Suddenly I have a question. About me. Am I a hypocrite? May be. Or may be not. I brag all the time that I respect others. Well, until now I believed that I had respect for others. Now, I am not very sure if I can still say the same thing about me. I use all kind of swear words. Most of the times I don't mean those words when I use them. But, I really do get pissed off when I see some incompetently developed software (which I have to use for some reason). In several posts of this blog, I have complained that some random software developer did something stupid to make me unhappy. One of my colleagues asked me a few days back: "Is there any software that you really like?" when I was cursing Adobe Reader for it's stupid behaviour on the print dialogue. I hate Hyderabad mainly because all the time I have something to complain about the people of Hyderabad. What do this all mean? Do I have no respect for people whom I don't see face-to-face? Am I a hypocrite when I say "I have respect for other people"? Possibly. If you have spent some time with me and you think you have something to say about me/this post, please write back. Oh yes, I encourage you to be brutally honest.

KTorrent Troubleshooting

Some torrent files may confuse KTorrent and it may go into an infinite loop consuming all CPU cycles but essentially doing nothing. I had a similar experience just a few hours ago. How did I solve it? I used the command ktorrent --debug to see what it does. Reading the debug output helped me find the directory* where KTorrent stores the current torrent files' information. I just removed the directory of the torrent that was causing trouble. Voila, KTorrent is back again to normal! [*] $HOME/.kde/share/apps/ktorrent/tor*

Have I become allergic to governments?

Crap! What are these people doing? A few months ago I had to pay 1000 rupees for all my flight tickets in the name of tax. Air Deccan sold tickets for 150 rupees onwards and the government took a whopping 1000 rupees. Now the tax is increased to 1500 rupees. I come in the "rich people" category of the Indian government and I don't have any of that "IT-exemptible savings" so I end up paying 30% of my salary in the name of Income Tax. Whatever I spend the remaining 70% for, I have to pay taxes (again). For petrol I buy, more than 70% of the price is nothing but tax. Wherever I go I pay 12.5% VAT. All this for what? For these idiots to stop me on the road and make me bribe them for not wearing a helmet. And, these laws are for the benefit of me (i.e. the people). I don't understand one thing -- who are they to decide what's good for me and what's not?

Sify Broadband Client for Linux

I wrote about my home-grown Sify Broadband client some time ago. As with any program it needed some tweaks. Now it's pretty much stable. This is how now I connect to the Internet.

• Configuring the network: My laptop has to use a DHCP-based network in my office. Sify requires that I use a static IP address. I have added a virtual network interface to the computer by adding these lines to my /etc/network/interfaces file:

  iface sify inet static
  address 10.15.66.107
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.15.66.1
  dns-nameservers 202.144.10.50 202.144.13.50

  When I am at home, I activate this network settings on eth0 by running: $ sudo ifdown eth0 $ sudo ifup eth0=sify
• Signing into Sify network: $ sify.py i
• Signing out of Sify: $ sify.py o

Requirements For this script to work, you must have the following installed:

• Python 2.4
• BeautifulSoup (Python XML parser library)

Download and Install ** Update: This project is now hosted on Google Code. See http://code.google.com/p/msify/wiki/GettingStarted for more information and to download the latest version. ** Download the zip archive at http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QR5TC7DK. Extract the contents of the archive into a local directory in your computer. Edit the .sify file and specify your username, password, IP address etc. Then run sify.py to login or logout. Fine Print

• I developed and tested this on a Kubuntu Dapper machine. It works fine for my usage; but I cannot guarantee that this will work for you. I don't provide any warranty of any sort.
• This script is released under GPL V2. Feel free to change and/or redistribute.

Don't attach those Windoze Media format files, puhlease...

<rant> It's been more than two and a half years since YouTube was launched. It's the most famous video sharing service on the Internet today. I know a lot of people know about it. But the problem is they don't use it. Very often I get emails with a zip files attached to it. The zip file contains one single WMV file. Instead of taking all the pain to zip a WMV file (which results in almost no file size difference; but a hell lot of annoyance), if at all they upload it to YouTube or some other fancy video sharing program they like, it would be a pleasant experience for us to watch it. </rant>