Geek with an attitude

I've never been officially asked to play games in front of a crowd as part of a lecture before.. until NOW, that is! But to add to the joy, how about going out of Colombo (sort of) and into a camp? LKing Camp was what it was called and this second time around, it was held at the Sarvodaya , Moratuwa. How much more fun could it get? Especially considering the timing with my dual core upgrade and 1GB RAM. So you could imagine how excited I was at the opportunity, when I was invited right after my speech at FOSS-Ed for hackers. Getting machines for the setup was the event was a bit of a hassle due to the hardware being pretty new and the machines donated by University of Moratuwa still running Fedora Core 4. Ultimately I was able to convince an upgrade to FC5, which fixed most of the 3D grahic issues. On my notebook, I had to do a quick install of Ununtu since I didn't have time to get 3D working on Gentoo (its working now). As for the game, I ended up going with the quake 3 d...

I was quite impressed the other day when a few of us from the Lanka Linux User Group ( LKLUG ) visited the National Institute of Business & Management ( NIBM ) as a result of an invitation we received a little over a month ago, to deliver few lectures. The event was held on the 24th of June. I thought they did a fantastic job in organizing the event by inviting us well ahead of time and following it up with suggestions for topics to talk of and later fixing a proper time slot that was convenient. Surprisingly this was the first of such an event and they had even made it a public event (which we were unaware of until later), and had yet managed to fill an entire auditorium of about 90% outsiders. It was only a couple of years ago that LKLUG first walked into NIBM and planted the seeds of Free & Opensource software by conducting a 2 day workshop on GNU/Linux. Therefore I think it was quite rewarding for us to see how organized and determined they have become in executing this ev...

Thought of bloggin on the topic as I am constantly asked about the topic. Its not that difficult to get the Bell CDMA phone working most of the time. If you have the hotplug or hald running as soon as you plugin the phone to the USB port it should get detected and the proper driver loaded. This is how you can check if the driver was loaded properly: Type dmesg and check the end of the output you should see something that says the ti_usb_3410 driver was loaded successfully. # dmesg ti_usb_3410_5052 2-1:2.0: TI USB 3410 1 port adapter converter detected You can also check that the driver was loaded by using lsmod. The dmesg output should also tell you the USB serial port that the driver has bind itself to. (Usually /dev/ttyUSB0) # lsmod|grep ti_usb_3410 Also make sure that the proper ppp modules have been loaded, or else you will notice that the dialer will not be able to connect to the ISP. # lsmod|grep ppp ppp_generic ppp_async ppp_deflate To connect, I'd recommend using wvdial wit...

Who said that only rich doctors were allowed to clone? I've just cloned my 3 year old notebook on to my brand new Acer TravelMate 4200 notebook that I got from my office . While the operation wasn't extremely easy, given that I had about 30GB to clone accross a 100MBps shared LAN, it was relatively easier than reinstalling all my 500 odd packages. Given my preference for Gentoo Linux, this would have resulted in a considerable amount of down time waiting for everything to compile. Instead I had a workable system that was identical to where I left off. Cloning 101 Cloning a GNU/Linux box is relatively simple. I booted both machines off two Knoppix LiveCDs , and then proceeded to configure the network cards on each notebook, so that they can ping each other. Then I partitioned my new notebook's hard drive, wiping out windoze, but keeping the hidden recovery partition just in case (i needed to return it). If you thought that this required creating partition sizes ident...

After the last foss-Ed event and seeing the quality of the pictures taken from my (6 year old) Kodak 3600DX camera, I decided it was time to buy a new one. When deciding what sort of camera to buy, it occurred to me that having a small, highly portable one would be most practical as I can always carry it around with out pre-planning to take pictures. There were countless number of times that I wished I'd brought my camera along and had to settle for a quick phone camera shot, instead. So I decided to go with a Sony cybershot T series. After reading a couple of reviews and especially this one , I was sold on buying the T30. I got mine at Nastash, a/the gadget shop at Liberty Plaza. A few days after I went on a trip to Amaya Hills (aka Le Kandian), and took these pictures among others :) ENjoy! More Pictures from Amaya Hills

Many geeks turned up at ExcelWorld on last Sunday for the launch of the much waited and anticipated version of Ubuntu, codenamed Drapper. Drapper, aka Ubuntu 6.06, has several improvements over previous versions. Here are some of the high-lights: Single installable LiveCD Graphical Installer Nice sleek look (Ubuntu only IMHO) Official promotion of Kubuntu Update notification applet Improved hardware support, especially for wireless devices Anyway, I hope to write a review on my first impressions on Ubuntu later this week.. so stay tuned. I got to the party a little bit late - at around 6pm even though it was on from about 1pm. As I arrived I could see a table infested with geeks, notebooks and digi camera's. Got myself a set of Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs of which I installed Ubuntu on my home barebone system as an addition to the existing 3 or 4 other distros :) Anyway it was a fun launch... enjoy the pictures. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ubuntu/ http://www.flickr.com/phot...