Updating Nokia E66 on VirtualBox

Well i wanted to update my wife's phone software which is a Nokia E66. I don't have a separate windows installation on my pc since i'm using Ubuntu. So i normally keep a window installation in a VirtualBox vm for emergency cases like this.

Well when i tried to start to update in the Nokia Suite it just switch of the phone which will be in kind of like sleep mode. After some time the Nokia Suite reports the connection is interrupted. Well first i though its some thing to do with the phone. Well then again i though may be i should look at the usb connections available. Because in the Nokia Suite massage it says to restart the phone to try to run the update process again. So that means the phone is not switched off, its in a mode which the user interactions are disabled.

So what i did was, i created a empty filter criteria in the vm usb settings and then start the update operation again. So as soon as the phone screen switch off  for my surprise when i look at the usb device connections i saw some thing like "Nokia ROM .....". So i selected that. This cause the Nokia Suite to show some progress in the progress bar. The easiest way to find out whether your phone is switched it's mode is the usb activity indicator in the VM status bar. If its idle that means the phone has switched it's mode.

So for this phone it switches in the three modes before it restarts the phone. After the restart the phone had the new version of the software and the feature that is stated in the update information. Hope this will be help full for some one who is primarily not running windows but on a OS which can run VirtualBox.

My Git-SVN Experience

Well some time back i started to use Git at my work place so i can share the code with my fellow developers when doing parallel development. The main reason for this is that the code was not ready to be push to our central repo.

Well then i though of giving a try with git-svn so i can create topic branch and work on it, share it and then when things ready, commit it to central repo. But the first thing i saw from my fellow developers was a unhappy face :(.

Well there is a reason for this. Because git have lot of advance functionality which make you possible to do things that you even don't think of. And their alternative commands for same task which make most of people confuse (including me some time back) and using those in wrong places will put you in trouble.

Well i tried git-svn for first time and the cloning of the repo was fine. But it was fine on command line not in the tortiseGit UI. And before committing back to central repo i was force to svn rebase (even though there was no changes in the central repo after i cloned) and dcommit which i guess is bit confusing for some users. It also took a long time to commit a change with few local revisions which got success after retrying for the second time. Even though it was OK with me, but we need some thing more simpler which gets the job done quickly with out the need for going through manuals to find out descriptions of various commands.

So i though to give a try to bzr which also have a svn integration. But that will be in another post :).

Installing Avidemux on Ubuntu 11.10

Well for Ubuntu 11.10 the video editor (converter for me :) ) avidemux is not yet ready. So i though of finding a way to install this may be from an older release of Ubuntu to give it a try.

I chose natty since its more close to oneiric even though oneiric is based on Gnome3 and Natty is based on Gnome2. So i downloaded the debs from  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avidemux/1:2.5.4-0ubuntu6/+build/2158020
. Well when i tried to install the debs i got a error saying it cannot continue because avidemux-plugins-common_2.5.4-0ubuntu6_i386 is looking for libx264-106. But oneiric comes with libx264-116. So though to give a another try by changing the dependency version in the deb. To edit the deb file i used the  scripts at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=636724 thanks to the guys up there who post the bash scripts. I change the libx264-106 to libx264-116 and save the deb.

Well then i again try to install and this time it works, and i open up avidemux and try to convert a video for my droid and it worked great. So i hope this post will help you if your looking for avidemux on oneiric.

Terminal launcher with drag and drop location for Unity

The following launcher configuration will allow you to add a Gnome Terminal launcher into your unity launcher bar. This has the ability of opening the terminal for a given folder which. To do that you can simply drag the folder onto the launcher shortcut which will open the terminal in the dropped folder. The motivation behind this effort was that the open terminal nautilus extension is not working properly with nautilus 3.2 right now on my Ubuntu 11.10.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Gnome Terminal
Comment=Drag and drop a folder to open in.
GenericName=youtube uploader
Exec=gnome-terminal --working-directory=%u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=gnome-terminal
Categories=GTK;Graphics;
MimeType=inode/directory;
StartupNotify=false
TargetEnvironment=Unity
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewTerminal
[NewTerminal Shortcut Group]
Name=New Terminal
Exec=gnome-terminal
TargetEnvironment=Unity

My experience with Screenlets and Conky

Last few days I looking for some thing new for natty desktop after sysmonitor screenlet gave up on me. Well my options were
1. Running plasma under gnome.
2. Conky.
3. Continue with screenlets.

Well the first option I gave up soon as I saw how to get it running. Damn I'm not ready to give up Nautilus desktop to plasma :D. So next option was to try out was conky. Well it was not quit good experience to get it up and running. Since it didn't had a GUI to manage the widgets it was bit hard at first. Then I thought to give it up and update the existing screenlet installation using the PPA. Well again I though why I should I sacrifice my memory (since screenlet took nearly 9mb per each widget) I gave a another try on lovely conky. Well I must admit that I was enchanted by the lovely widget which was there on OMG and Davianart. It took less memory as well (around 2mb). Well going through the manual helped me alot. And nice thing is the concky script syntax was really easy to catch-up when compared to learning python :). It turned out to really nice once I did some changes in widget and ran it to see how it looks like. And chaging the script cause the widget takes changes instantly which is really great.
So I think I'll let go screenlets and stick with conky :)

Using GIT with Subversion

In this post I will go through how to use git together with subversion side by side. Lets say your working in project which uses subversion as the SCM. But you and your team is asked to implement a CR. Now you have a requirement to share the code between your team members while you are working on different parts of the CR. One way is to commit changes to main repo. But if you have CI this will lead to build failures which is not good. So the other option is to use a searate repo for you requirment. So I have choose git for this. Its because it will not conflict with your svn metadata. And its distributed, therefore you don't need to setup a seperate server for this.

Here how you do it:
1. First tell one of your team member to checkout the project from subversion.

2. Then create a git repo for your project.

3. Create a .gitignore file and add the following line to avoid .svn metadata folders getting into to your git repo.

.svn/

4. Now add all files you want to track onto git index. Add the rest of the files you don't like to track by git in to ignore list.

5. Then commit the changes to the git repo.

6. Now tell the other members to take a copy of your .git folder and past it into their project folder. After doing that they can do a hard reset which will sync the working tree with the git repo that was just copied.

7. Now they need to add your repo as a remote repo. You need to share your project directory to do this.

8. Then they can do a fetch and do a merge to make sure it works fine.

9. Now you could add them as remote repo as well and do step 7 to make sure its working.

10. Now you all can work on your working copy as you wish and commit things into your local repo when you think it's done and ok to share with other members.

11. To get your changes they need to do a fetch and merge.

12. If they get a conflict during the merge git will not commit the changes. So they need to resolve them before committing. One way to do it is by manually resolving the conflict by using git merge tool. Other way is checkout using --ours or --theirs options. The first will keep the original file and ignore the remote changes. The second will do the opposite. After resolving the conflicts you need to add the files into the index and commit the merge changes.

13. If change your mind and want to revert the merge because you got conflicts, then do a hard reset which revert the merge.

14. When its time to commit changes to subversion, then you can do it using your favorite subversion tool. This will not be a big task since you have the svn metadata. One thing important is to do this commit by one person always. Other wise you see conflicts because you have the same change in your working copy with different subversion metadata since you have taken those changes from git. But its matter of ignoring those conflicts since you know they are not and committing the changes you want to subversion.

If you get things configured correctly you will save lot of time in applying patch files and copy past code here and there. But if you not get it configured correctly then you will loose lot of your time on just trying to share the code. Time is money for your managment ;).

Skyline movie sucks

Watching the skyline movies was a total wast of time. Thank god it was only 1hr 30min :D. Its a movies with lots of special effects and no story behind it. I preffer to watch over the Transformers series or The Independence Day over this one.