Iphone Pwned

Dude.. I did it! iPhone 2.1 running fine. Jailbroken and unlocked!

MDTL Tutorials - Fedora and XP

Well the Google Docs publishing is shite, so link here for

Viren Joky's

Quick and Dirty guide to dual booting Windows with Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

Blog Publishing from Google Docs

Okay, just below this post, you will see a large unwieldy tutorial on how to use BitTorrent. I had created it on Google Docs for a friend, and thought I'd publish it on my blog. For people not in the know, Google Docs allows you to publish your document directly on your blog. On the Share button on the right, hit 'Publish At Web Page',  change your blog site settings, and hit Post.

However, as you can see below, the formatting is shite. It looks slightly better as a published web page, but my graphics have lost their black backgrounds surprisingly enough, so they dont look as cool.

Update: Yeah, its apparently just IE6 which displays the icons like crap. FF is working just fine

Viren Joky's

BitTorrent for Dummies

 

Okay, you've heard a lot about this torrent thing; supposedly the next great thing in file sharing <read pirating>. But, you have no idea of how to go about accessing it's power. In other words the last word of the title describes you to a T. Hey, if the shoe fits... 

Well here's my simple 5 step guide to getting on the torrent bandwagon and achieving download nirvana. Okay, so it may not be 5 steps. At this point I'm not sure of the number of steps it'll take.

 

How to read this guide -

 Step to be followed  My recommendations  The mechanics behind it (Don't read this if you don't want to)  Links to resources  Warning!  And this one because it just looks cool!

Here we go -

 Download a BitTorent Client

     I personally use BitComet, but that's probably not the best client. uTorrent is supposed to be good, and it's really light on resources (I'm trying it out now), or try Azureus for a full featured download.

      Here's a list of torrent clients

 Install it. No explanations here.

     You might want to allow it to associate with your .torrent (the BitTorrent format) files automatically.

     You may want to configure the upload and download speeds here. Okay, this is gunna be a bit technical. Torrents are based on sharing. That means every time you are downloading a file, your torrent client automatically starts to upload that part of the file you have downloaded. You can change or reduce the upload speed in your preferences. Why not reduce your upload speed to zero, you ask me? Well, besides the fact that its good to contribute to the pool of uploaders, torrent clients are built in such a way that restricts your download speed based on your upload speed. So why not make your upload speed max? Because that will seep your bandwidth! A comfortable middle ground should be reached.

 Now go on-line and search for a good torrent site.

     I like Torrentz.com which index a huge list of sites. Best of all, it doesn't index porn. Okay, so that's a huge negative, but you can use Pornorip or Torrentspy to look for that

     List of popular torrents sites.

 Use the search facility to locate what you want - just type in some keywords.

     For example - this is what you get if you search for 'Year of the dog' on Mininova -

     As you can see, a list of torrents are displayed here. Make sure its what you want before downloading, or Year of the Dog may just turn out to be an extreme bestiality vid. Uh, unless that's what you're looking for. Hey, I'm not here to judge. It's just that you're a filthy pervert. That's all I'm saying. And it's not often I get a change to call somebody else this.

 Okay, so you can see several matching torrents. Which one do you pick? Simple answer - the one with the most seeders (or Seeds, or S, or even health).

     Like I said above, every person downloading a file is also uploading it to some extent. And some people are just uploading it out of the goodness of their hearts. All the people who are uploading the file are called seeders. Anyhoo, the more people uploading, the more likely is it for you to get a faster download, and the less likely it is for your file to stop in between. Usually at 99% which proves Murphy's law and provoke me to extreme violence.

     Also, you may want to choose the link which has the least downloaders or Leechers. Obviously, the less people who are hogging up the bandwidth of the seeders, the more bandwidth is there for you to hog. On the other hand, the more people that leeching the file, the more likely is it to be the genuine article.

 Click on the download torrent link. You will be asked to save/open the file, which will have the ext .torrent. If you've associated your torrent client with this type of file, you can open it directly. Or you can save the torrent onto your hard disk (it's a small file; just a few kb). And then open it with your client of choice.

     Actually the .torrent file is just a link to the tracker, which keeps information of the people who are uploading the file. The client uses this information to connect to them and establish P2P connections to get the files.

 

And that's it. You're done and well on your way to accumulating masses of porn.. er legitimate files. Now may be a good time to buy that external 1 Tb hdd you were thinking about.

-Viren

Have sex NOW. The world ends at 1pm.(or maybe not)

Well, the large Hardon.. er Hadron collider will be switched on around 12:30 pm Indian time. And of course, we don't believe in CERN's safety nonsense. Heres how it'll go..

In about 3 minutes it'll have produced Strangelets and Vaccum Bubbles and Magnetic Monopoles.

At 7 minutes , scientists will discover the God Particle (even more fantastic than the Jesus phone) and will almost instantly come up with the Grand Unified Theory which will be so magnificent, so stupendous, that scientists, at a flash will understand how to achieve faster than light travel, solve global warming, and even make Sarah Palin VP.

Just past 9 minutes, a stable black hole will be created which absorbs enough matter to be self sustaining.

Ten seconds past this the event horizon will overtake Earth.

In twenty minutes, the black hole will crash into the sun, extinguishing it. Jupiter has already been swallowed and Neptune will be spiralling into the hole.

One hour later, the solar system does not exist.


So, my advice is; grab your towel and hitch a quick ride from a passing Volgon ship. The end of the solar system should be quite a spectacular sight seen from a couple of light days away.

Update - apparently today was just a test run. We have till Oct 21.

Strangely Appropriate.

The science of sleep

I'm having a tough time keeping my eyes open right now. Even Feeder streaming on the last.fm app on my iPhone is not helping. Nor is the cup of murky water which passes for coffee round here. Maybe it was due to a really late night yesterday. Following a late dinner, my friend stuffed her face with the bday cake I had received from office. Unfortunately, this cake had eggs... and guess what; my friend's allergic.

Within minutes, her face had swollen up to epic propotions. She refused to look on the bright side - that the swelling had eliminated the bags under her eyes at least. So at around 12 am we drove to the nearest hospital to get some allergy pills. Since we were around there, we decided to show her to the doc. In a few minutes this doc wanders in, obviously still groggy with sleep. So he goes into the curtained enclosure and started asking my friend questions.

Now my friend is a total fraud indian, and when the doc asked her to show her 'jeeb' (which means tongue in Hindi), she started unbuttoning her shirt. Okay I kid, I kid, but she kept speaking in English, and the doc, apparently not comfortable with the language, decide to come out and talk to me, as the obvious person in charge (NO I do NOT look old enough to be her father). Well, as I suspected, he just prescribed some Avil and Allegra, though he did want to give her a shot; which I was quite keen on too. But madam was too skittish, so we dropped the plan.

He did tell me, though, to take a long hard look at her face so I could make sure the swelling didn't increase, which cracked us all up. We reached back at 1 with no further incident; I still suspect the 'allergic swelling' was nothing more than fat from all the cake hogging that had no place else to go.

However I stayed up even later, as I was in the midst of installing Fedora 9 on my laptop. Yes; if you've read my post 'A Tragic Gap', you'll know my XPS died a horrible and painful death. Dell have however, been most impressive, and they replaced my hdd and dvd drive (which was acting up too) within the week. So yeah, my laptop is resurrected, and I'm in the best phase... installing new apps. I simply love fresh installs, the smell and feel of a fresh OS gets me all sweaty and excited.

To start off, I installed XP on a 15gb partition, leaving the rest of the disk unallocated. Now I know people who don't bother to partition, and to them I say 'Repent!' My partitioning strategy is to use a smaller partition for XP, and other essential software like an antivirus. The rest of my programs are installed into the next contiguous partition, and the rest of the space is partitioned to store my Media, Pictures, Games and Downloads in separate partitions leaving about 15Gb for a Linux install.

After installing XP and the necessary drivers from Dell, I registered it, and installed SP3. I love updates, and am determined to get the latest stuff on this installation. I then flashed my DVD drives firmware with the latest update, and downloaded the latest graphic drivers from Nvidia. So far so good, everything went without a hitch. I also installed AVG antivirus free v8. Now, I've always been a Norton fanboi.. but their last incantation left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. After hearing good things about AVG on lifehacker.com, I decided to give it a go and not install Norton's Systemworks.

Around this point I decided it was a good idea to install Fedora 9 alongside XP. Why Fedora? Because I've been a fan of Red Hat from it's 3.0 days. Not that I've given any other system a try. Well I booted off the DVD, and everything proceeded fine till I tried to create the Linux Partition Structure, where it fell over in a heap telling me that I had insufficient space to create the / partition. After trying all sorts of things.. even repeatedly repartitioning my drives, I was ready to give up.

A search through the forums, however gave me a clue. A HDD can support only a maximum of four partitions apparently. A new user will point to my afore mentioned multiple partition in confusion. Allow me to clarify - All those partitions were logical partitions created inside an extended partition. However I had created my Programs partition as a primary partition, instead of a logical one which means I had already used up 3 of the 4 allowed primary partitions - C drive, Programs, and an Extended one to hold my logical partitions. And Linux needed at least two spots to install. And this was the correct reason inspite of the incorrect and misleading 'out of space' error.

Well, using Powerquest's infinitely useful Partition Magic, I converted E: Programs into a logical partition inside my Extended partition, and then reran the installation. This time it proceede without hitch, and I soon had Fedora up and running by 3 am. Initial impressions are not that great however. I expected the Gnome UI to be more kickass... infact its almost boring in it's plainness (I'm looking at screenshots of fedora 8 and it seems prettier). I'll try KDE today and let you know. Maybe these guys should talk to my kickass designed friend.  I'm also still trying to get my WiFi working on fedora, but it's taking a while. I am such a n00b.

Anyways, I should be running on full functionality soon. It's such a relief to work on a bright 1950x1200 display again. THAT is what my blog is supposed to look like. For now I'm carefully searching for the latest versions of essential software. Do you have any suggestions or preferences for the best essential software no Windows installation should be without?

Anyways, after all that I finally got to sleep at 3 am. And that explains why there are imprints of the keyboard on my forehead today.

Speculation..

Larry Niven, creator of Ringworld, has wayyy too much time on his hand. Here's why.

Another Random Post

I'm still laptopless and lazy, so instead of blogging the longer posts I have been working on, here is another collection of randomness. Hmm maybe I should have written that laptop-less. You know, so the perverts out there don't read it wrong. Yes. I mean YOU.

I'm typing this while listening to Kraftwerk on my iPhone. Yes I have an iPhone. I'm posh spelt P-O-S-H. I drink my tea with my pinky extended and I never come, I always arrive. What I'm trying to say is - listen to Kraftwerk. Back in 1997 my friend from college, Prashanth dug out this old tape and made me listen to Kraftwerk's Man Machine. A very interesting album, techno trance, with a lot of music which seems to have been stolen by later artists.

One of the books I'm really looking forward to reading is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Supposedly one of Sci-fi's best, I'm surprised I never ran across it. I hope it's magnificent; I'm willing to forgive Card his homophobia. And why didn't anyone tell me about Clive Cussler. I kept seeing his books but was never motivated to pick one up. I plan to rectify that immediately.

And now for some internet goodness. Weird Universe give you your daily hit of bizarre. Want to do some quick and dirty photo editing and don't have the tools? Try Picnik. And read superhero parody [this is NSFW] 'The Pro' here.

Dunno

I just ran into one of my favourite books as a child. It's Nikolai Nosov's The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends. It's funny and whimsical and has the most amazing illustrations. Its available for free online here. Definitely

worth a read.

5000 Twisted Hits