rohitj's domain

I didn’t mean to upgrade this site, but since I screwed up some files, and i didn’t have backup, I took this opportunity to shift this site from “self designed CMS + 3 wordpress blogs” to “wordpress multi user”.  I expected wordpress MU to ease my life a lot, but thats not true.  It only made it tough. wordpress MU is not a good substitute for what I had before. Its no doubt good if you want to create a blog for each student in your school, like navya did for IIT Kanpur (see http://blogs.iitk.ac.in/). Though I hope/think that in long run it will be helpful.

While upgrading, thing went smooth apart from one problem. When you install wordpress, by default it creates a blog, and its posts has URL /blog/blah blah. But /blog/ will give 404 error. Now, this meant I could import all my posts from old blog, and I don’t have to worry about indexing by different search engines.  But feed url shifted from /blog/feed/ to /feed/. Now this was bad. So, I tried to change settings so that this defualt blog could work properly with /blog/ urls. But alas, it didn’t work out well. and I am pretty much sure that there is no way of doing so. So, I wrote some rewrite rule sin htaccess and now it works. (hopefully). This site was useful : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds.

If  you find any problem with the site, please let me know

Another glitch with Kontact. I use wordpress for this blog. And I recently started using kontact journal to keep some private journal entries. Now, Kontact journal allows you to use XML-RPC, which means I can use kontact to write and read blog posts from this blog. I tried that, and I changed my last blog entry in Kontact. But instead of changing the post, Kontact deleted the post. This is ridiculous. Seriously, Kontact people need to straighten up their basic testing protocols. The first and foremost thing is that data *must* not be deleted. And someone told me that open source developers are the most intelligent developers. I sincerely and with sadness doubt that.

So, I use a pop3 client for all my email accounts. I prefer to keep all my emails on my computer rather than on web. And I organize my emails properly. I have lots of folders, and lots of subfolders. And lot of subsubfolders. I liked the folder system most of the time. I didn’t like the label system because I prefer not to see the read emails (read ‘read’ as ‘labelled’). In my email client, I move my read emails to the right folder, so in my inbox, there are only those emails which either I have not read or I haven’t responded. But, now I am finding folder system a little annoying. The problem is that if in an email thread there are 10 emails, and 5 of them are already in some folder, and the new 5 are in inbox. Its difficult to switch back and forth between different folders. In label system, this is easy. Also, it makes it easy to leave all emails in inbox. So, I do not have to plan move emails all the time. I wonder how difficult it will be to implement label system in Kontact or Thunderbird. I have been noticing that Google interface seems bad and ugly, but there are subtle things which make it much more usable. Google HCI people are way too intelligent.

So, one of the reasons why I use ubuntu and not debian is that I want relatively new softwares. But ubuntu’s release period is really irritating now. They release a new version in every 6 months. Of course, nothing major changes this short duration. So, all they do is mainly add new release of KDE or gnome, thats it. Basically in ubuntu upgrade is practically equal to a decent size update. Now, there is nothing wrong is releasing new releases every six months, the problem is that those new softwares are not supported in previous release. For example, Jaunty has KDE4.2. But Intrepid will not have 4.2. Just because KDE updated, and because I want to use KDE4.2, I have to upgrade (or I have to use unsupported KDE, which I want to avoid, for obvious reasons). I wonder how big an issue it would be for system administrators. This is getting irritating. The definition of upgrade and update is totally screwed for Ubuntu.
The only decent difference as I see between Jaunty and Intrepid is KDE version, couldn’t they just give an update for KDE. I believe same goes with gnome.

Now then summer is coming, I think I will again be exploring various distros. Any suggestions?

Update : Oh, the issue with upgrading is that there are chances of things breaking. For example, when I upgraded to Jaunty, my knetworkmanager was gone. So, I had to use LAN and install it. fglrx drivers are not installed. And stuff like that.

Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.

0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.

1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.

2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)

I went to a group meeting. Usually, my laptop is not used for projector. But since, everyone else had mac, and they didn’t have the connector, I had to use my laptop. I had to restart X to get the projector working. Now, my default my KDE starts kopete, firefox, kontact, amarok, skype, plasma. The worst is plasma, skype and kopete. Plasma because I have this photobox on my desktop which shows pictures. Now, there is no objectional photo being displayed, but I still want to avoid showing that in public, because they are a little private. Skype because it doesn’t start in minimized mode. Kopete because it starts showing offline messages. Also, the sound. Now when I am in a group meeting, I want my desktop to be a little formal. I don’t want all this on startup. But when I am using it for normal purpose, I want all these things. So, here is the wishlist. Is it possible that on start, I could have an option to start the Window Manager in a formal mode, or unformal mode. Like I have an option to select between gnome and kde on start. I strongly believe that its a really important feature, and it should be available. Since I use mostly KDE applications, I believe KDE framework should have such facility. It will also be easier that way.

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

Pidgin has a cool plugin named “Text Replacement”. It has a built in big mapping between wrong spellings and correct spellings. So recently in #xchat IRC channel, someone asked for auto replace plugin. XChat has plugin for auto replacement, but it doesn’t have a map. You have to make the map yourself. XChat doesn’t allow cool options that pidgin gives (like case sensitive/insensitive or exact match or partial), so the mapping I am providing is case sensitive and exact match. I converted that Pidgin map (which is usually stored in “~/.purple/dict”) into XChat format (stored in “~/.xchat2/replace.conf”) . So, you can download the replace.conf file from the below given link, and can replace your current replace.conf with this file.

After restarting XChat, you should be able to see the plugin working properly.

here is the link to the file.

http://rohitj.net/myscripts/xchat_replace_conf/replace.conf

The Perl (yes, I still love Perl when it comes to regex) script I used to convert the format is here

http://rohitj.net/myscripts/xchat_replace_conf/replace.perl

You will need to put the script in the folder where “dict” file is.

License : The dictionary copyright mainly belongs to Eric Warmenhoven (piding.im).

Recently I started using IRC a lot. As I was doing some django, PyQT and KDE/C++ development. Yes, its lot of development. And then whenever I want to ask some question on IRC, I have to use pastebin/dpaste. ( dpaste is developed upon django framework. ). Now, to dpaste any code, I have to switch to Firefox, I have to use mouse as well. I have to copy paste the link to xchat. This was tedious task for me. So, I started making a plugin for xchat so that I could easily paste my code. Fortunately XChat has python plugin interface.

This plugin runs with the command:

/dpaste language

If you keep <language> empty, it will assume it to be “Plain”. You can use any language supported by dpaste.com. The command will open a gtk window, in which you can paste your code. And then “dpaste” button will copy paste the link (containing your code) on your xchat input box. . As of now I am sure, it works fine in IITK proxy system. I am pretty much sure it will work fine if you are behind no proxy.

Before using the proxy, you will need to change few parameters in the script, namely “proxy_username”, “proxy_password”, “proxy_server”, “proxy_port”. If you are not behind proxy, just keep “proxy_server” empty.

Also, you should install python module “ClientForm”, “pygtk”, and “urllib2″.

aptitude install python-clientform python python-gtk2

To load the script, a simple way is /load <path to plugin file> . Or you can copy the script in ~/.xchat2 folder. That way the script will be loaded whenever you open xchat.

You can download the code from here. As of now I haven’t made docs, but its an easy plugin, and some commenting as well.

Updates : Download the plugin version 0.6, and you don’t need to change anything in it. The plugin uses xchat proxy settings by itself.   As of now, http proxy and no proxy is supported.
http://rohitj.net/myscripts/xchat_plugin_dpaste

So, I had to change the feedparser code to run it behind proxy. Basically the idea is that python by default doesn’t user environment variables http proxy. You have to specify it in the python code.

In feedparser code, url is accessed at the line # 1895. Now, opener has to have http settings so that it could access the url. For that, I added 2 lines before calling opener:

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http" : "http://<username>:<passwd>@<proxyserver>:<proxyport>"});
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support)

Here is the final feedparser : FeedParser With Proxy Support