Fix your totally insecure password in 1 minute

There is this interesting article on Slate called Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes The method mentioned is quite good but there is another way through which you can create strong password and it will probably not take more than one minute. And you can even continue using your current password.We are just going to make it very strong. Let us  start with a word that you will not forget that easily, any word will do ,even your current password, but I will start off with the word password. Using 'password' as a password is not only pointless but is also quite stupid. Let us insert two symbols in the word to get p@$$word. Replace the o with a zero to get p@$$w0rd. Now capitalize one of the letters, usually it is recommended to capatalize one of the latter letters but making p capital works too. So the final password comes to p@$$w0rd. This password is too short for using in a system environment but it is superb password for any user.

Weather Updates on Linux Desktops

There are a lot of options for displaying weather information on Linux Desktops. There are some KDE plasmoids which usually ship with most distributions. There's the Weather plasmoid and there's yet another weather plasmoid (yaWP). Unfortunately, they are examples of what I would like to call as inadequates. The Weather plasmoid is not that much customizable and yaWP just got rid of an ominous bug. I hate it when plasmoids eat 100% cpu. I want my computer to be responsive and having a plasmoid eating 100% cpu is, basically, a bummer.

So I searched around until I stumbled into a gem, called Customizable Weather Plasmoid, this plasmoid shows the power of customization, shows why great softwares (including desktop plasmoids) allow high level of control by users, and shows how to make a great plasmoid. It is themable, it is versatile and it can include much more information than other plasmoids- the key is to know how to customize it.(Don't forget we are talking about Linux users :-)) The website has some screenshots.

For those who don't like KDE, there's something in a great desktop environment called Xfce. It is THE choice for desktop managers. It has a plugin for Xfce panel called the weather plugin. The plugin automatically determines your location based on the computer's IP address and updates weather information from the weather channel. The weather information scrolls in the panel and it is pretty accurate.

PDF Editing in Linux

There are very few professional quality PDF editing tools in Linux. There is a "PDF editor" called PDFEdit which does not even have an undo key. Yes, you can do a lot of things (like add text and objects) but you can't go back from any mistake. In other words, a bummer. I like Pdftk which can do such simple things as merge and extract pages from pdf file/s. It is much more useful than PDFEdit. Then there is the PDF import extension for OpenOffice. Unfortunately, it has miles to go. The pictures and text (of the original pdf) appear so out of sync when I use the extension. The formatting looks terrible. For me, the best PDF Editor, by a large measure, is an application not even meant to be used as a PDF Editor. It is called Inkspace and it is a vector graphics (think SVG) editing program.

The formatting stays, the texts are in place, the graphics are not jumbled and adding objects and texts is very easy. It is actually easier to do things in InkSpace than many commercial PDF programs. Unfortunately, there is a huge problem with InkSpace in regards to PDF editing. It can only import one(yes one) page from an existing PDF document. So you need to edit each page separately, save those files and combine them with something like pdftk. One feature request for Inkspace developers is to make Inkspace import all pages from PDF. I believe it is on track and will be implemented soon. After this, Inkspace should be THE choice for anybody wanting to edit PDFs in Linux.

Checking CDMA Phone/Modem signal quality through Minicom

In the last two blogs, I wrote about how to use a Chinese PCMCIA Express CDMA Modem to send and recieve voice calls and SMSs using Minicom. In this blog, I will write about how to check the signal quality of the Modem/Phone through Minicom.

First a little understanding of what we are measuring. We are measuring the signal power strength in dBm. Since dBm is a logarthmithic unit, the decrease of about 3 dB implies roughly doubling of power. We typically get CDMA signal strength in the range from 0 to -104 which equates to 1.0 mW to 0.1pW. A -50 value is better than a -60 value.This is because -50 dBm comes to 10nW whereas -60 dBM comes to 1nW. A value of 105 from the modem implies that the modem is in a no service zone.

Now my Minicom output

AT+GMR will give me the software version.

AT+GMR
+GMR: S/W VER: SUC6002 Ver 1.0
OK

AT+GMM will give me the model number of the modem.

AT+GMM
+GMM: SRE 100
OK

AT+GMI will give me the manufacturer information

AT+GMI
+GMI: BELLWAVE CO. LTD.
OK

A simple Google search finds that the Bellwave Co. Ltd. is a South Korean company based in Seoul. I don't know whether the Chinese manufacturer bought the data module from Bellwave or not or they simply "copied" the module.

Now to check the signal strength. The command to check signal strength is AT$RSSI. It gives me the results in dBM.

AT$RSSI
-48
OK

Signal Strength is -48 dBM

AT$RSSI
-50
OK

Again,

AT$RSSI
-48
OK

Now I am shortening the retractable antenna. The signal quality immediately drops.

AT$RSSI
-61
OK

The antenna is completely inside the card. The signal strength is low.

AT$RSSI
-76
OK

I can now call and receive calls, send and read SMSs and check signal quality in Linux through Minicom.I don't need to boot to Vista for these functions anymore. If anybody reaches these Blogs and needs my help, leave a message.

Sending and reading CDMA Phone's SMSs through Minicom

In my last Blog post, I wrote about how I used Minicom to call phones through a Chinese PCMCIA Express CDMA modem called SEP 6000. As I could now receive and send calls, I only wanted to know how to send and read SMSs received.

By the way, the AT command for accepting voice call is AT$QCCAV which is a Qualcomm specific AT Command. AT+CHV will hang up the call.

I already had the text version of the commands from reading the srt.exe in Vim editor. So, all I needed to do was to find the commands for sending and receiving SMSs. First I googled around, until I reached two links, one in Chinese and one in Indonesian . The Indonesian link is very helpful.

After I fired up Minicom and connected to the phone, I send AT$MTCNT and got the reply 3,3. This means that there is 3 SMSs and I have read none. Now to read the SMS. First I had to do

AT$SMSTYPE
1
OK

I need to change the SMSTYPE to 0 if I want to read the SMS
AT$SMSTYPE=0
OK

Then to read the first SMS

AT$SMSMT1
20090522215437,403,4098,0,"SMS Message"

It tells me the date and time of the Message and gives me human readable SMS Message.

Now to send SMS Message,
AT$SMSMO00=Number,,4098,4,0,0,0,"Message"

Number is the number that I am sending the SMS to and Message is the SMS message.
After some time, I get
$SMSOACK0
which means that the SMS has been sent successfully.

Next blog, how to check the signal strength through Minicom.

Calling phones through Minicom and CDMA ruim card/PCMCIA

I needed a cheap PCMCIA Express card for my CDMA card to access the Internet. I bought this one. Called SEP 6000, the application only works in Windows and unfortunately is a piece of junk. Most of the times, it would stop immediately after I start the application (by the way executable is srt.exe) telling me that ruim card is not found. The choices are abort, ok and cancel. If I click abort, sometimes I can use the internet but that's it. I can't call or send or receive SMS.

But I don't need the call and SMS features right? After all, I bought the card for Internet. Not true, turned out that the only way I can charge (or recharge) money in the phone account is by calling. No other way. A really crappy telephone company.

So I needed to charge the account last week but the windows application refused to work. Maybe it is Vista, the worst operating system in the world, or maybe it is that awful application that the crappy Chinese company made -no quality control, no testing, and no feedbacks. Immediately after I started the application, it would hang and the ominous windows message- the application needs to close- pops up.

Most of the times I use Linux, right now Mandriva 2009.1 to be precise, and I need to reboot to Vista to do these stupid things (like recharge account) and use applications that don't work in Linux (like this one). Since the windows application would not work,I had no choice but to do something in Linux.

First I downloaded BitPim and then Gammu and Gnokii . Through BitPim, with a little bit of tweaking I can access the ruim memory to see the SMSs and that's all. I could not get the phone to work from either Gammu and Gnokii even though I tried a lot.

Then I had no choice but to go to Minicom, the common serial console program in Linux. So I loaded it up. My /etc/minicom.dfl file is:
pu port /dev/ttyUSB0
pu callin
pu baudrate 230400
pu mnocon1 NO CARRIER
pu mnocon2 BUSY
pu mnocon3
pu mnocon4 VOICE
pu rtscts No

/dev/ttyUSB0 because the PCMCIA card uses a USB serial emulation.


Now I needed a set of AT commands for CDMA and I got them at this site. To call phones the standard way (through AT) is ATD number in CDMA. After I connected the card through Minicom, I tried ATD number which did not work- threw out a bunch of unreadable data, and then I looked around the commands until I stumbled into at+cdv=number. It worked perfectly. Now I could call phones from minicom. But I also needed to dial numbers after the call is initiated - DTMF and even though the commands for DTMF are AT+VDS=Tone (Tone example: At+VDS=1 for dialing 1 after the call is initiated) and AT+WSTD=Tone both of them did not work. I cursed the Chinese manufacturer but what could I do. I needed to charge the account and to enter the numbers, I needed DTMF to work.

Then it stuck me, reverse engineering. I opened srt.exe in Vim, my favorite text and hex editor, and voila -there it is- in clear text- no need for reverse engineering- the commands. And here they are:
AT+CDV%s
AT+CHV0
AT$DTMF%c
AT$VOL=%d
AT$VOL?



Clearly the AT+CHV is for hanging up the phone. It could also be found in the AT command set. But that set did not have AT$DTMF. Therefore, AT$DTMF%c must specify the DTMF with %c being the tone (1-9#*) and AT$VOL=%d must specify the volume of the phone. I tried it and it worked. Now I can send and receive phones and SMSs, check signal strength and recharge through Minicom, the Chinese SEP 6000 PCMCIA card and my RUIM CDMA card.

Next blog, how I send and received SMSs from Minicom

I love the new blogger look

Wonderful and crystal clear. My old posts were not being formatted
properly. This one formats correctly.

Hello World

Hello World. I am back. From oblivion. Trying to live again.

Doomed relationship

This is anecdotal. This seems like a life story. But somebody is no
longer in my life anymore.
I think that my relationship with Ycnan is over:

1. I seriously think that I need her more than she needs me.
2. I think that she believes that I took her space without any consideration.
3. She believes that the phone call that I made during dinner time was
inconsiderate. She also believes that I went on talking as if she has
no other thing to do except to talk with me.
4. She is probably feeling better after we have stopped talking.
5. People will suck up to her on the account of her being white and
having money.
6. She gets to know more people at her school and her work. I think
that both are favorable for her to create new friends. She does not
need me and I refuse to pander. I refuse to sink low just to please
her.
7. After her friend comes to Nepal, she has somebody else that she can be with.
8. She believes that I will not have any positive impact in her life.
9. Mos and Mayhs will find something bad about me and she will come
abroad their team. That will remove any guilty feeling that she might
have about me.
10.I don't need her as much I used to.
11. I think that my life would be a lot better if she is not in my
life. That said , having her would still help.
12. She will get involved in Okinra and other projects and she will
have no time in her mind for me.
13. I expect an email about the battery after her friend comes. But
till then, I think that there is zero chance that we are going to
talk. Maybe it is good to me too.
14. It is one of the lessons of life.

Faith:Continued:Another View :This view is more interesting though

And faith also keeps you going when you rationally should give up
hope, or when your rationality is overcome or undercut by powerful
emotions. You have faith in rationality. Faith is more akin to an
emotion, and rationality to a method of interpreting information. They
are not really opposites, any more than rage is the opposite of a
trial by jury. We associate them with opposite scenarios, but they are
not strict antonyms.

But faith obviously must have survival value, otherwise it would have
been weeded out by evolution quite some time ago. Perhaps when the
world was a much more risky, unknown, isolated place, having faith
allowed our progenitors to survive and succeed when the best, rational
course of action in the face of the unknown was to call it a life and
expire. Like many of the emotions we have, they were shaped in a very
different environment than the typical human finds themselves in
today. My personal suspicion is that faith is a highly useful, good
thing to have, INDIVIDUALLY. It gives us the courage to try new things
that we don't know that we can do, to face disease, death,
selfishness, and all the evil in life and try to make the world a
better place despite that. OTOH, when it starts becoming a group
ritual, it seems to take on many of those negative aspects you
mentioned; it tends to enforce existing power structures, allow one to
suffer through circumstances rather than change them - to make it
acceptable to be a victim, if I may sum up some of what you said.

Faith isn't going anywhere, any more than greed, lust, love, or
curiosity are leaving the human condition. Figuring out how to
accommodate it in society without it becoming a cancer like the
American-style religious right is the challenge.

Faith:What is its use

Hi,
Back after a zillion years. This I got somewhere from Slashdot. Loved it.

I argue the opposite. Faith is a weakness. Faith leads people to
accept their conditions and pray that it will get better rather than
act. Faith leads people to accept conditions that are unacceptable.

Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope
they'll see the light. Faith keeps people from speaking out against
the government because they hope their God will intervene. Faith keeps
people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they
hope that the words in a particular book are true.

Our best quality isn't our ability to blindly accept conditions as
they are because they might change, but to recognize the flaws in our
condition right now through research and figure out a way to change
the stuff we can. In fact, the ability to drastically modify our
environment is what makes us a technological species.

Perhaps you're using a different definition of "faith" than I am.

Another interesting decision to make

A very good paying job or a full scholarship to study in one of the
top colleges in far away Sweden.Decision time!. As they said -life is
full of choices- it turns out the way you choose it to.
I hope that I don't make a bad decision now.

Happiness

When people are pretty down, as I am most of the times(and even now) I
listen to music. Music is the greatest thing that keeps my spirit
alive. I wonder what else could I do.
There was a question in The Guardian,London about depression(in the
magazine section, yesterday's Issue) and I found it exhilarating.

HP Pavilion 7850 Problem

I have found a odd problem with an old HP Pavilion 7850.
After pressing F1 for entry into BIOS, the computer doe-
s not do so, but it stalls and stalls with the black screen
on, but as soon as the bios setup option is not used ,the
computer boots into Windows Xp.
Some problem that.
robin

Basic Principles of Life(Continued)

Relationship is a strong word.It may mean a million thing to million
different people.And I know that most relationships start randomly, as
almost God(if there is one) provided the thrust. I believe that asking
for a date from an unknown person, if you think that person is
somewhat interesting is all right. But pursuing a relationship which
is leading nowhere is inane and foolish. The most important thing that
I have learned from my quarter century of relationships is that you
should care about only those who care about you. Running after ( or
trying to maintain) a person of interest is ridiculous.
Thus
CARE ABOUT THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU
and
YOU CAN'T CHANGE OTHERS
That means
CARE ABOUT THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU BUT IF YOU WANT TO MAINTAIN THAT
RELATIONSHIP DON'T EVER TRY TO CHANGE THAT PERSON ,IT SIMPLY WON'T
WORK.

That you know is life.
Robin

My basic principles of life

Sarah used to tell me that life is an university, learn from it. In
this quarter century of my life I have learnt some things -which I
have made the basic principles of my life- the way I judge people and
the way I think that the world should be run. They are
1)The root cause of unhappiness is expectation.As long as I am
expecting something from somebody I will always be in the pangs of
unhappiness.However much I love the guy/gal in question ,I would try
never to expect anything from anybody.As they say nothing comes free
in life.
2)You can't change others. You can only try to influence others.The
rest is upto them.But even then you can't change the basic inherent
characteristics of people ,no matter what.A troglodyte is always a
troglodyte, a procrastinator is always a procastinator, a mendacious
guy will always be mendacious, and a totally selfish one will remain
the same throughout his/her life.An iota of change does not mean that
the person has changed .If fact it will never happen.
3)I am alone and will always be. That is because of the fact that
everybody is inherently different.Nobody actually lasts as a friend.
4)I am what I am. The reebok's ad has a message.Whoever says that
he/she couldn't do anything because of something is giving an excuse.
I am what I am , and will always be so.
As in the theme song of One tree hill, I don't wanna be anything
except what I am.
Robin

Back to square one

I am writing after a long time.In this time I have already started my
graduate course in a so called "prestigious" college. Since the course
that I am doing is directly relevant to the current technologies,I am
pretty sure that if I could successfully complete this course,I will
at least be materialistically successful in the standview of the
world. In the meantime I have lost the one girl that I care about and
that would make my world little more interesting.

Crazy demented 2

Today I did some real crazy stuffs. But that could seem natural to me ,isn't it.

Crossroads of life

I have come to this crossroads of life, the direction forward I know
is dependent upon me.I think of life retrospectively and I think of
myself as an iota of hope. I lived my life on hope,but never had hope
dictated my life.Now I know that I am in love with somebody ,though
she deserves somebody a million times better than me.Whatever I have
done or not done has come back to hunt me, remind me of the fatality
of life.Decisions ,decisions : which decide what I do or not.Every
decision ,every lie, everything that I have done has come back
sometimes to hunt me, sometimes to deride me, sometimes to make fun of
me, sometimes to just give an iota of hope .And that iota of hope is
what that keeps me alive.I almost had given up completely.I was
thinking of suicide, then thinking about the amazing achievements I
had gained without any support from anybody in life. I may not be
exceptional but I am certainly above average in certain stuffs. And I
may not be the worst ,but I am certainly well below average in things
like communications and socialization.I always claimed that I could do
it alone, I don't need friends ,I don't need anybody to support me
,but I came to know that the recluse is speaking, I need attention.I
don't want to be a cynosure,but I do need friends with whom I can
talk,I need people to listen in.And I don't have that,probably I can
never have that.
I don't know, maybe because I am black or maybe because I am a geek in
a true sense of word, I intent to live that way. I am completely
progressive and my political feelings sometimes paint
the horizon sometimes encompassing all possible scenario of mutuality
with somebody I would probably want to talk to.
Sarah is different,but I can't say anything.As I said she deserves better.