http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/301-useless-facts/
and also
http://www.singlegrain.com/category/blog/humor/
It makes a nice read when you are bored or wants to have some serious laughs! :D
Just to quote:
104. People photocopying their buttocks are the cause of 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide.
LOL!! Explains lots of things! :D
Labels: Fun
Keep in mind that the movie was mostly done in studio, using CGI techniques and stuff. Even then, it's a real masterpiece, which I highly recommend to cinephiles!
Mind you, if you can't bear the sight of blood, and the mild sex scenes at the beginning, keep off!! Apart from that, that's the greatest fight movie I've seen...
A tragic end... but such a great movie! Check out the trailer! And then? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??! GO SEE 300!
Labels: Movies
Title says it all. In an attempt to "enhance" my template, I completely killed it. Font size became minuscule, header spacing and colors got distorted. In short, it was as if I could see a blog straight out of hell! :s
I am trying to customize a new template, and as soon as it is up, Infinity's Spot will have it. But god! IT TAKES LOTS OF TIME!
Among a mess of CSS tags, cryptic color codes like #333 meaning Dark Gray, I am striving to get this template look as I want.
For now? I'm sticking with a classic template. Too bad for me.
That's all for now. I'm currently working, so I'm not so free to work on my computer. Life's tough.
Labels: Blog
As my pals on MSN have said it, and so well at that:
"The Theatre of Dreams was dyed in red, following the clash of ManU v/s Roma!"
LOL! Way to go ManU, and Cristiano! :D
Labels: Sport
Maybe it's time to post some updates, so here goes:
1) I am victorious on the spam bots till now! The mod I implemented (the one that asks random questions from a pool at registration time) has kept them away till now. If the question is not answered correctly, the registration is rejected. You need to preset the mod with a pool of question and answers before use. At least it has worked till now! Let's hope it continues like that.
2) Kubuntu, at least KDE, has crashed again. I don't know why, but it has stopped at booting. Maybe I am to blame, since I restarted Kubuntu 3 times while it was booting. I probably corrupted some essential KDE files, since all the critical files booted, except KDE refused to load. Kubuntu stuck when the progress bar completed. However, Recovery Mode granted me access to the command-line version of Kubuntu. So the OS was still functional, but without GUI. So I prefered to re-install, losing all my packages, drivers and settings for the 3rd time. That's becoming a problem! Can't they include an option like WinXP to repair the OS without losing your files and drivers? Like reinstalling the critical files on the OS, preserving the user files, settings, programs and drivers?
3) After the reinstall, I was able to configure Samba to recognize and access Windows shares. I finally resorted to put my login name for linux the same as my login for the XP box. Passwords were same too. So perhaps it granted me access more easily. And also, the Samba panel from Kcontrol is a real delight to work with! :D
That would be all for now. Maybe more later...
Labels: General
To tell you, I hate spam! Now, when I see my site (numanga.net) come under attack from spam bots, this really really annoys me. I had to bring the site down until I have time to mod it to prevent bots from registering.
The mod appears to be simple, requiring 5 mins to install. I hope that this will, once and for all, prevent bots from posting on my site. What do they post? Guess... :/
I'm really tired of seeing such posts on my site, so I'll be doing that mod ASAP.
Sorry Numanga visitors, but I had to bring it down. I hope it'll be back up soon.
Edit: I have applied a mod. It asks random questions from a pool, and any registering user must answer correctly to proceed. Let's hope it works. It took me 10 mins to implement and is called Textual Confirmation. Now I think this will keep spam bots away... Perhaps...
Labels: General
I was successful in configuring Samba with the IPs and workgroup through smb.conf, usernames and passwords, and configured the shares and privileges using:
smbpasswd -a {username}
then I was prompted with creating a password and it went fine.
My WinXP box was able to see the Linux box and access its shares after putting in the username and password created through smbpasswd. Everything was fine up till here.
Now, when I tried to make the Linux box access the WinXP box, things went bad. I used konqueror and tried "smb://{IP of WinXP box}
Privileges problem I thought. I set the share privileges on WinXP to Everyone, that is, everyone is allowed to access and modify that share. I ensured that everything was well set manually, and set the group privileges. As far as I know, the privileges were ok. I retried connecting. No result. I disabled firewall and tried again. No result.
Note that smbclient from konsole was able to list the shares without password, but I wasn't able to access them. Again I was prompted with username and password, but everything I tried failed.
What the hell is that username and password prompt? What am I supposed to input? WinXP username and pass failed. Linux username and pass failed. New user on XP failed. New user on Linux failed. Linux user and WinXP pass failed. Vice versa failed! Now what do I do???
That's just as far as I have progressed. If it works, I'll post something... Till then, I'll be dancing samba trying to figure out how to get Samba to work.
Labels: Linux
- Ask a friend from abroad to buy them and ship them back here
- Buy the parts online and have them shipped here
The second option seems to be better, however, the methods of payment are restricted. Paypal doesn't recognize Mauritius! And I am quite reticent at giving my account and card details online. So perhaps, I'll have to resort to the 1st option, and bother a poor soul to do my bidding.
This is rather unacceptable. How can we dare call ourselves a "Cyber Island" when we don't have the means to pay online (safely)? Numerous emails have been sent by many people to Paypal, with no reply. Maybe it's high time one of the leading banks decide to contact Paypal to get our country recognized. That could solve lots of problems!
I hate to say it, but as with all things, maybe it's time a letter is sent to one of our ever-so-useful politicians to get things done... Anybody interested?
Labels: General
Anyways, it's true. I crashed my KDE. Don't ask me how, I don't know. I was quietly (ok not so quietly, feverishly perhaps) trying to configure Samba to allow sharing with my WinXP box, with lots of kdesu's and sudo's, but finally, everything went kaboom and Kcmshell crashed. I restarted the session, no result. Restarted the laptop, no result. Kcmshell, at least the kdenetwork-filesharing module was dead. Now what? I had to reinstall Kubuntu, and lose my 1/2 day of modem driver installation! OMG! Damn it! But there wasn't any other solution, as far as I knew... Also, I was successful in setting up Internet Sharing between Kubuntu and WinXP. It was quite easy, just setting up gateways and configuring the static IPs, nothing great. I was about to lose that too... Too bad.
So I proceeded with the reinstall. Sent Kubuntu to the CD-Drive, changed the boot sequence and next, I was into LiveCD mode. I reinstalled the whole thing, and formatted my existing EXT3 and SWAP partitions. Hopefully, the config* I used allowed me to preserve my files on WinXP and my Files partition. Remember, I had dual-booted WinXP SP2 and Kubuntu on laptop.
The reinstall was fast (15 mins) and the desktop was back. Now, something great happened. I don't know how, but it seems Kubuntu had already configured my NIC via DHCP, granting it an IP and had already set my gateway and workgroup settings! Now that was really fantastic!
Now, I just had to reinstall my modem driver. The idea of using Internet Sharing didn't occur to me when I first installed the driver manually. Now, since Kubuntu had already configured Internet Sharing for me, I could just Adept the essential files, namely Build-Essential and Linux-Headers-
Anyways, Kubuntu is real great in the sense that it configured everything from the moment it saw that my laptop NIC was connected to my pc! Fortunately for me, I hadn't disconnected the LAN cable during installation!
Apparently, it used DCHP, although I didn't use it on my PC. I don't know how it managed to configure the IP of the laptop without a DCHP server. It did it alone? Perhaps...
And yeah, when it configured Internet Sharing automatically, there was a problem with DNS, or name resolution. I could ping IPs but not hostnames. I just had to edit my resolv.conf file and put "nameserver 202.123.2.6" in there. 202.123.2.6 is the DNS Server of my ISP, which I obtained via an ipconfig -all in WinXP. Everything worked fine after that... Nice nice!
More about my experiences with Kubuntu to come... If I have time!
*File Systems Config (Size Approx.):
--> WinXP = NTFS = 20GB
--> Files = FAT32 = 50GB
--> Kubuntu = EXT3 = 7GB
--> SWAP = 1GB
--> Total = 80GB
Labels: Linux
Well, the situation cropped up since I have an USB ADSL modem. I know, I should be using an ethernet modem! But I have to do with what I have at hand! And I took it as a challenge... That I'd setup my modem like a big boy, without assistance! DAMN! That was the worst thing I ever tried! Manual Install!
I went to Ubuntu's wiki to know how to install an USB ADSL modem. I've got a Sagem F@st 800 and (fortunately) the instructions were there. Mind you, I spent one whole day trying to get this thing to work! And I kinda went wrong some times... na MANY times!
The process started with getting the essential driver files, an Eagle-USB package. Simple enough. Now, there were 7-8 versions, and since I'm lazy I took the one with the smallest file size (grave mistake #1!). It didn't work. Why? Because I had to compile the driver.
Here comes the worst part: Dependencies Hell. Linux manual install is not something I'd wish to my worst enemy. I needed the build-essential and linux-headers packages from "http://packages.ubuntu.com" . I downloaded them and installed them (right-click - Kubuntu package - Install). Immediately, I got "Dependencies Missing" errors. Then I saw something... that those packages had Dependencies, and worst of all, that these dependencies had...dependencies which had dependencies which had dependencies!!! NESTED DEPENDENCIES! OMG! I downloaded and downloaded! Finally, I had like 30 dependencies files on my hands! I sent all to my USB Pendrive (which Kubuntu recognizes on plugin, great!). I started installing the first package dependency, a .deb package. It said I had not installed another dependency. They chained and chained!
This was really hell! In fact, several times, I had to use my main pc to go on Internet, fetch additional dependencies, send to Pendrive then copy to Laptop!
"Dependencies not found", "XYZ not installed", "ABC not configured", "LMN could not be found" were common errors. And after lots of experimentation, and I really mean LOTS of experimentation, I finally got the build-essential and linux-headers to install!
I moved on to compiling my driver. It didn't work since I had misread (grave mistake #2) the instructions and got the wrong package and I was doing the instructions for Edgy Eft while I had Dapper Drake (grave mistake #3) I had to go back, download the correct package, send to Pendrive, copy to laptop and try again. Tiring... And that doesn't include setting permissions on the folders required to extract the Tarball contents for the driver. Chmod through konsole etc etc then re-chmod to set the permissions back to default! Phewww!
Finally, I found "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsbAdslModem/EagleUsb" and followed the instructions strictly, uninstalling everything I had installed and reversing all changes (and in the process, uninstalling build-essentials! More Dependencies Hell - grave mistake #4).
After lots of fiddling, I was able to get the modem up and running. And I was able to connect to the internet... YAAAAYYY! And I had done a manual install all by myself, at least for the dependencies. I'm not gonna do that again anytime soon! NO WAY! Now I shall adept! I hope...
I tested browsing with Konqueror and chatted a bit with Kopete. Both worked fine. And a ping to google returned positive results. So everything was working fine. Just that... to start the connection: Open console, then sudo startadsl. This is kinda... difficult... considering the double-click I used to do on Windows...
Conclusion: Read the instructions damn well! That's all there was to it! And don't be lazy!
P.s. I'd highly recommend these links to people who have Sagem F@st 800:
-https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsbAdslModem/EagleUsb
-http://packages.ubuntu.com/
However, try at your own risk! I do not take responsability for what you do after you read this post, and any consequences of your actions! :P
Labels: Linux
