After a quiet december, I am back to doing some more travelling.. arrived in bangalore couple of hours back, to attend friends wedding..
my trip will be like delhi – bangalore – hampi – bangalore – pune – mumbai – delhi. originally this was to be a extended holiday, to some place down south.. but had to change plan for Gnunify07 on 27-28th in Pune… the schedule is out, I will be speaking again 4th time.. no prizes for guessing the topic 
Got my tata indicom plug 2 surf connection, which is basically a cdma usb modem. they have existing pcmcia data card , this one is a new offer. one advantage being, being usb could be used with any machine..
Took it since needed net at home…& didnt want to take broadband which still remains @ home only… this should be good for travelling around..
worked well with linux with spo0nman’s howto here
the model no was EC 325, its a little cheaper (3850/-) than data card (5095/-)
though one issue being TI seems to measure every bit transfered, whatever it be…so bandwidth usage grows quite quickly.. so best used for email, IM than browsing any loaded up sites!!.
thier initial offer being 2 months 1GB free.. later will switch to 700/- pm for 1GB.. or 1500pm/unlimited if it really comes to it..!
Debconf7 -> Practical info for visitors (to edinburgh) -> Plugs used in UK -> ground & neutral -> Railway electrification -> Railway electrification in britain -> Search for Railway electrification in India -> Indian Railways -> Nilgiri Mountain Railway -> Indian Railways – > Shortest railway station name -> Longest railway station name -> Pic longest stn name -> IRFCA trip gallery -> Narrow gauge trip report -> train trip reports -> ….
dist: testing, unstable
arch: all
Panorama is a wide angle shot created by stitching multiple photos, requirement being there be some overlap between the photos.
hugin is gui frontend for panorama tools , to make panoramas from multiple pictures. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms, and much more. The gui provides for lot of options & controls, read the docs once before using.
Install: apt-get install hugin
meta package hugin installs hugin 0.6.1 and its dependencies ( hugin-bin, hugin-tools, libpano ). Latest version is 0.7 beta 1
A rough sample stitching of 5 shots. read hugin documentation and tutorials to use it best
Panoramic view of Thimpu city (Bhutan)
testdisk is a tool to scan and repair partitions
apt-get install testdisk
TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks. It is very useful in recovering lost partitions. It works with : * FAT12 * FAT16 * FAT32 * NTFS (Windows NT/W2K/XP) * EXT2FS/EXT3FS (Linux) * Linux Swap (1 & 2) * IBM Multiboot * BeFS (BeOS) * UFS (BSD) * ReiserFS (1 & 2)
Its sister tool photorec helps recover images, files from digital camera memory cards..
speaking of disk partitions its always a good idea to keep a printed copy of partition table (or store in multiple email boxes)..
fdisk -l /dev/hda | lpr
Case
Today I almost lost the data in /home partition when reorganizing the partition table on 120GB disk…while had the proper cylinder counts (from partition table print!).. there were some mismatch in the no of blocks allocated…perhaps some boundary alignment errors.. which rendered the partition unmountable… testdisk was able to fix it by properly marking the partition.
Debian has an ever growing package repository..maybe 16,000 or more…while many tools are well known.. but i find many which i never knew of… so here will be listing one interesting package a day..something i find I never used or read about.. (though it may quite widely be known already )..
Following the customary tradition of making resolutions.. here goes
1) Would try not to procastinate..!
(ok.. donno how long this will last.. since this post was to go much earlier
2) Read a book a week..
since i have gone completely out of the habit of reading a printed book.. will try reading one book a week.. for a start short stories.., self help, health.. photography etc.. tech books out for the while..(they are better read as ebooks!)
3) Learn something new each day..
this is a bit difficult thing to do with a plan in advance.. but for a start will be like studying some code on how something works,..or reading an article on wikipedia…offcourse apart from these many more things can be learned keeping an open mind!
4) Get a stronger financial base..
this typically means earn more.. how.. that is to be seen.. do consultancy projects or join a regular IT job (maintaining code than writing!).., start something.. I guess only mid-way through the year will have sense of how things go..
5) To be or not to be ( a bachelor )..
ie. get married this is something which has foxed me… considering family pressure on getting hooked.. I only wonder how it will happen.. considering my aversion to arranged marriages & my poor convincing skills to get some gal to agree …. so i hopefully hope to end the year.. remaining to be..
Woke up to a foggy new year day in delhi.
till afternoon (1pm) there was not much sign of it lifting up!
