I decided not to make any this time and I hope to be a happy person throughout. BUT..

You know what I hate even more? No, not New Century’s resolutions; but challenges from friends, to make a resolution and stick with it. There were many really, however there was one which I thought I really should look into. This blog. I somehow get the sense that I am falling into the ‘resolution hell’ again but my friend who requested to be left anonymous and insisted I called him the G-Man, said he would help me out with this. He also insisted I publicly announce this challenge.

I keep learning and discovering new stuff every day, and I used to share some of the stuff here and they got a decent response from the web. One thing that really got me to consider was the number of hits this blog still gets everyday even though the last post was in February 2010. I am learning a lot more nowadays so I won’t be running out of content; I just need to get it up as soon as possible before it goes stale.

Traffic in the last 24 hours

The G-Man’s challenge was easy; or so I thought. We all know how big of an asshole the real G-Man is, this G-Man is no exception. He had a couple of clauses. First, the obvious one, I need to keep writing on a regular basis. The second one on the other hand still confuses me. I have to take the geekiest experience in the past decade and write it in a completely different context while maintaining the main storyline intact. Huh? I assume something on these lines: If I have to say “My computer’s processor died”, I should say “My friend is brain dead now.” He says it will improve my writing skills. Really?

Anyway, if you have gone through my posts in the past, you know what the story is. I just have to add spice to it. I am usually too lazy to accept such a challenge but let’s just say the stakes are really high and I have to.

Alright, it is time to sleep and I have till this weekend to finish this. If someone is reading this, I would appreciate some suggestions/tips.

As I value screen space more than gold, I hate it when status messages show up and bloat my list size to twice its original size. Most people think that this is the aftermath of Google’s new Buzz. Well, no actually, this happens because the setting to hide the statuses isn’t an inbuilt feature in Google Chat, but is a Google Labs feature. Its called Muzzle and Google have silently removed it from the Labs database, along with it some other features listed here [Gmail Labs graduation and retirement]. I can understand when they say they want to clean up, but keeping the Back to Beta feature which just adds a beta label to GMail and eliminating Muzzle seems utterly stupid.

The only solution that I have found so far is to use a greasemonkey script which will hide the statuses and make it behave normally. You can find it here [GMail Muzzle Lab Reviving]. If you are not familiar with scripts read this [Installing Scripts]. I will update this post when there is a better alternative to this.

We want survivors

Anyone got any idea what the hell this means? I am totally stumped!

Right now, I am still unable to make it work with both the PC and the phone at the same time, so I need to pair it to the device every time I need to use it. Although pairing is not a tedious process, it still needs some manual labour, like deleting existing devices, adding and re-pairing. Almost a 5 minute task every time I want to use it. I want to avoid this hassle. Yes I am lazy.

The basic idea behind my experiment is simple, fake the connection. Make the headset think that is communicating its my phone, a spoof attack sort of a thing. My knowledge in bluetooth is limited so my initial plan of action was to follow these steps, spoof the mac of the bluetooth dongle on my pc so that it is the same as that of my phone, then change the device class of my PC from Computer -> Desktop to Computer -> Palm (My phone is the imate version of the htc wizard with windows mobile 2005) and finally find the secret authentication key between the phone and the headset. Once I get that I can emulate the phone on the pc and try to connect to it. Unfortunately there are any tools available in windows to do some serious work. The tools that we generally use to change the MACs of network cards like SMAC or A-MAC will not work with bluetooth adapters, so I had to come to Linux.

The first step was to change the Bluetooth hardware address of my bluetooth dongle. After hours of digging around, I finally found a way to do this. Here it is. I did this in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, it had all the bluetooth modules already installed, else, install hci and hci related packages on your distro.

Some info first. All bluetooth devices have a hardware address similar to the MAC address for network (NIC) cards. That address is the unique identification information on the dongle. There’s a great tool called bdaddr that allows you to change the BD_ADDR, the physical address, in your Bluetooth adapter. It works with Ericcson, Cambridge Silicon Radio and Zeevo chipsets. You can download it here: bdaddr. By the way, you must intstall the bluez-utils and libbluetooth-dev packages.

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sudo apt-get install bluez-utils libbluetooth-dev

Getting the address of the phone or the device you want to fake. Switch on the bluetooth on the phone.

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$ hcitool scan

Scanning for available devices

Now we have the address that we need to fake. i.e. 00:12:37:85:1B:78. We need to compile the bdaddr application, extract it to a folder and “make” it.

Compiling bdaddr

Once that is done, we now a working version of bdaddr.

BD_ADDR

As you can see, bdaddr detected my dongle. The device address is same as that of the phone because I recently changed it.

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[heaton@sulphure:~/Downloads/bdaddr]$ ./bdaddr
Manufacturer:   Cambridge Silicon Radio (10)
Device address: 00:12:37:85:1B:78

Switch to root to proceed and then follow what I did (in the image below).

Changing the BD_ADDR of the dongle

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hciconfig hci0
./bdaddr -i hci0 00:12:37:85:1B:98
hciconfig hci0 reset

Unplug the adapter and insert it again. Check for the change in address.

Address changed to new specified one.

YAY! my first step is complete, I am working on the next two steps and will post as soon I make a breakthrough.

The fix is the new patch (Mirrors Edge v1.01) that EA released a couple of days ago which deals with the lockup issue. Download it here. Install and play. If it still locks up, disable Physx and then restart.

Apart from this minor glitch, this game is the most annoying game I have played in a couple of years. Its not due to the gameplay nor the graphics nor the story.  At the beginning of the game, there is a tutorial which teaches you how to jump around and die. It took me 5 mins just to figure out how to jump. All credits to the incredible negligence of DICE, the developers of the game. The game tells me to press LB, I being an innocent PC gamer thought it was the Left Button. I frantically kept pressing the LB and all I did was punch in the air. I then realized who the fuck assings LB to jump in an fps and I did the sensible thing, I pressed space and voila I’m in the air. I was overjoyed and approached the next hurdle, slide under a rod. This time though I had to press LT and I was like “what the fuck is LT? left tab?” (btw, since this was an fps I thought the default controls would apply and didn’t look at them or configure them). Back to hit and trial, I tried tab, control and then shift, yay! shift worked.

The next part is what ticked me off. It asked me to press Y, I did. I did again. Again. Again! fucking again!!!. Nothing! I then alt-tab to windows to check if the damn key is dead and no, it was fine. I tried to alt-tab back to the game and gracefully crashed. I restarted, I LBed LTed and then kept pressing the damn Y again and again. I got tired and went to check the control screen only to realize that there is no Y listed at all in the mapped controls. WTH? This is when I realized that Mirror’s Edge was also developed for the console-tards. DICE didn’t bother to change the tutorial. Instead of helping me they managed to piss me off for half an hour. All those were XBOX controls I believe. I then wrote down the controls and started playing game.

Even after all this the controls still confuse me. Disarming an opponent seems to be the worst test for me. I run always. The importance given to PC gamers seems be on the decline. I am disappointed :(.

My maruti doing 170 kmph

We were just roaming around trying to find a fuel station near the Golkonda fort and we found this nice stretch of STRAIGHT road and decided to give it a go. You will see this road on the way to ocean park. BTW its VXi (petrol).

Well, the top speed of the car was rated as 160 kmph in the manual and I wondered much of it was true. I once did 140 kmph but that was not a full blown attempt. The car itself hasn’t been modified in anyway except that I have replaced the hopeless JKTyre 165/85/R14 rubber with the Michelin Energy XM1+, 185/70/R14 and a set of Plati Alloys. The fuel used was the normal juice, no high octane stuff, I couldn’t find it in that area and going back was almost an extra 30km.

The car had four people in it so its was on the heavier side. Being a petrol vehicle, it didn’t have loads of torque hence it took a while to pull all the weight. Three attempts later I was able to find a clear way and it hit 170!

Btw, if you think my gear shifts suck, don’t, because, I was one hand driving (hehe). I was holding the camera with my right hand and the left hand was doing the steering and the shifts, also I needed to keep and eye on the road and balance the camera too.

I chose Vimeo coz the quality on it is way better than youtube, even youtube hd. If you cant view on vimeo here is the youtube video for you.

Wordpress

The Upgrade :

1. Backup the following files and folders :
   • wp-content (backup the whole directory)
   • wp-config.php (file)
   • Database (using phpmyadmin, backup the whole database, safe.)
2. Downloaded the latest WordPress here.
3. Delete all the old WordPress files .
4. Extract and upload (or upload and extract) the new WordPress files.
5. Copy the wp-config.php to the WordPress root directory.
6. Run wp-admin/update.php (http://yourwordpresssite/wp-admin/update.php). It will ask for a database upgrade, continue. If all goes well it will redirect to a blank page.
7. Delete the new wp-content directory and upload your old wp-content directory in place of it.
8. Visit your site!  All your posts and plugins will be active and it will look the same! (All incompatible plugins will be disabled automatially, but most of the plugins that work with 2.6.* also work with 2.7
9. Admin URL is the same: http://yourwordpresssite/wp-admin/

Known Issues :

1. If you by chance cannot see the left navigation menu, disable any menu optimizing plugin that you have installed before like Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu plugin or Lighter Menus. Do that by deleting the corresponding plugin directory in the wp-plugins directory.

Successfully upgraded my site by exactly following the above steps :). The new admin interface is brilliant! Its good to look at and the interface is just amazing. Moreover, once you upgrade to 2.7 you don’t need to follow this painful upgrade process every time a new version is released. You can directly upgrade from the admin interface. Cheers ;)

1. Transblack FINAL v1, Visual Style for Vista.
2. Darkwood wallpaper pack
3. VistaGlazz, for patching Vista theme files which enables custom themes.
4. SimpleX 0.33, Winamp skin. (“Wow! Its really dark!” Color theme)

Also if you are feeling “I want something more sexier!”, you can try this winamp skin, just make sure you enable Desktop Alpha Bending in Winamp reflexion by ~sXnc | See the Last 2 images in the gallery.

1. Navigate to the folder :
   • XP users :C:Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
   • Vista users : C:Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\
2. Delete all the folders in there.
3. Create a new folder with the name of the Profile ex: tHeSiD (folder remains empty)
4. Create text file: active.txt (must NOT be readonly)
5. Open active.txt and type in your profile folder name (tHeSiD)

Thanks to ju7er117 at mininova for this fix :)

I eventually disabled the plugin and the titles were reverted back to WordPress default. Blog name – Post title. I didnt want that either. I want Post title | Blog name. I checked the template header file and rearranged the wp_title() function and the bloginfo(‘name’) variable. There was still a problem with that, the separator was still on the left side. The title looked like this ” » Post title | Blog name “.

I went on to codex and researched a bit, unlike the older versions wp_title() does take parameters. Setting the right parameters can help customize the way the title of the post is displayed. Here is an example, one I used for this blog.

Originally

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<?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?>

This resulted in a Title of this format. “Blogname » Post title”

You can change that to this

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<?php wp_title('|',true,'right'); ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This results in a title of this format “Post title | Blogname”

A small tweak but really helpful when you want your search listings proper.

For more information and customizations of your own read the wp_title() documentation here. Template Tags/wp title