Thoughts On Rails

I am leaving for Allahabad in a few hours. Shall be back in town by 26th March 2007.

Going for some work related stuff, but photography will not be left behind!

There’s a good chance that I’ll be able to get online before I come back, so do watch this place for posts and the photos section for well, photos.

Cheers!
Harshad

For the FreeBSD users, there’s a bit of a problem when using laptops -
the special volume buttons are usually not automatically recognized.
The following page helps in configuring that:

http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/

For configuring the keypress/command association, we use the following port:

x11/xbindkeys

You might want to install the following port for making configuring
xbindkeys easier:

x11/xbindkeys_config

Now, there’s only one issue - the volume cannot be muted and unmuted
to its original setting automatically, here’s a small shell
script that resets volume to 60
[http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/xbindkeysrc]

I wrote a python script that uses commands from above file and
adds persistence of volume setting while automatically muting or
unmuting each time the script is called, also it relies heavily on
UNIX commands - since this script is necessary only on UNIX/FreeBSD.
It will not work under windows.

It also has a nice feature - soft fade-in / fade-out (configurable via script). Especially useful when you mute at high volume and forget it… then play some loud music and unmute - if done using this script, it might not shock with you with sudden loudness. :-)

All configuration is kept inside the script to keep usage of the script as easy as possible - just a call:

./mutetoggle.py

Hope it is useful to anyone looking to solve this or similar issue…

Here’s the file: mutetoggle.py.txt

It is 3:43 am, when most other users are offline, I am trying to download KDE 3.5.5 source packages for my newly installed FreeBSD 6.2 on AMD64 machine - I am using a 256 Kbps BSNL DataOne Broadband connection. On January 2007, BSNL announced that it has upgraded all users for speeds upto 2 Mbps. Yes, I enjoy the speed - and I am thankful to BSNL. However, as I watch the progress of my downloads, there’s nothing else than “SHOCK” that awaits me.

Here’s a sampler from my Python download session:

Python-2.4.3.tgz                                5% of 9129 kB 3775  Bps 39m04s

3775Bps, around 3 KBps which comes around to 3*8 = 24 Kbps. Am I being served 10 times slower internet or what?

This is not just for one or two downloads. I tried reconnecting, hoping vainly that things might magically sort themselves out. I tried to check my DNS settings (Regular and OpenDNS both) both resolve fine. This is not the first time this has happened. It’s becoming a regular P.I.T.A., and I’m very much frustrated with it. If BSNL decides to make the 2 AM to 8 AM block free for all users (no charges for downloads) then they should at least give the minimum promised 256 Kbps speed!!! 24 kbps is just #$%@#$% #%$@@.

That’s jungle code for “my machine is going to be upgraded now.”

Hopefully, I have all the backups in a good shape. I’ve just made sure - but with machines, you never can be really sure. Have the AMD64 version of FreeBSD ready to leave its mark on my system. I’m loving PCBSD, but it is 32bit only, my machine sports a AMD Turion 64 processor - better use the power!

Will try to set things up as they are (or at least very close to as) in  PCBSD 3.3. If I’m able to do that in the next few hours/days/weeks/months/who knows when, I’ll be a happier man! No, I’m not planning on PBI support, I like ports tree more - and I just realized, The FreeBSD Foundation has Java binaries available for most of our systems… great! Because I hate compiling java by hand (those who have tried it, know what I mean ;-)

Here’s the link.

I’ll be gone, not for long - cause I do have 3 other machines (actually, with friend’s machines lying here… those can be 5 spare machines) to come online if I mess this up! So no worries mates! I’ll just be busy, living on pure caffeine and rock music for the next few hours/days/… whatever :-)