RESEARCHUT

I have been a long time KMail user and love this email client. It has most of the features that I care about, like Message Threading, Spam Filtering, Disconnected IMAP et cetera.

KMail has good integration with SPAM Handling softwares like spamassassin and bogofilter. The KMail wizard will autoconfigure spamassassin, bogofilter and others (as detected from your installation). The default settings were a little annoying because messages detected as SPAM were re- written with the SPAM Heading. The problem was when spamassassin mis-judged a genuine message as SPAM. Well, we could mark it as HAM, but the added heading never went off.

Last weekend I went to a pub here (In Bangalore). Boozed a llittle.

Two things to think about

1. A unique drink that I had, Lambroghini. Lambroghini was a special drink served with flames. Had to sip the liquor from the flames while the liquid was on file.
2. When returning from the restroom, the waiter told me that I had broke-in into a Ladies Room. Unfortunately no lady was there.

I’m not a music fanatic. While I see many of my friends and colleagues working, with their headphone on and music playing, for me, it is not at all possible. It is just the opposite. I can’t work with music (or any kind of distracting sound) on.

So when I sometimes run Amarok, I used to think what a pile of crap it really is. I mean, look at the resource consumption. Amarok alone took around 20% of CPU cycles when just playing music. This was disappointing as I am a KDE addict and prefer KDE applications over any other. Trying to run other applications led to additional libraries being installed/loaded.

Sometimes things can be so interesting.

Yesterday midnight, after my colleague finished dinner from my place, immediately called me back that he was:

• Hit by an Auto-wallah
  And
• The Auto-wallah was drunk
• Didn’t have any identification in the auto.
• Instread was demanding money from my colleague.

So trying to sort out matters we moved to the near by police station and let the police-Gentle-man know that he was hit by a drunk auto-wallah.
The actions of the police-Gentle-man are what were more interesting than anything else. It really shows how much of faith one can have in our legal system.
And how much of value do people like us have, here, when our law makers and law-care-takers act such..

When Rusty was here during FOSS.IN, he mentioned about utilities without which how difficult life would be.

• Mercurial
• distcc
• ccache

I have been using Mercurial and really love it. It is wonderful. I always thought of spending some time with distcc and see what all it can help.

I am amazed. distcc is exactly what it says. And the setup is so much simple.

I had been fucking my laptop by building KDE4 on it every week. Now I can give her some time to soothe and cool down. She’d gone very hot when building on her

I received my ZippoBlu Butane Gas Lighter yesterday. And today, I’m using it.

I had ordered it through eBay. Initially I was worried about the delivery of the item as it might get damaged during shipping to India. But the seller (123khaly)is awesome. He did a good packing before the shipping and the lighter reached safely to me. Keep in mind that the gas cannot be shipped because it is flammable. These are international regulations. So I inquired with Zippo India if they have imported Butane Gas or not. Unfortunately they haven’t. This got me disappointed. It was like I have a Plasma TV with no Cable connection. So I moved down to M.G Road, Bangalore and was able to find Chinese Butane Gas. While Zippo doesn’t recommend non-Zippo Butane, I didn’t have a choice.

Many of my friends, when watching me work on my laptop, think that I’m using Windows. But now it is going to be real.

They’ll soon be using, what I use, on Windows. Yes, I’m talking of KDE. KDE on Windows.

The recent builds of KDE for Windows have been awesome. Most of the applications, " Just Work"

That to Qt and KDE, to road to Freedom has just begun.

Most of the applications from KDE, even though they are under Beta currently, work perfect on Windows.

While the Debian KDE Team has done a great job of packaging KDE4 in time, with quality, it is not always possible to fulfill the request of every odd user.

Unfortunately, I fell into the Odd user category because I still want to have KDE4 and KDE3 installed together. For many reasons.

So here’s one way to do it.

• Install KDE 3 Packages from Debian Repositories
• Install KDE 4 from SVN
• Create a X session file like this.

rrs@learner:~$ cat /usr/share/xsessions/kde4-svn.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=/opt/kde4-svn/kde/bin/startkde
TryExec=/opt/kde4-svn/kde/bin/startkde

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KDE 4.0 is out

Despite all the FUD that KDE4 won’t stay up to the expectations of the users, I must say KDE4 has impressed me a lot. It is definitely a lot more faster than KDE 3.

The shiny new desktop with all the new core technologies of KDE 4 and the new visual effects (kwin, plasma, oxygen), all make KDE 4 the best.

Go ahead and install. It is wonderful.

Many of us might be aware of the block level encryption features (LUKS for example) provided in Linux.

Most of the articles that I referred to over the internet mention the usage of the traditional scsi block device when creating it as an ecrypted device. Eg. sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb1

This actually poses a problem. The problem is with the way Linux detects SCSI devices. While many distributions have shifted to using ID/LABEL based access to devices, users still use the old traditional way of using a device. This turns out to be a problem in cases like suspend/resume where devices are rediscovered. Technically there is no guarantee that the device you see currently as sda will be named sda again on reboot/resume. While we don’t see issues like this with attached disks, the issue can be easily reproduced in a SAN Enviornment or in cases where users use external hard drives using USB.