Carthik Sharma

One of the main problems I had (about a year ago) with working, or using the computer, when at home, was that I did not have a proper seating arrangement, and so used to end up slouching in the couch, or torturing my spine in bed, or some such. So I got myself this desk from Target.

Now the problem with working from home was that when I work on the laptop, the laptop keyboard on top of the desk made for an uncomfortable typing position. The keyboard tray in the desk is already occupied by the desktop’s keyboard and mouse — so I can’t place an external usb keyboard and mouse on the tray for use with my laptop.

So as things were, I used to work, and use the computer at school.

Until tomorrow. Today I installed Synergy on my desktop as well as laptop. This was very easy to do – $sudo apt-get install synergy was all it took, thanks to Ubuntu’s magical software management. Then I edited a synergy.conf file onthe desktop following the instructions at the wiki.

The following is the entire content of the file /etc/synergy.conf :

section: screens
        # two hosts named:  umberto(desktop), milan(laptop)
        umberto:
        milan:
end

section: links
        # umberto's screen is to the right of milan's
        umberto:
                left = milan
        milan:
                right = umberto
end

Then the desktop was ready to act as a “server”, that is the machine that has the keyboard and mouse physically connected to it. $synergys --config /etc/synergy.conf got synergy running.

Now, on the laptop, I installed synergy, and I fire it up using $synergyc umberto (where umberto is the host-name of the desktop). That’s it, now I can use the same mouse and keyboard for both the desktop and the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme left on the desktop’s monitor, and then a little more to the left, the mouse pointer pops into the laptop’s screen, and now the mouse and keyboard can be used for the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme right of the laptop screen, it pops into the desktop, and now the kyboard and mouse can be used with the desktop. This is so magical, almost, when you try it – especially since setting it up was so effortless.

I wonder why I took so long to set this up, really. Now I can’t wait to do this at the lab too, where I have another desktop, keyboard and mouse waiting

Come tomorrow, I might just feel better about working from home, and save myself at least the late-evening trip back to the lab.

Oh, Synergy works for windows and macs too, and for any and all combination of OSes, and for multiple computers. So you can have 5 computers and monitors all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse. Isn’t that great!

I used to dream about the day when Linux had better media management/playing software than Windows, or Macs. That day is here.

I hate iTunes on Macs. Kludgy, and reminiscent of a recalcitrant adolescent. I never could figure out how to play just a set of songs from a particular directory in the hard drive in iTunes. It creates a library and then shoots itself in the foot – a mess! Don’t teach me a new paradigm – allow me to listen to my music, whichever way I want to get at the music and play it, dammit!

I hate the MediaPlayer on Windows too, too many shiny things in there, and it looks suspicious – sort of like a coupon book trying to sell culture to you when you are online. I dislike teen-pop, so MediaPlayer, ould you please just play exactly those songs that I want you to, and hide your ugliness so it doesn’t get in the way? Using mediaplayer to queue songs and play music is for me a very irksome task – one which subtracts from the pleasure that follows.

In any case, I will leave it to the User Interface experts to convert my subjective dislikes to technical terms and to reason on which components caused me to feel the way I did. Basically, I am not one to “adapt” to the computer and make my behavior, wants and needs fit what the computer is capable of (and Windows users like to think they own the computer, hah!), but want the computer, which I bought, and, though this is easy to forget, is a dumb inanimate machine, to do what I want it to.

Amarok came as a pleasant surprise – given my presentiment that anything that “imports” songs and creates libraries is a sure loser. Part of the hesitation was also due to fact that it is a KDE app, and I use the Gnome desktop environment, but I decided to try it out anyways. Good thing I did, ’cause I love it, except for the fact that it demands a lot of the old desktop at home.

Thanks to the recent visit to India, I now have 150+ GB of songs – songs I mostly have not heard before, that I really want to. Amarok simplifies a lot of things. Using ID3 tags, it sorts songs by artist/album/genre etc, in a tree-like fashion, and lets me decide what comes first, and the structure of the tree. I can browse songs on my computer by directory (I can’t do without this), by genre, artists, albums, ratings etc too. I can drag and drop songs, albums — pretty much anything that is in one pane to the playlist to queue the songs up. Amarok uses Musicbrainz to automatically fill in the ID3 tags. It fetches me album covers and lyrics for songs, and the best part is – it suggest songs similar to the currently playing song – that are present in my existing collection! This is a godsend when you have a lot of new songs to explore. Say you like one song, and want to find more of the same, Amarok comes with an option that appends similar songs to the end of your current playlist. It also has the ability to let audioscrobbler (now last.fm) know of the songs you are playing. Check out my last.fm profile page if you want to see what it looks like. last.fm provides recommendations for songs too.

There are oh-so-many more el-neato features, I don’t want to bore you with them – but this is for sure – this music player is here to stay on my desktop. It is, after all, the first one that has stood up to each one of the challenges Carthik threw at it: “Can you do this?” says Carthik, “Of course, dear sir!” says Amarok. Reminds me of a very efficient and genial butler, who got in the business early, and is still pretty young, and who likes to wear bright-colored ties. In fact, if future versions deviate too much from where it is now, I will stay at this spot in time, and not upgrade. It couldn’t be better, I say.

I got a whole lot of Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary the hedgehog) cds from the Ubuntu free distribution center.

I figure that good should beget good, and so am willing to pass on the free distribution, at my own personal cost. The reason for doing this is that though you do get free cds from Ubuntu’s shipit system, it takes an awfully long time, and what’s not available immediately has very little worth. So I decided to re-ship them. If anyone wants a copy of the live and install disks of Ubuntu 5.04, please leave me a comment with your postal address in it, and I shall ship it to you for free. If you don’t want to leave a comment, then you can email me at mail@carthik.net.

When I was in India, I realized how slow downloads (still) are, and so it’s only fair that people who cannot download the images get the cds easily. I will ship them within a week of receiving the request.

The Gnu Privacy Handbook stresses the importance of creating a revocation certificate for your gpg keys soon after you create your key-pair(s).

Update: the official FAQ lists the following, too, more or less. Why is it that you always find what you were looking for after the event?

It does not, however say how to revoke your keys using the generated certificate at a later date.

So here’s an overview:

Create a revocation certificate by :
gpg --output ~/myrevoke.asc --gen-revoke your_user_id
The above command will generate a revocation certificate, and save it as myrevoke.asc in your home directory. Save the myrevoke.asc file – guard it, since if I get my hands on it, I can revoke your certificate.

Protect it by:

• Encrypt your revoke cert with gpg -c file. As you are using symmetric encryption with -c, the password is the only key you need. Then, burn the key on a cd (or two), store them away properly and erase the key plus any temp files the burning program might have created (also, dd if=/dev/zero of=/partition/of/swap might be a good idea, /dev/urandom for the tin foil hats)
• You can enable others to generate revokation keys for your own private key with via gpg –desig-revoke (or just hand them a cd with your encrypted revoke cert if you trust them not to brute-force it.

Thanks to Richih of irc://irc.freenode.net/linuxhelp for help with the above.

On a later day, when like me, you grow suspicious about the integrity of your key-pair, you want to revoke the key-pair using the revocation certificate that you already have, do the following:

Import the revocation certificate to revoke the key-pair on your system:
gpg --import ~/myrevoke.asc
The above command assumes that the revocation certificate is named myrevoke.asc and resides in your home directory.

Now send the updated keys to a keyserver near you:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys your_user_id

Now you are all set. Whenever someone refreshes their keys database, they will know that the old keys have been revoked.