Archive for the ‘FOSS’ category

Mozilla Developer Day – 2010

February 27th, 2010

Mozilla had organized developer day at Bangalore today, 27th February, 2010. The contents for day where quite interesting, specially Arun Ranganthan’s session on Web Standard was very impressive & useful. He showed usability of latest web standard which allows, direct play back of video, drag & drop, CSS & graphics capabilities. Besides Firefox, these capabilities should work well in Chrome & Safari (I hope, in-directly all WebKit based browser) well.

Using web standard based code instant of Adobe Flash has certain definite benefits, Such as,
- Code of sites are open & can be understand (Read: Debug/Optimization/Re-utilization)
- Works with out external plug-in.
- No need of paid & heavy weight editor tools.

At EOD, I would sum up Mozilla Developer Day as Highly technical & useful event with clear focus. With all this goodies, it will remain more memorable.

[Update: Arun has uploaded detailed report along with his presentation.]

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Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable drive Partition table issue in Linux

January 3rd, 2010

Recently, I purchased Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable Drive. I have Fedora 12 Linux on my system & it turned out to be mess with partition table.

[user@localhost media]$ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: Seagate   FreeAgent Go      0142
Power condition mode page:
>>> warning: mode page seems malformed
The page number field should be 0x1a, but is 0x00; try '--flexible'
SAT ATA Power condition mode page:
>>> warning: mode page seems malformed
The page number field should be 0x1a, but is 0x00; try '--flexible'

[user@localhost media]$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107860992 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa4b57300

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       60801   488384001    7  HPFS/NTFS
[viral@sachde media]$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb1 -l

Disk /dev/sdb1: 500.1 GB, 500105217024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60800 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1p1   ?       13578      119522   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p2   ?       45382       79243   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p3   ?       10499       10499           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb1p4          167628      167631       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

I went ahead & formatted & found it working well atleast with Ext4 file system :) .

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Free and Open Source Software on Proprietary Operating System

April 4th, 2009

I use Linux on my laptop, so was feeling bit different when I recently used Windows and Mac on few friends laptop. I want to do some browsing and media playback. On both machines, Mac as well as on Windows, I end up using Firefox for browsing and VLC for media playback. On windows, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player was existing while on Mac Safari and QuickTime. But on both machine, default was Firefox and VLC. That made me to think about this topic of Free and Open Source software on Proprietary Operating System. I asked my friends about usage and experience with Firefox and VLC, which was positive. In one line, Both of them rocks ! ! !

So those who likes to use Firefox and VLC, take one step forward and try some linux operating system (any distribution ubuntu, fedora, centos etc.) And make a change in your life.
Those who still wants to stick with Windows and Mac, Please ask your operating system providers to offer better software. Obviously FOSS developer does not mind you providing support if asked in proper way, although many times people ask and expect different level of support and make developer frustrated.  Otherwise as I mentioned, Best use of Internet Explorer is to visit mozilla.com and download Firefox.

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