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Archive for September, 2005

Ham radio License

September 23rd, 2005 1 comment

I had almost forgotten about my ham radio license. I wrote the examination at Trivandrum centre of WPC on 20th January 2004. I was expecting a license in 4 to 5 months time. But nothing happened for a long time. I thought something had gone wrong after reading Ramakrishnan’s experience about ham license in India . Fortunately, Sunu Sthaynathan came to learn Linux from me . It seems, he is a hardcore ham. He virtualy forced me to call up Mr. Irshad Ahemed at WPC Delhi. Mr.Ahamed today faxed me a letter stating that the ministry had decided to grant me a Grade 1 license back in 2004. It seems they sent some letter in November 2004. It has not reached me yet! I am sending all the particulars and demand draft towards license fee today and I hope I will be on the air soon.
By the way Ramakrishnan’s weblog is a wonderful source of information related to ham radio and debian.

Categories: Ham Radio Tags:

cdrecord on sarge

September 16th, 2005 Comments off

I havent burned cds on linux for ages now. Today I was trying to make one. It seems you no longer needs scsi emulation on 2.6 kernels. I had some trouble with cdrecord on my sarge box at home. cdrecord -scanbus said.

cdrecord: Warning: Running on Linux-2.6.12.3
cdrecord: There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer.
I googled a bit and found out the reason in the following link.
http://programming.linux.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/09/1341236&mode=thread&tid=40&tid=91

I used the fiollowing commands on my debian sarge box running 2.6.12

a) scanbus
cdrecord -scanbus dev=/dev/hdb
b) blank
cdrecord -V dev=/dev/hdb blank=all
c) burn
cdrecord -V dev=/dev/hdb debian.iso
( -VV flooded my screen )
you can try out -eject and speed=48

cdrecord manual has some good example on burning different formats. (I am yet to try making a VCD)

Categories: Gnu/Linux Tags:

Programming Linux

September 7th, 2005 Comments off

There is a good discussion on Tri(g)lug mail list after I posted this this.
Some of the arguments put forward by Mr. Kannan are convincing. I have to agree with him on the duration of the course . My idea is to give help to aspiring students. I was teaching a group of students from a leading engineering college last year. Most of them were slightly acquainted with Linux. The sequence given in my posting is a broad snap shot of what I taught. I have seen that those with a proper logic and some programming experience can migrate very easily.

Most of our engineering college teachers are still using Turbo C to teach C programming. So Their students will be suddenly at a loss if they see gcc. My idea is to remove this road block and help them to easily migrate. I think some of my old students are list members. I am sure that they will be able to shed more light on this aspect.

Categories: Gnu/Linux Tags: