Nice movie about the crusades and Jerusalem. The story revolves around the young Baron of Iblet and how he prevents the citizens of Kerak and Jerusalem from becoming scapegoats in the never-ending battle.

But the reason why I liked this movie is not because of the Baron's heroics, but because it helped me to learn a little bit more about the history of the middle east, of Salah-ud-din (or Saladin), Raynald de Chatillon, the relation between the Saracens and the Christian crusaders, the Knights Templar, and the leper king of Jerusalem Baldwin IV. I had encountered many of these characters years ago while playing Age of Empires, and it was nice to see them again.

However like all movies, this one also modifies facts to suit the whims of the scriptwriter, so be sure to cross check facts before swearing on them. :-)

Varkon is a free CAD system and high level development tool for Engineering, Computer Aided Design and Product Modeling applications originally developed by Microform AB in Sweden.
It is now maintained and further developed by the CAD group at the Department of Technology at Örebro university in Sweden.

The GNU/Linux version is under the GNU GPL and available at no charge, while the current price for a Windows95/NT license is 875 USD. Support is available for all platforms.

Someone is using it on a Cray T3E supercomputer with 256 300Mhz 64 bit Alpha processors.

Check the Varkon home page at http://www.tech.oru.se/cad/varkon/ to know more.

Though I have not yet tried it, the fact that SAAB uses Varkon to design its aeroplanes is enough to earn it a four star rating.

Exaile (http://www.exaile.org/) is GNOME's reply to AmaroK. It is based on GTK+ and written in Python. It uses the GStreamer engine as its backend. Exaile boasts of many of the features that has endeared AmaroK to so many people. The artist and album information extraction feature is working nicely and it also downloads guitar tablatures from http://fretplay.com/ and http://lyrc.com.ar/ provides the lyrics.

I tried out version 0.2.7 from the tarball supplied on the Exaile website, and the first thing that struck me was the absense of a polished build system. One has to do:
$ make
# make install
to install the thing, but the absense of the configure script was a real pain. In no time I ran into a dependency quagmire, but my new found knowledge of Python came in handy. After some downloads and yumming from the Fedora repositories and rpmfind.net, I had Exaile running on my Fedora Core 5 GNOME desktop.

Being a relatively new project, it is not yet as polished as it should be. However it is worth giving a try, and if it were not for the incomplete build system it would have surely got a four star rating.

Thanks to Adam Olsen for developing such a nice program, I do not have to gape at AmaroK on a KDE box.

Htop is an interactive, text mode process viewer using the ncurses interface.

A brief comparison of htop and top:
* In 'htop' you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
* In 'top' you are subject to a delay for each unassigned key you press (especially annoying when multi-key escape sequences are triggered by accident).
* 'htop' starts faster ('top' seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number to kill a process, in 'top' you do.
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in 'top' you do.
* 'htop' supports mouse operation, 'top' doesn't
* 'top' is older, hence, more used and tested.

Courtesy: http://htop.sourceforge.net/ and Debian Times.

After waiting eagerly for a couple of months, I finally got my hands on the Kubuntu Dapper Drake CDs that I had ordered in late May. The thing to note about the KDE interface was the sleekness which was previously lacking in KDE's bloated up feel. However I found it strange that Konqueror is still tagged as "not fully supported" in GMail. This is one thing I would like the KDE hackers to fix at the soonest possible.

I would have been so happy if they had also sent Kubuntu stickers along with the CDs just as they do in case of the Ubuntu CDs.

After months of torture at the hands of the buggy Fedora Core 2 desktop panel menus, Alacarte Menu Editor came as a huge relief. Like all other GNOME applications, this one too as a well polished and clean interface and brushes away all the pain of customizing the GNOME panel menus.

The Fedora Core 5 RPM package of Alacarte can be downloaded from Fedora Extras (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/), while the Ubuntu .deb package and tarball may be obtained from http://www.realistanew.com/projects/alacarte/.

"Fedora is a set of projects, sponsored by Red Hat and guided by the Fedora Foundation. These projects are developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.

Fedora Core, the central Fedora project, is an operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, now and forever."

That is what Fedora is. But what is most important is that Bordeaux is simply is the best Fedora Core release I have seen. This is important since the previous releases was more of a downgrade than an upgrade. But this one simply rocks, and alongwith Fedora Core 2 will be topping my list of favourite of OSes. Sure Ubuntu and SUSE comes close, but then this one will be getting the top spot.

The primary reason for which I changed form Tettnang, was the sparking fresh set of packages that Bourdeaux was going to have, I believe me, it exceeded my expectations. GNOME 2.14 (this I did not put KDE) will probably put an end to the simplistic tag attached to the GNOME desktop. GCC 4.0 is there, though a copy of GCC 3.2 is there too, and so is core-utils 5.93.

However a few things about the philosophy behind Fedora confuses me. While on one hand they claim "Fedora Core is a free operating system that offers the best combination of stable and cutting-edge software that exists in the free software world.", they also say that the Fedora Foundation's goal is to serve the Fedora community "By funding patent filings for inventors in the open source community, so that dedicated individuals can help to build a protective patent shield around open source code." Now how can that be? Is not Free Software supposed to stay away from patents? Or is Fedora only free as in beer, and not free as in speech?

For all those who had been stuck because of M$'s reluctance to support the ext2/ext3 file system, here is some reprieve. Visit http://www.fs-driver.org/ to find more about it, or contact info@fs-driver.org.

The most fool-proof GNU/Linux distro I have ever seen. A boon for IBM Thinkpad and HP/Compaq laptop owners. The touch-pad and the volume control buttons work out-of-the-box, and so does the help button on the keyboard. A huge improvement over my existing Fedora Core 2 installation, which required some obscure GRUB hacks to make the touch-pad work and the volume control never worked from the buttons provided.

Synaptic provides a wonderful GUI front-end to apt for those addicted to Windoze's click-and-go feel. Whether you want to install KDE and convert to KUbuntu or want to install the latest codecs, all that you need is to click the correct button in Synaptic. No need to use the console to un-tar, configure and make your packages.

Although I am still sticking to good old Fedora Core 2, I know people who have migrated to Ubuntu Breezy Badger. I am just keeping my fingers crossed and waiting for Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake to be released in April 2006. If Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical keep their promise to deliver a 'real zinger' and with M$'s Vista slated for release, we might have a delicious battle on our hands! May the freedom fighter win!

The latest Firefox browser, version 1.5, was released two days ago. I downloaded it yesterday and and I am currently using it.

Being an avid fan of Firefox, I had been waiting for the release for quite some time now. It promises better security, search facilities, automated updates, faster browsing and so on. However till now I have only found that many of the older 1.0.6 themes that I had would not work directly with 1.5. Upgradation is required in most cases.

Its still too early to comment on the performance of the browser, but I have high hopes that Mozilla would continue to be the best browser technology around.

This Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman starrer is about how engineer Michael Jennings' life goes berserk after he gets involved in a secret project at Allcom and trades 3 years of his life for 92 million dollars. Uma Thurman is Dr. Rachel Porter, a biologist in Allcom, who falls for the handsome Mike.

Jennings works on 'free alliance' for different organizations. After completing every assignment, his memory is erased for the time period that he had been working on it. One day, he is offered a secret project at Allcom, a company owned by his friend Jimmy, for which he would given fifty thousand Allcom shares, if he agreed to get his memory erased for the two or three years that he would be working on the project. However once the three years are finished and his memory erased, he finds that he has already forfeited his shares few weeks back, and the FBI is at his doorstep. A whirlwind sequence of events follow, and Jennings is hard pressed to find out what took place in those three years to make him give up his millions for a packet of seemingly insignificant objects.

If you are looking for a profitable way of wasting your time, then go ahead and watch this flick.

The morale of the story: Never predict future. It takes away the mystery and the hope.... If you show them their future, they don't have any future.

My quest for a lightweight chat program that I could use to communicate with my friends over our college network was successfully ended by IPChat. This peer-to-peer chat program uses ncurses for its front-end, provides a separate window for every coversation, and a contact list.

As far as I am conerned, there is no need to waste precious time in trying to configure ytalk, when IPChat exists.

Visit the IPChat project page at https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ipchat/.

After having spent more than half an hour in installing Core 1 on my brand new Compaq 2203AL laptop only to find my system to be completely dumb (sound-card not detected), Tettnang was a big relief. Although it took more than 180 minutes to upgrade from Yarrow, listening to the first sound emanating from my speakers was enough to make me go over the top.

The absence of the mp3 plugins was an initial hurdle which was easily overcome with the resources from freshrpms.net. However problems with the Redhat menu-editor exist, which prevents me from deleting entries from the menu. Renaming existing entries is, however, possible. Programs like Adobe Acrobat Reader and Quake III cause multiple entires to be inserted into the menu.

Other than such minor blemishes, Fedora Core 2 has been a wonderfully well rounded release. The touchpad, though not fully functional out-of-the-box, works on adding psmouse.proto=imps as a kernel parameter in GRUB. Its been almost 6 months now, and never have I needed to re-install the system. Absolutely astonishing given the fact I have a habit of pushing the system to the limit of its 'bleeding edge' capabilities. A momentary reflection on how a corresponding Windows box would have performed is enough to drive home the point.

My heartfelt thanks to the Fedora community and Redhat for liberating me from the clutches of Microsloth's slimy grasp.

Visit the Fedora project page at http://fedora.redhat.com/.