RESEARCHUT

My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.

With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE’s efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one’s personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.

Well most must be knowing by now that Samsung is rolling out the Android 2.2 FROYO update in phases. And it would be available through Kies.

There have been numerous reports of Kies not detecting the Samsung Galaxy S phone.I think I have a pattern and know what has been causing the trouble.

Samsung Kies , by default, is set to auto-start and reside in the System Tray. The Kies application auto-detects the phone when plugged-in and starts up the applications. I guess this is where the problem lies.

Just revoked my old GPG key as I do not use it anymore.

pub  1024D/[04F130BC](http://www.researchut.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE11862EA04F130BC) 2003-08-18 *** KEY REVOKED *** [not verified]
                               [Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>](http://www.researchut.com/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0xE11862EA04F130BC)
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf (Ricky) <rrs@researchut.com>
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf <ritesh@cyberspace.com.np>
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@fastmail.fm>
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs_rhwlist@softhome.net>
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) <rsarraf@netapp.com>
                               Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net>
                               [user attribute packet]
                               [user attribute packet]

When I wrote the [autoEqualizer ](http://kde- apps.org/content/show.php/autoEqualizer?content=70509 “autoEqualizer”)plug-in for the Amarok (1.x) media player, to the best of my knowledge, there weren’t any media players with this feature nor were there any plug-ins.

Recently, I came to know that the Samsung Galaxy S ’s media player looks to be having the Automatic Equalizer functionality. Not sure if this player is specific to Samsung Galaxy S or the Android Platform in general.

The latest kernel upload (2.6.32-16) brings goodies to SystemTap in Debian. This version has added support for kprobes, on which systemtap has a major dependency, for many of its features.

Most of the systemtap instrumentation should work now and all of this will be part of the Squeeze release. Instrumenting the kernel modules still needs some work (DBTS: #555549) but can be done.

First you go unethical by forcing users (stating security concerns) to upgrade to a newer firmware. And then, you don’t even do a good QA on the firmware you release. It clearly looks you were in a hurry to strip off the “Other OS” feature.

I lost all my gameplay in the firmware upgrade.

The blog entry is about the F word.

What the fuck? You don’t know what the F word is. Sigh!!!

Mea Culpa! Not your fault. It is quite offensive, no? More offensive than BC, MC, BsdK, LkB ?These are some of the usual terms used in our local derived languages in all its locally derived richness.

The word Fuck, many times, either from people with authority (HR) or the receiver, is termed and reacted to as a very offensive term. Usage of the word fuck is kind of blasphemy. In organizations, its usage can lead to harassments (to all those ultra fuckin’ dumbs) and terminations. Sigh!!

So this past weekend, me and my friend, went on a drive to Yellagiri Hills. It was exciting driving on the highway in an entry level Indian car, Maruti Suzuki Alto.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it to the destination. 5 kilometers before the destination, while we were uphill, the car b0rke down. On one of the hair- pin bends where we had to cut down the speed to zero, switch to the 1st and 2nd gear failed. Hmmm!! At that point, we were on a very steep road, with the car stalled and the gear box (for 1st and 2nd ) broken down. Nice!!

Just uploaded tomoyo-tools and is waiting in the NEW queue.

Thanks to Moritz Muehlenhoff, tomoyo kernel support should be available in Debian with kernel 2.6.32-13 and above.

What is Tomoyo ?

Description: Lightweight and easy-use Mandatory Access Control for Linux

TOMOYO Linux is Lightweight and Usable Mandatory Access Control with

- “automatic policy configuring” feature by “LEARNING mode”

- administrators friendly policy language

- no need libselinux nor userland program modifications

I just uploaded apt-offline version 0.9.8 to sid. Hopefully this is the one that would be part of squeeze. For those who still arent aware of apt-offline, it is an Offline Package Manager for apt.

I wrote a small [howto](http://www.debian- administration.org/article/Offline_Package_Management_for_APT) that can give more details about it.