the brook

Just came across this via digg - Microsoft Live Labs has come up with a really cool idea called Photosynth. Basically the idea is to take a large number of photos shot at the same location and merge them into a 3-D virtual world through which one can walk through; the details being provided by the photographs. Microsoft is envisaging that given enough data, you would be able to create tours of entire cities with this - though I doubt that will happen. What is definitely possible if they’ve got the vision research correct though, is that popular locations can be mapped out with great degrees of accuracy.

One big application of this idea would be for the software to look at a photograph you’ve taken, recognize the location and throw you into the walkthrough composed using different photographs and allow you to explore the location in 3-D. A very, very cool application of research if they can do it well.

A video explaining Photosynth is available here.

The title says it all. Earlier this week, I tried to install OpenSSH with Kerberos authentication support for Dapper, using apt-get of course. Doing so broke my system miserably. Package ssh-krb5 was installed but not configured and it gave me an error saying it couldn’t stop the currently running SSH service. However, SSH stopped working at that point - totally - and that is something I just can’t live without. Worse was to follow. I tried to reboot, and after going to INIT 6, Linux simply stopped responding after trying to shut down SSH server; a first time I’ve seen that happen. No tty was accessible, and although my system was up (I could enter junk characters via the keyboard), I couldn’t do anything useful. After waiting and hoping for 20 minutes, I had no choice but to reset the system.

On restart of course, fsk had to go through my disks - 320 GB of space to check the un-unmounted filesystems which happily took another twenty minutes. I went into single user mode, uninstalled SSH and Kerberos as completely as I could. No luck. On rebooting again, the system still stopped - this time after stopping the rsync daemon. And so on, a few times. Later I found an open bug in Ubuntu which says ssh-krb5 will not install due to malformed dependencies. And here I was, thinking that because of it’s Debian heritage, Ubuntu would have the best package management around. I can understand that a package may have malformed dependencies and behavior but to (a) keep such a package in the repository and (b) for apt-get to fail to realize that it will break the system is quite strange to me.

In any case, Ubuntu was the only distribution that came *this* close to being a Fedora-replacement for me. The only other issue I’d had was that a lot of applications wouldn’t compile using the standard configure and make scripts due to missing “development libraries” and I couldn’t find those through apt-get or synaptic - something that usually isn’t a problem in Fedora.

In any case, I am now back to Fedora Core 5 on which everything that I need for work (including Kerberos5) works out of the box, and yum has grown - in my perspective - to be as good as apt-get for fetching stuff like codecs, utilities and the like.

Talking of utilities, I found a gem of a gmail checking utility for linux called checkgmail. It’s in fact the best gmail checker I’ve seen - you can not only see snippets of mail in notification boxes, but also open or delete a message, mark it as read, or mark it as spam. Check out the screenshot below.

Here’s to continuing Linux progress!

Is this any less than terrorism?

Using military force to kill unarmed, neutral, civilian diplomats from the UN? And that too after the UN peacekeepers called the Israeli forces ten times before the killing blow, each time only to be assured that the shelling would stop?

It is fast becoming a world where might is right. As a penetrating infographic from the independent shows, on one side there are the “mostly United Nations” - some 189 of them asking for unconditional ceasefire by both sides; and three nations who don’t want it - Israel, USA and UK.

It’s almost ironic that I am going tomorrow to attend a talk by Shashi Tharoor entitled “The future of the UN”. For now, it looks bleak indeed.

This is just in via digg and other sources - apparently the Indian government has issued orders to ISPs to block blogging sites including blogspot.

One of the reasons cited for this is that blogs are apparently being used by terrorists to communicate and spread information. I think this is not only draconian, but quite ineffective: you can’t block out the whole net, terrorists can easily set up blogs outside of the standard services, and there are workarounds to the ban that have already been posted. Worse, if the identity of the alleged misinformation blogs were to be revealed, this move would only increase traffic to that site. It appears that the government only requested for a few particular blogs to be banned; however some private ISPs have reacted over enthusiastically and shut down entire blogspot or geocities domains.

Links: Amit Varma, Blog Censorship wiki, Censorship Google group.

If you are accessing from India, I’d appreciate if you leave a comment and let us know if your access is being blocked.

I recently discovered that my Ubuntu root directory was getting uncomfortably tight from a space perspective (I’d allocated about 6 GB, /home of course lives on a separate partition). The culprit, du soon told me, was /usr, eating up as much as 4 gigs of space. I guess thats because I’ve installed tons of apps, including MATLAB (which eats up a whopping 1.4 gigs).

My primary HDD has a slew of partitions, which I’ve used at various points to test out distros, so I decided to move /usr to a partition I wasn’t using anymore. Initially, I’d thought of moving root itself to another, bigger partition, but after trying to figure out what options to give to grub-install, I decided not to be too adventurous. Maybe another day. In any case, I was nervous enough about moving /usr, though in the end it went off smoothly enough. Here’s how, for anyone who might be looking:

1. Reboot and select recovery console in GRUB. Ubuntu should have thrown you into a root console.
2. The partition I want to put /usr into is /dev/hda5. Enter the following commands:
3. cd /
mkdir usr_new
mount /dev/hda5 /usr_new/
rm -rf /usr_new/*
cp -dpR /usr/* /usr_new/
umount /usr_new
mv /usr /usr_old
mkdir /usr
mount /dev/hda5 /usr
4. Last thing to do is edit your /etc/fstab file. You need to add the following line:
   /dev/hda5 /usr auto defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
   It’s possible that a line beginning with /dev/hda5 already exists; if so, replace it with the above.
5. Type reboot and press Enter. Hopefully, you should be good to go.
6. If all goes well, when you relogin to Ubuntu, fire up a Terminal and do sudo rm -rf /usr_old.

Important: Be *very careful* while executing the rm -rf commands! The standard rule of the rm command applies… type-rm-minus-rf-star-hands-off-keyboard-STOP-AND-THINK! A mistyped rm -rf /* might be an honest mistake, but it will send the entire darkness of the universe descending upon you.

That I’m going to the trouble of moving around partitions, not to mention writing this post says enough about how much I’ve taken to using Ubuntu Linux as my primary distribution at home. I still prefer Fedora at work though, more on that in another post later, though.

Last night, CNN and BBC world were both running feeds off Indian news channels for an hour or so to provide coverage of the blasts in Mumbai. I remember one particular commentator saying “Although Mumbai is no stranger to terrorist threats, this particular incident is one that affects everyone, and I feel that despite the much talked-about spirit of Mumbai, life isn’t going to go back to normal very soon.” And I thought to myself, “Yeah, right.”

Even at that time, soon after the blasts, it was quite clear that that the Mumbai janta wasn’t running scared. They weren’t even running. They were hanging around, taking the injured to hospital, clearing up the place, bringing bedsheets from homes to carry bodies and severed limbs. TV coverage clearly showed that of the people who were helping out, far more were out of uniform than in. Not only that, hundreds of people were just standing, right on the scene of the incidents, observing.

Around four hours after the blasts, the first train service on the Western line was restarted. BEST, the bus company has pressed extra buses into service, and this morning, mostly everyone will be going right back to work.

So no, Mumbai isn’t cowering by any stretch of imagination. But to anyone who’s lived in Mumbai for long, that’s hardly a surprise. What’s surprising is that these attackers thought to accomplish something. What, we may never know.

I used to go to college by train when I was in Mumbai - my college was right opposite Matunga Road station, where one of the blasts took place. If I had to take the train to school in Mumbai today, I admit I would have felt more than a little sense of foreboding. And so will other people… but that won’t stop anyone from doing it. The whole concept of lets-sit-at-home-because-of-reasonX is totally alien in Mumbai. It’s not so much that Mumbaikars are brave, resilient and defiant (though they certainly are all of those) - but that they thrive on activity, whatever the circumstances. For the city to stop running is simply unimaginable.

The law will take it’s course. Terrorist groups will be blamed, suspects will be apprehended, the investigation and judicial process will go on for a score of years (a court ruling is still expected for the 1993 blasts). But this, no more and no less — will be the most expressive response of Mumbai to terror. A simple message: “Nothing will stop.” You can murder 200 people and injure 400 more, but if you were hoping to stop 15 million people with fear, that ain’t happening.

In or around the following stations: Matunga, Mahim, Khar, Bandra, Jogeshwari, Borivali and Bhyander.

So far, the news networks are quoting official figures of 135 dead. Given that the trains were packed during rush hour, the ultimate toll will be much more.

A sad day.