3D Desktop in Linux

March 13, 2007 | Filed Under Linux | Leave a Comment 

Dynamic DNS

ADSL users who don’t have fixed IP from their ISPs can use Dynamic DNS services provided for free by several websites.  Personally, I use DynDNS .  DynDNS has lotsa features, you can find out more about them in their website, but I only use their free Dynamic DNS feature.

So, what is this?

Simple.  Since your ISP does not provide you with fixed IP, you will be getting different IP each time you login.  DynDNS will help you to tie your dynamic IP to some hostname - for e.g. yourname.dyndns.org.

Most of the ADSL modems has Dynamic DNS support, you enter your username and password on your modem and the modem will login and update your IP to your hostname.

How can you benefit from it?

Well, imagine if you are at work and you want to connect to your home machine.  So, all you have to remember is the hostname from DynDNS.  You can setup a torrent client at home and download torrents from your office, install web server and host your blog there, setup an FTP server and share the files with your friends and etc etc…

You must also know how to do port-forwarding on your modem in order to use all of the above mentioned examples.

March 13, 2007 | Filed Under internet | Leave a Comment 

ATM Monitoring in Ambank

Recently, I had the opportunity with three other vendors/freelancers to come up with a solution for their M$ ACCESS based “application” which record downtime of their ATMs. Basically it’s a .mdb file which is shared on a ms win server folder.

Before everything else, I was surprised how they “monitor” their ATM machines!  They literally watched the ATM reporting screen to see if the ATM was down.  I mean, a person is allocated for this task - just sit and stare at the monitor, if the ATM status goes down he needs to open their “application” and enter the downtime.

Anyway, they did a small presentation of their usage of this “application” and their expectation.  They wanted some applications which will replace theirs.  “Replace” not as in enhance or add-on new functions.  They just want to keep the way they “monitor”.

I must note that I was contacted long before this meeting with regard to this matter and I was planning to use Perl/Shell scripting in Linux to do all of this with a LAMP interface for reporting purposes.  But, it turns out that all their infrastructure as well as IT team is pro-Microsoft.  What to do?  They just want it in some Microsoft .NET or Visual Basic (is it the same now?).  So, unfortunately we fail.

We proposed to them a fully automated uptime/downtime tracking facility with auto generation of reports in Excel/PDF.

What I don’t understand is why they find it all right to have somebody just sit and watch the ATM monitor screen.  It’s wasting resources for nothing, instead of hiring/training a person to use Open Source stuff and make everybody’s life easy?

And, of course, some extra cash for me?

March 13, 2007 | Filed Under Programming, freelance | Leave a Comment 

Lenovo IBM Thinkpad R60

Ok, after my first post on my brand new blog, let me write about my beloved laptop.

It’s a Thinkpad R60. It has Intel Centrino Duo T2300 1.66GHz, 2MB cache, 667MHz, 945GM, 1256MB RAM, 60GB HDD and I upgraded to DVD-RW.  It has no bluetooth or infrared, but it has - as any of the decent modern laptops - WiFi.

The reason we choose this model among other Lenovo IBM Thinkpads was it does not come with any OS (if we don’t count FreeDOS).  This way I’m allowed to run whatever I want without any limitations.  I have tried almost all the popular Linux/BSD distros so far on this laptop and currently I have a strip down of Ubuntu linux with XFCE 4-4.4.0.

I will, in the future, posts my experience installing and configuring various distros and softwares on this laptop.

March 12, 2007 | Filed Under Laptops | 1 Comment 

welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog!

After a long time of planning and thinking, I started my own blog.

So, welcome to my blog, please register yourself in order to leave comments.

Arstan

March 11, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 
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