On December 29th I got a new mobile when I was on my vacation in Trichy. It is Sony Ericsson W700i which is popularly called as a walkman phone. I was searching for a good mobile handset to buy for the past 4 months and finally settled with this. Some of the features which attracted me are:

• Walkman phone with Mega Bass
• Has a very good 2 mega pixel camera
• Compatible with GNU/Linux
• Feature rich with technologies such as bluetooth, infrared, etc...
• Has FM radio
• Java Enabled
• Has a 30mb phone memory and comes along with 256mb memory card which is extendible

I wrote my first Drupal module today. I ve named it as "What's new?". Yeah exactly the block which you see at the right side bar in this website. Previously I had popular contents in the same place which is a default block feature present in Drupal. It was not getting updated frequently because the popular contents gets changed after a long while. Then I was thinking today to change that particular block with some other content. I was updating my poems as a page entry which is added as a content but there is no means to show those new poem pages or any new content for that matter separately in the website. So I decided to write my own module known as "What's new?" and Drupal code base is so easy that I was able to finish it within a hour or so :)

I ve written a lot of tamil poems and today is the day I ve started publishing it in stylesen.org. Since I have a huge repository I may not be able to type all of them at one shot, so keep visiting http://poems.stylesen.org (yeah I have a subdomain for this) where I keep updating the contents when I find time. There was always a wish/dream in my life to publish my tamil poems in a printed form (formal way), that may or may not be fullfilled, but today I think this wish is going to be partially fulfilled via stylesen.org.

Its been a long time I have written tamil poems and most of the poems which I am going to publish here are those which are written in my school days (pleasant memories) and in the early days of my college life.

GetEz a downloading software developed by myself and Ranjani (my college mate) is now hosted as a project in SourceForge.net. Today I ve setup all the required things for that project and even the website is ready. I am planning to spend some time in order to remove any bugs if it exists in the project.

The project website can be accessed at http://getez.sf.net

I ve uploaded the initial release source code of the project and yet to make the CVS repository up. The project summary page in sf.net is http://sourceforge.net/projects/getez/

This is a Howto to Configure BCM4318 Airforce Wireless cards in Debian Etch.

NOTE: Run lspci and look for the line "Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)". If this is not there then this how to is not for you.

Step1: Update your Kernel to 2.6.17-2-686 which could be done using Desktop->Administration->Update Manager

Step2: Install bcm43xx-fwcutter from the .deb package obtained from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/bcm43xx-fwcutter.

So after a long time (4 months) I ve started working with my favourite disto again! Yeah its Debian now, but this time its "etch" and not "sarge". I tried Ubuntu Dapper Drake in the intermediate time. The primary reason which kept me away from Debian these days is my laptop HP Compaq nx6110 which had a Broadcom bcm4318 card which did not have any free drivers and firmware. Hence I was desparately searching for a solution to get my wireless card working, since both in office and home I have wireless connectivity.

At last today I figured out how to configure the wireless card, of course in Debian etch.

On October 24th, 2006 we had the new release of Firefox ie., version 2.0 Release Candidate (RC) 3. I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake in my laptop and wanted to update my firefox to the new version. I found the installation of firefox is somewhat tricky because it does not have the usual way of configure/make/make install cycle. There was also another happy news today that Ubuntu's latest release Edgy (6.10) is out which has all the latest softwares including Firefox2.0. But I was not in a position to update my Dapper to Edgy today, but I decided to get Firefox2 in my Dapper and this is how I did it with the help of the following script which I obtained from Ubuntu forum: