Santanu's Mindspace

A general interest message

2010-05-16T23:48:00.005+05:30

Generally I don't forward chain e-mails. Today, however, I received a mail from a student of mine and it seemed to ask people to perform something very simple. I didn't forward the mail.. I'm just placing the message below. (I have a soft corner for birds ..)

Class action lawsuit on sony

2010-05-03T14:13:00.002+05:30

Here it is finally: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/108/1086720p1.html
It has been due for quite some time now.

Alas my PS3 bricked right after my last post and i got a new PS3 from sony service after 21 days. It's the slim 120GB which never had the OtherOS feature at all. Sony service is another story..maybe i'll get around to telling it later. The new set looks flimsy like a cheap plastic box...

Only thing that i will recommend is that don't buy a PS3 in India. The unit is not repairable in India. Yes.. in the warranty period of 1 year they will provide you with the latest available model. (I had the rugged 80GB model .. I got the flimsy 120GB model after waiting for 21 days). No extended warranty is sold for PS3 in India. Bet your retailer won't tell you that.

I think this is the last Sony product that i will ever have bought.

Outrage on customers by Sony

2010-04-01T12:19:00.003+05:30

Sony has released a mandatory firmware update for the PS3 that removes the ability to install GNU/Linux on the system. What is the problem with that? Well, problem is that, this feature was available only with older models of PS3 (upto the ones with 80GB hard disk).
I bought my PS3 at a time when these old ones and the new 120GB models (without GNU/Linux installation option) were just becoming available. (Mind you, both models cost the same in India..). I specifically bought the older model for this feature. It's a damn good piece of sophisticated hardware, and i loved it till now. The games look and play awesome on it, so does the HD movies. And I know a bunch of others who did the same.

I am not qualified, but is it legal for a company to remove feature from a product that has already been sold to the customer with the particular option being touted as a feature? If anyone is qualified, can they take the fight to sony? In india? What if somebody told you someday that a software update will disable the ABS feature on your car since some users were using counterfeited parts with it?

The most outrageous aspect of this whole thing is that unless one installs this update (s)he won't be able to log onto the PSN for playing online games and other stuff. That means you have to upgrade if you want to play online.

What is the way out? No safe ones seem to be in range. One could wait for the promised firmware from GeoHot. But that won't be legal. Meaning you may(will?) not get support from Sony if your PS3 bricks. I did BUY the PS3 at full price .. didn't rent it. What goes next? BD playback? DVD upscaling? DLNA streaming playback ( Well... you can play your pirated MP3s with it )?

Personally I do not like to use pirated stuff. I started using GNU/Linux for this primary reason around 8/10 years ago. I have quite a collection of Movie DVD's and Audio CDs. However, this time I am tempted. Will I update? Not right now... I need more time to decide.

I have a lot of sony hardware lying around the house ranging from phones to TV's. Now, frankly, I have lost my trust in them. I didn't buy an iPod/Xbox 360 for this kind of vendor mentality.

What next? PC's that don't let you install other OS? (If you install any OS other than the pre-bundled one [ we can all guess what that would be ], you won't be able to see HD on you 15K HD graphics card). Where does it stop? I urge people who read this blog to speak up against this outrage on customer rights.

Ugly Goats on your desktop

2010-03-09T15:18:00.002+05:30

Heh!! Heh!!
When in GNOME, press Alt+F2. In the run box type "gegls from outer space" and enjoy...

Solang 0.3 released

2009-09-18T12:56:00.001+05:30

We are glad to announce the release of Solang 0.3.

Solang is a photo manager for GNOME and this release contains several
new features and improvements.

* A new logo and .desktop file.

* Context sensitive popup on right-clicking a photo in the browser
renderer.

* Folder exporter to export selected photos to a folder.

* Improved editing abilities. A new GEGL based editing engine; and
support for brightness, contrast, saturation and scaling. Of these
only the first two operations are based on GEGL. The rest will be
migrated as GEGL improves in the future.

* Introduced a histogram in the editor renderer and the property
manager.

* It is now possible to copy a set of applied operations from one
photo and paste it onto others.

* New vertical toolbox for the editor renderer. The flip, rotate and
scale operations are now placed in this toolbox, and their
corresponding entries have been removed from the menu.

* Support for slideshows.

* The date, property and tag managers, and the search basket are
hidden when using the editor renderer.

* The main horizontal toolbar style has been set to "icons only".

* Use a black background for the photo when in fullscreen mode and do
not draw a frame it.

* New dependencies on BABL and GEGL.

We would like to thank Yasen Pramatarov and Andrea Zagli for contributing the
Bulgarian and Italian translations respectively; and Angella Inzinga for
creating a logo.

For more information on Solang, including links to file downloads,
please see the project page http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang.

Please email bugs or suggestions to .

Here are the compressed sources:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use the signature file to verify that the corresponding
file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download
both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command
like this:

gpg --verify solang-0.3.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then download the project keyring from
http://sv.nongnu.org/project/memberlist-gpgkeys.php?group=solang&download=1
and run this command to import it:

gpg --import solang-keyring.gpg

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Better editing support in Solang

2009-09-10T16:08:00.004+05:30

As I had indicated in the last post, I have been working on improving the editing capabilities of Solang. The results have been the following:

1) Integration of Gegl as a backend that can be used for some operations. This opens up a vista of new opportunities. For this release we have only 2 editing features that use the Gegl back-end: Brightness and Contrast. Other operations will be moved to gegl once the speed issues are resolved in Gegl code.
2) Histogram for photos in both properties pane, as well as in editing.
3) The following editing features are supported now:
a) Rotate by right angles
b) Flip vertically and horizontally
c) Up and down scaling
d) Brightness adjustment
e) Contrast adjustment
f) Saturation
4) Last and my favorite one: Copy and paste a set of editing operations done on one photo to others.
The changes are currently published as patches on the solang-devel list. They will be pushed to the git repo soon.
On the non-editing side, debarshi has added support for slideshow and has also written an exporter that can export to a directory and optionally creates a zip archive out of the photos being exported.

Histogram in Solang

2009-08-31T12:58:00.011+05:30

Been long time since the last release ... but lots of things are happening behind the scenes. First of all, debarshi added slide show support in solang. He is working on photo exporter architecture at the moment.
I am working on development of an improved editing architecture. To this end I managed to write code for adding support of editing using GEGL. I was personally inclined to move to GEGL as it would allow us to do 16 bits editing and as a direct consequence proper RAW processing. However, some parts of GEGL are too slow at the moment.. I am sure they will be fixed soon by the good folks working on GEGL. Therefore, we decided to go with 8 bits per channel editing support only at this time. The backends can be switched fast. We will support simple operations at the moment .. ones that can be done by Gdk::Pixbuf directly or have fast implementations in GEGL.
The back-end switching systems are in place now (not in git though...). I am working on a filter architecture to enable fast creation of filters (operations) along with dynamic GUI creation for each filter. The full thing will be committed in one go. To this end, over the weekend I created a back-end and a corresponding widget to show histograms. At this moment it supports 8-bits-per-channel images only (it reads from a memory buffer that is currently set to a Gdk::Pixbuf object). However, it supports both linear and logarithmic histograms. It also supports a per-channel histogram generation option. The histogram has been added to both the browser and editor pages of solang. I am attaching a few screen-shots below.

Solang 0.2 released

2009-07-09T11:23:00.004+05:30

We are glad to announce the release of Solang 0.2.

Solang is a photo manager for GNOME and this release contains several new features and improvements.

* Pagination bar and zoomer for the browser renderer.

* Support for zooming within the enlarged renderer.

* UI elements for navigating within the browser renderer -- previous page, next page, first page and last page.

* Added a new non-deletable "All Photos" tag.

* Queue based object deletion framework. Ability to delete tags and remove them from selected photos.

* Flickr importer to import photos from Flickr.

* Editor infrastructure. A new editor renderer; and support for rotation, flipping, and undo, redo of operations.

* Various improvements to the importer dialog, importer, progres dialog and progress observer.

* New dependencies on Flickcurl, LibSoup and WebKit Gtk+.

* Ported to Exiv2 version 0.18.

We would like to express our special thanks to Andrea Colangelo and Hicham Haouari for their reports, and efforts in getting Solang packaged for Ubuntu and Fedora respectively.

For more information on Solang, including links to file downloads, please see the project page http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang.

Please email bugs or suggestions to <solang-users@nongnu.org>.

Here are the compressed sources:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig
http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use the signature file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify Solang-0.2.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then download the project keyring from
http://sv.nongnu.org/project/memberlist-gpgkeys.php?group=solang&download=1
and run this command to import it:

gpg --import solang-keyring.gpg

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

Working towards Solang-0.2

2009-06-18T10:44:00.003+05:30

Time is nigh for the 0.2 release for solang.
First of all a news: We have a solang-users list now.

Before we go into the details of the next release, I would like to address some issues and questions that were raised as a part of the comments to my blog and on this blog.

First of all MANY, MANY thanks for the interest. We are very happy you have noticed this project.

1) Solang is NOT an f-spot "clone". It contains / will contain features that f-spot may or may not ever have. (Searching using multiple dates, searching using photo-property, paginated browsing etc). It also lacks a lot of features that f-spot even currently provides (A plethora of editing options and filters etc)
2) Jaunty compilation issue: The git version of solang should be compilable. Exiv version 0.18 has been supported. The author of this article has been kind enough to test it out.
3) In-photo tagging: We are NOT planning to do this. Instead we plan to do something better... we plan to port solang to windows in the near future. The back end database path will be made configurable, so that the database may be placed in some shared user area visible to all OS installations on a host.
4) Import from f-spot: We are planning to do this probably in the next release. If this is an immediate requirement, please let us know on solang-users mailing list and we will try to make a patch release for this after the 0.2 release.
5) Exif-IPTC editing... we haven't decided yet .. but maybe soon enough ..

A request to all users, please file bugs at Solang Project Page (needs login). Also, we are available at sane indian working hours (and sometimes even the insane ones) on the #solang room on irc.freenode.net. Feel free to drop in to let us know of feature requests, any required build assistance, rants and whatever you feel like (we discuss movies also on the room .. :-P)

Okay, so, for the next release we present the following feature list:
1) Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
2) Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
3) Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
4) Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
5) Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
6) An importer from flickr (Underway)
7) A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)

Another thing... it would be nice if someone could find the time to create some user documentation for solang... otherwise, it will take some time for us to come up with a decent doc for this.

Okay, enough talk... back to coding... and we are waiting to hear from you.

Solang...

2009-06-01T17:50:00.004+05:30

Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light

After many a long day and sleepless night we are pleased to announce Solang, a (or yet another if you may please) photo manager for GNOME.

Why solang? Well, I have a busted old laptop (a worn out HP NX6115 with 512 MB RAM) that aches and burns to manage my photo collection using the so called state-of-the-art foo written in the state-of-the-art bar language. So we thought, maybe re-inventing some wheels are not totally misplaced excursions of the mind. Besides I need to get something that runs on my ol' buddy.

Solang will not become a one-stop-shop for all photographic needs. We may never decide to give top-notch editing support in Solang. IMO, the UFRAW, RawStudio, Gimp and CinePaint stack do quite nicely for RAW processing and general photo-retouching. Solang will try to act a front-end for all photo-storage containers (Folders, CD/DVD, PicasaWeb, Flickr etc). We also want fast operation, powerful search capabilities and a flexible and extensible design.

The first developer version of Solang is available at: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang

Unfortunately the Savannah servers have gone Kaput!! for a few days. I am sure the good folks at GNU will get them back online soon enough. For the time being solang can also be found at: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/solang/

Please checkout the README file before you do anything. Use at your own risk!!
Also practically speaking there may be som changes in the back-end database in the later releases. Oh and one more thing, currently you cannot delete anything (Tags/Photos) from Solang. We are working on an undoable deletion system. Should be committed shortly.

Feedback on this will be highly appreciated. You can also subscribe to solang-devel list. We will start a solang-users list after a few days.

Below are some screenshots of Solang in action:

Coming Soon to a PC near you

2009-05-28T12:57:00.002+05:30

C for Censorship

2009-01-20T11:05:00.004+05:30

Remember remember, the fifth of november
the gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
why the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot...

Yesterday I bought the DVD for "V for Vendetta". I already have the Alan Moore masterpiece of a Graphic Novel. I also caught the movie while I was abroad. While not as radical as the book, the movie is quite good in it's own right. So I decided to add it to my collection.
The DVD is from BIG Home Videos, the print quality is pretty good and so is the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix. What are missing are major parts of the movie!!!
Watching a censored version of V for Vendetta is just to ironic. For the uninitiated, it is a movie about an anarchist who wreaks havoc on a totalitarian regime in England. I mean, the logic behind the censorship of an "A" (Similar to 18+) rated movie completely beats me. Okay, so what was censored? In the movie a gay couple is shown kissing. Now the resourceful and highly intellectual, moral police (a.k.a the censor board ) thought it was inappropriate for the indian adults to see this.
What is my problem with the removal of the scene? Simple, it breaks the continuity of the movie. Below I print the list of other DVD's (of the ones that I own or have seen) that are victims of censorship:

1) Bram Stroker's Dracula - Seems like half of the movie is gone. It is almost impossible to even begin to understand what is going on in the movie. For god's sake the theatrical version (I saw it twice, both times in Calcutta) was far more complete than the DVD version. (Sony)
2) Sin City - Half of the movie is gone (UTV)
3) 300 - Many scenes have been removed. (WB-SareGama - I think)
4) Casino Royal - Daniel Craig torture scenes are almost completely gone. Another scene where murino tells craig about the whereabouts of dimitrios has been edited out. Now, this is done such ruthlessly you would completely miss why suddenly craig suddenly orders for caviar and leaves. (Sony)
5) Schindler's List- Can you imagine they put knife even to this masterpiece!! (Univeral)
6) Kingdom of Heaven - Some important intimate scenes between eva green and orlando bloom (Fox)
Many others (read most others) have removals that make them unfit for viewing.
Currently the state that we are in, the only way to see a complete movie is to download it off the internet. Is this the way recommended by the govenrment? I want to know this, because, I spent 750 bucks on buying the platinum edition of Casino Royal. And none of the others that I mentioned cost less than 300 bucks. Most cost considerably higher.
The people sitting on the censorboard, I think, are completely clueless as to the importance of freeness of art for the proper development of society. Otherwise they would think twice before touching Schindler's List. I recommend to them, the movie "Salo" by Peir Paolo Pasollini (assuming, of course, they are qualified enough to read subtitles). What would they do about that? Or movies by Goddard, Bunuel, Antonioni, Bergman? What would happen to Apocalyse Now without the controversial scene of the bull sacrifice? Limit them to film festivals .. of course, so only a few are able to see them. I did. But howabout afterwards? What will I show to my friend in place of Salo, which I think is the single most powerful commentary on the perverseness of a totalitarian and fascist regime?
I am angry. I am depressed and I am sorry. Sorry for us. Sorry for the people that elect governments that censor art before public consumption. Why does the govenment need to censor a movie even after it is given a rating? Censorship is a social disease. It needs to be eradicated from it's root. The last time I checked we live in a democratic repulic. One with the largest number of voters. As the protagonist "V" so poignantly puts foward in one of his discourses to Evey Hammond:

The people should not be afraid of the government, The government should be afraid of the people

If this finds a place on your mind, please feel free to share with me what you think of censorship in art.

2 new lenses

2008-05-12T13:13:00.004+05:30

Got 2 new lenses recently for my Pentax:

1) Sigma 70-300mm DG macro
2) An used Sigma 170-500 mm APO DG lens ... thanks to an old friend, i got this lens for 1/6th the price in calcutta...
Tried to take some snaps, results came out like this.

While reading came across this really great page on photography related tools on GNU/Linux

Currently i am using the Ufraw-CinePaint-Gimp pipeline on Debian/Sid and it works really well, at least for me.

Monsoons..

2007-07-05T10:46:00.000+05:30

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked
the furthest city light.

-Robert Frost

Monsoon is here bigtime... and it has been raining like cats and dogs for three days now. Despite the cancellation of the post-workshop session, delays in coming to office and getting back home.. water clogged streets I still somehow manage to love the rainy season. Brings back many happy memories from times long since left behind.

Preparations for post workshop sessions

2007-06-30T01:18:00.000+05:30

After the successful workshop we have started working for the post workshop session at science college. The items covered would be:

Demonstration of GNU/Linux installation using Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
Demonstration of configuration for commonly used peripherals such as Phones, Printers, Cameras etc.
Q & A session on topics covering the GCC workshop as well as general GNU/Linux related installation and configuration issues..

The workshop will be held from 4:30 PM onwards at Rajabazar Science College on Tuesday, 3- July-2007

Preparations have started as meetings on IRC at #ilug-cal. Topics have been discussed and delegated..

Created hackergtochi

2007-06-25T14:11:00.000+05:30

Hey I created my new hackergotchi...

Funny Definition

2007-06-24T12:31:00.000+05:30

I was checking the exam papers for a few students from one of the classes that I take. Question was simple: What is the definition for Complexity of an Algorithm? Answer was simpler:

Complexity denotes how much the execution of a program is complicated

Workshop on GCC at Rajabazar Science College

2007-06-10T11:33:00.000+05:30

Introduction

Indian GNU/Linux User's Group, Kolkata Chapter and Department of Radio Physics and Electronics, Calcutta University had organized a 5-Day Workshop on GCC from 2-23rd June 2007. After a month of studying, teaching, shearing footaches and dried up mouth, I sit to write about the workshop.

Preparations
Not too much prepared :). We started off with shaky legs and doubtful mind as to what to do. Me and Debarshi Ray started off with writing tutorials and discussions on the topics to be covered on the #ilug-cal irc channel. The top level list of items was suggested by Dr. Partha Pratim Das. We selected items from that list and after many a long discussion came up with a rough game plan for the workshop. The format was simple:
We start off with the basics of Free Software. Move to GCC. Do a small session on writing make files. And move to a basic tutorial on GDB. The idea of the workshop would be to enable the users to hack-up a small project of their own.
Final phase of the preparations was completed with a meeting of the volunteers at the Cafe Coffee Day at the Infinity Building in Kolkata.
On the CU front, Prof Susanta Sen, Sumit Das Gupta and Arpita di were working day-in and day-out to handle the administrative tasks and other necessary preparations.
With all this complete, we were all setup for the workshop on all fronts.

Inaugration
Day started off with an inauguration program. Present were Professor Debesh Das, Hon'ble minister in Charge, Information Technology, Govt. of West Bengal, Prof. T. K. Ghosal, Pro-VC Finance, Calcutta University, Professor D. K. Basu (TEQUIP), Prof. P. K. Basu (TEQUIP), Prof. Goutam Ghosh and Prof. Bijoy Bandyopadhyay, Convenor for the Workshop, and of course Professor Susanta Sen, Head of the Department, Calcutta University. They spoke well about the current wave of enthusiasm over Free and Open Source Software in West Bengal. They also appreciated the herd from Ilug-cal who had really worked hard to make it a success.
This program ended with a high-tea and we went onto the workshop.

The Workshop Sessions
The first two days had two sessions, one on GNU/Linux Pretutorial and the other was the main workshop on Linux. Resources for the Pre Tutorial were Debarshi Ray, Indranil Das Gupta and Kakoli Bhattacharya. For the GCC workshop, it was me, Debanjan Basu, Madhubanti Das Gupta, Debarshi Ray, Avishek Dutta, and Parantap. Not all of us were present on all days except me and Debrashi... Others shared the duties between themselves. And thanks to my apathy towards vanilla flavoured icecream, Debarshi has 2 ice-creams everyday..
We were sure that there would be interest in the workshop. What we saw how ever was overwhelming... People were very much interested in learning the tools offered. Most of the participants were faculty from different academic institutions, including Techno India, IEM and Ashutosh College as well as people from the Computer Science Department, Calcutta University. A lot of bright students had also appeared eager to learn the ways of FOSS. They were enlightened and will hopefully come forward as developers for different open source projects. Since the workshops I have had many mails from many a participant asking for various details. Some such as Debashruti Maitra have already come forward and joined the LUG.
We tried to cover the basics of GCC, make and GDB. Even the basics amount to a lot.. so we can say we touched the surface only. However, if followed the tutorials will help students to hack up prototype projects of their own.
The overall response was extremely positive from the participants. However, the general notion was that it would have been better if the workshop could have been split up over two days. This could have been done, but what started off as an idea for small workshop for 20 people ended up being a grand one covering 120 people!! We are happy that atleast we could start them off on the journey to FOSS nirvana through the workshop.

Moments
In no particular order:
1) Rishi getting scolded by one of the participants for standing in front of her...
2) One of the participants trying to make us understand some co-rllation between "Desktop refresh" and "capacitor discharge in RAM" !! :-0
etc etc.

Photographs

Many thanks to...

Beloved professors: Susanta Sen, PKB, GG and BB
Sumit Da and Arpita Di
PPD and SC from my office

Session Dates
Workshop on GCC, Make and GDB basics:

2-June-2007
9-June-2007
16-June-2007
17-June-2007
23-June 2007

Pre tutorials on GNU/Linux

2-June-2007
9-June-2007

Materials
The materials can be found here.