RESEARCHUT

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:

So Yesterday, I was finally confident enough to uninstall VMWare from my laptop.

Thanks to the richness of virtualization technologies which are present in Linux (2.6.22) now.

I’ve always liked to explore different operating systems (not distributions really) to see what interesting features they implement differently. BSDs being one, Solaris being the other. But sometimes it really was difficult for me to try them out.

Reason:

• The current machine that I have apart from my laptop is a very old box with 64Mb of RAM and a 750 Mhz Intel Processor
• This box is primarily used for building my cusotmized kernels to run on my laptop.
• This box serves as a file server.
• This box doesn’t have a head.

I also own a Dell XPS M1210 laptop with a pretty good configuration.

Does anyone know when really did coreutils get patched for this behavior ?

rrs@learner:~$ rm -foo
rm: invalid option – o
Try rm ./-foo' to remove the file -foo’.
Try `rm –help’ for more information.

This feature really wasn’t earlier and if you ever ended up with files starting with characters like “-”, it was not a straight task to remove it.

Earlier (when I wasn’t aware of this patch), the workaround was to write a small 1 liner and not use getopt at all. Something like: