RESEARCHUT

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.

I recently came into the necessity of having something which could load equalizer prests by reading the genre from the current running track.

For Amarok, I couldn’t find anything available. So I filed a bug report. But soon realised that my wishlist could be accomplished just bhy a small amount of work.

I then looked at Amarok’s scripting framework. It is amazing. It took me just 3 hrs to get my wishlist item done.

So I recently got my head shaved because of irritating itching problems.

Here’s the obligatory image:

Today I also bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000. She is small, sleek and sexy.

And the good thing is that she Just Mates with Linux.

Here’s what she speaks to her buddy:

input: Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse� 1.00 as /class/input/input14
input: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse� 1.00] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-2.1

Today I, for the first time in my life, bought extra speakers for my machine.

While I’m not a music fanatic I thought of buying extra speakers to bring some change to my boring life. I finally settled down on [Altec Lansing ATP3](http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-speakers/altec-lansing- atp3/4505-3179_7-1587363.html) PC Multimedia Speakers.

I must admit; The bitch is awesome. She rocks. And she blows me off good.

It has been around 5 yrs when I suffered a broken collar bone in a road accident on my bike.

My take since then had been to avoid biking in Indian City Roads. But I finally gave up on it because I realised how much I really missed avoiding it.

So here I am, back to biking.

I wanted to start up again with a bike which would be:

• Steady on the roads.
• Would definitely have a sporty look.
• Would be Mr. Unshakable and Mr. Reliable

Amongst the Indian bikes in the market today, the best I could find to my requirements was the Bajaj Pulsar 200 DTS-i.

I must admit, Linux Power Management is Fuckin’ Pathetic.

On a Dell XPS M1210 Laptop with a 6 Cell battery, I get a shitty 15 mins of power backup compared to 2 hrs on Microsoft Windows XP.

And woo, On my IBM T43 running Microsoft Windows XP, I watched a full movie on battery, and it still survived.

The Linux running laptop had no sound enabled.

Yes, Yes Yes!!! As many would say

So in the search of finding a simple solution for printing colored text in python, it took me some time to dig up. Most solutions people have done were using curses or some modules. My ultimate intention has always been to cut down on the dependency on the 3rd party modules.

I think the ANSI Color Codes would be good enough for my requirements to print colored text on an ANSI compliant terminal.

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned about not being able to simply configured networking for the Guest VMs. I feel that area is still unimplemented properly by the GUI wrappers available for KVM/QEMU.

There is a good utility VDE2, which can work great for all your networking needs for the Guest VMs. But unfortunately none of the GUI wrappers (Qemulator, QtEmu, Qlauncher) are handling it.

The simplicity of vde is amazing. Here’s what all you need to do: