Ripening Guavas. Delish!
Picked (and eaten). These were not so tasty as the one above. The smell was just amazing. My whole room smelt of guava within half an hour. This “crop” was kind of small though, the larger one being about 2.5 inches.
Here’s a comparison with my Nokia 6630.
And more on the way! Can’t wait :D
But what are you going to do with all those shells?
Just wait and see kid, just wait and see…
BTW. First post using Bleezer :D
Debian recently froze Lenny. Which means that Debian 5.0 is coming out soon. September is an estimate I’m hearing.
But I’m already using the “testing” (or Lenny) version of Debian. This lets me use fairly new software (like Firefox 3.0), without having to wait a year and a half for it to get into the “stable” version. So how does Lenny being frozen help me? Well, when Lenny is released, I’ll be able to upgrade to Sid (which will become the new testing)!
I’ve been able to get my hands on most freshly baked software, once it passes stability testing. Like the mentioned Firefox 3 which I got only recently. Although still not hot out of the oven, it works for me. The one thing I haven’t been able to get is KDE 4. This has been out for some time now. And has recently been upgraded to 4.1. Don’t get me wrong Debian releases KDE 4 packages as fast as the coders can write them. The problem is that they’re released to “experimental” or more recently, “unstable”.
I could just wait till September for Lenny to be released, upgrade to Sid, and get KDE 4. Or I could upgrade to Sid right now. I’m not very eager about the latter though. My system is running pretty neatly and I don’t want it to become unstable just because I want a better desktop. On the other hand, KDE 4 looks to be worth it. But its not just the eye candy. KDE 4 runs faster as well. Decisions, decisions…
In other news, the embassy hasn’t returned my passport yet. Which means I can’t attend the Fulbright Gateway Orientation in New York. I was kind of expecting this, so I didn’t get myself too excited about it in the first place. Anyway, good luck to all those who are going to the Gateway.
This also means I have a problem in paying my accommodation fees. Northwood housing at University of Michigan doesn’t take credit cards. Dang.
Back to square one: waiting for my passport again. Deja vu ca. 2006. Maybe this will give me more time to look into this KDE issue…
UPDATE: 21st August, 2008 - Turns out sid is not going to become the next testing. Which means that I’ll have to wait for lenny to get released and the new testing to come out. More waiting :/
My visa has yet to show its face. And today was the recommended date for arrival at the university. I still have some time till classes start on September 2, but its looking very unlikely that I’ll make it. Deferral, here I come… yippee…
I’ve just created an account on Wikipedia and have been spending some time editing stuff. Recently I made some changes to the PNEC article. For one thing I changed the info box to reflect the fact that this is not a military college. So many people get confused by that. When I was being interviewed by Fulbright, one of the interviewers asked me why I had joined the Navy! Its going to take a long time for people to realize that the Navy in the name of the college is just a name. People like me study there, and don’t join the navy after graduation.
I’ve also found that if you have a Telenor connection you could get google calendar notifications on your phone. At least Telenor is listed on google’s help site. Since I don’t have a Telenor connection, I can’t test this.
Maybe something can be done … involving Twitter?…
I had been delaying this for a long time. Since I very rarely boot into Windows these days, it has been a real pain to access my phone’s memory card. I don’t have a card reader so I can’t do that either.
Earlier on I had looked into several ways I could do this, but nothing was clean and simple (like it should be). There was literally no way you could get away without having to put your hands right into the guts of the Linux OS and play around with devices and source code. And since, more often than not compiling source code fails because of some obscure dependency issues, I dropped the idea in favor of sanity.
Things have become a lot better since then. Thanks to Debian’s packaging system all you need to do is issue some commands and install something called openobex. I’m going to discuss what I did in order to get my Nokia 6630 to work with my Debian box using the USB cable that came with it. Start by updating your database and installing what we need.
# aptitude update# aptitude install obexftp obexfs
To check if your phone is being detected properly
# obexftp -u -l
Which should give you something like,
Found 2 USB OBEX interfaces
Interface 0:
Manufacturer: Nokia
Product: Nokia 6630
Interface description: SYNCML-SYNC
Interface 1:
Manufacturer: Nokia
Product: Nokia 6630
Interface description: PC Suite Services
Use '-u interface_number' to connect
Connecting...Segmentation fault
We need one piece of info from this list: the right interface. As you can see, Interface 1 describes itself as “PC Suite Service”, and this is what we will connect to.
Next we issue a command to list the parent directory on the phone.
# obexftp -u 1 -l Connecting...done Receiving "(null)"... <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE folder-listing SYSTEM "obex-folder-listing.dtd" [ <!ATTLIST folder mem-type CDATA #IMPLIED> <!ATTLIST folder label CDATA #IMPLIED> ]> <folder-listing version="1.0"> <folder name="C:" user-perm="RW" mem-type="DEV" label="Phone memory"/> <folder name="E:" user-perm="RW" mem-type="MMC" label="NO NAME "/> </folder-listing>done Disconnecting...done
We got our folder listing!! … But its all in XML. You can make out the folder names C: and E: in the last few lines. These represent the phone’s memory and the memory card respectively.
You could now use obexftp to copy files to and from your phone (read the man page for more details). An example:
# obexftp -u 1 -c E:/Music -p Take\ A\ Message.mp3 Connecting...done Sending "E:"... Sending "Music"... done Sending "Take A Message.mp3".../done Disconnecting...done
This is all well and good but not really what we’re looking for. As much as I love the command line, and swear by its efficiency, I do like to use a GUI interface to manage my files. Never fear, obexfs is here!
ObexFS allows you to mount your phone so that it behaves like a normal directory. You can then access the directory in any file manager you want. It does this by using a little something called Filesystem in User Space.
First you will have to load the fuse module
# modprobe fuse
Create a directory
# mkdir /media/phone
Then
# obexfs -u 1 /media/phone
Where 1 is our interface number from before. Getting a file listing should show you the directories C and E.
# ls /media/phone
Oh glee! But wait, we’re not finished yet. If you’ve noticed we’ve been logged in as root the whole time. If you log out and try to access the mounted filesystem, you will not be able to do so as normal user! We have to fix this now.
First you’ll have to add yourself to the fuse group.
# usermod -a fuse zohair
Replace zohair with your username, of course.
Then add the following lines to /etc/fstab. (Note how the spaces in the command line disappear in the fstab listing)
obexfs#-u1 /media/phone fuse allow_other 0 0
The allow_other option is needed because by default only the user issuing the mount command can view a fuse filesystem. But we want everyone to see it.
# mount /media/phone
Done. Log out of root and access the files as normal user. If you can read but not write change the file permissions of /media/phone (or wherever you choose to mount your phone). You might have to unmount it in order to do so.
# umount /media/phone # chmod 775 /media/phone
I’m not entirely sure that an unmount is necessay. The chmod option gives the owner (root) and the group (normal user) read, write and execute access while letting others only read and write.
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