ohmkara 1.0

data

deepak — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:53:00 +0000

I am used to throwing data at the problem. But it seems that these days people throw problems at the data — the data is a primary entity!

(Not everyone, including myself, agrees completely though)

Computation

deepak — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:21:44 +0000

The world is ever computing. Every object is at least a special purpose computer, computing its own behavior (running the code that is the laws of nature)… can we execute a different code? Are the rules meant to be broken? Can we run our programs on substrates that we do not currently recognize as computational? Is there a substrate or is it all code?
(OR, in other words, am I crazy? :P)
P.S: I do not know how long this ISR, which woke my blog from sleep state will last…

FVWM, making laptop multimedia (sound) keys work

deepak — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:45:01 +0000

I was giving fvwm a spin on my laptop. Of late I have grown to like fvwm.

Problem statement: Making volume / multimedia keys of the laptop work in fvwm

Well the following two pages documents how it is to be done –

1. Figuring out the key-codes for your multimedia / sound keys and including these in your .Xmodmap : howto-link

2. Map these keys to alsa-mixer commands in your .fvwm2rc: howto-link (post: Audio buttons)

fvwm + xscreensaver

deepak — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:25:00 +0000

For xscreensaver to work, a daemon process has to be running in the background. I load it up with the following line in my ~/.xinitrc

xscreensaver -no-splash &

linux screen resolution

deepak — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:19:57 +0000

I have just started using FVWm2 @ home but everytime I login, X was going into weird screen resolutions — the solution is available here: @Ubuntu wiki

The following works — adding

xrandr -s 1152×864

to your ~/.xprofile file (ya, I know, wierd resolution — more on that in another post, if ever)

how long did it take?

deepak — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:37:07 +0000

How to measure how long it took to run a command — to benchmark etc. in linux / unix etc.

…]$ time command

Online man-page

wireless ad-hoc network

deepak — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:29:25 +0000

Try with static IP setting if you are un-able to logon to a wireless ad-hoc network. IP setting over DHCP did not work whenever I tried…. Maybe I am trying wrong.

Thanks to my roomie for this gyaan.

split / join files in linux

deepak — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:23:14 +0000

I was looking for a way to split and join files in linux.

“split” command splits – online man

“join” command joins — online man

Another way to join files is (say join two files file1, file2 to a combinedfile)

cat file1 file2 > combinedfile

You can specify sizes. Ex. If you want to split a bigfile (of size 820Mb) to an 700Mb file and the rest

the following ‘may’ work

split -b 734003200 bigfile

And so on see the manpage

linux — display off / prevent display off

deepak — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 01:33:24 +0000

I keep my laptop on most of (all) the time. To turn the display off when I sleep etc. I have the following alias in my ~/.bashrc

alias doff=’sleep 5; xset dpms force off’

doff command then gives me enough time to ctrl+alt+L before the display switches off.

To prevent turning off the display / screen blanking etc. while the system is idle and I am thinking / watching movies etc. I have the following alias

alias don=’xset -dpms; xset s off’

I did not invent these by any means, to know more — link

enqueue file(s) in audacious (and other linux media players)

deepak — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:14:20 +0000

Problem statement: I “NEED” the feature — right click on the media file (say .mp3) and have a “enqueue in player-x” option / functionality

Solution: The following was tried out in audacious2 but I think that this would work for others like xmms beep etc.

Hope the following description is clear enough. Basically we are changing program-file association, this could be done in multiple places, following is one method.

Right click on any mp3 file and select “Properties”

Select the “Open With” (Tab)

Click “Add” (Button)

Click on “Use a custom command”

Enter the following text in the field — “audacious2 -e” (without the quote)

-e option exists for other media players (or some equivalent option / flag) with that change this process could work for other players as well, But I have only tested with audacious2.

I have deleted every other player listed in the above mentioned “Open With” (for mp3, flac etc.) only two was left — the default option is audacious2 (without the enqueue option) and right click on the media file provides me the audacious2 (with enqueue option).

Thought that I might as well share it because I spend some time to figure out a way to do this. There are some nautilus scripts available to do this, but I thought that this (“my” :P) method might work even in KDE etc. (not tested there though)

Please comment if you have any ideas about better enqueuing methods (I am a noob).