No Sound From Dell Inspiron Mini using Ubuntu

Bless my mom. Even after a few weeks of using ubuntu on her Dell, she didn't realize that it cannot produce any sound at all. Recently my father was complaining about the windows on his Dell too, so he too wanted me to install ubuntu on it. Since now I've got a little bit more time on my hand, I wanted to do a proper job with all the codecs and flashplugin installed and everything.

But after installing flash, going to youtube I realized, "Hey, this thing is not making any sound at all". So after much googling, I came to find out that I have to add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell

Once I've rebooted there was a new option in the mixer(Speaker). Just have to max that up and finally we have sound.. foss ftw :)

MyMeeting, Ubuntu Netbook and other stuff

There has been a lot of things happening for the past month or so until I've been so busy I didn't get the time to update my blog properly and even if I had the time I'd rather use it to sleep to get back my energy. Anyhow things are much calmer now and let me take this opportunity to say a few things.. :)

First off the bat, MyMeeting has won an AIPA (Anugerah Inovasi Perkhidmatan Awam) and it was awarded by The Pak Lah himself (some people call me Pak Lah too but this is the real Pak Lah, the one that's running this country. I don't wish to run this country.. :P) at the AKSA (Anugerah Kecemerlangan Sektor Awam) 2008 on 27th November 2008. Check out some of the pictures of the OSCC booth on that day here.

I guess I'm pretty proud that it won that award. Now I can write on my resume, one of the developers of an award winning system.. :) LOL.. somehow I like the sound of that.. :P Whichever way it is, it has drawn quite a lot of attention to MyMeeting. And finally we get feedback from users.. Yay.. \o/ And thus why I've been so busy. MyMeeting has been developed quite a lot since then and finally I think I can be truly proud of it. Most of the features that I've been saying it has but wasn't actually implemented is now implemented.. >.< You can check it out at the MyMeeting trac.

Apart from that, quite recently (as in around 3 weeks ago), I've bought for my parents Dell Mini Inspiron 9. So one for my father, one for my mother (using their money of course.. :P). The funny thing was that my mother's mini just kept on having problems. It wouldn't shut down properly so suddenly you find that it's battery has been completely drained. It sometimes wouldn't detect the mouse. But my father's one was a-okay. My mom asked me to fix it. What was my answer? "You know you wouldn't have this problem if it was running linux rather than windows xp :P"... So she agreed to let me install Linux on it.. \o/

So I went out to buy an external DVD drive (I know there's ways to install it using usb pendrive and all but I need an external DVD drive anyway.. :P) and promptly installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I've read that because the SSD have limited amount of write cycles you should limit the amount of writing to it as much as possible. So rather than formatting the hard disk with an ext3 that has journaling (and thus more writes for every file operation) I opted to use ext2. Some people would also suggest not to have a swap partition as there would be lots of writes there too. But I've read somewhere else that most of the time you don't use enough memory to require a swap if you've got 1GB of ram (which the Dell Mini has) and thus wouldn't use it even if it's there making it okay to create a swap partition. But I didn't create a swap partition because what's the point. If you want to create a swap partition for suspend and stuff you need to create it at least 2.5 times larger than your amount of RAM. The Dell Mini has only 8 GB of real estate. After installing Ubuntu you're left with only around 5GB (compared to only 3GB with bare windows). 2.5GB would take away half of the available space. So forget suspending this baby. Better just shut it down. Googled for Ubuntu netbook and followed the instructions written here. Made sure to add maximus and netbook-launcher to the list of programs run at start-up (System->Preferences->Session for those who doesn't know).

The verdict. After over two weeks of using it, my mom loves it.. :D Now she's not embarrased when she try to boot up the netbook in front of her friends it doesn't boot. Or when she tries to connect the mouse it doesn't work. It just works and it's interface is lovely. And then it happened... My wife asked me to install it on her EEEPC too.. :) Her EEEPC was still using the original custom Xandros which greatly limited the amount of software (and even drivers) available for her. So I went and installed it. And because it has a 20GB SSD, there's plenty of space to create the swap partition (which I did). So just like I suspected it now boots a lot slower than the original Xandros (but still much faster than any kind of windows xp installation.. :P) but at least now she's running the latest software and drivers. There's a whole lot more issue with the EEEPC actually and I've still haven't got the internal mic to work yet. But at least bluetooth doggle should work (actually I haven't tried it yet.. :P).

Fuh.. this has turned into a longer post than I thought. So I'll just end it here. If you're a PHP developer (especially if you're a CakePHP developer) please check out MyMeeting and who knows, maybe you can contribute something. If you're not a developer but you know how to install web apps (php, mysql stack) try installing mymeeting and see whether maybe your organization can use it. If not give us a feedback on why and maybe we can make it happen.. ;) If you're neither of that but you know someone who is, tell them about it.. :)

Alrighty then, till next time...

Leon: The Professional -- Shape Of My Heart

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn't play for the money he wins
He doesn't play for respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

He may play the jack of diamonds
He may lay the queen of spades
He may conceal a king in his hand
While the memory of it fades

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

And if I told you that I loved you
You'd maybe think there's something wrong
I'm not a man of too many faces
The mask I wear is one
Those who speak know nothing
And find out to their cost
Like those who curse their luck in too many places
And those who fear are lost

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Great movie. Thanks to BuffaloSoldier for pointing it out. :)

Get only the second column of output

Little bash script which took me quite some time to figure out:

svn status | grep ? | awk '{print $2}'

Will get rid of the status field and that can be used to add to svn.

Food first post

My blogs' name is High-Tech Rojak but I don't recall ever talking about food. So here's a first. Just recently I got some free time and finally got to cook the pasta I've bought for ages. So here's an account of how it went down.. :)

Okay. That's the thing I cooked. I have no idea what it's called. At first I was thinking of buying the ribbon ones, then my wife looked at the colorful spiral ones and said "why not get these? they're more colorful" and so we got them (yes, we know nothing about pasta.. :) So I boiled it, actually put some salt and oil into the water so that they won't stick, drained it and tadaaaaa, you'd get the above. I remember once I tried to cook macaroni and I didn't drain it after boiling it, it filled up the whole pot. LOL... Learned my lesson.

Next up the sauce. Like I said we don't know anything about pasta so here's the ingredients we prepared.
Yes ladies and gentleman. Instant pasta sauce all bottled up and ready to go. Some dried up basil also bottled up. Some onions and garlic. Hahahaha... The sauce is "traditional" lagi tu.. So yes, it's about as authentic as I can get it till I learn to do better. So on the color spiral packaging mentioned about frying some onions, garlic and capsicum. Since I didn't have any capsicum, garlic and onions would have to do. So into the frying pot.Once the smell has risen (how DO you say "bau dah naik" in english ?) you can just dump in the sauce. Stir it around a bit. Put water into the bottle and add that to the pot too so that nothing gets wasted. Once it start boiling dump in the minced meat (apologise for my vegetarian or non-cow meat eating readers, the following pic is rather graphical.. :P ).

It doesn't look very impressive. Well, stir it up some more. Add diced vegetables. Add some salt (actually I overdid it with the salt >.< ). But in the end...
Tadaaaa... Looks pretty good eh.. :) A bit salty I know.. But still edible enough that we went to sleep with a full stomach and even got enough for breakfast. I didn't do the whole pasta thing again but eating the sauce with bread is really nice. Fuh.. Now I'm hungry again.. >.<

foss.my is AWESOME!!!

Lol.. I can't help but keep on writing awesome in big capital letters.. AWESOME!!! :D

That was the most awesome weekend that I have ever had. It's monday and I still feel the high.. >.<

There was so many great things about it and a lot of people have written about it. Here is just some of my thoughts and what I'd like to highlight (and can read back this entry in the future and feel the awesomeness again):

First impression when I just arrived was that the whole atmosphere was so cool. Everyone was friendly and down to earth. There was no special separation between any vip and the other participants or anything. Maybe I've just been to too many government conferences but I love this atmosphere and attitude.

Then I remember when Collins mentioned special thanks to the sponsors. First one he mentioned was Microsoft and all was quite. As soon as he said Mozilla, WHOA!! Everyone clapped and cheered. And so was for Mixi, Bytecraft, Inigo and APIIT. LOL!! I felt sorry for the Microsoft rep there but at least they didn't boo or anything. I guess we're polite. Makes me so proud.. :)

The Raj 'Dylan' strumming the "The Times They Are A-Changin' " song on his guitar. To tell the truth there was a few hiccups and most of the audience didn't know the song (yours truly included :P). But I thought it was great. Great for 2 things. One is the fact that "Hey, there's a guy who came forward and played his guitar at this conference.." and two is I find the lyrics very appropriate to how I feel about this conference. The fact that they was able to pull of this conference just shows that the foss community here is getting stronger and better and this could really be the sign of "Times They Are A-Changin'".

Yoon Kit gave the opening keynote about the "Format Wars". There wasn't any keynote from APIIT as scheduled. Then it was my talk. Hmmm.. I think it went well despite the slides was just prepared a few hours before the talk. Could have been better if I had prepared earlier but with MyGOSSCON and all that's pretty much the best I could do. There certainly was more interest from the audience than normally from government conferences. Even on Sunday there was still some of the participants come up to me to talk about mymeeting and cakephp. Love it. Hope I stirred up enough interest in MyMeeting to get even more feedback and participation from the community. I better buckle up too and make sure MyMeeting gets better and better all the time.

Then it was Google Summer of Code 101 by Raj 'Dylan' Kissu. Awesome talk. Wish I was still a student. I would certainly try my luck in getting into the Google Summer of Code. The opportunity to learn, the money incentive (4500 USD is a lot of incentive ;), the experience in getting involved with Google. After that Kaeru presented the Orca talk because En. Rahim wasn't able to make it. It was great.

I stayed awhile for the Navigating the Commons talk but in the middle of it decided I'd rather go to the fosschix session. I missed the main presentation by Pia (until now I still regret it..) but it was great. Just chatting about how to make the working hours more family friendly so that the ladies can get more involved in IT. Love it.

Lunch had McChicken. To tell the truth it was nearly enough for me. But I didn't come for the food anyway so I don't mind.

Then listened to Toru about OSS at mixi.jp. Cool dude. Way cool.. :D you know how you read comics and all and you think, wow.. the japanese people are so cool. Well.. he's even cooler.. >.< Loved his style of presentation. Relaxed and walking around everywhere. I think if they have given him a clicker he might have actually walked of the stage and just talk and talk.

Then went to a "Birds of A Feather" session on python. Kaeru and Bakhtiar were great. Talking about things which I haven't even heard of before.. :P Even gave me some new ideas I can try out with my projects. Programming in firefox. Sounds cool.

Then end of day 1 with Pia's keynote. Almost the same as the one she gave at MyGOSSCON but with a bit of modification. Why do open source? "Fun, Work and making the world better". Great. Got me all revved up to contribute more.

Then off to the speakers dinner. Great to be able to mingle with great people. But actually I was soooo tired I wasn't able to take full advantage of the opportunity. But it was fun nonetheless..

Day 2 was full of awesomeness too. I actually didn't read the schedule and thought it would start like day 1 at 9 am. But actually it was scheduled to start at 10am. I was an hour early and apiit was noisy with a taekwondo competition downstairs.

Keynote by Ditesh was again proof of how awesome he is.. :D Highlighted things which a lot of us didn't know of before. All the contributions of the community which we wasn't even aware of. Actually he gave almost the same talk at MyGOSSCON but now it was a bit modified to be more cool. :P

Track session began and I was torn. I had no idea whether I wanted to listen to Toru on memcached or Kamal on git. In the end I decided on Kamal and again I must say this dude is one heck of a great speaker. Now he got me all excited on using git. I'm already using svn, hg, bzr. Now git pulak.. :D

Followed by James Morris talk on kiosk mode in Fedora. Looks great. Reminds me of Juzt-Reboot card which I used to have. Do whatever you want. As soon as you restart the computer is restored into it's original pristine state. Would be great to be used in computer labs at school or libraries.

Then off to fosschix. Pamela Fox is so cooool.. :D There was so many people that we had to move to a bigger room. And Pamela just sat on the table talking about webdevedu. Awesome.

Lunch. And it is confirmed, python is used a LOT at google... :D Pamela is into languages too. Asked about the Malay language and all. Awesome.. :)

SaaS and PaaS? I had no idea what that was until I heard the talk by Jerome. Software as a service, Platform as a service. It's the wave of the future and it is happening now. Hmmm.. MyMeeting as a service? Maybe one day.. :P

Then OLPC talk by Pia. The thing I remember most about the talk? Pia raised the XO high above her head and dropped it.. 0_O wow... it still work. That thing was built to be abused. :P Wonder whether it can take on Muhammad.. >.< But seriously I want to get on to developing on it. Got some ideas of creating local content to learn. And I've got two beta testers at home. :P

HTML 5 and google gears was presented by Pamela. WOW!!! Can't wait for it to be properly supported by mainstream browsers. It's seriously cool stuff. I know how l33t it is to be able to do complex ajaxy stuff right now, but soon those complex ajaxy stuff have to be standard fare and html 5 will help a lot in making that come true.

Lightning talk... My first ever. And what do I remember most? Couch surfing by the totally awesome dude.. :D Lol.. wonder whether I might actually do that one day.. :P

Keynote: Makkal Sakti by Jaya Kumar. Yeah!! Very cool. Run, study, redistribute, modify. The four freedom.. :D All men are created equal.. :D

Then wrapping it up with all the speaker, crew and volunteers in front. Toru said it best when he mentioned "The world needs more love".. :D

Foss.my was AWESOME!!! and I hope to be there next year (especially if it's at a beach.. ;)

MyGOSSCON 08 is over..

Alhamdullillah finally MyGOSSCON 08 is over. InsyaAllah life will soon return back to normal.

It is sometimes funny that when you talk in real life, face to face, you tend to forget or leave a lot of things out because you just missed it. So when you come back from the meeting only then do you realize the things that you really wanted to say. Happened to me after dinner going back home from oscc tonight. So I just want to say it here to get it off my chest.

First and foremost, I want to congratulate the superb maestro Mr. Marzuki. He has done a great job conducting the implementation of MyGOSSCON 08 from beginning to end. I was there and saw how much and how bad the problems he had to face, and even more amazingly how he overcame them with his trademark off handed coolness and kept his everlasting charm. **power** **power** /me doing the firdaus salute.

Second of course a big thank you to the lovely Eavay for her excellent work in leading the development, design & maintenance of the MyGOSSCON 08 website and also for developing the plspeakers product for our intranet so that we can easily manage our speakers data. Personally I think that handling the speakers (something that I was actually officially responsible for, at least some of the speakers) has been made much easier with that product. And I think having a better infrastructure to actually work together and collaborate with in one of the primary reasons why I feel MyGOSSCON this year is a whole lot more easier than MyGOSSCON last year.

Thirdly of course a big thank you to all of my team mates in SC1 (Shima, Razlina and Yana) and not forgetting the head honcho Mr Nicholas for all of their help and support in calling up the speakers and chair person. It wasn't easy but finally we got through it all (well, almost all.. ;). And later on MyGOSSCON itself eavay joined SC1 too and helped a lot. Another round of thank you to eavay. .. \o/

Fourthly a big thank you to all the OSCC staff. It wasn't easy but finally we pulled it through, together. This thank you even includes ex OSCC staff the foss advocate extraordinaire kaeru. I can't help but think of him as I saw the awards for the OSS Case Studies given out to the winners. And thank you also Mr Firewall ;). It was tough I know. So to kaeru, kak siti, stanly, suria, Mr Jacob, Mr Foong, saro, nuhaa, cikgu, hisham, indhran, gopi, Mr Fauzi, e-jat, eric, achik, ella, kak aida, coreen and nadia, thank you all.

Lastly thank you too all the speakers (especially those who I had to contact, please forgive me if I was ever rude or intruding) for their time and cooperation, thank you too to all the MAMPU staff and MEP staff who made MyGOSSCON 08 the success that it was. It was GREAT!!

~~~

Come to think of it, there is no way I could have thought of all of that on my feet ad hoc before dinner just now. So oh well, I need to improve some more.. :P