Older blog entries for muks (starting at number 9)

Some cool scripts

Here are some cool scripts found on the web:

  • pat2pdf will take a US patent number and generate a PDF document of the patent for you. Google patents can also do the same, but it is missing many new patent applications. (Btw it’s wonderful to go through some of the old inventions from the last century.)
  • mb2md takes a mbox and converts it to Maildir
  • That _svndiff script, which makes svn diff generate an annotated diff

Syndicated 2008-01-27 11:57:11 from Mukund's blog

Ethical gadgets

Make Magazine has a nice list of items that gadgets should conform to, so that they are user friendly. Most of them are reasonable and should be required. Here are some more that I want:

  1. Gadgets must support open formats, and preferrably not have DRM at all
  2. No frail wires in the open that can snap off
  3. Any chipsets and processors that the gadget uses must at the very least have open and complete documentation
  4. Any firmware / software on a gadget should be free software, along with a HOWTO on how the software can be compiled and replaced by the user
  5. It’s the designer’s job to make sure the gadget cannot be disabled (or `bricked’) by any software updates, and it must always be possible to reload a default image and get the gadget back to its factory state

Syndicated 2007-12-23 22:04:49 (Updated 2007-12-23 22:05:02) from Mukund's blog

New host, new website!

I’d asked on this blog for hosting after Nerdfest’s demise. While some kind folks offered to pitch in free user accounts, I needed a full server as there were many web applications to run. After a lot of careful evaluation, I decided to go with The Planet for hosting. At $69/month, they provide a dedicated 2.4 GHz P4 server with 512MB RAM, 80GB disk, 750 GB bandwidth and most important of all, remote reboots and support. It’s real money and expensive for someone living in India, but all in the name of a free software company :).

FWIW, I had evaluated several options including SFCCP, Blue Linux, Jump and Server Beach. I can only say good things about the former three options and the nice people behind them, but they ended up as either expensive or not a good match. Now I have to contact them and let them know.

After about a week of moving in, things are good so far. There is no upstream firewall which is a great thing. I have moved many of Banu’s web applications and services over in the past week, and hope to finish it off this week. This website and blog have also been moved.

Syndicated 2007-12-17 07:12:12 (Updated 2007-12-17 07:12:51) from Mukund's blog

Got a spare server?

After the demise of Nerdfest, I was/am looking for a dedicated server setup to host projects and other assorted websites such as Graphics Planet. The trouble with popular hosts such as ServerBeach and Layered Tech is that they filter useful ports such as IRC to achieve a false sense of security. Blue Linux seems to be a great place to go to, but I’m facing trouble getting a Dell server out to them as Dell UK will only accept UK registered credit cards. Other options are far too expensive.

If any company in UK is willing to donate a used 1U rackmount server (x86 P4, 1GB RAM and 80 GB disk - or higher class), please get back to me (muks at mukund dot org). The server will be used to host free software and open media projects, and we can add a link in the footer back to any website of your choice. It will be a one-way transfer though and the server will not be returned. It will be put to good use. :)

Syndicated 2007-12-03 10:13:49 (Updated 2007-12-23 19:53:06) from Mukund's blog

Google web hosting

It looks like Nerdfest will be shutting down operations very soon, after a good 8 years of consistent free community hosting, because our upstream provider is going away. Yes we started in 2000! Btw, if you can provide free colo for Nerdfest (low bandwidth requirements), or can take over some of our users’ accounts, please contact me.

This is a tip for Nerdfest account holders who are unable to locate alternative hosting. Google has a free apps service which lets you host your webpages, email (including IMAP), chat, etc. for your domain. I see at least one user who has already switched partly to it. The hosting isn’t as good as rolling your own.. you host static content, and you can have a blog too. But this is better than nothing, and Google is bound to be around for a long time. Think about it.

Syndicated 2007-10-29 07:27:02 (Updated 2007-12-23 19:52:54) from Mukund's blog

GIMP 2.4 is out!

GIMP 2.4 has been released! It is the culmination of many man-years of real effort by several developers from around the world. There are many new things to expect in the new version, with more features, better usability and less bugs. Uncork your champagne and enjoy by upgrading to it.

Syndicated 2007-10-24 09:32:13 from Mukund's blog

India win Twenty20!!

What a series it has been.. England, South Africa, Australia and now Pakistan back to back. Amazing series and we are loving it here. They said we couldn’t win in every one of these matches. The quality of cricket was also awesome in these matches. When my country wins a major tournament in our favorite sport after many many many years, it sure is sweet! We were screaming our heads off in the cafeteria.

Syndicated 2007-09-24 16:01:51 from Mukund's blog

SSL site seal

I don’t follow the rationale behind SSL site seals, which are usually marketed as an add-on to higher-priced X.509 certificates. What is the advantage of asking a visitor apparently on your website to click on an image, and go to a 3rd party website to verify a site’s certificate? It brings a false sense of security, as users who don’t know about SSL can be fooled into visiting a dummy non-SSL webpage with the site seal.

Your web browser already verifies the CA’s signature on the presented certificate. Many popular browsers also let you view information about the Subject and the Issuer in the certificate. If the site seal was created because a certificate may have been revoked and the browser hasn’t checked that, then the same can be said for the certificate that the CA’s website hosting the site seal sends.

On the subject of SSL certificates, it is high time that Firefox added a box next to the location bar, which displays the organization (O) of the Subject DN in the X.509 certificate when visiting a website over HTTPS. Right now, hovering over the padlock displays the certificate authority that signed the certificate. A user like me would be more interested in seeing the organization that it was issued to.

Syndicated 2007-09-15 15:04:19 from Mukund's blog

Hello world!

I bit the bullet and updated this blog to use Wordpress, due to its fancy WYSIWYG editor thing and overall ease of use. This blog will be more or less about my work and personal life from now on.

The Hemingway theme was picked as I liked the look of John Lilly’s blog.

Syndicated 2007-09-09 12:11:15 from Mukund's blog

Splint and variadic macros

It would be very worthwhile for someone to add support for variadic macros to Splint (a C static analysis tool similar to lint but better). While it is not as good as Coverity Prevent and generates several false positives, it can be made to work with GLib/GTK+ application code and would be very helpful in eliminating several types of programming errors. It is certainly much better than lint. It has been used on GIMP trunk, along with other static analysis tools and it found errors which were fixed. Another tool called href=”http://www.cubewano.org/oink”>Oink doesn’t compile on my x86_64 box, but seems interesting nevertheless as it claims to support C++.

I dream of a day when C/C++ programmer editors do static analysis as I type, and suggest corrections to stupid mistakes. NetBeans (Java) has really spoiled me, by how productive one can be using it.

Syndicated 2007-08-19 20:54:00 from Mukund's blog

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!