This post is about my open source remote bandwidth usage stats logger project.

I’ve been wanting to log the internet bandwidth usage at my home for quite some time since I don’t really find the stats put out by my ISP to be completely accurate. But I have multiple devices at home that access the internet so it is not feasible to install a bandwidth monitor individually on all these devices as I’d still need to add up all logs and many of such devices don’t even have a way to install a monitoring software installed (e.g. my PS3, my TV, my media players, etc). So, I thought of monitoring the usage at my router. It is a smart one (Asus wl-500w) and I can install various linux software on it but then it requires a hard disk to run most of them which I don’t turn on all the time. Moreover, even if I could run the software directly from router flash, it doesn’t have enough space to store the logs (neither is it a good idea to keep writing to the flash often).

Hence I came up with the idea of a light weight remote bandwidth usage logger where in the router has to do the bare minimum possible (here, it just has to make a GET call to a webpage with current status of received and transmitted bytes, accomplished by a single line of wget command). The system is completely open source and is intelligent enough to keep track of things even if router reboots or the bytes count wraps around the 4 GB limit (because of 32 bit data structures used). The logging and parsing is all done on server side and provides various useful things.

Few of the features of the system:

• Very lightweight in CPU/RAM resource usage on host as well as server
• Outputs easy to browse html and graphs
• User defined directory structure to decide the granularity that is wanted
• yearly, monthly, daily stats and graphs
• Provides quick access to extra stats like last time the host connected, last known host IP etc
• Provides total download/upload numbers as well as detailed
• Estimates uptime of remote host
• Can use a DNS name or IP to avoid (or call out) spurious amounts of usage logged by a spurious IP

Remote Bandwidth Stats Yearly Stats

Remote Bandwidth Stats Monthly Stats

Remote Bandwidth Stats Daily Stats

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Remote Bandwidth Stats, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

It was just about an year ago that we heard about the $35 Android Tablet from India which would revolutionize the education in developing countries. Mr. Kapil Sibal promoted it with utmost fervor until it was found that the BoM itself of the tablet was more than $50 and none of the guys claimed to have “invented” it even knew about its existence until a few days before the announcement. Ultimately, it was discovered that the tablet was just a rebranded chinese import which the government wanted to bring down to $35 price point by subsidizing the cost and not by somehow inventing cheaper parts. What more proof can we get about it’s non existence that it hasn’t materialized after so much of time and even the company that was supposed to be making it according to the government (HCL) has said that it has nothing to do with it.

That was that but it seems like the episode has given a brilliant idea to a few others as well. Import cheap/sub-standard products from China, rebrand them, ask government for subsidy and claim to have “invented” a revolutionary low cost computing device. iWebLeaf is a case in point. I came across them through a couple of articles where this little company formed by a couple of engineering students has invented two ultra low cost products: A 3G data card for 1300 INR (~ $30) and a Laptop for 5000 INR (~ $110). I was pleasantly surprised and my initial reaction was to applaud the effort. Then I noticed that these products, although announced for quite some time and having gotten a LOT of mainstream media coverage on almost every news channel, have not come to the market yet. The reasons for the 3G card are unknown but the laptop was said to have been dropped because of lack of Government support (read “subsidy”).

Disclaimer: Before you read any further, please note that I’m an Indian myself and stay in India only (i.e., not a condescending NRI). I am a developer myself and love innovating and innovators and have the greatest respect for all that our country has given to the world. This piece is a rant against only those few individuals who make the rest of the India look bad by claiming authority over fake innovations.

Being a part of the semiconductor industry for quite some time, I was curious to find out how they achieved this feat which no one else including big name companies have been able to do even after years of research (XO-PC). I looked at the purported specs of the laptop and it struck me that yet again, the BoM itself was much more than 5000 INR. When I raised some questions about this, the “innovators” replied that they are saving all this money because they “developed their own processor DXA16″ which is equivalent to a 1.6GHz Intel Atom. What again raised even more doubts in mind was that they said their processor didn’t have anything to do with Intel and they didn’t even have to take an X86 license even though they claim windows support for the laptop, which means that their processor MUST be x86 compatible. Secondly, they mentioned that they have got jobs in TCS and CTS and won’t continue further. I’m completely flummoxed why an under-graduate student who has designed his own commercially viable micro processor in a college lab during a period when other students struggle to just write 10 line assembly programs, would go and join a mass-recruiting services company. If I was him, any company from Intel to TI to Qualcomm to ARM would be ready to hire me for any salary that I demanded. On top of this, they gave weird reasons to drop it that they want to do it only for Orissa and no other state, etc.

It was also mind-blowing that they made such great inventions but their own website doesn’t have even a single word about these. All they have there is the run of the mill Web-Hosting, SEO, site design, blah blah.

Anyways, another person on the same forum where I raised the doubts uncovered an ugly truth. Their data card is nothing but a rebranded chinese card. See this link: Cheap 3G Data Card.

Points to note:

1. This card has the exact same specs including speeds, features (e.g. same RAM, ROM amounts, sd card etc)

2. It costs around $35 for a single piece including shipping. So, for bulk purchase, you can easily get it much cheaper and sell it around the $30 price.

3. It looks exactly the same  with just an iWebLeaf logo slapped over the version sold by these innovators.

Pics:

iWebLeaf Data Card:

Chinese Data Card:

Note: You can also see this video of iWebLeaf Data Card and compare it against the rest of the pics on Deal Extreme site for the chinese card.

Laptop: I was even more skeptical about their laptop now. And I was flabbergasted with surprise when I found out that all it took me was around 2 minutes of search for “cheap chinese laptop” on china trader sites like alibaba/traderkey etc and I stumbled onto a company called Enzo-Tech. If I could do this in 2 minutes, couldn’t the rest of the mainstream media folks do a little bit of fact check with their vast resources? They produce a 10″ Mini Laptop which, just like the data card:

1. Has the exact same specs as the iWebLeaf laptop (except that they list Atom as the processor instead of DXA16, which is a farce anyways)

2. Looks exactly the same with just iWebLeaf stickers pasted all over. (Pics below)

The only concern here is that even this laptop is not available for the low price that iWebLeaf mentioned. This laptop sells for around $200 in small quantities. If bought for very large quantities (e.g. in thousands or 10s of thousands by a government), the price would come down radically and with a little bit more of subsidy, it can achieve the price that iWebLeaf mentioned. But it would still be “cost price”. Sale price to end users will have to be much higher due to customs, logistics, handling, shipping, etc even if they were to sell it on a no-profit basis.

iWebLeaf Laptop:

Enzo-Tech Laptop:

Note: You can also see this video of iWebLeaf Laptop and compare it against the pics/specs on Enzo-Tech’s website and see that it is the same.

What to make of it? I don’t have anything against these guys as entrepreneurs. They have every right to import, rebrand and resell products. A huge number of people and companies do this. What I take offense to, however, is to claim that they invented these things which isn’t true and then blame the Government for not allowing them to prosper by not spending the tax money I pay for their benefits. Moreover, this not only shames other “True” Indian innovators when these fakes are discovered but also sets wrong examples for our budding engineers to choose the shortest path possible to get 15 minutes of fame and then a job instead of really doing something to make the nation proud. I’m also yet again dis-illusioned by our mainstream media who will report anything and everything under the sun just to get more eyeballs and TRP without doing any sort of fact-checks. Yes, YOU SO CALLED TECH JOURNALISTS, I am calling you out.

In the end, I will make my offer to iWebLeaf guys again as I made to them elsewhere. Prove me wrong and I’ll myself heap praises upon you and your products through my blog and all other publications that I influence. Also, I will make sure to hire you in my company with at least 5 times the salary that you are getting in TCS/CTS.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled iWebLeaf – India’s $35 Android Tablet Spawning Fake Innovators?, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This post describes my first attempt at making Kinect work with a PS3. Microsoft’s new XBOX 360 accessory, kinect has made a powerful entry into the market, becoming the fastest selling gadget of all time. Looks like their “You are the controller” tagline is working. Of course, Sony’s “similar” accessory Move is selling well too but is far behind kinect adoption probably because nothing beats the lure of making something work with just “The Force” .

Now, of course, kinect doesn’t work with PS3 obviously but then if we can’t break the rules, we can at least bend them a little towards our way. I’ve  created a mashup that allows you to use kinect as an input controller for the PS3.

Please note that this is pre-alpha quality software currently. I haven’t updated to a lot of recent code for the below libraries and also haven’t done most of the performance/feature improvements yet. The axis performance specially needs lot of tweaking and it works well only while sitting. Putting this out purely as a proof of concept. For the things that I plan to add soon, please see the Todo section below. Follow me at @shantanugoel for latest updates.

VIDEO IN ACTION

The program makes use of several other programs in order to provide this functionality. To compile/use it, you also need the following programs:

1. OpenNI Libraries – To get data from kinect

2. NITE Libraries (Choose “Middleware” on the page) – Builds on top of OpenNI to provide gesture detection etc

3. PrimeSense Libraries for kinect – Kinect drivers to get raw data

4. DIYPS3Controller – The main component for PS3 connection and also known as sixaxis emulator. This emulates a DS3 on the PC and send the inputs to PS3 through bluetooth.

Installation/Compilation/Usage

1. Make sure that the above 4 things are installed on your machine and working fine.

2. Download the source of this project to the NITE Samples directory. You can even place it anywhere else but you would need to tweak the makefile to account for the changed paths.

3. Make any changes to the source that you need.

4. Change the included ps3 controller config xml file and place it in one of the locations where diyps3controller can find it.

5. Run make -f kinect-ps3.mak

6. The executable will be available in Samples/Bin directory of NITE.

7. Run kinect-ps3 (without any arguments)

8. Run emuclient (from ps3 controller software) and choose the new xml config file

9. “Become the controller”
Default Config:

Menu Profile – This is the default profile that kinect-ps3 starts with and allows to operate the PS3 menus. Moving hand in any direction will move the ps3 menus as if you were using the DPAD with those directions keys pressed. If you run out of the kinect’s watched space, then just do a backward push with your hand, bring your hand to center and then again do the backward push and continue scrolling. This is like you lift your finger up and then start dragging from edges of a laptop’s touchpad.For selecting any item, make two successive push movements with your hand without changing any x-y direction.
Game Profile – This profile can be switched to by doing 3 successive backward movements of the hand while in Menu profile. Right now I’ve implemented only directional controls in game profile because I’m still struggling with multiple hands detections and skeletal tracking. A full profile will be activated soon enough. Currently, the your hand’s x/y movements and directly translated to right stick x/y movements (e.g. this is looking in different directions in various FPS games). Moving the hand towards or away from kinect (z-axis) translate to left stick y movements (e.g. this is moving fowards or backwards in most FPS games).
Issues/Queries/Suggestions

Please direct them to me by commenting here or emailing me at shantanu AT shantanugoel DOT com

Coming Soon/ToDo

-Full Menu and Game profiles

- Skeletal tracking for better game profiles

- Switching back to menu profiles from game profiles

- Easier way to specify user custom profiles instead of changing code for the same

- Performance improvement for game profiles

Full source code of the project has been released at https://github.com/shantanugoel/Kinect-PS3 under GNU GPL v2.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Making Kinect Work With PS3, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This is a small review of my Acer TimelineX 4820TG that I purchased a few days ago. Now, I won’t be talking numbers (like CPU/GPU performance etc) because these things are almost same as per the component used and have been covered in various other reviews online. What I’ll concentrate more upon are the things that other reviewers don’t look at, or look at purely from numbers perspective which don’t make sense to an average buyer. Please let me know if I miss something out that you want to know about this laptop.

For clarification, I bought the topmost model of the TimelineX 14 incher series which has a core i5 430m with ATi 5650 1 GB graphics. (Other models have i3 only and one has 512mb graphics, while lowest end has only intel HD graphics). I bought it from Croma Retail for a price of 45,999 INR. So, here it goes:

Frame/Overall Build Quality: Overall, TimelineX 4820TG “feels” sturdy. It has a brushed metal lid and a plastic bottom. There is some flex all around, especially in the lid area but that is to be expected from a laptop which is so thin. For reference, I compared it to a lot of other laptops with almost similar dimensions, and the build quality and flex was generally on par with all of them, except the Asus Bamboo series and macbooks. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though. It is perfectly luggable through the campus or office, just that I wouldn’t keep anything heavy on top of it (I used to keep a lot of my books and other stuff on top of my previous laptop).

Keyboard: 4820TG’s keyboard is chiclet-type but it feels a bit flimsy as compared to the competition. It seems that the keys do not have support all arund but just at the center, so you can see the key edges tilting while typing. Also, the keys are not beveled but flat, which could put off few users though it was not a hindrance for me. Also, the keys feel just a tad bit mushy. But it takes just a few hours to get used to it. Only thing I’m not sure is whether I’ll still feel the same about this keyboard one year from now.

Touchpad: The touchpad is awesome. It is fairly big compared to what others give you these days. It is also multi-touch and supports the usual gestures like two fingure scroll, pinch-zoom, rotate, etc and I guess you could extend these pretty easily by using appropriate software. The click buttons are rocker-type, i.e., a single bar serves as the two buttons depending on where you press. It’s ok but you have to be slightly more careful than having two separate buttons here as you have to press near the ends for the clicks to register properly. Though this also becomes a second nature after a few hours of use.

Weight: The notebook is very light. I haven’t measured it on a weighing scale but for the oomph it packs, it is pretty slim and light. I can lift it easily by two fingers without feeling any strain and can work for hours with it sitting on my lap.

Heat / Temperature / Noise: The heat and noise emission is very low. While browsing and downloading and doing other general stuff, I couldn hardly feel it heating up while on my laps. The left top area on the underside (just near the vents) becomes a bit warm after prolonged use but still it is not unconfortable. The keyboard and wrist/palm rest areas remain cool throughout. I could not hear the fans at all while doing normal work in the dead of night and this turns into a slight whirr when the laptop is tasked with heavier crunching.

Battery Life: This is the USP of this model and one of the biggest reason why I went for it. This laptop has switchable graphics, i.e., you can chose to use the onboard intel GMA HD graphics for regular use or multimedia playback (plays HD media beautifully) or switch to the ATi 5650 for heavier tasks like gaming, etc. While using the intel graphics, I could easily browse for around 5 hours. I also downloaded around 500mb of stuff during this time and another 300 mb worth of windows updates were downloaded and installed. Moreover, this was all on normal settings and that too when I had a very poor wi-fi signal. I hadn’t mucked around with any power saving options at all and I believe that doing that, along with dimming the brightness and better wi-fi signal etc would easily pump it over the 6 hour mark. This is not as much as the 8 hours that Acer promises but still, it is excellent and much better than most of the competition. While turning on ATi 5650 for the same type of tasks reduced the battery life to around 3 hours.

Performance: I didn’t run any benchmarks on the laptop and neither did I do any gaming, but I didn’t feel any slow downs while doing any normal tasks and 720p/1080p media playback even while using the intel graphics.

This is it for now. I’ll keep updating it as more things come to my mind. I hope I have touched upon the significant aspects that I found missing when I was searching around for reviews of this laptop. Let me know if you have any queries for it and I’ll surely update it. Also, I haven’t gone into too much details as I’m primarily a linux user and haven’t explored or tasked this laptop too much till now. I’ll also be installing Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat on this asap and blog about this laptop’s linux compatibility, issues, fixes and workarounds as well.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Acer TimelineX 4820TG Mini-Review, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Recently I found an issue with my asus wl-500w wi-fi router that I wasn’t able to change the channel on which it was transmitting. I moved to a new location which was totally jam-packed with other wi-fi networks using same channel as mine which was hampeing my connection. I tried for umpteen number of times. Changing the channel through the web configuration did not give any error but I found that it was still transmitting at channel 1. I confirmed by checking on the “Status & Log” page, checking the logs, and running “wl status” command through ssh and they all confirmed that it was transmitting at channel 1 only, no matter what I set it to in the configuration. I even opened an issue in the firmware project for the custom firmware (by oleg and lly) that I am using but they weren’t able to help me as the wi-fi drivers are binary only.

But by sheer chance, I stumbled upon the solution finally by trial and error. The solution is that you should set the “Bandwidth” to 20 MHz in wi-fi configuration if you are using 802.11 G. If you set it to 40 MHz then it gets stuck somehow but as soon as I changed it to 20 MHz, I was able to see the channel change immediately after reboot. Here is the screenshot of the page where you can find this setting.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Cannot Change Channel Problem With Asus WL-500W, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Skype on linux works great but the problem that I faced was that it does not handle the buttons on the bluetooth headsets. My wife uses skype to call into her work related conference calls and was pretty frustrated that she had to keep sitting in front of my laptop (her laptop didn’t allow to install skype) just to switch mute on and off. So, I whipped up this little trick to do so. Here is how:

1. First I looked at the skype API (pretty simple, based on dbus). Also found a sample script somewhere that allowed to answer and hang up calls through skype API.

2. Modified the script to switch the mute on and off instead of answering/hanging up. Script can be downloaded at the end of this article. You can also modify it to take some other action that you want.

3. Install “blueman”. If you are using Ubuntu, just type “sudo apt-get install blueman” in shell.

4. Once blueman is installed and you have done your headset pairing etc, right click on the blueman icon in the system tray and click on “Local Services”.

5. In local services, click on headset tab and you can see a input box where you can give the path of a program/script which will be run whenever the “answer button” on the headset is pressed. This is important to note that blueman only supports the answer button and nothing else and I didn’t have the inclination to develop a full-fledged AVRCP compliant program to capture other buttons as all I was interested in mute functionality. You can see the screenshot of this below:

6. Make sure that you give the path where you saved the script that you downloaded in step 4 and you are all set now. Make a call and click on the answer button of your headset to see the magic happen

Let me know if you have your own hacks like this or know of a way to have a full fledged capturing of all headset buttons.

DOWNLOAD: Skype Bluetooth Mute Button Script

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Mute (or Answer) Skype Calls with BT Headset Button in Linux, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This is just a short post to to document how I got JDownloader to integrate with Flashgot. JDownloader doesn’t have an installer but a zip file that you just download and extract somewhere on your PC and start using it. Somehow, the Flashgot extension of Firefox is not able to detect it automatically and I didn’t know what parameters to use to add it manually to its list. Latest versions of JDownloader ask you whether you want to install Flashgot or not. I didn’t install it because I already had Flashgot. Turns out that this is the missing step. You should allow JDownloader to install Flashgot in your browser, even if it is already installed(If you have already run JDownloader once and didn’t say yes to installing flashgot, then you can do it by going to Settings->Plugins 7 Addons->Extensions->Flashgot for Firefox in JDownloader and clicking Install). And then, you will see that the JDownloader option is not grayed out anymore. If you see the version of Flashgot that JDownloader is installs is older than the official version, don’t fret. Now, you can re-update the flashgot addon (Tools->Addons->Find Updates in firefox) and the JDownloader integration will still stay intact. Hope that helps someone

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Integrate JDownloader with Flashgot, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This is just to let you know that a few of my friends have started Overclocked, a haven for PC enthusiasts in India. Overclocked is an online store for the people who like to stretch the performance of their machines to the maximum. They store a lot of high end computer stuff that isn’t easy to find in India and that too for a reasonable price. They also assemble mean gaming machines while giving you quite a bang for your buck with gauranteed satisfaction, shipped anywhere in India, and that’s not all, they can personalize it too with a variety of custom modifications (I really like their laser engravings).

Apart from the computer hardware, they also sell a lot of games (Primarily PC but consoles as well, and that too for a cool discount from the MRP, again shipped anywhere in India). They also have a forum where people can hang out and discuss how to eek out that last bit from their PCs.

Do check them out. I’m sure you will like the stuff they have on offer and if you have any comments/suggestions or queries, don’t hesitate to contact them via their contact page or the forums. I’m sure they will be glad to listen to you. I’d say that a word of kudos will be great as these guys are doing this along with their full time professions and such places are hard to find in India

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Paradise For Overclockers, Gamers and PC Enthusiasts In India, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

A few days ago, I had to install Windows XP as a guest OS on my Ubuntu Hardy machine as I needed to carry out some Visual Studio work. What I noticed was that my CPU usage went through the roof (constantly at 100%) even if the guest was completely idle. Result: My laptop was shutting down within a few minutes because the CPU was heating up and its temperature going beyond 75C. And finally came to know a simple solution from a friend, that immediately worked. The solution was to create a new dummy guest machine in VirtualBox, allocate minimal RAM to it (I gave 4MB) and just run it, don’t even need to add boot disk to it and to my surprise, the CPU usage came down to just 3-4% immediately. I’m not sure why this issue is happening and how the dummy machine solved it but atleast it is working for me now. If you have a similar issue, you can try out the same.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled VirtualBox High CPU Usage Problem Solved, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Today, the whole word is going gaga over "Opera Unite", the new technology in Opera 10 which will make your web browser a web server as well (and not just that, it will make a whole lot of “sharing” options available). Well, I’m not so excited about it. Technology wise, it is really cool but what they don’t realize is that this is like giving motorized chain-saw or a swiss army knife in the hands of a two-year old. Seriously, majority of the people around the world who get themselves into all sorts of shit while just plain surfing the net, now got a whole new array of avenues where they can be exploited upon. For people who do need a webserver, there are plenty of straight-forward point and click options available. I hope they atleast have options to completely turn it off and even better, keep it turned off by default.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Opera Web Server In A Browser: Bad Idea, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings