Last week, I travelled from one side of the continent to the opposite side of it. By all accounts this should be an easy thing. People are travelling this route and longer distances everyday. But a small delay (30 minutes) in the first flight, completely disrupted the plans. What was supposed to be a 10 hour trip, took over 24 hours, and involved a very creative path. What is not obvious in my description is that other delays should be added to the 30 minute delay: waiting to pick up luggage, going through US customs, going through security, etc.
In an age when I can order something online and have it shipped to me from across the world in a couple of days, why can’t I travel with that same efficiency?
A couple of weeks ago, I was heading on a trip and wanted to bring along a nice video recorder. Having heard of pocket size flash-based video cameras like the Kodak Zi8 and the various Flip products, I decided to give the Flip UltraHD a try.
Note: Before we go on, I forgot to take any photos of the actual device but there are enough reviews online that there’s no real los (here, here and here).
The device itself is twice as thick as an iPhone, and nearly the same in other dimensions. Usability was simple, a big red button that starts and stops the recording, and some navigation for reviewing your videos. What I found really impressive was the actual quality of the video. The video was crisp, and it recorded decent enough audio (in the direction the camera is pointing). The big drawback was the shaky quality of the videos when you record while walking. That, along with the small viewing angle – which meant I had to be at least a few meters away from subjects to get them fully in the frame – are the two drawbacks of this device for me.
Here are two sample videos I took with the Flip, and you can judge for yourself. First video is taken indoors to show how the camera works in low light, it is not HD. The second video was shot outside with good lighting but it was taken while walking and you can see the shakiness of the image. (To see the HD version click on the link to go to Vimeo)
Overall, I would get this camera for doing quick shoots and things that one would normally use a cellphone or point and shoot camera for. For longer videos, I would look to other more advanced cameras.
It was 31 years ago tomorrow that the Iranian Revolution (sometimes called the second revolution) succeeded in sending the Shah of Iran out of the country. Thus began 3 decades in the history of Iran marked by war [1], violence, and hardships. For Iranians of my generation, those times will not be forgotten and for future generations they will be just another chapter in history.
I mentioned all this, to say that tomorrow Iranians are planning to go out and let out a collective scream against the current government and all things that has made daily life hard for them.
Let’s hope all those who go to make their voices heard come back home safe.
As with most things in tech, large companies catch on to the power of instant messaging late. Where I work is no exception. They rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator a couple of months ago (as a side note, that is a horrible landing page) and made much of the new and improved power of communication between employees. It’s a great thing that I can finally communicate using instant messaging, but the proprietary software threw a monkey in my desktop setup. After some research I found out how to get my desktop to connect to the Office Communicator server: Pidgin and SIPE.
First, I needed to install Pidgin
sudo apt-get install pidgin
Then, I installed the TLS plugin for Pidgin
sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption
Now, the important piece of the puzzle was SIPE, which is needed to connect to proprietary server. I initially tried the usual
sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe
But the version of SIPE available for jaunty was version 1.2-1 and it didn’t work. So, I went with the old school way of compiling my own binary. I got the code from here and followed the simple instructions on the same site. They are as follows:
tar -zxvf pidgin-sipe-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd pidgin-sipe-1.7.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install
Once installed, I started up Pidgin and after entering the necessary info connected successfully. You can see the detailed info of what I entered in the pictures below.
We run a large scale and highly visible website. This site is updated frequently, and is very complex. So far the way the site is updated is using subversion where the latest code is checked out into the public servers – after much testing, of course.
A typical release goes something like this:
checkout code from subversion
run a few scripts to modify database and generate intermediate files
generate various connections between site and underlying software
update underlying software
One problem with this approach is inevitably developers tend to push last minute fixes while in testing mode. It’s easy to update the code with a svn co but the code always tends to diverge and one fix usually leads to other bugs! Another issue is that each time a release is made a long list of complicated – and different each time – steps have to be followed. There are many other issues as well that I won’t go into right now, but suffice to say each release is as easy as pulling your own tooth!
So, one idea to cut down on all this trouble is to build a deb package for each release. This essentially locks down development, since each code change involves building a new package. I’m also fairly certain it will make life in the software lifecycle much easier.
And the debianized release would go like this:
apt-get install website package
apt-get install underlying software
Or even simpler if I made the website package depend on the underlying stuff:
apt-get install website package
Now only if I could get the decision makers to agree.
Last week, I travelled from one side of the continent to the opposite side of it. By all accounts this should be an easy thing. People are travelling this route and longer distances everyday. But a small delay (30 minutes) in the first flight, completely disrupted the plans. What was supposed to be a 10 hour trip, took over 24 hours, and involved a very creative path. What is not obvious in my description is that other delays should be added to the 30 minute delay: waiting to pick up luggage, going through US customs, going through security, etc.
It was 31 years ago tomorrow that the 
