Airtel 220BX router forgot password

If you are reading this, you like me belong to the forky lot, who just cant rest without forking around in something unitl its messed up. Why do we do it, "thats how we learn!!!" right?
So, you know that blackbox in your home is not some magic but a Beetel DSL router, whose default username is admin and password is password
But that was default, the moment you you got to know of it, you had to change it. So you did, and couple of boring office days later you decided to access the router again, but alas you had forgotten that password, that secret known only to you 6 letter phrase.
Although your internet still works but this being denied access to a box sitting right in front of you, no I cant take it.
So what do you do?
Warning: This might lead to your internet not working for sometime, till you configure it right.

1. Get your username and password: For most people your ADSL router works using PPPoE
   , which requires a username and password. You will need this to restablish your connection to the internet. It could be
   username:<stdcode><phonenumber>@touchtelindia.net
   password:<accountnumber>
   You can confirm this by calling up the helpdesk and asking them to tell you your username, and reseting the password.
   
   
2. Reset your router: Now make sure your router is on and then reset your router by pressing that black button hidden inside a hole at the back of your modem using a pen or some pointed thing, See screenshot below:
   
   
   
3. Switch off and Switch on your router.
   
   
4. Open Router Management Console: Now fireup your browser and access your router using http://192.168.1.1/
   As the router has been reset you will be able to log in using the default username: admin and the default password: password
1. Once you have logged in Click on WAN.
   Now you might see a couple of entries here, delete them by selecting the checkboxes
   next to them and clicking on remove. Reboot the router by clicking on save/reboot.
2. Login to the router again. Click on WAN, and click on Add to add an entry.
3. In the ATM PVC configuration screen Enter VPI value 1 and VCI value 32
4. Next you will see the connection type screen, select PPPoE in that screen.
5. In the Next screen enter the PPPoE username and password.
6. Keep default values in all subsequent screens and save this newly created entry.
7. Reboot your router, by Switching on and Switching Off.
8. Once up again, Login to the router again and click on the WAN.
9. The entry you created should show status UP. This signifies you internet is back up and running.
   

Access your favourite website and voila, ur back again. Happy surfing!

Enabling Indic in Firefox on Ubuntu

Do you have problems reading Indic lanaguage websites? Do you see incorrect rendering such as misplaced matras, aadha akshar appearing with a halant? Have you been blaming firefox/Ubuntu for not getting such basic stuff right?
Well not to worry as the fix is a very simple series of steps.

1. First check if your browser has been compiled with the --enable-pango flag. To check this, type "about:buildconfig"(without quotes) in your address bar and look for the string --enable-pango (See screenshot below). For most people on Ubuntu, this flag should be there, but in case you have one that doesnt have this flag, you will have to obtain a firefox build that was compiled with this option.
   
   
   
   
2. Now you will need to set two environment variables, naemly MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO and MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO. To set these variables(On Ubuntu) open the file /etc/environment in your favourtie text editor, and type the following lines at the end:
   MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1
   MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0
   
   
3. Now you will need to install certain fonts (in case these are not already present), to install these fonts type the following in your terminal(See screenshot to know where to open the terminal from),
   
   sudo apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts



   
4. And thats it, you are done just log off and log in and you should see Indic text being rendered properly. To check, see if you can read this beautiful poem in Hindi properly,
   http://manaskriti.com/kaavyaalaya/kaho_kaise_ho.stm
   If you cant read Hindi open your favourite website and see if it renders properly.
   

Troubleshooting: In case you still cant get Indic script to render properly, before asking your LUG or any help group gather the following Information:

1. Your Operating System details: You can get display operating system details by typing uname -a on your terminal.(See above on how to open the terminal)
   
   
2. Your browser version details: In firefox go to Help -> About Mozilla Firefox
   
   
3. Your Browser Build Details: Go to address bad type about:buildconfig
   
   
4. Font Details: On Ubuntu Go To System->Preferences->Fonts and check what Hindi/Tamil/Your Language fonts(if any) you have.
   

Notes:

1. For more detailed information on enabling Indic on your system, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts
   
   
2. Pango is a free and open source computing library for rendering internationalized texts in high quality. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support, that was written as a part of GTK+ widget toolkit.
   http://www.pango.org/
   
   

The "I have 2 orkut accounts problem"

This is a problem that a lot of people tell me about. I have 2 orkut accounts or separate Gmail and orkut accounts but how do i open them both in Firefox. Opening 2 separate windows doesn't work.

Well the solution is pretty simple if you follow the following Step by Step. This is a solution on Windows which i believe is the majority audience here.

1. Close all firefox windows, including any download windows.


2. Right click on My Computer. Click on properties. You will see a tab "Advanced". Click on that and then click on the button "Environment vairables".
   Now click on New and a small dialog box will appear asking you for Variable Name and Variable Value. In the variable name field write MOZ_NO_REMOTE
   
   Make sure its in Capital Only. In the variable value field enter 1.
   
   Now click on OK in the dialog Box, and then OK in the System Vairbales Dialog.
   


3. Go to Start->run. Type firefox.exe -ProfileManager.You will see a window like below. Here Click on "Create Profile" and then create a profile named "Separate Gmail". Once you do that and click on finish you will see 2 profiles "default" and "Separate Gmail". Click on default and Make sure "Don't ask on startup" checkbox is selected. Now click on "Start Firefox". This opens a Firefox window, login to your orkut/gmail account.
   
   
4. Now for opening a separate window with your other account, we will first create a shortcut. Go to your Desktop, right click and click on New->Shortcut. This will open a Create Shortcut dialog. In the location box enter the following String
   "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p SeparateGmail
   In case you selected some other directory while installing firefox navigate to that directory and select firefox.exe. Once you do that at the end add " -p SeparateGmail"(without quotes).
   Now click on Next and give an appropriate name to this shortcut, say Separate Gmail Firefox.
   
   
5. This will add another Firefox icon to your desktop, with the above name. Now double click on that to open another firefox window. Now go to orkut/gmail , you will see the login screen, login with your other account and you are there.
   Please Note: The Firefox window opened through this shortcut will not have your settings like proxy settings, addons etc. You will have to add them again for this profile.
   
   
   
   

Google News Strange Behavior

Last night I was up till about 2 AM watching the English Premier League Game between Totenham Hotspurs and Aston Villa. Spurs have had a horrendous start to the season, so I slept off when it became 1-3 thinking it was a done deal.
Then today through a news report on TV i got to know Spurs had actually drawn level at 4-4. Now i wanted more of this news. Fired up my browser went to Google News India and searched for "totenham", href="http://news.google.co.in/news?hl=en&ned=in&ie=UTF-8&q=totenham&btnG=Search">here here is the result page I got. Strange part was it had only one result a Sky Sports news report. This was a pretty strange, had everyone in UK slept off not written anything about spurs Liverpoolish achievements?? Obviously not, Next I searched for "totenham villa", and here is the result page i got, with all the results I wanted.
Isnt it a little strange that when i include more terms i actually get more results, shouldn't more terms mean narrower results.
I am not a search expert but something has to explain this.

Quote Unquote

The idea
that the value of the system will be discovered rather than known at the time of
installation implies, in turn, that product flexibility and adaptability, as well as ongo-
ing account service, should be critical components of any buyer’s evaluation check-
list.

Geoffrey Moore

P2P file sharing

P2P stands for peer to peer and is an amamzing concept that is brillian because of its simplicity. Its yet another technology thats modelled on human behaviour of one on one talk and thats what p2p systems exploit, they build on one on one interaction between computers to deliver value to users.
The most popular category of p2p systems is file sharing systems such as napster, gnutella , KaZaa etc. These systems have exploited peer to peer to different extent. Napster had central-distributed architecture whereby the information about all files shared on the network as stored at certain central servers where the users could search for files. After obtaining info about where the file is located the users directly obtained the file from the concerned user. Thus the file retrieval was peer to peer. Napster was revolutionary it lamost became synonymous with rebellious technological endeavours. But it was a rebellion which was dependent on its leaders i.e. the central servers. These were pivotal in its functioning because without them you couldnt know who had which file. And this pivot was what enabled the anti-music piracy camapigners(read RIAA) to cripple it. AFter the court ruled against napster these servers were shutdown and there ended the first generation of p2p file sharing systems.
But the community leraned a lot. Centralization in any aspect was a strict no-no and anonymity of sharers was also important. Gnutella protocol fulfilled the first objective, it did away with centraliztaion. Initally released by nullsoft (which after making the source code available for sometime on the net withdrew from the project) the protocl was reverse engineered from the source code. The protocol specification allowed numerous clients to be written.
The protocol basically worked in simple terms by friend asking friend model, whereby you ask your friends if they know anyone who has that file. And if they knew anyone who had it they just sent you his/her number so that you could obtain the file directly from them. Thus there was no central repository and the network would continue to exist as long as even two nodes were present.
There have been other attempts - Pastry, CAN, CHord but none have proved to be as popular as Gnutella or napster.

The Linux fairytale

Linux pronounced "Lih-nux" is a storey teller's dream. Its a fairy tale really of how it started with a man(Linux Trovalds) in the Nokia-country(Finland), and has caught on to become one of the nightmares of the tech Czar Bill Gates.
So lets go the fairy tale way: Once upon a time there was an Operating System called Unix that was used by the educational institutions as well as in the industry as the backbone. But it had a problem it was not available for free, and some people had made computing with it their life. So a man called Linus Trovalds from Finalnd, (who incidentally was writing his own game for a gaming console his dad had bought him)had a novel idea. He wrote the underlying crux of the operating system called the Kernel and instead of selling it for the potential millions he just released it for free!! Released it on the biggest medium for communication the Internet and that was where the Linux movement started.
Now all those people who had spent dark nights configuring there systems, writing programs to make their newest piece of hardware work, figuring out archane protocols had found pure nirvana. They had a full operating system to play around with and the freedom to change it,improve it, or in their terms hack it!! And they took great pride in calling themselves HACKERs!! The term might have a different connotation now, but the older tribes of these people collaborated over the internet to create what we know today as the full blown Linux Operating System in tis various flavours Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and what not. There is even a distribution(another flavour) called DSL which stands for Damn Small Linux.
The romantic aspect of this tale lies in the fact that this method of collaboration of people who have never seen wach other through an extrmely unsure medium such as the internet, had all the indregients of chaos. The method is a Software Engineer's nightmare with no official documents, no formal deadlines, no responsibilties and no managers and no employees collaborating only through unreliable channels such as IRC and mailing lists. But still it has worked and it has worked like a dream with Microsoft set to loose 20% more of its Desktop market share to Linux in the next 2-4 years. Its the biggest technological revolution of the 90's generation and the bandwagon still rolls on.
Over the years people have devloped Linux into a succesful business model with dedicated Open Source Software companies such as Red Hat, SuSE etc and big corps like IBM increasingly becoming Open Source oriented Linux or the Open Source Software movement is steaming ahead. But still at the heart of movement remain the eternal hackers, 14 year olds - 40 year olds who just write code for the fun of it. And thats what the Open Source movement is about you have fun and shre the fun that you have i.e. the code so that everybody can have fun. And the spoilers, the Microsoft's of the world who force people get locked into a pay for our mistakes deal will have to come up with a wonder or just submit to people exercising their fundamental right, The right toc hoose freedom.

Welcome

Hello, and a very warm welcome to all of you looking to start your life as an open source developer.
I am using this space to enlist the things that iam going through as a novice open source developer.My primary focus right now is to get involved in one of the GNU projects as i ahve been influenced a lot by the FSF thoughts esp the thoughts of Prof G. Nagarjuna who is the chairman of FSF India. My second love in technology is mobile devices and applications. The current project that interests me the most is The GPE Palmtop Environment, http://gpe.handhelds.org/ whcih marries the GNU idea to the new and emerging field of mobile devices.
I came accross this as a part of the bounties that the Ubuntu linux project has for google summer of code program, which is a great program for student OSS developers to get paid for doing what they do best right open code. Anyways thats it for the first post, i hope this blog will be helpful as it develops to novice OSS developers.

Time to time just to keep it refreshed i will also post about european football which is my second pasiion(Iam a barca man).