µTorrent - using it with Kerio

If you are using torrents to download stuff (legal or illegal ;-)), you would be aware that it works based on the rule that
"The more you share, the more you get to download".
There are lot of forums where people have asked the million doller question; "How do i increase my download speed?". More often than not the answer is that "you should share more". If  you are someone like me who connects to the internet world through a router you would have to do something known as port-forwarding. If you are someone who spends a lot of time on Internet then i expect you to have a firewall.

I use Kerio Firewall in the free mode and µTorrent Client to download stuff via torrents. By default, Kerio will not allow in coming connections to your µTorrent client; Even if you have the port forwarded... You have to keep an exception in Kerio firewall to be able to accept connections from other peers. Which means unless you allow Kerio to allow to peers to connect to you, µTorrent shall not give you a very good download rate.

Now if you are wondering how you can do this? It is quite simple. Here is small guide

1. Right click on the Kerio icon in the lower right hand side.
2. Go to the configuration screen and choose the Network Security subscreen.
3. Click on the Packet Filter button
   
4. In the new screen that shows up click on Add
5. In the screen that shows up fill in details as shown below. In the section called Local the number 39313 is the port that µTorrent is using
   

  Once all this is done you can test if th port is really getting forwarded properly by http://www.utorrent.com/testport.php?port=PORTNUMER



You should be done!! Happy downloading!!

Spotme - Cool device with cool features

The past two days have been extremely fruitful as i spent a major portion of both these days in the "Freescale Technology Forum", also known as FTF. The event hosted a variety of lectures by Freescale experts and other industry majors.

The really eye-catching or so to say attention grabbing device of the event was a device by name spotme. The device is a
"All-in-One Participant Communication Tool".The device has a wide LCD screen with a qwerty keypad which can be used to key in messages to other participants. To the right of the device, we find 6 buttons which are used to navigate to various screens and services. The built-in radar can be used to scan for other participants. The device will also let you navigate to other participants. The schedule for the events and the feedback can be collected using the spotme device.

I found the device very useful in spotting other participants and exchanging my business card with them. One can take notes, reply to surveys and also send messages to other participants. Below is a snap of the device i picked from their website.

The I2C bus - learning the hard way

After completing a I2C bus driver recently ( and struggling a bit in doing this activity), I thought i would just pen down something which might be of interest to others who are doing similar activity. For those who are new to I2C bus; In a nutshell, I2C is a synchronous bus with only two lines ( usually called SDA and SCL which stand for serial data , serial clock respectively) for communication. I would be just re-doing the work if try to explain the whole I2C bus here. A very detailed description of the protocol is availabe here.

The reason for me writing these few lines here are to draw your attention towards a specific problem that one might face when using the IIC bus.

The Start
The story began on a very fine monday morning when i just started the system and did some basic debugging and finally got the bus to run. I was really happy when i saw the RX and TX happen smoothly and the Philips IIC interface based EEPROM getting updated. Everything was fine and i took my much deserved coffee break.

The Coffee Break
Two sips of coffee woke up the paranoid engineer in me and i wanted to somehow break my drivers functionality, secretly hoping that nothing bad turns up. I started putting breakpoints here and there and corrupting status variables, resetting the systems at odd points etc just to see how the system worked. Suddenly, disaster struck and my Rx interrupts vanished. Might be a glitch, so i just pressed the reset button in the debugger window and try to do it again. Oh My God!! Now even my Tx interrupts vanished. After stuggling for some time with the debugger controls and trying single stepping through my code several times i found myself looking a big zero. I could not figure out how the code had to do something with my hot coffee else why should it suddenly stop?!!. I just powered down the whole system, went out for my lunch.

Problem Found
Post lunch, i ran the system again and suddenly i heard the chime from the debugger saying it had hit a breakpoint. What is this now, i thought and just looked in to the debugger window; Aha, My Tx interrupt is back.. i just disabled the breakpoint and hit go. Now both my Rx and Tx intterupts where coming alright and the data was all flowing smooth. So, what had happened earlier?? After wondering, struggling and googling for about a couple of hours i figured out that what happened. The IIC bus was being held low. This typically happens, when the slave device is transmitting data and the master undergoes a restart or reset in which case the slave might pull the bus low and would be expecting the further clocks to come to it via the master. Since, the master module has undergone a reset, it is not able to create the clocks without doing some intialization ( sending of START condition), which it fails because the slave has pulled the bus (SDA) low.

Hence, after spending about more than 8 hours with the IIC bus and reading a lot of material i was a bit wiser now knowing about this potential problem with the IIC bus where in your bus can be simply hung for a long time because the slave has no way of knowing when to release the bus. (The power-on of the whole ckt had removed this state from the slave in which case the slave device had relinquished the bus.)

Great message presented in a wonderful format

Unfortunately, to view this fully you will have to right click on the image and choose view image. I could not get this to show up completely on the page without messing up with the image.

Making Ubuntu a bit more better looking

The one thing that appealed me in UBUNTU was the cool effects when you navigate, move or close a window. The slight wiggle that you get when you drag the windows makes it look a bit flashy. It looks even more flashier on my 19 inch ultra bright display. To make my desktop look a bit more cool, i started out this new journey and started looking at themes and wallpapers for UBUNTU ( my attempt to work with TUX).

After going through various forums and many more other related sites, I discovered that UBUNTU supports something known as desklets. I found two categories gdesklets and adesklets though i am not qualified enough to tell how different are these from each other. However, I chose to go go with adesklets simply because these were written in python and i am python literate. However, understanding these adesklets is still beyond my reach.

One can install it via synaptic package manager quite easily. Once installed i could easily download the various adesklets from here ( you can also do it via the following command sudo adesklets_installer in the terminal window). If you are running UBUNTU Hardy and are running on a 64-bit AMD machine then you will run into issues. It makes me smile, because so far nothing with UBUNTU has gone without me spending some time reading forums ( a lot threads!!). Please have a look at this in case you hit a road block.

You can install a lot of cool looking desklets and use your imagination to create great looking desktops. So let your creative juices flow!!.

The forgotten colors - Red, Yellow, Green

          I remember when I was a kid my teacher had told me during a class on road safety that Red means stop, Orange means get ready and Green means now you can proceed. However, looks like this simple piece of information is no more a relevant of part of our ever improving ( as they claim) system. I am forced to believe this because of the indifference shown by the people towards the traffic signals. I travel for about an hour (one way), to my office and get to see a lot of traffic junctions. However, not once have I seen the traffic lights being respected fully. At some traffic islands, the red light takes a different meaning all together, as it hopelessly tries to signal as stop and the motorists just bother to slow down a bit just to ensure that they can slam the brakes if a cop pops out around the corner.

          I know this traffic junction, where every day the traffic lights keep blinking and motorists keep moving at their own will. In fact, someone who tries to adhere to the traffic signal is often rebuked by other motorists. The traffic police is often blamed of not managing the traffic in Bangalore. However, I wonder if it is really possible to manage the vehicles if no soul is ready to follow any rule. It is like asking the doctor to treat cancer, when you cannot give up smoking.

         

          Can making stricter rules solve the problem? Maybe yes, but personally I feel that more the rules, more will the people who will try to break them or find some loop hole to break the rule. What is needed is a system where people realize this problem and understand that some rules are for their own benefit. In in fact, I would not even call the traffic lights a rule or law, it is just a discipline which shows that "You" are concerned for the well being of other motorists who are using the road. It is probably very easy for a rash driver to jump a signal and he might do it very successfully because of his driving abilities, but there might be others who might try to either mimic their actions or be a victim because he just followed the traffic signal without bothering much ( after all that is why they are there?). Life is precious and losing it because of something as trivial crossing a traffic island is indeed very unfortunate.

If you are reading this and belong to the category of people I have mentioned above, please spare a moment and give it a thought.