Today, I was much happy to see my classmates after a long time. We all gathered together for the wedding of Krishnaraj’s sister’s wedding. There were around 20 from our batches and a few of our seniors. Few colleagues of me and Krishnaraj from MES also came to attend the function. Seeing all after a long time was a memorable one. Though the gap was less than a year, it still looks like a long one… Also, we came to know of a sad news that one of our batch mates, who was studying in MES for B-Arch died yesterday due to an accident And because of it, the get together was a little gloomy too…

Today, I thought deeply of managing web designing as a part time job. The main thing what I lack is support. Parents don’t like me spending lot of time with computer and Internet and they says that I am wasting lot of my time with computer. If I get someone with ideas like mine, it won’t take long for me to start web designing as a part time job… With my more than 5 years experience with the web and its technologies and services, I think I have got enough exposure with the field.

Another field is that of free software. I hope that the GNU Lab project at college will be helpful in gaining exposure in that field too.

Modems are the major help for villagers to access net, since broadband connections haven’t reached much of the villages. And for Linux users, configuring a modem, which is originally designed for Windows(Winmodem) still stands like a giant wall.

Many of the modem manufactures are providing binary files of the drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Even though for a new user, its hard to compile, experienced  persons could help in configuring it. But, take the case of Conexant, one among the leading Modem Chipset manufactures. Usually, with every piece of hardware we purchase, we also get the drivers needed for working with it. But, Conexant isn’t providing drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Its ok. May be Linux is now growing up and many hardware vendors don’t provide drivers for Linux in the driver CD, but it can be downloaded from net for free. So, when we search for its drivers, what we will come across is a site named Linuxant, who provide Linux drivers for Conexant chipsets. But, the free drivers they provide is somewhat like a trial version, which supports just 14.4Kbps, while the modem can support upto 52Kbps. It means, with it, we can use the modem in Linux, but maximum speed is limited to just above 2KB per second…

Another funny thing is that they are providing full drivers for 20US$. The modem costs below INR 300(around 7US$) and for the driver we need to pay extra money, which is thrice the cost of  modem.

This is a fact to think about. Why is a company like Conexant behaving so to Linux?

I tried in every way to achieve the full speed, like what we usually do with softwares in Windows, but it doesn’t work. I even managed to make the driver say its full version, but still by calculating the data transfer rate, the speed is the old 14.4Kbps. Has anyone found any way to manage through this? If so, please help me…

A get together of the members of Kalarikkal Puthur Madom was conducted in the two days, 10th and 11th. The event was interesting as we children could see may of the unknown members. I was assigned the work of computer operation but the main job was catching the viruses. With Clamwin, I was able to remove them, but, few of them resided in my pen drive, with which, my collection of virus infected files in my computer crossed the landmark of 1500.

I also started a bit of localization(L10n), with the GNOME 2.24 – Malayalam files available at http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/ml/gnome-2-24/

Few selected snaps of the family get-together is given below:

After a long thought, today, I registered a domain for myself; tvmanukrishnan.uni.cc. I also created a home page , with links to my blog, files section and others of my interest. This was all made possible because of the free DNS service at http://freedns.afraid.org/. I think this service is very helpful for free web hosting. With a collection of quality free services, which I came across, it will be much easy to create a professional website for free. I am thinking seriously of creating a blog post on it. With the free DNS service, I created two sub domains for my blog and files section, which reduces the length of URL and also making it easy to remember.

The current structure of the site is:

www.tvmanukrishnan.uni.cc

* blog.tvmanukrishnan.uni.cc – Tvm’s personal blog
* files.tvmanukrishnan.uni.cc – Tvm’s files section

Though I could make e-mail addresses with my domain, I am not doing it since its hard to manage all together. 🙂