Story
Once I was at an ATM machine, of course to get some money for a gift to a friend of mine. I keyed in the amount & was waiting for money. The machine took a while, printed the receipt, gave out the card. Yes that’s all. I got no money but a receipt saying that the machine gave this amount of money & that amount of money left in the account. I lost my tongue except to murmur Faaaark!. I pushed my card back in checked the balance in account & the machine was very happy to say that I’ve just lost this amount of money.
The gift I was planning to by was intended to be a wedding gift & my friend was/is not the kind which is gonna marry again ;). I went to the bank, talked to the pretty girl & my story didn’t amaze her in any mean. Hmmm…That’s something to think about.

Thoughts
Facing that inconvenience, my mind kept thinking of the very thing a lot, I mean about the technical stuff. Why the machine don’t handle that very little but so very important event? What’s the system run on an ATM machine? is it an embedded system? does it run GNU/Linux? :) hell a lot to think.

chit-chat
After few days I went on a long tour with two of my geek friends & the topic ATM took priority at a time. And my friends provided me with these info. There are ATM machines which runs Microsoft Windows XP :D (in Sri Lanka) & earlier days it was OS2, according to Such. Kunchana has seen windows XP booting on an ATM after a power down. [Wikipedia confirms Such and Kunchana :)]

Assumptions/Solutions
In thinking deep about ATM machines I made some assumptions in my mind.

1) The machine keeps track of the money using some kind of a hardware mechanism or someone adds money & update records on the machine. So that the machine keeps track of the amount remaining. If this is the case it’s only a matter of a software modification to compare the remaining amount and requested amount to stay away from hassles.

2) Since there was no evidence to backup above assumption, I happen to think that ATMs don’t keep track of the amount of money they have. So in order to avoid problem I faced, the machines have to have a mechanism to keep track of remaining amount of money and of course compare the remaining and requested amounts.

appendage (17/12/09) :
This was quite an old writeup I never had chance to post till now. This is totally black boxed thinking without looking up Internet for more details how an ATM works. The incident I mentioned happened at Commercial Bank Nugegoda. I got the money back in my account in few days (The bank fixed it manually, I guess). I’ve heard few other cases like this but never again happened to me. And also Things should be changed and these problems should be ironed out by now. Anyway Off to Look up “How ATM works” :D

PS: And the friend who got married was geekaholic :D . The incident occurred  someday around 20/06/08, the wedding day.

For the second time in just two months I heard of Microsoft lifting others code, this week. No I’m not gonna bash microsoft, there are two sides in both stories.

Case 1:
Microsoft lifts GPL licensed code for their Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool.

This one was first reported by Rafael at  withinwindows.com. As Rafael guessed at first, Microsoft announced that the software was done by a third party developer. And they pulled the software making a pledge to return it under GPL. Even though it took some time, MS finally released the software under GPL.

Case 2:
Microsoft China’s Microblogging tool Juku lifts code from Plurk.

Just five days from seettling with GPL violation, Plurk blog reported that Microsoft China’s microblogging tool Juku, has code lifted from their popular Microblogging tool. The terrible thing was that both UI and code base looked very similar (See Plurk blog post). Like MS did last time, they announced that Juku was done by a third party developer and of course they pulled the service. Indefinitely.

So that’s it. In two months, two code lift cases. The latter one was even uglier (Or is it otherwise?). I think Microsoft should start to worry about how genuine their products are :P, especially when they outsource to third parties. Since it’s a huge company, I don’t think they would have an easy escape next time.

PS: My intention was not to say borrowing code is a bad thing. There’s no problem if Microsoft borrow codes from Open source projects and obey the license.

The other day I came across this blog post “That Dirty (Sri Lankan) Mind“. The first thing I got in mind: “Seriously, WTF?”.

I’m not quite sure whether google place suggestions according to the relevance. But seems like it is.

Today I found these two screenshots, google suggestions for sara and rajap on my friend @laktek’s Tweet. And felt like looking for more.

So I looked for ‘how to’. See the results for yourself.

Seriously? How to get Pregnant? Oh c’mon Sri Lankans.
I don’t know why I felt like checking out Google.in for same thing. (Maybe I was looking for a way outta this shame ;) ).

See? We are not screwed. Yet. Apparently India screws up suggestions for us (It’s good to have a great neighbor :P ).

I checked the Google trends for “How to get pregnant” to be sure.

So it’s time to remove some bras.

Google Sri Lanka suggestions for “removing”

Google india Suggestions for “removing”

And now let’s see who really don’t know how to remove a bra.

Now that’s a big relief :D. Eff you Goog. We know how to remove bras, eyes wide shut :P

The privacy is again in hot zone of topics in communities I follow. The reason is @ericschmidt, Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The register reports, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” under the heading “Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy”. That’s how journalists do it. Let’s have a better perspective on the subject.

“Judgment matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place… If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Quoted from Eric Schmidt on CNBC video found here (some interesting stuff about Schmidt too ;) ).

Doesn’t really sound as bad as The Register report, but still it’s bad.

Google has to obey the laws, I agree, and the laws are not perfect. Anyway laws and regulations is not the only reason they track and log certain information. It’s a part of their business model.

Google offers simply awesome services and I find it really difficult to stay away from all that awesomeness thinking of privacy issues that doesn’t seem to be hrmful for the time being. Hope it’s the case for you too.

It’s not only Google that we should be alarmed of. Recently Yahoo said something similar to “Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, Consumers“. Is that sound frightening?

So I think it’s the time to at least stay concious about these issues, if not to stay away. I would rather ask Google than a friend, of a private and sensitive question, thinking my secret is also gone with the closed search page. But it’s not the case anymore. Unfortunately.

Note: Find some interesting ideas about privacy, on secutiry guru Bruce Schneiers blog

My tweet you just read says the long story short. In case you didn’t come across, Google made DNS a buzzing topic again with Google Public DNS. So I felt like trying a dns cache again. The logic is “If a better DNS server makes things better, DNS cache makes it even better.”

This is more of a note to self than a HOWTO. If your use case atches with mine, feel free to use this.

My use case: I use an HSDPA, mobile broadband connection on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

Install pdnsd with,

$sudo apt-get install pdnsd

Now launch the text editor you hate and add following to /etc/pdnsd.conf

(By default all the parts are commented so just adding this was fine enough for me)

server {
ip=208.67.222.222 , 8.8.8.8;
timeout=5;
interval=30;
uptest=ping;
ping_timeout=50;
purge_cache=off;
}

global {
 perm_cache=5120;
 cache_dir="/var/cache/pdnsd";
 min_ttl=15m;       // Retain cached entries at least 15 minutes.
 max_ttl=1w;        // One week.
 timeout=10;        // Global timeout option (10 seconds).
}

I copied this piece from here and edited ;). Added the global field because defaults were not cool enough for me. And in ip field I’ve put respectively OpenDNS and Google DNS addresses. You can just add one address there. ‘man pdnsd.conf’ will teach you more about the content in the file.

Once you are done editing the configuration file restart pdnsd with

$sudo /etc/init.d/pdnsd restart

Now you should tell the network manager to look for pdnsd for it’s DNS needs.

Right click network manager icon and then follow Edit Connections > Mobile Broadband and choose to edit your preferred network connection.

In Editing <Your Network Connection> dialog box,
[1] Choose IPv4 Settings tab
[2] Choose Automatic Addresses (ppp) Only in Methods Dropdown box.
[3] Set DNS Servers field to 127.0.0.1 (which refers to pdnsd in our case)

And obviously, Apply Changes :P .

If everything went fine, you are now ready to enjoy DNS cache goodness with pdnsd.

You can check how good is it with dig command.

ex:
$dig yahoo.com

run this command twice and compare Query time field.

Note: If you followed all the steps but still it doesn’t work, try restarting pdnsd. If you get following error refer this page

/etc/resolv.conf must be a symlink

Update: Added the global settings for config file.

It was another exam in Sam’s school for screwed up youngsters ;) . I was on time and was pretty much ready for it. Exam started when the longer arm of the clock rest on 12. I started answering like any other sane guy would.

Started from the second question and I’ve finished it in 20 -25 minutes. Then I took the next on. It was only 40 or 45 minutes passed when I finish that. Then came some question that needed more attention so I just kept doing them.

Another one down. and at this point I’ve lost track of time. And I can’t clearly remeber how many questions I’ve finished at the time but It should be four. Now that I’ve lost track of time, the only option was to check how much time left. looked at the clock.

JUST FORTY MINUTES?!?! HOLY B+ TREES.

:’( Just forty minutes left and I have two full questions to finish, *including* the question I’m quite challenged by. OK now I’m done. But there’s no way out. I can at least try to make it a wee bit better.

I didn’t panic. Since I knew it’s not gonna do more harm than good if I did. So I did the question number 6. Finished it without much pain and looked at the clock, Just to find out that I’ve got only twenty minutes to face the question number ONE. The hardest one for me as I believed.

I started with part ii of Question one finished without neither big problems nor confidence. Took part iii. My brain is not happy to process at the speed I want. So many hiccups. But I never felt upset or feared (It’s really difficult generate such feelings in a careless bastards mind). Though I wasn’t so confident I finished part iii without a feeling like “I’m gonna get 0 marks for this :(“.

Here comes the question 1 part i. I was somewhat nervous. But dude ma’m didn’t say anything that did sound like the conclusion. I have no clear memory what I did at the time but I remember I came up with a satisfactory answer just by 4.00 O’clock.

But why the hell everyone is still busy. Why ma’m is still silent?. 10 minutes after I was checking this and that. And started to curse the wall clock thinking it shows me the wrong time. There were few minutes that I tried so hard to understand what’s going on. But no clue. Cursed myself for only having the phone to check time (which is switched off right now). Checked the answers again. No new ideas coming. Corrected few mistakes found here and there. Still no idea what’s going on. One moment I thought this should be a dream or an illusion or something I just can’t understand. Another round of checking.

“You have only 30 minutes left”. That’s ma’m. And match over (for me).

Last two papers were on 1.00PM-4.00PM slot. So all this time, I was _believing_ it’s the same game going on today. But it was 2.00PM-5.00PM this time. I thanked whoever deserves for todays paper not being anything like the Software Engineering paper (So much work for so little time). If it was, I don’t think I’d be writing this ;) .

So I have 30 minutes. I can’t go out now, that’s the rule. Found a question that I’ve missed which had 3 marks allocated. Hammered it like Thor. Checked the rest again but nothing new comes in mind. Brain was like totally blocked or maybe it was relaxing.

Came out and told friends. No one believed at first. Some time wasting at cafeteria. Laughter!

It wasn’t all that bad. And again thanks whoever deserves for the paper not being anything even remotely like Software Engineering paper.

Update: The reason why I’m here to sit this exam.

Oh dammit I’m growing old. I removed all the fancy things from my blog. Even the smiley images. Now I start to act like a matured bastard. Oh damn this is not cool ;).

On the other hand I’m happy that I manage to grow up. Somehow.

Cutting the crap, here are some more details about the topic.

The need to reduce extra fat and sugar in my blog was in my todo list for a long time now. But there’s no ideal time other than the exam days :P. So I took time for the long awaited change. I loved my old theme garland. I still do. But I equally love dark themes. Black is new green you know?. And a change is always good. If you are not sure, ask Obama.

It was not really difficult to find a black theme out of the 11 dark themes wordpress has :P. Seriously ONLY ELEVEN dark themes?. That’s not acceptable. Anyway I chose the current theme ChaosTheory because it was the best suiting to my taste, even though it eats up left hand side with post info. I wish the text was on left side. Then it would be easy to read. But anyway, “contentment is bliss”. A wise man once said.

I have added carefully picked items to the bottom of the site. Hope it will help someone who is interested in my blog and well… myself ;). Earlier I was forcing those stuff + many other crap on reader. But that’s not the way I like it anymore. I want to kiss. Oh hold.. hold on a second… I mean Keep It Simple, Stupid. More readers, more pageviews, more clicks are in the vocabulary of money whores anyway.

By the way I want you to know why I say “You should follow me on Twitter” somewhere in the bottom. No I’m not a twitter follower whore either :) .

OK you are done reading this post! Maybe you’d like to check my Tumblelog, right now.

I know exactly how it feels when you break your heart. Actually some one else does that for you :). Then you start to feel broken. Start to feel lonely. Start to feel left behind. You want to see the end of the world, soon. Just to get away from the pain. But if you are suffering a broken love or one you just can’t get on with, things just get worse.

You want some one to listen. And you want that someone to react the way you think is right. This is really bad but still really normal. When you hear something not very sweet in your ears from the listener you just avoid her. Simply because you believe she doesn’t understand you. It’s normal that you don’t understand that you are the one who is weak in mind, for the moment.

If the listener keep telling those not so sweet things again and again you start to hate her. ’cause she is shattering your dream world. You just see the happiness surrounding the feeling, not the great pain burning inside. You simply want to suffer it. And there is almost no one who can help some one who enjoys the pain.

You start to live on assumptions. You lose the world around you without knowing. You never realize that there’s a day that all these things end up ’cause all these are just an illusion of nature. And you keep running away from everything else you loved and loved you in return.

Fortunately there is a solution. It’s so simple that you don’t understand. ’cause you think way too hard. And maybe you simply don’t want an answer. You enjoy the pain. But just think simple and tender. And just embrace what you love and still loves you back. You know what you enjoyed before. Just throw yourself in to them. Drown yourself in them.

You still have the scars of the pain. It’s alright. But at least now you don’t burn in that ugly hell. Instead you enjoy life. And believe me, those scars are not there to stay. They go away when you find something better. And you are finding something better. For sure. It’s all relative.

Just listen and think, simple and mild.

NOTE: This is not based on my personal experiences. At least not anything recent. But there are plenty of this kind happening around me. Just wanted to break writers block. And I’ve been tired of writing lot’s of semi-colon ended stuff.

About Image: I love this image. Using on this blog for the second time. Click image to go to deviantart page.

Hacking is always fun. That’s why I always lose focus on everything one interesting hack. That’s why I spent whole last night trying to figure out how to mimic Window focus event in a shell script. Though this is completely new to me, you maybe very much comfortable with implementing it :) . If so please let me know in comments.

Anyway here is my story.

I found this nice command line IM client called centerIM (Thanx @chathuraw for info). Once I got it set up I was just scanning on it’s documentation page & came across this interesting part “External actions & auto-responses“. I wrote a script right away for GUI notifications, inspired by notify.pl script for irssi. Here is the script if you are interested.

Since the load of IM messages was very high at a time & It was useless when the terminal window with centerIM was already focused (which means I’m chatting on centerIM) I was thinking of getting notifications only when centerIM window is not in focus. Few Google searches lead me to very limited resources & I chose xwininfo & xdpyinfo commands for my work.

Workaround: I’m using gnome for now & so gnome-terminal as my terminal emulator. I had to set edit > profilepreferences > Title & command option to keep initial title, in order to have “Terminal” as the terminal window name all the time.

And ran xininfo to get following output.

chanux@nim:~$ xwininfo -name Terminal

xwininfo: Window id: 0x3800003 "Terminal"

 Absolute upper-left X:  0
 Absolute upper-left Y:  52
 Relative upper-left X:  0
 Relative upper-left Y:  27
 Width: 1280
 Height: 691
 Depth: 24
 Visual Class: TrueColor
 Border width: 0
 Class: InputOutput
 Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
 Bit Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
 Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
 Backing Store State: NotUseful
 Save Under State: no
 Map State: IsViewable
 Override Redirect State: no
 Corners:  +0+52  -0+52  -0-25  +0-25
 -geometry 156x37+0+25

This can be used to get the window id of the windw which runs the script.

Then I can find the focused window at the moment as following.

chanux@nim:~$ xdpyinfo |grep focus
focus:  window 0x3800004, revert to Parent

I fetched the window IDs with a little bit more work.

Anyway the problem I had is that, I get 0×3800003 (at this example) or likewise for the Terminal window id & even when the Terminal id is focused I get 0×3800004 as the focused window id. Yes I know with some more work I can manage to handle that & come to a point that I can compare those window Ids to check for the focused window. But I reall like to know why that difference come up. Anyone have an explanantion? Or anyone like to mess with this?

Following is the way I fetched window ids from above outputs

chanux@nim:~$ xwininfo -name "Terminal" | grep xwininfo | cut -d " " -f 4
0x3800003
chanux@nim:~$ xdpyinfo | grep focus | cut -d " " -f 4 | sed s/,//
0x3800004

OK, There’s one now. wait.. wait… it was not me. That sage girl defined the club. First of all let’s see who are already in.

The Way you make me feel | How I see it
Michael Jackson and Me | Landon Lanka and Drums
A Legend | A heart on a sleeve
The way you make me feel | delilah says
There will never be another you, MJ | Jus Chillin’
MJ’s gone :( | A glimpse of lady devine
What’s your fav MJ? | Chaar~Max 2.0
Singer Michael Jackson dies at 50 | Gossip Lanka
‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson dies at age 50 | City Hits
The Six List – Tribute to “The King of Pop…” | Untitled
So, about MJ | The Abyss

Update: Here is a comprehensive list of blog posts on MJ’s death on achcharu.org. (thanx drac for the link) Most of the writers should include the club. Now I really love to be in this club :P .

Dropped in happily:

Doesn’t matter if you are black or white. | Bumble for PM

So this is all I found on a kottu search (query:MJ Michael). If I’ve missed any of you please let me know. And if you think you don’t match the club since you are not upset of MJ’s death, ping me I’ll remove you from the list.

11 posts (edit : at the beginning it was), written by people who are shocked by the death of MJ. I just feel like that’s not enough. I too join the club.

Yesterday I woke up to the news ‘MJ died’ on Fox news or something. First thing I did was switching on my laptop & rushing to the interwebz. My twitter feed didn’t have much info but Twitter search kinda confirmed that I should start to feel upset. Not that I’m a big fan. But I dunno why the hell I feel so bad that MJ is not any more. I can remember I grew up listening to him. Heard those strange stories about him. My uncle had few albums of MJ which I still can remember the cover art of.

I was upset when people call him a child molester. But I just didn’t give a shit. Yeah that’s my kind, “Just don’t give a shit”. But I can’t stop feeling upset of MJ. Maybe that’s because he was a legend, an icon & still he went away that way. Maybe I’m not upset about MJ but the universal truth, “it all comes to an end”. MJ’s death just make it a bit clear I guess. well… I dunno.

So I hope I’m in the club, *drumroll* “MJ ass kissers club”.

Damn it feels so cool here. But I wonder why the “sage girl” is upset about our feelings. We putting on feelings on our blogs which are public, which unfortunately are on kottu, which is sage girl’s personal feed reader. Indi… hey buddy please kick me off. Please do that. Sage girl is upset about what we write. And hope others in the club will also get their blogs out of kottu, just to make sage girls reading experience a bit better.

And by the way guys, sage girl also says like this.

“My blog is mine. I never invited you to read it.” (source. And it’s not the first one)

Now tell me why you put your blog on Kottu? isn’t it kind of an innocent invitation to other kottu readers to read this? Well.. I like when people read my posts, kottu people too. But unlike sage girl *I don’t write for Kottu*. So just think why we should get labeled as ‘ass kissers’ for being on Kottu? (and stuffing sage girls good read heaven a hell).

Anyway sage girl always manages to eclipse her own thoughts by her own thoughts. Sounds freaky but that’s the way it is. Defending her own false facts with another bunch of false facts. What got pissed me off of is aiming bloggers who are free to write & free to be on any social aggregator as long as they don’t harm the community or any terms set by the aggregator so badly. And this not the fucking first time.

I know I’m trying to put too much light on a small bug. But I don’t want to see this happened again & again.

PS: I was trying very hard to not use any offensive words (ex: fuck, fucking, shit) coz I’m practicung to reduce the usage :-S.