Instant Internet Connection Sharing

Today I came Kandy for 5 days stay due to some functions lined up to attend. My office provided me a HSPA dongle to keep my self online during the stay. Nah.. it's not about the dongle. ;-). I wanted to share the Internet connection with another computer at home. I only had a crossover cable with me, which I always carry in my backpack. So I connected the two Laptops with it and shared my primary PPP connection with the guest Laptop. Both Laptops are runnung on GNU/Linux. The simple setup I had is as below.

Host PC Settings.

I already received an IP for my ppp0 connection from my ISP. So I only had to assign an IP to my LAN card (eth0)

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

(Don't need to set the default route in the host, cos it's already set to ppp0)

Enable NAT in Farewall and IP forwarding.

# iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forwad

Guest Settings.

Set up the Interface.

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

Set the default route of the GUEST to HOST eth0 IP

# route add default gw 10.0.0.1

Put the name server IP which received to the HOST PC from ISP in the GUEST /etc/resolv.conf

# echo nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > /etc/resolv.conf

That's all. I simply enabled Internet Connection Sharing in my Laptop.

Mandriva One 2009... You made me say "WOW"

Today I installed Mandriva One 2009, a distribution which comes with a Linux Kernel, GNU software and many other custom made and free software. I installed this as a virtual machine, to test it and to see how Mandriva Directory Server performs on her own man's lap. ;-). So I started to install the packages requred for it, and while they are downloading, I went an inside tour. I was amazed, and couldn't hold the "wow" came from my inside...

Mandriva One 2009 comes with a Linux 2.6.27 kernel and I installed the KDE version of it which runs KDE 4.1. There is Gnome version too. Even though I'm not a KDE fan, I wanted to see how is KDE doing it to satisfy me. I was pretty amazed, the start menu is well organized, not too many options, and looked neat. That's some thing I was looking forward to see from a KDE main menu.

There were some cool widgets Which are ready to use and I activated couple of them just to see. And the default wallpapers are very eye catching.
Mandriva One comes with OpenOffice 3.0.0, and it was loading faster than the 2.x versions. Then I quickly went through the applications installed. There is almost all the major apps you need to run a Desktop enviorenment, Internet, Multimedia, Software Installation, Systems Tools, etc. If you need further apps you can easily installed using various methods, rpm, GUI based, or urpmi, etc. And Compiz was packed with the OS, and have all the 3D desktop effects you nee.



This version of Mandriva One 2009, comes with good collection of apps for the desktop users and is in a single CD. You can download it from their official mirrors. The System Requirements need is (as in the web site)

• Processor: Any Intel®, AMD or VIA processor
• RAM: 512MB minimum, 1GB recommended
• Hard disk: 2GB minimum, 6GB recommended
• Graphics card: NVIDIA®, ATITM, Intel®, SiS, Matrox,VIA. 3D desktop functionality requires an NVIDIA GeForce (up to 8800), ATITM Radeon 7000 to HD 3870, or Intel® i845 to x4500HD
• 3D acceleration is supported on most capable hardware. For more details, check the hardware compatibility database
• Sound cards: All Sound Blaster, AC97 and HDA compatible cards are supported. Note: Creative Labs X-Fi cards are not currently supported
• DVD drive required
• SATA, IDE, SCSI, SAS: most controllers are supported in non-RAID mode, and some are supported in RAID mode

So for those who are willing to kick Windows Vista away and also for those who are interested in trying out KDE 4.1 without the messy look, I think Mandriva One 2009 is a good distro to try out. It comes as a live user version and can be installed and make secure as a regular GNU/Linux distribution.

Okay It's time for me to get back to the work I was doing... Got to start playing with the Directory Server of it...

Mandriva Team, Good Work fellas!!!

Fedora Directory Server, NFS, SAMBA in action.

I was working on a Centralized authentication system in the past couple of days. I was comparing Mandriva Directory Server with Fedora Directory Server and testing them in various levels. I thought of make the work available online so any one else in the world can benefit from this. This will not be a step-by-step guide sort of a thing, but have methods of performing the tasks.

My setup was able to;

• Authenticate Unix and Windows users from an LDAP server (Fedora Directory Server).
• Map a dedicated network drive for all the users under their username using SAMBA.
• Enable roming profiles for POSIX accounts using NFS exports.
• Control hardware on GNU/Linux based systems using PolicyKit.
• And some other stuff... Like mail server authentication, etc

Scenario

• Users must authenticate using LDAP user credentials from a central server.

• Existing/New Windows and GNU/Linux Clients should be authenticated via LDAP server.

• Use e-mail facility.

• Control over selected client hardware (eg:usb pen drives, digital cameras, etc).

A very rough diagram ;-)


Testing tools

Hardware

* Intel Core Duo2
* 512MB RAM
* Networking Hardware

Software

* Fedora Directory Server 8.0
* Zimbra Collaboration Suite
* Apache 2.0
* Bind

Operating Systems

* Fedora Core 9 (For Authentication Server)
* Ubuntu GNU/Linux (Clients)
* MS Windows (Clients)

Server Installation

* Installed Fedora Core 9
* Installed Fedora Directory Server 7.1
* Installed Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Client Installation

GNU/Linux

I have to perform few steps to set up GNU/Linux clients to authenticate with the Fedora Directory Server.

* First install the meta-package for LDAP authentication.

# apt-get install ldap-auth-client
* Then edit the /etc/ldap.conf file to suite our setup. I have to put following details in the ldap.conf file.


##Host

host 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

##The distinguished name of the search base

base dc =mydomain,dc=net

##LDAP version to use

ldap_version 3

Fiter to AND with uid=%s

pam filter objectclass=Account

pam_filter objectclass=posixAccount

Group member attribute

pam_member_attribute memberuid

pam_member_attribute uniquemember

##Password hash

pam_password md5

Leave the rest of the file as it is.


NFS Server set up

I thought of keeping the user’s files in a different server for security reasons. Hens I installed the NFS server in a different computer running Ubuntu GNU/Linux . (Actually I’m running the NFS server in virtual host)

* Installed NFS Server


# apt-get install portmap nfs-kernel-server

* I created a directory /home/nfs to create user home directories.

* edit the /etc/exports and added the following lines. This is to create the network shares.


/home/ *(rw,sync)

The above lines will give permission to all users to access /home/nfs with read write permissions.

After that I have to do export the shares

# exportfs -ra
* Restart the services

# /etc/init.d/portmap restart

#/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

After I’ve done with the server side, next thing was to set up the clients to auto mount the NFS share.

* Installed the nfs modules in clients

# apt-get install portmap nfs-common
* Then installed the automount module

# apt-get install autofs

Then I need to deny access to all others and allow only for set I want.

* Edit the /etc/hosts.deny and enter the following lines.

portmap : ALL
* Edit the /etc/hosts.allow and entered the IP address of the NFS server

portmap : 192.xxx.xxx.xxx
Tip : When ever I edit a configuration file, it’s always better to put a comment before the edition. That way you can track your changes easily.

eg: in /etc/hosts.allow I’ve put a comment

#Anuradha added these lines..

portmap : 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

After that, try to mount the NFS share manually to check whether the setup is working.

# mount 192.168.0.166:/home/nfs /media/netdisk
(This is done in the client machine, and I have created a mount point in client’s /media directory.)

* Then add the following line in /etc/fstab to mount the share automatically at the computer startup.

192.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/nfs /media/netdisk nfs rw initr 0 0
Tip: Set the permissions on the nfs share as read, write for every one in the /home/nfs. (This is until I separate the user directories for each user)

This was okay to mount a particular share in a client computer at every bootup. But, what I want is to mount the relevant users share up on his login. So at this moment I create a small shell script to get the user ID and mount the particular share. In order to get the job done from this script, I need to have the user NFS share being created in the NFS server. eg: /home/[username] in the NFS server.

The script looks like this.

#!/bin/bash
#Get logged in user and mount the NFS share.
logname > /tmp/users.txt
mount 192.168.0.116:/home/`cat /tmp/users.txt` /media/netdisk
I have to make this script run after the user login.

But this way the user’s profile will not be in a roaming mode. I wanted to test this as Ill. So made the /home directory of the user available from the NFS server.

* Create a directory for each and every user in the NFS server by the user’s user ID.

eg: # mkdir /home/user1
(I have give the mode as 777 for the time being…)

In the client machine, I have to configure the autofs.

* Add the following line to the /etc/auto.master

/home /etc/auto.home
* Then create a file /etc/auto.home and put the following line there.

* soft, initr, rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nosuid,noexec 192.168.0.116:/home &

* I added the following line in the /etc/auto.misc too.

/home -fstype=nfs 192.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home
* Finally you have to edit the /etc/fstab and make the /home directory hard mounted.

192.168.0.116:/home /home nfs rw,intr 0 0
When reboot and log in as test user “foo” with passwd “foo123”. The login was successful with one error.

“$HOME/.dmrc… some thing

To resolve this error, I setup a directory in the NFS server and named it same as the LDAP user ID and gave the permission as follows.


chown -R [usr_name] /home/[user_dir]

chmod -R 770 /home/[user_dir]
Then it set the home partition and also set the permission “world non-writeable”.

Authenticating Windows Clients.

* Use pGina plug-in to handle the ldap authentication.
* In pGina configuration select the ldapauto.dll plugin to configure the authentication.


Server 192.xxx.xxx.xxx
mode : Search
* Put the total dn and dc entry to the search base
* in pGina configuration you have to put your profile


H:\\192.xxx.xxx.xxx\home\samba\%username%
(this way it’ll seek the profile that comes under UID each login)

I Have to attach the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, that is the file which handles the sharing thing. But It's too long and will not be suitable for this post.)

Note: All unix users who wish to authenticate as NT users have to have samba user credentials too)

Blocking USB storage mounting.

In GNU/Linux

* Use Polkit-Gnome

Define policy kit in the client machine as below.

Under “Storage” section find “Mount file systems from removable drives”.

Then edit it;

Anyone : No

Console : No

Active Console : Admin Authentication

Then using Webmin, I can log in to LDAP server and manage LDAP users and groups. I can give sudo poIr to some user by adding that user to an admin group (GID 123). After I add the user to the admin group that user have sudo power and can mount USB pen drives. And keep in mind that the user gets admin power of that particular system too.

Tip: In Ubuntu Systems it's always a good idea to create the super user and secure it with a password. Else any one can activate the super user account and your system will be in risk.

sudo passwd root
In Windows

* Windows Local Security Policy.

Map a Samaba Share as a Network Drive for Windows.

* Installed samba in a GNU/Linux (ubuntu) server (In this case in the same machine which runs the NFS)
* Add a samba user to validate access

smbpasswd -a ‘username’ (here you enter a valid LDAP user name)
* Create directories under the same name, as in NFS and make them shared.

# mkdir /home/servername/share/user1

I created a small shell script to automate the user creation in NFS. (just for fun) But thought some one might get use of it.


#!/bin/bash
echo "Enter the new user name: "
read name
echo "Creating account for $name..."
sleep 2
echo "Creating NFS Share..."
`mkdir /home/$name`
`chown -R $name:2000 /home/$name`
`chmod -R 770 /home/$name`
echo "/home/$name --done"
sleep 2
echo "Creating Samba Share..."
`mkdir /home/virtual/$name`
`chown -R $name:2000 /home/virtual/$name`
`chmod -R 770 /home/virtual/$name`
`smbpasswd -a $name`
echo "NFS Share and Samba Share is ready for user $name"

The above script will get the input of the user name from the keyboard and create the NFS and SAMBA shares for that user. I only had to give the userID which I created in the LDAP as it is.

Please accept my apologies in not arranging this as a step-by-step how to. In GENERAL, I don't follow a structure when I work (In some CRITICAL cases, yes I do follow the steps...). I try to combine the work pieces from here and there and build a system in my way of doing it.

Cheers!

SMS Alerts on root logins

Last week I met Anuradha at Kandy and we talked about various stuff. At one time, Anuradha mentioned about this sms alerting method and how we can use that tools in our working environment. So I thought of trying it out (not in an operational server but in a testing server).

There are several ways to get an alert on your mobile phone when there has being a root login in your server. This is not for a critical server set up. There are other better alert systems for those kind of systems. But, for a small business server, home network this is a very cheep and cool solution.

Assumption:

Your server is a GNU/Linux (I used debian/Ubuntu distribution)

What you need :

• A Mobile Phone with USB cable.
• smstools package.
• Your time.

Let's start.

Install smstools.

# apt-get install smstools

Plug in the phone with the USB cable. And get the device name.

# dmesg |grep usb

eg: You should see some thing like /dev/ttyACM0 or similar. If your phone is not detected then you have to troubleshoot that. ;-)

Now you can edit the configuration file and set up the device and baudrate.

# vim /etc/smsd.conf

#init =
device = /dev/ttyACM0
incoming = yes
#pin =
baudrate = 460800

Most of the time you don't have give modem init commands, cos modern phones have their own init commands.

Start the smstools

# /etc/init.d/smstools start

The location where your messages handled is;

$ /var/spool/sms/

There you have several directories.

checked - Messages cued for various checking, and ready to send after checking.
failed - Messages which being failed to send, and the reason for the failure is stated inside the sms
incoming - This is the place where the system stores incoming messages.
outgoing - This is where the message to be sent is stored as a text file.
sent - Messages which sent successfully.

To test your configuration, create a simple text file and put it in the outgoing directory. It should be sent in seconds to the mobile phone number specified in the text file.

Format of the message.

From : Foo
To : 9471XXXXXXX
This is the message, Testing...
If the number specified in the file gets the sms, you are ready to do the real thing. :-) Else you can always manually edit the /etc/smsd.conf or run dpkg-reconfigure smstools and set the values.

Now you want to be alerted via a sms when some one loged in as root to your server locally or remotely.

What I did was very simple. I created the text file in somewhere (/home/user/alert.txt).


From: Server1
To: xxxxxxxxx
A Root Login Detected.

Edit the bashrc file (expecting your default shell is bin/bash) and put the line showed below to get my job done.

# vim /root/.bashrc

And put the following at the end of the file.

cp /home/user/alert.txt /var/spool/sms/outgoing/

Done.!

What it does is each time some one loged in as root, the text file which I created will be copied to the smstool's outgoing directory and cued. smsd will send it to the phone number I specified in the text file. And a copy of the sent message will stored in the sent directory too. If you want you can clean it later (manually or by using cron with a rm /var/spool/sms/sent/alert.txt).

You have to keep a phone attached to the server and the phone should have credit to send out going messages!!:D

Hope this help.!

Word Children's & Elder's Day

Children are the future of the world. We must protect them and guide them to make the world a better place for every species. We must teach them good habits and develop a good mind set on them. If we don't guide them on the right track, future of this world is not going to be a very nice one.!

Elders are those who have made this world what it is now... (I'm NOT referring to the elders who made this world a living hell). They have sacrificed their lives to make ours a better one. So we have to protect our elder generation with love and care.

My Blog in Sinhala

I started to blog in Sinhala. "Sinhala" is my first language. I thought it would be nice if I keep a separate blog for Sinhala postings. And there in that blog, I will talk about the life, imotions, etc. Less or no technical stuff. And I will write this blog as usual, in English.

My Sinhala Blog is : htpp://anuradha-life.blogspot.com

Cheers!

Synaptic Scrolling Problem

- GSynaptics couldn't initialize. You have to set 'SHMConfig' 'true' in xorg.conf or XF86Config to use GSynaptics -


Is any one there who got this error message when trying to configure your touchpad using gsynaptics? "Yeh I had that message"... I installed Debian lenny by saying "See you later" for my neat, one year and three months old Ubuntu installation. after completing the installation my touchpad's scrolling feature was not working. I googled for a solutoin and found several tips and tricks to overcome this, but didn't help, so had to read up a bit about it and found a way to get it working.

Even though it says "set 'SHMConfig' 'true', it did not work. Then I add the server layout and second InputDevice to the xorg.conf.

Here's what I did to over come the issue.

added this section to the xorg.conf

# vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf


Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
EndSection

Then I add the following lines to the bottom of xorg.conf to specify the server layout. I did not have any of the parameters for server layout, so I added all the sections to it.


Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

After doing this I restarted the Xserver (Alt+CTRL+Backspace). Scroll works fine! but I still get that error message when I try to run gsynaptics. :-) But for now I'm not going to worry about the gsynaptic, but will have a look at it later.

Ceylon Tea Musium

Last weekend I had an opportunity to visit the World's one and only Tea Museum, Ceylon Tea Museum. The museum is located in Hantana, 3KM drive from the beautiful “world's heritage city” Kandy. The museum building itself is an abundant tea factory (built in 1925) for more than a decade.

The museum has 4 floors. Ground floor occupies with heavy machinery like tea rollers, power generators, and other large mechanical equipments which being used in the very first tea factories in Sri Lanka. The first tea roller which were used in year 1889 and many other machineries are displayed in the ground floor. And most of the engines and rollers used over a century ago have being restored to working condition.

When you go to the second floor you will be able to see the whithering process and some other equipments used for drying, and categorizing the tea for various qualities. And there is a section which contains the equipments used by Mr. James Taylor, the father of the tea manufacturing in Sri Lanka. In 1867, Mr. Taylor planted the first tea to be grown commercially in Sri Lanka.


The third floor occupies with more drying racks and two shops where you can buy quality Ceylon tea. And I didn't forget to visit the top floor for a nice warm tea. (for those who don't know, my favourite drink after water is "Tea", I never say no to a cup of tea at any time of the day). While the tea is getting ready, I enjoyed the view from the top floor window. And there was a telescope which we can nicely see the hills belong to Hunnasgiriya region.


I think this museum is a place where every one should visit. A place with a value of informational, and historical, which tells the story of the tasty tea manufacturing in Sri Lanka.

Some facts at a glance;

Location : 3 KM from Kandy town, towards the Hantana road.
Ticket Prices : Students : Rs. 10/= Adults: Rs 25/= (As at 03 -05 -2008)
A friendly staff, with a person who explains every thing through out the tour inside the museum.

P.S:
My camera was broken that day so could not get good pictures of the factory, but I got some photos from my phone, which are poor in quality. Sorry about that.

ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් සිංහළෙන්

අද දිනයේ මීගමුව පිහිටි A.G. School of Management Studies හි පැවති ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් වැඩමුලුව අතරදී මා, අනුරාධ, ඩනිෂ්ක, යජිත්, රවිත්, කුංචන (සාකච්ඡාව අතරමැද නිදා ගත්තේය) ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධතියට සිංහළ සහාය මුසු කිරීම පිළිබඳ සාකච්ඡා කළෙමු. මම මෙතෙක් කළක් සිංහළ ලිනක්ස් පිළිබඳ අවධානයක් යොමු නොකිරීම පිළිබඳ කණගාටුචක් ඇති වූ අතර අද සිට හෝ ඒ හා සම්බන්ධ ව්‍යාපෘතියකට සම්බන්ධව කටයුතු කිරීමට අසහස් කළෙමි.

අද දින මෙම ස්ථානයේ පැවති වැඩමුලුව සඳහා සිසුන් 50 කට ආසන්න ප්‍රමාණයක් පැමිණි අතර ඔවුන් සියලු දෙනාම ලිනක්ස් මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධතිය පිළිබඳ දැඩි උනන්දුවක් හා කැමැත්තක් දැක්වූහ. මෙම මොහොතේ (රාත්‍රී 11.55) මම, කුංචන, යජිත්, චනුක, ඩනිෂ්ක A.G. School of Management Studies ආයතනයේ පරිඝණකාගාරයේ අවදියෙන් සිටින අතර අනුරාධ මුලින් අප හා සිටින බව කීවද හවස් යාමයේදී පැන යන ලදී. :-)

හෙට දින මෙම වැඩමුලුවේ දෙවෙනි සහ අවසන් දිනයයි. තව ස්වල්ප වේලාවකින් මා නිදා ගත යුතු වේ. දැනට නවතිමි.

Workshop on Unix (GNU/LInux) Shell

We (LKLUG) organized a workshop on Unix Shell, to provide some hands on training about the Unix Shell. We used GNU/Linux, a Unix like Operating system as our platform. Today is the first day of the workshop where we covered basics of the shell.

• Introduction to Shell by Anuradha R.


• Basic Filters by Bud


• Advanced Shell usage by Sapumal

We conducted this workshop in the Lanka Software Foundation's Lab at UCSC. We expected 20 participants but there were around 25! Since we planed this as a geek's event we didn't mind standing positions and shared seats. :-) Right now Sapumal is conducting his session, the last session for the day and tomorrow we'll cover up some more advanced stuff in Shell Scripting.
Anuradha's Session.

Bud's Session.


Sapumal's Session.

Insert a copy right label to a set of photos.

Most of us have photo galleries in the Internet. And we upload hundreds of thousands of photos to the Internet. I started to use this nice image manipulation tool named "Imagemagick" to insert a label (a copy right label or some thing) to a set of photos at a one go. since I felt it's very easy to do it by saving it as a script so I can just run it any time I want. Imagemagick is a very famous tool and it has various set of tools to manipulate images. You can check the man page for all the commands and syntaxes, or from web too. Since couple of people asked about this from me I thought of sharing it among all. Imagemagick is available for Mac, Unix and Windows platform too. But I'll stick to my favourite GNU/Linux way of doing it.

First check whether imagemagick is already installed in your system

In Debian based systems issue this command and see the result

#dpkg -l | grep imagemagick

If you don't have the package, install it using your favourite method. I used the apt.

#apt-get install imagemagick
I have collect all the steps and create the script below and run it inside the directory where the photos are located. Actually I reduced the image size to suite for upload, and reduce the quality a bit too. Then inserted the label to all the photos and finally open the photos in gthumb image viewer. First of all it copies all the photos in to a directory to preserve the originals. So you always have the original photos you've taken.


echo "Resize, Convert, prepare photos to publish for web.";
echo "==================================================";
ls *JPG;
mkdir temp
cp *JPG temp
cd temp
for PICME in `ls *JPG`; do convert $PICME -resize 800x600 -quality 80% $PICME; done
echo "Photos resized to 800 x 600";
for PICME in `ls *JPG`; do convert -pointsize 12 -fill Black -draw 'text 20 20 "Copyright 2007. M.D.D.Anuradha Mallikarachchi. All rights reserved."' $PICME $PICME; done
echo "Label inseted."
gthumb *
You can see the inserted label, at the top right of the photo. and it's very convenient for me, when I have to insert a label for set of photos at a one go.

Oh don't forget to make the script executable (chmod +x script) and put it in /usr/local/bin.

Hope this will be useful to some one. :-)

Minister Dr. Marvin Silva (Bad Marvin) got served!

Today I saw a very interesting news about Mervin Silva's latest thuggery incident. He's being treated very nicely by the staff of Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, with an ink bath and smashing stones and bottles. Well done guys and ladies at Rupavahini. This is what happen when you mess with the wrong people in the wrong territory.

He has entered to the SLRC and threaten to a News Director regarding not publishing a peach he gave in a function, in the news. In the mean time one of his guards had hit the news director and the war started.! The guard is being arrested and minister and rest of his crew being held up in the Rupavahini premises and on the way they go out, all the people have hit them with bottles and stones. His head is damaged and now he is in accident ward.

This guy should be kicked out from politics, father shows his colours in one side and son also follows the father and show the power to innocent people from another side. This is unacceptable. Politics should have a disipline, which is not happening here. And Foolish ministers like this should be banned from politics and should quarantine.

Good work SLRC staff and this is a good lesson to other organisations too, if Mervin comes to your door step and threat you, call the police and don't forget to treat the fucker like SLRC guys!.

I don't think Mervin is going to learn a lesson from this, he will continue to act same way, but Dear Hon President Mahinda, please take necessary actions against this idiot.!

Say NO to Marvin

Some pics at http://www.lankadissent.com/sinhala/news/04_27_12.htm
Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvY8hBb44c8

A Small Idea for Mobile Service Providing Companies.

Time to time I hear new inventions, added features to mobile phones from the mobile communication world. And I'm very happy about the current level of mobile telecommunication capabilities we have in Sri Lanka. I had this idea for a long time and didn't have a time to blog about it. One day when I was with few friends of mine, one of the friends mother said "I was in a deep sleep when my son calls me, and it's a big disturbance to me when people call me while I'm resting". That's the day I got this idea right up in my head.

People who use an Internet Messengers even gmail with chat are already known to this feature and it's not a new thing in that context. I'm talking about setting a status in the IM. For those who don't know this feature yet, here it is. We can type some text and set a message as our status in the IM so all in my contact list can see my status (Available, busy, don't disturb, meeting, etc). Just take a look at the image below, this is a screen shot from my Internet Messenger (Pidgin). I'm sorry about making it horrible to see by erasing the names of my buddy list, it's due to privacy issues. Just take a look at the circled areas. :-)
You can see "Away", "I'm Awake" (My status) and a red sign means "Do not disturb". I can get an idea of the current status of my buddy before I call/text him/her. And that is a small but great feature.


But what I think is, how can we take the benefits of that feature if we implement it in Mobile telecommunication world? Even in other telecommunication fields? Lets see some advantages and disadvantages in my knowledge scope, any one free to come up with more ideas for this.

Advantages

• If the person is in a meeting, he/she can set the status to "meeting". When caller dials his/her number and hit send/call button he/she can see the receiver's status as "meeting". So he can hangup the call. And a miss call alert will send to the receiver. When the caller is unaware that you are in a meeting, he/she will keep on ringing and it's a big disturb to you even your phone is in silence mode.


• 
  When you are driving (actually before you start driving) you can set your status to "Driving", so callers can see you are driving and can hangup if the call is not urgent. It's better not to have strong conversations while you drive, cos that may drive your attention away from the road.


• When you want to rest and do not want to be disturbed, but in the mean time, you do not want to switch off your phone either, you can set the status "sleeping" or "do not disturb" so caller can hangup right after he/she sees the your status message.


• When you want to show the callers that you are busy with your studies/office work, while you are truly busy with your girlfriend/boyfriend and do not want to be disturbed, you can set a customized status, "Studying", "Busy" so callers can get a picture of your current situation. (Kidding but true)

List can go on... but let me stop from here.

Disadvantages and how to over come those.

• People are used to dial the number in the key pad and keep the phone on the ear right after hitting the send button, so the chances of seeing a status which display on the screen is very low.
  How to over come this? How about sending a beep signal once caller get connected to the receiver's phone which has a status set. The signal can be send from the receiver's phone to the caller. And yes, advertise about this feature nicely using some celebrities :-)


• People will not use this feature if they have to walk deep in menus.
  If this feature is embed in to the SIM card, Service providers should find a short way to enter in to "set your status" feature. I have seen there are so many value added features uniquely set for each service providers.


• Any one who find your number can call you and will see your status. So if some one want to spy on you also have a chance to get an idea of what you are doing now.
  It's bit complicated when it comes to security and privacy. So it's bit difficult to come to a compromise situation here. But the service provider always can provide this as an optional feature so any one who like to use it can use, others just don't have to use it. So both service provider and customer are safe!. Customers can't say "ABC Phone company have violated my privacy". Cos it's a feature that user can turn on or off.

There will be more disadvantages too. It's up to the people who are interested in implementing this idea as a feature in their service to find solutions to all the problems that arise.

This feature can be implemented either in the phone or in the SIM card. At present I'm not capable of actually implementing it. But I'm sure mobile phone companies, telecommunication service providers can do this for sure.!

I have a very important thing to say.If one phone company implement this feature in their phone models, they should not patent on this feature, also service providers. This feature should be globally available. Like we all used it in our Internet Messengers. And it should be freely available to customers/users.

So I hope my post will be useful to those who are interested in this field. And I'm sure one day we all will see this feature and many more attractive and very useful features in our hand held communication devices.

Cheers!

Welcome Gibbon

Today Ubuntu released the version 7.10, code named "Gusty Gibbon". After Suchetha's wake up call for upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10, I upgraded to the development version of 7.10 few week ago. I will not explain the whole set of new developments and added features here, you can see the full release note in the Ubuntu web site. But I see some improvements in this version and hope to explore the Gibbon to see whether it is really gutsy.

Ubuntu users, happy upgrading to you all.

Share your photos with F-Spot

Last week, I was looking for a simple and fast tool to organize and upload photos to my flickr and picasa galleries. After going through the photo management software tools available for GNU/Linux, I found this nice, "free and easy", software called F-Spot. This is a product from Novel Inc and more details can be found in F-Spot web site.

Some basic but main features.

• Import photos directly from the camera, disk or from a directory.
• Organize photos according to your selection criteria.
• View as a slide show, full screen.
• Upload your photo set directly to Flickr, Picasa, etc.
• Resize your photos on upload by selecting all at once.
  
• And many more feature for you to explore. :-)

I found this tool very useful, cos it was a headache uploading photos to Picasa or flickr from the web interface. And F-Spot can save the time on Resizing, optimizing photos manually for upload. This is just a one tool available for the job, you will find some other tools that does this even better. But... it's choice! :-)

Software Freedom Day 2007 - The Day

Finally the day came. I was organizing the event at Matara. After a very successful event at University of Ruhuna, came down to Colombo, excel world where there is an event going on right now!!!. Time right now is 9.36pm.

Even though we all were very tired after Matara event, after came to Exell World all the hard feelings went off... I sang a song in the open Karaoke evening too. Since the event is happening right now... I will blog more later... Right now I need to stick with the event!

Enjoy the freedom.! Use FOSS.!

You may already know, may be not till now.

Please register your self in my private club! Amazing benefits to members!!

Your email :


Password :

In many web sites (specially in public forums) you may have request to enter the email and password (as I've asked above). Many of you (Non IT and IT professionals) give your email and your password, which is the one you use to log in to your email. Am I correct? If your answer is "yes", I'm very sorry to say that the owner of the particular forum or the web site might have access to your email account (cos you have provided the user ID and Password) .

I did a small research regarding this matter using 20 users. (just the people in my office) And I found that 19 out of 20 Internet users were doing this mistake. It's obvious that one tend to enter the email and it's password by the way that it's being asked. So I thought of posting this for the sake of others who still does this mistake. :-)

Social Engineering is a very beautiful art. One can use it for good, one can use it for bad. The above trick is used by some people to get other's personal information. And you will become a victim by being unaware and careless. Your email will be accessible to the out sider, and will be used to spam others, and will do various other bad things "as you do it".

So never ever enter your email password (you may type the email address) in any other web site except your mail box login page. Your email password should be used only with your mail account, any thing other than that, give a different phase as the password. Be aware. Don't be a Cyber victim!

Software Freedom Day 2007

Sri Lankan FOSS community is organizing the SF Day 2007 in parallel to the global SFD event. This event will happen in three areas in the country, Colombo, Kandy and Matara. This will have awareness programs to the school, university students and to the general public. We wish to hold the event on both 14^th and 15^th September at these three areas.

The general idea of these event is to advocate and promote Free and Open Source software, GNU/Linux, and also to encourage people to use those, etc. I will update my blog about this event time to time.

Feel the Force - Read the Source.

Seven/ Seven/ Seven

Humm... after a while... today is a very nice day. it's 07/07/07. Some people says it's too bad to have a day like this, ( හතේ හත ), but for me today was a very good day from the morning.

From last week onwards I started to cram for my semester exam. Well, you will be surprise to hear about my academic work, yeh, I know I'm an idiot. I'm doing this degree from year 2003. :-( I'm doing BIT. I had to finish this by year 2006, but, I'm still in my second year, last semester. I paused my academic work due to some idiotic reasons, which are unacceptable and unreasonable. But now I'm back. Have to finish this degree by next year. So even though it's bit difficult to balance the work-family-degree, I'm trying my best to be a graduate!

Humm.. while that in mind, I went to see the movie, Live Free or Die Hard 4.0. Me, Madhu, Suchetha went to the Majestic Cinema, which has a dolby digital sound system. After I reserved the tickets via the eticketing service I was expecting to enter the hall without a hassle. But case was different, even it says "You can save the time and money by reserving the tickets via Internet" in the web site, we had to stay in a cue for about 20 minutes till the ticketing people receive the list of online reservations. Then after a small "rugby battle" I managed to get my three tickets.! Then come the next joke in the Majestic cinema bar, "Beer is not allowed to take in to the theater" F**K!!!, we were supposed to drink the beer at out side and then go to the cinema. humm, by that time, the movie would have reached the end. I find it very hard to understand the importance of existence of that bar inside the cinema. People have no time to drink their beer!!! F**k the beer, we got two Red Bulls, Coke, Cream Soda, Pop corn, Chips and went in. Movie was very good. එල කිරි.

Humm after stretching the brain and ears, came home safely. Have to start the studies again now. So see you later.

Have a nice 07/07/07.

Ubuntu 7.04

I'm upgrading my Ubuntu 'edgy eft' to 7.04 code named 'feisty fawn'. I've been using Ubuntu for an year and I'm getting more and more into the distro cos it's getting better and better in Computer Desktop world. Recognition of new hardware is excellent. And I love the neat Gnome Desktop. I'm enjoying my sunny Saturday with Ubuntu at home!!

If you are interested in Upgrading to 7.04, just issue the below mentioned command. No need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, Update manager will automatically replace the 'edgy' with 'feisty' and will comment the third party repos temporary. Issue the command as a normal user. Not the super user. It will ask for the 'sudo' password when needed. And mind, you need a broad band connection if you use the Internet as the upgrade medium. Follow the on-screen instructions. Please read the released notes too. ;-) Enjoy the Power of Ubuntu Desktop.

$ update-manager -d

P.S. You can only directly update to 7.04 from 6.10. Older version users have to upgrade the distro to 6.10 before you begin.