Experiencing sketchy and patchy graphs with RRDtool? Could be because the data sources are out of bounds. Increasing the limits (rrdtune(1)) fixed it for me.

Back from the Floss meet at NIT, Calicut where I gave a presentation on BSD titled – The Devil's Side of OpenSource. At the start of the talk there were < 5 in the audience who were aware of BSD, the number should now be > 125 at least.

Everyone knew what Linux (the product) was though!

http://glugc.nitc.ac.in/conference/poster_html

also spoke at the conference.

Thanks to the organizers (Dilip and Praveen) for extending extreme hospitality to us. The entire trip was a pleasant experience. Any more hospitality and we would have ended up missing the return train to Bangalore!

e16.8 CVS needed getttext-devel to compile. After installing it over a pathetic 19.2Kbps connect on Reliance Rconnect roaming from Calicut last evening, the CVS compiled and runs just fine. Some cool features now in CVS:

- Support for the Xcomposite extensions for drawing border shadows. This does not turn on for some reason.
- The much needed systray for docable applications like Gaim and Rhythmbox. I need not have the big ugly GTK windows on a clean enlightenment desktop anymore!

Here at NITC (formerly REC, Calicut) where am presently attending the one day FLOSS seminar (I presented a talk on BSD), they have a great WiFi network which you need to step outside of the guest house room to access. The SMC54G PCMCIA wireless card which carried along for me simply refuses to associate with the access point for more than 10 seconds at a stretch. I tried it on Fedora Core 3 and in Windows XP. I ultimately had to give up and stick to the CDMA connection.

Some connection is better than no connection.

The presentation went well. Only 3 people raised hands when I checked for BSD awareness. Now some 125+ people know about the devil!

So I logged into my workstation as usual in the morn, checked mail (mark as read, IOW), started on slashdot and switched desktops to recheck on mutt. No new mail???? WTF!!!

PANIC!!!!

$ tail /var/log/mail
Jan 27 11:09:49 buffy sm-mta[210]: rejecting connections on daemon MSA: load average: 18

Aieeee!!!!

[buffy] ~> uptime
11:11AM up 30 days, 16:13, 6 users, load averages: 18.16, 18.43, 18.81

Aieee!!!!

Enlightenment had turned rogue and needed to be killed to get the load averages back to 0. Whats interesting about the experience is that during the entire time, I had no visible signs of slowness at all. I browsed, read mail, listened to my mp3 music, port upgraded did everything I normally do each morn all while the machine was at 18 load. WoW!

Talk about a solid OS. Impressive! If it not for the mail failure, I would not have noticed the problem at all.

I now have E-LoadMeter.epplet running

I had activated GPRS and MMS service from Hutch on my Sony Ericsson T610 in the hope that I can do something interesting when I commute to office in the cab. This is a good +1 hours of my time being spent on travelling each day.

Turned out to be a not so exciting browsing experience with e crippled browser. I guess all WAP browsers are crippled in all respects any way.

I'l think about reactivating it when I get a blue tooth enabled PDA. Maybe the rates would have come down by then too For now, bye bye GPRS.