Google Plus

So then there was Google+.

Big brother Goog sure has cried long nights about the miscarriages that were wave and buzz. Being beaten up by facebook and twitter in the then coolest thing in the block should’ve hurt the search giant a lot. But now it’s time to see the light spread. I mean, see Google+ spread.

We don’t want to talk about facebook privacy again, do we? I chose not being a dumb fuck and deleted facebook sometimes back and that was it.

And that brings us to Twitter. Twitter’s so called organic growth has been great for it until everyone and his mother jumped in and Twitter decided not to do anything about managing ever increasing crap in it. Yes they introduced groups and new web interface that was more of downgrade but it doesn’t help. I, an early adopter, a hard core user and an original lover who went to bed so many times with Twitter is currently having second thoughts.

And that brings us to light… tsk… Google+. Circles is the real deal. Because It was what I wanted with UI sex added in to it. I’m still discovering G+ circles and G+ is still beta. But it’s already doing good. The real social life is not a binary decision. Facebook learned this the hard way and struggled to deliver something that works ever since. Twitter on the other hand simply is not supporting the idea by design.

The dangerous thing is, G+ seems to be the best of both worlds. I can send a ceratin post to Public, a Circle I created, many Circles, all the Circles, extended Circles or I can just select, to the finest detail, who are going to see it. Your new crush is too old fashioned that she’s only on Facebook?. She got email right? You can chose to send your love poems via email. It’s that Simple.

We don’t talk about Facebook privacy anymore. We don’t have to talk about G+ privacy either. Because you can control the privacy settings to the finest detail for everything on G+. Deal closed.

You get Google chat integrated in to G+. So fortunately we don’t have to hop on yet another chat network to chat in G+. I hear it’s Hangout feature to be quite awesome. I never tried it. I haven’t had more than a handful of videos chats for all my life anyway.

The Sparks are G+ attempt to improve on and eat what Twitter has for lunch. You can follow news in the sense ‘new stuff ‘ with sparks. I fiddled with it for sometimes and it looks OK. It’s yet to be improved but it’s there usable. I know Google has all it needs to make it super awesome. I’ll come to that point.

Remember Priority inbox? It’s so simple that  we don’t even remember to thank it when it helps us. Or do we even notice it’s there? yeah that simple. Take technology used in priority inbox, improve and have it handy for later.

Sparks can use some priority-inbox-y goodness right now. But believe me it can be used on our social feed. Because no matter how carefully we make Circles and how rigorously we try to maintain sanity using Circles, our contacts will find ways to ruin it. See what happened to Twitter. It’s hardly usable with the crap people dump in there. It will take sometime for G+ to come to that point. Because 1) G+ current conversation model doesn’t make it easily ruined like Twitter’s @replies (Still love the simplicity of the idea and hate the people who ruin it). 2) Not everyone and his granny is on G+ yet. But they will come in (They should). They will come in to ruin.

That is when priority inbox technology (Machine learning and stuff) can save the world. I predicted priority inbox feature when Google launched their prediction API. It’s safe to predict similar integration of predictions technology in social graph. I won’t lose anything if it never turn out to be true. But if it does, it’ll be good news for all of us and there won’t be a day with crap on our social feeds anymore.

I am really looking forward what Google engineers come up with in the future. Now that Google has found UI engineers that can add sex in to UI Google engineers works will serve more happy people.

I see a bright future for Google+. I wish one of course. So that we can tell EVERYTHING about us to the big bro Goog. Apparently, they already estimate the strength of the relationships we have >:).

Oh Twitter

Currently I’m so out of social media madness. It was nice when I was already mad. It was awesome, actually. But then I got work. Became a busier man (The office doesn’t block a single thing. We have sensible people here.) and kept moving away from social media (Just Twitter for me). Every time I went back to Twitter to have that awesome time I expect from it, it ruined the moment for me. It was too much of a chatter, lot of LOT OF crap.

I know, Twitter is what you make out of it. I know I made this monster myself. I overfollowed people, mainly thanks to tweetupSL. I’m not being an asshole here. People are awesome. They say nice things, they say cool things, they say awesome things, they share wisdom, they share totally meaningless crap. We all do. The thing is I don’t have time to at least scan through all that anymore.

I think the way people use twitter is also changed. They probably tweet more which naturally leads to tweeting more crap too. And people just tweet whatever comes in their heads with very little filtering.

I also experienced that twitter interactions are slowly becoming facebook like. It doesn’t have the natural warm feeling it used have. It feels mechanic. For an example take birthday wishes on facbook. This is also thanks to the ever increasing followee count. No one sees all the tweets anymore. No one can really care.

For me it’s almost end of the high time in twitter. I seriously thought of getting rid of twitter but It’s really hard. I loved it so much once and it can come back anytime :D. The reasoning we come up with when we want to stick to the shit we don’t want.

I should (and will) do something to improve things a bit better. I will be unfollowing people. And if I unfollow you, it’s not because you are ‘not awesome’. It’s because I’m too old I can’t handle much 140 awesomeness anymore.

PS: Started to write about Google+ and ended up writing this. Perhaps I’d write about Google+ tonight. Perhaps.

My Kindle

It rekindled that habit. The habit formed in me when I still was a kid. The habit that made me understand good lessons about life without actually having to go through all those hardships. The habit that let me leave reality for a better imaginary world. Amazon Kindle did what once seemed impossible: Making me read, after the computer. And the Internet.

This is the day I got my hands on my own Kindle.

Since then, I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading on the couch, on the bed, on the bus and even on a Kottu place chair!

Yeah Kindle is like a book. Only better. Well.. minus the smell (solved already?). Minus, sometimes, the weight too. And it’s not just a single book, more like a mini library, right. OK let me organize my thoughts a bit and improve my bragging.

Don't Panic!

Something inside doesn’t want me to say this but I like kindle better than a book. Only thing I miss is the smell. (I liked the kindles smell though it faded too soon and not gonna renew with a new book.). Talking about the ‘wins’, first thing is ease of holding it. I don’t have to try and keep it open. It weighs just perfect that a book rarely will weigh less than that.

Surprisingly, it’s dimensions don’t ruin the thing at all. I said surprising because the first time I had a kindle in my hands (Bud’s Kindle) I thought it (the screen to be precise) was a bit too small for a book replacement. But it really is not. One day I was reading on Kindle and it just occurred to me, “Dude.. the Kindle’s screen dimensions are just perfect”. I should be exaggerating things a little but you still get the point.

The screen quality, as they have advertised, is really close to print quality. Kindle 3′s screen beats ‘LCD for reading’ any day, hands down. The text on Kindle has sharp, well defined edges comparing to other e-ink screens I’ve seen. Sometimes the screen shows a ghost of previous screen and other blurs and stuff but Alt+g wipes it all clean. To be done with screen quality, you can read on Kindle screen almost anywhere you can read a book. This means it serves fine under bright light and won’t magically light up in the darkness.

Once I slide the power button and get the device in life, thanks to the instructions on the screen savers, it’s pretty much straight forward to navigate and start reading.

Before I see a kindle for real I thought the page flip buttons on the sides are to flip to the respective side (left button to go left/back and right button to go right/forward). Once I started using one I realized it is not and that it would almost be a usability nightmare if it was. On both the sides the bigger, lower  button is to flip forward and the smaller, upper button is to flip back. This allows the user to have the device on either hand and not worry about flipping. And we rarely flip back, so the smaller button. I find flipping pages on Kindle to be easier than it is on a real book. Oh and I can go to a specific page using the menu and move between chapters with left and right navigational buttons.

When I read a book on kindle, it presents me with some interesting information on the bottom of the screen. From right to left, number of pages, current location and the percentage I’ve currently finished. Below that information is a bar that visually represents the progress and the milestones (chapters). This seems to be very encouraging when you are  reading. Yeah the little things matter most.

Little things...

The in-page dictionary look up has been very much helpful and convenient. Up/down navigational button spawns and moves a cursor on text and kindle automatically looks up dictionary for the word next to the cursor. The result is shown on a small box on top or bottom of the screen. I’d only ask for quicker ways to navigate! (hint: touch)

Amazon promises a month long battery life for reading (with wireless off). I could never test on this because I plugged the device to the computer many times and sometimes left it plugged for so long. But I can say I used it without plugging for more than a week and didn’t see a significant drop in battery level. Probably it’s the infinity for practical usage.

Kindle comes with many extra features, advertised and not advertised. MP3 playability and the browser are among advertised extras (experimental). Both the features will come pretty handy when you need them ’nuff said. Image viewer, minesweeper, Gomoku and screen shots features are not advertised by Amazon as I know. I use the image viewer just to show off.

Kindle’s text to speech is well advertised but I never seriously used it. Of course it adds up on show-off-ability.

I honestly think that the Kindle 3 is really great for reading. As Jeff Bezos wrote on his letter to me ;) (the letter appeared on kindle when I registered it online) the Kindle disappears in my hands – getting out of my way, leaving only the author’s stories, words and ideas.

Yes I jailbroke, rooted and did whatnot with my Kindle (thanks to the awesome people who made it real) but all that was only for few days. Now that I’ve had enough bragging and showing off, it has come down to ‘something I read on’ from ‘teh ozam thing’.

I can’t really ask for more but if It could accept touch on screen to navigate, I don’t think it would ruin the whole idea of simplicity in Kindle. Most the people who got this in hand tried touching the screen first. That probably is a result of the ongoing touch-hype but there have been times I’ve felt that I could use some touches for good.

OK time to read some awesome books on ‘the thing I read on’.

I love my Kindle.

PS: … and I love my friends who actually made me own one. Thanks @aerobender , @geekaholic :)

10 Reasons why You should migrate your system to Gnu/Linux.

Note: I wrote this article an year or two back. For a FOSS blog I contributed to. But I never published this because I wanted others to write too. But I didn’t see much enthusiasm. That’s how community works here. So after a long time I offered this to another local online IT magazine but didn’t have a reply till today (It’s been a long while but can’t complain, it sounds a bit too extreme for a generic IT mag :D ). I know sometimes it sounds outdated. But this is my blog and I haven’t posted for so long. So here we go.

Are you still stuck in windows looking for reasons why you should make the big transition? Well…I think you’d find reasons good enough reading this.

reason 00: Because it’s free

This might not make a sense to you since you can copy windows on a CD which you can buy for 20LKR. But remember that you are stealing someone else’s property. In case of Gnu/Linux, you can download it for free from the internet or you can find a friend or a Gnu/Linux user group which would give you a totally legal copy for few bucks or for zero cost. And remember free doesn’t necessarily mean ‘commercially free’ in free software.

reason 01: Because it’s “install & go”.

Normally a Gnu/Linux distribution installs in 20+ minutes depending on your machines power. Installing the OS means you are ready to go. Because it comes with office software, media players & everything an average user needs. You do not have to install software one by one like you have to do after a windows installation. I didn’t mention that Linux supports plethora of hardware now. You’ll rarely have to worry about a driver or another.

reason 02: Because it’s ‘Headache-ware’ free.

You are so familiar with Viruses, adware, trojans & all those junkware right?.  You have to spend valuable time, RAM & processing power in order to stay away from those crap. But at last, once your friend came with a flash drive with some nice music videos or some flashy video files …duh… and the story might begin again if you reinstall windows.
Let’s say you get windows for nearly zero cost. But Santa or ‘avurudu kumaraya’ won’t give you RAM & Processor. Why you want to waste RAM & Processor power for both Junk-ware + anti junkware. (Poor dual cores have to give one core to junk-ware :P )
If you are on Gnu/Linux you don’t have to worry about those things any more & you can *actually use* your computers resources.

reason 03: Because it is pure knowledge.

Believe it or not, Gnu/Linux let’s you learn the real deal behind the technology unlike any proprietary OS/Software. Even if you do not want to jumble yourself with source codes, still you can learn lot of things working on Gnu/Linux. If you are ready to play with codes, since you are free to read & modify the code, you can really learn hell a lot.

reason 04: Because it can amaze your friends (even teachers).

Believe me guys, I have lots of experiences on this. I have amazed people by just copying a file on Gnu/Lnux ;). Now you won’t be able to amaze people like that. But still there are plenty of things which makes average users astonished. Nice graphics, 3D effects with compiz-fusion, emulators & even xnest is still enough to entertain your friend.

I said ‘even teachers’ because my best bud ones did it. Just don’t ask me how :D.

reason 05: Because you have lots of choices.

Gnu/Linux has lots & lots of different flavors (flavors are called distributions, shortly distros). You may have heard of Ubuntu, Fedora/Red hat, Debian, Kubuntu, Mint, Suse, Mandriva, Sabayon, Knoppix, Gentoo & list goes on and on. (You will find a good list on distrowatch.com). You can try different distros & choose what suits you best or use a different distro every month :) or even every week if you are the type.

And if you are not happy with any of those available distros, you can build your own distro too!

Apart from distros, you can switch between plethora of other goodies. Think of the desktop, You can chose between KDE(K Desktop Environment), Gnome, Enlightenment, Xfce, OpenBox & LXDE which are different desktop managers.

reason 06: Because it runs on anywhere.

From a very low powered desktops to ultra fast super computers — Gnu/Linux can handle.
You can install it on iPods, Playstations or any other similar high tech gadget. There are Cameras, Cars, Motorcycles and even radios running Linux. Don’t think the washing machines would survive.

The latest trend is Linux on smartphones. Google rolled out there own Linux based mobile OS, android and Nokia did Maemo on linux. I think it’s safe to say that a new linux gadget comes out every month. And don’t forget that the extremely popular netbooks started off with linux.

With GNU/Linux your old computer is not older enough to be dumped — in Gnu/Linux world. Vista hates your computer? Even XP don’t run smooth? It’s not your computers fault. You can find a Gnu/linux distro which runs well on your old computer without any complains + far better than XP or Vista does. You can spend your money for a new phone, iPod or for precious education.

reason 07: Because you are a hacker wanna be.

Be honest & tell me that you do not want to be a hacker. If you say no, can you explain that gleam in your eyes when you see the topic “Because you are a hacker wanna be”? Every one wants to be a hacker. And you can’t do it if you keep on using windows. Probably you’ll be a script kiddie with window. If you know the real meaning of the word “Hacker” & you really want to be one, you better start using Gnu/Linux. Find some dusty old hacking tuts to find the reason.

reason 08: Because it is the future.

You may have doubts on it. But if you just come out & see, you’ll believe it.
NASA, Google, Yahoo, Majority of Internet servers, Latest Smart phones run Gnu/Linux & there are lots more in the list. Since Gnu/Linux is powerful, free & flexible, every one is moving towards it. A huge, knowledgeable, dedicated community is around it. Big companies invest on it. Day by day it’s growing while others die. It’s the trend today & it definitely is the future.

reason 09: Because you want to get a good job.

Even though most of you do not believe this, I’m sure you are interested in this reason other than all others. Gnu/Linux with free and open source software is gaining the upper hand in the IT industry. And so the job market around it is growing rapidly. If you are Gnu/Linux savvy you might outsmart your opponent in the job market & you’ll get a higher salary too. Good luck you Gnu/Linux users :) …. or people who are willing to be.

This is the best time to make that big change in your life.  Happy converting :)

Portable encrypted virtual disk.

I was really fascinated by the stuff I have read about Truecrypt. I wanted to try that but I had two reasons to not do that. First, I had nothing really to hide; Second, I thought my poor hp mini won’t be able to handle encrypting a partition, if not the whole disk. And also I was lazy. My close friends, bro and sis know my password anyway. Sis won’t find anything I don’t want her to and I have no problem others finding those. So the only reason I’d try encrypting is curiosity.

One day I was struck by a fireball of curiosity. And I was looking for ways to make portable, encrypted disk I can even put in Dropbox [referral link]. I found few good howtos with lot of details but what I’m going to put together will be an easier howto for a better virtual disk that is encrypted on-the-fly.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx so there maybe a leetle Ubuntu specific things that I’m not sure of. The process has commands that can destroy your data if not used with care. I have tried this and it works perfect for me. If you manage to screw things up in the process that should be purely because you are stupid or careless or even both. And that was my disclaimer.

Alright let’s go make it.

We need dmsetup and cryptsetup installed for this.
$sudo aptitude install dmsetup cryptsetup

Once the installation process is finished we can start making our encrypted vitual disk.

1)
First we create a file with random data in it. You can chose a size that matches your needs. In this example I’m making a 20MB virtual disk so I will create a 20MB file in this step.

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=~/sekret bs=1M count=20

Here, the dd command creates 20 1MB blocks and fill it with random data. ~/sekret means that we create the filee named sekret in your home directory. You can chose a file name you like and also a path you like.

2)
Next we need to create a block device from the file. For that find a free loop device with
$ sudo losetup -f

And use that loop device and create the block device. Let’s assume /dev/loop0 is free.
$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0 ~/sekret

3)
Now we need to luks format the device. FYI: LUKS stands for Linux Unified Key System.
$ sudo cryptsetup luksFormat -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 /dev/loop0

This will warn you that the data in /dev/loop0 are gonna be overwritten. Hope you are confident enough to say yes. Then you are required to enter a pass-phrase for this encrypted this. Chose a powerful pass-phrase here. And then confirm the pass-phrase. The process will report success if we are lucky.

4)

Map the crypto partition using

$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop0 mycrypt

To be sure about the success run
$ sudo dmsetup ls

This will output something like mycrypt (252, 0).

5)
Now we create file system on the device we created.
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/mycrypt

This will create EXT3 file system on the device. You can format it with your choice of file system. At the successful finishing of formatting, we have our own encrypted disk ready to use.

6)
We can mount it with..
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/mycrypt /media/sekret

7)
Once you are done adding juicy stuff on your device you should unmount it AND REMOVE THE DEVICE FILE.
$ sudo umount /mnt/sekret
$ sudo cryptsetup luksClose mycrypt
$ sudo losetup -d /dev/losetup

Once you have created an encrypted disk, to use next time you only have to follow the steps 2), 4) and 6). Once you are done using the device, unmount with step 7).

I have put an encrypted virtual disk in my Dropbox and it works pretty well. Maybe you’d like to try that too. To use it in Dropbox, copy the encrypted virtual disk file (~/sekret in our case) in to your Dropbox directory.

I have put together a bash script to automate the process and I named it crysp :). You have to run the script as root so use sudo when running it. I might be an evil bastard trying to destroy your data so take a look at the script before you run. With the script you can easily mount and unmount the encrypted devices similar to the usage of mount/umount commands. I have added a dirty hack to allow read/write access to the device from Nautilus. To use this, change chanux to your login name in line 08 in the script.

Find the source in it’s Google Code repository. There’s a version that prevents the existence of thumbnails related to the encrypted disk. check crysp-no-thumb branch for that.

#!/bin/bash

#check for required programs
type -P dmsetup &>/dev/null || { echo "dmestup rquired but not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
type -P cryptsetup &>/dev/null || { echo "cryptsetup rquired but not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }

CRYPTDEV=mycrypt
REGUSER=chanux        #Change this to your login-name.

case "$1" in
mount)
 LOOPDEV=`losetup -f`
 echo $LOOPDEV > /tmp/crysp-$REGUSER
 losetup $LOOPDEV $2
 cryptsetup luksOpen $LOOPDEV $CRYPTDEV
 mount /dev/mapper/$CRYPTDEV -rw $3
 chown -R $REGUSER $3            #workaround to allow nautilus r/w access to the mount
 ;;
umount)
 LOOPDEV=`cat /tmp/crysp-chanux`
 sync
 umount $2
 cryptsetup luksClose $CRYPTDEV
 losetup -d $LOOPDEV
 ;;
*)
 echo "Usage:"
 echo -e "\t $0 mount /loop/device /mount/point"
 echo -e "\t $0 umount /mount/point"

 ;;
esac

exit 0