Saturday, May 31, 2008

Side Orders #2

Here we go with more clips, previews and other fun stuff: I think, from now on, I'll start these Side Orders posts of with an opening from a movie I like. Now, when most people cite great credits sequences, they're usually in that Saul Bass/Kyle Cooper mode of thinking--animated graphics and the like. But what about the ones where the graphics aren't the whole magilla? Case in point: the

Side Orders #2

Here we go with more clips, previews and other fun stuff: I think, from now on, I'll start these Side Orders posts of with an opening from a movie I like. Now, when most people cite great credits sequences, they're usually in that Saul Bass/Kyle Cooper mode of thinking--animated graphics and the like. But what about the ones where the graphics aren't the whole magilla? Case in point: the

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Film #41: Dad, Can I Borrow The Car?

When I was about nine years old, I tuned in to The Wonderful World of Disney one night to watch what I thought would be your typical Disney fare--cartoons, or a live-action adventure with li'l prairie dogs, or even a faboo tour of Disneyworld (an episode kids always wanted to see). Instead, what I got was something that blew my mind, and I hope it blows yours. But first...I was never a big fan

Film #41: Dad, Can I Borrow The Car?

When I was about nine years old, I tuned in to The Wonderful World of Disney one night to watch what I thought would be your typical Disney fare--cartoons, or a live-action adventure with li'l prairie dogs, or even a faboo tour of Disneyworld (an episode kids always wanted to see). Instead, what I got was something that blew my mind, and I hope it blows yours. But first...I was never a big fan

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Change Gnome Desktop Icons

So you use gnome and want to add or remove the default desktop icons. You want to add or remove the Desktop, home folder or trash Icon, or you don't want the mounted volume icon to appear on your desktop and hamper its beauty. Changing them is very easy.

Hit ALT+F2
Type gconf-editor

Go to /apps/nautilus/desktop/



There you will find the following options:

computer_icon_visible
home_icon_visible
network_icon_visible
trash_icon_visible
volumes_visible

Toggle them according to your choice.
The last one is the option for showing the mounted volume icons on desktop.

KFOG broadcast: May 20, 2008

Monday, May 19, 2008

Toward the center of the Milky Way

As Saturn continues to dominate the evening sky, Jupiter now rules the morning sky. It shines brightly in the pre-dawn sky near the constellation Sagittarius. This week the Moon will pay a visit to the scene, passing through the "teapot" of Sagittarius on May 23rd and near Jupiter on May 24th.

When you look toward Sagittarius you are looking nearly at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. While the Moon is passing through, you can't see much of the Milky Way at all, but once it has moved on and the light of the Moon doesn't impact the sky, you will have a better view of the center of our galaxy. Use binoculars and peer into Sagittarius and you will see a wealth of beauty, even with city lights. And if you don't want to get up so early in the morning for the view, wait until Summer and Sagittarius will be rising earlier and earlier in the night.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Amsn music plugin

Just like Windows Live Messenger you can display current playing song in Amsn too. It supports most music players.

First download the small plugin here.

Then unzip it.
Put them in either
  • /usr/share/amsn/plugins (for all users)
  • /home/YOUR_USER_NAME/.amsn/plugins (for you only)
Go to Account on main menu, select plugins.
You should see "Music"
Click configure.

Restart in not required.

Fedora 9 out now.

As everyone is shouting Fedora 9 is out.



Release Note

Get Fedora 9

Free Media Program

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

TriBeCa Diaries #9: Dying Breed

I had talked about seeing the film with a very sweet publicist earlier in the day. But I had forgotten about Dying Breed when it came to showtime. I had settled on seeing Harmony Korine's new film Mister Lonely instead, even though earlier in the day I had run into someone who said it sucked. I felt I should give Harmony another chance. He had, after all, written Kids. And though I disliked

TriBeCa Diaries #9: Dying Breed

I had talked about seeing the film with a very sweet publicist earlier in the day. But I had forgotten about Dying Breed when it came to showtime. I had settled on seeing Harmony Korine's new film Mister Lonely instead, even though earlier in the day I had run into someone who said it sucked. I felt I should give Harmony another chance. He had, after all, written Kids. And though I disliked

TriBeCa Diaries #8: Green Porno

It's perfection, having the always extremely erotic Isabella Rossellini as the focus of Green Porno, her eight-film debut as director (along with co-director Jody Shapiro). The subject of these charming, inventively educational one-minute shorts?The sex lives of insects. In each, an elaborately costumed Rossellini portrays a bug--a firefly, a house fly, a spider, a snail, a bee, an earthworm,

TriBeCa Diaries #8: Green Porno

It's perfection, having the always extremely erotic Isabella Rossellini as the focus of Green Porno, her eight-film debut as director (along with co-director Jody Shapiro). The subject of these charming, inventively educational one-minute shorts?The sex lives of insects. In each, an elaborately costumed Rossellini portrays a bug--a firefly, a house fly, a spider, a snail, a bee, an earthworm,

The Days Are Getting Longer

The days are getting longer as the Earth moves in its path around the Sun. Why do the days change in length? This has to do with the axis of the Earth being tipped. Why does that affect the length of a day?

For illustration, visualize of a globe mounted on a base. Globes are always mounted at an angle, representing the fact that the Earth is tipped 23.5 degrees from vertical. That is, as the Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, the line around which it spins points up and we call that direction North. This point in the sky is fixed over a period of hundreds of years and changes very slowly such that in a lifetime, the axis of the Earth will point nearly perfectly toward a single point in the sky. It is pure coincidence that for us in the current era, this point in the sky is almost directly where the North Star can be found. This star, Polaris, is the current north star but in a few thousand years won't be. If you want to learn more about the changing location of the pole star, you will want to read this article on "precession of the equinoxes."

As the Earth travels on its 365-day journey around the Sun, the axis of the Earth remains fixed in the same direction, North. That means that for half of the year the north side of the Earth is tipped toward the Sun, and for the next half of the year the south side of the Earth is tipped toward the Sun. That leads to the seasonal change that we all come to understand. When the north side of the Earth is tipped toward the Sun, we get more hours of light each day in the northern hemisphere. We are in that situation right now and with each passing day between now and the Summer Solstice, the days become longer. A side effect of this is that the Sun appears to rise north of due east and set north of due west. As the Sun moves across the southern sky, it climbs higher with each successive day. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it will be nearly in the zenith on the day of the Summer Solstice. This diagram illustrates how the light changes on the Earth throughout the year. Enjoy the sunshine and warm weather and take note of how high the Sun climbs in the sky at midday.

Note: Mercury remains visible for a few more days and is changing phase rapidly. It is found in the north-west part of the sky just after sunset.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Windows VS BIOS a Linux Addict

Its been nearly a year since I replace my Windows XP with Ubuntu and from that point I have never used Windows. Last week I have been to one of my relatives and he had a windows PC. I was using it (yes windows) for nearly an hour for checking mails, photos,playing music and so on. Then due to some technical problem I had to restart the PC and go to BIOS. I spent nearly five minutes there in BIOS. Later I realized that I enjoyed those five minutes of BIOS lot more than that I enjoyed using Windows.

P.S. I am a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE)

Saturday, May 10, 2008

DBMS Normalization Steps

Input RelationTransformationOutput relation
All relationsEliminate variable lenght records Remove multiattribute lines in Table1NF
1NF relationRemove dependency of non-key attribute on part of a multiattribute key2NF
2NFRemove dependency of non-key attributes on other non-key attributes3NF
3NFRemove dependency of an attribute of a multiattribute key on an attribute of another(overlapping)multiattribute keyBCNF
BCNFRemove more than one independent multivalued ependency from relation by splitting relation4NF
4NFAdd one relation relating attributes with multivalued dependeny to the two relatins with multivalued dependency5NF


Source:SMU

Friday, May 9, 2008

How to setup network bridge

I have written following tutorial based on my system(Debian). It may work with little or no modification in your system too.

First of all what is a network bridge?
According to www.linux-foundation.org
A bridge is a way to connect two Ethernet segments together in a protocol independent way.
I assume if you are reading this then you must know lot more than this.

So how do we create a bridge then? In windows it is very simple, just select the interfaces, right-click them and select create bridge.

In Linux, you need to do it following:

Edit your /etc/network/interfaces file
vi /etc/network/interfaces

Add the following codes
iface br0 inet static
address 172.16.5.1
netmask 255.255.255.224
gateway 172.16.5.5
bridge_ports eth0 eth1


OR

iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0 eth1


Save and exit.
Go to Terminal.
sudo ifup br0

Doing so will produce the following error

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
br0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
br0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Bind socket to interface: No such device
Failed to bring up br0.


This is because you haven't installed the package bridge-utils
In terminal type sudo apt-get install bridge-utils

Bingo! you are done.

If you want the bridge to be up automatically then you can add auto br0 in the /etc/network/interfaces file somewhere near the above added lines.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Launched


Openoffice.org 3.0 is launched.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is ready for testing

Download

The official site says A Start Centre is added,new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar.



Another major feature
OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).


It can be also run on MAC OS X without X11.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Puppy Linux 4.00

Do you have old computer lying around in your store. Want to give life to it. Have you heard of puppy Linux?

Puppy really is small, the live-CD typically being 85MB, yet there really is a complete set of GUI applications. Being so small, Puppy usually loads completely into RAM, which accounts for the incredible speed.



Hardware Requirements
CPU : Pentium 166MMX
RAM : 128 MB physical RAM for releases since version 1.0.2 or failing that a Linux swap file and/or swap partition is required for all included applications to run; 64 MB for releases previous to 1.0.2
Hard Drive : None
CDROM : 20x and up


http://puppylinux.com/

Try it for yourself.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Media Player for your Linux

VLC media player

The cross-platform media player and streaming server.
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Audacious

Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1.
First off, the fork has no political reasons, it is based entirely on technical merit. It's based on a few issues:

* BMP classic had a number of deficiencies relating to Unicode.
* BMP classic is no longer actively maintained by the development team.
* We had our own ideas about how a player should be designed, which we wanted to try in a production environment.
* Beep lacked functionality that is useful for people who do streaming, such as the songchange plugin from XMMS.

Therefore, a fork seemed most logical as a choice for accomplishing our goals. The BMP team has done very good work, but their ideas for a next-generation beep do not align with ours.

http://audacious-media-player.org

Exaile

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

In addition, Exaile also includes a built-in SHOUTcast directory browser, tabbed playlists (so you can have more than one playlist open at a time), blacklisting of tracks (so they don't get scanned into your library), downloading of guitar tablature from fretplay.com, and submitting played tracks on your iPod to Last.fm.

http://www.exaile.org/


Xine


xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available - and some of the most uncommon formats, too.

http://xinehq.de/

Save by Title in Firefox

One major difference between IE and FF is the way they name file while saving the web page. IE saves by the title while FF saves by the title only if in URL there is no page name. In rest of the case FF saves by the page name. But people find lot convenient by saving by title name. To do so in FF you can add addon. Just search for the addon title save and install it and the next time you save the page it will be saved by the name of the title.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Wine 0.9.61 Released

Check it out here.

What is wine?
Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Tribeca Diaries #7: The Autuer

WARNING: This is a salty-languaged review, by necessity. Writer/Director James Westby has certainly gotten off the most raucously received movies at the 2008 TriBeCa Film Festival with The Autuer. This brilliantly-constructed pastiche of mockumentary and true narrative storytelling posits the existance of Auturo Domingo, the world's foremost director of hardcore porn, the Kubrick of cum. Played

Tribeca Diaries #7: The Autuer

WARNING: This is a salty-languaged review, by necessity. Writer/Director James Westby has certainly gotten off the most raucously received movies at the 2008 TriBeCa Film Festival with The Autuer. This brilliantly-constructed pastiche of mockumentary and true narrative storytelling posits the existance of Auturo Domingo, the world's foremost director of hardcore porn, the Kubrick of cum. Played

TriBeCa Diary #6: Bart Got A Room

I didn't come to TriBeCa to slag any movies, but I lost my patience with the contrived Bart Got a Room about 45 minutes in, and I just had to say something. At first, it looked as if I'd like Brian Hecker's somewhat hateful new film. It opens to Danny Stein (Steven J. Kaplan) as he's playing in his school swing band for a smatterling of beach-tanned senior citizens. It's a promising opening,

TriBeCa Diary #6: Bart Got A Room

I didn't come to TriBeCa to slag any movies, but I lost my patience with the contrived Bart Got a Room about 45 minutes in, and I just had to say something. At first, it looked as if I'd like Brian Hecker's somewhat hateful new film. It opens to Danny Stein (Steven J. Kaplan) as he's playing in his school swing band for a smatterling of beach-tanned senior citizens. It's a promising opening,

TriBeCa Diaries #5: The Wild Man of the Navidad

When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez unleashed Grindhouse on us in early 2007, it was an essential orgy of nostalgia dressed up in zombie violence and car-chase-mania. It was an exhilerating experience for anyone who'd gone, back in the day, to the drive-ins and--yes--the grindhouses to catch Death Race 2000 or Dawn of the Dead or God Told Me To. It seemed to get every detail right--the

TriBeCa Diaries #5: The Wild Man of the Navidad

When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez unleashed Grindhouse on us in early 2007, it was an essential orgy of nostalgia dressed up in zombie violence and car-chase-mania. It was an exhilerating experience for anyone who'd gone, back in the day, to the drive-ins and--yes--the grindhouses to catch Death Race 2000 or Dawn of the Dead or God Told Me To. It seemed to get every detail right--the

TriBeCa Diaries #4: Run For Your Life

I stepped into Judd Ehrlich's Run For Your Life not knowing anything about the history of the New York City marathon. I stepped out an educated man. The event was started by a charismatic, Romanian-born businessman named Fred Lebow, whose enthusiasm for running began the marathon's infancy in 1969. At that time, people on the street weren't used to seeing runners jogging alongside cars in clothes

TriBeCa Diaries #4: Run For Your Life

I stepped into Judd Ehrlich's Run For Your Life not knowing anything about the history of the New York City marathon. I stepped out an educated man. The event was started by a charismatic, Romanian-born businessman named Fred Lebow, whose enthusiasm for running began the marathon's infancy in 1969. At that time, people on the street weren't used to seeing runners jogging alongside cars in clothes

TriBeCa Diaries #3: Empire II

Dedicated not to Andy Warhol but to late film geniuses Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Amos Poe's new experimental documentary Empire II still owes a lot--including its title--to the white-haired pop artist. Warhol's 1964 film Empire was an 8-hour black-and-white shot of the top half of the Empire State Building. It was a quizzical experiment that I suppose had to be done, but of

TriBeCa Diaries #3: Empire II

Dedicated not to Andy Warhol but to late film geniuses Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Amos Poe's new experimental documentary Empire II still owes a lot--including its title--to the white-haired pop artist. Warhol's 1964 film Empire was an 8-hour black-and-white shot of the top half of the Empire State Building. It was a quizzical experiment that I suppose had to be done, but of