Jit's Blog

Dear Readers,

This is to inform you that the “Ubuntu Linux” category has been renamed as “Linux (all distros)“.

Thank you.

Jitendra

To have full access to NTFS, we need to install ntfs-3g driver, which can be downloaded from http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

1. Check to see if you have the required pacakge, FUSE 2.6.0 or later. WI assume your system already has one. If not, read the”Installing FUSE” section below and then come back here.

# yum list installed | grep fuse

2. Download the source code, ntfs-3g-1.913.tgz.

3. Extract the source codes

# tar xvzf ntfs-3g-1.913.tgz

4. Install ntfs-3g driver by typing

# cd ntfs-3g-1.913
# ./configure
# make
# make install

5. Try to mount NTFS hard disk. In the command below, /dev/sdb1 and /mnt/windows can be changed appropriately, if needed

# mkdir /mnt/windows
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows

If it had already been mounted somehow, unmount it first

# umount /meia/My\ Book/
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows

Sometimes, you may need to enforce mounting like

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows -o force

6. To unmount the volume, type

# umount /mnt/windows

7. To mount and unmount the volume with non-root account, type

$ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows/
$ fusermount -u /mnt/windows/

To see the mounting information, type

# mount

or

# more /etc/fstab

Installing FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace)

1. Download the latest stable release from http://fuse.sourceforge.net and extract it.

# tar xvzf fuse-2.7.0.tar.gz

2. Install FUSE by typing

# cd fuse-2.7.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install

3. You may encounter several error messages while running ./configure. If you see the following message,

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

You may need to install whole packages related with Development to have a C compiler.

If you see another message like

checking kernel source directory… Not found
configure: error:
*** Please specify the location of the kernel source with
*** the ’–with-kernel=SRCDIR’ option
configure: error: ./configure failed for kernel

You must install kernel-devel with appropriate version

# yum install kernel-devel-2.6.18-8.1.8.el5

Then running ./configure should do work. You may see the following warning message, but you can ignore it.

***********************************************************
* WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING *
* The FUSE user space binaries were NOT installed with
* root directory executable prefix. This means that
* automounting NTFS volumes during boot could fail. This *
* can be fixed the below way by reinstalling FUSE using
* the right ’configure’ option during FUSE compilation:
*./configure –exec-prefix=/
*make && sudo make install
* WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING *
***********************************************************

4. Note that you need to reinstall FUSE if you upgrade the kernel.

India’s Pallava Bagla has won the American Geophysical Union (AGU) David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism for his articles on the impact of climate change on Himalayan glaciers.

The Perlman Award of AGU, the largest organisation of earth and space scientists with more than 58,000 members worldwide, recognises work published with deadline pressure of one week or less.

Announcing the award for Bagla, NDTV’s science editor, AGU’s Perlman Award selection committee applauded “Bagla’s articles for addressing “a very serious issue in the earth sciences”.

“His articles serve as a reminder to journalists to question sources, to think harder about the agendas and ideas of those people about whom they are reporting, and to stop the steamroller of opinions or ideas when the facts just don’t back them up.”

“Although Bagla’s articles reveal embarrassing foibles of scientists, ultimately they also illustrate science’s ability to self-correct,” it said.

The first of his two articles “No Sign of Himalayan Melt Down, Indian Report Finds”, published in the journal Science, explores dissent among glaciologists regarding the claim by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that Himalayan glaciers would imminently disappear.

The second article, “Himalayan Glacier Deadline ‘Wrong’, published by BBC News, reports on an apparent typographical error in the IPCC claim which appears to explain the panel’s controversial, 300-year acceleration of when Himalayan glaciers are expected to vanish.

Bagla is also an author. His latest book is “Destination Moon: India’s Quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond”. He also freelances stories to BBC and other media outlets, and contributes photographs to Corbis images.

The era when the IT department decided which laptops and phones workers would use in the office is ending: today employers are starting to embrace the idea that staff should be able to use their own laptops and smartphones in the workplace.

As many as a quarter of employers in the UK run bring-your-own computing schemes, where staff are given allowances or discounts to buy their own computers or phones to use in their day job, while employees in many other organisations will be using their own hardware to access work systems or store company data, whether the CIO likes it or not.

Allowing workers to use their personal devices at work has its risks, ranging from letting viruses and data-stealing trojans inside the corporate network to letting sensitive data out.

Dr Richard Clayton, security researcher at Cambridge University, warned that consumer tech poses a malware threat to businesses, as consumers are often less diligent than corporate IT managers at updating their antivirus suite and patching their software against the latest vulnerabilities.

“About one in 20 machines have something bad on them and almost none of their owners are aware that their machines are infected,” he said.

“In an organisation where all of the defences are around the edges of the corporation once you get a breach then the thing runs wild because there’s almost no protection inside.”

Bringing consumer machines into the workplace also increases the chance of corporate data loss – as staff carry sensitive corporate data around with them on their personal laptops and smartphones, theres an increased risk of that data falling into the wrong hands if the device is lost or stolen.

“If someone loses their laptop, an individual might just go and buy another one and not tell anyone, and the IT manager has no way of knowing that the data has been lost,” said Guy Bunker, security consultant and member of the security user group the Jericho Forum.

Once sensitive data is outside of the company firewall, the organisation has lost control of where that data might end up.

For example, today there are many services that allow consumers to back-up their data in the cloud – where data is copied to a third party’s datacentre and is accessible over the internet. If a member of staff backs up corporate data using a cloud service, the organisation’s IT department has no way of checking whether the third party can be trusted not to access or share that data. Fortunately none of the security issues surrounding the consumerisation of IT are insurmountable – an organisation can make consumer devices as secure as those bought in-house by putting the right security policies and technologies in place.

“The mantra is don’t do anything you wouldn’t do normally,” Bunker said. “Look at your audit and compliance and security and data loss prevention requirements and say ‘Can I make sure that the consumer devices will be as secure as if I own the hardware myself?’ “If you can’t guarantee that then think again – it doesn’t mean that you can’t do this because we know that some huge companies already do do consumerisation of IT. “It just means sitting back and thinking ‘I need to make sure that when they get their machines there’s a security stack on it which I can audit against’.”

Climate change is a topic for hot debate across countries right now, but is it possible to predict future climate change?

Researchers at Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen said that climate change probably occurs as a result of different chaotic influences and as a result would be difficult to predict.

The most pronounced climate shifts besides the end of the ice age is a series of climate changes during the ice age where the temperature suddenly rose 10-15 degrees in less than 10 years. The climate change lasted perhaps 1000 years, then — bang — the temperature fell drastically and the climate changed again.

This sudden change is called the tipping point and researchers have not been able to simulate it in their labs.

“We have made a theoretical modelling of two different scenarios that might trigger climate change. We wanted to investigate if it could be determined whether there was an external factor which caused the climate change or whether the shift was due to an accumulation of small, chaotic fluctuations”, explained Peter Ditlevsen, a climate researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute.

According to Ditlevsen, in one scenario the climate is like a seesaw that has tipped to one side. If sufficient weight is placed on the other side the seesaw will tip — the climate will change from one state to another. In the second scenario the climate is like a ball in a trench, which represents one climate state. Turmoil in the climate system such as storms, heat waves, heavy rainfall and the melting of ice sheets may finally push the ball over into the other trench, which represents a different climate state.

Currently, an increase in the atmospheric content of CO2 may be triggering a shift in the climate again.

“The Earth has not had such a high CO2 content in the atmosphere since more than 15 million years ago, when the climate was very warm and alligators lived in England,” he said.

“This could mean that the climate might not just slowly gets warmer over the next 1000 years, but that major climate changes theoretically could happen within a few decades”, Ditlevsen added, but stressed that his research only deals with investigating the climate of the past and not predictions of the future climate. The results have just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The Oxford dictionary, which has been in print for over a century, may now be available only online.

The publisher of the dictionary, Oxford University Press, said that the ever increasing demand for the online version of the may see the print version getting extinct.

The publishers are skeptical about the availability of the market for the printed form by the time the dictionary is revised and updated to its latest edition.Statistics show that the online version of the dictionary gets about 2 million hits from subscribers in a month.

Sadly the printed form, published in 1989, has sold about 30,000 sets in total. The printed matter comes in a 20 volume set costing 750 pound ($1,165).

Nigel Portwood, Chief Executive of Oxford University Press said on the printing of the latest edition, “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year.”

Although Portwood’s comment referred more on the full-length version of the dictionary, he added that the shorter versions were also facing a tough time due to the convenience that the electronic format provided.

In addition to that, the online version, launched in 2000, makes it easier for its publisher to catch up with rapid semantic changes and the large numbers of new words. Updates are put every three months. In fact, the latest entrant, Vuvuzela, was announced only a couple of weeks back.

While more and more people are shifting to the digital dictionaries, it is still early to say if they will gulp the printed format.

New study has suggested that dinosaurs were killed 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike.

Previously, it was thought that the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico lead to the extinction of dinosaurs from the earth. But now evidence for a second impact in Ukraine has been uncovered.

The discovery of the Boltysh Crater has suggested that the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by a “double whammy” rather than a single strike.

In the current study, scientists examined the “pollen and spores” of fossil plants in the layers of mud that unfilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape. Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores – dubbed “fern spikes” – are considered to be a good “markers” of past impact events.

They located a second “fern spike” in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.“We interpret this second layer as the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact,” the BBC quoted Simon Kelley of the Open University as saying.

This shows that the Boltysh and Chicxulub impacts did not happen at exactly the same time. They struck several thousand years apart, the length of time between the two “fern spikes”. Kelley continued, “It is quite possible that in the future we will find evidence for more impact events”. Professor Monica Grady, a meteorite expert at the Open University said, “One possibility might be the collison of Near Earth Objects.” The new findings have been published in the journal Geology by a team lead by David Jolley of Aberdeen University.

Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is the new standard for 3-D movie compression. While reducing the data significantly, MVC allows at the same time providing full high-resolution quality.

At the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam from September 10-14, 2010, researchers will showcase how 3-D movies can be transmitted via Internet and digital television channels such as via satellite. Blockbusters like Avatar, UP or Toy Story 3 will bring the 3-D into home living rooms, televisions and computers.

There are already displays available and the new Blu-Ray players can already play 3-dimensional movies based on MVC. The first soccer games were recorded stereoscopically at the Football World Championships in South Africa.

What is missing is an efficient form of transmission. The problem is the data rate required by the movies — in spite of fast Internet and sat-ellite links. 3-D movies have higher data rate requirements than 2-dimensional movies since at least two images are needed for the spatial representation. This means that a 3-D screen has to show two images — one for the left and one for the right eye.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI in Berlin, Germany have already come up with a compression technique for movies in particularly HD quality that squeezes movies while maintaining the quality: the H.264/AVC video format. What H.264/AVC is for HD movies, Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is for 3-D movies. The benefit is reducing the data rate used on the transmission channel while maintaining the same high-definition quality.

Videos on the Internet have to load quickly so that the viewer can watch the movies without interruptions. Thomas Schierl is a scientist at the HHI in Berlin and he explains that “MVC packs the two images needed for the stereoscopic 3-D effect so that the bit rate of the movies is significantly reduced.” These 3-D movies are up to 40 percent smaller. Thomas Schierl and his colleagues are working to establish the MVC codec for television transmission over satellites or the Internet. “New TV sets will start off by only playing 3-D movies from the Blu-Ray disc that is now coming into the third dimension. The next step to bring 3-D into living rooms will be made possible via broadcast or IPTV channels running via DSL or cable.”

You will be able to experience 3-dimensional movies in your living room in future without any 3-D glasses because the MVC format has the technical features to code and compress several views. After all, everybody enjoying the movie with you on the sofa has a different viewing angle. That is why they need a separate view — their “own” 3-D movie — for his or her individual seat. MVC compresses all of these views into one compact file or stream and one receiver, one set-top box decodes this information and passes it on to the television.

It will also be possible to play the MVC-coded movies on older televisions and set-top boxes and Thomas Schierl tells us how: “The first view corresponds to the signal that the existing television can receive and we would hide the second view in the same stream so that only the new receivers can use it. They are invisible to older tele-visions.” That is especially interesting to movie lenders and television stations because they do not have to worry about compatibility. And even mobile radio and mobile phone manufacturers can join the trend towards 3-D with the MVC standard. In the meantime, there are even displays the size of a mobile phone that allow a good 3-D impression.

The experts from the HHI show how the MVC-Codec functions transmitting television via DVB-S2 satellite from September 10-14, 2010 at the IBC in Amsterdam.

According to an estimation, seven percent of the world’s annual oil production is used to produce and manufacture plastic, and the amount is more than the oil consumed by the entire African continent.

Thankfully, a Japanese company called Blest, has invented a way to recycle plastic. The company has created a small, safe and easy to use machine that can convert several types of plastic back into oil, writes Carol Smith of Our World.

By burning the plastic, we generate toxins and a large amount of CO2. If we convert it into oil, we can save CO2 and at the same time people’s awareness about the value of plastic garbage will also be increased, said Akinori Ito, CEO of Blest.

The company uses a temperature controlling electric heater rather than flame to burn the plastic, therefore, the conversion technology is very safe. The result is a crude gas that can fuel things like generators or stoves and, when refined, can even be pumped into a car, a boat or motorbike.

One kilogram of plastic produces almost one liter of oil. To convert that amount takes about 1 kilowatt of electricity, which costs approximately 20 cents. The company makes the machines in various sizes and has 60 in place at farms, fisheries and small factories in Japan and several abroad.

According to Ito, the company wants to produce a product that anyone can buy. The smallest version of the machine costs $9,500.

Come next fiscal, all taxpayers will have something to cheer about as the Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the
long-awaited Direct Taxes Code (DTC) Bill under which the government has proposed to hike the income tax exemption limit to Rs. 2 lakh from the existing base of Rs. 1.6 lakh.

The Bill, which also seeks to remove surcharge and cesses on corporate tax as a measure of providing relief to industry while simplifying taxation norms, is expected to be tabled in Parliament during the current extended monsoon session and referred to a select panel of members of both Houses for vetting.

Speaking to the media after the Cabinet meeting, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee indicated that the basic exemption limit for income tax is proposed to be raised to Rs. 2 lakh from the current Rs. 1.6 lakh. As for the new tax slabs, he said: “That will be discussed in Parliament.”

Although exact details are not available, indications are that an annual income of Rs. 2-5 lakh would attract a tax rate of 10 per cent while those in the Rs. 5-10 lakh category would have to pay 20 per cent and above Rs. 10 lakh at 30 per cent. As of now, senior citizens and women are likely to get some additional relief in tax slabs.

Explaining the purpose of the DTC Bill aimed at replacing the archaic Income Tax Act, 1961, Mr. Mukherjee said: “The whole objective is that a plethora of exemptions will be limited. [Income] tax slabs will be three. Rate of taxes will be taken in the schedule so that they need not be changed every year.”