Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

June 17 2008 was the day the Mozilla team decided to release Version 3 of the Firefox browser. And to add to all the new features that come along with it, they took upon the challenge to create a record for most downloads in a day for a software.

I took part in this initiative and here is the certificate provided by the Mozilla team to recognise by download.

You can download the latest version 3 of the really fast and one of the most extensible browsers at the browser website.

For the past few months I have been using my Sony Cybershot W80 extensively and taking photos left and right. One of the features that I use is that of creating folders on the memory card. On one such occasion I created a new folder which was for experimenting with the camera options next day.

Once I finished with the experimenting I wanted to delete them, since there were lots of photos deleting them individually did not make any sense so I used the ‘delete all photos in the folder’. The pictures got deleted fine….but as luck may have it the initial few photos were the one which I wanted. So was it all gone for ever??

Well….Google is here…..did a quick round of search and ended up with a quick open source solution to recover media files from a memory card. here is what needs to be done.

• Install ‘testdisk’ package for your distribution
  The first step which I did was to install a software package named “testdisk”, depending on the distribution you use you should easily be able to find the package.
• Make an image of the memory card
  The next step is to make an image of your memory card, this is achieved using the ‘dd’ command which comes by default with most distributions, the command you will have to issue is:

  $ dd if=/dev/sda1 of=memory_card.img bs=1024

  In the above command, ‘if’ is the input drive which should be your memory card, ‘of’ is the file name for the image which we are creating, and ‘bs’ is the byte size.

• Recover files by scanning the image using photorec
  The final step is to use a command provided by testdisk package. The ‘photorec’ command will recover all the JPG and GIF files which were recently deleted from your memory card. The command is very simple:

  $ photorec memory_card.img

  The software will take you through a menu driven interface where you will have to select a few options to get your work done. It is simple and anyone should be able to use it with ease.

So by following the above three simple steps I was able to recover the pictures which I had thought were lost for ever and that to using only free software and on a Linux system. There is one or the other software in a Linux system which will always be there for your requirement but may have been unknown to you, but once you know your requirement you would be amazed at the options that are available, atleast I was blown away. Three cheers to free software and lots of thanks to the developers of ‘testdisk’ and ‘photorec’. Now only if someone would write a proper GUI for this….well I don’t want to be too greedy…

So I am off to take more photos without having to worry about losing some photos unintentionally when deleting photos from the Cybershot memory card…

Finally, I found a simple and really fast image viewer for my gnome desktop - GPicView. The first impression I got of this software was that this looked very much similar to the Microsoft Image and Fax Viewer, and the layout of the buttons is quite similar to it.

Before coming across GPicView I was using ‘Eye of Gnome’ for viewing images and photos. But some how or the other I felt it was a bit slow to start up and use. But GPicView, though not as polished as the other software is a no nonsense approach to image viewing. It just has a few options to offer, but it does what it is designed to do - that is view images and pictures. A must have program, given its small footprint and the small install files size. The best things about GPicView is its really fast load time on low end machines with very less RAM.

The features of the program are as below (taken from the sites homepage, link provided at the bottom of the post):

• Extremely lightweight and fast with low memory usage
• Very suitable for default image viewer of desktop system
• Simple and intuitive interface
• Minimal lib dependency: Only pure GTK+ is used
• Desktop independent: Doesn’t require any specific desktop environment
• Open source, licensed under GNU GPL

I download the rpm for my Suse 10.2 from the http://rpm.pbone.net/ site.

You can find more information about this project at its home page - http://lxde.sourceforge.net/gpicview/.

Photos….Photos…and more Photos…..ever since I bought the digital camera I have been clicking photos of anything imaginable. I have been on a few trips as well, hence I thought of putting some of the good ones on the web and share it with a few friends, and the best solution for these for me turned out to be Picasa.

So off I went about putting together the photos I wanted to upload to Picasa Web, that is when I realised that I am in a bit of trouble. With each photo being 1.8MB, it was very obvious that I needed to resize the photo’s to a more web appropriate resolution of 1024×768 and at a lower image quality.

I did not directly recollect any software available in Linux which has batch resize options, hence I quickly did a google search and the results surprised me. The solution was a really simple one, that of making use of the package which is by default available in most Linux distro’s - “ImageMagick”, which provides the ‘convert’ command.

Here’s the simple script:
for k in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $k -resize 1024×768 -quality 100 re_$k; done

The working of the above script is simple, here is what it does:
1. Loops through all the JPG files in the current directory.
2. Then for each JPG file in the directory it calls the ‘convert’ command telling it to resize the images to the size 1024×768 and without an quality loss (i.e. 100, means no compression) and saves the resultant file with the prefix ‘re_’.
3. The done statement tells the script to end once all the JPG files are processed.

How is that for a simple and effective solution. Three cheers for command line….who needs bulky and resource hungry GUI programs…? And if you are waiting for the photos…sorry…that is available only to a few select friends and relatives…..but I have posted some of them at the following link http://flickr.com/photos/knithink.

Want that document urgently, but don’t remember which folder you put it in…and thousands of files are littered all over…..Search! Search!….but how…..???

Well over the last year or so the desktop search, an area which has been a sore point in Linux desktops is finally seeing light. Initially we were offered Beagle, which I liked but had to do away with because of it hunger for cpu and the ram. And more recently Google announced its offering. And this time not a wine implementation of the Windoze version like Picasa, but a complete port of Google Desktop Search.

So I thought I will give it a try. Installation was simple as every, just downloaded the file and the installation went on without any issues. After installing, the next time I restarted the machine the search agent appeared in the system tray panel and it began indexing.

The good thing was that it installed the required extensions for firefox and thunderbird itself, so I did not have to do anything. And the indexing was getting done during the idle time, and not when you were using the machine, though I would feel the system crawl How?? Well, I have just 256 megs of RAM ;-( and too much thrashing and swapping was going on, also thunderbird began to slow down, since the indexing was getting done real time rather than offine.

But Google being Google delivered a good product, though with fewer features than the Windoze version. The search result are accurate and it even has a cached copy of the search result.

Over all a good product with good search capabilities, I keep it on most of the time, but sometimes when the things get slow, I do turn the ‘pause indexing’ option on. So no more struggling to find that document, google is here.

You can find more about it here @ features page.

You can download it from the download page.

GAIM, the multi protocol instant messenger client for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Using Gaim one can talk to one’s friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

GAIM has now been renamed to Pidgin. The change in the name was due to a trademark issue with AOL, which has an instant messenger which goes by the name AIM. But change in the name has been quite good and it is extremely nice to finally see the new version which was held up due to the issue with AOL.

Pidgin has a new logo, looks great and functionality is top class. One of the first things I noticed was the new Tango icon set they shifted to. The icon set gives a huge boost to the look and feel of the software. I am just in love with this icon theme. Also the way the contacts are displayed has changed a bit, they are displayed as dots along with the name and photos. The dots/images make it easier to know the status of the user much easier.

Overall a too good of a product, and I recommend it to ever one who uses any instant messenger client. In fact, yesterday when I finally managed to get back to connecting to net via Linux, the first thing I did was download Pidgin and get it working. Also when compared to the other two Internet products which also are in version 2, viz., Firefox and Thunderbird, I would say Pidgin has had more of a significant change from 1.x series to 2.x version.

I recently got a internet connection from Tata Indicom (CDMA Wireless). I purchased the Huawei EC325 modem which uses a USB cable to connect to the PC. My inital reaction was since it was a USB connection and was using a custom software to connect to the net, it would not be possible to connect to the net in Linux using this modem.

After full two months, I finally gave up my laziness and did a quick search. I tried out the first solution offered and it worked out in the first try itself, how often does that happen. It took me a total of 10 mins including searching, restarting and configuring to get connected to the net in Linux.

Here is the procedure to get Huawei EC325 Data Modem in Linux:-

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Log in as root, i.e. type “su -” sans the quotes and enter the root password.
3. Then use vi to edit/create the following file “/etc/wvdial.conf”.
4. Enter the following text into it.
   [Modem0]
   Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0
   Baud=115200
   SetVolume=0
   Dial Command = ATDT
   init1=ATZ
   init2=AT+CRM=1
   FlowControl= Hardware (CRTSCTS)
   [Dialer tata]
   Username= internet
   Password= internet
   Phone=#777
   Stupid Mode= 1
   Inherits = Modem0
5. In the above change the Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0 to what ever your device name is, you should be able to see it while the OS is booting, else give the “dmesg” command and search in that.
6. Final step is give the command “wvdial tata”, and if everything is proper you should now be connected to the net.
7. Press “Ctrl+c” when you want to disconnect.

I have tried this on SuSE 10.1 and it should work on any latest release of any Linux system. Also I had this system configured for net access for BSNL dataone service before, so am not absolutely sure if you have to do any DNS settings or not. But it should work regardless of it.

Great to be back into the Linux world again.

Looks like the holiday season has come early this year, many companies have been generous to give away their commercial products for free for a limited period. Is it not sad that piracy is very rampant in developing countries, and people use pirated software even though free alternatives are available. But now there is a chance to get commercial software for free, so don’t miss this opportunity, download and register them right now.

| Platform: Windows 2000, Windows XP | Size: 35.6 MB |
Offer expires January 4, 2007

A productive software which helps you to design a logo or a graphic for your website or other media, draft a vector diagram, edit your photos or touch up graphics for your website, It uses a super-fast rendering engine means there’s no waiting around to see the results of a tool, either. Even images with complex layers of fills, blends and transparencies will be updated right away. Also note that Xara XS is a special edition of Xara Xtreme that has been created exclusively for promotions on magazine covermounted CDs and is not available from Xara direct.
Registration Details: You can get your serial key by clicking ‘Register this Copy’ which you can see in the initial splash screen, when you start Xara XS.
Download Link

| Platform: Windows 2000, XP, 98 | Size: 8.4 MB |
Offer expires December 13, 2006

Do you use Nero for burning CD/DVD’s? Now is the time to try out a simple but powerful software that matches the power of Nero and you can download and register it for free. It has features to burn files and folders on data CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray discs, burn Audio CDs from WAV, MP3, FLAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis files and many other features. So hurry only one more week left before the offer closes.
Download and Registration Details

Offer Expires December 10, 2006

The program starts very simply. If you want to join a few film clips together, for instance, then just drag and drop them on to the timeline (MPEG, MOV, AVI and WMV formats are supported), and export the finished results as Windows Media Video (WMV) file. All finished in the minimum of clicks. The program comes with a range of special effects. It also provides a flexible Title editor, letting you add all kinds of animated titles and captions with the minimum of effort.
Download

| Platform Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP | Size 11.1 MB |
Offer expires November 26, 2006 (still available though)

Replacing your tired old hard drive with a speedy, high-capacity model is one of the most effective PC upgrades you can make. Don’t go through the tedious process of reinstalling Windows and your applications on the new drive, though: just run Drive Copy instead, and it’ll clone your existing drive in the shortest possible time. Once your new system is up and running, you can also use the program as a simple backup tool.
| Download | Registration |

| Platform Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP |

Partitioning your hard drive is an invaluable way to optimise the use of disk space, improve performance, or create a dual-boot PC so you can install another operating system.
| Download | Registration |