Shaakunthala's Portal

I have been a silent blogger for more than one year. It's actually one year and one month since I have published my last post on 10 January 2011. Things have changed a lot around me and now I'm not even using the Sony Ericsson phone mentioned in my last post!

Two things happened in the last year... on February I got a new phone as a gift from a friend, and on October I got a bike. That's it! Made in India, and called Hero Honda Hunk. It is said that this bike can topped to 112 km/h. For me that's not enough top speed, but this is one of the most stable bikes made in India. Most others waggle and vibrate, but Hunk is very stable at speed.



Due to the extreme excitement of the bike, I'd just forget to mention the phone! It's a Nokia 5230 and not that handy, but enough for my day-to-day activities. Same as most Nokia cameraphones, this one's camera is also not suitable for professional photography. But, its video recording is pretty good.

I really love to ride this Hunk... (despite of its gay name :-) ) it brings lots of excitement every time when it's over 100. Its stability at higher speeds, and stability when cornering, wheelies, stoppies... everything eventually tempted me to have a video collection of it. This is how I become interested in making a HelmetCam. I don't have much of equipments for this, and I've heard somewhere that a professional HelmetCam kit costs over US $200. So why not use my own cameraphone? Here, I'll explain how to get it prepared with a Symbian (Nokia) phone.

The simple setup is to wear your helmet, and then put the cameraphone in, and fasten it. This setup has a problem. Why? Whenever the touchscreen/ keypad hits your nose or somewhere in your face, there's a probability for video recording to interrupt. Or even it can dial emergency while you are on ride!

This is the time for SymDVR to shine. SymDVR is a very handy app which can turn your cameraphone into a DVR with lots of options. The main reason for using this app is, unlike your phone's in-built video recording application this allows you to lock the screen/ keypad while recording. This is a huge advantage as it also keeps the phone's backlight off while recording.


Other advantages include that it can calculate your riding speed using GPS and include as subtitles, landscape recording while keeping the phone in vertical position, etc.

Go to SymDVR homepage, download and install the app on your Nokia phone. Start the application, choose appropriate settings and start video recording. Once you start recording, you will see a Nokia Menu icon on the screen. Tap on it, and SymDVR will continue to record video, running in the background. Now it can be placed even inside your underwear without interrupting the record. :D

Be sure to have a strap for your phone. You can fasten the helmet's strap across phone's strap to make sure it's safe in case if your phone loosens inside the helmet and falls down on to the road. Other than that, the phone will fall onto the road making you distracted, eventually turning you into dead meat. If you don't have a strap, just go and buy. It won't cost much. This is important to avoid accidental distractions.

Image courtesy: fadbus.com

Now, we need to have is a full face helmet. We are going to need a full face helmet because then only it can be held between your face and the helmet.



If you plan to try this out in Sri Lanka, be sure to choose a helmet with a dark tinted visor. Most of the traffic cops are weird jerks, and if they see the cameraphone inside helmet they will remake the story as you were having a phone call while riding. (They just want you to invite them for a bribe). That's Sri Lankan traffic cops. So beware of them.

Firstly hold your phone vertically, and start recording on SymDVR. Then click on Nokia Menu icon to allow SymDVR to run in background, and lock the screen/ keypad. Even if you hold it vertically, SymDVR will record the video clip in landscape mode without having you to flip the phone, and without affecting the clip size.Then, while wearing the helmet, place the cameraphone in the helmet in the way shown in the photo below. It will fit between your face and the helmet.  Finally, cross the straps as described above.

In this setup, cameraphone fits between my face and helmet.

Make sure that your sight is not disturbed by the position of the camera. Letting it cover one eye and seeing the road by the other is prone for accidents. You need your both eyes to get the correct idea of distance to other vehicles on the road. If you still unsure why, read more about depth perception.

If it doesn't fit into your helmet you will have to find a workaround. A good suggestion that I have seen over the Internet is to use Velcro, but the problem is that you will have glue it onto the phone. :-/

Another suggestion of is to use a phone holder such as Nokia CR-119. You will have to remove the cone shaped part which in normal use attaches to a vehicle windshield. Carefully mount the phone into the holder facing the camera out. This arrangement will take more space inside the helmet, and it will fit better if your head is small. :-)

Make sure that camera is facing directly front. Start your ride, bang all over the city. Forget about the phone and enjoy your ride as much as possible.

A great feature that I really love on SymDVR is that it can measure your speed using GPS. This can be different from the actual speed , plus or minus 2 km/h, but with this feature on you don't have to look at the speedometer to get the speed on video. It also helps a lot to avoid distraction. Speed is recorded in a separate subtitle file (srt), and later you can use a video encoding software to merge it with the video file.

Once you are done, take the phone out, and open up SymDVR. Properly stop recording or otherwise you will end up with a corrupted video file. It will take a moment for the video file to be prepared. Once done, you can connect the phone to PC in Mass Storage Mode, and transfer the video file to your PC. It's in \SymDVR\ directory on your phone's memory card. This is by default hidden if you are using Windows on your PC.

After recording if you want to embed subtitles into the video, I recommend using mencoder. If you just want to trim the video file, you can use ffmpeg to get it done without affecting the video quality.

---

I have done some helmetcam videos using this setup. And.... here goes my first performing a stoppie somewhere near the end.........


And another I took at Malabe...


Well,... finally that's it! Thanks for reading.
Enjoy!!

If you've read my last post you'll find that I had a trip to Jaffna. Yes, it was last month, but I had nothing to do other than waiting for my internet connection to be restored. Sad. :( Early in the last month, our ADSL router seemed not working properly. So we handed it over to claim warranty. This caused me miss some important events including few career opportunities. I tried to use my mobile phone to connect, but it also failed. Although Airtel provides a very attractive and pleasing 'Youth Pack', no chance for us to use at least 100 MB of the 400 MB data bundle -- no 3G connectivity. I live in Ambalangoda, a well known coastal urban area in Sri Lanka, and I don't know why would such a big telecommunication service provider fail to offer a satisfactory service.

However, things are now OK as we got the router back yesterday evening. :)


Okey,... let's get back to the topic -- Jaffna. I had a chance to join a group of devotees who were on their way to Nainativu. For a person living in the Southern Province it's a fairly cheap travel to Jaffna. Since I'm a novice photographer I wanted to make this a chance to enjoy the art of photography also. So,... my K770i was back in action, althogh it has begun malfunctioning a bit. Here's the journey... (please click on each image to enlarge)



















































I have many more. Not all are worthy shots, but I've kept them because I believe that in any particular graphic any viewer other than myself may see something that I may never see. They're available to download.



Since sunlight is too heavy in the North province, lighting quality of raw photographs were poor. Even automatic white balance settings in my camera didn't work. So I had to do some post-fixes such as curves and levels, with the use of GIMP 2.6 software. This is something usually I don't like to do becuse I believe that the photographer must retain the original lighting conditions whenever possible; simply because photography is the art of capturing light.

Overall I'm not satisfied with my photography experience during this tour. I even missed several 24k shots. If you're a reader of my Sinhala blog, you could know that I had a wondeful experience in our tour last year. This time it was with a group of devotees and the tour was to worship Nainativu and some other religious activities. No no time to wait and capture light... what do do? :(

Okey... thanks for reading! Have a great time!!


PS:
If you use Airtel be sure to keep your phone in 'Flight mode' to save battery. Your Airtel SIM will act as a world class dumb SIM, as it is required for nothing but keeping few other phone functionalities other than communication. X(  

Hi fellas, after few days... I'm back again with some cool cool stuff. My internship is over... and now I look for new career opportunities. Anyhow, I was not so quick to apply for a new job like others did. After completing my internship, I wanted a 'free time' of just one or two weeks to have a tour around Sri Lanka.

So, I just had the tour. Amazingly, it was to Jaffna. I live in  Southern Province and going for a tour in Jaffna is just a daydream for a busy man. However, in any tour I have two main intentions, photography and flirting :P . (however I was not able to photograph her since her mom was there :-O )

I have been using a Sony Ericsson K770i phone for more than one year and that phone has made me a photography freak. But recently, it had encountered a problem with it's memory stick reader compartment. This really made me upset as my phone now can't read memory sticks. However, by deleting some wallpapers, ringtones, themes and midlets I managed to make some free space of 15 MB in the phone's internal memory. This is just enough for 15 photos at maximum possible quality. Sad! :(

Luckily I found another phone (a Chinese phone without a brand) which had a memory stick installed and bluetooth also. So my plan was to transfer photos into the Chinese phone over bluetooth after taking each 15 photographs, and delete originals to make free space on my phone for new photos... just like using a revolver ;) . It worked, but since bluetooth file transfer took longer than expected each time I missed few imoprtant shots as well. :(


Sony Cyber-shot cameras use a specific file naming convention. It's the DSC (Digital Still Camera) prefix before the five-digit file number (i.e. DSC00001.JPG, DSC00002.JPG, ...). Due to my 'revolver methodology' sometimes when I make free space my phone seemed to reset the file number. This resulted duplicate filenames, and upon transfer those duplicates were added a Dup(xx) prefix in their filenames. However, thanks to the Chinese phone, during the three days of tour I have been able to take nearly 300 photos, including few panoramas.

After coming home I wanted to arrange all the photos in the correct timeline. Since file naming has already been messed up it was no use arranging them by name. So the next chance is to arrange them by the modification time (unix mtime). Due to some unknown reason, there were some small misconjusnctions in the series when arranging by mtime. It was like Elephant Pass coming before Kilinochchi when heading to Jaffna. :P

So here comes the sorting problem... it's not the Sorting Problem that we learn at the computer science lecture, although we use the tools built upon those theories. I realized that playing with ctime, mtime and atime is just a waste of time... so I was looking for another solution. Yes!, there is. It's the Exif data stored with each file. I can extract the DateTimeOriginal tag from Exif and arrange the file accordingly. I am a Linux geek, so rather than doing a web search for an automated GUI tool  I wanted to do it by myself.

So my ultimate plan was to write a bash script that will check date-time from each file and rename them in the correct order. Also, I wanted them to follow the same DSC convention. There's a handy command line tool for reading image exif on Linux. It's exifprobe. Just an apt-get install is enough to get it installed on the computer. With exifprobe we have another handy tool called exifgrep. Now let us go ahead.

Here we extract the origianal date-time:
$ exifgrep -n DateTimeOriginal DSC00001.JPG

and the output will look like,
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:10 12:04:16'    # DSC00001.JPG:

What I want to do is to list each file against it's OriginalDateTime and then sort with Unix sort command. So it's just one more simple step, (I wanted the output in a text file too)

$ exifgrep -n DateTimeOriginal *.JPG | sort > sorted.txt

Here's a random portion of the output I got,

JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 12:18:54'    # Dup(01)DSC00046.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 12:20:39'    # DSC00048.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 12:23:13'    # Dup(01)DSC00052.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 13:31:30'    # DSC00001.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 13:31:49'    # DSC00002.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 13:32:38'    # DSC00003.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 13:34:07'    # Dup(01)DSC00004.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 13:48:40'    # DSC00007.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 14:01:13'    # Dup(02)DSC00008.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 14:24:49'    # Dup(01)DSC00014.JPG:
JPEG.APP1.Ifd0.Exif.DateTimeOriginal = '2010:09:11 14:25:43'    # Dup(02)DSC00015.JPG:

Now, it's the time to write the actual shell script. It's not a big deal actually, as you can see, so I don't need to explain.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir sorted
lines=`cat sorted.txt | wc -l`
for (( line=1; line<=$lines; line++ ))
do
  src=`cat sorted.txt | head -$line | tail -1 | awk '{ print $6 }' | cut -d: -f1`
  dest="DSC"`printf "%05d\n" $line`".JPG"
  cp $src sorted/$dest -v
done

Finally, after running this script I managed to get all photographs according to the timeline. I'll be writing a note about my Jaffna tour as soon as possible, and will be releasing some photographs under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Few of them (such as File:JaffnaPeninsula.JPG) are already available on Wikipedia! :-)

See also:

• EXIF.org - EXIF and related resources - specifications 
• exifprobe - camera image probe

Hi all, after about a one month of silence, I've thought of a nice story to share with you readers. How I switched to Linux.... well, I feel it interesting.... don't know how you'll feel. Just read... you don't need to be a geek. :-)

I live in Ambalangoda, 86 kilometers away from the capital of Sri Lanka and at that time the Internet and computers were not so popular in our area. Even I got my own personal computer in 2003. (I'm still talking about the situation before 2003) The main source of information were just newspapers, magazines, and library books. Because of my usual habit of reading everything I have, I got to know that there is something called Linux, some call it RedHat, and it is different from our Windows, we have to use it from the command line, no mouse,.. and blah blah..

However, after I got my own computer in 2003 (which had Windows installed by default -- obviously), I wanted to try out Linux. But, I couldn't find any installation media. And also, at that time I was living inside a 'Matrix' made by Windows, and I eventually forgot Linux.

In 2005, while I was studying for my A Level examination, one of my friends, who was spending his first year as an undergraduate at SLIIT, opened the door of open source to me. And that was Ubuntu! He was one of my closest friends, and we usually discuss technology related stuff and share our knowledge whenever we meet. He said that they study C programming language in their first semester, and the course is based on Linux.

Furthermore, as he introduced it to me, Ubuntu is a type of Linux, and it looks the same as Windows, you can install aside Windows, you can use the mouse, grapical user interface, you have nice themes, but can't play videos and music, and can't install any software that works with Windows.

So, it made me an Alice in the Wonderland, and I was very keen to learn more. I asked, "Don't we need to type a single command?" (that's what I've heard before). Then he showed me, "Here it is..." the terminal. For me it was amazing,... totally new and there's a whole World in front of me to explore, but, for most of the same aged individuals, it is not.

"Can I borrow your copy for two days?"

"Hey, it's yours!"

He gave me another copy containing two CDs of Ubuntu 5.10, with their logo originally printed on it. One Live CD - One Installation CD. Wow! it was free!!

Canonical, the maintainer of Ubuntu, was shipping large quantities of installation at that time. My friend has ordered 20 copies for re-distribution. But I'm pretty sure that nobody other than both of us were using it till today.


I installed it on my computer and started using it as my secondary OS, but I still didn't have an Internet connection at home. So, learning was very hard. Several times Windows installer ruined the bootloader and I was helpless. But interestingly, my courage and effort was still there! I still wanted to explore this new world!!

I wanted to join Ubuntu community, but no Internet. Download software for Ubuntu, no Internet. But, although I've felt Ubuntu can do nothing other than consuming three valuable gigabytes of my 20 GB hard drive, the remarkable thing was, I still wanted to use and redistribute!! But again,.. no Internet to make the shipit order. :(

Finally, in 2006, I was lucky to have a dial-up Internet connection at home. I've joined the Ubuntu community, asked lot of questions, answered one or two, and I began learning fast. Still I didn't know what Linux is, haven't even heard the word "kernel", but I was happy with what I have. I also distributed some installation media, about 50 copies were given to various people, but, today, only less that ten of those are still using it.

I was doing Win-Lin dual boot for some time. By reading various stuff, I got to know that there are many distributions. I've used Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Mandriva, Puppy, Knoppix and PCLinuxOS 2007. But none of them were able to suit me like Ubuntu did. I know, it's psychology,... the first impression with the meaning of the word "Ubuntu" -- humanity; it simply didn't let me run away.

In 2007, I entered University of Colombo School of Computing as and internal undergraduate, and UCSC is an excellent playground for wannabe Linux geeks. I was studying, studying and studying,... I got to know about the software market, copyrights, law, the FOSS concept, RMS' four freedoms, software licensing, community, what Linux is, it's evolution, the kenel, and all that. So, finally I decided to completely switch to the open source software, rather than sticking into closed Windows.


So, roughly seven months ago, I have been able to do it! (most of my colleagues have not) I removed all Windows stuff from my hard drive, re-partitioned it, and installed two distros. One is Ubuntu, and the other is Fedora. Ubuntu is for day-to-day usage and Fedora is for learning purposes. As I had a sound understanding of what Linux is, and how it worked, it was very easy for me to adopt to the new environment.

I'm still an undergraduate at UCSC, and spending my final year. I have gained lots of things thought my experience, and thought my studies. I use Linux at my school desk, I use it at home, I use it on the way to home, I listen to rock, watch TV, do my assignments and projects, collaborate with my friends, continuously learn, blog and have fun,... one system - for everything. Thanks to Linus and RMS!! :-)

Finally, today I feel I am one of the happy Linux users of this World but I know still we have very few happy Linux users in the World. And I am proud to be part of that beneficent community.

Thanks for reading!

Today, I've received an email from Google (accounts-noreply@google.com) subjecting Google Password Assistance. Google sends this email when somebody has made an attempt to reset the particular Gmail account's password. But, this request is not initiated by me.

Google password reset process works as follows:

1. User enters the Gmail address into the password reset form.
2. Using CAPTCHA, Google verifies that the request is not made by truly a human.
3. Google uses either of the following methods to verify the account ownership.
   

• If the Gmail account was inactive during the past 24 hours, Gmail asks for the security question which the account owner has provided during sign up.
• If the Gmail account was not inactive, it sends an email to the secondary address that is provided during sign up.

4. After the verification of account ownership, it enables the user to choose a new password.
   

In my case, somebody has made the attempt, and Google has sent me the password reset email. Well, I have reset my password -- I periodically do so. :) So thanks to the poor guy who made the attempt. :P

Anyway, how do we prevent such vulnerabilities? Here's what I think:

• Use at least two email accounts. Use each other to receive password reset emails. Eg: set your Yahoo! address as your Google account's secondary address and set your Gmail address as your Yahoo! account's secondary address.
• Try to access those accounts frequently.
• Use ambiguous Q/A pair as the security question and answer. Use your own tunes with creativity. I know, this can go INSANE!!! Eg: Q - Where did you spend your honeymoon? A - Cloud #9

OK. Anything else does not come to my mind this time. May be later I might add more. By the way,....... who might want to hijack my Gmail account? I still don't have an answer. :-?



Well, there might be several bloggers who want to do this adventure. :D

Thank for reading!

Yeah, the exam is over... Big thanks to ppl who facilitated and helped.... Now it's gonna be vaccation... up to Adam's Peak...

Few more words about the exam... I dropped sociology for this time.. don't ask why -- parroting sucks! gonna do it next exam season... Today I did the marketing paper somewhat well... hope the entire exam is OK :-S (Exam rocks when it's Software Engineering/ Development paper -- a different story)

Anyway... during this vaccation... I'm planning to build my personal web site... which I think may support my professional carrier...

First thing is the design (not appearance) stuff... team leader is me, team members are me, client is me, and also the supervisor is gonna be myself. I like to begin all from begining, coz I learn and experience.. but.. since it's a timewasting task to 're-invent the wheel', I decided to use an existing template. Anyway... currently I'm planning it's skeliton... software design stuff.

Then.. the next problem -- where do I host it? I'm still in the bigining.. so there's no need to spend money a second level domain name... I'm looking for a lower level doamin name at no cost. Currently I have chosen one at com.on.lk. But it may subject to change according to my requirements. Currently, there I have put my tech blog inside a HTML frame. Take a look if you are interested in. If you have a better recommendation (such as one offering more than 250 MB) please leave a comment. (I know that 250 is enough for a beginner :D )

So, what's gonna be the content? It's all gonna be tech tech tech! I have enough contributed to spread junk (like this blog) to the rest of the World.. so.. my site -- gonna be no junk. :)

OK,... that's it.. now back to work :-|

Although I have decided to keep my hands away from the Blogger Dashboard, I thought of writing a little bit of the ongoing exam. Yesterday we had the Software Engineering paper. It was nice, properly printed.. hehe.. There was a one question which carried 20% of marks. The expected answer was a block of C++ source code and yeah, it was a pretty easy and interesting question for me. Piece of cake ;) . But sadly, I have missed two code lines. :( Anyway, the paper was pretty easy, and my big big thanks for people who helped me.

Tomorrow we're gonna have the Internet Application Development paper, I hope it's also gonna be a nice time. HTML, XML, DTD, XSD, javascript, PHP, CSS, XMLNS and all of those web development stuff. Well, I've already completed some of those stuff, and now it's the time for PHP and javascript. Within all of these web development stuff, I love PHP very much. It's easy to learn, well defined documentation, open source, copatible with object oriented development and ohh I don't know why I'm so interested in. We don't have to cram big big code blocks, the important things are basic functions, some of the default variables, basic structure and syntax. Otherwise if we had to cram all of code examples given in examples during our lectures, it could be a nightmare. (I hate cramming like parrots)

I'm still wandering what would appear on tomorrow's paper.. Hope it would be an easy paper.. Okey dokey... back to work...!

Ohh my head! The examination season has arrived!! PHP, XML, AJAX, Multimedia, Software Engineering, Business Statistics, bla bla bla... ohh... what a pain..!!!
Looks like I'll have to resign from this blogging and Internet fun stuff for some time :( . I have done nothing for this semester... hey palz... බැචාලා... help me... please...! Business Statistics and Operational Research... what's that?? I don't know even a single word of that subject. Kuppies kuppies... please help,... F1 F1 F1 !!!
PHP, XML, AJAX and all that web development stuff are pretty cool.. then Flash, Premire, and Photoshop.. ohh Kuppies please F1! Software Engineering is somewhat OK, and oh shit.. I did nothin for Marketing subject.. It just came into my memory right now! :-o

Ohh shit...! What should I do? What.. ohh damn... Kuppies F1 F1 F1...
There is no difference between me and an ant which has broken it's sac! ;)