Tashan - Movie review.

The events portrayed around the characters dont look or sound practical or believable. With a end that it had, Tashan is on the disappointment path. It started off well, each of the characters were introduced in the style and stereotype that they would be portraying in the rest of the movie. Perhaps the proceedings were fine, till about middle of second half. Thats when the pace slows down and begins to drag. The sudden change in Kareena's character was difficult to digest and believe. Even Saif had a tough time believing her!!

The climax was a major let down. It was as if the director had no clue how to end it. So he used some wacky stunts and thrills best suited for B grade films, the one's with which Mithun chakroborthy was once associated with or like some of the over the top south Indian action flicks.

Having said that, there is no doubt the characters were likeable as well as worth remembering once you leave the screen. The phunny english lines of Anil kapoor, or the total Kanpuria basha of Akshay kumar, you laugh and do enjoy the proceedings. Another disappointing aspect if not something that lifts the movie, is its music.  Lack of catchy numbers is not going to any add recall value for the film either.

The lead characters have done their job, in the best manner they know to. in the acting department, you cannot think of anyone else doing any better , given the limitations of a great script. The production is of high quality. Understandable, for a YashRaj film. The visuals for songs and sequences are appealing and the effort of the team is visible. For a first time director, its a job completed. Yes it could have been better, if not for the final sequences.

It can be recommended for a one time watch, if one has liked the works of Anil, Kareena, Saif or Akshay in the past.

* * 1/2

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Road Rage - The new ill in the society!

Have you ever been involved in a war of words with others while on road? Or have you been witness to a traffic standstill because two parties ahead of you are just not agreeing or willing to give up on their causes. Atleast one of your answer could be a yes. Road rage is not uncommon on roads on metros these days. There are various factors and reasons that lead to a tiff. It could be a genuine mistake by one of the parties involved. But as is with most of us, we seldom accept our mistakes and refuse to admit it and leave alone take a abuse lying down.

Road rage could kill. Have a look at this article http://www.ibnlive.com/news/pregnant-woman-husband-thrashed-by-bus-drivers/63019-3.html?xml on IBN-Live. Nobody can ascertain whose fault it was. But one thing is certain, the consequences could have been fatal. Imagine a serious injury to the lady, or worst a unforced abortion. And all these can be avoided.

Our natural instinct in everything that goes wrong, is to find someone to blame for the same! Hence the moment we see something wrong, our senses immediately react and start pointing fingers. This explains our sudden anger on others. Even you and I have been in similar situations hurling a abuse or two on different accounts. A bad at work or home is mostly the source of our anger, and we look for excuses to vent it out on others. This idea of teaching others a lesson could lead to catastrophic results as we have been hearing in the news now and then.

Hence in my humble opinion, its best to exercise self restraint and avoid getting into arguments. Its easier to get provoked and your reaction could provoke further reactions and you never know how the chain reaction could be.

Trust me there is no pride lost or egos hurt than witnessing a loss of life.

Live Cricket scores on your Firefox statusbar

Install Extension!

Add this site to be allowed to install extensions on your browser, else right click on the above link and save the file in local system and then drag and drop it Firefox > Tools > Addons

Aamir Khan Blogs!!

Yes its true, this blog is for real!! The Actor himself writes and reads all the responses. Even I couldn't believe this earlier when I read it in newspapers. Thought this was taken care by his production team. But when I observed him during the Ghajini remake shoot at Bangalore, I was made to believe that it was really him who is writing all those posts. He would come between shots and will be fully engrossed in his personal Sony Viao! Wow that was one sleek model..

On an average each of his posts attract about 500+ responses. It was startling to observe his earlier posts in which he makes it a point to respond to the responses themselves. Phew! this guy has lot of patience and dedication. It would be interesting to see how Aamir would deal with the increasing no. of responses each day. Also not all comments would be pleasant to read! Hope he understands the anonymity of the web, where anyone can disguise and say whatever they feel, without the fear of being caught.

But nevertheless hope to see more of his posts, and get direct info about him and his work. He should be moving to his personal site soon, which is in the making for quite some time now!!

Aamir Khan at ITPL, Bangalore for Ghajini remake shoot.

On a lazy sunday morning out of nowhere a friend calls up and tells me that Aamir Khan is in town for shooting. I rush to the location and find a sizable gathering already present at the shoot. Aamir had just arrived from his makeshift green room. As in the Tamil version, ITPL building was shown as the AirVoice office of which Aamir is the head. The scenes involving the office and building were being shot at the location.

Asin is the female lead with Jhia khan as the other actress. I remember watching Asin in amazement on screen in the Tamil version. Her's was one of the few author backed roles one can find on Indian celluloid. Thankfully since she was not a established or a seasoned actress, there was a raw and amateur freshness about her acting.

I guess for any Die Hard fan like me, this is for real a special day. A day you always dream would happen. And finally it did.. I was seeing my favorite actor live in flesh and blood..




Click on the image to view full size image.





Thats my pal Satish(left) staring at Aamir like a Luntt :P when am clicking him !!



Aamir meeting some fans after a shot :)



Aamir's official BMW for the film.


One of the Autorikshaw used for a scene. Lol!! we dint even spare the rik!!!

Aamir signing autographs

Thanks to papoouday

Aamir Khan's Official Blog!!

Cheers!!

Decided to make this blog tech free! Will continue to put new findings/howtos on my wordpress blog. Till then this is my chill out zone...

Assorted Linux/Ubuntu Gotchas!!

To customise Vi Editor
copy /usr/share/vim/vimrc to ~/.vimrc
:syntax on for color highlighting
:set incsearch for incremental search in vi editor

to clear and redraw the screen ^L


To get network info
$netstat -lneap | grep tcp
5900 for vnc
21 for ftp

To mount Windows partitions (NTFS) on boot-up, and allow users read and write access

$sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

$sudo vi /etc/fstab and add the following

/dev/hda5 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

To mount network folder
//192.168.151.97/freeware /media/freesoft smbfs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials 0 0

To list all ips in a network
nmap -v -sP 192.168.185.1/24 | grep "appears to be up" | cut -d ' ' -f 2

Install FLash editor for linux
$wget http://www.sonsuzdongu.com/paketler/f4lm_0.1-1_i386.deb

$sudo dpkg -i f4lm_0.1-1_i386.deb


Postgresql

If you want to allow other(s) network system to access your
database, you need to make changes in two files : postgresql.conf and
pg_hba.conf.

in postgresql.conf file you need to specify IP address(es) to listen on,
with comma seperated. OR '*' for ALL.

listen_addresses = '*'
And in pg_hba.conf you need to add the following line at end :
host all all 192.168.185.1/8 trust

Java 5 doc
$wget http://javadocs.planetmirror.com/dist/jdk150-hh.zip

Setting up a SVN 1.4 server using Apache 2.2

To setup svn 1.4 , we need to compile both apache 2.2 and svn 1.4 from source.
This how to has been tested under Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy.

$sudo apt-get install build-essential libneon25-dev autoconf libtool -y --force-yes

Before starting make sure you have removed prev apache2 and subversion from your system.
To do this:
$sudo apt-get --purge remove apache2 subversion
$sudo mv /etc/init.d/apache2 $HOME/apache2_bak


$cd $HOME
$mkdir softwares
$cd softwares

$wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
$tar xvfz zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
$cd zlib-1.2.3/
$./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$make
$sudo make install

$cd ..
$wget http://apache.forbigweb.com/httpd/httpd-2.2.3.tar.gz

$tar xvfz httpd-2.2.3.tar.gz
$cd httpd-2.2.3/
$./buildconf

$./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-mods-shared=all --enable-deflate --enable-proxy --enable-proxy-balancer --enable-proxy-http --enable-dav --enable-so --enable-maintainer-mode


$make
$sudo make install

$sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
Now test your apache2! goto browser and type http://localhost, you should see it works!!


$sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop


$sudo cp /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /etc/init.d/apachectl
$sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/apachectl

We just need to add a few lines to the file for it to work nicely:

$sudo vi /etc/init.d/apachectl

Add the followinig, so the top of the file looks like:

#!/bin/sh
#
# chkconfig: - 85 15
# description: Apache is a web server.
Save the file.

$sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d apachectl defaults

Securing Apache

It?s also a good idea to create a dedicate Apache system user account. It?ll make your install much more secure.

$sudo adduser --system apache

Now we just need to make sure that Apache runs under this user. We do that by editting the configuration file:

$sudo vi /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

You need to find the lines that say:

User daemon
Group daemon

And change them so they look like:

User apache
Group nogroup

$sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start


Installing Subversion 1.4

As we have built Apache from source, we'll need to do the same for Subversion in order to get the Apache 2 modules mod_dav_svn and mod_authz_svn.

# rm -f /usr/local/lib/libsvn*
# rm -f /usr/local/lib/libapr*
# rm -f /usr/local/lib/libexpat*
# rm -f /usr/local/lib/libneon*

$wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.0.tar.gz
$tar xvfz subversion-1.4.0.tar.gz
$cd subversion-1.4.0/

$sh autogen.sh

$./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-httpd

In case you find a error for missing apr or apr tool give the following configure command

$./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-httpd --with-apr=/usr/local/apr --with-apr-util=/usr/local/apr

$make
$sudo make install

This will also add the relevant LoadModule directives into your Apache 2 configuration for you.
Creating your repository

Now, create your Subversion repository:

$svnadmin create /home/yourusername/subversion/repos

We have to make that repository owned by Apache so that it can be accessed via the web:

$sudo chown -R apache /home/yourusername/subversion/repos

Authentication File

Now create a user/password file for authentication:

$/usr/local/apache2/bin/htpasswd -cm /home/yourusername/subversion/dav_svn.passwd yourusername

When prompted, enter your password.
Configuring Apache

Edit your /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf file with the following placed at the end:



<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNPath /home/yourusername/subversion/repos

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
AuthUserFile /home/yourusername/subversion/dav_svn.passwd
Require valid-user
</Location>




If you want access control based on different users, add the following line after the Require valid-user line:

AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/yourusername/subversion/svn_access_control


To setup a local mirror using svnsync

$cd /home/ajopaul/subversion/repos/hooks/
$vi pre-revprop-change
$sudo vi pre-revprop-change
Add the following lines
#!/bin/sh
USER="$3"

if [ "$USER" = "svnsync" ]; then exit 0; fi

echo "Only svnsync user can change revprops" >&2
exit 1


$sudo chmod +x pre-revprop-change

$sudo svnsync init --username svnsync file:///home/ajopaul/subversion/repos http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/svn

$sudo svn proplist --revprop -r 0 http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/svn

$sudo svn propget file:///home/ajopaul/subversion/repos --revprop -r 0 http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/svn

$time sudo svnsync sync file:///home/ajopaul/subversion/repos

Remember! local mirrors is/should be read only

To ensure no commits happen on the local mirror add the following lines to hooks/pre-commit script

#!/bin/sh
SVNLOOK=/usr/local/bin/svnlook
USER=`$SVNLOOK author -t $2 $1`
if [ "$USER" = "svnsync" ]; then
exit 0;
fi
echo "Sorry no commit allowed on mirror! use 'svn switch' to point to master repo and then point back to local mirror after the commit" >&2
exit 1



-Ajo Paul

Source:
Apache 2.2
Svn 1.4

Orkut Tool Bar for FireFox!!!

Install FireFox first if u already dont have it, click here , next install this Orkut ToolBar Extension from here

Now click on Install and restart the firefox, bingo u have the Orkut toolbar ready for easy scrapping and easy posts!! you can even insert pics and flash movies in your posts!! aint tat wonderful!!