g13n

This blog post is also on Map-Reduce following setting up Hadoop on your personal computer. This post describes the step by step process of setting up Oozie on your personal computer running OpenSUSE GNU/Linux. OpenSUSE is just used as an illustration, in fact you can set up Oozie on any other distribution by modifying the process of installing the dependency packages.

Oozie is a workflow system that runs on Hadoop and is specialized to run Hadoop/Pig jobs.

Installing the pre-requisites

To setup Oozie (with HSQLDB), the following requirements need to be met.

• Java 1.6+ (preferrably Sun Java)
• Hadoop (0.18.3, 0.19.1 or 0.20.0)
• Pig 0.2.0
• Tomcat 6.x (preferrably 6.0.18)

If you have not setup Hadoop and Pig on your personal computer, follow these instructions for getting them installed. A bit of caution here, the Oozie distribution currently works only with above said versions of Hadoop and Pig 0.2.0. So while following my earlier post for installing Hadoop and Pig, install Pig 0.2.0 instead.

Tomcat can be installed by running the following command:

shell> sudo zypper in tomcat6

Installing Oozie

Grab the Oozie distribution that works with Hadoop 18 (0.18.3). Unpack the distribution under a directory say $HOME/bin and set the PATH environment variable to include $HOME/bin/oozie-0.18.3.o0.1-SNAPSHOT/bin.

The following section assumes you're running a Bourne-compatible shell like GNU Bash.

shell> wget http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12409973/oozie-0.18.3.o0.1-SNAPSHOT-distro.tar.gz
shell> cd $HOME/bin
shell> tar xzf oozie-0.18.3.o0.1-SNAPSHOT-distro.tar.gz
shell> PATH=$HOME/bin/oozie-0.18.3.o0.1-SNAPSHOT/bin; export PATH

If Tomcat is running stop it. Copy the oozie.war file from the distribution root directory to Tomcat webapps directory and start Tomcat.

shell> sudo /sbin/service tomcat6 stop
shell> sudo cp $HOME/bin/oozie-0.18.3.o0.1-SNAPSHOT/oozie.war /srv/tomcat6/webapps
shell> sudo /sbin/service tomcat6 start

Testing if everything went well

That's it, the installation is over. To do a quick sanity check open your favorite web browser and hit http://localhost:8080/oozie. Oozie assumes that Tomcat is running on port 8080, if it does not you will have to set the CATALINA_OPTS environment variable before starting Tomcat and use the same for checking.

Assuming Tomcat is running on localhost:8888, you would set CATALINA_OPTS to:

shell> export CATALINA_OPTS="-Doozie.base.url=http://localhost:8888/oozie"

If the setup was successful, you should see the Oozie web console upon hitting http://localhost:8080/oozie.

Configuring Evolution with Yahoo! Calendar

• Choose File > New > Calendar from Evolution menu bar.


• Choose Type is CalDAV (in case its not automatically selected for you)


• Choose any Name (I chose Public Calendar)


• Choose some Color, and set as default calendar if you wish


• In the URL field enter the following: caldav://caldav.calendar.yahoo.com/dav/yourusername@yahoo.com/Calendar/calendarname/
  
  
  
  • In case your e-mail domain is not "@yahoo.com" use the appropriate one
  
  
  • Don't forget the trailing slash (/) character
  
  
  
  


• Select the Use SSL checkbox


• Enter your username (yourusername@yahoo.com - yes with the domain name) in the Username field


• Choose an appropriate Refresh period


• Save the form by clicking on the OK button

Unless you're on a different planet Map-Reduce is not a new term in your vocabulary. Hadoop is an open source Map-Reduce framework implemented in Java for processing large amounts of data in parallel. Although the framework is implemented in Java, the Map-Reduce applications need not be written in Java.

Setting up Hadoop on your personal computer

In this section, we will try to setup Hadoop on a GNU/Linux machine in a pseudo-distributed mode setup. In such a setup, each Hadoop daemon will run in a separate Java process.

Requirements

At the minimum, you need Java 1.6.x (Sun is preferred), sshd, and rsync. If you're running OpenSUSE, you can install all of them by running the following command:

shell> sudo zypper in java-1_6_0-sun openssh rsync

Once you have the pre-requisites, you can download the Hadoop distribution from one of Apache's Download Mirrors. At this time, since we're planning to use Pig with Hadoop, be sure to download one of the 0.18 versions of Hadoop only. This is because at the time of this writing, the latest version (0.3.0) of Pig works only with Hadoop 0.18.x versions.

Installing Hadoop

Unpack the downloaded Hadoop distribution. If you have not installed Java under its standard path, edit /path/to/hadoop/conf/hadoop-env.sh and set JAVA_HOME to the root of your Java installation. Next edit /path/to/hadoop/conf/hadoop-site.xml and within the configuration section paste the following lines:

<property>
  <name>fs.default.name</name>
  <value>hdfs://localhost:9000</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>dfs.replication</name>
  <value>1</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>mapred.job.tracker</name>
  <value>localhost:9001</value>
</property>

Starting Hadoop

Check if you can ssh to your machine without a passphrase:

shell> ssh localhost

If not, run the following commands:

shell> ssh-keygen -t dsa -P '' -f ~/.ssh/id_dsa
shell> cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Format a new distributed file-system:

shell> ./bin/hadoop namenode -format

In case you get an exception like INFO util.MetricsUtil: Unable to obtain hostName java.net.UnknownHostException: check if your hostname has an entry in /etc/hosts file.

shell> grep `hostname` /etc/hosts

Now that you're done with configuring, you're ready to start the Hadoop daemons.

shell> ./bin/start-all.sh

If everything went well, you can check the list of files under the newly created HDFS.

shell> ./bin/hadoop fs -ls /

You'll see the output similar to the one below:

Found 1 itemsdrwxr-xr-x   - yourunixusername supergroup          0 2009-09-05 22:10 /tmp

A Quick Test to find out if everything is fine

Open your favorite browser and hit http://localhost:50070/. If everything went fine, you should see that there's one live datanode. If not there is a problem. If you have downgraded from your previous version of Hadoop (to be able to run Pig), then you may notice ERROR org.apache.hadoop.dfs.DataNode: org.apache.hadoop.dfs.IncorrectVersionException: Unexpected version of storage directory in the datanode log file. If it is so, you'll have to stop the Hadoop cluster, physically remove the Hadoop data directory (typically /tmp/hadoop-yourunixusername) and run the setup (namenode -format) again.

Pig

Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets. Pig Latin is a SQL-like language that lets you specify a sequence of data transformations (split, join, filter) over large sets of data. The Pig engine compiles Pig Latin into Map-Reduce to be run on Hadoop.

That was a quick overview about Pig. In the following section, I'll show you how to setup Pig on the locally running Hadoop cluster.

Setting up Pig to run in Map-Reduce mode to use the local Hadoop cluster

Assuming Hadoop is already installed, we have satisfied the basic requirements to run Pig. Pig can be downloaded from one of Apache's Download Mirrors.

Unpack the downloaded distribution. The Pig launcher script is located under the bin directory. To use Pig with the installed Hadoop cluster, you need to set the PIG_CLASSPATH variable to the Hadoop's conf directory and set the PIG_HADOOP_VERSION to the appropriate Hadoop version.

For example, in my system, Hadoop is unpacked (installed) under $HOME/bin/hadoop, and the installed version is 0.18.3. So, I have the following launched script for launching Pig.

#!/bin/sh
PIG_PATH=$HOME/bin/pig-0.3.0
PIG_CLASSPATH=$PIG_PATH/pig-0.3.0-core.jar:$HOME/bin/hadoop-0.18.3/conf \
PIG_HADOOP_VERSION=0.18.3 \
$PIG_PATH/bin/pig $@

Running pig should print something like:

2009-09-05 23:17:41,113 [main] INFO  org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.HExecutionEngine - Connecting to hadoop file system at: hdfs://localhost:9000
2009-09-05 23:17:41,428 [main] INFO  org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.HExecutionEngine - Connecting to map-reduce job tracker at: localhost:9001
grunt>

To test, you can run the ls command in the grunt prompt to check if things are fine.

shell> pig
2009-09-05 23:22:13,845 [main] INFO  org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.HExecutionEngine - Connecting to hadoop file system at: hdfs://localhost:9000
2009-09-05 23:22:14,197 [main] INFO  org.apache.pig.backend.hadoop.executionengine.HExecutionEngine - Connecting to map-reduce job tracker at: localhost:9001
grunt> ls /
hdfs://localhost:9000/tmp	<dir>
grunt>

This is my first post on this topic, going forward I'm planning to post more articles, until then, keep Grunting!

In one of my earlier blog posts, I had mentioned why I'm moving away from Gecko and moving to Epiphany/WebKit for my browsing. But one of my most annoying things which made me use some other web browser was its inability to work with secure web sites (https.) So I was looking around for options, until it struck me I can also use Google Chrome since it was also being ported to both Mac and GNU/Linux. For people who don't know the fact, the underlying rendering engine behind Chrome is WebKit.

Getting Google Chrome for GNU/Linux

The easiest option for getting Google Chrome for GNU/Linux is to grab the binary from one of the pre-built daily snapshots. Unfortunately, on many of the distributions (including the RedHat and SuSE ones), the binary doesn't work out of the box because it links to different libraries. So, to get Google Chrome working on OpenSUSE (version 11.1), you need to have the following packages installed as a dependency and link the libraries to the ones that Google Chrome expects.

Packages needed on OpenSUSE

• mozilla-nspr (provides libnspr4.so, libplds4.so, libplc4.so)
• mozilla-nss (provides libnss3.so, libnssutil3.so, libsmime3.so, libssl3.so)

Installing is as simple as running sudo zypper install mozilla-nspr mozilla-nss.

What are the missing libraries/linkages?

Running ldd /path/to/downloaded/chrome | grep 'not found' returned me the following output.

	libnss3.so.1d => not found
	libnssutil3.so.1d => not found
	libsmime3.so.1d => not found
	libssl3.so.1d => not found
	libplds4.so.0d => not found
	libplc4.so.0d => not found
	libnspr4.so.0d => not found

Running zypper what-provides libnss3.so.1d or even any of the above missing libraries returns nothing!

The Dirty Trick

When I'm bumped with such situations, the simplest thing I try is to run one of the shell procedures that I had written ages ago which just tries to locate a similar library (may be a newer/earlier version) and symbolically link it as the "expected" library. In all probabilities if there isn't a binary incompatibility, it would work like a charm. So, I tried it, and voila! it worked!

All I had to do was just run find-and-fix-missing-libs /path/to/downloaded/chrome.

The Shell Procedure that I'm using

The shell script is about 50 lines of code and can be downloaded from my samples directory on GitHub.

How is Chromium?

As expected the browser still has a lot of rough edges, and probably not suited for daily browsing (nevertheless I use it.) But it is way better than Epiphany in terms of stability and support for protocols, and one of my favorite options (being a paranoid) - private browsing :)

Yesterday was one of the memorable days in my life.

I couldn't be more surprised, time flies, it was 5 years ago that I joined one of the companies that I was dreaming of stepping in. Yes, there were happy moments, sad moments, surprises, shocks, but nevertheless, it is still one of my favorite companies, and would remain so in the coming years!

I would like to thank all of them who has helped me in traveling this far in my life. And yes, thank you fellow Yahoos.

Ever since I bought my Nikon D60, I wasn't very happy with the 18-55mm VR kit lens that came along with it. Though it is a good lens for portraits, it is no way useful for wildlife. If you ask your friends who claim to be expert photographers, they might say that for birding you cannot buy anything less than 400-600mm. And those might cost you lakhs (hundred thousand) of (Indian) rupees.

I wanted to shoot birds, but my budget (at least now) was very limited. I was totally confused. This is where WisdomTap was very helpful. Given my choices and my budget it came back to me with a bunch of options, with comparisons between them. Amazing, isn't it! After some investigation, I chose the Sigma 70-300mm APO DG after some advise from yathin.

Where to buy?

I did some comparison on the price offered in the US, and in India. After a week of asking various dealers, I finally settled with Propix. Propix was just awesome. It not only offered me a good price, but also helped me in trying out the lens before I buy.

About the Lens

The Sigma 70-300mm is not the only lens in this range, almost every lens manufacturer has at least one model in the same range. So, how is Sigma 70-300mm better?

• It is one of the lowest priced lens in this range.


• It serves as an excellent Telephone zoom lens.


• It has a switch to double up as an excellent macro lens.


• It can auto-focus on my Nikon D60 (and also on Nikon D40/D40x camera bodies.)


• This APO model (note the red ring on the end of the lens) uses low dispersion glass to minimize chromatic aberration.

I should definitely say that I'm mighty impressed with the lens. The lens can bring out excellent detail even at telephoto range. As with all lenses, there are some negatives with this Sigma lens as well.

• The motor isn't silent. Anyway the Nikkor lenses (with the built-in Silent-Wave motor) is almost double the price.


• For macro shots (especially on very small insects), the lens hunts for focus. Using manual focus does work.

I do a lot of trainings, give tech talks both within the company and outside the company. Most of the times I used to create presentations using OpenOffice.org (at home) or Powerpoint when I had the Macbook Pro work laptop. Even though I used one of these tools, my presentation files would be exported and distributed as PDF.

Two years ago, I stumbled upon browser-based presentation tools like S5 and Slidy. I realized the importance of such tools since it conveyed a very important point--"the browser is the platform". If the presentation (format) is just plain HTML, then:

• Creating presentations are a breeze


• Distribution is also quite simple, it can even be hosted on a web server and be viewed from any computer with a web browser

Not that S5 is bad, I liked Slidy very much. I even started to convert my existing presentations in Slidy format, and I got so impressed with the tool, that I even sent a patch to the developer.

Then I started noticing more problems with Slidy, and also wasn't quite impressed by the way the code is organized. So I thought why not create a presentation system that follows the same philosophy as S5 or Slidy, but yet much better than these tools.

An idea struck to me that I could quickly whip a simple presentation system using YUI Carousel. I started putting together the pieces and to my surprise a simple presentation system with animation for slide transition was written well within 20 minutes! I cannot control my joy, it is an awesome experience.

If you're interesting in downloading the template, you can grab it from GitHub.

Having heard much about Munnar, we decided to make a trip especially to escape the heat during the month of April/May.  Of late, Bangalore has been quite hot after its reprieved of much of its greenery.

Fortunately, since May Day was a Friday this year, and a long weekend ahead given the vacation time, we had to plan much earlier for the trip including the stay.

From Bangalore to Munnar (by car)

It is about 485kms from Bangalore to Munnar. We started around 6 AM in the morning from Bangalore to avoid much of the traffic since the fastest and best route is to drive on NH7. Since there would be a lot of heavy vehicle (lorry) traffic at Hosur, it is better to start even earlier since we couldn't escape the traffic much.

Though there are multiple routes from Bangalore to Munnar, the drive on NH7 would be a breeze, so we picked (and suggest) the following route:

• From Bangalore, take NH7 and drive to Hosur


• Continuing further on NH7 leads to Krishnagiri


• Do not take the road to Chennai (left), instead continuing straight on NH7 leads to Dharmapuri


• Dharmapuri to Thoppur (through the Tamil Nadu forest area), again on NH7


• At Thoppur, take a right (Palakkad route) for SH20


• Take a left for Bhavani (SH158)


• After the Cauvery river bridge near Bhavani, take a left onto SH20 and follow the route to Erode


• Take NH47 to Perundurai


• Continue on NH47 to Perumanallur


• Continue on NH47 to Avinashi


• Instead of going to Avinashi and taking the SH166, go via Tiruppur


• Take SH19, instead of Palladam road


• Take SH97 to Udumalaipettai


• From Udumalaipettai, drive through Indira Gandhi National Park to Marayoor and then Munnar and Devikulam

Staying at Devikulam

Whether or not it is the peak season (Apr-Jun for any popular hill station), it is always better to stay outside the city/town. So, we picked a resort in Devikulam which is about 7kms from Munnar. The Spring Dale Resort in Devikulam is one of the cheapest yet very clean, comfortable and hygienic place. The resort has single/double occupancy, suite, and even tree top house options. At the time of writing, for a suite (with dining hall and attached bath room), the tariff was Rs.1050/- per night, food is extra.

In and around Munnar

Munnar itself is a beautiful place covered with Tea Estates and is very scenic. The Kannan Devan tea estates are situated in Munnar. Apart from the popular tourist places like Mattupetty Dam, Echo Point, Top Station, etc., the Eravikulam National Park is one of the better places to visit and has the largest surviving population of Nilgiri Tahr. From Devikulam, the park is about 20-25kms.

Nature Watching

Since Munnar is close to the Western Ghats one can spot a variety of birds. The resort in which we were staying has a lot of trees and is surrounded by quite a thick vegetation. During my stay there, every morning I spent some time there watching/listening to barbets, babblers, and thrushes.

Here are the list of birds that I had spotted in this trip:

• Red-whiskered Bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus)


• Malabar Whistling Thrush (Myophonus caeruleus)


• White-cheeked Barbet (Megalaima viridis)


• Grey-breasted Laughingthrush (Garrulax jerdoni)


• Long-tailed Shrike (Lanius schach)


• Indian Scimitar Babbler (Pomatorhinus horsfieldii)


• Oriental Magpie Robin (Copsychus saularis)


• Chestnut-headed Bee-eater (Merops leschenaulti)

Among the list of animals, I spotted the Nilgiri Tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius) and Nilgiri Langur (Trachypithecus johnii).

On the whole, the trip was awesome--I learnt a lesson not to visit Munnar during this peak (Apr-May) time again.

Couple of weeks back, I went to Namada Chilume for a weekend getaway. Namada Chilume is a natural spring situated close to Devarayanadurga (about 6 kms far), near Tumkur. The place also has a deer park.

How to go from Bangalore?

1. Take the NH4 highway to Tumkur


2. Take a right at Nelamangala, be on NH4 till Dobbasapete


3. At Dobbasapete take a right under the fly-over and follow the road until you see a sign board on the right to Namada Chilume

The road is awesome till you take the right to Namada Chilume, after which its a little bad for a stretch, and then its fairly okay.

The Place

It is hot during this time of the year. The deer park is not worth it. If you are expecting the deers to be in open, you're mistaken, completely. The deers are inside a fence. Also, we couldn't locate the spring, totally frustrating.

But the good part is that, there are lots of birds, bee-eaters, minivets, warblers. The place is okay for birders, but otherwise it isn't worth it to be a weekend getaway.

Its a beautiful life!

In true teemus style ... here goes list of things/events in my last year

• friends relocated to US


• frequent US trips, drove there


• moved to a new home


• awesome weekend trips


• i18n


• regularly playing table tennis


• tried VDS hosting


• mad about birds


• g13n was born!


• bought sony (camera and lenses)


• interest in photography


• using two mobile phones


• chicken pox


• hosting at LJ


• using openSUSE at home


• more resposibilities at work


• evangelizing TDD, UML


• expiring passport


• successfully continuing to be lazy

Even though I had recovered from chicken pox couple of weeks back, I was advised not to travel much, at least till mid April. But this never had stopped me from my favorite passtime these days--bird watching.

Where do I go for bird watching

My apartment is in Marathahalli and shares the compound wall with the Karunya institute. This institute has lots of trees including Mango, Neem, etc., which attracts lots of birds. So over the weekends I wake up around 6 AM and take my camera (Sony DSC-H50 with the VCL-DH1774 74mm lens) to do bird watching.

What birds have I seen till now?

Some of the most common birds that I quite often spot are Rose-ringed Parakeet (Psittacula krameri), Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis), Blyth's Reed-Warbler (Acrocephalus dumetorum). I had the oppurtunity once to spot a Red-wattled Lapwing (Vanellus indicus).

Last week I was lucky enough to spot Tickell's Leaf Warbler (Phylloscopus affinis) and Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea). Though I'm not sure if it is very rare to spot these (within Bangalore), this is my first sighting of these beauties.

While I had spotted the Greater Coucal (Centropus sinensis) couple of times during my (earlier) Chickmagalur trip, I could never shoot them because sometimes they were far to be captured from my camera, and sometimes they disappear before I could focus on them. But it turned out to be a lucky day for me yesterday, I spotted a pair of them very close to my apartment and finally caught them on my camera :)

All of these pictures, and a lot more are available on my Flickr set (titled: Birds in my backyard). The pictures that I upload on Flickr are raw (not processed). I post some of these pictures on IndiaNatureWatch.net, but due to the restrictions of the image and file size, I edit the pictures before uploading it there. Here's the link to my pictures on IndiaNatureWatch.net.

My new Nikon 7x35 CF binocular

After weeks of doing research (on the Internet) and asking a lot of experts, I have finally bought a pair of binoculars (Nikon 7x35 CF) for bird watching. They're just awesome for spotting birds at least if my camera cannot capture them.

That's it for now, Happy Easter Sunday!

Goodbye Gecko, Hi WebKit

I have been a fan of Gecko and was using it since Mozilla M14 Milestone release. My initial experience with Mozilla was simply amazing, because I was annoyed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Netscape Communicator was much worse for it was very slow in rendering pages. Then came Firefox. I was one of the early users and was using it when it used to be known as Firebird. The 1.0 release was a much anticipated release, and it lived up to its expectation. When Firefox 1.5 introduced tabbed browsing, it was one of the most hyped features because most browsers didn't have it, even though Opera users were enjoying it for long ;)

Slowly, I started noticing some problems with the 2.0 release of Firefox, it had horrible memory leaks, and hence would make my computer crawl at times, chugging memory like mad! Then came Firefox 3.0 release. Firefox 3.0 claimed to be a better release with better memory management and many other (developer friendly) features. While I did notice that the memory consumption is low, it wasn't good either.

In the meantime, I was trying out lot of other browsers on different operating systems. At work I use Leopard, and at home I use Debian GNU/Linux. On the Mac, I was happy with Safari; I noticed that it was faster in rendering, and at the same time consumed less memory. All because the recent versions of WebKit, which is the rendering engine behind Safari, Google Chrome was getting better and better both in terms of speed, simplicity and in terms of supporting web standards. At home I was using Epiphany for web browsing since I didn't have separate profiles for work and non-work related browsing in Firefox. The current version of Epiphany that is bundled with GNOME on Debian GNU/Linux uses Gecko as its rendering engine, but nevertheless it was better than Firefox in terms of memory usage. While this can be attributed to the extensions that I have with Firefox, I was using quite a few extensions with Epiphany too. So, gradually I was inclined towards WebKit and started to avoid Gecko for anything but testing. The next version of Epiphany will be using WebKit according to this announcement. While this annoucement itself is quite old, because I was happy with WebKit, this announcement got me excited. So, I started compiling the latest version of Epiphany against WebKit because there weren't any beta releases of their upcoming release.

Compiling Epiphany with WebKit

Here we go. If you wish to compile the latest Epiphany (2.27.1 as of this writing), you begin the process by satisfying the following dependencies:

• GLib2 version 2.19.7
• GTK+ version 2.16.0
• libsoup version 2.26.0
• WebKit version 1.0

If you're like me, having a stable version of all these packages (but an older version since it comes bundled with your operating system), you can of course set up all these libraries under a different directory. Usually, /usr/local, or /opt is chosen, but I chose /usr/sfw. If you wonder why, I like the Solaris file system layout very much, which is why I chose this directory.

The order of compilation of these dependencies are the same as specified above. The steps are identical to compile the first three libraries. So for each of the libraries, the following steps would have to be performed:

# Download the source, and extract them (using whatever archive expander your operating system provides), then for each of the library, do the following steps
shell> sh configure --prefix=/usr/sfw
# Assuming the software is configured to be built
shell> make
# If everything is a success ...
shell> sudo make install

Compiling WebKit is also same, except that by default it compiles HTML 5 video support. If you wish to have this support you need gstreamer plugins. I didn't care to have this support since even without this WebKit can play videos. So, the following steps would build WebKit into the same /usr/sfw directory.

# Download and extract the nightly WebKit source tarball
shell> sh configure --prefix=/usr/sfw --disable-video
# Assuming the software is configured to be built
shell> make
# If everything is a success ...
shell> sudo make install

Finally, all the dependencies are satisfied for Epiphany itself to be built against WebKit. One word of caution is that this is a very unstable version of Epiphany, so we would not replace our original Epiphany with this, but we would be building and installing this into a separate directory. For building Epiphany, since the dependencies are installed in a different directory, it is necessary to make the newly installed directory searchable for include file path and library paths. So, lets start by configuring the build environment for building Epiphany against WebKit.

# Make sure that /usr/sfw is given precendence in include and library paths
# Since Debian GNU/Linux installs the dbus include files into a non standard directory, we'll have to fix it
shell> CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/sfw/include -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/dbus-1.0"
shell> LDFLAGS="-L/usr/sfw/lib -L/usr/lib"
shell> LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/sfw/lib:/usr/lib
shell> PATH=/usr/sfw/bin:$PATH
shell> PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/sfw/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
shell> export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH PKG_CONFIG_PATH

The build environment is ready for Epiphany to be built against WebKit now. I chose to install Epiphany into /usr/sfw/epiphany. The source for the latest version of Epiphany can be downloaded from here.

# Download and extract the source archive
shell> sh configure --prefix=/usr/sfw/epiphany
# Assuming the software is configured to be built
shell> make
# If everything is a success ...
shell> sudo make install

The newly built version of Epiphany can be launched by running /usr/sfw/epiphany/bin/epiphany.

Final Words

Things seem to be perfect. The newly built browser has passed 100% in the acid3 test unlike Firefox 3.0 which passed only 71%. Nevertheless, it has some glaring bugs which are really annoying at times. Here are some of them which might affect your daily web browsing:

• FTP URLs don't seem to work, at least for me.
• View source doesn't work.
• Sometimes with page scrolling you might notice video/image content getting clipped.
• Extensions don't seem to work as of yet.

But I'm using Epiphant with WebKit for my daily browsing. I'm happy with it otherwise :)

After several years, I'm finally on LiveJournal. Its not a decision that I've taken hastily. I've tried many options, from choosing different blogging solutions like Wordpress to maintaining and running my own weblog (again on Wordpress) on a shared hosting, and more recently my own server (VDS). I have been doing this for years, but enough is enough, what I wanted is a simple system where I can voice my opinions, share my knowledge, write about my travel, and many other things.

Why shared hosting didn't excite me?

Running your applications and maintaining a weblog on a shared hosting is a pain, because you're stuck with the restrictions that your web hosting provider puts on you like running PHP as a CGI, and not installing your favorite extensions, using ".htaccess" for configuring Apache to some extent and so forth. Its a pain that you'd have to live with. I hated this, I wanted to configure my web server, and PHP and other libraries, so I chose for a VDS.

But for the kicks, VDS didn't last long too

After carefully investigating several options, I chose miniVDS. If you haven't had the experience with a VDS, its a completely different kind of experience. There are several options provided by miniVDS, out of which one of them is a barebones VDS, where you completely configure the operating system, web server, mail server and so forth. I liked this very much, because I had the luxury to configure and secure my web server like the way I want. Even I had the option to not compile unwanted modules/extensions into Apache or PHP. I even started writing my own weblog software since some of the popular blogging software are either bloat, or full of holes. I had designed my weblog software to be darn simple, each post was an RSS feed, and I used Lucene to index the posts and serve them. But, this too didn't last for long, I didn't have the luxury of time to do all these things forever. If you ever had run Gentoo (or even LinuxFromScratch), you would know what I'm talking about.

All is well, now :)

So, I was back to square one, looking for a good blogging provider broke my head upon many options including Typepad, Blogger, but finally I settled with LiveJournal. One, because it's open source, and two, because I know that all of my friends (yathin, vijayr, teemus, anomalizer, suhas, bluesmoon, code_martial, hitesh, ...) are here for years. I'm happy now :)