English Vinglish

English Vinglish is the story of a neglected and belittled housewife/entrepreneur who decides to take English classes while she is in New York.

It helps you understand how people feel when dealing with a language barrier, and the kind of value/stigma that Indian society puts around a good knowledge of the English language.

This is the only movie that required both French -> English and Telugu -> Translation I ever saw.

It is a good clean family movie that I really recommend.

For Rebellious Screen Backlights

I had a problem on every Linux distro I ever used on this specific laptop. The light setting wouldn't change, no matter how much I pressed on the designated buttons.

On the #korora IRC channel, I got this very good tip from csmart I thought I should share:

As an administrator, open /etc/default/grub, and then locate the line that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. On that line, inside the quotes, add "acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" (no quotes) and then you need to refresh your grub information and finally reboot.

You can get more information on the Arch Wiki.

openSUSE is Configuration Torture

I was having a lot of crashes with Linux Mint 14 on my laptop, so I considered trying a distro I didn't try yet. So I went for openSUSE. I regret it.

First, you notice that the wi-fi isn't enabling. This is very weird, because the live CD had it working out of the box. I had to turn on some option in YaST and then things went back to normal. This was a warning of things to come...

Then, there are crazy instructions to install JDK. Your eyes may bleed. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do, I installed the RPM from Oracle, and put together a script to automate the alternative-setting. However, that script isn't perfect and it gave me trouble trying to build LibreOffice.

The pain wasn't over. There are 3 interfaces to set up an HP printer - YaST, the KDE gui, and HP-Setup. Which one should you use? The right answer is HP Setup - not obvious. But if its a non-HP one, then you have to use YaST.

Note that you may need to reconfigure your firewall if you have a network printer. Instructions to do so are pretty unclear, and there is no wizard/magic GUI to do it for you.

Then, there is the fact that the SSH key/password daemon is not supplied out of the box. You need to install ksshaskpass. But the official package doesn't install. But, lucky you, the unofficial one does work.
But that doesn't make it enabled yet, you need to mess with many configuration files.

TrueCrypt doesn't work out of the box, so you need to mess with another configuration file.

Skype didn't work out of the box either, I had to manually pick the audio settings.

And, weirdly, I don't see any pop-up telling me to install updates, which the live CD was showing. No, you need to install an applet for that. But wait, it conflicts with Apper. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? Oh, and even funnier: YaST doesn't update all the repos you have set up, so you end up using two package managers. Double WAT!

If I wanted this kind of pain, I'd have installed Arch. And I'm doubting that Arch may be more sane...

I seriously can't recommend this distribution for my friends and family. The ease of setting up a printer in Ubuntu/Mint and Fedora is leagues ahead of openSuse. And as a sidenote, I'm not sure I actually got my printer to work reliably yet.

And about those stability issues? Well, I got a few crashes and freezes too...

My gut feeling right now is that I'll install Mint 15 when it is released this month.

Google Reader Closure

Man!!!

I have been consistently reading my news from Google Reader and keeping an offline copy to read when I'm offline.

I saw some options online, but I wasn't too happy:

• NetVibes doesn't have an Android app, so that's online only
• NewsBlur's free account allows you to follow 12 feeds only. Are your crazy??? On the plus side, the android app looks like it works offline.
• Feedly has an android app and unlimited feeds, but no offline support.

It looks like the only real option is  Tiny Tiny RSS - it has an android app that syncs with the server, but you have to host it yourself. Grrr...

I'm sort of hoping that either Feedly gets an offline mode, or someone sets up public Tiny Tiny RSS access at this point.

Building LibreOffice with Clang on Ubuntu/Mint

So, I wanted to build a clang plug-in for LibreOffice. I never expected that it would be hard to do so.

I am on Linux Mint 14, and the problem was that the clang/llvm version is slightly older.

So, here is how I made it work (thanks to the guys in the mailing lists).

1. Install the clang ppa: https://launchpad.net/~dr-graef/+archive/llvm-3.1.quantal
2. Update your package cache: sudo apt-get update
3. Install clang: sudo apt-get install clang llvm
4. (optional - if you want to build plug-ins) sudo apt-get install llvm-dev libclang-dev
5. Add the following to your autogen.lastrun file: CC=clang
   CXX=clang++
   --enable-compiler-plugins (that last one only if you want to build the plug-ins)
6. Run ./autogen.sh && make  and you are in business.

The rest of the discussion is available on the wiki.

Summary of the Proprietary Stunt

You might have read that stunt and wondered what happened... It turns out I got busy enough to skip writing.

So here it is.
I spent one month using Windows 7 with as many proprietary programs as possible. My experience:

• DRM-enabled things like YouTube paying movies work so much better. +1 For proprietary.
• For music playing, Windows Media Player isn't too awesome. It doesn't support the formats well, nor the tags in the music files for sorting them. On the other hand, every serious media player on Linux does these things super well. +1 for open source
• I had one BSOD in Windows. In Linux, it depends on the distribution and the software I use. Still, +1 for proprietary.
• User-friendliness of Excel was not very good with the separator thing, LO wins on that. +1 open source.
• Both WMP and the default video player handled the videos I wanted cleanly, so that's a draw.
• Keyboard layout switching worked good on both, so that's a draw.
• Weather widget is not as good as on Linux. +1 open source.
• HP Print setup is confusing and contradictory - I wasted a lot of ink on that. +2 open source.

The bottom line: stability was greater on my hardware on Windows than on Linux. The quality of the rest of the software was worse, however.

Had I got a not-cheapo laptop, the stability benefits would've probably not even be seen. 

Then, I spent a few days on Windows 8. That experience was traumatizing. It was 10x worse than the switch from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3.

Eega

Eega is sort of a crazy hero movie. The hero becomes a murderous fly after being killed by the villain. The whole movie is about how he's trying to make that happen.

On the good size, it is very decent and has a lot less violence than most Telugu movies. It is still very violent.

The animation is cheapo at times, and makes you feel that they cut a lot a lot of corners.

You can skip that one.