Adding Page Elements To Header In Your Blog

Posted by Harish at Tuesday, June 24, 2008
0 Comments

With your default blogger template, you can add page elements or gadgets to your footer. Adding such elements to your header is also possible with a little tweaking of your template. Here is how

  1. Go to Layout -> Edit HTML
  2. Create a backup of your template with 'Download Template' button.
  3. Check the 'Expand Widgets Template' button.
  4. Find for the following piece of code
    <div id='header-wrapper'>
    <b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='3' showaddelement='yes'>
    <b:widget id='Image1' locked='false' title='' type='Image'>
  5. Here the maxwidgets specifies the number of page elements you can add to your blog in the header. Default will be 1 for your title and description. Change it to any value you wish and press save.
  6. Now click 'Page Elements' and you can see additional space for page elements in your header. Add anything you wish. Enjoy!

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Digital Twin Spark Ignition (DTS-i) For GLOSS This Semester!!!

Posted by Harish at Friday, June 20, 2008
2 Comments

You may be wondering at the title. Let me explain you why. Since all the activities and events in GLOSS are based on digital, we start it with 'Digital'. By now you would have guessed why 'Twin Spark Ignition' came in. That's right, we have two great events to start this semester for GLOSS with a Kaboom!!! Here are the events

July 5th, Saturday : GLOSS kicks off for first years

You may be wondering why this is very special. Read the list of chief guests attending this and you will search for some word more apt than 'very special' for the event.

The guests are: Ganesh Hiregoudar(chief co-ordiantor for Campus Ambassador programme in Asia Pacific, Sun Microsystems), Anil Gulecha (Campus Ambassador, Sun Microsystems) and Angad Singh (Campus Ambassador JIIT, Sun Microsystems)! Great guests na? Abhishek is talking with these guys for coming to the college for the event.


July 9th, Wednesday: Even bigger event

If you thought the first one was too good read this. This is the second event planned. Here is the notice forwarded by Abhishek.

Event: A Live OpenSolaris Chat in Second Life. People not familiar
with second life do not have attend with an avatar but can watch and
contribute via the web.

Goal: To educate, build awareness, gain adoption and answer questions
on
OpenSolaris

Audience: Community Members, Students, Web 2.0 developers and employees

*Date: July 9th - new date
*
Time: Early morning (7:30/8:00 am) so all geos can participate

Duration of Chat: 1 hour - 20 minutes of presenting/round table and
then
40 minutes for Q&A

*What will be discussed and who will be involved with the Chat:*

This discussion will give community members, students and all others
that join the chat an opportunity to ask questions regarding
OpenSolaris
and to hear about what direction OpenSolaris is heading.

Some Topics to discuss: (TBD)

OpenSolaris direction
OpenSolaris support
Contributions to respositories
Support Packages
Contributions to Community from Sun

*Potential Speakers: (TBD) 2 presenters and 2 additional experts for
Q&A
session*

Tim Cramer
Stephen Hahn
Glynn Foster
David Comay

What is more exciting is the members of GLOSS get to attend it!! As for people who don't know about Second Life, its like the Matrix. If you need more details, visit this site.

Now that's the way to kick off GLOSS in super style for this semester rite? Our GLOSS team members are already holding conferences to discuss plans for this kick off. Hope every thing turns out fine. I will keep you guys updated.

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Firefox Certificate!!!

Posted by Harish at Thursday, June 19, 2008
0 Comments

Hey guys!!! Just now read a couple of blogs regarding Firefox's Guinness Attempt. The download server has recorded 10,989,608 million downloads in 24 hours and made into the Guinness Book of World Record!!! As a token of thanks to the people who downloaded Firefox 3 on its release date the Spread Firefox team is giving out certificates!! Here is mine :-)


This certificate makes me feel proud. You can get your certificate by clicking here. The Guinness World Record authorities are evaluating this record attempt. Soon we can enjoy a Guinness World Record under our favorite browser's cap!

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Hiding Nav bar in Blogger Template

Posted by Harish at
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There are many cool customizations you can make with blogger. Some are really easy while others are a bit tough. So I thought I can blog about some blogger hacks as well. Here is the first and the simplest one in the series "Removing Nav bar from Blogger Template"

Removing Nav bar from Blogger Template

Its perfectly legal to hide the nav bar in your blog. So feel free to try this simple hack. Here it goes

Step 1: Log into your blogger account and click Layout -> Edit HTML.
Step 2: Before editing the template, I recommend taking a backup of it. The simplest way is to click the 'Download Template' link and save an XML copy of your blog template.
Step 3: Now find the following line
/* Variable definitions
====================
Step 4: Paste the following code before this code
#navbar-iframe {
 display: none !important;
}
Step 5: Press save and preview your blog with the nav bar hidden.

Next time, I will post a simple hack to add page elements or gadgets to your header section of the blog.

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Labs for GMail and Draft for Blogger!

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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GMail Labs

Most of you would have tried the labs feature in GMail. For those of you who don't know about GMail Labs, log into your GMail account and click Settings -> Labs. There you get to test some of the newest innovations in GMail. Most of these are created by individual engineers in the GMail team. When some spark is produced in their brain for improving GMail, they code it and put it in the labs section. Most of the features introduced in this section are untested (mostly) and you get to use, test and send feedback to the GMail team. When a feature is really popular it is made a part of the regular GMail. Cool nah?


There are many cool features in GMail labs. Try them out and I recommend you to try mouse gestures definitely.

Blogger In Draft

Now lets move on to Blogger in Draft. Similar to Labs in GMail, GOOGLE guys introduced draft in blogger. To use this feature go to http://draft.blogger.com and log into your account. After logging in, the first thing you will notice is the new improved dashboard. They made it look sleeker and is very neat with all the required options in one place. Here is a pic of it

You may wonder why this is similar to the labs feature in GMail with out giving some special addons. Click on edit layout in your blog and immediately you will see the striking difference. You will see 'Add a Gadget' instead of the usual 'Add a Page Element'. Click it and a new window pops up with the usual 17 page elements put up in a cool fashion on page 1.

There are several categories listed on the left side. Click on any and you can find thousands of gadgets to add to your blog. This is really cool. Absolutely anyone in the world with working knowledge of Java can create a gadget and submit it to GOOGLE. They test it and put it in this page with full credits to the author of the gadget. Pretty sleek huh?

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I m a Weird Nerd!!!

Posted by Harish at Monday, June 16, 2008
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Weird Test

Today my friend Adithya mailed me about his blog. Me being pretty jobless (as usual), checked his blog. It was very neat and was frequently updated. I started to read through the blog and there was this weird post on weirdness quotient. His score was 80 with a percentile of 80. Just this weird image was enough make me want to take up that weird test. I tried to click the image but it was not working. This made me more interested in it. So a simple GOOGLE search helped me to find the weirdness quotient test. It had some ten simple questions. Some answers to the questions were really very weird. So I just clicked my way through the questions and finally pressed 'Submit'. The results were displayed and to my astonishment my score was a staggering 131!!! There are 1 percent of people about as weird as me according to the test, 3% more weird than me and 96% more normal. After seeing the results I was like wow! So I thought I could blog about it so that you guys can also take the test and tell me how weird you are :-). Oh, btw, here is the prize they gave me for my hardwork (whatever it was).

What is your weird quotient? Click to find out!

Even the HTML code they give for embedding your weird prize in your blog is weird. It is supposed to be a link to the test page but you can't even click on it. I made a small change to it so that it can be made clickable. Simply remove ?im from a href="http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_weird.php?im". Pretty weird huh? :-)

Nerd Test

The result of the above test was enough to leave me asking for more such funny tests. So I browsed around the same website (http://www.nerdtests.com) and found another such test the Am I a Nerd Test!! That too version 2! I clicked it immediately and a long page with tons of questions loaded up. Trust me, this is the longest test page I ve seen in my life! This test was too much. It took me some time to clear through the test. Finally I hit the Submit button and the results page loaded up. This was even longer and more detailed than GOOGLE Analytics may be :-). It had my percentile in various fields like Science, Math, History, Litereature etc along with some fun facts too. I scrolled down to see some beautiful numbers my scoreboard and suddenly this message struck me "From this time forward, you'll hold the title Mega-Dorky Light-Weighted Nerd!" Yuk!!! How do they find such titles!!! I was still eager for my prize (the usual image). I expected something really crappy as above but this one was neat with proper HTML code. They even gave an option to add a custom image to this prize which I didn't. Here is my Nerd Test prize.

NerdTests.com says I'm a Mega-Dorky Light-Weight Nerd. What are you? Click here!

Take up the test and let me know your scores and titles. C ya!!!

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Firefox 3 is here!!!

Posted by Harish at Sunday, June 15, 2008
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Finally its here!!! Yes, after all the beta releases and release candidates, Firefox 3 is all set to hit the cyber world on June 17th!!! This is a very special occasion for all the Firefox fans across the globe. People are hosting parties to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and they are doing it in many crazy ways. Mozilla guys also give away free Firefox goodies for people who host parties to make it even better. If you are interested in partying for the release of Firefox, visit http://mozillaparty.com. Now, at this point of time, I would like to address the people who are not aware of some of the features that make Firefox the best browser around. Yes, its far better than IE or Safari. Here are some of its super cool features.

Lets start with Security:Firefox is simply the safest browser on Earth! Here is why
1. Security experts are engaged even before the development of Firefox is started.
2. If any critical security bug is found at any point of time be it the beta stage, RC stage or even the post release stage, it is made public so that it can be fixed by anyone across the globe asap.
3. Firefox has many special features like anti-phishing filters, automatic password manager, protection from Spyware and Adware etc. More importantly, security updates are released every 6-8 months and more frequently if it fixes a critical bug
4. It is open source. So anyone in any part of the world can contribute to the development of Firefox making it very very robust.

What's a software which you can't customize? With Firefox, you can realise the actual meaning of customising your browser. With more than 3000 plugins which help you to stay in touch with your friends, listen to music, prevent your kids from accessing inappropriate sites, find better shopping deals and everything under the sun! You can have millions of themes and skins for your Firefox as well. Trust me, there aint any browser in the world which can give you these many customizations.

Finally, Firefox is a 100% Organic Browser as they call it. Its because Firefox is a non-profit project which is developed by hundreds of thousands of people across the world coming from various geographic and cultural backgrounds as a result of which more than 120 million people use it in more than 20 languages in regular basis!!!

I think all this talk should get you atleast a bit interested in trying out Firefox 3 . So go ahead and download your copy of Firefox 3 on June 17th from here and help set a Guinness World Record on The Download Day!

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Holidays!!!

Posted by Harish at Monday, June 9, 2008
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Finally one year of BTech is over for me in SASTRA and holidays have started!!! My favourite fourth years have returned to their homes and some good juniors (hopefully!! if you know what I mean :-)!!!) are yet to join the college. I m sitting at my home with my new laptop just enjoying life. Many of my friends ask me what they can learn during these holidays. So here are some useful and simple stuff you can do to make something useful out of these holidays.
1. Try to learn Java. Atleast the basics.
2. Learn HTML if you don't know.
3. Learn some multimedia software like Photoshop or Flash.
4. Learn some UNIX stuff.
5. Read the newspaper daily regardless of watching news channels or reading news online. Trust me, newspapers are gold mines.
And most of all, meet your friends, go out and party!!! :-)
That's it for now. Catch you later guys. Bye!!! Take care!!!

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GLOSS Newsletter is Out!!!

Posted by Harish at Friday, May 30, 2008
1 Comments

Hi folks! Finally our exams are over and we Coronas went back to our homes for short trips and some of us are back to college for doing the certificate course. We couldn't make a very good online presence till now but that doesn't mean that we Coronas don't work. We worked on this newsletter with very strict deadlines and lots and lots of hard work from every Corona. Creating the newsletter showed me an example of how good our team is and how well we can work in together. All the members who were a part of creating this newsletter did their very best and that too in the given very short intervals of time. Sanjeev and Abhilash together wrote an article, Vikas and Abhishek complied the events list, plenty of members contributed to the finer details of the newsletter and I took care of the designing part. The newsletter is circulated to over 80 countries! Now that's something which every Corona can be proud of! The newsletter was appreciated personally by many of the big guns in Sun like Ganesh. Overall, with the guidance of Abhishek, the newsletter was created and released in the exact timing we wanted it to be.
You can get a copy of it here
http://www.mediafire.com/?jlnmx1zdztz
Read it and send me your reviews about it. Also, if you want to make a contribution to the next edition of OpenView, feel free to drop me a mail about it.

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GLOSS Networking Site is Here!!!

Posted by Harish at Saturday, May 17, 2008
1 Comments

Finally it's here!!! The GLOSS Networking site is finally open to public now!! It's super cool and is like adding one more scoop of ice-cream of cool features on top of orkut. Abhishek created this site from ning.com. He has been working on it for a couple of days and he has did an amazing job with it.

Here are some of the cool features of it:
Share pictures and videos with some visibility options
Have your own blog
Create your profile
Socialize by adding friends
Leave a comment to your friends which is like scrapping someone
Apply some cool themes to your profile
Have your own GLOSS badge like the one on the left :-)
Create and join groups
Participate in a discussion forum
and much more

The new site is really amazing and super cool. I will help us to socialize better and also help our "international" fans to get involved with the members of GLOSS easily. Abhishek has also told us that he will not be closing the GOOGLE GLOSS Group so that GLOSS members can flame war in two places :-)

Here is the link to the site

http://glossnetwork.ning.com

Do join the site and we'll have loads of fun there :-D

Btw, my exams aren't over yet. I ll have one more week of this ordeal :-(. Bye for now...

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Open Solaris Birthday Celebrations

Posted by Harish at Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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Yesterday OpenSolaris was released worldwide finally!!! We at GLOSS look at OpenSolaris as a member of our family. Since a new member was born yesterday, we decided to celebrate the release as its birthday. The function started at 12.30 in the Krishna Canteen after Abhishek finished his interviews for the members who wanted to be a part of the Development Wing of GLOSS.
Vikas, Sanjeev, VK, Prabu and I went there by 10.00 to start decorating the place for the birthday celebration. We had loads of fun there. Pasting balloons, decorative papers, hangings, 'I Love OpenSolaris' posters and a couple of more hand made posters all over the place. I ll post the pictures of the event soon after my exams are over.
It was 12.30 and the juice section of the canteen was full of GLOSS members and other OpenSolaris enthusiasts. The party started with a small speech by Abhishek as usual. He spoke about OpenSolaris for some time. Then he cut the 6kg cake we ordered for the party. And there were some fun events too with two people winnning OpenSolaris tee shirts. What's a party without food rite? So after the cake pieces were distributed to everyone in the canteen GLOSS sponsored a Rs.30 coupon for everyone who attended the party.
We had a good lunch and came back to our hostel with a determination to become the largest OpenSolaris community in the world before the next release of the OS which is a year later.
We have made a small video from the pictures taken during the party. It was sent to the important people in the OpenSolaris community around the world. We will be making a better video soon after our exams are over. I ll post that video too here with some pictures of the party.

Till my exams are over bye everyone!

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Video Sharing Site for GLOSS

Posted by Harish at Friday, May 2, 2008
0 Comments

Thanks to startyourtube.com, GLOSS now has its own video sharing space! You may wonder why GLOSS needs a video sharing site while we already have a profile in you tube and also we are going to get a new website ready?(It's true folks, we will be having a site exclusively for GLOSS soon!) Here is the answer. In start your tube, you can make your webspace similar to blogspot powered by youtube. In simpler terms, you can invite people to join you and they create their blogs under your space and start posting.

Organize Stuff
The community is growing everyday and the members have a good amount of techy videos with them which they wish to share. Also, GLOSS releases some videos of its seminars from time to time. So, when all of these can be put under a common heading, it will be very organized and also easy to find resources related to GLOSS and open source technologies.

For the Film Makers Out There
There are some developing teams in SASTRA who want to make really good films for GLOSS. So, we give them a good platform with a very good visibility to screen their videos and make their way into the promotion wing of GLOSS (which will also have a blog here :-) ).

Where This is Headed
With this site started, many members who hate to type (maybe that's why they remain inactive in the group :-)) or like to say things through videos are expected to create their blogs here. The best videos, will be selected and they will be posted in the GLOSS website which will be created in the near future. So, this site will remain even after the creation of the GLOSS website as a medium of sharing videos for the members.

Some Important Links
GLOSS Video Sharing Website: http://www.gloss.startyourtube.com
Start Your Tube: http://www.startyourtube.com
My Blog in start your tube: http://www.harish.gloss.startyourtube.com

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Open Solaris B'Day

Posted by Harish at Tuesday, April 29, 2008
0 Comments

Yes folks! Open Solaris final version is going to get released this May 5th world wide at Sun's Head Office. This is a very special occasion for every open source enthusiast. People who are following it right from its DP releases are waiting for this moment. We at SASTRA love Open Solaris very much that we feel like it's our own child. We feel that a new baby is going to be born in our family on May 5. So we have planned to celebrate it in a big way by having a huge birthday party by cutting a cake and distributing sweets! Open Solaris is very special for every Corona ( that's how every GLOSS member is called :-)) and this occasion is even more special for us. May Open Solaris, be the best OS on the planet when it is born this May.
As for the celebration, we'll be doing it only on 6th as 6th in India is 5th in USA where it is born. I request all of you to have blast on May 5 for Open Solaris and also come and join me and my GLOSS team for own house OS :-)
I will post the photos of the celebration here in Open View and if possible I ll add some videos also.

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PicLens

Posted by Harish at Monday, April 21, 2008
0 Comments

The GLOSS discussion forum becoming more and more active everyday. It is directly reflected in our post counts. Last month mine was 18. This month it has crossed 60 already. We can see replies to the posts in gap of almost 2 mins. Its becoming like a chat room for the members of the group. I was worried that nearly all of these posts are nothing but flames or useless replies. But today, Venki posted a new thread introducing us to a new software named PicLens.

PicLens is a plugin for IE or Firefox. It is not just another plugin, but a software of its own kind. It gives you a 3d view of the pictures you search for. After installing the plugin, you restart your browser and this page loads up allowing you to go for the first drive.
Now press the play button on the image and your Vista transforms into an evolved version of Combiz-Fusion and you get to view the pictures in 3d. That too, not compromising on the speed of your machine. Trust me, I tried this on a 512mb machine and it was loading at the speed as if I was watching a video from my hard disk.


You can move from one end to another and zoom into any picture and it will loaded in real-time. The animations and speed in this part is too good. When you click on a zoomed image, the image is loaded in full screen mode with a film strip of the other images at the bottom.

This is when you click an image to zoom in
Now, a full screen for you. :-)

After the inital drive, I decided to try it with a Google Image search. So I searched for the pictures of Rajnikanth. The results showed up. When I moved my mouse over an image, the play button appeared. I clicked it and viola! the screen changed to the 3d view and I can see the the results of my search in the 3d wall. The best part is, it even displayed results from other pages as well on the wall.

You can download this plugin at

http://www.piclens.com/demo/#

Trust me, its too good. :-)

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GLOSS in Wikipedia

Posted by Harish at Sunday, April 20, 2008
0 Comments

When a community grows, it is heard in its locality. When a part of it is in the Internet, it is heard worldwide. One of the primitive methods used to make it to be heard worldwide is to create groups of the community in popular sites like GOOGLE, Yahoo and Orkut. Some people even blog about it. As for GLOSS, we have the blog here in Sun's website.
The next thing people do is to create a Wiki page on it. This is exactly what I did today. Yes, you read it correctly, GLOSS is now in Wikipedia. Here is the URL to the blog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLOSS_at_SASTRA

Feel free to visit the page and contribute to it also.

PS: I forgot to tell this, the GLOSS page at Wiki doesn't have the logo on it. So, some one please be kind enough to upload the GLOSS logo to it.

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Newsletter for GLOSS

Posted by Harish at Saturday, April 19, 2008
0 Comments

Today we were discussing about the future of GLOSS. Eventually, we
decided to create a newsletter for GLOSS and circulate it in over 80
countries. The name of it is ' Open View '. That's right, it's the
same name as this blog.
So people, wait for a week and you can read the newsletter here.

--
Thanks and Regards,

Harish.R.

Don't ask for a light load, but rather ask for a strong back.

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GLOSS

Posted by Harish at Friday, April 18, 2008
1 Comments

Let me tell you about GLOSS. GLOSS a community in my college established with the view of learning and contributing to open source technology. Our goal was to become the largest contributor in India. Over a period of time, GLOSS has evolved in the college to a great extent in creating awareness among students to learn open source technologies and has grown into a family rather than a community with everyone having a sense of belongingness in the group. GLOSS is supported by Sun Microsystems directly as of now.

We have taken up some projects in open source too. I ll write more about out projects and keep this blog updated with the latest happenings in GLOSS and also my views on some open source technologies.

Btw, this is the logo for GLOSS. I designed it. Pretty cool na? Everytime I look at it in the Sun website or on any notice or certificate , I feel very proud.

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Contact

Posted by Harish at Monday, January 14, 2008
0 Comments

Contact me by

Email: harishindian@gmail.com
          rharish90@in.com

Mobile: +91 9940988900

Address: SASTRA University,
               Tanjore.

 

About Us

Posted by Harish at
0 Comments

We are a bunch of enthusiasts who love blogging about diverse topics. We are engineering students are SASTRA University and from various branches.

 

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