Moments with Twitter..

I was recently playing with a few tools, that let you have a look into your past tweets. All My Tweets is an interesting service, that lets you view all your tweets in a simple page, from the beginning. Interestingly, another service, named Twitario gives a view of all your tweets, as a diary. Though Twitario provides a nice interface to find the tweets easily, based on the calendar, it doesn't support Unicode characters, which is surely a minus for those who tweet in Unicode languages. "All My Tweets" include the link to the original tweet itself, where Twitario provides the option to delete the tweets. Having analyzed these tools, I should mention that these tweets were really useful, and brought a few interesting memories back.

Now time to look into the trail of my tweets. Here are some of my tweets, since the 26th of March, 2009.

is finishing the documentation. Mar 26, 2009
It is notable that my first tweet is on documentation. It was probably on the documentation on the project done during the internship. I have always been a supporter of good documentation - It helps the blood flow of open source.

Abiword Cross-compiling using wine successful on Ubuntu. Apr 16, 2009
At that time, uwog was still completing the MSVC build for AbiWord. I found Cross-building useful, since it was complete and gave me a usable AbiWord build for Windows, with no issues. This was indeed a remarkable point, which gave me further confidence to work on AbiWord Windows API, using Ubuntu as my platform.

Summer Love with Abiword... Apr 20, 2009
This was a happy announcement of me getting into the Google Summer of Code 2009. This was my first Google Summer of Code, and I was pretty much excited. AbiWord community was super-friendly, and I am proud to be a member, since then.

with Anjuta.. an IDE similar to Visual Studio... for Linux. May 08, 2009
Anjuta DevStudio is a Gnome Integrated Development Environment. I have mostly used Anjuta as a syntax highlighter for my C/C++ projects including AbiWord development. For compiling and building of AbiWord, I just use make directly.

needs a mute option and filtering for facebook messages. Any suggestions... Jun 01, 2009  
At that time, there was no way to opt-out from the Facebook notifications from the photos that we commented, or to remove ourselves from the facebook threads. I was annoyed, when someone sends group messages directly to inbox. It is great to see that these options are now available for facebook. Now we can remove ourselves from the messages. However, filtering is still not possible. Neither muting (receiving the messages, but not getting the notification of that red one for the new message, for the uninteresting thread).

#AbiWord Turns 11! Happy Birthday to dear Abiword! Happy Birthday to you... Jul 16, 2009
That was remarkable to mark the 11th year of AbiWord, since it started as an open source project in the year 1998.

My computer never complained abt me repeating the same build million times, and I've never complained abt its time delays. We <3 each other. Aug 17, 2009  
Some romance with my computer.. ;)

10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone from @oatmeal Feb 23, 2010  
Oatmeal never fails to amuse me. Many of its posts deserve a tweet.

my #javascript has gone wild and bigggggg and GO #bananascript GOO.. http://www.bananascript.com/ Compress it.. :) #fb Mar 03, 2010  
Bananascript is a nice online tool to compress javascript files.

A periodic table of visualization methods http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html Apr 04, 2010  
Each of these visualization methods deserves a blog post on its own. Visual-Literacy.org provides interesting learning resources, such as an introduction to argumentum. I have also enrolled to their online courses, full of study materials.

I should create some of my own thought experiments as well.. :D http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/ Jun 06, 2010  
Thought experiments are fun, and it enhances your ability to think, weird. ;) Follow the above link to realize that. Again, each of these thought experiments deserves a post on its own.

GSoC welcome package once more. Special thanks and love OGSA-DAI, OMII-UK and Google. Reminds me the lovable days of GSoC2009 - Abiword too. Jun 19, 2010  
A blog post that happily announces my second welcome package from Google. Yes, this was for my Google Summer of Code with OMII-UK.

Also make sure to read Moments with Twitter - II, the successor of this post.

run-init: /sbin/init" I/O error "kernel panic not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

My Ubuntu 10.04 LTS / 64 bit failed to start with the error message, "run-init: /sbin/init" I/O error "kernel panic not syncing: Attempted to kill init!", with the CAPSLOCK constantly blinking, all of a sudden. It was working very fine, till the day before, and all of a sudden this failure happened without any apparent reason. The recovery mode and the attempts to log in through the previous versions of the kernel were not successful either. When logging in through a Live CD, it suggested no error on disk and it had been mounted properly too.

So I tried to use "mkinitramfs" from /boot to build mkinitrd and rebooted. "update-mkinitramfs" (sudo, of course!) from the live CD didn't work either, as the drive was found to be read-only media just for that command! Similarly also tried to get initramdr from the LiveCD using the same command, and also downloaded from the relevant site, and restarted after adding the relevant menu entry to /boot/grub/grub.cfg and rebooted. Still no luck.

menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-14-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux 
--class gnu --class os {
    recordfail
    set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode
    insmod gzio
    insmod part_msdos
    insmod ext2
    set root='(hd0,msdos5)'
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 890aebc7-6238-4ce9-99d1-356b3f0163a4
    linux    /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-14-generic root=UUID=890aebc7-6238-4ce9-99d1-356b3f0163a4 ro   quiet splash vt.handoff=7
    initrd    /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-14-generic
}
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-14-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
    recordfail
    insmod gzio
    insmod part_msdos
    insmod ext2
    set root='(hd0,msdos5)'
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 890aebc7-6238-4ce9-99d1-356b3f0163a4
    echo    'Loading Linux 3.0.0-14-generic ...'
    linux    /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-14-generic root=UUID=890aebc7-6238-4ce9-99d1-356b3f0163a4 ro recovery nomodeset
    echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
    initrd    /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-14-generic
}

There are many threads on "Kernel Panic". But only a very few comes to the point, and only a tiny bit of those sites actually suggests some fix to try, where many of those threads are still unanswered questions for years. From what I learned, this "Kernel Panic" seems to be one deadly issue that can happen for multiple reasons - and is not an easy fix - except by the means of compiling the kernel or simply reinstalling the operating system. After trying all possible attempts to fix this, and also after trying to compile kernel, I decided the time invested on this is a bit waste. Hence I backed up everything on my Ubuntu to my windows partition through the Live CD and re-installed Ubuntu.

I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), where I had 10.04 before. The first impressions were not so nice, thanks to the new Unity interface. However, "sudo apt-get install gnome-shell" followed by "sudo apt-get remove unity" resolved the issue, letting me switch to gnome3 interface. :) Now I am awaiting the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to upgrade in a few months.

Apart from this Kernel Panic, there were a few other remarkable events too. One was the GSoC awareness session at the University of Jaffna (Presentation Slides). The WSO2 offsite at Avani Hotel, Bentota was remarkable as well. These were the remarkable events of the first fortnight of the year 2012. This year seems to be so eventful!