twistedgenes.com - Blogs by Rakesh Gupta

ISP related issues. Reliance Communications WiMax problems solved

Rakesh — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:51:17 +0000

Recently a lot of issues have turned up with my ISP provider, Reliance Communications in this case. I happen to use multiple laptops and a router. They lock a system based on MAC address or a long duration dhcp lease file. There are various ways to get rid of this situation. A few which I could figure out and seem to work are

– Do neatly logout of their web application, before switching machines. As they keep the records, which would not let you login using a different machine till a session timeout which ranges from 0.5 to 6 hours.

– Spoof Your MAC Address, if you are using multiple laptops/desktops

use ifconfig utility:

MAC address can be changed very easily using ifconfig. Run the following command as root user.

#ifconfig eth0 down hw ether address

eth0 is the name of the interface/NIC which address is to be changed.

down means the NIC is to be shutdown before changing address.

hw ether means hardware address class is ether(which indicates ethernet).

address is the address which will used as the new mac.

After the successful execution of the command. start the NIC again using the command:

# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

– Release your IP after successful log out

# dhclient -r -pf < path to the current dhclient pid file >

The path of current dhclient pid file can be found using

# ps -eaf | grep dhclient

Path is usually /var/run/dhclient-eth0.pid or /var/run/dhclient-wlan0.pid

Obsession – How much is too much ?

Rakesh — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:17:37 +0000

Obsession: an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone

Everyone or say most of us or may be some of us would have definitely gone through the periods of intense obsession. It could be of diverse nature viz. career, love life, passion, religious sentiments etc. Obessions in a way can be a boon as they tend to keep you focussed and energised, if related to career/work etc. Although, if there is a result associated with that obsession, consequences may not always be pleasant.The human mind tends to believe the positive outcome of the obsession. You tend to seeing things fall in place in a way to fulfill your obsession. And offcourse, the famous quote from Paulo Coelho catches up more meaning and essence.

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Obsession can grip your mind so intensely, that those school of thoughts keep on running in mind while you are eating, sleeping, driving or even taking bath. Some people regard obsession as a quantity to measure seriousness and willingness on that obsession. It may not always be true. Obsession is usually coupled with retrospection. We may try to relate it to some unaccomplished tasks of the past. It can also be accentuated by superstitious beliefs, astrology etc. There are various factors that may trigger or enhance obsession like friends, family, society or even music.

Is obsession good? Well it’s a difficult one to answer. It all depends on what you are obsessed with, its feasibility, relevance and practicality to your life etc. A positive obsession is always good and a negative can have a bad impact on your life. It is good to be obsessed, but in a moderation. Sharing your obsession with loved ones, close friends etc can help to overcome or drive it in a new positive direction.

2012 – The Movie impact – Worth Sharing

Rakesh — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:05:08 +0000

Case 1 : One fine morning in Bangalore, I had to hire an auto to some place. Apparently, the name of the road was uncommon. Barely any autowala was ready to go. I managed to convince one autowala. His chatty nature throughout the way kept me quite engrossed as well.

This is the MG Road, this one goes to Indian Express Bus stop .. bla bla etc. At one junction, the auto stopped under semi-constructed namma metro flyover. He started enriching my knowlege with some stats. Construction of these metro tracks started way back in Dec. 2006 and its 2009, they have not achieved anything concrete yet. They are spoiling the garden city by erasing all the gardens. What’s the point, 2012 is near, nothing is gonna survive.

Gosh !! I was amazed. The movie 2012, seems to have made a real impact even on the autowalas.

Case 2: Weekly shopping at Reliance Fresh for the vegetables. At the vegetable counter, the reliance guy, Bhaiyya 2012 dekhi kya? Ekdum mast movie hai .. jarur dekhiye … kya mast effects hai …

Looks like the movie has made an impact in different segments and sectors of the Indian Population. What’s your take on this ? Bunch of my friends liked it and appreciated. I am yet to watch it

Video in ASCII using VLC, SSH and refine with ffmpeg

Rakesh — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:47:01 +0000

This is how a video looks in ASCII.

How did we achieve it ?

- Login to a remote machine using ssh

- play a video using cvlc ( command line vlc )

- record the video using istanbul session recorder ( if u are in linux )

- convert it to mp4 format using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i file.ogg -sameq file.mp4

- Overlay the sound using ffmpeg and .mp3 of the same video. As in the sound would have played on remote machine and hence istanbul session recorder would not capture it.

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -map 0.0 -i file.mp3 -map 1.0 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ab 128k -ar 44100 file.mp4

- Crop the video, if you want to remove stuffs of your desktop before upload

ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -croptop 50 -cropbottom 50 output1.mp4

How to make Bhelpuri at home in few easy steps !

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:57:18 +0000

Bhelpuri, the exotic Indian snacks can be prepared easily at home in the following easy steps.

=> Get a large packet of Haldiram Bhujia Sev

From Food

=> Get two tomatoes, two onion, 4 lemons, 1-2 green chillies, black pepper powder etc

From Food

=> Cut the tomatoes and onion in small pieces and lemon into 2 halves as shown below

From Food

=> Mix onion and tomatoes in a large bowl

From Food

=> Add black pepper ( don’t add too much of it, as it may upset the stomach)

From Food

=> Squeeze all the lemon in a different bowl and remove the seeds

From Food

=> Empty the haldiram bhujia sev pack in the bowl containing onion and tomatoes

From Food

=> Add the lemon juice in the mixture and mix well.

From Food

=> Add topping of coriander leaves and nicely cut green chillies, mix well and it is ready to serve

From Food

The chef can be reached here

Huntplace – The idea, reason and future

Rakesh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:07:30 +0000

Travelling, excursions, adventures who doesn’t like them . A vast chunk of population likes to freak out on small adventurous trips on weekends. The reason for this drive is to get rid of the mundane and mechanical cycle of office-home-offce and destress oneself. But the major question that arises is where to go? why this one and why not that one ? what kind of place is it ( historic, nature, modern etc). How do we decide on this, googling and talking to colleagues. After all this exercise of mining tonnes of pages and talking to bunch of friends, the decision becomes more difficult. Differences of opinion starts among the group.

Huntplace as the name suggests let’s you hunt for the place where you want to go . It basically aggregates/mines the data from resourceful and rich web applications like Flickr, Youtube, Wiki, etc. and makes your life easier. Instead of stumbling upon those stale and old sites, get the data from the popular and reliable sources. It is a mashup that calls the pulic APIs and let’s u explore your travel destination based on the content received.

The whole idea is in a very early phase and has been implemented. There are bunch of enhancements and ramifications that can be done.

When it rains in Bangalore

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:34:38 +0000

9:30 PM – 20 K.Ms – Shutdown the system. Lappy goes in the bag, lights off. Door locked. Into the parking, hit the road.

9:45PM – 12 K.Ms - Old Madras Road signal. Lights, red. Gigantic water drops started falling. Being on a two wheeler, had no option but to stop. Parked in Indira Nagar on the juice shop. Had an awesome mango shake. Rain pouring in at gushing speed. Roads started submerging , water everywhere. All traffic rules violated, everyone rushing here and there. No option , but to wait, cosy and dry under the shop.

10:15PM – 12K.Ms – Making calls to friends to kill boredom

10:20PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:30PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:40PM – 12K.Ms – Rain seemed to reduce in intensity. Made an attempt to proceed further, drenched slighlty. But bearable. Heading south.

10:50PM – 10K.Ms – Whoa, what’s that? Never seen so many vehicles and jam on a flyover (Domlur flyover). Cars coming in from all the directions. What’s happening. Rainfall intensified.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms – Managed to get down from the flyover, swerving in between car spaces. Drenched badly. Roads submerged in water till knee length. Parked the vehicle and hid under the big stationary shop.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms - Waiting for rain to reduce. Cars, trucks , buses all stuck up on the road. Honking honking ! Jam packed. No one goes anywhere. No movement on other side of the road. Looks like the other end is witnessing a phoenix, ganges in south !!! World came to standstill. People trying to manoeuvre their bikes across the water logged gaps, pavements. People falling in water logged ditches, heading in some direction. Total chaos. Power went off. Street lights off. Can see big shiny blue DELL on the far end.

11:30PM – 10K.Ms No traffic movement ahead. Looks like the inner ring roads are submerged totally under water for a stretch of 4KMs. No one goes ahead. The mob broke the divider to let the water flow out.

12:00 AM – 10K.Ms Still waiting under the shop. A noble voice shouted: The inner ring road is totally submerged and vehicle movement is impossible. Cars take a reverse and follow Old Airport Road, Old Madras Road, MG Road etc. Slight movement in vehicle began.

12:15 AM – 10K.Ms The traffic reduced. All vehicles headed in reverse direction. Drizzling. I too took the reverse route .

12:30AM – 8K.Ms. Brigade Road . Roads damp, but not flooded.

12:30AM – 6K.Ms. Bannerghatta Road. I am an idiot that i did not take this route. May be I would have escaped that Domlur inner ring road crisis.

12:45AM – 2K.Ms Outer Ring Road. Whoa, I am reaching home finally . Hurray.

12:50 AM – 0K.Ms Alas ! Reached home. Drenched. Took a shower to freshen. Had dinner. Did some tweeting and finally slept at 2:00AM . It was a tiring day .

Epilogue

Wallet got drenched badly. It took two full days to dry. Luckily, the two 500 notes managed to stay off from getting biologically recycled owing to excessive hydration.

Catastrophes bring people closer. They seamlessly start helping each other without thinking as otherwise they would.

Voila, it was an amazing experience

Solution to the 23 pages puzzle.

Rakesh — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:40:44 +0000

Hi,

Just came across this awesome 23 pages puzzle via a forward chain mail.

http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/hacker/1.html

I could crack it .

Give it a try before looking at the solution.

Pages in sequence are

Navigation made easy

Rakesh — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:12:22 +0000

With the advent of web, location base searching and driving directions have been of key importance as these form one of the integral needs of the time. There have been many key players viz. Google, Yahoo, Everyscape etc providing driving directions, routes on map, rich image experience etc.

The latest addition to the field is video based direction, which is new and unique in its kind. Video Maps is the new terminology coined by the Bangalore based startup Vidteq . The key features include video for the complete route, location based services images etc. Video based experience is beneficial for people on the move and who are new to the city.

Vidteq on NEWS9

How to crash a DELL laptop in seconds and unscrew it (with a video)

Rakesh — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 11:01:17 +0000

P.S. The whole video/literature etc. is not targeted to malign the manufacturer and is rather based on writer’s personal experience. No offense meant.

A brief intro on how it happened

It all started with my adamant attitude to have a dual partition on my Dell Vostro 1510. Fedora, my obvious choice led to multiple crash of the lappy’s motherboard. The reason sounds strange, but is the concrete reason, as it happened not once but rather twice. Burnt the ISO image of Fedora Core 10 on a DVD and began to boot the lappy. It started normal, but before the UI asking for Fedora installation could load, the laptop hung with nothing shown on the LCD. Forceful shutdown and subsequent reboot led to weird behavior, caps lock, num lock and scroll LEDs glowing indefinitely, without anything up on the LCD. The usual methods of removing the RAM, resetting the static electricity failed to work and it turned out that it was a motherboard failure. Hence a replace for the same was done by the manufacturer.

Video

The video below is shootout of the replacement of the motherboard. ( Done by manufacturer’s engineer). But you may give a try on your old laptop or if your eagerness could not be held anymore.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part5

Part 6

Part 7

How did we capture and process the video

The video capture was done using a Sony Ericsson phone and which resulted in multiple 3gp files. It was essential to merger these multiple files and convert them into flv format for upload using some tool. ffmpeg was the ideal option and worked like a wonder. Key steps were …

-> Converting indiviual 3GP files to flv with all the parameters viz. bitrate, frame etc

ffmpeg -i file.3gp -s 320×240 -vcodec h263 -r 25000 -b 200 -ab 64 -acodec amr -ac 1 -ar 8000 file.flv

-> Merge all files into single. This method somehow did not work with flv files, hence they were converted to mpg format and back to flv for upload to youtube.

converting to mpg with same parameters

ffmpeg -i file.flv -sameq -y file.mpg

Merging into single file

cat 76.mpg 77.mpg 78.mpg 79.mpg 80.mpg >final_mpg.mpg(This method somehow did not work with flv files)

And finally, back to flv file

ffmpeg -i final_mpg.mpg -sameq final.flv