WiFi as in HiFi, not WeeFee

My fifteen minute attempt of an abstract on "Wifi in Linux" got selected for Linuxasia2k6. The conference was held at the IHC(India Habitat Center) in Delhi. It was my first visit to the capital, so I was quite excited, actually more so , coz I was flying by Kingfisher [:p] They're damn right about their motto "fly the good times". Even before you board the plane, in the airport itself, you can spot their cabin crew by either looking around for chics with bright red suits or simply look where everyone else is looking. The flight is a good two hours from Pune, so that gives you enough time to "be attended" by the air-hostesses, for any lame reasons you can think of. Well for me, getting a window seat behind the wing was more important, than "being attended". [Ahem] The in-flight entertainment systems are cool. They have LCD screens on every seat, serve good food, and the music stations are pretty neat. So, enuf said about the flight.

My first impression about Delhi was ruined coz of the traffic. I mean, they have excellent roads but everyone drives carelessly. Even round-abouts have more than one lane ! So ideally, if they were to follow the right hand rule, and pick a lane according to the exits around the round-about, they'd have such a peaceful ride. But no, that aint the kind of thing happening here. The second thing you notice instantly is the number of four wheelers ! Everyone has a car, there are hardly any two wheelers around, and hardly any undented cars.. in fact I could see only 3 undented cars in 2 days. Trust me, I did travel a lot around Delhi, mostly coz the roads were blocked and diverted because of Moharam (?) processions.

So the venue was at the IHC(India Habitat Centre), which is like a convention centre for expo's and conferences, not just for the techies. But LinuxAsia was full of techies alright. Not really the geeky kinds but it was a mix of CEO's, CTO's, regional heads, VP's blah blah... so basically excellent for startups wanting to pitch at open source tech. The 'crowd' was 'pretty good' (pun intended), so it made for excellent timepass. Was even better coz I had the "Speaker" tag hanging round my neck, so free food, free everything and an excellent excuse to get talking to the chics ;)

The IHC has WiFi too , so that was cool ! Just a couple of hours before my talk, my colleagues who had tagged along, decided to kill some time checking mail and stuff. So they got some scratch cards from the IHC that had the login names and passwords on them. Within the next few minutes 3 of us were out in the open gardens with our thinkpads. I didnt find it worthwhile paying 150 bucks for an hour so I didnt buy me a card. Instead I decided to fire up Kismet (read: wifi sniffer) to check for anything interesting. Suddenly I saw "codito marvin enter login name: ramana.radhxxxx, enter password: ramana123" !!!!! yes, I could see my colleagues login name and password as the dude was checking his mail. So I say to Ramana, "Dude ! ramana123 ?!! C'mon man you can do better than that !" , Ramana just looked at me for the next 20 seconds until he finally uttered a series of "F" words in succession. I had already taken a screenshot of this and added it to my presentation slide, and I was right, it really was an eye opener to the audience. So, basically, the Wifi at the IHC sucks, nothing is encrypted in the air. I dont know what they've done of it now, but its a serious flaw in their setup. So with that last slide and my comment on ramana's lame password, my talk ended with a good sound of laughter in the theatre.

All in all, I had a great time at the IHC.The talks by Klaus knopper ( Knoppix dude) and Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu dude) stole the show and I got to meet some of the prominent personalities in the open source industry at the CEO lunch, although I was in casuals and everyone else was in suits. But the "Speaker" tag saved my arse [:)]. I have some snaps of the event on flickr, but I cant for the life of me remember the url right now :p so will update this space later.

Tech this Tech that

Damn it, I think its time for one of those things called vacations. I mean, my parents never used to say this to me before, but since the time I've started working, they've been after me to take breaks periodically ! Man, I wish I could just go biking, or camping, or just spend a weekend at a lake or something with friends, every weekend or so. Honestly I'm ever ready to do these things, but its fun only when everyone shares the excitement. Also, its really a pity that we cant do many things that our peers in the western (eastern also perhaps) world do, like surfing, adventure sports types. Sure they say there are "adventure sports" near our city outskirts, but I just heard they charge astronomical prices. That just spoils it for me :)

Actually, I dont even need to be going outdoors to maintain that "balanced life". I mean, I _think_ I could even do with watching really good classic movies. The ones that dont make it to our theaters, you know. Plan to watch a movie, depending on what mood I am, lookup imdb, find a perfect match, download it if it isnt available with friends, choose a day, setup the acoustics, culinary stuff and some aqua vitae maybe and then .... just chill !

But I dont think I could do that for too long consecutively. I'd probably need to try out different things every so often. Whatever it is , I'm really looking forward to this Goa trip that should happen around this month end.

The problem with me is, once I get back into the rigmarole at work, all these plans go for a toss, and even if I happen to finish my work earlier than expected, I know I could do some of these things that Ive planned for me, but I still dont do them ! Coz either I'm too tired, or just satisfied that I did my work well. The latter being more probable. I wonder if "somebody" can change that ? :D

I'm at it again :)

I just figured out how to use the plugin features of GAIM. So no more ugly source code hacks. I just followed the simple.c sample in their plugin folder and voila ! Lo and behold, you now have fortunes in IM. I've simply used fortunes cookies from linux and routed them to GAIM through a pipe. So far it looks stable enough. Actually havent really stress tested this, but what the heck, it aint no big thing. My TODO things for this would be, to add GUI support for different fortune databases (the simpsons one is really cool).

How does it work?
Now that the interface is clean and all, to enable this, you just need to select the plugin through preferences. Of course you need to compile the source (make ashbert.so) from your source trees plugin folder and then copy it to the systems plugin folder (generally, /usr/lib/gaim). Restart/start Gaim, and you will see my plugin there. Just tick it.

Then when someone opens up a conversation window with you, and types fortune , he will get one ultra cool fortune. Of course in this case, its like _you_ are the fortune server. If you want to see the fortunes, either add yourself to your list and IM yourself OR tell your friend to install this plugin.

Here's the source code. I will also convert the Haddock insults patch(See links) into a plugin when I find time.
Till then Happy hacking.