Harsh J

There are certain things in the software world that may blow your mind up while you try to make sense of them but yet leave you as you were at the end. This software, Coccinelle, is one of those.

Perhaps Anomit can make use of it.

Turn those blues to violet using Violet

Violet was the UML modelling tool I had to use to save me some fun-later-time and make the whole process quick and painless. It also supports exporting to an image format and all in all it is a lovable, simple and just-works tool. But do note that it uses Java to do all that magic.

The other alternative I had was Umbrello which sadly isn’t in a very usable state yet. Perhaps this summer its GSoC fix may make it better. Wish I knew enough of QGraphicsView stuff to try it myself

Please Recurse.

This article shall detail the steps to setup, configure and begin using the Huawei E156 HSDPA (3G) USB Stick on Linux (fondly called by them BSNL employees as a ‘Data Card’).

On Windows, one generally uses the bundled ‘Huawei Mobile Partner’ software which does wonderful things like read messages, compute statistics, etc. There isn’t a similar software on Linux providing all of those under one roof, however.

First off, you need to create a BSNL 3G dialer profile, and you would require a software known as wvdial. Install it by either of these commands, in the Terminal application:

# On Ubuntu
sudo aptitude install wvdial

# On ArchLinux
sudo pacman -S wvdial

Now as root (or using sudo), open the file: /etc/wvdial.conf

# If you use GNOME, try:
sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf

# If on KDE, try:
sudo kwrite /etc/wvdial.conf

Paste into your editor, the following lines:

[Dialer bsnlnet]
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = *99#
ISDN = 0
Baud = 460800
Username = " "
Password = " "
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = at+cgdcont=1,"ip","bsnlnet"
Stupid Mode = 1

Save the changes and close the editor. Now to get connected, you have to ask the wvdial command to start a particular connection. So simply do, on each startup:

wvdial bsnlnet

And lo, you’re online with blazing 3G speeds!

Note: You may be supposed to use a different APN like bsnlsouth sometimes (instead of bsnlnet or etc.), so change that in the highlighted line.

My undergraduate project is complete, with a few glitches to cover up. It ain’t much for now, but I guess its enough to make a sizable impact. I’d like to say that PyMT is an excellent library, and I can’t thank the developers behind it enough for their work so far (They’ve written a tracker too now, you gotta check that out). Maybe I shall contribute to it in near future, provided I have the time and skill. Contributing by code is something I only recently learned and its not wise to be hasty. Plus, there’s loads of math involved

Randomly placed warning for a random post.

On the Qt front, I have this draft of a PyQt4 + Designer tutorial lying around for 7 months and it still doesn’t feel complete (alright, am lazy to make it so). Maybe I should do another screenshot + diagramming session and see if that turns out satisfactory. Something brewing in my mind for a feature in KDE 4.5 has pushed me to handle XML with the same toolkit – and writing SAX parsers is ugly, even more so if its C++. I wish I didn’t have to do that, I hate writing readers of tags and the characters between them – it always conks out someday or sometime.

Poster to 'Fall of the Hulks'

Am addicted to comics these days, more than I’ve been to TV shows or movies (You may count “Lost” and ‘The Matrix’ as exclusions to that). Let’s talk about ‘Fall of the Hulks‘. Its twisted in its story, not many have great guesses on the new Red-Hulk (or Rulk) character and the entire screenplay is Nick Fury-esque; Apparently the story following this arc will have all major heroes of the Marvel Universe hulked up, which would be totally awesome to read (the covers are making me ogle already). For now Siege and Realm of Kings satisfy the addiction hunger. I’m not much of a fan when it comes to DC, having read pretty out-dated stuff only (such as Death of Superman or Knightfall), and thus am not quite enjoying the over-stretched Blackest Night titles they have everywhere. Karthik would not be happy with this, but fear not my friend – the completionist in me won’t give up till it ends.

Re-read Mostly Harmless and am dying to purchase and read ‘And Another Thing…‘ by Eoin Colfer but it seems too expensive even now. Will get it in the sale season probably, and read it at the Eloor libraries until that happens. H2G2 and its associated books are a must read for anyone with brains and capacity for painful-cheeks humor.

Until the next update!