NULL.in

VMware player on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Nalin — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:13:44 +0000

I recently upgraded my office computer from Gusty to Hardy and VMware player stopped working for me. I looked around a bit and found a nice step-by-step guide to get it up and running. Here are the steps:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
cp vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.orig
sudo tar xvf vmmon.tar
cd vmmon-only/include/
sudo vi vcpuset.h
change line 74 from: #include “asm/bitops.h” to: #include “linux/bitops.h”
rm vmmon.tar (return to the folder where you decompressed the tar file)
sudo tar cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
sudo rm -rf vmmon-only/
sudo vmware-config.pl

To save you some time, I have uploaded the fixed vmmon.tar, that you can use to replace the original with. Just untar the vmplayer package, download vmmon.tar and cp it to /lib/modules/source/ and then start the installation process.

This same process should work for VMware Server and Workstation as well.

Random Posts

Hemingwayex 1.1 is finally here

Nalin — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:36:29 +0000

I have finally found time now and then in the past three weeks and tweaked HemingwayEx to work with Wordpress 2.3+ and Wordpress 2.5. I have fixed a lot of small issues here and there with CSS and the PHP code. I also added few more options to make the theme even more customizable. One can now choose to enable/disable sidebars, post navigation, excerpts on homepage, font resizer. Also, I have added in-built support for Related Posts plugin.

I would really like to thank people who have use this theme and have come back to me with bugs and ideas to improve HemingwayEx. Though I didn’t look at the emails/comments for a long time, I did go though all of them while working on this update. I have incorporated many comments and suggestions into this update.

I already have ideas for the next release, but I am sure that is ages away. Work has become so hectic that I have even stopped blogging regularly now. This will be my first post in almost half-a-year.

Anyways, I hope everyone who tries this theme has a good experience.

Thanks…

HemingwayEx 1.1 on it’s way

Nalin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 07:10:12 +0000

Tonight, I finally found it in me to fire up my XAMPP installation and make modifications to HemingwayEx. Things have again changed quite a bit in Wordpress 2.3, especially with the way categories are handled now and the added support for Tags, and this means a lot of changes in the theme as well.

The major changes that I made are:

Got rid of the ‘Check for Updates‘ feature. I never really got it to work properly, so I have gotten rid of it altogether. Also, I don’t see this theme changing so regularly that one would need to check for updates periodically.
Got rid of the Asides feature. It was earlier possible to assign a category for Asides and then display those posts separately. But I haven’t really been able to add a whole lot more into this feature. Also, to use it, I had to provide a widget and a block implementation as well. I figure it is better for everyone to just use a plugin for setting up asides on their sites.
Fixed Tagging, by replacing UTW functions with the native WP functions. This also meant that I have gotten rid of the Tag and Tags templates. Another thing that UTW provided was a way to display related post. I had to remove this as I couldn’t find a good plugin to replace this.

I am currently waiting to fixing some CSS issues and trying to figure out how to (and if I want to) add internationalization support. I don’t know when I would be able to find time for that…

Long long time ago…

Nalin — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:36:16 +0000

Man…. it’s been ages since I have had a look at my site. I have been just too busy with work and lazy the rest of the time. My last post was on July 29th…

Finally, I upgraded to WP 2.3.1 tonight. As you can see (or might see), I am using the default WP theme right now as HemingwayEx doesn’t work with this version. I have been getting a lot of emails from people regarding this theme and many ppl have been enthu enough to go ahead and fix the theme to work with 2.3 as well. Hopefully, I will find sometime this weekend and do some work on it and answer questions in the forum.

Currently, I am eagerly looking forward to Dec and Jan. Both are going to be very eventful months. I am leaving for a three week trip to India in December and have other things coming up in Jan. Other than that, life is going on as usual… busy as hell on weekdays and boring/sad on weekends…

peace…

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

Nalin — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:44:30 +0000

I finished reading this last night and it left me with mixed feelings. I was happy to have finally finished reading all the Harry Potter novels, but I didn’t really enjoy the last book much. I had figured that after all these years, at 17, Harry Potter would be closer to being a proper hero, not the usual messed up dude, who can’t survive without his friends help. I was expecting him to take more responsibility and see his buddies relying on him.

But, the story was good. There is a good and reasonable (?) explanation for everything that happens. It does get quite complicated during the end with the reasoning for how he survives or why elder wand belongs to him, but then again, this series stopped being children’s novel a long time ago. I was quite ready to see Harry die, but because I had seen Bedazzled, I thought this self-less act of offering himself to he-who-must-not-be-named, would eventually save him :-).

One thing that I really liked was that Rowling inserted the last chapter with describing Harry’s life 19 years later. It just makes a lot of sense as this way, no one is going to expect her to write another Harry Potter 8. I just hope someone else doesn’t start writing about how Harry saves the world again at 45, which has been the case with Robert Ludlum’s character Jason Bourne.

In the end, I have loved reading Harry Potter novels more than anything else I have ever read.

Multiple IE on your PC

Nalin — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 06:21:38 +0000

Download: Multiple IE Installer

I have been getting quite a few complaints now that my Wordpress theme HemingwayEx is not working well with IE6. I had a standalone installation of IE6 that would crash every time I tried opening the slidebar on my theme and I thought that it was just a bug in IE6.

But apparently it is not. I thought of looking for another IE6 installer that would allow me to have IE6 and IE7 running at the same time. I came across Multiple IE Installer, that allows one to install any IE 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6. I used it to install IE 5.5 and IE6 after I had installed IE7.

So, now I can see that my theme doesn’t support IE5.5 at all, IE6 crashes because of a java script and IE7 doesn’t crash, but has other issues with the HemingwayEx Sildebar :-(. Well, now onto debugging the theme…

The Bourne Trilogy

Nalin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:32:46 +0000

“Cain is for Charlie, and Delta is for Cain“

I finally finished reading all the three Robert Ludlum’s novels written around the fictional character Jason Bourne a.k.a David Webb… Having watched the first two movies, I just had to read the novels before I went for Bourne Ultimatum on 3rd August.

But, once I started reading the first novel, I realized that the movies, though based on the same lines, are still completely different from the novels. For example, in Bourne Supremacy, the novel takes Bourne to Hong Kong and his wife is very much alive, but in the movie, his wife is killed in the first 15 minutes itself and he never goes far east.

I really liked reading Bourne Identity, but didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum at all… Considering that the movies are just amazing, it was a little difficult to read these novels in beginning. I got really interested in Identity, only after about the first 150 pages. The way Ludlum tries to get the reader to understand Jason’s mental state is really amazing. Also, Ludlum’s use of a lot of French (in Identity) and Chinese (in Supremacy) makes the novel a lot more realistic (but annoying to read at times).

I didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum because it was too long and winding, with a lot of plots and sub-plots that were loosely related to each other. Jason Bourne is 50+ in this novel and knowing that it’s just a bit to hard to imagine him doing all that is written in the novel. Also, so much information was repeated over and over again. I just ended up skipping a lot of pages in the end…

Anyways, so much for the novels…. the movies have been quite amazing. I am really looking forward to the last movie in the Bourne Trilogy. The first two were just amazing and I want to see what’s Bourne up to now…

Say Hello to HemingwayEx 1.0

Nalin — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 08:14:05 +0000

After about 4 months of ~~inactivity~~ little activity, I finally sat down sometime back and updated HemingwayEx. Added some much needed new features and squashed some old bugs. Again, a lot of help came from many others who have liked this forum and were nice enough to report bugs and give ideas of what more can be done with the theme.

Anyways, with this relase, HemingwayEx has made a major jump. The theme is now Widgetized. Users can now go to the options page and set whether they want to use the old blocks system or use widgets for sidebars. I have also added a font size changer and added comment numbering.

Going forward, I am planning on making the theme more customizable and adding internationalization support. Also, will work on adding more user styles.

Here are the ~~pseudo~~ release notes / changelog:

Version: 1.0
Release date: Jul 14, 2007
Release Notes: I have fixed a few more bugs. Also added some major features into the theme.

Added Features

Widgetized the theme. User can switch between using Hemingway Blocks System or Widgetized Sidebars.
Added a font size changer. Now viewers can increase / decrease the size of font by clicking on a few links just below the search form. Credit goes to this simple and easy tutorial.
Numbered comments, that look (IMHO) cool.
Added an Asides Widget to be used when theme is being used in widgetized mode. The functionality is the same as the Asides block previously added to HemingwayEx.
Added a new block WordSpew, thanks to Darwin.

Bug Fixes

Simple CSS fixes to style.css
Added more properties to white.css
Removed all PHP short tags. I think this time I got ‘em all.
Fixed bugs pointed out by Darwin

Tested on : Wordpress 2.1 and Wordpress 2.2.1 with IE6, IE7 and Firefox

Virtual Barbershop

Nalin — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:06:17 +0000

Get yourself a pair of headphones, close you eyes and get a virtual haircut.

Telemarketer Nightmare

Spider-man 3 : The IMAX Experience

Nalin — Sun, 06 May 2007 03:06:00 +0000

Watched the 1:40 am show and still didn’t manage to get good seats… This movie sure is all set to break records. We reached about an hour before the start of the movie and still there were about a 100 people ahead of us in line. One kewl part was getting watch IMAX for the first time. The picture quality really is something different on that huge screen. This wasn’t a dome, but it was a great experience never-the-less.

The movie itself wasn’t anything great. It’s worth a watch on the big screen as there are a lot of special effects and a lot of action. But they ended up making this movie so melodramatic that it kind of started to suck. And… I don’t know about others but I found the black spiderman suit better than the red-and-blue one.

All in all… it was fun to be up so late after such a long time… Got into bed at 5:30 in the morning.

The movie…. 7/10.