Autoclean Linux Modules

Here is a excerpt from The Linux Kernel guide produced by The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP).
Modules can be removed using the rmmod command but demand loaded modules are automatically removed from the system by kerneld when they are no longer being used. Every time its idle timer expires, kerneld makes a system call requesting that all unused demand loaded modules are removed from the system. The timer's value is set when you start kerneld; my kerneld checks every 180 seconds. So, for example, if you mount an iso9660 CD ROM and your iso9660 filesystem is a loadable module, then shortly after the CD ROM is unmounted, the iso9660 module will be removed from the kernel.

Getting rid of unused modules from memory is a good idea but I didn't find a way to doing this with latest 2.6.x kernels. Can anyone throw some light on this?

Download Sitepoint Firefox 3 Revealed ebook

Did you download the firefox3 on June 17 ? Did you like the robot's greeting "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill!" easter egg :). Sci-fi geeks will recognize the reference to nikto in the page title right away.

Here is something to add icing to the cake, Sitepoint released a Firefox 3 Revealed ebook to go with all the excitement. I hope this ebook will guide you in master the new features of the firefox3 browser. Happy surfing !!!

Character Encoding Problem in Anusaaraka Urdu to Devanagari transliteration script

While test driving the latest firefox3 I found that the Anusaaraka Urdu to Devanagari transliteration system was not working as expected. After looking around I figured out that the CGI script was setting the page encoding to Western (ISO-8859-1) instead of standard unicode(UTF-8). Perhaps the developers should note that setting correct parameters in HTML/XHTML meta elements is not enough. You need to set the proper encoding via the HTTP headers returned by the Web server, in this case I guess the CGI script didn't do that and the web server sent the default headers.

Oops

Often character encoding issue like this is mistaken for missing fonts or worse lack of proper support in the web browser (sic).

After changing to Unicode (UTF-8)

Firefox 3.0b5 Crash Report

First crash since I upgraded to Firfox3 months ago, you can have a dekho at the Breakpad crash report of the event.

Lttoolbox Install Notes

Lttoolbox is a lexical and morphological analyser package from the Apertium machine translation system. Here is a brief install notes taken from my NLP summer school lab notes.

Build Lttoolbox

Download the lttoolbox source package from sourceforge.

tar zxvf lttoolbox-xxxxx.tgz cd lttoolbox-xxxxx/ make make install

You will need root level permission to install other dependency packages for lttoolbox . GNU Debian users however should use the lttoolbox debian package available in stable/testing/unstable and also read the Installing Apertium on Debian documentation page for more information.

Usage

If the tool is installed properly then you can look up the program install path with which lt-comp command.

Here I am compiling the Hindi dictionary with a left-to-right option lr, the output is stored in binary format in file 'mydata'. This binary file is used by the lt-proc processor to do the morph analysis.

lt-comp lr hi.dix.noun_f mydata lt-proc ./mydata

For more information do read the manual pages for the lt-comp and lt-proc tools or fire me a email, I would love to you help you.

Kompare to the rescue

If you have been reading this blog for the past week then you already know that I am in NLP Summer School in IIIT-Hyderabad. And while doing a project comparing the results of various dependency parsers we had to read through large text files to find the errors and its a real pain. Well, I strong believe in the motto of letting the computer do the dirty work. I would have preferred to use a editor like Vim or Emacs with multiple spilt windows to compare the files and their diff's output. However I found that the KDE's GUI based Kompare (frontend to diff, comp or cmp) to be better suited for this project since my team mates are linguists and quite new to gnu/Linux. Also almost all the lab machines have it installed KDE as default desktop envirnoment.

The above screenshot shows kompare in side-by-side mode and just by using arrow keys or the mouse we could manipulate both the windows at the same time and tally our results. It did help to finish the job quickly but its still a pain.

New Open Movie : The Big Bunny Movie

Two years ago The Elephant Dream was made to make a point that Free and Open source software is capable of creating high quality films. And once again Ton Roosendaal is back again with a big movie with a enormous bunny. What are you waiting for go and download it here right now
Darn! I'll have to wait until I can get back onto a high speed internet hookup to do that :( .

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.