Learning Joomla

There are thousands of guys out there who are working with Joomla.

I wanted to learn Joomla. So I set up Joomla on a domain. Read a tutorial for 6 hours and went about setting up the site.

The Joomla default setup gives the a few sample articles, menus, themes etc. which is user is free to modify and experiment.

I deleted the default Joomla articles, menus etc. to set up my own and now it looks like the thing has crashed. Its giving me a 404 for a component that is not found. I have to re-install the thing now

Webserver on Home PC

I setup my home PC to be a webserver based on the instructions given in the following articles.

http://www.thinkdigit.com/details.php?article_id=1061

Everything seems to be working fine. I’ll need to test this tomorrow from a PC outside my home.

Running two wordpress blogs on the same domain

Today I tried to run two wordpress blogs from the same domain name.
It is entirely possible and works like a charm.

The following are the steps to be used:

1. Download the latest version of WordPress.
2. Unzip the the WordPress files to a folder.
3. Make a second copy of this folder
4. Name the copies of the folder as say blog1 & blog2
5. In each of these folders you will need to create wp-config.php file.
6. To create this you need to edit the wp-config-sample.php file
7. The following items shown are to be edited:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere‘);    // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’);     // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

8. To edit the above you will need to first create your databases.
9. Create two different MySQL databases one for each blog in your domain. I’m assuming you have MySQL/PHP on Linux hosting. You will need to use the control panel provided by your web hosting service to create these databases.
10. Note down the parameters with which you set up the database and fill up the wp-config.php file suitably.
11. Upload the blog1 & blog2 folders to your domain to sit at http://www.yoursite.com/blog1 & http://www.yoursite.com/blog1
12. To setup the first blog start with http://www.yoursite.com/blog1/readme.html and follow the standard WordPress install procedure.
13. To setup the second blog start with
http://www.yoursite.com/blog2/readme.html and follow the standard
WordPress install procedure.
14. Now you will have two different wordpress installations, two different databases and two different blogs.
15. The first blog will be at http://www.yoursite.com/blog1 and the second one at http://www.yoursite.com/blog2.

Have fun with your blogs.

Getting on to the internet

Today I purchased a domain name and some space on a webhosting server.
Now I can peacefully learn how to run the “real” wordpress.

Open “My Computer” in “Windows Explorer”

enThese are a couple of old windows tricks that I find very useful. However, I manage to forget them every time I sit on a new PC or re-install windows and I thought it would be better to write it down.

Trick 1 : Always open “My Computer” In “Windows Explorer” Mode

Many users find My Computer on the desktop to be a convenient starting point for file operations. Clicking My Computer opens to a Task Pane view, which while gaining wider acceptance, has yet to come close to overtaking the more widely accepted and preferred Explorer view. To set the default so My Computer opens in Explorer view:

1. Launch My Computer > Tools > Folder Options… > File Types tab
2. Select the icon for (NONE) Folder and click the Advanced button
3. In the Actions List, select Explorer and click Set Default
4. Click OK and Close.

Trick 2 : Always op”Windows Explorer” in “My Computer” mode

1. Reach for the Shortcut to Windows Explorere Start > All Programs > Accesories > Windows Explorer.
2. Right-click the Explorer shortcut, select Properties, and in the Target line, add: “/n,/e,/select,c:\” to the end, so your Target line looks like this: “C:\WINDOWS\EXPLORER.EXE /n,/e,/select,c:\”
3. To Open Explorer in your other choice of folders use a format similar to: “explorer.exe /n, /e, c:\windows\favorites”

Rules for a planet

I’ve always believed in the truth of Agent Smith’s words:

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we, are the cure.”

There is yet another equally powerful thought I came across in Yuva Anandan’s blog.

He points to an interesting comment on BBC – “…it’s not the planet we should be worrying about, it’s us.” In principle, I agree with the point of view that whatever damage human activity has caused to the planet till date is not major. With the race being supposedly being well past the peak oil, perhaps our ability to inflict further damage to the planet is limited. When the oil prices go up in the next few years, I would expect the food production to drop and people will dying of malnourishment. The population would drop and people would be forced again go back to living in fertile lands near water sources.

But for the human race, it has never been about the planet. It has always been about us. It is the same callous attitude that prevailed for centuries and still continues to do so. For once people should think about living symbiotically with the host planet. I wish there was a global political body that laid down rules for the planet. As a finite planet, the earth can only sustain finite human activity. What is that point? We will really need a careful scientific evaluation to find out. To me, ideally, politics should be simple human welfare. We need to have an association with this planet such that the damage we do is minimal and every person on this planet has a joyous experience of life on this planet. If it means limiting the population of the planet to a billion, then we should get there in the next 50 years with a clear plan.

Global politics, beyond regional interests, is the need of the day. Like in Starwars, we sure need a galactic republic and a Padme to decide for each planet.

To Mac or not to Mac, that is the question

A week after Mac, it has still failed to sweep me off my feet.

I don’t know if 2 gigs of RAM is indeed too small to handle three operating systems at the same time. But things become so slow when I try to run three operating systems together. Also, getting all the operating systems to read all the hard disks at the same time looks difficult too. I operate 6 portable hard disks to keep my data. So with data transfer becoming a chore, some times it looks like the windows way was simple.

Debian too runs on a Mac. But Mac had a much smaller range of applications to choose from. There are sadly no equivalents to the small but powerful FlashGet and uTorrent in Mac. Azuerus seems to be a complicated program to do a simple thing.

In the place where I live, we lose electric power many times a day. When we have power back, I need my PC needs to return to what it was doing even if I’m not sitting in front of it. There seem to be a few problems in getting the Mac to do it. But I think, I’ll eventually tide over it.

I think I need to live through this period of difficulty before I learn to shuffle data between NTFS, ext3 and HFS+. Not to mention, that the keyboard bothers me too. I surely cannot unlearn the windows shortcuts because I need to use windows at work. Remembering how to do it on a Mac with a keyboard is clearly an extra load on the head.

On Debian, again

I didn’t realize that months had passed by since I changed my default boot OS to Win XP.
Now I’m on Debian again.

Carbon dioxide emissions don’t cause global warming

In April, KLM had an interesting exclusive in-flight documentary on global warming which I happened to watch.

The documentary goes on to present that man-made CO2 emissions do not cause global warming. It states that earth’s present temperature increase is driven by the sun and not by human activity. A few points presented in the documentary are:

1. CO2 is not the major green house gas. Its concentration change has been too small to explain such major temperature differences. Oceans can emit 180 billion tons of CO2 tonnes of CO2 where as human activity emits only about 7 billion tons. It is argued that water vapour and methane are bigger influences than CO2.

2. Earth has seen decades of temperatures which were significantly higher and and also significantly lower. But the ice did not ever vanish completely.

3. Changing of the size of the polar ice caps is explained to be a normal thing which happens routinely with temperature even between summer and winter.

4. Earth’s temperature is more closely related to solar activity and is known to have had a very good co-relation with it for centuries.

5. Change in CO2 concentration in the polar ice caps is an effect of change of earth’s temperature and it has a 800 year lag. This 800 year year lag is the time required for the temperature of the oceans to change to release or absorb CO2.

6. Earth’s temperature continued to drop from 1940 to 1970 when the economic activity boomed. The present upward trend lasts from only 1970.

7. Yet another observation was that the change in temperature profiles of the earth’s atmospheric layers did not seem to support increased green-house activity.

8. The model used to predict the global climate has several hundreds of assumptions on which not all experts seem to be in agreement. Clearly, a model can only be as good as the assumptions that go up to make it.

The documentary goes on to state that the IPCC report is driven by considerations that are non-scientific and serves to retain several jobs which were created by the billions of dollars funded to study this.

Those who are closely following the global warming issue must be already aware that there is a clear second opinion on the need to limit the emissions from developing countries in order to reduce global warming.

One can’t help but wonder if the entire global warming tale is fabricated by an energy thirsty group of nations who are using misleading pointers to prevent the developing nations from creating a stronger demand for energy.

That documentary was an eye-opener to me.

Reading Linux Partition from Windows

Just so that I am always able to access my data from Linux, even when I’m on XP, I installed this little utility.

http://www.diskinternals.com/download/DiskInternals.zip

It loads the Linux partitions as read-only and lets you copy files from Linux partitions to Windows partitions.

Cool

Moved to Debian

After downloading 3 DVD isos totalling 13 GB, after a week of 9 hour per day scheduled power cuts, after sitting up all  night, after drinking precisely 11 cups of tea with sour milk, after the first few install attempts crashed due to NVIDIA, after GNOME, after KDE, though I’m still on Iceweasel – I movedto Debian.

Good bye Mandriva 2008, You gave me the confidence that Linux can be truly fun.

Good bye Vista, You suck.

KDE 4 release event

KDE 4 release event is planned on January 17-19, 2008

http://www.kde.org/kde-4.0-release-event/

Living with Linux

Setting up ktorrent to start automatically after a power cut:

With KDE:

Open up the file manager (konqueror) and browse to ‘/home/username/.kde/Autostart’. Right click in that folder and create a shortcut to ktorrent

Without KDE:
You can also add the command in your .bashrc – This is not dependent on KDE.

Using Yahoo Chat on Mandriva:

Gyache is the solution. I just ran this rpm.

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gyachi/gyachi-1.1.0-1.i386.f7.rpm

Setting up NTFS read write:

Mandriva 2008 release notes read as follows:
In Mandriva Linux 2008, drives and partitions formatted with the NTFS file system can be made writeable via the use of the ntfs-3g
driver. If the package ntfs-3g is not installed, install it. Then use the Mandriva disk management utility, diskdrake. Select the desired partition, unmount it, and switch to advanced mode. Change the partition type to ntfs-3g.Click Options, and ensure the checkbox labeled ‘ro’ is unchecked. Now mount the partition again. Exit, and save your changes.

But for whatever reason, I was unable to install ntfs-3g through the internet. I ran the following packages from the install DVD manually in the following sequence:

1. fuse-2.7.0-6mdv2008.0.i586.rpm
2. libntfs-3g10-1.826-1mdv2008.0.i586.rpm
3. ntfs-3g-1.826-1mdv2008.0.i586.rpm

I then tweaked the mount points settings and restarted the machine.

Bingo! I was able to move 200 MB of downloaded stuff to my 320 GB hard disk which is NTFS. Now who needs Vista?

Living with Linux

Now here is a story that is a living proof of people’s laziness to move out of Windows:

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

For the last two weeks now, I’ve been playing around with computers and operating systems. I’ve finally settled on Mandriva 2008. Its been a week now. I haven’t booted once into Vista though it is installed on my PC – some austerity is required, if I were to ever learn Linux.

Just so that I don’t forget it, I need to document my steps every now and then.

Installation (12th Nov 07):

I re-installed from the Mandriva 2008 Powerpack DVD iso which I downloaded. My earlier installation did not include GNOME so I added it on. Install process was simple. I allocated only 15 GB space to the root ext3 partition, which seems to be big mistake now though. The remanining 65 gigs of this hard disk and the other 320 GB hard disk are all in NTFS. This is limiting my ability to handle data.

I could not boot any version of Linux with my NVIDIA geforce 5200
plugged in. So I simply pulled it out and am presently on i915G
graphics.

Configuration of installation sources and update (13 Nov 07)

After repeated complaints about the installation media not being readable, I used to Mandriva control centre to change the media source for installation and updates to be from internet and excluded the installation media. No complaints since then.

Added compiz effects (16 Nov 07)

Now the 3D graphics rocks . Shame shame Windows Vista.

Viewing .rar files (17 Nov 07)

Added capability to view .rar files on Mandriva by running this rpm

ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/non-free/2006.0/i586/unrar-3.51-0.1.20060plf.i586.rpm

Now set to learn Linux

For the last two weeks now, I’ve been playing around with computers and operating systems.

One thing comes out clearly. Open source software has come a long way.

In the last two weeks I tried SuSE 9.1,  openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, ubuntu 7.10, kubuntu 7.10, Mandriva 2008 power pack. I loved what Linux did to my PC.

I could never resolve the conflict between my nvidia geforce fx 5200 and the onboard i915G that kept preventing Linux from booting. I finally yanked the nvidia card out and settled for the onboard graphics.

Vista runs on my PC with an experience index of 1.0 and the Aero interface disabled. Mandriva rocks my PC.

Haven’t used Vista or XP in weeks. I dont think I need these anymore. I need to learn Linux to survive.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Booting from grub

All this week, till I complete re-formatting, this is what I need to type at the grub prompt during every start-up of my PC

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

Artifical life, in a test tube!

The guardian reports that scientists have now been able to achieve artificial synthesis of protiens. Mind blowing, indeed.

The article is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/sep/06/2

Well, Synthetic biology?
I’ve never even heard of it despite being an engineer for over a decade.
I don’t know how many doors this would open though.

HP iPAQ 610 business messenger

This is the news I’ve been waiting for.

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=1173338163

HP iPAQ 610 ships this month or next. Hopefully it should be in India by the last quarter. It is one super gizmo which is a mini-computer with windows mobile 6, can run office, push email, a mobile phone, a camera, a PDA with a touch screen and – hold your breath -  a GPS all in one tiny bundle less than 150 grams.

No wonder Apple dropped the i-Phone prices.

The specs are here and the phone retails at US$600

Now the question is, if I get to lay my hands on it. Buying this makes even more sense to me – because this can tether with my laptop, which is also HP, to give wireless internet access at every location where there is phone coverage.

Educational objectives

There are said to be six major areas in the cognitive development process that includes: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

1. Knowledge is remembering previously learned material, from specific facts to complete theories.
2. Comprehension is the ability to grasp the meaning of material.
3. Application is the ability to use learned material in and concrete situations. This may include the application of such things as rules, methods, and concepts.
4. Analysis is defined as the ability to break down a problem into component parts so that its organization is understood.
5. Synthesis is defined as the ability to put parts together to form a new whole view or aspect
6. Evaluation is defined as the ability to judge the value of materials for a given purpose

I love Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia for many reasons

- It is a dynamic encyclopedia
- It is free
- I can contribute to it
- It unleashes the full power of hypertext and enables the knowledge seeker to reach new limits effortlessly

Now there is one more reason to love it.

- It runs offline on my Palm.

I discovered the possibility just 5 hours ago. Thanks to the download speeds and possibilities in the U.S., Wikipedia is now running off-line on my Palm

Black Web, bright future

Anand Patil, my college mate, sent us all an email.

When your screen is white, being it an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts, and when its black it consumes only 59 watts.

Mark Ontkush wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts / hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with a lower energy consumption check

http://www.blackle.com/

for more info …
http://www.blackle.com/about/

We can shut down a few power stations and pollute less without significant loss of fucntionality only if all our web pages are black.

Please spread the word.

Killer apps

I am beginning to like simple programs that pack a lot of power.

I’d mentioned TED notepad earlier.

Today I discovered two other great apps. The Foobar2000 player and ScribeFire.

Foobar2000 is my default music player within just one hour of its installation.
And, of course, I’m typing this on ScribeFire – which runs from within firefox.

These are two great apps which will now be permanent features on my PC.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Global warming – Check list for Indians

One man cannot cause global warming. The globe is warmer now because over several decades , its people have continued to do things that have consumed energy. Cutting down unnecessary energy consumption is the first step to slow down the process. Here is a quick check list that applies in the Indian scenario. 

 global-warming.pdf

Please print this and paste this in a place so that it hits the eye often.

Spreadsheets these days

The square root of -1 is i. Excel 2007 thinks otherwise.

IMSQRT(COMPLEX(-1,0)) is 6.1257422745431E-17+i

Arctic ice cover disappears!

From the film Matrix:

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

From Yahoo News:

Perennial Arctic ice (ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the summer) has disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles !

If global warming continues at the same rate, in 10 years time we can navigate the arctic area by ships.

Read the full article here.

Tags: Sustainability, Matrix, Arctic ice cover