Changing windows product key from command line

1. In the CMD admin window, type: slmgr.vbs -ipk
2. Activate windows after changing the key, slmgr.vbs -ato

Auto blogs

I like reading blogs especially related to automobiles.

Here are some Indian blogs

Team-BHP

Drivoblog Tirthankar Basu, I envy your vision "Many Dreams, Many Kilometers"

vicky.in

International blog

Autoblog

Lemme know if there are any good ones that I should follow

Paddle Shift : Ford Taurus

Its been a long weekend, July 4th, American Independence Day and we set out to see fireworks @ Savannah
This time we got the mean machine, Ford Taurus SEL version.

It has got all the electronic gizmos that you expect a bit more. Yeah Paddle shift baby !!.  Oh if you dont know about paddle shift read about it here.  

If you see the pic the two levers projecting from the steering does the job.  Put the gear in M mode. Drive off u can do up-shift with either of two levers. When u slow down down shift is done automatically. Well this is not as fun  to drive as fully manual but better than Automatic transmission. At-least u can rev her up.

Synergy plus

Ever thought of controlling multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse and with out using a KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch ?

Try out the free software synergy plus. The only demand put by synergy plus all the computers that you control has to be connected to an Ethernet. No matter the machines has Linux, Windows, Mac or even ipad, synergy does its job. Even you can do copy paste from one machine to another. BTW I stole this image from here

Multiple Desktops in windows 7

I always wondered why Microsoft didn't care about multiple desktops feature in their No:1 Market share operating system. Linux had this feature from the Day 1 the KDE or GNOME was in place. From a developer point of view I suppose its a very simple feature. You have a desktop class, Just create multiple instances of it.

Anyways I used to use  Ubuntu Linux for all my work and Windows when I need excel or power point. Once I started using Windows 7, I'm kinda addicted to it. The Aero interface is uber cool and its really FAST !!!.. Needless to say, I have a Dual core with a 4gig RAM. I have been looking for 3rd party softwares for the Multiple Desktop feature in Windows 7. I tried many virtual desktop, NVIDIA Nview etc. I would say all of them are not stable and crashes at times or doesn't have the features that i need.  Then I came across the dexpot software for windows which provides multiple desktops feature.You can download the tool from here . Its much stable and its FREE !!. It has got all the bells a whistles you need. So go ahead and try it out and if it crashes let them know :D

Mission STS 132 : A dream come true

Alright for those who dont know, I'm a space enthusiast. Yeah lets get back and write some boring stuff "AMBITIONS". I had like 3 ambitions. First I wanted to be a test driver for the super car companies, second aerospace engineer, third astronaut. Guess what I ended up being a couch potato starring at the laptop. The  glorified software engineer.

Anyways end of digression back to the point "SPACE". I used to follow the rocket launches, Space station build, Mars landing etc and always wished to see a rocket launch live. Luckily I'm in Florida and the Kennedy Space Center is like 2.5hrs drive from my place, they had a shuttle launch (Mission STS 132) scheduled last Friday and its summer vacation I dont have any classes.

We ( 5 of us ) decided to head to flag off the shuttle. Augmenting the excitement we got a Pontiac G6 with 3.5L V6 monster under the hood.

We started at 11am. Had an awesome drive till Orlando other than annoying toll booths on the highway. WTF. America is so rich still toll !!. Anyways we took a short break at Orlando at Mcd. The Cape Canaveral  launch pad is like 40 mts drive from Orlando. We had a 1 hour buffer. Then comes the traffic. I lived in bangalore for 4 years and I have seen worse. At least here it moves. But still we thought we r gonna miss the launch. After 30 mts the traffic got less and I used my Indian driving experience, floored the gas pedal  to 95-100mph along with crazy lane changes . Thank God I guess cops went for the launch as well.

Yeah we reached the river were most of the people camp for watching the shuttle launch. The place is like 3-4 miles from launch pad. We asked a guy when is it gonna lift off. He said "Dude u've got 15 seconds". Oh boy that could have been a  near miss. The final count down begins 10, 8 ,7 ....1, lift off. Its the best thing I have ever seen. Two long flames from the solid rocket boosters and short flames from shuttle engines. In 10 seconds from lift off we could feel the sonic boom. The cars that parked were kinda vibrating. Well here are some pics. We didn't click the lift off as we didn't wanna miss the initial show.

Seeing all this I got jealous of the astronauts who are in the shuttle. I felt as if they are looking at me and saying What the heck are you doing down there you have better things to do !!. Oh yeah i can do better things. Hey astronaut r u seeing, You are floating at 13000mph.. I'm sitting idle, enjoying the beach breeze and gravity and I'm gonna get "high" soon !!

Tabspace in vim

For those vim users who care about code intendation.,You may put this in vimrc. For those who not or your favourite IDE is gonna auto intend for you then exit(0) ;)

set expandtab (Tab key will create spaces)
set tabstop=4  (If you need 4 spaces for a tabkey. thtz wht I use)


set shiftwidth=4 (The auto indent aligns putting 4 spaces for the nestings for loops etc..)

Totally useless..unless you are in UFL

This is the schedule of classes at UFL. Here people say I have class at period 1, I'm free at period 6 etc. I always get confused with the mapping between period and their scheduled timings. I decided to put it here, so I can quickly look  up.

Period 1     7:25                            
Period 2     8:30                            
Period 3     9:35                            
Period 4     10:40                            
Period 5     11:45                            
Period 6     12:50    
Period 7     1:55    
Period 8     3:00              
Period 9     4:05                            
Period 10    5:10                            
Period 11    6:15

Google chrome on Linux

Today Google released the chrome browser for Linux. I was desperately waiting for the release. And u know why. I'm a big fan of the porn mode.;) oops !!! the in-cognito mode in chrome. I don't like the private mode in Firefox as it opens a new private session after saving your current session.  When you close the private session, ure old session will be restored. Gosh !! its way too complicated. Chrome simply opens an in-cognito window.

Again Thank You Google...

Family restroom

Ever heard of a family restroom. Well seeing is believing

Found it in KOHLS Gainesville during our thanks giving morning walk. Here is an excerpt from wiki about Family Restroom

Another recent development in public toilets is the gender-neutral toilet or "family restroom". These areas contain multiple stalls designed for maximum privacy and a communal washing area for use by both genders. The family restroom is designed so that a parent with a young child of the opposite gender can take the child into the restroom without the concerns associated with single-gender restrooms. Family restrooms have started appearing in newly-built sports stadiums, amusement parks, shopping malls, and major museums.

F-spot

Hey its not a so called bad word like ****.  Its an open source photo management software for Linux.  I dont know if  **** is the motivation behind naming the software. Anyways i liked the software very much. The best feature to be highlighted is the way F-spot imports photo  from your digicam. The import is done in a hierarchical manner. Oops am i getting too techy !!.. Well lets take an example. Suppose you are going for a week long trip to Canada. Everyday you took pit stops at say Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto respectively and took your  favorite snaps. After the trip you are back at home. You put the digicam memcard in your laptop and copy the pics. Lets say you want to share  only the photos from Vancouver. Well you have to sort the pics with date and select them accordingly. Here comes F-spot.  F-spot imports the photos from your memcard  and separates them based on the date which you took them.

The created folders will be of the Format

Year/Day

You can navigate to the day where you visited Vancouver. see and share the pics.

You can do all sort of basic photo editing like you do in picassa. With export to web albums feature, You can upload your pics to picassa, flicker etc..

Try F-spot and let me know the feedback....

Wish List

1)  Sky diving

2)  Drive a Ferrari and Lambhorgini Diablo

3)  Wing suit flying

4)  To fly a F-35 Lightining

5)  To spend a week in International Space station 

Well I'm looking for sponsors..Let me know if anyone is interested :)

Automation with expect

For doing project i have to ssh to the Tesla machine in the college as i don't have GPU on my laptop. At times the connection is so slow that its difficult to even type. So i decided to do the coding on my laptop and do the build in the Tesla machine. This needed frequent transfer of files for which i use sftp. Each time invoking sftp and typing in commands is a pain. I wanted to somehow automate this. Googled and came to know about the expect command. The command can be used to automate tasks which needs user interaction. In other words expect talks to other programs using a script. I browsed through the expect man page and I felt writing a script for expect is not that easy for newbies. Well here comes autoexpect script which will generate the script for you.

The expect comes with default installation of most Linux distros but not autoexpect. You can download the required packages from here.

If you are using Ubuntu 9.10 you can use apt

sudo apt-get install expect-dev

The autoexpect script is located in /usr/bin/expect_autoexpect file

Now lets see how we can automate sftp to put a file a.cpp to the some host

girish@MATRIX:~$ expect_autoexpect sftp user@host
autoexpect started, file is script.exp
Connecting to host...

user@host's password:
sftp> mput a.cpp
Uploading a.cpp to /home/user/a.cpp
a.cpp                                              100% 
sftp> bye
autoexpect done, file is script.exp

Now run the script.exp..Bingo!! it  automatically does the sftp operation. with 0% interaction from you.  Ok wait here is a catch.!! Open the script script.exp. You will be shocked to see the password in pure text smiling at you. This is no way acceptable. Well here is the work around.

Add these lines before spawn in the script

send_user "Enter password: "
stty -echo
expect_user -re "(.*)\n" {set PASSWORD $expect_out(1,string)}
send_user "\n"

stty echo

When the script is run it asks for your password and store it in  the variable $PASSWORD. stty -echo ensures password wont be echoed. Change the line where your password is shown to

send "$PASSWORD\r"

You are good to go. But you have to enter password each time you run the script. If you are too lazy for this and not concerned about security, stick on with the original script. Hopefully expect will add an option to encrypt password in the generated script.

vim:: Restore cursor to file position in previous editing session

Add these lines to .vimrc file.


if has("autocmd")
  autocmd BufReadPost *
  \ if line("'\"") > 0 && line ("'\"") <= line("$") |
  \   exe "normal! g'\"" |
  \ endif
endif


You can read more about autocmd here

configuring xterm

Few tips for configuring xterm
Configuring Font:
Run the command xfontsel

This will open an X window where you can configure font parameters.

Copy the values from the dialog box. Create a .Xresources file in the home directory and paste  it there.

Sample .Xresources file

XTerm*font: -*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*foreground:white
XTerm*geometry: 80x40


Instead of .Xresources file you can have a custom file say xsettings and run the command xrdb -merge xsettings

Professor names in CLR exercise questions

Im taking the course Analysis of Algorithms under Dr Arunava Banerjee. The textbook is the standard book Introduction to Algorithms by CLR.  Some of the exercise questions  in the book refers to professor names. Like Professor ABC claimed theorem XYZ. Give a counter example etc etc. I wondered if they were really professor names. Well as usual googled and found the answer.

All these are some real personalities (not professors) and the question is to make fun of them.

Example:

Page 557 of the book refers to Professor Deaver

The exercise is on strongly connected components, and Michael Deaver used his connections to excess in the Reagan administration.

Firefox addons

One of the reasons i chose to move from IE to Firefox is the availability of tons of addons. These are the addons I use

Tree style tab : This makes the tab bar vertical and the new tabs will be opened as children to the current tab making the tab bar look like a tree. Its very useful for me because I hardly close the browser (unless it crashes). So by the end of day there'll be lotta tabs sitting in the tab bar and its very difficult to find a tab or close a group of tabs. Vertical bar makes this job easier. When the parent tab is closed, u can choose to close children as well. Since the bar is vertical with tabs kept one below the other, there is more room for tab headings which you can read. The bad part is vertical bar takes up some part of the screen. But it doesnt matter if ure using high resolution .

All in one gestures :  While browing through web pages ill be mostly using mouse.  This addon enables all the keyboard shortcuts with mouse gestures. Takes a while to get used to it. But its funny to use. Not recommended for laptop touch pads as well as non-optical mice.

Down them all  : Download accelerator. Integrates very well with conext menus.

You tube video download :  Shows up links for normal and HQ video download.

 

Sage: A simple reader for RSS feeds. Nicely integrates along with the Tree Style tab.

Xmarks: Synchronizes the bookmarks among multiple machines. The best part is addon supports inter browser synchronization. You can even synchronize passwords and open tabs.

Let me know if there are any good ones that can be added to the list.

Morning Glory Clouds

I stole this from APOD. For those of  you dont know APOD, its Astronomy picture of the Day. The website is maintained by NASA and Michigan Technological University. Each day they upload an astronomy picture and a short description of the picture. For those space enthusiasts out there its worth checking it everyday atleast u can find something to put in your blog :).  Read more about these clouds here.

Karmic Koala

This is the so called scientific name of Ubuntu 9.10. Installed it yesterday. Wow its really fast !!. The shutdown happens in less than 5 seconds and boots up in around 25 seconds on my Toshiba E105-S1602 laptop. Canonical claims its faster than windows 7. Well im waiting for my windows 7 DVD from Toshiba. I will have a better comparison then.  Oh the xterm background is white and the font is black by default. I dont know whatz the motivation behind that and i hate terminals with white backgrounds (Well the blog is white background ;). Its not good for mother nature either as white pixels eat up more power ;). Other than that Koala comes with ext4 file system, GRUB 2.0. I have to read about whatz new with these. Im playing around with the bundled softwares. More on this later.

My First blog

I dont know what to write. Lets start with some rubbish. I Googled a lot to find a catchy name for my blog. But i ended up in a stupid name "gi-random" which is very well my own creation. Dont ask me what it means. Of course the first two letters are from my name and the random is to add a bit of techieness.