Thursday, 18 June 2009

Troubleshooting linux #1

Recently I was trying out Digit April 2009 DVDs on my openSUSE 11.1. After checking out a DVD, when I tried to eject it my taskbar froze and the plugged in devices popup remained on top of other applications.

However, KRunner was working fine so I fired up Konsole and entered super user mode with the following command.
su
After that I started investigating with the following commands.
df -h
ps aux
The DVD was obviously mounted. So, I tried to unmount it using the following command.
umount -v /media/Digit-April09DVD
The message told me that the device is busy. So, I checked the output of ps command keenly to locate what could be keeping the device busy. I found some kaffeine instances:
phoenix 6015 2.7 4.6 518808 47192 ? Sl 18:24 0:40 /opt/kde3/bin/kaffeine /media/Digit-April09DVD/Entertainment/Videos/ComputerGames/Computer1984_4_256kb.mp4
phoenix 6032 0.0 1.4 144980 14856 ? S 18:25 0:00 /opt/kde3/bin/kaffeine /media/Digit-April09DVD/Gaming/Game_Trailers/bioshock2/bioshock2_excl_debuttsr_gt.mov
phoenix 6033 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 18:25 0:00 [kaffeine]
phoenix 6076 0.0 1.4 144980 14856 ? S 18:32 0:00 /opt/kde3/bin/kaffeine /media/Digit-April09DVD/Gaming/Game_Trailers/bioshock2/bioshock2_excl_debuttsr_gt.mov
phoenix 6077 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 18:32 0:00 [kaffeine]
phoenix 6080 0.0 1.4 144980 14840 ? S 18:33 0:00 /opt/kde3/bin/kaffeine /media/Digit-April09DVD/Gaming/Game_Trailers/bioshock2/bioshock2_excl_debuttsr_gt.mov
phoenix 6081 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 18:33 0:00 [kaffeine]
So, I promptly killed them and then ejected the DVD manually.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Challenge your limits

If you thought M. L. Khanna's book was the bulkiest you would encounter, check this out.

Wednesday, 3 June 2009

treachery

Cheney admitted he lied US into war.

Monday, 1 June 2009

looooooong lifetime OLED

DuPont has achieved a record lifetime of over 1,000,000 hours with OLED. Future displays are consuming less power and are becoming gentler on the eye.

Friday, 29 May 2009

misuse of SEO

Gradually as Google has risen, so has the popularity of SEO. However, along with them, misuse of SEO has also risen substantially. I remember a few months back I was looking for some organization and the organization's webpage was listed in Google's second page while related articles and some unnecessary pages were listed on the first page.

Obviously, you can argue that those articles were more important the page of the organization. Well since I dont have any screenshots I can't prove much. You have the choice of not trusting me in that case. However, I could not find much important materials in the webpages pointed to by the links on the first page.

Such instances of hoax results are uncommon; but their number is growing. One of the major reasons is misuse of SEO. Recently, I found another instance of SEO misuse. The tags on the article and the content are obviously unrelated.

Google depends heavily on SEO techniques. I hope it improvises on this soon.

Saturday, 23 May 2009

The changing web

We all know the web is changing and along with it our lives as well (though the extent and kind of change is determined by the our own decisions). While surfing I found this. I was impressed to see the way it responded to mouse gestures. The design is intuitive. Developments like these are welcome. They make proper use of the power of current technologies. I could see Google's philosophy playing a role. The interface was not coming in the way.

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

Ida

Ida is the nickname of a fossil (Well there are stranger things in this world; no need to wonder so much about a fossil having a nickname.) found in the US. It is considered to be an essential connection between modern higher primates - monkeys, apes and humans - and more distant relatives.