The fastest Download Manager for Linux is on its way!
I've been disappointed by the state of linux download managers for quite some time. While on the Windows platform, some excellent download managers exist such as FlashGet, Internet Download Manager and Download Accelerator Pro, besides many others. What is it that sets these download managers apart? Its their support for what I call "multithreaded downloading", enabling them to download different parts of a single large file in multiple streams, independantly of each other! The benefit: an exponential increase in download speed. On a shared 2 MB/s if I use the ordinary linux download managers: kget,wget etc.. I dont get more than 50Kbps, but because I'm short on time, I go to a windows machine with one of the above download managers installed, and guess what the speed is: 160-220 kbps! Its not a Windows vs. Linux issue, its just that a 'serious' download manager in my opinion has never been developed for Linux. But this will soon change! I've started a project, in python which aims to be feature compatible to the download managers I've mentioned above. I've developed the module which allows me to download a file in independant chunks, parrallely. I'll keep you all posted on the progress. I'm also thinking of using Jython for this project, to create powerful Java frontend for it, so that people in Windows/Mac don't have to use those download managers above and pay licenses!
Are there any features which you would like to see in this download manager, for now I'm calling it Py/Downloader?
Craigslist coming to Pakistan
Well not exactly, but a craigslist inspired service is in development here in Pakistan. The website is called "YayCheez" a slang word used to denote an emotion where "you get what you wanted" (can be interpreted wrongly, I mean materially).
The site is still beta, and I would encourage people to start using it to iron out any bugs in the system. There are some e-shops available for the Pakistani market like ShopHive which sell new stuff but support only a limited number of cities, but this website is like a place where you could get new aswell as used stuff, and its extremely useful if you want to get some stuff (Ipod??) which is not available in large parts of the country.
Having had a cursory glance there are two things which I would request the developers to work on:
One is a rating system, where people could rate people with whom they had some transactions, this is to ensure that good sellers/buyers get recognition and future sellers/buyers can have increased trust in the person concerned. There are some real problem related to trust b/w buyers and sellers esp. in Pakistan. I was initially thinking of proposing an embedded video conference system embedded in the site, but that's impractical in Pakistan, where most users are behind dialup connections. However I'm also not comfortable with actually meeting someone and performing a transaction right there. In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, for example street crime is very common, how can I be sure that the buyer who is meeting me is not someone who would rob me at gunpoint? In the US you have atleast the police/legal system to fall back on, but neither is the case in Pakistan. But I'm confident that the people behind the website are innovative and will think of something to handle this. Maybe the readers can propose something?
Another thing which I would recommend the developers to improve upon is the interface! It's a web 1.0 website, which is hard to navigate and in my first try, I didnt even know how to post something. Amongst other things I would recommend the developers to use CAPTCHA in the signup forms, otherwise the system would be really vulnerable to spam.
Never host with Serversea!
Earlier this year, we were looking for a hosting service, where we could host our website, one of my collegues, Shuaib Khan, recommended to us to host with Serversea, because they provided good service and were cheap, just $30 per annum! We went for it, but now we realize that this was a mistake! Serversea advertises 99% availability, however to be honest this figure is closer to 30%. Just now I was updating our website, and the domain went down!! I'm an incredibly busy person and I don't get much time to do stuff like website updates etc. But when I do get the time, the domain is down!!!! The Serversea setup is riddled with problems: Just when we started, the mailing lists won't work! then the archives were not being created, there were problems with authentication later on. Once the mails from the serversea server were blocked because of spam originating from their networks, which put us in an awkward position, as we could not interact with our international collaborators.
So just to say summarize it all: avoid ServerSea, the money you will save will be compensated with your time, so just go for a better hosting service!
My Blog is 100 days Old!
What an incredible 100 days it has been. Before I started my blog my mail was flooded by mails from the Linux Kernel developers mailing list. But during the last 100 days, it's increasingly flooded from comments to my posts 
.
During the first 100 days, the blog amassed 30,000+ page views. Recieved 169 genuine comments and 141 Spam comments. There have been 38 posts. The largest number of views in a single day was for the "Happy birthday KDE!" post, which got close to 10,000 views, because it was digged!
Before starting my blog there was no reference to me when you searched "Irfan Habib" in Google. Now this blog makes it to the first page!
In the last 100 days, God has been gracious to me! In October my first research publication was presented at the International Conference of Grid and Cooperative Computing, Changhsa, China. Tommorrow I have another research paper presentation at the 4th Workshop on the Frontiers of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. I also got my admission to a PhD programme which involves research work at CERN. I also got a publication in the Linux Journal. Earned more than $3,200, which allowed me to purchase my first Notebook. Another thing which happened in the last 100 days was the openSuse 10.2 was released !
My tip to everyone is that they should keep doing something that they love (but make sure that that thing is productive, not unlike one of my friends who keeps watching TV serials and is the most unproductive member of our research team), and always keep their trust with God, and success will find you.
Linux Rocks!
This is not another article where I'll go about saying why Linux is cool etc! I came to this conclusion when I was running simulations on a highperformance UltraSPARC IIIi system running Solaris 10. Sure its faster than any Linux workstation we have in the lab (UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5 Ghz beats Pentium4c 3.0 GHz hands down!). But when a Linux workstation is running the identical simulations as the SunBlade 1500 Workstation, the speed is obviously faster in the SunBlade station, HOWEVER more crucially in the Linux system the quality of service, in terms of the response to the user's actions like mouse moves or opening of some application is not at all affected whereas in the solaris machine the interface behaves as if the machine has jammed, its only through SSH I know that it is running!This is a failure of scheduling, the Solaris OS probably doesnt give higher priority to the user input than executing compute intensive tasks. I'll try to publish some results comparing the affects of compute intensive applications on the QoS of both systems. Maybe some geek can recommend me some tests to perform?
OpenSuse completely supports my Notebook!
Good news for Dell Inspiron Users: Your notebook is completely supported in OpenSuse 10.2
You can check out these tutorials for getting ubuntu run on Dell Inspiron and this one for Fedora. What do both have in common? Massive manual configuration encompassing kernel recompilations and what not.
However in OpenSuse 10.2, I didnt have to do any special configuration at all to get my hardware running. OpenSuse 10.1 supported everything except the MMC card reader (from Ricoh). Now this is supportedd aswell.
However one thing that is not supported is hardly openSuse's fault: The Connexant Modem. Connexant Modems are notorious for their proprietory hardware standards and focus on the Windows users! Besides I hardly use a dialup connection so this is irrelevant for me. For those reader who do use dial-up connections, I would suggest that you get those cheap external modems (hardly $30).
Ubuntu came to fame purely through marketting and hype! I believe that OpenSuse is the better Desktop/Notebook distro and without any proportional marketting/advocacy large parts of the human population will be deprieved of the 'better' Linux. I personally will soon get a pack of DVD's and spread it amongst my friends.
Linux expected to be leading Smartphone OS market by 2010
I just came across this research by Diffusion Group, which found that Linux is set to become the leading Smartphone OS by 2010. I don't have access to the full report which one has to purchase but from my experience from using a Linux based smartphone, Motorola E680i, I can say this is very much possible but some hurdles remain.
Motorola E680i smartphone, is an amazing phone and I fell in love with it when I first saw it. It has everything one would expect from a smartphone: large Touchscreen, bluetooth, voice recognition, productivity applications like Picsel, camera etc. It's based on Montavista Linux, and the price was just a bit over $300. One strength Linux has which other can't compete with is the price! Linux is free, hence Linux based smartphone manufacturers only charge for the hardware and software licensing is kept at a minimum. It does not however mean that there is no money to be made for smartphone Linux providers, because as I previously stated most money in open source is made from services either for open source software (support) or on open source software (Google), not with open source software (selling licenses). Once the Linux smartphone market starts to take off I'm sure a lot of support companies will spring up, aswell as applications which would run on the open source platform.
Now, although the platform (kernel space) is ready to take over the smartphone OS market, the user space is NOT. One thing that bugs me a lot about my smartphone is the lack of native applications, you can run Java applications and there filling most of my needs. Windows CE/Mobile based phone have a large eco-system of applications which they can use, but this eco-system does not exist for Linux. And it was actively discouraged by Motorola in the beginning, when it didn't release the user level libraries to support native application development. Thanks God, Motorola has come around and released those libraries, and a vibrant community (Seem to be having server problems since the last month) has sprung up which provide valuable services to Motorola Linux smartphone users.
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