I find myself pronouncing a lot of English words differently from what my friends do. One of the reasons for this is the fact that English just happens to be one of the 5 languages that I speak.

A couple of these word pronunciations also lead to a healthy debate with neither party accepting defeat and the only way to conclude such a debate is to validate the pronunciation.

Not to boast, but most of these debates are won by me and there is no denying that I have lost a couple too ! Surprisingly there have been debates where both parties have lost

When you are also in a similar situation below are some of the tools that can help you to validate the English Word pronunciations:

AT&T Natural Voices Research Version

AT&T Natural Voices is a commercial TTS engine which has support for multiple languages and is marketed by Wizzard Software.

However they do have a Research Version which is also available for general public here:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

You can select from a list of voices (accent) and even have the option to download the voice.

The service is however slow and its probably due to the fact that the engine generates audio files on the fly !

However note that you can give input more than one word (preferably separated by comma) and the engine will generated the audio file with the pronunciation for all these words.

Dictionary.com/Thefreedictionary.com

Unlike Natural Voices, Dictionary.com and FreeDictionary.com allow you to hear pronunciations for words which are there in the dictionary.

Also you don’t have the option to input multiple words. However the pronunciations are pre-compiled and hence play much faster compared to Natural Voices.

If by any chance, you don’t have a sound card, or if the drivers of your card are corrupted, these 2 services provide a pronunciation key table which could be used to decode the word pronunciation.

HowJSay.com

HowJSay is another portal similar to the Dictionary portal mentioned above where you can type in the word and listen to the pronunciation.

However HowJSay additionally lists a set of words based on the input word and I found this feature quite useful.

Windows Text To Speech Engine

Windows comes with a built-in Text To Speech engine and mainly used for the Narrator Application.

On Windows Vista, you can access the Speech Properties dialog via

Control Panel -> Ease of Access -> Speech Recognition Options

On the “Text To Speech” dialog, you can input the word and select “Preview Voice” to listen to the word pronunciation.

The same option is also available on Windows XP. (Control Panel ->Speech)

I find this the quickest way of checking on a word and does not require an active Internet connection.

For Linux users, there is an option in the form of Festival ! I haven’t tried it though.

If you know of any other service, please feel free to suggest the same using the comment form.

A service is a long running executable which does require any user intervention and is configured to start when the operating system is booted.

On Windows, the services are managed via services.msc and you can also communicate with a NT service using the SC tool.

On Linux the services can be controlled via the chkconfig command line tool.

Usage details of chkconfig  is shown below:

chkconfig –list [name]
chkconfig –add <name>
chkconfig –del <name>
chkconfig [--level <levels>] <name> <on|off|reset>

Add and Del options are used to create or delete services for management. A service can be activated or deactivated using the on or off flags. Note that you have to mention the runlevel using the --level option.

The absensce of this runlevel will lead to the settings being applied to the current runlevel.

The <name> argument refers to the name of the service and this can be found by referring to the /etc/init.d director on Linux, which is a central repository for all startup scripts.

Also note that chkconfig modifies the data on /etc/rc[0-6].d directories and not the actual startup scripts.

A much faster way of enabling or disabling Linux services is by using the ntsysv command.

The command lists the services available on the repository (/etc/init.d) and enables the user to disable/enable services in one shot.

Also if the service name looks too cryptic, you can always press F1 to get more information about the selected service.

As with chkconfig, if you need to control the services at multiple runlevel’s you need to invoke ntsysv with the --level argument

ntsysv --level 345 will configure the services on runlevel 3, 4 and 5.

If you are a Linux newbie, Linux.com has an excellent introduction to Services, runlevel’s and rc.d scripts.

Note: In Debian, services are managed using the update-rc.d command

Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.

Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people.

There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible architecture of the platform).

Following is the list of Eclipse Plugins for some of the popular Source Control software.

PixelBeat has nice compilation of some of the commonly used Linux terminal commands. The commands are also categorized and should help in finding the right command/command usage for the task at had.

Link: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html

Also note the comment in the above page:

Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, soyou may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.

Don’t forget to Bookmark it for future reference !

I was a die hard fan of Suse Linux and was hesitant to try other Linux distributions.

Suse 10.1 worked flawlessly on my laptop and I was able to even get the Xgl working on my ATI Radeon X700 graphics card.

Post on Suse
Suse 10.1
Xgl Working on Suse
XGL on Suse – Photoset

The other Linux distribution that is very popular among geeks is Ubuntu. My friend Harish recently shifted to Ubuntu and this further motivated me to try out Ubuntu.

Unlike Suse distribution which is around 4GB, Ubuntu 7.04 codenamed Fiesty Fawn is a lightweight distro at 700MB.

Installation

1. When I booted up via the Installation CD, I was directly taken to the “live mode” of Ubuntu. The installer even detected the sound card and welcomed me with a audio clip
2. On the live mode, I was able to connect to Internet (via my secure D-Link Wireless Modem/Router)
3. Ubuntu even detected the SD card and displayed a shortcut for the same on the desktop.
4. The live mode is not a persistent mode and hence I proceeded with the actual “disk” installation. Again this was made easy by an “Install” shortcut on the desktop.
5. Best thing was that I could browse the Internet while the installation was in progress
6. The installation interface is not that great.
   • The time display was wrong even after setting the correct time zone
   • The Partition manager was very slow. After every change in the partition configuration, the installer used to scan the hard drive and this was awfully slow.
7. The installation also read the user profiles on the windows partition and asked if I was interested in importing the user profiles !

Post Installation

1. The Ubuntu startup screen with the Orange progress bar does look cool.
2. On starting up Ubuntu, there was a continuous dump of error message. The error was something like “mmcblk – error 1 – sending read/write“. After some time I realized the error was related to the SD card. Ubuntu had trouble reading the SD card (Note: Ubuntu had no issue reading the SD card in “live mode”)
3. In terms of software, Ubuntu does come bundled with all the goodies. There was even a free Sudoku game ! Cool eh
4. Even though I didn’t install any video drivers for my ATI card, proper resolution was set for the wide screen display.
5. I turned on the Desktop effects and even this worked flawlessly. I had the “wobble” and “cube” effects working with no issues.

Screenshots (Click to view the enlarged image)

More screenshots can be found here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/venukb/sets/72157600269090101/

Try out Ubuntu if you haven’t. It does look like a good alternative to SuSE.

Every time I try to edit a file in Unix using vi, I end up corrupting the file rather than “editing” it.

To get out of the mess I resort to q! command which helps me to exit from editor without saving the modifications. Incidentally this command (q!) happens to be one of the most used commands by me

An alternative to avoid this mess is to start the XServer and use gedit/kate to edit the file. However this is not suitable if you want to quickly make few changes in the file.

So I have decided to master vi in one week (hopefully it should be enough).

If you are also in a similar soup and want to learn vi, try out these links

• Mastering the vi Editor
• Manual Page of vi Editor

Also this graphical cheat sheet should come in handy !

Update

There is a tutorial based on the graphical cheat sheet. You can find it here

If you know any other good sources of information to learn vi, let me know

If I wanted to created a directory tree say /first/second/third this is how I used to do it, till now.

$ cd /
$ mkdir first
$ cd first
$ mkdir second
$ cd second
$ mkdir third
$ cd third

Today I learnt that you could do this in a single swipe using the -p option!

mkdir -p first/second/third

And its not just restricted to simple hierarchies, you could even create a complex tree structure like this

$ mkdir -p project/{lib/ext,bin,src,doc/{html,info,pdf},demo/stat/a}

You can find 9 more such interesting tips on the IBM post titled “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“

The default shell on most Linux operating systems is Bash. And as with every other application (which I use extensively) the first thing I do is to search/use Keyboard shortcuts.

First I checked the Bash Reference Manual, however there was no mention of any keyboard shortcut in that manual.

A search in Google lead me to this post (via Digg). For those who are lazy to click on that link, here is the list

Ctrl + A 	Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E 	Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + L               	Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command
Ctrl + U 	Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.
Ctrl + H 	Same as backspace
Ctrl + R 	Let’s you search through previously used commands
Ctrl + C 	Kill whatever you are running
Ctrl + D 	Exit the current shell
Ctrl + Z 	Puts whatever you are running into a suspended background process. fg restores it.
Ctrl + W 	Delete the word before the cursor
Ctrl + K 	Clear the line after the cursor
Ctrl + T 	Swap the last two characters before the cursor
Esc + T 	Swap the last two words before the cursor
Alt + F 	Move cursor forward one word on the current line
Alt + B 	Move cursor backward one word on the current line
Tab 	Auto-complete files and folder names

To be honest I didn’t know half of these shortcuts.
I am definitely going to use Ctrl + L extensively and will try to avoid Ctrl +C (Many a times rather than copying a line of text, I terminate a program by using Ctrl + C !! )

Sorry if you are mislead by the title. Check this image. (Click for the enlarged image)

Also this happens to be my new wallpaper on SuSE. I found this image in one of the Novell’s CoolSolution Article.

I just couldn’t stop laughing for some time Notice that stare given by the Penguin

Now for the important question ! Will the Penguin “catch” the Butterfly or will it “fail” ?

I finally got Xgl working on SuSE. I struggled for 2 days to set this up and finally a comment left by a reader(Mahesh) on my earlier post helped me to resolve the problem !

So what was the problem ?

Compiz was not installed properly ! Gnome Control Center showed the Desktop Effects tool (confirming that Compiz is installed), however when I opened the Gnome configuration editor (gnome-editor) I couldn’t find Compiz under the apps.

So I removed Compiz which was installed from software.opensuse.org and installed the one which was available on the SuSE 10.1 DVD.

There were a couple of other configuration I did as per the instructions in this post:

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17174.html

The article may seem specific to NVidia Graphics card, however the same can be used for ATI Graphics card as well. If you have a ATI Graphics card refer to this article to setup the Fglrx driver !

So was it worth the time I spent setting it up ?

Absolutely yes ! I setup Xgl on both Gnome and KDE and it works better on KDE. I thought the effects in Vista were cool ! However Xgl effects are ultra-cool. See these photos to believe it

I have uploaded a few more photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/venukb/sets/72157594409934979/

Xgl is an X server architecture designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers. The development of Xgl was sponsored by Novell to increase the usability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and was led by David Reveman

Checkout this video to see Xgl in action :

I recently installed Suse 10.1 and I have been trying to setup Xgl from the past 2 days ! Setting up Xgl is turning out to be painful unlike the Suse Linux Installation !

This is the sequence of steps I followed to setup Xgl/Compiz (Compiz is the window manager which works in composition with Xgl)

1. Download latest Linux drivers for my ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphic card.
2. Installed Kernel Source,gcc and make packages.
3. Installed the ATI Linux drivers by referring to this post
4. Installed Compiz by referring to this post

I was all smiles when I saw the “Desktop Effects” tool in the Gnome Control Center. My smile didn’t list long; It ended with this message.

The tool crashes on startup and prompts me to log a bug report on the same !

Anybody know the reason for this error ? I have uploaded the crash log here

Ethereal is one of the best open source packet sniffer available today. It is available on both Windows and Unix Platform.

Detailed list of Ethereal features can be found here !

Richard Sharpe and Ed Warnicke have written an extensive user guide(450 pages) on Ethereal. The intent of the document was to improve the accessibility of Ethereal.

If you are new to Ethereal or if you are already using Ethereal this guide is for you

Download Ethereal User Guide V1.1

Digg This !

Nope I am not going to write a post listing the 100 Linux Tips and Tricks. I am just going to attach a nice book that I found while searching through by E-book collection

The book is pretty good for new Linux users and can help them to quickly get started on Linux ! I have checked the copyright and its free of charge.

Download PDF(1.18MB)

P.S. The search for this document was triggered by the recent installation of Suse 10.1. .

Suse Linux 10.1 is a mammoth 3.5GB installation. I spent almost 30 hours downloading it via the torrent and I should say it was worth that effort.

I had Suse 10.0 installed previously. SuSe 10.1 has lot of improvements in terms of installation and hardware drivers.

• For the first time I could install any linux distro with ACPI enabled !
• For the first time I was able use hibernate on Linux
• For the first time I didn’t have to struggle configuring the graphics card and monitor.
• For the first time a linux distro detected my ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Graphics card.
• For the first time I am able to set a wide screen resolution (16:10 aspect ratio) in a linux distro.
• For the first time I had no trouble setting up the wireless connection

If I wasn’t having a legal copy of Windws and if my VPN connection worked on Linux, I would have happily shifted to Suse Linux .I have tried a lot of Linux Distros in the past including Fedora, Ubuntu etc, but Novell’s SuSe stands out. Installation of Linux has never been smooth in any of the other Linux Distributions.

Few days back Novell and Microsoft even announced a partnership under which MS will provide technical support for SuSe, however I guess this is going to be on the Enterprise front

I installed both KDE and Gnome and somehow have started a liking for Gnome, its kind of lightweight and loads fast. If you are planning to shift to Linux, go for SuSe

Which Linux Distro do you like ?