ComPair - Match Peers and Make Pairs

     Something, I've been trying for sometime now. Finally, done I guess. I don't want to talk anything lengthy about it. After all, there is nothing I can really tell about it. It's a simple app that would compare the names you put in and find out who make the best pair. How does it sound like? :D

Does the very idea of it make you want to ask me "errrr.... Could-you-not-come-up-with-anyother-idea-to-build"? You say so. Well, it was fun building it. Not just the logic part (Can you guess that? :D) but the struggles I had in building it - with Rails - top to bottom and also deploying it. 

I've been trying to host this right from Yesterday night and hours of attempts later where I finally gave up all the hope on hosting things at Heroku, I brought OpenShift into play. And you know what? I'm not exaggerating, but OpenShift just works! A push request and within a couple of minutes, the site went live. Yay!

Now, why did I decide I need to make a blog post about it? Well... I'm feel unusually energetic right now jumping between places like a ping pong ball kicked across an empty hall. Is writing this blogpost helping me? Honestly, I've got no idea. But, I don't feel like doing anything but this. 

Try and let me know how it is. Will you?

Open Weekends – A weekend well spent

     You know what? This post seriously deserves a better title. I know it sounds quirky, but I couldn't manage to jog my mind up to bring out a better one. Well, anyway, going by what it says, I'll have to agree that Open Weekends was indeed a great thing that happened in the recent times for me, Mozilla and of course, for most other people here in Chennai. Frankly, a couple of months back everything was just a thought. Well, hey, no. Not even a thought. An 'Ambition' may be? Hmmm... Yeah, you could say that. So, there it is, ambition – to do something for the city, that's known to have a great geek culture.

So, how did this happen? Before we begin talking that, let me tell you, we're not doing this the usual way – this guy came, the other one spoke that, he clapped, she thanked, yadda yadda yadda... – Dude! Everyone knows what happened. It's there in the agenda. What really matters and should matter to each one of us is the reason why everything happened the way it did. For what its worth, I believe in this – When you tell others something, its really important for you to communicate what you did, why you did and how you did. People simply call it – the 'takeaway factor' –What you take or learn out of something you did or see happen, that inspires others to do things with a better vision and motives. It becomes particularly significant in cases like our communities where most of the learning comes from within ourselves.

I really have this habit of drifting away once I start talking :D So yeah. It was February. I had just returned after attending GNUnify in Pune. From the very beginning I was thrilled about the very idea of different communities coming together to do something. After all, community collaboration and sharing is what that defines the concept of open source and sharing, right? The moment I was invited to attend the conference, believe me, Pune didn't excite me. Rather what piqued my interest was my intention to see how these conferences happen. I mean like, I wanted to see if meetups like these did really have the potential to bring out successful partnerships among the various communities in India.

And trust me, learning took up a whole new curve those two days. Sharing of practices, ideas and the methods –that's what happened there. And me being a Chennai fanboy, each time when something was told or discussed about Pune being a great city and the opportunity it provided, I would think, “Why not do this at Chennai? Why not here?” - Just like how your parent would think when your neighbor's son scored better than you in exams. :P I didn't know what the problems would be in organizing such an event here. Honestly, I couldn't think of any reason otherwise and just wanted to do it sometime soon and thought, may be I'd wait for the right moment to host one.

So well, I had returned from Pune and was busy with college and my other priorities back home ;) And there comes Karthik and Naresh into the story –The guys who bugged me to host a MozCafe here. They had like, been telling me to organize a get-together for about a month and I failed to do each time – had too many things in mind. Finally, somehow, like about a month after GNUnify, we managed to host an informal meetup of sorts here in Chennai. We didn't have much time to plan ahead on things but wanted to do with something cheap but, out of the box –Marina Beach! Yes... Myself and few other fellows here met at the city's own paradise – the Marina beach. Meeting with us was Wikimedia India's executive council member, Bala Jeyaraman or Bala anna as how we'd call him. [fondly, of course, as people used to write ;) ]

Among the many topics we spoke that day, this “A GNUnify in Chennai” was one. He was so supportive of the idea. And was okay in doing one right on! “Why not do this sometime in May?” he said, we have ample time to plan and execute things. Everyone agreed. And thus became Open Weekends a reality!

Organizing an event like this is so much fun. You get to say hi, talk and shake hands with many people you might not even have heard about earlier. You develop your circle far and beyond. Personally, as an organizer, this is what I'd always look out for, whenever I do or get myself involved in something. So, as soon as it was decided that Open Weekends was happening, I wrote a one page agenda – in English – with a language that's plain and simple – and no mumbo jumbos – putting forth why I thought this had to be done in Chennai. I had sent it to my guys here and they agreed too.

Next was promotions. We had no ideas on what to do, how to do and the rest. We just wanted to see if there were any takers or people who were interested to participate in this mission. We extensively used Facebook, the Linux user groups', Wikipedia's and Mozilla India's lists. Most of them who came forward to reply, were very appreciative of what we had planned to do. And some people had doubts and once you spoke to them, they were okay as well. That's how Atul Jha from the Open Stack community and Shrinivasan from the Chennai wing of Indian Linux Users Group had come forward to participate in Open Weekends. I really thank them for their support towards organizing this event.

For about a month and a half, it was all like this. Talking to people, writing emails, posting updates, tweeting – just the online stuff. And then once we had the list of people interested in participating – a tentative list – from which we had called for the ones who wanted to speak at the event. The whole idea of doing this event was providing opportunity for everyone, not just the guys we know who could speak well. Well, mind you! You're making a calculative risk here – of putting the participants who come to the event to sleep. :D But you know! At times, its worth taking. You see new talent emerge. So, I made that choice – calling for people who wanted to speak at the event. And that's how we had roughly about five speakers that also included our very own Soumya Deb – Well, I needed at least one guy as a backup who could wake the people up in case everyone had slept, right? :P

So, the plan was 'just talking' the first day and hackathon the second day. Yeah. We also had a hackathon. We didn't want to restrict the guys on just a thing or two. Mainly because, we didn't or won't know what the participants might be knowing about or be interested in. So, we generalized it as 'Mozilla hackathon' – Do whatever you feel like doing – Build Firefox addons, hack Thunderbird, make apps for Firefox OS or just whatever you feel like. Along with it was the Mediawiki hackathon handled by YuviPanda – thus giving all a wide variety of choice to choose from. And I was so confident that every guy or girl who comes there will atleast know any one of the above. Acquiring venue was no big deal as well. Thanks to ThoughtWorks and Railsfactory for their timely help. Original plan was to host it at ThoughtWorks but unfortunately, the venue had to be shifted to Railsfactory for a few reasons.

So, rest is all the same. Event had proceeded exactly as expected. One thing, I was not very sure about was the participant count. I thought may be we'd have about 20 to 25. But, never in my wildest of wildest dreams, did I think of a count like 40. Sometimes, it brought me both shock and surprise to find that even old Wikipedia contributors like Sengai Podhuvan had turned up for the event.

Anyway, that was my take on Open Weekends. The list goes on and on and on! So, let me just put , "thanks to all who made it happen!". I knew this event would be fun – meeting friends, talking tech, learning new things – and everything that we wanted to do couldn't have happened in a better way. And this is definitely a great start for Chennai :)

Pictures here : http://flic.kr/s/aHsjFso6Ya

Open Weekends, Chennai

Community Collaboration is very essential when it comes to Open Source. We’re just a group of individuals motivated by passion and moved by interest. Our paths may differ. But remember, we’re all striving for the same cause – Freedom and Openness and that’s exactly the reason why we need to collaborate on different arenas – sharing of technology, methods, practices, knowledge and know-how.
And thus happened the Open Weekends idea! Chennai is home to a great geek culture. People here love technology. Sadly though, there is no proper platform and medium to collaborate. With this Open Weekends, we hope to break that barrier to bring the people here an opportunity to learn and share. This might not be as big as it sounds like (I hope it did). But is definitely a good start.

Next weekend on the 25^th and 26^th, come join us at the ThoughtWorks Chennai campus at the Ascendas IT Park, Thiruvanmiyur where Mozilla, Wikipedia and Open Stack communities come together to host a plethora of talks, meetups and hackathons throughout the weekend.

Follow this space for more information : https://www.facebook.com/events/152064334973643/?ref=3

We promise to keep you entertained, have you thrilled and make you smile! :)

The Pirate Bay AFK–What I made out of it

I’m a big fan of the Pirate Bay. I have to admit, yeah. But, wait. Do you know what Pirate Bay is? Oh, yes you do. I may speak for openness and non-piracy and “Hey guys, please give credit to software manufacturers etc.” and some stuff like that. But, inside of me, I still have a little of my childish urge to get things for free. Who doesn’t? You get movies, software and what not… with absolutely no effort. And now with unlimited broadband plans with decent speeds, every person has access to things he wouldn’t even have had a chance to look into. Often, when I ask people, “Why do you want to use torrents?” they’d tell me… Or forget people. When I ask myself or when you ask yourself, the answer we’d get is – “Why waste money on buying stuff when I can get it for free? I’d of course, buy things which I consider them worth. But, for others, why would I do it?”

This was the center of discussions that were filmed for the movie The Pirate Bay – Away from Keyboard, which was released very recently. The way the movie was filmed - It didn’t look like it was to safeguard the Pirate Bay. At least to me. The founders of the site say they are not responsible for things that are being shared and that it is the user who’s actually responsible. But, don’t you think, if your medium or idea promotes doing things wrong, it is you who is responsible for taking corrective measures?

 

The Pirate Bay AFK

On a serious note, one thing is damn well true. Movie studios and software manufacturers who put in their hard work and effort in making products (with quality or otherwise) need to be credited for what they have done. It is how they make their living. To share things for free, without any restrictions the copyrighted material does not obviously look good. Thinking from the perspective of the manufacturers, would you actually want your product to be sold for free? If you do not like it, why pirate it? Better avoid using it.

The idea, platform – everything from top to bottom sounded great. If there was or is a way to prevent illegal activity, Pirate Bay is the best way to promote and share stuff.

Lvextend to the rescue. - Increasing the size of Root partition in Linux Filesystems.

I'm a linux newbie. I've been playing with it for about a year and a half now and I still see myself a novice user. Probably because I'm not a proper computer science student or may be I wasn't good enough with linux filesystems. Yeah, these things are such a pain in the ass. I agree. Root, Swap, /Boot, Logical volume, physical volume, ext4, lvm, sda, partition, bla-bla-bla, bla-bla-bla... "Oh my God! Spare me the linux mumbo jumbo. I just wanted to be an average user. I didn't want my linux experience to suck bad! Especially with drives and partitions. Grant me this wish, please..." I begged. "What is it son?", asked the Almighty.

"My linux root partition (the partition represented by "/") is running out of space. What do I do? I'm not good with partition manager or the command lines, for I know nothing." God replied, "Here's how..."

First understand what Logical Volume and a Physical volume is. Physical volume is the physical, abstract partition that exists. It is hard coded. That is how the disk drives and the drive partitions in it exists. Logical partitions doesn't exist as a single entity altogether for you to find and point at. They are made out of groups of physical volumes. I'd rather suggest you to refer to the diagram at the LVM Wikipedia page for more information.

Well, here's the real problem. You have installed your linux operating system in your PC by some means. Either using conventional installer mechanism, like Anaconda in Fedora or RedHat supported OSes or like me, with "Install inside Windows" as in Ubuntu. :P

Whatever it is, let's assume for the sake of this article or for real that you had messed up with the partition sizes and now you notice that the size of your root is annoyingly small. Annoying because of the pop-ups that come up, as and when you start to meddle something in it or when you boot your PC up. Goal is to increase any of the size of root, obviously. But, you want your other files to be intact and your existing Windows-Linux dual boot to be undisturbed or rather to put it precisely, everything to be the same except that you want your root size to be increased. "No way!." would tell the old me. "Bitch please... Get me your computer.", I shall tell now.

I'm taking that the linux OS you run shall work in legacy grub or the old grub, to be clear to all(E.g. Fedora 15, 16). Because, that's where you'd find a /boot partition as against grub2 where you wouldn't find one like that. Not an issue. All that really matters is to identify the root partition and increase the size, which I'm sure you can recognize as to what it is. That is, to find if it is /dev/sda9 or /dev/sda10 or whatever it is. And also, we're considering that the file system of the root partition to be lvm2 pv. (linux volume management).

Now, first step: Shut down your computer and make a bootable device with a linux OS. Preferably Fedora, because that's what I'm going to be using throughout and I guess it'll be easy for you to follow. If not, not a problem. Just make sure you install the packages using command line or through GUI.

Step 2: Boot from bootable device and install "Gparted." GUI partition manager for linux in the Live OS.

su -c 'yum install gparted'

Step 3: Run it as adminstrator, find a suitable drive and create a partition out of it, as unallocated space. The space you take out of the original drive is purely your wish. You may take out 5GB or 10GB and all that is left to you. If you can allocate an entire drive to increase the size of root, then fine. Else, follow this way.

Step 4: Right click the unallocated space and make a partition, preferably the same format as that of the lvm2 pv. (ext3 or ext4) After you format, let's assume the new device formed under sda to be /dev/sda10. Replace the sda10 with whatever you get, like if it is sda5, you take it to be /dev/sda5. Right?

Step 5: You can't simply extend this new volume to the root. That is because Gparted doesn't work with LVMs. You'll have to go the command line way.

Type,

"pvcreate /dev/sda10"

Step 6: Type

vgextent <volumegroupname> /dev/sda10

How do you find your volumegroup name ? Type

vgdisplay

and the VG name in it, specifies the Volume Group Name which in my case was vg_laptop.

So the command would be,

vgextent vg_laptop /dev/sda10

Step 7: Next is to find the number of extents. You can achieve this either using command

vgdisplay -v

as like "vgdisplay -v vg_laptop" where the Free PE value gives the number of extents.

Alternatively, you can use, vgdisplay command, that again displays the Free PE value.

Here, I found my Free PE value to be somewhere around 319. (Don't get confused with the screenshots provided. They have been given just for example purpose and doesn't actually reflect the original values that were executed for implementation.)

Step 8: Type

"lvdisplay"

to find the Logical Volume Path.

Which in this case was found to be: LV Path: /dev/vg_laptop/lv_swap

Step 9: Type

lvextend -l +<number-of-free-extents-found-in-step7> <logical-volume-path>

e.g., lvextend -l +319 /dev/vg_laptop/lv_swap

Step 10:

resize2fs /dev/vg_laptop/lv_swap

Voila ! Your root size has just been increased.

Sources :

http://serverfault.com/questions/297631/extend-volume-group-with-adjacent-unallocated-space
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Cluster_Logical_Volume_Manager/nofreeext.html

My weekend with Mozilla

   It has taken me about two long weeks to sit down and write a blog post. Hey there, I am talking about the Mozilla Mania and Tech Carnival Sastra that we had sometime back. Am I just too busy or not managing time properly? I had already thought about that a million times, before calling my state “Helpless”. Well, enough of oh-sorry-you’re-making-me-sleepy stuff.

Exactly a couple of weeks ago, we had two big events coming in Tamil Nadu. One at Velammal Engineering College, Chennai on 6^th October and another one at Sastra University, Tanjore the very next day. Preparations had started about a week before the events. Each day, after I return home from college by evening, I would talk about an hour or two with the organizers, who would call me to ask about arrangements, logistics, food and again the regular “We sure will get goodies in time right?” It gives you so much pleasure and enthusiasm replying to a responsible team, although sometimes can make you a little tired in answering too many questions. :P

The swags had arrived to me just in time. Thanks to Konstantina, for making sure of that. I had to pick up Gauthamraj, my fellow Rep, from the Railway station, on early Saturday morning. Because it was kind of his first time in Chennai. But, I fell asleep and he had to find his way to my home. Sorry Gautham :( And, about the time when we had got dressed up and ready to start to the venue, Deb had landed at the Airport and was picked up already. We had a lot of goods to carry to the venue and the organizers had sent us a car to reach the college premises where we were joined by Karthik Padmanabhan and Naresh Kumar.

The hospitality of VEC was downright awesome! Volunteers had accompanied us wherever we went. The organizers had arranged a pretty good team to help us with the workshop. From students and staff to the Head of Department, everyone seemed too friendly.

Around the time, when we got prepped up and ready to say, “Hey every...”... oops, is there.. uh? Ummm... ?!” “Well, sorry, there is a power problem. We are sorry for the interruption.“ said an organizer. Yeah, power problems are rampant in Tamil Nadu. But, this ?! The irony or beauty of the situation, whatever you call it, is that, the back up had also failed that day. We had to wait for about an hour or so, before we could start the session. Gautham however, had made an intelligent use of the time and kept the crowd engaged with FOSS, Mozilla and Webmaker initiatives.

Soon after, boom! The power was back. For almost about 3 to 4 hours, Deb had given a good session with Firefox Addon making. There was enthusiasm all around. Students rising their hands, asking doubts. We had just enough time to wind up the worshop back at VEC. We were given special shields by the College's Entrepreneurship Development Cell for participation in Mozilla Mania. Call it a little too much ?! I won't say so. After all, its Mozilla !

After the event got over, we had a little over five hours before we started for Tanjore to attend the Tech Carnival 2k12, where we were supposed to conduct similar sessions. Deb, myself and Gautham had come to my home and spent some time here. Soumya had successfully managed to flatter my parents with his so called “obedience and respect towards elders.”. Well, that's all what happened here.

And at around 8 or so, we started to again. Myself, Gautham, Naresh and Soumya, at Egmore station to Tanjore. When everything seemed to go smooth, we suddenly noticed that our names weren't there in the boarding list ! We got all panicked, shocked and finally surprised only to know that our tickets were upgraded. The night's journey was unforgettable. We were talking everything except Mozilla. :P It was like friends on a bachelor party.

By morning, we were picked up again at the Tanjore railway station. People at Sastra were no less than the ones at VEC. Their reception was equally commendable. Only that we had to run two sessions back to back. Although the first one was a little delayed owing to problems, second session went on to be really nice.

I had to miss so much of Mozilla's events owing to several reasons. “Be it bad luck or fate, I am not blaming anyone, but I had ultimately missed the joy” I would often think and worry. But now, I think I've made up for it. Early Saturday morning, I never knew who Gautham even was. Now, he is my best pal. Not to mention Soumya. He has already been a good friend to me. But we bonded really well those two days and especially the Monday morning. I had my project review that day at my college and I didn't bother to bunk it just to spend time with Soumya to give him company. He had about 6 hours to go before he could board his flight. We didn't know where to go. We were tired, strained and stressed. But, that didn't stop us. Out of nowhere came the thought of hitting the beach to watch the sunrise. At first,I thought Soumya is reserved and moody. That was back when I had first met him during March. Not anymore. I never knew, we would open up so much to ourselves. From our retirement plans to my first crush, there was actually so much to talk about. Probably that brought us really close I feel.

This is the best part I guess. Building community and friends. Mozilla is not always about building good goals, motives and exposure. It also about adding values, creating bonds. Those two days of Mozilla was certainly a memorable one.  

Comes a new blog page !

Hi All !

Its been a while since I wrote a blog on my page. The reason its because, I’ve started writing for the 4cast.com – The new technology site in the making. Doesn’t mean, I would stop blogging here from now.

4Cast shall also host my blog entries.

Follow me @4cast here : http://www.the4cast.com/author/dwarak/

Follow 4Cast : http://twitter.com/#!/We4Cast

Creating Add-on, Hands-on the fun way ! at Chennai Workshop

What makes Firefox the best browser ? Open Source ? nah ! HTML 5 ? No… you gotta be better than that. Look, I’m an average user just wanting to have the best browsing experience. I don’t really care if you got HTML 5 or 4 or 6 in it.  Well, Its not just me. Its about how Firefox has maintained a significant user base. Obviously, it all comes down to the greatest collection of Addons that the browser has got !

We’ve all enjoyed using addons with Firefox. It’s even more fun to develop one right ? We just wanted to share it to a greater crowd there and thus happened the Add On Development Workshop at Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai on 25th March 2012.

The speaker for the event was Soumya Deb a.k.a Debloper. He got along really well with the audience and was very interactive. Assisting him were Dwaraka – (myself), Harvish and Naresh.

We had the session split up into 2 parts, covering, the need to have Addons- an introduction, setting the developer environment in 1st part and developing addons using online builder in the 2nd part.

All the participants had developed a sample add-on that provided a right click menu option to see all the ‘About:<--->’ pages using a simple javascript code.

Internet connection was slow but, we were able to manage though. Thanks to the MIT hospitality team ! You were amazing :) On the whole, the session was very productive and enjoyable !

Click to view the Slides and Notes of the Workshop.

Phonetic Typing…? Yes, you can do that in Linux !

Typing always makes us shit crazy ! English typing is a you-have-to-do-it situation. But, most of them using Internet, are non-Englsh speakers. How about typing in that language ? Not many would’ve learnt typing in that language keyboard layout. Phonetic typing might be an answer. But, do we have the right stuff to get it working ?

Yes, we got tools for that. Consider using Google Transliteration. It works, yes. But, native support for Phonetic typing is always preferable, if you want it to work in a cross-application platform scenario – not just the web. Unfortunately, Google has released its Input Method Editor (IME as how it is shortened) only for Mac and Windows operating systems. Poor old, Linux is left back :(

We’ll now see a workaround to this. iBus (Intelligent Input Bus) to the rescue. Let’s see how to get it working in Linux, in our case a Fedora 16 x64 operating sytem.

Steps

 

1. You first need to install the iBus tools. Do it command line, by typing,

         su –c ‘yum install ibus’

  2.  Once, the install is complete, you may run it by executing,

         ibus-daemon from the run dialog window (Alt+F2)

  3.  You’ll now see a ‘keyboard icon’ getting displayed in your window

4. Right click the window, click preferences and choose the language you want;

5. Always choose a phonetic language;

6. Now, you’ll see an option to choose between the Input Methods as below.

7. Voila ! You’re typing your language ! (Tamil language screenshot has been given below)

The Dual Power Phone Adapter… Finally ;)

Everything has a story behind it. Do you agree ? Once again, I’m going to stick to the same old style of why and how the Dual Power Phone Adapter came into being.

Okay. Down South in Chennai is where I live. We have the worst power shortages here. Nobody knows when the power may go and come back. Real Worse. So, one problem that usually irritates me is when I talk over my cordless phone and power goes down all of a sudden. Line gets lost. Well, after all it’s just 9 volt DC supply that’s powering the base station from the adapter. Why not, use it with a battery cum AC voltage ? So, you know, we could have it set it up like, whenever the power goes, we can use the battery for alternate supply. Cool, right ? I soon decided to make one.

Okay, that was the story behind and now we go on to the schematics of the circuit.

 

Circuit

Essentially, you’ll need

• A 230v, 5A AC supply –> 9v DC supply transformer
• 4 nos. of 1N4001 Diodes or something similar
• Electromagnetic Relay – Something like RSM822 (Data sheet here : http://www.ges.cz/sheets/r/rsm822.pdf )
• A 9v DC Battery
• Connecting Wires
• Phone Adapter Pins

 

In India, the standard power supply is 230v, 5A. Choose the transformer appropriate for you to step down the input voltage to 9v or required power supply that your phone needs. Check with the product manual.

 

1. First step, its obvious. You’ll need to step down, your input power to 9v DC supply.
2. So, connect, your input to transformer and output secondary winding to a bridge rectifier. So okay. Bridge rectifier is one with which you make your input AC into a DC voltage. Essentially DC voltage is a single polarity voltage. It doesn’t have a positive and negative voltage concept at all. So, we’re going to clip the negative side of the AC voltage to get a single polarity. But, that alone is just not enough. It is still a pulse. –> pulsed voltage. To make it tend to much more DC characteristic, we may use a capacitor. Although, we didn’t use capacitor in the circuit given, you may use it for best results as in a full wave rectifier.
   
3. To switch back and forth between the AC and DC supplies, we’re going to use a Relay coil. It is basically a 2-input, 1-output switch, controlled by electromagnetic coil. Whenever the coil gets powered, output from 1 terminal and when the power goes down, output comes from another terminal. We’re going to power the coil in switch with the rectified power from Bridge rectifier and use it send AC input to phone. Whenever, there isn’t AC supply, DC shall take over.
4. Find more about Relays here : http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/components/relay.htm
5. Connect the negatives of both the AC and DC together and use the Relay switch to control the adapter.
6. Use appropriate adapter pins to connect the supply to your phone.
7. This might not be the ‘perfect’ solution to the problem. But, suffices, one may say.

 

Find my adapter here :

 

Find more @ Dwarak'sBlog.

Below is the Cadsoft Eagle Schematic. Free to share and edit

http://ubuntuone.com/4kS5MKZGSQJlQPbQe2m2wv

Kanaku – The Simple Calculator for Windows Phone 7

For sometime now, I’ve been intrigued on developing apps for Mobile devices and platforms. Sure enough, most of the devices right now, run either Android or iOS. Windows Phone 7 platform is slowly gaining momentum, with big break coming from Nokia’s Deal with Microsoft to produce Win 7 phones from now on.

The following is a simple calculator with text boxes and buttons that runs on Win 7 Phone Platform. Designed exclusively for those running v7.1 and above and supports Metro UI.

Source Code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;

namespace calculator
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
            int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
            int z = x + y;
            tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
        }
       
        private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
             int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
            int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
            int z = x - y;
            tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
        }

        private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
             int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
            int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
            int z = x * y;
            tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
        }

        private void button4_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
            int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
            int z = x / y;
            tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
        }
    }

}

Download

The project is hosted at codeplex.com and can be found at http://kanaku.codeplex.com.

Let Linux breathe some ‘Air’

Oye ! We’re not talking about, atmosphere. Rather about, the Adobe’s Cross platform application runtime environment – the ‘Air’. Yes, just like any other Adobe product, Air is very dynamic, interactive and easy to deploy.

Adobe Air is a means to create Rich Internet Applications – RIA as how Adobe wishes to call it. If the term Cross-platform application runtime environment is a little confusing, take it to be, Adobe Air is a means to create application that utilize all the best components of both Web-based and Desktop computing to bring rich interaction and utility to the app for the user. Of late, a lot of applications are being built in Web based environment. Some of them over Flash, while some with Flex. Deploying these applications across all other platforms, Desktop (Windows, Linux and Mac ) and Mobile ( iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 ) has always been an issue to be addressed. With so many platforms and application environments, it is not easy at all, to create a run-time architecture that works in sync with all. Adobe Air is meant to eliminate that.

Many Corporate Giants have started shifting towards Adobe Air now. Adobe themselves are using it for employee directory. NASDAQ, Salesforce.com, Model Metrics are some of them using it currently. eBay also uses Air to deploy its Online Auction Application in Desktop environment.

With Air seeing development at such a fast pace, it is so disheartening to see that, Adobe has stopped development for Air in Linux. Why ? ‘Our priorities are currently towards developing the Mobile platform and the action isn’t currently in Linux.’, says adobe’s blog post. It has been over five months, since this happened. But, it was only recently that I noticed it. I wanted to install Tweetdeck, the One-for-all desktop Social Networking App, that uses Air in my 64 bit Fedora 16 Desktop. Though, Open Source Applications are great, there can never be a match to this freeware Tweetdeck. It’s convenient, easy to setup and you got so many tweaks and options to customize. But, there wasn’t any installation package or repository to do it. I desperately wanted to install Adobe Air over my Linux desktop and had finally done it.

Here’s how to do it.

Installing Adobe Air in Linux

For 32 bit

 

• Go to, Adobe Air download page, you’ll be prompted to choose the old repository. Download the Adobe air v2.6 binary file (.bin)
• Open your terminal.
• Navigate to the location where you’ve your binary file.
• Make it executable by running the following command

     chmod +x <name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin

• Run the file with the command

           ./<name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin

You’re done. You’ll have installed your application. But, would not receive any more updates. If in future, some application requires a new version of Air to run that, you wouldn’t be able to run it for sure.

For 64 bit

 

• Running Air in 64 bit computers is one heck of a job. You’ll need 32 bit libraries to do that.
• So, first, we install 32 bit libraries first. We’ll see the case of Fedora Linux.
• Open the terminal.
• Import the keys first.

 sudo rpm --import http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/xenodecdn/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-15

sudo rpm --import http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/xenodecdn/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-15

• Install RPM Fusion

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

• Install Adobe Air Dependencies

su -c 'yum -y install ld-linux.so.2 gtk2-devel.i686 libdbus-glib-1.so.2 libhal.so.1 rpm-devel.i686 libXt.so.6 gnome-keyring-devel.i686 libDCOP.so.4 libxml2-devel.i686 nss-devel.i686 libxslt.i686 xterm rpm-build'

• If suppose, you get errors like, Adobe AIR could not be installed. Install either Gnome Keyring or KDE KWallet before installing Adobe AIR,

Run the following command

yum install libgnome-keyring.i686

• Make it executable by running the following command

  chmod +x <name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin

• Run the file with the command

  ./<name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin

Done. Great. You’ll run your Air applications now in Linux. Download your air applications and now, you’ll be able to run it with just a click !

Dude, what’s this html5 everyone keep talking about ? *-)

Lately, its been all about html5 all around. In internet, magazines and news reports. What and why does it matter to all of us ? Well, for the absolute beginners of the Web, this is how it goes.

The Roadmap of HTML

HTML is called the Hypertext markup language. During the early 90’s when the Web was still in large development, it was nothing short of an online photocopy of the books and documents in paper. Suppose, say you need to access a book in the web, you’ll get it as a full page, sometimes with nearly 20,000 lines of absolute text. No, images, graphics, nothing. Reading a book seemed much easier compared to reading it online. Whopping 20,000 lines, scrolling and navigating through the lines, proved very boring and un-interesting. Well, that was way back, like two decades ago.

The scenario changed step by step. The inventors of the web (mainly the people at CERN), realized, What if we could bring out each page in the book as separate web pages and provide a way to move to the next page ? So, now, you could access a single page at a time, navigation wouldn’t be a problem, a little content each page would make scrolling and reading much much easier than earlier. Idea was great ! and thus came the concept of Hypertext ! Hypertext is the way to link webpages. Plan was to provide a link to subsequent pages for navigation. And shortly, they introduced means to format the textual content in the webpages. So, now, you could differentiate between text sizes, underlines, bold words, paragraphs and things like that. Wow, web was improving greatly.

As time passed, “Why not introduce graphics and images ?”, the developers asked themselves. “Oh sure. Why not ?”. And yes, images made their way towards Web development. Slowly, it was images all over the place. And, one by one, new technologies came popping over. Notably among them, is the usage of Video in Webpages. Having videos in webpages is so cool. It brings so much life into things, a better interaction with the reader and provides greater understandability to the issue you try to address.

Tags

So, ok. Web pages have all the content. Now, how will the Web browser or the device you use to access the web content, understand where to have the video, paragraph alignment, the image placement etc. A way was needed to tell the browser that this content must be place here. That content need to placed there and like, the content that follows now, is a video and it must be centered. Each element of the webpage need to be identified separately. That’s how tags came into place in a HTML. Tagging of content in a HTML is exactly the reason why HTML is called the “Markup Language”.

Consider, you prepare for your exam. You have large numbers of pages to read. You don’t read them blindly. Do you? Wherever and whenever you come across some notes or points that are important and need to be emphasized while writing, you try to highlight them with your maker, underline them. In a way, you are marking things that are important, you mark up things that are heading or sub-headings. You differentiate among the content available.

The same idea is being used in the webpages. You are marking up the various elements in the webpage for the browser to differentiate between. This marking up, just as how we highlight in books, is achieved in the Web through the use of tags. Tags specify the content that follows, if it’s a paragraph, if that is an embedded audio or video object, if that is an external content etc.

What is the html5 trying to bring ?

 

A lot of features that the web of today uses, like Video and Audio, uses third-party applications and codecs (short for COder and DECoder) for playback. This restricts content distribution across various platforms. Like, some browsers like Mozilla Firefox support only ogg vorbis (an open Audio format ) and theora (open video format) formats. Mac’s Safari supports only .mp3 file formats . Opera again, support .wav file playback. These formats that the browsers support by themselves are called their native formats. What format will I choose to go with now ? Confusion !

This is completely eliminated with the arrival of html5. All browsers shall support a standard video element that could be embedded as a separate tag. Which standard video format could be used is being still debated on. Initially Ogg Vorbis Theora was considered. And amid concerns from Apple Inc., this was later changed to MP4, but is still in very much confusion as to which video format, the browser must support.

Another notable feature that would be introduced with the html5 would be a native support to a standard audio format. It is expected to be something among, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 or Wav formats.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and MathML would become inline from now on. Meaning, they would also be available as tags to be embedded into. Scalable Vector Graphics is a XML specification for drawing Dynamic Graphics and Images with lots of features for compression and scripting ability. MathML would enable us to write Mathematical equations with much ease. Mathematical equation representation in Web pages has always been a problem from the very beginning. In most cases, it was done by the use of images for equation. This problem is also expected to go with the introduction of html5.

HTML5 allows offline application running and storage. Many other features that come with the html5 are, Timed media playback, document editing, Drag and drop, Geolocation.

With already a number of sites, starting to use the html5, this is bound to rock !

Yes, Virginia, We need Email Encryption !

Email encryption has been gaining a lot of attention lately. With growing numbering of security attacks, often in public places like coffee shops, airports and cyber cafes, it is not hard to imagine your confidential data being hacked. There are so many loop holes that a bad guy can use to reach you and sniff your data. Let alone the public places. How about your email security ? What if you lost your Email password ? Now-a-days there are many security features like Recovery Email, SMS Alerts/One Time Password, a 2 stage password mechanism and the like. But still, a little insight about you and your passwords can get the hacker right into your inbox. Though you might know it later, there would be nothing you could’ve done, because, the details that the person had wanted would’ve already been stolen !

May be it could seem like a very complicated case, but sure enough not be taken lightly. Email is more like a personal diary. People might have so many things in their Mail history. Theft of their Email password or mail account is no less than losing their identity.

We now present a way of encrypting your email safely and securely so only you could read it – PGP Encryption !

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What is PGP ?

PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It is data encryption cum decryption standard generally used for transmission of confidential data like Email and files. It was written by Phil Zimmermann in 1991 to answer email security issues.

Some patent problems with the PGP led to Corporates forming their own version of PGP standards, thus making it unavailable for the larger public. So, by July 1997, Open PGP was formed by the IETF. Under this regard, the Free Software Foundation has its own version of the PGP Software – GnuPG, expanded as GNU Privacy Guard.

How it works ?

Open PGP standard that we are currently about to use, works through public key cryptography or in other terms, asymmetric cryptography. In layman’s terms, we encrypt the data using a key and decrypt it with an other key. So, in the end-to-end transmission data we need two keys to work with.

What we do is, we generate two keys. One public key and the other private key. The names are actually arbitrary. Any key can be used as public or private key. Its just that encrypting data with one key can be opened with only the other key.

After generating the public/private keys, we send the public key to the person who wants to send us email/data securely. We can send the public keys through email or can upload it to public key server so anyone wanting to reach us can do so in a secure manner. Anyone trying to read the data in between can get away with only gibberish.

The data they send can be viewed only us, as only we have the private key. This is very important. Never lose your private key or send it to anyone by any means. Better have a backup.

 

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Setting up Email Encryption

Before we start this, things you’ll need to set up the email encryption are, GnuPG – if you plan to go open source or the PGP Desktop, an email client – Thunderbird preferable or if you insist, you might also try having Postbox or Outlook and in case if you’re using Postbox or Thunderbird, you also might have to install Enigmail. The links for all the necessary softwares have been provided at the bottom of the article.

First install your email client, in my case Thunderbird and setup your email accounts. Not to worry much here. Thunderbird has a very easy to setup email account wizard that will guide you. Install the Enigmail addon. Same goes with Postbox.

 

The next thing you need to do is to install a PGP Software. The Enigmail extension that you’ve installed in Thunderbird works only if you’ve got a PGP Engine. I personally would recommend using Gpg4win. It is so easy to use and comfortable to work with. There are two options you can go with – either the full version(38 MB) or just the engine (15MB). The second option is fine.

Once you’ve done all the above, open Thunderbird Client and choose Key Management from the OpenPGP option in the menu bar. Choose key management and you’ll get a screen similar to the one below.

 

Now, choose Generate option to create your new key pair – remember the public and private keys we talked about ? That’s exactly what we’re going to create now.

Type in your account details, choose a passphrase – to verify your authenticity and to revoke your private and public keys. Choose your key validity and you are good to go.

Click on Generate key option and it’ll be a few seconds before you have a valid key. Gpg4win might prompt you to type in your password again to store the generated keys in its local database.

That’s it! You’re done.

Now, send your public keys to the person you want to have secure communication with or upload your public keys to any of the public key servers. Anybody wanting to communicate with you shall use it from there.

When you want to compose an encrypted message, type in your message and choose Encrypt Message from the OpenPGP option in your compose window. Remember, you need to have the public key of the person whom you want to send the encrypted message to.

Once you’ve chosen that option, you could see the message turn gibberish. Perfect Encryption ! Take a look at an example of what you would be sending the message as…

 

 

As for the receiver, he would be prompted for the password on first use to view the encrypted message that he has received and would see the decrypted version of it.

 

See, its that simple ! But remember to backup your keys before you send it to anybody, especially your private keys.

To view the decrypted message in browser, I didn’t find any convincing solution, except for FireGPG that works with Mozilla Firefox, although it didn’t work for me.

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Download Links

Mozilla Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/download

Postbox - http://www.postbox-inc.com/

GnuPG - http://www.gnupg.org/download/

GPG4win - http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html

PGP Desktop - http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=pgp

Enigmail - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/enigmail/

FireGPG - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fire_gpg/

My First Software Freedom Day !

I’m really excited today ! This is because, I had just attended my first Software Freedom Day Celebration at Chennai. Here I am, to tell you the story of how it went, my experiences and meetings with the local biggies and my thoughts about the first FOSS event I had participated in !

The Software Freedom Day – Chennai chapter was organized by the Indian Linux Users’ Group – Chennai Wing at the Madras Institute of Technology Campus, Chrompet and I had been there to represent Mozilla India along with Arun Prakash and Harvish Sekar, both of them being Open Source enthusiasts. Well, back in the morning, we had been one among the first to reach the college and we got a chance to look around it. We were guided by the personnel inside to the SFD Venue – MIT Aircraft Hanger. There were some odd twenty other stalls who were already preparing for the event. Others who had come for the event were, python, LibreOffice, GIThub, spoken-tutorials.org, etc.

Honestly, I had no great or big ideas on how to proceed with the event. After all, it was my first event and I was getting kind of nervous about my participation for the reason that I was informed, we would be hearing some of the big names in the FOSS circles later the day. All I had in mind was, “I shouldn’t mess it up”. But, trust me, the moment we introduced ourselves that we are from Mozilla, we were treated so nicely. The event co-ordinator stood up, shook hands with us and was there with us all along, to help sort out things. He even asked if we were comfortable and things like that. He expressed his happiness over Mozilla’s participation for event.

Find more @Flickr Blog.

Over the years, Mozilla has carved a nichè for itself in the world of Open Source. Remember that, it has brought in so much for free software and open source, that telling others that you are a part of it, brings you so much pride. It makes them look at you with so much dignity and respect. I realized this face to face during the event. But, it’s not just about boasting ourselves to be a part of Mozilla that is great. It is the contentment and satisfaction that you get on contributing something to the people, for their good and living that makes you happy, by being a member of such organizations.

So, we had got our slides prepared the event and had brought with us a laptop. We didn’t have the swag shipped in time. May be because, we had requested only a couple of weeks back. So, we didn’t have much to do there, but to speak. The slides titled “Mozilla and Software Freedom” – contained notes on how Mozilla had come up, what it is trying to convey, on how it has been actively involved in various projects worldwide and on how people could contribute – A general presentation to give a brief idea about the Mozilla’s Mission.

Check for the Slides here :

Mozilla and sfd

View more presentations from dtsdwarak

One by one, people had come up to listen to what we had to say. We weren’t going much technical into the details of Firefox, Thunderbird and other products as such, unless asked for from the slide. Here and there, we were throwing bits and pieces of information, facts and figures, like, “hey, do you know that Mozilla was one among the first to introduce tabbed browsing ?”. Things like that had really kept them kind of engrossed. In between, they had few questions to ask and thankfully, we knew the answers to them. lol :D Some key people who visited our stall during the day were, Mr. Manivannan, the editor of howopensource.com, Mr. Shrinivasan, the ILUGC founder himself, people from HCL Technologies to name a few. We got chance to meet people from Tamil Wikipedia Project and Mr. Arun SAG from fedoraproject.org. We also had college students coming in to listen about Mozilla.

One thing that I had noticed with all of them was they were very excited and kicked about drumbeat and WebFWD. Some had asked me to repeat, few had asked some doubts and a little number of them had even promised me that they would apply for the event. Hope they get selected ! God Bless !

We were asked to wind up at around half past four the evening that day and had a general discussion on the day’s proceedings. Though, we didn’t have as much crowd for the event as anticipated, the people we saw were enthusiastic.

Mozilla Wins Best Stall Award

This had come up as a mixture of both shock and surprise to us. Before we proceeded to leave, we were announced that ILUGC was giving away prizes for the best stall of the day. We knew we did well, although never thought that we did so well to get a prize. But we were one among the top three to get a prize for the best stall of the day. I had been very happy with that.

And hey, one final word - My description and presentation of the event to you as a whole might be a little unorthodox in the manner and in the way I put. Nevertheless, IMHO this would appeal to most of you and would help me reach all of you much better. 

A chance to work at Mozilla ? Welcome to WebFWD :)

Time and again, Mozilla has proved its worthiness by supporting causes that strive to improvise the Internet and web standards. Its not just technocrats and IT Ninjas who could contribute to the Web. More than all of them , it is you and me who could be of greater use.

 

 

And Mozilla is allegedly the first to realize this. Apart from supporting projects on account of drumbeat, Mozilla has very recently, say a couple of months back, came up with a new concept – WebFWD – Web Forward, an initiative that aims to bring brilliant minds together to put out a Software Project – One that is really out of the box, that tries to answer the problems and improvises the Web Standards.

 

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Workflow

• You and your friends have a really great idea, something original and true – you wish to bring a concept to the Internet that tries to answer problems of everyday Internet user and common man. Phew ! Great, you’ve crossed half the selection. Congrats.
• You apply for the Mozilla WebFWD here :                   https://webfwd.org/en-US/apply

• If your project is really worth to be worked into, you are either put into a 4 Week BootCamp or 6 month Fellowship programme – Projects that are early in lifecycle get into a 4 week intensive BootCamp and those which are mature place themselves in 6 to 12 month Fellowship programme.

• You go directly to Mozilla’s Offices. Work with Mentors from Mozilla, some of the greatest brains who’ve built the most friendly browser – Firefox.

• At the end of your project tenure, you come out with the product, one hundred percent yours, just the way you wanted –             “Internet – for the people, by the people.”

And both the programmes provide you

1. Chance to Work with Key Mozilla People
2. Mentorship with leading experts from the world of Web
3. Workshops on scalability and application security and development
4. Access to Mozilla’s tools and resources

Isn’t it so much fun ? Got an idea ?!! Hey, what are you waiting for ? Register you team now ! https://webfwd.org/en-US/apply

Mozilla Seabird–A Concept that is truly futuristic !

Open source has always been the innovator. Be it whatever. And in this regard, Mozilla has come up with a Concept Series- something like a study of things that, if we could come up with in the near future, could revolutionize the way we interact with the world and ourselves. It tries to promote the way we behave with objects, act intelligent and smart, and make life simple.
One of the ideas, that has in the recent past, that has been seeing a lot of attention lately, is the Concept – Mozilla Seabird

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What is it?

Well, Mozilla Seabird, is a Open Web Concept Phone. Created by Billy May, as a part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series, it has now evolved to be a phone, that tries to throw away the “frustrating physical interactions”, as how he calls it. It comes with unique devices and ideas to input and communicate with it.

Mozilla Seabird–2D Preview

Going by the way, the phone is touted to be,  it has a Dual Pico Projector, a 8 Megapixel camera, a 45 Luments LED Projector, an Embedded BT dongle, 3.5 mm Audio Jack, a mini USB port, and on top of it Wireless Charging.

The BT dongle, that comes with the phone, also has a IR device, that you can use to interact with the phone.
The phone, with projectors on, could also be used to run a full desktop version of a complete operating system and be used as such with a dock. Other projector, that comes along with it, can be used to show up a virtual keyboard that you could use to enter things.

The seabird with the dock, enables netbook-quality interaction by working with the projector’s angular distortion to deliver interface rather than content, says Billy.

It also tries to be the first phone with advanced motion sensing features in the market. Seabird imagines how a multiple use dongle might augment the crowded gestural interface with greater precision and direct manipulation of content in 3D space, as put in by the author Billy.

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Interesting ?

Mozilla Seabird also carries with it, several misconceptions. The idea or the project as a whole, does not mean that Mozilla or its partners have any plans to produce the phone. Atleast not anywhere in the near future. It tries to be the voice of people and technolusts around the globe. It is an amalgam of ideas, concepts and resources that if we could implement, would be of greater to use to all.

This is a commentor driven development. You could also contribute to this project by submitting ideas and resources. Join the community @ https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-online-identity .
Join conversations at the Mozilla IRC @ irc.mozilla.org in the channel #labs - irc://irc.mozilla.org/labs

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Download pictures in High Resolution or Print Quality.
Read More @ - http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2010/09/23/seabird/

Do we really need Google+?

Many of my friends have started asking me in recent days… “ Why do I need a new social network when I already have one? “

 

If you are one of them, thinking the same way, watch this…

Fedora 15 – The Good, Bad and Ugly

At the outset, I'll have to tell all the readers out there, that this article is a not-so-techie stuff ! I might drop in a few details here and there but I'm making sure not to get too technical (Coz, I myself don't know much ! Lol. )

 

Fedora 15 has come in for a lot of praises world over for its improvement in desktop interface changes. It has incorporated into it the newly introduced Gnome3 Desktop that has lot many features to offer. It also has many a faults (that can however be overcome). On the whole, I felt that Fedora 15 is great and its worth migrating to.

The Good

Some of the features that impressed me was the Desktop graphics and usage interface. Gnome 3 has all the ingredients to make the people say 'Wow, blimey.' I read in an article that Gnome programmers wanted to try out new interface paradigms. This Gnome3 has been really great to work with.

Some features you'll find appealing is the, yet-to-come Apple OS X Lion like App-center. The workspaces which could be shifted in sideways in the earlier versions of the gnome as default, have been made to a top-to-bottom shifting type in this version.

 

The notification area that earlier used to be in the top-right corner of the gnome desktop has shifted downwards where the taskbar used to be there. This has come in for a mixed response. Some like it and some won't. But I personally feel it as a good move. You got the app-center to compensate for the taskbar thingy. Another good news that comes in with the gnome-3 desktop is that, a lot more things can be done just with the notification area. Like in empathy, you can chat directly from the notification area. The same goes with the IRC client's chat notification.

 

There seems to be a minimal hardware-acceleration support given to this version of Fedora. Another good thing about the app-center is the desktop search feature. Just as you type file names in the search bar of the search applet in the app-center, you see the recently accessed file lists popping up. Also, you have an option to search Wikipedia and Google in the app-center.

 

Fedora Desktop's Customization has never been so very easy with the UAC settings put up just on the menubar of the gnome3 desktop. It comes with Firefox 4, empathy 3.0 and transmission etc.

All the more great is the graphics, as i said earlier. Its fun to work with.

The Bad and overcoming the Ugly

Apart from the good, there are a lot many bad things about fedora I find . Especially for a person moving from Windows to a Linux like me, using Fedora can be a lot more annoying.

No-Auto mount feature for the NTFS Drives

As in Windows, where the drives auto mount in the Windows startup, drives doesn't get mounted automatically. You gotta click them, and the Os prompts for a admin password and only then you get to enter the drive. This makes you even more angry when directly after log on you try to access you files or playlists.

One way to overcome this issue is to edit the /etc/fstab file that tells the Fedora Boot to initialize the drives just after logon.

One way to overcome is to use the gui ' ntfs-config ' utility

install it in command line using :

su -c 'yum -y install ntfs-config'

you cannot just run it from the application menu. You run it only from command line as root. If you ever encounter a problem in fedora 15 installing it, like

OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/hal/fdi/policy'

just create the directories hal and fdi inside etc and a blank file policy and it will work.

No Compiz !

Starting this version, Fedora has stopped its default window manager Compiz and shifted to the Mutter. That means, no more wobbly effects and bubbly graphics henceforth. But, there seems to be a way out of that, I guess though to replace mutter with compiz.

No Shutdown or Hibernate Menu !

OMG ! This is really frustrating. I was not able to shutdown and hibernate my PC directly from the menu given in the Menu. All I gotta do is to logout and then use the Shutdown option provided there. But, there is a workaround.

Try to install the

gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu

package from terminal that brings back the original back !

 

No Minimize

No minimize keyboard shortcut, Alt-F9 does nothing. But you can alter the keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard settings to bring it back ! Other way is to use the gconf-editor.

No Desktop Icons !

This is something glaring right straight at us, that we cannot use the Desktop user interface from now on. Especially for Windows users and Gnome 2 users. We can bring that back using the Gnome-tweak tool that can be installed from command line in terminal.

 

No Weather Applet !

Gnome3 also doesn't ship with itself the weather applet. It was always my favorite thing about the gnome desktop. Now, that it doesn't appear anymore is kinda irritating. One thing you can do is to install the alternative gnome desktop applet like the one I have.

 

Dowload this pakcage :

https://github.com/simon04/gnome-shell-extension-weather/tarball/master

Extract it in suitable place and type in the following commands in the terminal as root :

./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr

make

make install

If you encounter a problem like,

Making all in src
make[1]: Entering directory /home/dwarak/weather/src'
Makefile:426: *** missing separator. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory/home/dwarak/weather/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

install gnome-desktop-devel.i686 from the Terminal that is required to include the necessary files to compile the makefile. The reason this doesn't happen is that starting from gnome3.2 the os assumes all the tab spaces to be default spaces in the makefile. This is something like kinda patch.

Use the following command to change your Location using

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.weather woeid your_woeid

Change Temperature Units by

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.weather unit celsius

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.weather unit fahrenheit

Your Woeid is the Where On Earth ID provided by Yahoo ! Geoplanet referenced by a 32-bit identifier.

Find yours @ :

http://isithackday.com/geoplanet-explorer/index.php

If you have anything more to add, please post in your comments.