Reminder Bot

Do you often forget things? Do you always have a sticky pad next to you while you are working? If yes, you are at the right place. 

Just add reminder@asheesh.in to your friendlist in gmail and start using the service. To start just type 'hi' or 'help'.

How to use:
The possible ways of using it are:
   1. remind <time> <message>
   2. remind rec <count> <time> <message>
The first one is for one time reminders and second one for recursive reminders.


<time> can be either [0-9]<sec|min|hour> or <absolute time>

e.g.

• remind 10hour pay phone bill   ---- It will remind you after 10hours to pay your phone bill
• remind 20:00 book movie ticket   --- reminds you to book ticket at 8PM
• remind rec 5 11:00 project meeting     --- reminds you at 11AM for next 5days for project meeting

Transfering SMS from Symbian to Android

So finally i have my Android. The first thing anyone wants to do with the new phone is to transfer contacts, messages and calender. So now the problem started for me. HTC has a app to transfer data from your old phone but it somehow didnt work for me as expected.  Contacts and calender was successfully tranfered but whenever i tried to transfer messages, it used to fail without giving any reason.

I have 500 odd messages which i wanted to keep, so couldn't leave them on my old phone. The primary reason for unable to transfer messages could be the difference in way the messages r stored by symbian and android.

I googled and found many sites giving the steps to do the same (a lot of steps, do this and do that). Finally i found an easier way. So here it goes...
Prerequisites:

• Nokia OVI Suite
• Nokia2AndroidSMS
• SMS Backup & Restore-- From Andorid Market 

Now the steps:

On Nokia Phone :

1. Synchronize messages from your phone with OVI. 
2. Disconnect your phone and close the OVI suite(exit the application).

On Computer:

1. Extract Nokia2AndroidSMSto a folder
2. Run Nokia2AndroidSMS.exe
3. This application automatically find all datastores created by OVI Suite, else you can drag n drop the datastore from windows explorer to the application
4. You can select the phone by IMEI or select all phones.
5. Preses convert button and you will have an xml file in the same folder.

On Android Phone:

1. Install SMS Backup & Restore
2. Connect phone to PC (as disk drive)
3. Copy the xml file to SMSBackupRestorefolder in the root of diskdrive.
4. Run SMS Backup & Restore and import messages.

Now you have all the messages from your Symbian phone on your New Android :)

Nokia 5800 Express Music

I had recently bought Nokia 5800 Express Music.
Its been around 3-4 months now, did a lot of R&D on the phone. Now i know some good and some bad things about Nokia 5800.

Since i bought it i have installed unlimited apps on it. Taking from simple apps to games to chat messengers to browsers to email clients to accelerometer based apps to full end themeing making it not less than a iphone :P.... thats to Symbian OS....

The Good points about this phone can be the wide screen(not as big as i-phone ;) )
Its battery backup... Once fully charged i am able to use it for 2 days with 24/7 wifi connected.
Symbian OS helps in finding apps easily...shortcut keys of nusic.. nice accelerometer and lot of other stuffs...
But all this can be done upto a certain limit.

First most disappointing step from Nokia was that Symbian V5 phones have no backward compatibility. So i had tough time searching for Apps for Symbian V5 :(

Secondly the touch sensitivity is not that good.. Nokia lacks in this... it does not have multi-touch, touch works best if you use stylus or use your nails not your full fingers...

Rest this phone is a good buy if someone is specific of buying Nokia only (like me) and wants a touch experience.

Mac OSX on DELL Inspiron 1525

I am finally writing after such a long time. It was just that i was too busy with LIFE. But now here comes another post for my Dell 1525 :)

I always wanted to use MAC to see why everyone is so fond of a MAC. I didn't wanted to buy a macbook for that, so i adopted a hack ;).
This post is only for Educational Purposes and i have no responsibility of anyone using this article and pirating MAC.

It took me many months to finally install and run MAC on my Dell, and i took many months not because its that tough, it was just because i used to do it one in a week or 10 days whenever i used to get time. Whenever i used to get time form my daily office routine i used to google for some blogs etc or download a cracked mac on torrent, burn it and try. I can't even count how many times i have formatted my disk for all this.(I think it was more than 20-25 times).I used to bookmark any site i got, and used to try the hack. Finally after many tries, many formats, many tweeks with my bios, i was finally able to install MAC

I had to search so many articles etc but it was fun, learnt how to do it. Its been 3-4 months i had installed Mac. I use it whenever i have free time, not as my primary OS. But somehow i never liked MAC so much(may be i am rigid as my friend shamail says so), i never got that feeling of "Oh wow.. what on OS". For me its like any other OS with good looks. First of all i had a lot of problems learning the new shortcuts. I am a kind of person who uses mouse very less unless m feeling lazy, so not knowing the shortcuts was the main reason i found it difficult to use, but thanks to a Apple's Fan and my dear friend Shamail, i got to know many of them on chat ;)

But still i will say MAC is good but its not like something extraordinary.
Now i will continue to use MAC and lets see if my taste for MAC improves or not :)

Installing Linux on DELL Inspiron 1525

Installing a new OS on any system is a big headache and when it comes to your new laptop you are very scared too.

Just one day after i got my laptop ( DELL INSPIRON 1525) i sat for partioining and installing linux on it.

It had Vista pre-installed on it(Microsoft's Monopoly).

I had plans to use Vmware but i also wanted to have seperate OS.

For first time i had such a huge HDD(160GB), much than my 40GB on my old pc, so wanted to fulfill my dreams of having 4-5 OS :) :)

But here comes the problem, Vista didn't allow me to compress the C drive to less then 80GB.

I was not ready to give C drive that much huge space at any cost, so decided to partition from a live ubuntu cd.

I booted ubuntu 7.04 , started gparted("weapon of mass destruction"- as they say).

This weapon really did a mass destruction, it stopped at middle of resizing my c drive and said that error occured.

Now i was sure my Vista is gone.

Vista cried with thousands of error and refused to boot even in safe mode(mass distruction was done, how could it boot ).

So i decided to restore the system using the CD's i got with the laptop.

I reinstalled Vista, but the problem of partitioning was not solved.

I had one option of partitioning first and then reinstalling Vista or Linux, but that way Dell Media Direct was not installing.

So i decided to go by what they say RTFM.

I finally got the solution.

Here it is:

Dell gives a dvd labeled Media Direct, first boot from it,it has a good user interface and asks for partition size of C drive, i gave 30GB.

Then boot from the Vista DVD and install Vista on it, and then do whatever you like with the remaining partition.

Then i installed Fedora and Ubuntu seperately and Xp,solaris and others on Vmware ( I had 3GB of RAM :) )

All's Well That Ends Well

SSH Port Forwarding

SSH (Secure SHell) is well known to Linux administrators as a method for connecting to other systems.
SSH strongly encrypts the connection between the hosts, ensuring that passwords and any transmitted data are safe.


SSH port forwarding, essentially, is the art of causing a port from one host to appear on another, using a connection through SSH. Port forwarding can accomplish several goals at once, but one of the most compelling reasons to use the technique is that traffic to the forwarded port is encrypted.


Local Port Forwarding

When you forward a port locally, you make a port from the SSH server available on your local machine.
A port on the remote machine which would otherwise be unavailable to you can be used just as if it was your local machine’s port. This port is also then available to other programs on your local host, outside the SSH session.

Imagine a situation where you need to conceal your web browsing traffic
Certainly many nefarious reasons for doing this come to mind immediately, but how about a legitimate one?
Perhaps you need to solve a difficult problem for which you need googling but you don't ant that your boss gets to know that you googled the problem and all your activities are logged.

If you have a remote host in your home that uses a squid web proxy, and is reachable by SSH then, you can easily use local port forwarding to augment SSH with a secure proxy channel.
Assume your remote host in the home is home.com and your web proxy is proxy at port 3128 and your office host is office.com.

To set up port forwarding in this case, issue this command :

ssh -L 3128:proxy:3128 username@home.com

At this point, you can set your web browser to use the proxy, using the host office.com (or localhost) and port 3128.

Your web browser connects to your local machine’s port 3128, but the connection is forwarded over the SSH session to home.com in your home office, which connects to proxy to make HTTP requests. Anyone at office.com watching traffic will see only SSH traffic between office.com and home.com.

Hurray you have now forwarded your ports at home to your office!!!!

You can get more from
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/11/06/ssh-port-forwarding/

ssh with Putty on Windows

Unix machines have been able to run software on a remote machine and display the GUI locally.
Linux and Mac OS support X forwarding without any software .
Any terminal on Linux will do it.

But windows is also not behind.
Here you need two piece of software:

1. secure shell program (ssh) to establish the remote connection with PuTTY.
2. X Server to handle the local display with XWin32 or XMing with Portable PuTTY


Configuring PuTTY

1. Give the host name or ip address
2. Switch protocol to ssh
3. Give any name to session in saved sessions and click on save
4. Choose 'Tunnels' from 'Category' list
5. Check 'Enable X11 Forwarding'
6. Choose 'Session' from 'Category' list and click save

Starting the X Server on Windows

Configuring XWin-32

1. Start XWin-32
2. Click 'Security' tab and Click 'Add...'
3. Enter 'localhost' without quotes and click 'OK'

Configuring Xming

Just run "All Programs -> Xming -> Xming" and it should work if you've got PuTTY configured.


Connecting

1. Start XWin32 or XMing
2. Start PuTTY
3. Double click on the saved session and enter the username and password
4. It's done now .
Now you can access the full system with X applications

Enjoy !!!!!