Uncertain Binary Thoughts » fedora

How Manipal got its first Linux (fedora) server

Ankur Shrivastava — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:38:16 +0000

It all started with a failing Student’s Teacher Feedback System, designed by few fourth year students of my college, in oct-nov 2008 the system was not able to scale and everything was reverted back to paper, it was then when i was contacted by a teacher from my Department ( Information and Communication Technology ), regarding if i can improve it.

i asked DJ if he wants to join me and after few weeks of coding there it was Manipal university’s first (working) Feedback System, when the point of hosting it came, i was surprised to find Manipal University has no Linux servers, i mean come on no Linux what are you people click sys admins, then we decided to setup our own server in the department, thus giving Manipal university its first Linux ( fedora 10 ) server.

currently it just hosts the Feedback System, but we are planning to use it as local ( internal ) fedora repository mirror, we need permission from the WiFi provider ION because almost all the students use only WiFi and not LAN, last time we tried we were denied by saying ” You are a threat to our network “, lets see how it goes this time. we will also require people to manage it but i think this can be handled very well by LUG Manipal, some pics

Fedora 10 server in Manipal

PS – i am looking for a way to convince them that setting up a mirror will be helpful for them as well as students can anyone suggest me how to go about it??

Creating your own service like tinyurl

Ankur Shrivastava — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:45:56 +0000

Few weeks ago i came across this article on Techcrunch which says tinyurl is worth $46Million (of course before twitter started using bit.ly as default) which made me think how hard is it to make a simple service like tinyurl and i figured out its not hard. so i used apache’s mod_rewrite to rewrite the url and forward the code to a php script ( url.php ) which will then search for the url in database and take the use to the original url and for shorting, url it is inserted into a table with a auto increment primary key and the key is converted to base36 which contains [a-z] and [0-9], making the short code…

First create a database say ’shorturl’CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `shorturl` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `url` varchar(300) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
then create file .htaccess where you want your url to be and writeRewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \/([0-9a-z]*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) url.php?url=%1 [L]

and to create the url we will use a simple file say create.php
Url Shortner ob_start(); $host=""; //host $dbuser=""; // database username $dbpass=""; // database password $db=""; //database name $con = mysql_connect($host,$dbuser,$dbpass); mysql_select_db("url",$con); if (!isset($_POST['shorten'])) { echo "

`Enter the url to shorten`

";

}

else

{

if (isset($_POST['url']))

{

$url=" ".mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['url']);

if (strpos($url,"http://") or strpos($url,"https://") or strpos($url,"ftp://"))

{

$url=mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['url']);

}

else

{

$url="http://".mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['url']);

}

$q="select * from url where url='{$url}'";

$res = mysql_query($q,$con);

$row=mysql_fetch_row($res);

if (!$row)

{

$query="insert into url set url='{$url}'";

$res = mysql_query($query,$con);

}

$query1="select id from url where url='{$url}' limit 1";

$res=mysql_query($query1,$con);

$row=mysql_fetch_row($res);

echo "shortened url is http://yoursite.com/".base_convert($row[0],10,36);

}

}

ob_end_flush();

?>

then our url.php file




ob_start();

$host=""; //host

$dbuser=""; // database username

$dbpass=""; // database password

$db=""; //database name

$con = mysql_connect($host,$dbuser,$dbpass);

mysql_select_db($db,$con);

if (isset($_GET['url']))

{

$query="select * from url where id ='".base_convert(mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['url']),36,10)."'";

$res = mysql_query($query,$con);

$row=mysql_fetch_row($res);

header("Location: ".$row[1]);

}

ob_end_flush();

?>

Download here

Get updates of completed torrents via SMS

Ankur Shrivastava — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:13:16 +0000

This Sunday when i was giving DBUS a look and thinking about all the cool things possible with it, one of my friend came asking how can he control his torrents from anywhere and i thought controlling is ok, do you want SMS updates??, i fired up qdbusviewer and there it was a simple way to get sms notifications of finished torrents using well twitter and ktorrent, so here are the steps
1) setup your cell phone to recieve SMS updates in twitter,
2) get one more twitter account lets say ktorrent, follow ktorrent and turn device updates on,
3) now save the script below say as torrenttwit.py
4) now enter this ktorrent account username and password in the script below,
5) start ktorrent if not already started, now run the script by typing “python torrenttwit.py”

import dbus,base64,urllib2,urllib
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop

DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
username="username"
password="password"

def tweet(msg):
        request = urllib2.Request('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json')
        request.add_header('Authorization', 'Basic %s' % base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username,password))[:-1])
        request.add_data(urllib.urlencode({'status': msg.encode('utf-8')}))
        opener = urllib2.build_opener()
        req= opener.open(request)

s = dbus.SessionBus()
kt = s.get_object("org.ktorrent.ktorrent","/core")

def update(k):
        torrent = s.get_object("org.ktorrent.ktorrent","/torrent/"+k)
        name = torrent.get_dbus_method("name","org.ktorrent.torrent")
        tweet("ktorrent: finished " +name())

kt.connect_to_signal("finished",update)

import gobject
loop = gobject.MainLoop()
loop.run()

you are done, now whenever a torrent finishes the script will twit and you will receive an SMS update
enjoy

JavaFX and Pong

Ankur Shrivastava — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:38:03 +0000

There was a workshop conducted by engineers form SUN in our college regarding JavaFX, which went quite well. I was planning to start with JavaFX but as there was no Official release of any Linux SDK, it kept me back but this semester i had to install Windows because of my University which wants me to use Visual Studio for my mini project this semester, so as i had Windows (unwillingly) on my system i planned to go and attend this JavaFX workshop.
From what i have learned in these two days, JavaFX looks promising for developing Rich Internet Applications, the language is somewhat a mixture of JavaScript and Java. With Type Inference , Audio/Video support etc making it very easy to use and create applications with.
In the workshop after every thing was over we were asked to make a simple application in JavaFX, so here is my code for a Simple pong game in JavaFX
the resolution is set to 1440×900 you can change it to your resolution in the code

if you cannot see the code see here

PS – as i dont normally boot into windows i dont think that i will do anything in it soon, i am waiting for Linux JDK to be released…….

Using Apple Keyboard in Linux (Fedora)

Ankur Shrivastava — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:23:30 +0000

My Apple Keyboard

Few Days Ago i received my Apple Keyboard and i am enjoying typing on it, but having to hold down the Fn key then tap one of the F-keys to get F-keys working was irritating.
a simple solution to get it working just add this to your /etc/rc.local file



echo 2 > /sys/module/hid/parameters/pb_fnmode

and F-keys will start to work properly, enjoy

HowTo MPD with Pulse audio

Ankur Shrivastava — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:52:23 +0000

A Little background, i just shifted to mpd from Amarok 2.0 somewhy i dont seem to like Amarok 2 but thats a different story, For those who dont know MPD s a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. which runs as a daemon and has a lot of front ends for it, Sonata being a popular one.
now coming to the point i use Fedora 10 and it has Pulseaudio by default, now the problem is i some time get “NO Read Permission” in Sonata and then mpd would stop working, in mpd.log file i will find “Error opening ALSA device “hw:0,0″: Device or resource busy” error, which means this is an pulseaudio permission issue, to solve it we need to change the mpd.conf (/etc/mpd.conf) to
audio_output { type "pulse" name "My Device" device "hw:0,0" # optional format "44100:16:2" # optional }
then we need to add
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1
to /etc/pulse/default.pa which gives everybody permission to use pulseaudio and thats it.

MobiVision, Techtatva 08, LUG Manipal and lots more….

Ankur Shrivastava — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:36:06 +0000

I am posting to my blog after a long long time and a lot has happened, first Lets start with MobiVision.

People in MobiVision Workshop

MobiVision (Brain child of Subhendra Bhaiya) was a workshop conducted by people from LUG Manipal ( well not officially but everyone involved in it was from LUG Manipal ) as the name suggests it was on developing Application for mobile Plateform, basicly targeting Python for Series 60 and Android, We were expecting turnout of around 100 people and more the double turnout took us by surprise, it saw a partisipation of over 200 which comprised of guys/gals from First to Fourth year which was really amazing we even had people doing PG showing Interest, we had some trouble managing them in 2 rooms which were alloted to us but in the end every thing turned out pretty well. We had 2 Teams ready one for Python S60 and one for Android, Both teams did a great job and made Mobivision the most sucessfull Workshop in Techtatva 08.

Team MobiVision

Next was Techtatva 08 which is the annual Technical Fest of Manipal Institue of Technology, Manipal, Here again LUG Manipal was in full control ( and again not officially!!! ) we were to conduct events for the Computer / IT Catagory called ” PARAM ” and we planned to change the previously conducted events so as to make them fit in the 4 basic catagories of people –
1) ” MobiVision ” for Inovators here teams where to come up with a inovative Idea for Mobile Application and a prototype
2) ” Jour ” for Developers here teams were to make any one of the three Projects and give a Presentation and Demonstration of their product
3) ” CodeBytes ” for Programers the usual problem solving event with not so usual questions
4) ” Puzzle Mania ” for Every Day internet users comprising of all sorts of Puzzels
all the events saw good participation from all years and were prased for not having a single glitch.

Raunaq, Me and Nishant

I also made a Deligate and Event Registration system for managing and registering all the people coming for Techtatva 08 and also a CBT ( Computer Based Test ) system for priliminary rounds of some events, it was all basicly made in PHP and used MySQL as primary Database and was hosted on a Fedora 9 ( for those of you who dont know what it is — Its a GNU/Linux Distribution and also my Primary OS ) based server running Apache in Student Councels room because we/I were/was denined permition to host it on the main Manipal University server, they said “You are a Threat for our Network!!!” ??? which left me wonder what kind of stuff they do there and what did i do to them??? ( reason for which i got to know later ) anyways we managed to get a lab computer for using as a server, it had a AMD Athlon x3800 CPU, 80 GB HDD and 1GB RAM, which was all i needed for my work, the PC was formatted and fresh Fedora 9 was installed on it, after this all updates were applied which didn’t took much time as the connection there is not at all like I-ON and is at least 10 times faster ( well it was MAHE LAN and I-ON is WiFi but still!!! ) some changes in http.conf and iptables and it was ready. The System ran without a glitouch except when someone made the LAN cable for the server loose which made all on Registration Desks shouting but luckly everything was back online in 2-3 mins. The CBT’s also ran very good and results were decleared as soon as the alloted time was over and there were no objections.

CBT - updates, running on a lab PC for real time updates

Monitoring people in CBT

ginni ( back ), piyush and me ( during CBT )

Well this is enough for a post now 3rd Sessionals are approaching and i need to study as i screwed my 2nd sessionals, so bye
Ankur Shrivastava

Ion Auto Login script in Python

Ankur Shrivastava — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:28:42 +0000

i was just thinking about making the very famous IAL script of DJ in python and here is it and its damn simple

import urllib, urllib2, time
username = "Your username"
password = "Your Password"
interval = 10
data = {"loginID":username,"loginpassword":password,"flag":"0","popcheck":"0","submit":"Sign In"}
value = urllib.urlencode(data)
request = urllib2.Request("http://192.168.150.2:8080/clntAuth/clntAuth_main.jsp",value)
print "Logging In\nMade by Ankur - http://ankurs.com"
while (1):
        open = urllib2.urlopen(request)
        responce = open.read()
        for i in range (1,interval):
                print (interval-i),"min Till Next Login"
                time.sleep(60)
        print "Logging In\nMade by Ankur - http://ankurs.com"

or downlaod
run it by typing python ial.py
it uses urllib, urllib2 and time which are the default module, you have to change the username and password to your username and password, changing the interval changes the time interval in which auto login takes place. enjoy!!
PS – current it does no check if your connection is active or not, will add that soon

iPhone on Vodafone in India

Ankur Shrivastava — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:11:36 +0000

The price of 31k for iPhone in India has been confirmed i recieved the following mail

Hello Ankur,

Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3G^TM with us.

We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008
It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively.

Be the first to get the iPhone

We have received a large number of registrations. As there are limited stocks, make sure that you get yours first, by paying an advance of Rs 10,000 to confirm your booking.

Where can you make this advance payment?

The iPhone 3G will be available at select Vodafone Stores. All you need to do is drop in at any select Vodafone Store between August 20 and 21 and make the advance payment by cash or credit card. Don´t forget to show the iPhone booking SMS, which you would have received from us, when you visit the Vodafone Store to pay the advance. To find a Vodafone Store near you, click here

Get an appointment now. No queues for you.

Once you pay the advance, we will immediately give you an appointment date and time, starting
August 22 when you can come and experience a full demonstration and collect your iPhone, all ready to use with your contacts and settings, by paying the balance amount.

Hurry! Limited stocks.

Remember, the sooner you confirm your booking, the earlier you´ll get your iPhone. We have limited stocks and it will be on first come, first serve basis.

Buy a Vodafone connection now!

As you are not a Vodafone customer, you will need a Vodafone connection for your iPhone 3G.
We recommend that when you come to confirm your booking, please do get yourself a Vodafone connection too. Remember to carry a passport sized picture, photo ID proof and address proof as these are required for activating your Vodafone SIM card.

Happy to help

If you have any queries, log on to www.vodafone.in/iphone or call us on 9886098860 and we´ll be happy to help.

Hurry and be one of the first to make the iPhone 3G your own.

Regards

C P Joshi

AVP – Customer Service

At a Price of 31k and 36k i dont think there will be a large number of users going for i, here Vodafone seems to India what Rogers was to Canada, anyway one more reason for not going the i way!!!!!

Dell XPS 1530

Ankur Shrivastava — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:52:44 +0000

Finally after waiting for a long time my Dell XPS 1530 arrived yesterday and it really rockss, i was supposed to get it on 3rd July but continuous delay were caused by curfew in Indore and some other factors.

The Config is Processor : Intel C2D T8100 - 2.1GHz RAM : 3GB 667MHz Dual Channel Graphics Card : GeForce 8600GT 256 MB Screen : 15.4" WXGA+ ( 1440x900 ) WiFI card : Intel 4965 802.11n OS : Windows Vista Home Preminum ( removed after an hour )

It looks gr8 far better then what i previously owned, HP 6515b which was given by my college MIT, Manipal.
As soon as i received my Dell first think i did was to run Windows Performance Index and the score came out to be 5.0 with 5.0 being the lowest score because of my 3GB RAM!!!

I tried some Windows Media Centre and then it was time to say vista good bye and say hello to Fedora 9, the install went without a hitch but when i booted i that my mouse was not working, a quick search on forums and i had the solution add i8042.nomux=1 as a kernel parameter and every thing was working, WiFi, LAN all worked out of the box, some yum install and my new notebook was ready to rock and roll

so here they are x144 and x121

PS – i will be heading back to manipal on 16th, waiting for a really rocking sem……….

iPhone3G or Openmoko Freerunner

Ankur Shrivastava — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:38:37 +0000

We all have been listening ( reading ) a lot about the new iPhone 3G and how it is different, better and well cheaper from the first generation iPhone and a question came to my mind with Airtel and Vodafone planning to launch iPhone what will happen to Openmoko how many people know about it and well its available in India at a price of around RS. 20,000 by IDA system its really a great Phone to own actually Openmoko Freerunner is the second phone which will run Openmoko software and is similar to the first Neo 1973 its specification are
* Processor -- Samsung S3C2442 500MHz * RAM -- 128MB * Flash -- 256MB * Display -- 2.8-inch diagonal 640 x 480 VGA Color TFT LCD * Graphics -- SMedia 3362-based 3D graphics acceleration * Accelerometers -- 2 x 3D accelerometers * Audio -- "high-quality" audio codec * USB -- 1 x version 1.1, switchable between client and host modes * Cellular -- 2.5G tri-band GPRS/GSM (900MHz or 850MHz, depending on region) * WiFi -- 802.11b/g WiFi * Bluetooth -- version 2.0 * GPS -- AGPS (assisted global positioning system) receiver
Which is really great Freerunner does not have 3G but well in India at present there is no 3G and i dont think it will be there anytime this year as frequency allocation has not taken place add to that only planning is going on which will take a lot of time so remove all the 3G factor from iPhone 3G …….
Another thing Openmoko Freerunner is a complete Open Source Phone you can download the whole source code and change it according to your wish and well about the applications there will be plenty of applications available for it at no cost
So while many of people around me will go for iPhone 3G ( without 3G ) i am going to FREE MY PHONE!!!!!!

Firefox 3 is here!!!!!!!

Ankur Shrivastava — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:51:29 +0000

So Finally after a delay of about 1.5 hours Firefox 3 is here and the download link is here World Record here we come

PS – No matter how many people download it will anyway be a world record coz its the first time a record of this type is being done

MinWin and Windows 7 – You got it all wrong

Ankur Shrivastava — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:29:14 +0000

Somedays ago when i was traveling to Bangalore from Manipal in the Bus i read a tweet about MinWin from Aditya and day after that he tweeted this “aditya: @Ankur MinWin exists in Vista too. I’m still not buying the ‘modular OS’ theory, and from I’ve seen, W7 keeps me happy about buying a Mac ” now i know he is a big mac fanboy but that made me think how many people are thinking that MinWin is a part of Windows 7 ( when ever it comes ) well its not, just see this and notice

Now, this is an internal only - you won’t see us productizing this - but you could imagine this being used as the basis for products in the future. This is the Windows 7 source code base, and it’s about 25 megs on disk. Compare that to the four gigs on disk that the full Windows Vista takes up. We don’t have a graphics subsystem other than text in this particular build

I also noticed this in Wikipedia

A minimalistic variation of the Windows kernel, known as MinWin, was being developed for use in Windows 7

Come on people try to understand this MinWin in not something made exclusively for Windows 7, rather The code from Windows 7 Kernel was taken and slimmed down to make MinWin, so Windows 7 will be like addition of more crap over Vista
Now who will tell them them and them
Anyways i am Happy with my Fedora 9 Laptop……..

PS – Aditya i have nothing against you buddy

Hello Planet Fedora

Ankur Shrivastava — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:19:43 +0000

Hi everyone!
This is my first post on Planet Fedora so i think i should introduce myself
My name is Ankur Shrivastava, i am doing my BE-IT, I have been running linux since 2004-2005 and Fedora is what i really love, anyway you will be seeing me around……….

Synaptics Touchpad in Fedora 9

Ankur Shrivastava — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:30:35 +0000

I have been using Fedora 9 from a long time and it really kick’s ass but i was facing the problem that my Touchpad was not working with it but the i found the solution here
Here is how to do it

The easiest was will be to install the package http://atrpms.net/dist/f9/synaptics/
or you can do it manually here

edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Added the following to the ServerLayout Section
InputDevice “TouchPad” “CorePointer”

add a new section:
Section “InputDevice” Driver “synaptics” Identifier “TouchPad” Option “SendCoreEvents” Option “Protocol” “auto-dev” Option “SHMConfig” “on” Option “TapButton1″ “1″ Option “TapButton2″ “2″ EndSection

all done logout and login again and everything should be working fine

Update: found the rpm package here