How to Mount Windows Partition from Linux

I have dual boot in my laptop with Windows XP and my favorite Ubuntu. Windows XP is factory default. Two years back, I installed Fedora and after trying the recent version of Ubuntu, I wanted to install Ubuntu and it has become my favorite in no time. I simply like it. Since I backed up some important Ebooks and documents into Windows partition, I wanted to access those both from Windows XP and Ubuntu. After doing some searching in Internet, I found a mechanism to mount windows partition to Linux.

First, you need to identify the number of Windows partition and locate the partition that you want to mount. "df -k" will help you to identify all the partition/disk in your system. Then, use the "mount" command to mount. For example, here is the sequence of steps to be followed. Run "sudo fdisk -l" and identify windows partition and then mount it using script given after fdisk output.

lnarasim@lnarasim-laptop:~/scripts$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 78.5 GB, 78518522880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9546 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0f4738c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1958 15727603+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1959 9546 60950610 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 1959 4569 20972826 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 4570 4736 1341396 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 4737 4985 2000061 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 4986 9546 36636201 83 Linux
lnarasim@lnarasim-laptop:~/scripts$

lnarasim@lnarasim-laptop:~/scripts$ cat win_mount.bash
#! /bin/bash

sudo mkdir -p /media/c
sudo mkdir -p /media/d

sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/sda5 /media/c
sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/sda6 /media/d

I have also come up with a simple shell script to do that. If you want, you can also add this in startup scripts so that Windows partition is mounted automatically after startup. With simple use of Linux commands, we are able to access Windows partition.

Absorption and Agility - Learn from Animals

The recent days is testimony for many companies for their absorption capability. There are times when the companies should be agile in looking out opportunities and some times it so happens that they need to tuck their tail and sit idle waiting for opportunities. Sitting idle, as the words suggest, will not yield any benefits other than optimizing the operational costs. I remember that I read that in some business journals that the best companies in the world invest in innovation and making new products which supposed to take chuck of money. Being an uncertain time, many of us fear about the future's prospectus. It greatly applies to individuals also.

There are times when one needs to retreat and practice "wait and watch" game. And sometimes and the situation is in favor, we need to be agile to make use of the opportunity. Few months back, Microsoft's intention to buy Yahoo is an excellent example how things should not be done. Microsoft gave enough time to Yahoo and Yahoo thought that Microsoft undervalued Yahoo. The deal did not go through affecting the stakeholders of Yahoo.

If you ever wonder how to learn "Absorption and Agility", watch this video. We have to learn a lot from animals. Because, they do not have greed like human beings and their agenda is just to survive. I am sure, you will love it.

Lip Service, Laziness and Five Years in Hell

My father was a teacher in state government and he has retired now. When he was in service, he used to go to election booths as presiding officer. When we were kids, he used to tell us about his election experience. There would be so many people inquire him about his election experience on how people stone the election booths. Generally he used to go to other constituency and during all his election duties he never stopped exercising his duty - casting his vote (through post) .My grandmother is now 80s and she never missed one. Check with your family, you will have many great grandparents who are still casting their votes and show us that casting votes is such an important one. But these days, the people are merely enjoying a holiday either watching movies or mini-serial or mega-serial. You have whole bunch of entertainment channels. Also, this time, we also have IPL. Whether it is Congress or BJP or XYZ, why should I bother? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen? I can always yell at politicians or my servant just in case the economy fails.

Sometime back, the senior advocate and journalist Mr Cho. Ramaswamy, in his speech said that people of this generation do not exercise their electoral rights properly. It was proven right during that time that a by-election in TN registered a record polling of 90%. God and politicians only knows how they made the record. Sometimes, even God does not know. When we are not going to exercise our votes, there are two things that can possibly happen. Either someone cast your vote or wrong candidate has been selected to represent you because you did not vote. When you sum up, both the cases is sufficient enough to take our country backwards. If you are going to assume that no one will cast your vote other than you, you are dead wrong. This is secret for record polling. With this economic recession, the prosperity will be evaporated if a wrong party or party with protectionism comes to power. So, use your voting rights to pick the right candidate and right party.

Let us make this place a better one for the future generations. Let the future generations know that their great grandparents are visionaries and thought leaders. If you choose the other way, the next five will be "hell".

Speaking experience @ VIT, Vellore

This is the first time that I am visiting to Vellore and Vellore Institute of Technology. Today, I happen to be there for a talk on Linux Process, POSIX Threads and Linux Scheduler as a part of a workshop on "Open Source Initiatives and Linux Kernel Internals" organized by School of Computing Sciences VIT. I was very fortunate to share the speaking podium along with eminent and highly accomplished Prof. Dr. C N Krishnan and ILUG-C co-coordinator Mr. Bharathi Subramanian. We started in Chennai around 6 am and reached Vellore at 8.30am. The faculty members and Director gave us a warm welcome.

Around 9am, we headed to the auditorium for the workshop. The first part of the workshop is on NRC-FOSS. Dr Krishnan covered the agenda of NRC-FOSS (Phase 1 and Phase 2) and why FOSS makes sense to India. It was insightful and towards the end, I could find many students charged up to take open source in their mainstream learning.

Next, I spoke on Linux Process Management, POSIX Threads and Linux Scheduler. The students were very much interactive and had a lot of enthusiasm to ask questions. I too felt that some questions really made me think. After my talk, Mr. Bharathi took the session on Linux Device Driver and showed how to write simple kernel module and simple dummy character device driver. Again, this talk helped me to refresh whatever I learnt some 3 yrs back.

During the workshop and throughout the day, we received an excellent hospitality from the faculties and students. Overall, it was another productive Saturday and I can sleep with a lot of satisfaction. You can view some of the pictures that are taken during workshop @ here.

Be an agent of Change

Have you ever thought that this generation is going to do a turnaround. This is going to be a history in evolution of mankind. We saw a dreadful effects of hyper leverage, the retirement funds of many senior people eroded, lifetime wealth were gone without traces and the economy has come closed to a depression, if not grinding halt. We thought that "entry today" and "exit tomorrow" is a great game. Having said that, today, many organizations, business leaders and most importantly policymakers, economic experts are trying to make this as turnaround. We are in the verge of witnessing one more revolution which, I believe will take the economy and mankind to next level. I am sure, we will and it is just a matter of time. If each one of us take part in this change, I feel, the recovery will be fast and post recovery will be great. How can you take part in this change? Read on.

The concept is going to be simple but difficult. As Scott Berkun used tell, if something is simple, it doesn't mean that it is easy. Many simple things in the world are difficult. For example, consider a mother giving birth to a baby. The doctors and even some elderly folks many know that the process is simple. But they will also agree that it is difficult. The work of the security guard is simple - to continuously watch the trespassers. But it is difficult to watch consistently. So, many things in this world is simple but yet they are difficult.

Similarly, it is very much easier to say "be an agent of change" and it takes a great deal to be the agent and consistently trace the agenda - wellness to mankind. When I write this, I hear a good news from US of some data better than expected number. Can we try to shorten our turnaround time? Yes, it lot depends on how we work and face the challeges in front of us. This is the time that we should demostrate a state of high productivity and fully focussed on the work. It is the time that we show some mercy to people who lost jobs and try to help them to find their way. You can try to impart your knowledge to next generation and take sometime to make "education poverty (illiteracy)" a history. When economy recovers, the entire mankind should have a reason to cheer and not just few "so called" gifted souls.

Make use of this time to build your home, town, state and country. After a year, the economy will take of itself and show a great recovery. Think about this. What will you do if economy recovers? How do you want to see your people in a recovered economy? Don't we like to see a green ecosystem, dont we like to see computers in village schools or showing computers to these kids at least once. Devote 5% of your time to others. Believe me, it is not spending your time, it is investing. If you invest now, you will eat fruits, and then your generations. If you don't do, then, you will be a history and so is your generations.

This is the time to be a agent and hero or to die.

Happy Recovery :-)

What can you say? Is it a progressive society

It was late in night and all the big shots in Indian business gathered. Right from liquor king to king khan. When you allow these people, they will talk in length about social responsibility. Their social responsibility stop at either putting a web link in their company website, establishing aviation academy in a tribal village, or at maximum doing a lip service in their movies. They were in a big posh place and guy hitting the hammer. All were wearing fashionable dresses. Gents were in full suit and ladies :-( (I dont remember exactly they were wearing, but I believe there should be some dress). Thanks to Modi, CEO of IPL, who commercialized playing cricket. Thanks to media who gave him award for being innovative. Thanks to BCCI for brining an excellent cricket session. I know they are working really hard, squeezing their brain to bring only best cricket to Indian cricket lovers. It was great to watch movie stars, business guys, cricket players, spouses of stars/business guys/players. Each one of them involved in IPL deserve special award. But it is the cricket lover who has been cheated by these guys to make money. Read on.

Unlike 20 years back, these days cricket are played frequently. One dayers, test match and recent T20 cricket. The main strength of T20 is that it steals a lot of time but we do not know that it is stealing time. A normal cricket lover watches a match for 4 hours and these match certainly will be in memory for another 4 hours. Another 4 fours he spends in mere dreaming on how the match is going to be and seeing highlights of watched match. Totally, the "cricket fanatic" is going to waste 1.5 day of productive work. This is a case of one match. But generally these matches never come in single. There is a proverb in Tamil - "Sani ponam, thaniya poogathu". Each match except Semis and final are "sani ponam". And this is going to happen for almost 2 months in year. So for every year, on an average basis, a cricket fanatic is going to waste 3 months (I lost count and hence let us maintain the lower limit as 3 months). Also, you cannot say who is going to be the cricket fanatic.

Once they decided to go mad, they go mad to an extent which you and I cannot imagine. It catches everyone right from Vice President to Software Engineer, Homemaker to Aeroplane pilot. The cricket can make anyone idiot. It doesn't care whether he is Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Actor Vijay, Vijay Mallaiya, Srinivasan, Ramamoorthy, Gunasekaran, Prabhakaran, Karthi, Jopesh, Aslam, he, she, they, it, you and I. I also feel that we can official introduce betting as a part of IPL T20 so that it also helps us to earn (this is joke. dont take it seriously. i certainly feel that it may happen and tomorrow CNN-IBN will give me award for innovation. LOL)

Is it a sign of responsible society? If you are reading this, please think for a while, are you gaining anything because of T20 or does it lead to any benefits to our country. When you sum up, India loses more, IPL T20 is making Indian lazy and unproductive. Playing in casino is a gambling and IPL T20 is an organized gambling with cricket lovers as mere jokers. The "cricket fanatics" has to remember that it is energy sucker and growth ****er.

Ironically, these business leaders when they go and sit in their office they want their employees to be productive. But they forget the fact that they are the main culprits for making Indians unproductive. It is good that this time we are not going to have T20 in Indian soil. Let us say good bye to 2-month long T20, Lalit Modi, BCCI, Owners of the team and players. Let us spend sometime in thinking on how to make ourselves better and India better. If you are one of the policymaker or responsible citizen, please spread the awareness to fellow Indian. It is the people of India who make the future India and not these kinds of energy suckers. As Gerald Weinberg says, there is thin line between doing and over doing. Even a good thing done beyond a point turns out to be the negative. IPL is now overdoing cricket and let us stop it before it becomes overly non-sense.

Let Indian and India to grow.

Have a Reason to Cheer - Indian IT

It is not even over a month that Mr Obama addressed congress and made a powerful voice against outsourcing. He announced the end of tax breaks to the companies that outsource jobs to other countries. Within a month, I hope, he understood the value that outsourcing creates to US. In the recent statement, Mr Obama, rewrote his words that he was not against outsourcing low-level, low-skill jobs. Is there a reason to say this? Are there any hidden agenda? I believe yes. The emerging markets like India have become no non-sense market place for MNCs because of their consumption power. It is that consumption power that made US, the super power and it is the same consumption power that is going to make India, a super power.

The consumption is so powerful and that is how Pepsi, Coke, Colgate and many other brands are making money. Thanks to globalization. If there is a policy decision against outsourcing, the other countries where the jobs are outsourced will also make some policy decisions against these MNCs. Without outsourcing, the existence of these MNCs is Win-Lose proposition with emerging economies in losing side. I hope that the business organizations in US have understood this and this is right time for the policymakers in emerging markets to keep a watch on the developments. Also, with the current economic slowdown, MNCs will not be able to withstand any further blow. When the economy recovers, the stand on outsource will become irrelevant. Even in the current climate, the US companies wanted to push some "risks" to high value & risk taking Indian companies. So, the outsourcing helps to diversify their risks. :-)

Overall, apart from direct benefits, the outsourcing leads to a lot of flexibility and this flexibility is quite essential for all developed nations, not only to the US. So, moving forward we will see the dilution in "stop outsourcing" slogan and this will be done or can be done as a lip service.

Hearing YouTube Video in your Mobile

It has become a standard that people come minimum of 5 minutes and maximum of 15 minutes late for a 20 minutes meeting. Sometimes, even the meeting organizer comes late and ask a question "did anyone come for the meeting" forgetting the fact that he/she is the organizer. It is a punishment for being on time. Going late to these meetings is not a solution and it may not be a good idea to change people. I wanted to use the time effectively like thinking, planning and watching/hearing some useful things. Here is a way to manage your time.

These days a lot video like TED, You Tube are made available the users to download. Those videos are in a way revolutionizing the human thinking. I wanted to copy these videos and hear it during my leisure including the time I spend in meeting waiting for others. But if you look at the video format of You Tube and TED, they are primarily flv and mp4 format. These videos are relatively large in size and I cannot have more than 5-6 videos each running for 30-40 minutes. I have a Sony Ericsson and if I convert to 3gp format I can store upto 12 videos.

I came across a nice open source tool MediaCoder which transcode audio/videos. It has numerous features. It also supports both transcoding audio and as well as video. For a selected video, the user can select audio/video CODECs. There is one feature that is quite impressive. If you select the target device (Ipod, mobile, VCD player), the software automatically chooses suitable CODEs and video format. I have converted couple of videos and stored it in my mobile. It is good that I found this software and it helps me to hear inspirational stories everyday when I drive or am puntual to the meetings :-) Thanks MediaCoder

Time Management - I feel its importance

At my office, I have been nominated for a training which I believe is going to transform me if I achieve 50% of what lies before me. I have been given quite a challenging job and sometimes I feel it is quite a big challenge. Apart from the training, I personally identified some areas of improvement and if I strike a balance between both the training and personal aspiration, I am sure that it will take me to a point where I only imagined to be in. That requires a minimum of eight hours per day of work. This excluding the usual nine hours day. For the next few months, I had to stretch a lot and work hard. But it is good that I feel that I can achieve it with hard work and dedication. I can confidently say with my seven years of little experience that it can be done. However there is one trait that I would like to change.

I am poor in time management. When I like something, I tend to forget how much it is taking my time. Sometimes the things we like be there in memory leading to inefficiency and less productive at work. So, the first thing I have to do is to allocate time and manage it. For example, the initial goal of spending not more than 30 minutes surfing (orkut, linkedin, twitter stuff) will be hard to achieve. When it comes to work, the same is the case. That makes things easier to say but hard to do it. My next aspiration is to manage my time and boost my productivity. The goals I said in the first part of post will make sense only when I manage time. If not they will exist as goals and never be converted into accomplishments. Let us see what happens

Restarting my LFY Journey

As I wrote in another post, the journey in my life as a Linux for You author is most satisfying moment. I started my career as a tester and after a year, I moved to development (made to move). My initial work was primarily on Windows but once in a while, I tend to work in Solaris. As I was working in one of Network Security products, we (Enlightened Tester and myself) tend to get excited. After a while, we had a discussion with people around our cube and those days people stop by they see some technical discussion. We were discussing how to make HIPS and slowly the discussion went on to System calls and process.

Out of curiosity, I started to dig to know what is a process and ended up creating one. Of course, those days (and even today) the only option is to have Linux as it is open and you get lot of material in Internet. I had VMWare workstation and installed Linux. Within few days, I was able to manage my virtual machine well and my after office hours encounters were in Linux with this VMWare workstation. I also started to learn about basics of POSIX Threads.

In the same timeframe, my project leader R.K. Raja wrote a series of articles in Linux for You and this motivated me to write. I thought that writing in the magazine will be difficult. While that is true to some extent, the people working at LFY deal with people in a gentle way with lot of care. I remember my interactions with all of them but the interactions with Samartha Vashishtha needs a special mention. He is a great worker and know the strengths of people. He respects people and understands other's difficulties. He replies to email very fast (sometimes even before you hit the send button) and makes the article very beautiful. With the support of LFY and the readers, by 2007 I completed around 20 articles in 3 years and wrote articles on Linux, Linux Internals, Network Security and Java. Not only my technical knowledge grew, my writing skills and hard working attitude also improved.

But, it is very sad that I lost touch and now find it difficult to catch up. I am looking forward to contribute more articles that add values to the readers. Let us see, how it goes.

Going beyond Science, Loving everything as ART

Sometime back, one my friends, Rajkumar forwarded me a link on recent economic slowdown. The author, himself an MBA from a world’s most renowned B-School, talked length and breadth about the school and powerful alumni who created the mess. I neither going to defend nor go completely against those statements. It is good that people are now realizing that “greediness” is root cause of many of the problems we see today. As Tony Robbins (refer his TED talk), any education or learning has two forms. First, the basic form of education is learning something as a science. For example, by studying atomic physics one can know and become an expert in nuclear fusion and fission reactions. They came to know the ways of making a nuclear reaction to produce massive power. However, the science does not teach or bother to teach about how to apply the education. It is up to the student to use it for a noble cause or he may choose to use it for the destructive purpose. The system’s thinker, Gerald Weinberg also says the same (forgetting the second order effects) in his book “An Introduction to General System Thinking”.

This is where the second aspect of education comes into picture. It is so difficult and almost impossible for a teacher to teach anything as an Art. Even an art (like drawing or acting or music) cannot be taught as an Art. Do not misunderstand me. The schools that teach art (like music), they do teach music as science but not as art. If you join a violin class, the guru (the master) teaches you how to place your finger and put the bow on the strings. But did he teach how to play the violin as if you are playing it for your soul. My point is that the learning anything as an art cannot be taught. The student has to immerse during education at school and go beyond that. The people at work have to immerse in work. The immersion will not be successful until the person draws inspiration from someone and also does not look up to someone for moral support or next step. When you feel, emote internally, live with the subject gracefully and for sure you will start to see the subject in art form. Then, so many things sparkles out of you like “How can I do more to my subject, how can I contribute and take it to next level for human/world/universe prosperity”. Like OSHO says, whatever you do becomes creative.

These days, taking education or doing work as science is necessity but taking education or doing work as Art is choice.