Motorola Rokr E6, made a mistake buying it?

I bought this mobile after a very brief survey on the net. First I bought it for my fiancee and then when I saw it, without thinking much went and bought one for myself. The facts that made me like this phone are,

1. being a Linux based phone (E6 is powered by Motorola's custom kernel) I had a hope that we a lot of modified firmware as well as custom kernels which will enhance the phone features etcetera.
2. The cheapest touch screen phone AFAIK.
3. Had trust with Motorola as I have seen my friend using a moto for over 2 years and we literally played football with that phone. I heard that phone is still working after 5+ years.

Well its been 1 month+ that I am using this phone. I have not done much with this phone except, flashing it once and put a modified firmware which enable a few features in the phone. The firmware which I used is AhMan's Hybrid. You can see the release info and features added in his forum thread. One feature that made me smile wide was that I was able to edit the shortcuts in the home screen. I always wanted to change the FM shortcut to Alarm shortcut.

But...

Should I have bought this phone for the reason that it was running Linux and hence its open source ? Well Motorola is not a sweet and user friendly company as they seems to be (more). Motorola has set up a nice web page which has a FQDN http://opensource.motorola.com. It looks like only the web site has the name open source, not that they have released the source for E6 which, seems from the forum conversation, is licensed under GPL. A Motorola spokesman repeatedly assures that its their obligation to release the code as per the GPL terms blah blah, but seems to be "working on it for eternity". The commitment Motorola has shown in releasing the source for E6 puts me off from thinking that Motorola is a customer/community friendly company. They seems to be more committed to working on newer versions after releasing the E6 and hence there is no update firmware from Motorola for E6. Guess I made a mistake in buying this model without a proper research.

Still...

My phone works as a phone. I can make calls, I can use the camera, I can listen to songs and FM, I can browse the web. So I am not at a great loss, after all, features are a fantasy come true for a day and then you just go back to 'using it as a phone'.

Benazir Bhutto, featured in history from today.

I feel sorry but that does not stop me from saying, our neighbours have done it again. I am in no way, politically or religiously biased person, but thinking within the shell of an normal person, I do not understand why the people in Pakistan is so against democracy. I wonder the suicide bomber who killed their opposition leader, earns what ? No place in the glorious history, not a martyr praised in the coming era. Then why are they doing this ? Why they kill innocent people, why they kill Indian's at Kashmir, why they kill their own people, why they kill their politicians?. I have started to believe that this is because the people in Pakistan is so against Democracy, so against improving their life and the society and with that, their country. They does not seem to understand how good it feels to live in a peaceful atmosphere where there is no bombs and shells, no guns and rockets, no killing and beheading, no Taliban, no Jihads, no cruelty, no bloodshed, no hatred, no nothing. Well, that is too much of an ask.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father was former Prime Minister of Pakistan who was executed in 1979 by more or less a politically motivated action directed by the General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Now Pakistan was on the verge of election that this mishap, the demise of the probable Prime Minister of Pakistan occurred. Bad luck for our neighbours ? I say bad luck for the world, as now there seems to be nothing to control the whole country, Pakistan is going to be a feeding ground for terrorism. If a country has only one aim, that is to buy more and more weapons, not to defend itself, but to boast to the neighbours that we are a super power



I do not hope for any improvement in Pakistan's political scene, nor do I hope that the relationship with India would improve in any ways. This is me not being an optimistic, typical Indian, but since I learned the term "terrorism" the same time I learned about Pakistan and for all these years nothing has changed favourable in Pakistan, I am just saying what I feel inside.

(Added on 31st Dec 2007)

It looks like Musharaf and Pakistan government officials should at least learn to lie smartly. Claiming that the Lady was not dead by the shot but due to her head banged on the car roof's lever, ah, they are in an impression that rest of the world are people with their head filled with clay and not grey cells. Government accusing the terrorist and the terrorists denying the accusation, this is a kindergarten play ? WIth a literacy rate of approximately 50%, its understood why this happens in Pakistan. I do not have any interest in the proceedings regarding this, as, if there was anything up to this point, I have lost it. God bless Pakistan.

Jai Hind

Online PC Scanning resource.

Here are a few sites which offer free Online PC scan for spy wares and other malicious content. I find it useful at times when you suspect that you are infected. In the end its the best practice to buy a anti virus package for your windows machine, this will come handy before something screw your machine.

Microsoft One care PC Scan
Symantec PC Scan (virus and online threats)
McAfee Online PC Scan
Trend Micro Online PC Scan
BitDefender Online PC Scan
Kaspersky Online PC Virus Scan
Panda Security Online PC Scan
F-Secure Online PC Scan

Online File Scanner by Kaspersky
Kaspersky Online File Scan

Free PC scan/security resources
TheFreeCountry.com

Convert -File System- ext2 to ext3

Lets get started.

If you can un-mount the partition which needs the change, perfect. Else you can remount it in
read-only mode

mount -o remount,ro /dev/xxx

If you want to un-mount the partition and it complains that the device/resource is busy, you can use a little brute force to get things done if you are sure nobody else is using it.

lsof | grep "<mount point>" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

The above command may disturb other users logged in and  if they are using the machine. You should be sure that the machine is not shared with anyone else, hence make sure before you do. If the above trick does not work, you know what it does I hope, hence you can try do it yourself some other way. Once done, you can un-mount the partition. Next step is

tune2fs -j /dev/xxx

This will create ext3 file system in the partition specified. Once this is over "without any errors" you should change the "file system type" in /etc/fstab and make it ext3. Then do a

mount -a

To check whether its mounted properly and the file system type, do

mount

Offline weblog editors

After stumbling up on the "deepest sender", a few days later I thought I would search for more of these software which are stand-alone applications rather than a plug-in. I found that I have one blog editor in the windows vista that I use called, "Windows Live writer". Initially when I installed it, I had a feeling that this works only for the windows blog, called spaces in their live.com portal. But later today I had this urge to see more of what windows live writer can do. It was easy setup for my WordPress blog. with a few text entries and a few clicks I was ready to blog with Windows Live Writer.

This is how to start it. Select the tools> Accounts to see the image on the right side. Select "Another weblog service" from the radio selection and click on next.
You will get the the screen on the left after the click on next. Here you have to enter the weblog homepage URL - This is the blog home home page which You want to use. In my case it was http://kryptoz.wordpress.com. Username - Your WordPress username Password - Your password for the WP username. Additionally if you have the option for proxy setup.

After finishing the mentioned, when you click next, windows live writer will do its part and collect info from the WordPress for your account (styles, posts, keywords, etcetera) and you are ready to blog. There are a few plug-ins for the MS Writer, which are available at gallery@live.com. I did not find any of them interesting for me but, You are not me, so go have a look!

I am planning to use this as my primary weblog editor now. Not that I am a regular blogger, but it makes things easy whenever I want to scribble anything on the blog. Windows Live Writer saves me from, typing in the URL on my Firefox browser Address bar. Though, since I save my username and password in Windows Live Writer, I expected direct access to my dashboard (logged in) when I clicked on my link called "Dashboard" on Windows Live Writer. Currently it opens up WordPress login page. For me that should be okay for now, unless I get more lazy and want the auto login to the dashboard from Windows Live Writer.

Apart from this a few that are in my 'Apps to try' list are...

BlogDesk, Ecto, w.bloggar and QTM

These AFAIK are free tools which runs in either Windows (majority) and Linux (QTM) or both (QTM).

This is all aboutus.org!

Ever heard about aboutus.org ? Well time to hear it from me, if you have not yet. This is what the creators of aboutus.org says about themselves

"We are building a wiki resource on the internet that we hope will complement other great web resources such as Google and Wikipedia. We work to merge commercial with informational by helping people organize the information that is important to them."

Exciting enough, I have created a intranet wiki (mediawiki) for our internal use at office. I never contributed much to the local wiki at office. But lately I started scribbling the common (technical) problems which I see at office on day to day basis and the solutions also in there. More like a FAQ style, this was helpful to a few in the office as a do-it-yourself guide, as well as for me since when I do something rarely I have a documentation in hand to refer back. This made me less shy from the wiki on the www, and thus created the below page for my company.

Aboutus.org is a great way to put across to the world what we are doing (for a company, this is a nifty feature), and talk about what we do, what we offer to the community/people etcetera. Below is a image link ( a badge, as aboutus.org calls it) which links to the page I created for my company in aboutus.org community. Try yours, try create one at aboutus.org, its great fun to talk about yourself ~smile~

Firefox addon called "Deepest Sender"

This add-on called "Deepest Sender" claims that I can post to my wordpress.com account without going to the site all the time. I have just added this and am going to try this out. The installation was as simple as installing any other add-on to the Firefox. Next when I selected "Deepest Sender" from the "Tools" menu of the Firefox, it asked me for some one time information about the blog I use, the account user name and password. It went on and logged in without any errors (so it shows up as of now) and a nice small interface poped up for me to type. This is going to be interesting if this works it claims. This is going to be my first post from the firefox add-on called "Deepest Sender" to my wordpress blog. Let see if this works! ~exec post~

Oh well this did worked (All excited). This did posted my scribble to word press. This is a wonderful add on. I was looking for to have some option like this where I can post to my blog without having to login to wordpress and then click here and there before I end up with the pad they provide for scribbling.

On a quick look at this add-on, they have a "post history" which list all the posts on my wordpress account. Once from the retrieved history, I can edit any post just by selecting the post and click on "edit". (I am editing this post using the mentioned way). They also have a save option so that I can type and save those, for a rethink/recheck and a postponed post. Another feature they have is a offline mode, which I am yet to try. This sounds like saving my effort on saving the posts as XML if I am offline and then open to post it when I come online again. This offline mode should make the posting while offline transparent. I can add the post to one or multiple categories. So far I found one thing that will make me go to the website, wordpress.com is to add/edit the tags for the post. It doesnt seem "Deepest Sender" lets you add tags for a post. But thats the only feature missing that I felt straight away. Good so far. I really am going to try the offline mode today evening once I leave office.

I think those who are lazy like me to login each time to post a blog should atleast try this software. Well, Happy Bloggin...!

Funniest Reality TV show I have ever seen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br1WUSEwGwc

No kidding, watch this and you will find that I meant what I said!

Find out the IP Location

There are a few ways to get this done for free. First place where I stumbled up on was http://www.hostip.info. This is a community-based project which does locate the geographical location of IP address. They have a firefox plugin which comes handy for the curious souls.

 Other one which I found interesting was http://www.maxmind.com/app/city. This is a commercial one, though they have free country lookup. They have a python api which you can use in your code to locate the country from the visitor's IP address. 

You can find  a few hundred+ of such useful sites which a google search.

Re-read partition table without rebooting OS

I had this situation at office where I was told to re-partition an already existing partition. The situation was to get the below schema

/dev/sdb1 1 3040 24418768+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 3041 6080 24418800 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 6081 30515 196274137+ 83 Linux

to

/dev/sdb1 1 3040 24418768+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 3041 6080 24418800 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 6081 30515 196274137+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 6081 18239 97667136 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 18240 30515 98606938+ 83 Linux

Alright, now the partition /dev/sdb2 was in use and cannot be unmounted. So what happens when you finish the partitioning with fdisk ?

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
Syncing disks.

This happends, if you are using/mounted any partitions of the HDD which you just re-partitioned. Normally we do reboot the machine to get this right. But this is not always the easy way out, when you have something running on the machine/multiple users are on the machine working etc. So there comes the "parted" for rescue.

The package "parted" provides a tool called "partprobe". This will do the magic for you, you just type in the command (see the man page for more info on partprobe) and this will give the information needed about your newly created partition to your kernel.

Why I love netscreen

This is why I love netscreen and Juniper..

http://tools.juniper.net/fsa/

 They have this nice tool for session analyze and this shows a very useful report for me. They have instructions on how to get the "get session" output to be captured. It took me 15 minutes to get the input ('get session' output in text format) for the analyzer. This much time due to the shity vista which doesnt have the old hyperterm which was there in XP. It took a while for me to find and download the software. If you have a netscreen, go ahead try this analyzer.. its sweet.

Hyperterminal for Vista

Another reason why I hate vista..

Cant find hyperterminal. Where the hell has it disappeared ? Later found that Vista doesnt have hyperterminal with it, nor does it have a replacement/similar software which comes bundled, atleast not in my first and second look for such a thing. But good news is that there is a free personal version of the original hyperterminal still available for free download. You can find it here..

Update: There is no personal edition of hyper-terminal for free now.

http://www.hilgraeve.com/htpe/download.html

I made best use of tera term recently and it works fine in Vista.

The "http_proxy" environment variable - Setup proxy setting in a linux machine.

If you need to use proxy server to access http/https from a linux machine in the office LAN, set the environment variable http_proxy. This will allow wget and python's urllib modules and other applications (yum, apt-get etc) to use this environment variable and access http/https using the settings assigned to the variable http_proxy.

The below would be the ideal way of assigning values for http_proxy variable.

$export http_proxy="http://<proxy-server-ip>:<port>"

I have added this to my ~/.bashrc so that I don't have to export this variable every time I reboot my machine !

And then there is the "ftp_proxy" .....

Tweaking airtel ADSL Modem (Beetel 220BX ADSL2+)

I wanted my computer behind the beetel 220BX adsl modem (Provided by Airtel) to be visible for outside world. Basically for hosting a counter strike server and for webserver. I searched all the config details in the webUI given by the 220BX, but I was not able to spot a setting with which I can do a port forwarding or NAT. Then i started searching the net with google. The first search query ("beetel 220BX virtual server configuration") I entered returned me the url "http://blogs.broadbandforum.in/airtel/?p=9" in the first row. I should be more than lucky, the page says how to access the hidden page in the router, the "main.html" which gives a lot more advanced configuration options and I found exactly what I was looking for. So I am happy, the blogger should be happy as he was able to help yet another needful soul.

~Happy Ending~

Linux PPTP VPN client configuration

It is faily easy to install the packages needed and hand configure the pptp client for a linux server. The pptp server is a windows 2003 server running RRAS. How ever from my experience what was more difficult is configuring the firewall to let the pptp traffic go through. Here is what I did to make a connection from Linux PPTP client to the RRAS.

• Installed pptp-linux
  
  
  
  • Optionally you can install pptpconfig which will make life easier with the client configuration part. For that You have to add the below source to your sources.list "deb http://quozl.linux.org.au/pptp/pptpconfig ./"
  
  
  
  


• Collected the server details needed
  
  
  
  • PPTP Server Name - vpn.yourdomain.com
  
  
  • VPN User Name - user1
  
  
  • VPN Password - passw0rd
  
  
  • Connection Name - vpn1
  
  
  
  


• Edited the file /etc/ppp/chap-secrets to add the line "user1 PPTP passw0rd *"


• created a file /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1. Entered the configuration details as below.

pty "pptp vpn.yourdomain.com  - -nolaunchpppd"

name user1

remotename PPTP

require-mppe-128

file /etc/ppp/options.pptp

ipparam vpn1

With this the configuration finished. You can start the tunnel by issueing

• 'sudo pppd call vpn1' or 'pon vpn1'.


• for debug info try 'sudo pon veveo debug dump logfd 2 nodetach'

To stop the pptp tunnel, do a "sudo pkill pppd". You will be able to see the connection status/details in "/var/log/messages"

For me this much was easy. This didnt worked for me straight away. Fair enough, then after a long search I could find that pptp to work through my Juniper Netscreen (ns25) firewall, opening tcp port 1723 is not enough, I should allow the "GRE Protocol" (protocol 47) pass through. I added a custom service for GRE and then everything was working fine.

I am planning to implement a linux SSL vpn server later when I get time. But anyway only after learning the advantages and disadvantages of the SSL VPN.

Little trick in the user account details of Active Directory

registered the dll file acctinfo.dll for extra information for a user. Did the following

 "regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\acctinfo.dll"

This creates a new tab in the user properties called "Additional Account Info"

I find it useful to check when a user has last logged in to the server. Since none of the windows users login to the domain in my office (they dont believe in windows AD stuff nor do I find it worthwhile as there are convinence and double the troubles at the same time.), I use this to findout when some one has logged into the pptp vpn (RRAS) last and I can tell my manager that those who claimed to be working from home are not working and indeed they use the company laptop for entertainment purpose ....

when you wanted to set up a quick cvs server

follow the below link. I got a cvs server up in 5 minutes. Cant get faster than this can you ?

http://home.wanadoo.nl/cwdegier/cvs.html

Python, Bash yesterday's date

I wanted to get yesterday's date in a neat way for my backup scripts (bash). I found out a simple solution for the same pretty easily.

date -d "-1 day" +%d%m will give me the yesterdays date.

date -d "-1 month" +%d%m will give me date one month previous.

Here is what you do in python for the same.

>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.date.today()
>>> today
datetime.date(2008, 3, 20)
>>> yesterday = today - datetime.timedelta(1)
>>> yesterday
datetime.date(2008, 3, 19)
>>> monthbefore = today - datetime.timedelta(31)
>>> monthbefore
datetime.date(2008, 2, 18)
>>>

Cant hold on more..

After a long struggle, I managed not to drink, untill today. That was one amoung my new year resolutions. I decided not to smoke and not to drink, not even beer. Decision on smoking went in smoke in a few hours after entering the new year, but I managed to hold myself from drinking up till the 5th day, but today I guess I will get some beer home and watch a movie as I am missing the habbits. Things I am yet to do are invest some amount from my salary in the Mutual funds and other savings, spend less time for the counter strike (4 those who dont understand counter strike), learn Python! and some more were there, which I kinda forgot. All of us want to be better people and do better things. So we decide, we will do all good, no bad. But how much we succeed in what we have planed for us ? I am not ashamed of myself that I cannot keep up with my decisions, because I know I am not alone in this. But I will still fight for my good, with each mug of beer I gulp down I will curse myself for doing that and soon I will find its no phun drinking beer. If not the will power, wills is there :)

IE and MS Word doesn't go well ?

I had this strange complaint today from a user, saying she cannot copy & paste some text from her yahoo mail to the outlook express. If she does, it hangs the app for some time and then give a crash report saying, word application has crashed. When I heard this I was thinking what the hell, M$ products itself doesn't go well togather ? Alas its M$; anything is possible. I went to check this strange behaviour's cause, and I found that there is no problem when I do the same from a firefox browser. Searching further in the net I found this article in the "Yahoo Answers". I could have told her to use firefox, but she was much of a M$ fan and hence I thought I will update to IE7 which eventually solved the problem. Dont you think its weird, that it maybe some html code underlying while you copy from the yahoo mail opened in IE6 which is causing the trouble ? My advice, dont be a guinea pig for M$, use something like firefox for browser, thunder bird or pine for mail, open office instead of M$ Office. Well, world is changing, so am I, how about you ?