Router power-cut troubles : fixed !

I use a netgear router to power my home wi-fi network. The router and the adsl modem, which it is connected to are both powered by a 500va UPS.

But during power cuts, although the adsl modem would work fine, the netgear router would go into a loop of reboots. Impacting my wi-fi network. And this did not occur at all the time, but most of the times.

Until I could find a permanent fix for the problem, which probably is being caused by the inability of my UPS to provide sine wave supply to the router, so a cheap and good solution might be to change the power adaptor of the netgear router. I thought of an interim solution. I put a voltage stabilizer in between the UPS and the netgear router and this has fixed my problem for the time being !

Advertisement

Jolicloud on virtualbox

Continuing my search for a lightweight OS to be run on my old spare laptop I chanced upon jolicloud and requested for an invitation. Got the invitation right away and downloaded the iso image yesterday.
The initial impressions are good. The installation was fairly straight forward, much like any ubuntu install.
Have posted a few screen shots below.
Now I have two OSes that I want to try on the old laptop this weekend – jolicloud and goodOS.

I do like the new look of the desktop that jolicloud has and also the very nice and intutive interface to install new apps (see last image) makes is easier for people accustomed to other OSes to move seamlessly.

However, what I am not quite sure is how will jolicloud login behave when I connect to the jolicloud webservice from another machine. Since it seems to keep the data of my installed apps on their server.

jolicloud-image-1

jolicloud-image-1

jolicloud-image-3

jolicloud-image-4

goodOS on virtualbox

In my search for a lightweight OS for a spare laptop which has fairly minimal resources to run a full OS. I tried installing goodOS on my virtualbox and am quite happy with the initial experience.

The process was fairly straight forward. Just downloaded the iso from http://gos1.losslessrecords.com/gos/gos-3.1-gadgets-20081205.iso. The download did take sometime though.

And used the iso to boot a new vm in virtualbox. Found it good. Will give it a try on the old laptop sometime next weekend. I might face some driver issues. Lets see.

Some screenshots below from running it in virtualbox.

goodOS1

goodOS2

Looking for an intelligent feed reader

I use google reader to read most of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Last week I got hooked on to twitter and am now following few friends and few other people who tweet interesting stuff. Now here is my problem.

Most of the tweets are not simple sentences. They are usually a few words followed by a small url (from bit.ly or tinyurl or some other url shortener). To be able to read the stuff I need to open the browser and read through the article. I may or may not like the article. So, sometimes I end up spending time reading atleast 10-15% of the article which I might not like.

What I need is an intelligent feed reader which can parse my RSS subscriptions and twitter feed and provide me a summarized view of the stuff. It should also have a way of recording my likes or dislikes for the article that I read. Over a period of time it would have a fair amount of idea of whether I would like an article or not and prioritize the display of the feeds based on my interests.

Not sure if someone is already making such a tool or if such a tool already exists.

Installing apps on Live Android

After playing around with the liveandroid instance on my Virtualbox VM, it was time to try out installing some apps.

Few basic things first:

1. For switching to the console mode / terminal screen press : Alt-F1
2. For switching back to the GUI mode from console mode press : Alt-F7

I read about how to install apps here.

Android apps are files ending with .apk. And all that is needed to install the app is to copy the *.apk file to the /system/app folder. Image-1 shows how my /system/app folder looks like after I have installed a few apps.

So the only task remains is downloading the apps and copying them to the /system/app folder. For downloading apps try any of the following:

1. Download the AndAppStore Client – and use this client to browse and install apps. I find this as the best way.
   1. Either wget http://download.funkyandroid.net/SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk
   2. Or, click on http://andappstore.com/AndroidApplications/apps/125845!download
   3. Ensure that the SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk is copied to the /system/app folder
   4. Switch back to the GUI view (Alt-F7) and go to the menu screen, and you can see the AndAppStore Client – Seen as Software Directory (See image-2)
2. You could also browse apps at http://www.cyrket.com/
   1. Download the apps directly from the browser
   2. The apk file is downloaded to /sdcard/download
   3. Switch to console mode (Press Alt-F1 )
   4. cp /sdcard/download/* /ststem/app/
   5. chown 1000:1000 /system/app
   6. Switch to the GUI mode (Press Alt-F7) – That is it, you should be able to see your app !

image-1

image-2

Live-Android 0.3 on Sun Virtualbox

I had read about the live-android which is a live cd version of the Google Android mobile platform, and decided to give it a try.

Downloaded the iso image from http://code.google.com/p/live-android/downloads/list.

Had to download the two files liveandroidv0.3.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.3.iso.002, created a single iso using cat:

cat liveandroidv0.3.iso.001 liveandroidv0.3.iso.002 > liveandroidv0.3.iso

Created a virtual machine using virtualbox and there we go.

Did not get a chance to install any apps. Will try that sometime later and see how it goes. If all works fine, I might install it on my old laptop which just has 256mb RAM.

ACM Compute 2010

The 3rd Annual Conference of ACM Bangalore Chapter has been announced and will be held on 22nd and 23rd Jan 2010.

For details of paper submission and Program Committee member please refer to the CFP. Below are some of the details from the CFP :

Important Dates

Paper Submissions Due: October 1, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: November 20, 2009
Camera Ready Versions Due: December 10, 2009
Conference: January 22-23, 2010

Areas for Sumissions :

Search in both enterprise and internet context

• Information lifecycle management
• Data management
• Databases and Related Topics
• Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
• Data Mining
• Text mining
• Image mining / Processing
• Text summarization
• Structured-unstructured information integration
• Information Standards
• Information as a service
• Anywhere anytime access to Information (mobility, pervasive computing)
• Multi-channel and Pervasive Information access (including mobility)
• Artificial Intelligence and its role in Information Processing
• Information Accessibility/Usability (especially for Web)
• Cloud based Information storage/access/retrieval
• Semantic Web, Web 3.0, and Semantic Technologies
• Web 2.0, and Rich Internet Applications
• Analytics
• High Performance Information Management, including Data Grids, Low Latency Apps