Happy Birthday SinhalenFOSS!

SinhalenFOSS, Sri Lankas very first tech related podcast, the podcast that I proudly feature in, turned one year yesterday(9th April 2009). We didn’t have big plans for the day but it was truly a big milestone for me. I’m sure the story is same for the other two co-hosts Bud (geekaholic) & Seejay.

We had the episode 21 recorded on last sunday (5th April 2009) but due to my busy schedule I couldn’t finish editing & upload it. Finally there was a hope for uploading it on SinhalenFOSS birthday. But I’m really sorry that I couldn’t make it on time since my father was sick & I had to go to the doc with him. Added to that, I couldn’t stay up all night & finish it off since I was tired of fairly a long journy. Actually I tried to stay awake but failed. However my computer stood awake when I find it on my bed in mid night (Poor thing!).

Anyway I’ll try to finish things up & put the final product in our loving listeners hands As Soon As Possible!. The bits are running in to interwebz right now :) .

It was a pleasant year passed giving me lots of experience, introducing lots of nice people to me, taking my life to another level & best of all, making me very happy for being a part of. It’s all thanks to you dear SinhalenFOSS, I really love you. Wishing you a very happy birthday!

Update: SinhalenFOSS episode 21 is on interwebz now :)

Static DNS with wvdial.

It’s over. The fight against the dynamic DNS is over for me now. It took me so long to figure this simple thing out. But I don’t worry, even the big bro Goog couldn’t come up with a satisfying straight answer for my problem. So I myself searched under the mattress & found the pea which took my good night sleep (I’m neither a princess nor prince ;) ).

Sometimes back I had to come up with a pretty shitty solution for a shitty problem. No I didn’t won’t to show how bad my thinking or coding is. But wanted to show how shitty is the service of my ISP. But however the right way to fix all those are here with me. And I’m gonna share it with you.

If you use wvdial to dial up (Ok, now only seven people at most will continue reading this) for your internet connection, and you hate the DNS servers come your way automagically, here’s what to do.

Open /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial with your favorite text editor & comment the line usepeerdns. I mean make it look like #usepeerdns. Now wvdial won’t ask pppd to fetch those crappy DNS addresses again.

So go and edit your /etc/resolv.conf file and add you favorite DNS servers there. Mine looks like following.

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Wonder why I use 127.0.0.1 there? That’s because I’m a happy user of dnsmasq (I recommend you to use it). I used this simple HOWTO to install it on Ubuntu. There should be other guides & HOWTOs which might match you (In case that one doesn’t fit). Just ask big bro Goog.

And other nameservers are of the nice free DNS service OpenDNS.

Drop-manage yourself, the wiki way.

I am really good at procrastinating, I forget little things so easily, I have N.A.D.D and I work on specific projects. So in order to make my life a liiitle bit hassle free, I was looking for a ToDo manager tool. First I found Tiddlybackpack which had a dead simple interface but unfortunatley didn’t work with Firefox on Gnu/Linux. Then I found MonkeyGTD which looked too complex for my needs & then I checked tiddlydu2. However what I use now is GTDTiddlyWiki which is even simpler. It’s not as simple as tiddlybackpack but it’s a decent GTD tool which would fit anyones needs. May be you have already realized that these tools are based on tiddlywiki.

Yes you have to learn a bit before you start to actually use any Tiddly based GTD/ToDo tool. I found a good guide here.

You only have to download one single .html file to start working with any of those tiddly GTD tools. Once you save the .html file to somewhere on your computer just open it & start managing your todos. You can put it on a flash drive & take it anywhere with you. Or you can put it in your email account as an attachment. You can put it on your web server too. But hey… what I do is way cooler 8)  . I ‘drop it like it’s hot’ :D .

I use this cool tool Dropbox to sync my GTD/ToDo list. I put all my GTD/Todo stuff in to one directory called GTD and just created a symlink from Dropbox directory to GTD. tada. that’s all. [for now I have all the GTD tools I mentioned before]. Heres how to create the symlink.

$ ln -s -T /path/to/GTD/directory ~/Dropbox/GTD  [Read man page of ln or check here.]

(You can still put GTD tools in Dropbox directory itself. But you know I’m mad :) )

Now I can use my todo list when I’m offline, Dropbox will sync it for me with the dropbox on web when I’m online. So that I can use my todo manager from anywhere through Dropbox web interface. (for that you have to untick “Hide editing features when viewed over HTTP” option in advanced options).

Though I haven’t actually tried yet, Dropbox can sync through multiple computers too :) and it means you can have your todo list on Your Desktop computer, laptop or office computer, so easily sinced . And also I can share my files with friends trogh Dropbox, todo list can be shared too ;) .

Hope you make your life more manged with thses tools. Here goes the ‘cherry on top’, “Make your GTDTiddlyWiki your hompage”.

PS: If you wonder what GTD stands for, it’s Get Things Done :) .

The RSS reader that fits me.

Finally I have managed to come to an end of the loooong expedition. The expedition insearch of an RSS reader. A good one. One that fits Chanux’ needs. One like Google reader. Oops… I said that.

OK let’s face it. The best RSS reading experience I ever had was with Google reader (GR). I really like all the control I get over my subscriptions, through Google reader. But I wanted to switch. Yes I have reasons.

** Google Readers bandwidth usage is pretty high.
This maybe a myth. But I believe that I experienced it at the last time I used it. And my Internet connection has a bandwidth limit.

** I want to get rid of cloud madness. I’m afraid of cloud.

** I want my RSS subscription to be with me even when I’m out of internet. (now I have my HP mini with me all the time :D )

Because of those reasons I wanted an alternative & was googling for Good, great, nice, Google reader like RSS readers all the time. I found a lot of RSS readers & actually tried following readers. All I have to say is here in the shortest way I can express.

Mozilla Thunderbird. (Mozillas email/news reader : seejay suggested)

• I didn’t like the overall experience at all. (Only RSS experience. It’s my primary mail client).
• It downloads the RSS headings & then fetch the page itself when requested. I don’t like that.

Snownews. (Command Line Interface tool : found when googling)

• Since this is a CLI tool I really liked it.

• But had problems importing my GR feeds list (you have to convert xml to snownews format). Too lazy to ‘investigate’.

Snowl. (Firefox extension : found when googling)

• The interface was not compelling.
• I didn’t like the user experience.
• Less control over feed etching (or I didn’t find proper controls ).
• Annoying bandwidth overhead.

Brief. (Firefox extension : found on mozilla site)

• Great/cool user Interface.
• Usability, control over feed fetching is great.
• Almost GR like navigation with “Headline View”.

• Author of the software says that he doesn’t have plans to implement synchronization with GR. (Well I still want my RSS be synced with GR).

Akregator. (I knew that : seejay was using)

• Good interface.
• It’s KDE software (I <3 KDE) .
• Easy navigation with widescreen view (for me).
• Sync with GR is somewhere in the air :D .

• (my) processor cries in compact view.
• Couldn’t find syncing anywhere other than developer chit chat.

Conclusion:
Akregator & Brief will saty here with me. But I’ll choose one as my primary RSS reader soon. Most the time it’ll be akregator because hopefully it’ll sync with GR. Yes GR sync definitely makes akregator win over Brief even though Briefs’ User Interface is GREAT.

Note: AFAIK snownews & akreagtor do not have Windows versions. Thunderbird, snowl & Brief are available for win. For a long list of RSS tools check this great post. But Please choose free & open source software.

Use Portable Firefox from GNU/Linux (part 2)

Here I came up with part two of “Use Portable Firefox profile with GNU/Linux“(Now I feel ashamed for calling it a hack. Sorry fellas for calling it a hack :D ). This time it’s a shell script which would let you jump between default Firefox porfile & your own Portable Firefox profile which is going to live on your flash drive.

To use it you have to download fp.tar.gz & extract. There are two files in fp directory, one is sfp.sh which is the script & the other is profiles.ini which the script uses in the switching process. Those files are made to be together :). (You need Portable Firefox)

You have to edit path= Line in profiles.ini file. Add the path to your Portable firefox profile & run the script. It works for me & I hope it would work for you too.

Path=/media/CHANUX/FirefoxPortable/Data/profile

Known issues:

• The Extension versions you use may conflict with the Firefox version on the host machine.
• You won’t take the plugins (ex: Flash, Java) with you(I’m still tryiing to figure out a way to make it happen).
• You’ll have to obey the proxy settings of the host machine.
• You may have to change file permissions [ $ chmod 755 /path_to_script ]
• In worse case you may have to copy fp folder to host machine.
• In worst case you may not have enough rights to run shell scripts :( .

known bugs:
When I run this in fedora core 6 I don’t get the functionality for identifying whether Firefox is running when setting/unsetting Portable profile. I couldn’t figure out that little bug yet.

The day before I write this script I was a total idiot of shell scripting. I just read the manuals(Some bash howtos) & wrote it. So you won’t see any cool/advanced tricks in this script.

Notes

It will be more helpful if you read the part 1 of this(Link at top of this post).

I didn’t check this with Firefox 3. (There’s one who use this on Ubuntu hardy with Firefox 3.0)

You don’t need to have Portable Firefox for this. Just having your Firefox profile is enough (If you like it that way :) ).

Big red disclaimer:
Dumb me & all my dumb friends did this & it works just fine. If you are dumber enough to get problems with this just don’t try this or any kind of hacks. Any kind of a damage you do to your system trying this script happens only because you are an extreme fool. SO don’t blame me. Go infront of a mirror instead. :twisted: