Trichotillomania

301 Moved Permanently

2007-03-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

I will no longer blog here. Blogger and Google has pissed me enough. I am moving to LJ. Those who subscribe to the RSS can now listen to this.

Bye Blogger. So long.

How to encode an avi with subtitle.src file?

2007-02-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

So, I wanted to watch this Spanish movie. I only had a .avi file and after looking for days I found the English subtitles in a .srt

I used this command to encode the subtitles on the avi.

mencoder -noodml -o new_video.avi -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=970:max_bframes=2 -vf-add harddup -sub Pan.srt -subpos 97 -subwidth 80 -subcp latin1 -ffactor 1 -subfont-autoscale 1 -subfont-text-scale 4 -subfont-blur 8 -sub-bg-color 1 -sub-bg-alpha 22 orignal.avi

Pondicherry and Mahabalipuram

2007-01-31T02:52:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I had the misfortune to go to Pondicherry. Where can I start? Lets start from the good parts:

There was a kingfisher party which started at 11:40 PM and got shut down at 1 and the organizer got arrested. The party consisted mainly of White kids and no one asked for any refunds.

Other than that Pondicherry sucks. The food sucked. None of the restaurants could make a bowl of bolognese. French architecture? French architecture my ass -- The place is a giant village.

The waiters at Pondicherry seem to have taken the phrase "give time a break" (which, unfortunately is Pondicherry's official slogan) literally. Hours go by while you wait for something as simple as fried eggs to appear.

There was a place called Daily breads, they refused to give me breakfast because it was past noon -- when I arrived the next day at 11:30 they said they didn't have bread. By this time we knew it was time to leave this god forsaken place. We packed and left.

Pondicherry sucks. Don't go there.

Mahabalipuram is two hours drive from Pondicherry on the picturesque East Coast Road (ECR). The drive is a wonderful experience.

Once in Mahabalipuram, be prepared to be involved in a skirmish with beggars, guides, white backpacker kids and so on. It is part of the charm of Mahabalipuram and not to be frowned at. Thats what gives the otherwise dull place some life.

We found a place to stay without much trouble, two bedrooms with kitchen and a bathroom with hot water for around 600 bucks a night -- no wonder the white kids never leave. Food was generally OK. Nothing exceptional. Sea food prices were on a higher side and all they had to offer was squid and tuna. There is a nice cheap breakfast place called "The new cafe.", they also serve beer and play awful jazz and is crowded by regulars.

The beach, walking distance from our place was much cleaner than anything in Pondicherry. We decided to buck office on Monday and stayed an extra day. Mahabalipuram is by far a better place to visit than Pondicherry.

The drive back via NH7 Kanchipuram -> Vellore -> Krishnagiri -> Bangalore is a much better one.

Pictures.

Radio Schizoid

2007-01-09T03:55:00.000-08:00

In the year 2001 -- well! the less said about that part of my life, the better. A thoroughly undisciplined man, I was angry at myself and at everybody else. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, and, smoking pot. Needless to say the "experimentation" seeped into music as well.

What would prove to be the biggest mistake of the 20th century, I gave some trance to Oldmonk, a 40 year old narcissist, who thought one could trip on bohemian rhapsody. Coming months would see "Oldmonk the enlightened" leech the galaxy dry of psytrance.

Here we are half a decade later and he's still tripping to it, and, wants you to do the same. Oldmonk and cray3 come together to give you Radio Schizoid, give it a spin.

home made dosa and tomato chutney

2007-01-08T02:26:00.000-08:00

This sunday I made Dosas and tomato chutney. It was approved to be "good" by two tamilians, which made me quite happy.

Here is the recipe,

Dosa:
Buy dosa mixture from the supermarket :P, Don't buy the poweder, buy the stuff which is in paste form. Add some water and a bit of salt to it. Heat a flat pan and pour a tablespoon full spread it. Add some oil on top.

Chutney:
You need three big onions, three tomatoes, a spoon of mustard seeds, red chilli and salt.

Cut the onion into half and chop sideways as shown in the image. Cut the tomatoes the same way. Heat some oil in a pan add onions. Add spices and the tomatoes when the onions are done. cover and cook for 6 minutes. you're done.

last supper

2007-01-05T02:22:00.000-08:00

If it was your last meal before you died, what would it be?

Me?

Bacon and eggs for sure.

wisdom

2006-12-18T03:49:00.000-08:00

When life gives you a mango, use it to make sangria.
Life is a like a box of chocolates -- it is overpriced., will make you sick if you have it too quickly, and if others see you with it, they will try to take bits of it away from you.
Do not waste your time wondering if the glass is half empty or half full, if it is half anything it is time to order another round.

Credits: I moved your cheese. -Darrel Bristow-Bovey

bad day

2006-12-12T03:43:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, I will finish my second year at Yahoo!. It has been by far the longest I have been in any company. The only one coming even close is a 8 month stint at Jobsahead.com. Sarai, I don't consider as a job, it was time spent doing interesting things which I was paid for.

I should be happy about this. right? No. I've Been having a bad day today. As any old timer would tell you Yahoo! Bangalore is not what it used to be, and, I've been having trouble finding a "real job" in the group that I work with for a while now. Things that happened today make me have to think about whether I'll be staying at Yahoo! another year.

The only thing that I've found any pleasure in doing lately has been photography.

:(.

Meghalaya

2006-12-11T01:42:00.000-08:00

Last week was spent in Assam and Meghalaya. Went to Shillong, Cherapunji, Guwahati, ~~kanziranga~~ kaziranga and drove around the states a bit.

Took loads of pictures, about 6 gigs worth. Will be uploading the whole lot in the course of this week.

Meghalaya was beautiful. Loved shillong.

chennai sucks, security risks and prespective: A tale in three parts.

2006-11-29T03:28:00.000-08:00

Act I

An urban bar.

So, I'm here in chennai sitting at the airport measuring how my day has been. I flew in an ATR for the first time. Good. It rained as soon as I landed. Good. I had to fight with autowallas to get to the US embassy. Bad. The guy took me round and round. Also bad. Chennai is big. Good. It is freaking hot. Also good. :)

So far I was loving it. But, the thing that turned it around was the fact that I roamed around for two hours in the blistering heat and I could not find a single coffee shop or a place where I could just sit and kill the three hours that I had to kill. I arrived early morning at 8 and the visa appointment was at 15 past noon. Now, this really pissed me off. I thought I'd just sit in the church near-by. Wrong. The security guard (yeah! this church had one) told me I could not sit there. So, I fought with him for fifteen minutes over, "why?" Futile. So, I just opened my laptop and sat at the footpath and tried to catch up on some mail. Wrong again.

What was my fault? A cop came and told me I could not use my laptop on the footpath, apparently, there was a US embassy camera overlooking that part of the footpath. Hence, my using my laptop on a public footpath was a security risk for the US embassy and hence a security risk for the Government of America. What is the logic there? I fought with him. But, soon I was out-numbered and I though it sensible to move away (5 meters) from the vision of the camera, You see I posed no security risk there, as I was not under the vision of the camera.

Act II

A country road. A tree.

Ok. now I had successfully killed three hours and it was time for my appointment, as I tried to walk past the "security" they told me I could not take my bag in, the camera and the laptop posed a huge security risk and could not be allowed in. One dude was not allowed because he was carrying a cellphone. Now, he tried to tell that It is switched off. Wrong. The device is lethal explained the expert cop and can not be allowed in. I said OK. I won't take it in but, you could keep it somewhere for me.

"Yes! we can keep it in a 'secure place' ", said the cop. he led the way and we walked behind him to the "secure place", some 500 meters down the road, and guys! this is the killer ah! wait, I think I'll save the killer for later. So, we reached a tea stall, the usual tea stall made of tin, "This is the secure place", said the cop. Now, I don't know about you but, The embassy won't allow me to bring in my cellphone and a tea stall made of tin is a safe place for my $2000 laptop and $1000 camera?

So, I turned and went back at the embassy gates, fought with the security guards and the cops, they said I could not go in with my bag and that they can not keep it for me. Obviously, they all were part of some scam, and I returned to the stall. I gave the guy my bag. And here is the killer, "100 rupees", says the tea stall guy. So, obviously the security guards, the cops, and the tea stall guy were all together in this one.

I saw it clearly, they had a plan. We all are a bunch of fools I say, why do we go to work everyday? Now, these guys have figured it all out.

step 1: Disallow cellphones.
step 2: Raise a tea stall.
step 3: Profit.

Almost everyone carries a cellphone. There are perhaps three thousand interviews a day, use your imagination.

Act III

Hazy dream. Plastic atmosphere.

Last week, at foss.in sirtaj told me a story.

Sirtaj: "Once I was browsing through a bookstore, where I overheard a bunch of IITans talking about technology and tech books, then and there I decided: No matter what happens, I never want to be as ignorant as these guys! and that changed my life."

Just in front of my visa interview queue, stood one of "these guys", a dude from an IIT, who wanted to go to America. "Why do you want to study in America?", asked the interviewer, "because as soon as I'm in 5th sem I'll find a job and then I'm done there for life", thought I. "Because the technology is so great there", said our dude. "Explain?", asked the interviewer. Now, it is worth mentioning that this guy was wearing a black suit in 30 degrees chennai heat. Of-course it was not adding anything to his intellect. He wasted the next 4 minutes of his life saying, "It is so great there." in seven different ways. He was nervous. He stuttered. He could not convert his thoughts into sentences, it didn't help and the interviewer said, "I'm rejecting your application, and I want you to think about why I'm rejecting it."

Our dude didn't take it well. "I'm from IIT", he said. and some more garbage that I don't remember.

"Hi", he said to me now, "how you doing", I replied. It's worth mentioning that I was wearing a swag wear t-shirt, which said "oscAmp 2006" and a pair of jeans which I've been in since the last 15 days. "you work for Yahoo!?", "yeah!", I replied. "you know the mail beta is really slow, and when I add images they don't reach people. I've stopped using the beta now. You guys should really bring it out fast ... gmail is everywhere you know? .... .... ... ", that was my interview.

I assured him I'll file a bug. :)

foss.in

2006-11-26T23:36:00.000-08:00

I have been ridiculously sick eversince I returned from delhi, was on the bed for pretty much the whole week and the docs over at Manipal Hospital gave me a cocktail of very potent (think 750 MG twice a day) "medicine." Two days of this and I was able to make it to my talk at foss.in and it went quite well.

About 90 people attended - in a 60 seater, not sure if everyone got what I was saying. There were many blank faces. But, I had about half an hour of questions from four or five people which was nice, I don't think I'll talk about this topic again though, most people were doing a much smaller scale implementations and would have benefited more from a tutorial on nagios. I hope the mailing list goes that way.

I will anyways put up the promised packages at disgruntle soon. Will try to start the mailing list that we talked about too. Soon(I hope).

After my talk was over I indulged in a Fragfest, where I got my ass majorly kicked, my excuses:

1. I am a unreal tournament boy.
2. I was playing with a trackpad (come-on).

Dlafry and fox2mike p0wned everyone major time, t3 coming in form a bit later.

I also got a chance to attend a KDE tutorial, instigating some old love for KDE development, I hope Pradeepto would keep me pumped up.

Foss.in helped me get my adrenaline flowing back again, making me think if I'm going in the right direction with coding, life etc. I should attend multiple events like this, maybe one every quarter ... keeps one going,

Pics.

Iron maiden - A Matter of Life and Death review

2006-11-06T02:29:00.000-08:00

It is rather difficult to 'review' an album by a band that you have worshiped throughout your teenage life.

Adrian Smith's last album with Maiden, 'Seventh Son of a Seventh Son' is my favorite Maiden album, with songs like 'Can I play with madness' and 'The evil that men do.' The style and aesthetics of music in this album perhaps marks the 'classic' Iron maiden.

Adrian came back with Brave New World. I didn't quite like the album and gave it away to someone after a couple of months, Haven't heard it since.

This album is different, It's kind of return to the 'classic' period if only by taking 'longer' routes, compare the crisp and slick 4 to 5 minute songs in 'Seventh Son of a Seventh Son' to 8 minute parables of 'A Matter of Life and Death.' The album is 71 minutes long with songs from 8 to 9 minutes. Even then It is the band's best album in years. An aging man that I am I blissfully accept the crumbs the old greats throw at me.

What was missing in the last two albums was of-course the pace and the excellent, and heavy riffs but, also the time changes. All the songs have several time changes and the song which starts off with an aggressive riff keeps on getting stronger as the rest of the band picks up the song. There are some really nice solos too.

For the Greater Good of God, most appropriately reflects the dark progressive nature of the album. There are a few turn off as well, while listening to The legacy I double checked if I had by-mistake played a Dream theater lullaby.

The only flaw I can see so far is that the album is very lengthy. An Iron Maiden of the 80s would perhaps have kept out the junk and produced a more crisp album. The album is long and I almost fell asleep.

Preception

2006-10-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

* "You need to go to this shop; six floors, they have all the brands!"
* "This hospital is awesome ... they have barcodes and stuff."

In other news, I am really happy with the way this turned out:

More Eiffel tower pictures. Also, I'm speaking in foss.in.

Paris

2006-10-09T04:03:00.000-07:00

It's hard not to like paris and I'm liking it a lot. I paid a visit to some Friends. Went to the Louvre, Roamed around in the Paris Nuit Blanche.

The thing I like most is the toy like metro, it's plasiticy green and white and appears to have torn out a kid's bedroom and started roaming around the city. Also, the fact that you can sit on a street with a guitar, sing some songs and create an instant fan following, if only for an hour or two, people will gather, sing along and cheer each and every minute. Very friendly people (everyday someone or the other would ask "sa va?","how does it go?" to which you can reply "sa va!","it goes!"). It's a city with culture, romance, art, sunshine, beauty, awesome food, late nights and ofcourse lots of french kisses :) a city that lives rather than exist.

merci Paris.

Trappist

2006-09-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in a train towards Antwerp, However, my destination is a small town called Westmalle – home of the Trappist brewery of the Abbey of Our Beloved Lady of the Sacred Heart. Westmalle is the largest of the Trappist beer producers and maintains a huge commercial plant at the abbey that is overseen by monks.

There are only six Trappist beers in the world, Westmalle, Westvleteren, Achel, Chimay, Rochefort and Orval, all of which are brewed by monks. Ratebeer.com, rates Westvleteren Abt 12 as the best beer in the world.

It all started when in 1793, Napoleon began an anti-Church campaign in France. A group of monks left the Abbey of Val-Sante on route to safety in the New World. The monks found refuge on a farm outside of Antwerp, just west of a town named Malle. Not long after they had established a priory here, Napoleon invaded Holland and the monks again fleck this time to Switzerland and various parts of Eastern Europe. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the monks returned to Westmalle and re-established the priory.

The abbey has existed for 200 years, and the monks have now given up much of the labor of the brewery to maintain their quiet, contemplative life that is dictated by the Rule of Saint Benedict. The monks make their own cheese which is only available for sale at the abbey and the Trappisten café across the street.

I get off the bus on the street in front of the huge abbey and walk along a long tree-lined path to the front of the beautiful brick buildings. A certain kind of soothing calm wraps itself around me. I pay a visit to the brewery and walk across the street to the Cafe.

The Cafe Trappisten has a huge outdoor patio as well as a clean, sharply decorated, cavernous interior. The beer menu included many Dutch and Belgian pilsner type beers, but the stars of the cafe are definitely the two Westmalle products. Westmalle Dubbel and Trippel.The Double has a brown color from dark malts and dark candy sugar as well as a dry finish. One waiter at the cafe said, The dubbel is a favourite with the locals because it has a soft flavour and "does not go right to one's head."

The Tripel is available at the cafe on draft as well, Westmalle Tripel is a beautiful beer made with pale candy sugar.

As I enjoy my beer in a beautiful sun baked day, It is obvious that the abbey at Westmalle and the Cafe Trappisten are certainly worth the travel from any point in the World.

EuroOSCON 2006

2006-09-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was in Brussels attending and giving a talk at EuroOSCON. I had given a similar tutorial at Freedel 2005, this time around I tried to pack everything in 40 minutes, It was rather successful.

My trip was cancelled and I booked tickets to Delhi on friday 22nd Sep, to join Gopal and premshree at Freedel 06, It was a lot of fun, hanging out with LUG-Delhi folks. I came back to bangalore on monday to find that I had a flight to catch withing 5 hours, I shoved anyting I could find into a bad for about an hour and took a flight to bombay and then to Brussels.

I attended a few sessions, Rasmus talking about PHP apps, Simon talking about YUI, Apache dbd and a few BOF sessions. The one I enjoyed most was Damien Conyway's session on Perl, very entertaining.

I'm in Gent now, hanging out with friends and it's cold and grey :(. Pictures on Flickr.

Inception of a Hack

2006-09-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

By some evil twist of fate, Me, Premshree, Gopal and Teemus ended up eating dinner at garuda last night and Teemus ended up paying for it, and if you know teemus, you know that money is one thing that Teemus takes seriously. :)

On our way back we were discussing what everyone was doing for the Hackday. I am going out of the country, and Gopal and Prem, out of the city.Teemus was still cribbing about us not returning his money and Gopal suggested we write a Web to point oh app for it. A intranet application for keeping a track of money borrowed or spent and returned. Debt-o-matic.

Back in the office, it was time to have a couple of coffees and get to the design board. Double entry book keeping isn't as easy as it seems. But, We quicky froze a feature set and came up with a simple Mysql schema. It was around 1:30.

Things were going great, I wrote the sql, Premshree was ajaxing, teemus the API and front end and gopalv was generally jumping around being hyper ... which kept us from dozing off, if it were not for him we all would not be coding.

Three coffee breaks later, around 5 am in the morning we had a working version. We borrowed and loaned money :) Teemus was still applying CSS love.

At home at 6 o' clock we slept like happy hackers.

singapore botanical gardens

2006-08-31T22:01:00.000-07:00

Waking up at six o clock in the morning; looking at the empty roads stretching in front of me, I wondered whether locating a bus towards napier road is what tourists did in Singapore.



After a 20 minute bus ride through the town, as I entered the gates of Singapore botanical garden. I realized I had not erred.

With a mere 20 steps the highway and it's noise was long gone and a kind of wilderness had wrapped itself around me. I share the road with a squirrel and several crickets. We walk over a rocky path along small pyramids of fallen leaves and ponds.

As I soak the tranquility around me, a lake slowly emerges into view through the dense fog of trees. I take time and spend it with a couple of swans, engaged in what appears to be breakfast. This is the swan lake one of the three lakes at the garden, namely, Symphony Lake, Eco-Lake and Swan Lake. The Symphony Lake occasionally have free concerts by Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Singapore Chinese Orchestra on weekends.



The Singapore Botanic Gardens also has a small tropical rainforest, which is older than the gardens itself. Walking past it you can reach the serene National Orchid Garden. The garden has the largest display of orchids in the world. There is also a VIP Orchid Garden displays orchid hybrids named after several heads of state, presidents, kings and queens. There is a $5 fee to get into the orchid garden and it's totally worth it. I took a stroll through the orchid garden, it pays to bring a good camera along.

I followed the trail through the ecological garden, which describes the the evolution story of plant life on Earth throughout the ages.



Just as I was congratulating myself on how smoothly the day had gone, I discovered that I was at the other end of the park about four acers from where I had started, I decided to take lunch at Halia restaurant at the Ginger Garden, the lunch fare was delicious, to keep me in heaven for a little while longer I decided to take siesta on the garden slope.

I miss my mom

2006-08-13T01:14:00.000-07:00

I am down with cold since yesterday morning ... been sneezing like nuts, ten times in a row every 3 minutes. Been cleaning a pile of used tissues one after another ... and drinking million cups of black coffee. And now have high fever and every muscle in my body hurts and don't feel like eating anything. All the so called "friends" and people who give me a headache 12 times a week are no where to be found now .

Mommy! I want soup.

PS: Anyone commenting 'Awwwww!' or 'Poor baby' shall be strangled as soon as I am on my feet.

Huawei EC321 (cdma) on linux

2006-08-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

So what do you do after two days of non-sleep and a 5 hour party? You try to make your recently acquired gadget to work on linux :) I wish I was kidding!

It all started due to a cow orker "borrowing" the team laptop and somehow loading it upto the brim with spyware And Gopal trying to browse on it. within 12 minutes we were booting linux.

I had just procured a Tata Indicom cdma data card as replacement for my now broken reliance cdma card. Since the reliance junk would never work on linux. I was rubbing my hands in anticipation on my way back home.

Out with the reasons and on to the quest.

After a few Google queries we ran into a few helpful Chinese characters. Even though we couldn't read any chinese ... the commands were all in plain old ASCII.

So, if you do a


$cat /proc/bus/usb/devices 
$sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1001

you should be able to see /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyUSB1. If you're not using udev. you can


 #mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
 #mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

Congratulations, you are now the proud configurer of a modem. And, it's time to pull an old cat out of the bag. wvdial :)


cat > /etc/wvdial.conf
[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 115200
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
FlowControl = Hardware (CRTSCTS)

[Dialer cdma]
Username = username
Password = *******
Phone = #777
Stupid Mode = 1
Inherits = Modem0

And then do a wvdial cdma and say hello to Intraweb 2,0^TM

But we didnt just stop there, Mr Gopal is too lazy to type modprobe everytime he boots the comp, and so should be you. :D

So, As a little gift to our chinese fellows we give you a set of hotplug scripts.

 
cat > /etc/hotplug/usb/datacard.usermap
# Huawei EC321 CDMA data card
datacard 0x0003 0x12d1 0x1001   0x0000 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

The first three numbers are important here, if you noticed when we did a cat /proc/bus/usb/devices | grep -a2 -b1 Huawei it looked like,


1565-P:  Vendor=12d1 ProdID=1001 Rev= 0.00
1603:S:  Manufacturer=Huawei Technologies
1643:S:  Product=Huawei Mobile
1686-S:  SerialNumber=HUAWEI EC3X1

0x12d1 and 0x1001 is just the vendor and device identifier (duh!), So much for the linux is difficult. We just like to make it look confusing :D notice the useless 0x0000 padding that follows, reserved for future use and confusing all present grey matter.

Now that we have found the device we should be able to hotplug it. the script below should do just fine.

 
cat > /etc/hotplug/usb/datacard
#!/bin/bash
SED=/bin/sed

#/usr/bin/env > /tmp/datacard.log

if [ "$ACTION" = "add" ] && [ -f "$DEVICE" ]
then
        VENDOR="`echo "$PRODUCT" | $SED "s/^\(.*\)\/.*\/.*$/\1/"`";
        PRODUCT_ID="`echo "$PRODUCT" | $SED "s/^.*\/\(.*\)\/.*$/\1/"`";
        modprobe usbserial "vendor=0x$VENDOR" "product=0x$PRODUCT_ID"
fi

Make sure you do a chmod +x /etc/hotplug/usb/datacard .

The above script is simply finding out the same vendor and device ID automagically ;) and doing a modprobe with it.

At this point you should stop your wvdial, proudly take out the card, push it back in and just do a wvdial again.

It should Just Work^TM.

Bombings and work

2006-08-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is nice to work for Yahoo! news. I got to know about the UK bomb plot within 1 minute of AP releasing the story.

The last time when The UK bombings happened the traffic touched quite high. It was quite chaotic. Today should be a fun night as well.

It's work and I was amazed at how I could disassociate myself with the fact of what is happening, for me it means heavy traffic ... servers to look at and fires to cease.

I guess thats why the journalist folks are so disassociated while reporting, they have to fix their makeup while it's raining buckets and people are shouting around.

Over heard?

2006-07-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the extremely funny Overheard in New York. You can do it now with Overplot. It's double the fun.

Moving bases

2006-07-25T03:01:00.000-07:00

My team, Media System Engineering (Please don't ask me what that means) has moved to the temporary Yahoo! office at EGL. Where do I start? Lets look at the good points.

It's 3 KM from my house so I walk to office, no more fighting with auto drivers.

It took me about 20 minutes to write the above sentence, and trust me there is nothing else that I could think of this place being good.

This place is like a zoo, where everyday you can see the "software engineers" of bangalore at display, they all look alike, black shoes, blue shirt, black pants, a badge in the neck, which resembles a leash. This place is seriously depressing. I am considering early retirement.

The cube is about half as small as my earlier one, and the chair is utter crap, my back hurts after sitting on it for about two hours. There is no lunch at the cafe, so I have to walk down to eat with the rest of the zoo monkeys. And no pool table. Come on? No pool table?

This place seems to be like the mecca of cheap indian labour, I should start an alternate business, get visitors and show them around, I'll get rich and they'll get a laugh. Trust I will take photo's soon.

Wait a minute, does that mean *I* am the cheap indian labour that they keep talking about?

Blogspot blocked by Indian ISP's

2006-07-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

A gag order was passed over the weekend. All of BlogSpot is off the map for users of several ISPs in India, as is TypePad.

I am in the process of moving my blog to Disgruntle, I wrote a small perl script to mirror the blogspot stuff at http://disgruntle.net/blog/. It is a bit broken. But, It's there. Better then nothing. Will do more work to fix it, and probably install a blogging tool.

PS: This sucks!

Update: This boing boing article covers the major things. A Wiki has been setup and here are the ways to bypass the ban.

Hey bangalore! why are you so grey?

2006-07-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

Whether the weather be fair,
Whether the weather be foul,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather --
Whether we like it or not.

bored

2006-07-05T04:25:00.000-07:00

I want to run away to a distant place and never come back again.

synday lunch

2006-06-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last week I decided to cook on sunday and invite some friends over, It turned out to be great fun.

Menu:
* Thai red curry.
* Sticky rice.
* Fried chicken (recipe: hyacinths)
* French mustard salad.
* Caramel custard (recipe: hyacinths' mom)
* Red wine and lichie (thanks: SS)
* Ice cream (thanks: KK)

Jessica, her lovely daughters Julianne and Jade, Fiba, Raj, Gopal, Shiv Shankari, Kapil, Ajit and Valerie decided to come.

The cooking was the most fun part and was done by the Interpid constituting Me, Prem and Gopal. Everything turned out to be edible :) and tasted quite good. As the food disappeared, the afternoon commenced with a healthy dose of basketball and coupling (well! I did tell you gopal was there.)

It was a lot of fun ... we should do it again sometime soon.

one month

2006-06-06T02:05:00.000-07:00

One month in my new house ... I likes it. Here is a pic that I like, Premshree(my flatmate) and me.

Uploaded by, teemus.

Human or not?

2006-05-31T23:34:00.000-07:00

The only reliable method that we know of for sniffing out replicants is the Voight-Kampff Test, created by Phillip K. Dick in his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and later used by Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, in the film Blade Runner. The test uses a series of questions to evoke an emotional response which androids are incapable of having.

replicant (rep’-li-kant) n.
1. A genetically engineered creature composed entirely of organic substance designed to look and act human.
2. An android.

I interviewed six individuals to find out if I am indeed surrounded by replicants.
Subject 1: Premshree Pillai.

Me: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
ppillai: thanks

Me:You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
ppillai: bad boy

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
ppillai: fuck

Me: What do you do?
ppillai: write code.

Me: I mean in relation to the wasp, What do you do?
ppillai: I write code.

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
ppillai: I'm a dope

Me: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
ppillai: I love my mother

ppillai: aren't we done?
Me: yes. we're done.

Conclusion: I think we can safely say that Premshree Pillai is indeed a replicant, albeit one that “loves” the implanted memory of his mother. Keep an eye on him.

Subject 2: Hyacinths Pennefather.

Me: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
HP: ooooooooooooooh coolness

Me: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
HP: encourage him to take up another hobby. if he doesn't agree, spnmk him

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
HP: screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeem, flail arms madly, swat.

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look
down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
HP: coz i like to see it wriggle.

Me: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
HP: smiles, hugs, walks, hugs, love, awesome cooking.

Conclusion: The dissociation Hyacinths expressed in response to the tortoise question confirms what we already knew: Hyacinths Pennefather is a replicant. However, by evaluating her response to the wasp question, we can tell that she’s at least not a Nexus 7, an advanced model with in-built motion spasms perhaps. Perhaps one of the most highly advanced models available.

Subject 3: Hitesh Shah.

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
HS: thanks

Me: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
HS: non-plussed

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
HS: shake it off or get a paper n do it. and this is get to be rather boring now.

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
HS: I am half alseep dreaming.

Me: one last question Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind.
HS: questions like those are best left unanswered if the "results" will posted somewhere....

Conclusion: The self-awareness required to recognize that you’re dreaming, eliminates the possibility of you being a replicant. Adroids do not dream because they dont sleep. Good work, Hitesh! You’re human!

Subject 4: Jyoti Ahuja.

Me: Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
JA: i'll take it but might not use it. or may be later, i'll tell the person that i dispprove of such gifts

Me: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
JA: Oh no, i'll be mad but wont scold him wud to try to explain him but might get angry.

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
JA: oh jeez, i'll scream and throw it away not killing it

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
JA: its not true, i w'll help..in case im not , im scared.

Me: But as is evident you are not helping.
JA: or looking for something to turn him over with. cant touch, im scared

Me: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
JA: patient, adjusting, loving, caring.

Conclusion:Inconclusive. While generally empathetic, there is a homey quality to Jyoti's answers that are almost too good to be true. As if they were … programmed. She might be a replicant. Beware.

Subject 5: Ishwar Sridharan

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
IS: ewwww. next q

Me: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
IS: get him another one. in the spirit of science

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
IS: get up suddenly flailing hands in all directions

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
IS: what's this - some psychoanalysis? because i've seen an empty tortoise shell
hmm so now what the heck was that? are you gonna give the results to my momma? are you gonna give the results to my manager? are you gonna give the results to my girlfriend?

Me: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
IS: WTF.

Conclusion: Almost too close to call. Ishwar displays a defensiveness when his empathy is questioned. He’s aware that he’s being probed for emotional responses, and even expresses concern about this. However, this concern is alleviated a little too easily by the next question. (notice how Ishwar responds precicely the same was as a Nexus to the mother question) Ishwar is definitely a replicant. Probably a Nexus 5.

Subject 6: Shiv Shankari

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
SS: I'd accept it. as long its gift anything goes.

Me: You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
SS: I will hide the killing jar

Me: You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
SS: I will scream at first, jump frantically and then push it away

Me: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
SS: I will definetly help

Me: but you are not helping.
SS: I will not help only if I was crazy.

Me: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
SS: Kindness, Smile, Gentle, Patient, Beautiful.

Conclusion: Her obvious grogginess leads us to the conclusion that she is indeed a human, but one with an ill-formed sleep schedule.

Yahoo! Search without eye sore

2006-05-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

Ok. So, one of the things that kept me from using Yahoo! as my default search engine was that I am used to the google UI and the Yahoo! search UI just looks like a big eye sore to me.

So, I wrote a GM Script to change the Y! search results UI to look like that of google.

Features include:
1. Clean interface.
2. It remembers what you clicked.
3. No more rd.yahoo.com

Use :)

Emily and I, on a saturday night

2006-05-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

Dear God, if you exist!
Let there be a heaven,
Where I can go,
And be a slave to Emily Dickinson.

past perfect

2006-05-16T23:42:00.001-07:00

Not so.

I am sure you have done it. I have done it many times to look for stuff I posted or an email thread I was a part of. Today, I went the whole way, "Googling myself" and reading every single thing that showed up, ah! yes. How cruel is the interweb? Oh! How it does not forget, oh! it does not forgive that you were once a 16 year old, writn lik u p0wn the wrld.

At home, I found my precious 120 gigs hdd, which stores all personal email, all IM and many IRC conversations that I've had since 1997. It was brutal, It was funny, it was heartbreaking.

It was fun to attend to the people from my past -- reminiscing and remembering can be an incredible way to reassert the path you've been traversing so far.

The ground that I have already covered is an intoxicating diorama, some moments that should be consigned to the oblivion, some as sweet as rain, and it may still hold ideas about where I should point myself to. I take a look back. Thinking about what I miss and how to get that back into my life.

Sony bravia commercial and the rest

2006-05-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

If you haven't yet seen, you must see the Sony bravia(lcd tv) commercial, it was shot in San Francisco. It's quite beautifully done, get it here and the long version.

There are more photos on flickr, here is a photoset shot while they were making the advt.

There is a parody of the advt. (which I like better than the orignal) here.

more on 10,000 days

2006-05-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Anonymous wrote:
> I didn't know if you people knew this. But, If you burn both Viginti Tres followed by Wings for
> marie .. Then, play that track as one with 10,000 days as another track and play both at the
> same time, Both Wings for Marie AND 10,000 days sync ! It is incredible ! It is like an 8
> piece band but it all FLOWS ! It flows like one song.. It is the most unique and incredible
> thing I have ever heard in my life.. BadA$$ ! The vocals, drums, the guitar riffs, everything
> flows ! Both songs get heavy at the same point at 9 minutes and 14 seconds in, it is magical !

I gave it a try, and yes ... all the songs are in-sync, they are in the same key and it flows. It did not became a messy goo, which I expected it to, it sounds pretty good. tyr it.

0. Buy Tool's new album (10,000 days) ... rip track 3,4 and 11.
1. download/install audacity.
2. import all three songs (10,000 days, Wings for marie and Viginti Tres).
3. Adjust Wings for marie to start right when Viginti Tres ends. listen to the song and see if all songs are in key, the first two are already in-synch, you just need to shift Wings for marie a bit. you're done.

Listen. Have fun.

Geotagged Flickr pictures

2006-05-12T05:56:00.000-07:00

My internal hack, to display the latest geotagged flickr photos on Yahoo! maps is now public. here. I had done it long ago, Zoomr's lightmap looks a lot like this. There is somekind of bug with Yahoo! maps ... you need to zoom all the way out to see all pictures.

Premshree, has posted a GM script which does for flickr, pretty much what lightbox does.

Update: The awesome sliding image preview on the top right corner uses javascript code donated by Gopalv.

Tool 10,000 days review

2006-05-12T04:27:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd be too old to get excited over a new album, Tools last album Lateralus, left a funny taste in my mouth, I liked a few tracks on the album -- It was meek for a tool fan. But, after five years of nothing from the band, except "A perfect circle", Maynard's ~~solo~~ side project, I welcome the crumbs Tool throws at me. As I listen to 10,000 Days I realize that I am not too old - especially since it's been almost five years coming.

The album is pure, unadulterated, Tool sound, with an exception of "Intension", which, reminds one of "A perfect circle." The sound is familiar as well as fresh at the same time.

Jambi, Vicarious, Right in two, are just awesome, all other songs are presented aesthetically with a mix of heavy and slow Tool-ish music.

Tool fans will not be disappointed. If you are new to Tool, you have to sit down with this album and go through each and every track. 10,000 Days is a wonderful album and if you really listen to it, it will make you think.

Update: More on 10,000 days.

Update 2:

When I first heard Tool, I was 18 and just out of school, a lot of things were happening in life, women, job, the world. And listening to Tool always brought, as silvan said, "the toolish melancholy and subliminal thoroughgoingness." It was a time for learning and growing up, and thanks to tool for making me question realitly and think for myself. It seems like a lot to say about a band, but, I know I haven't said enough. Of-course there were people I met and books I read that helped me be the person I am. But, as far as music goes, Tool does stand out as one of the best things that happened to me.

Secondly, about making fun of Tool fans, Everyone makes fun of them, Its easy to see why, Tool fans are almost religious about the music, I can clearly remember shoving Tool tapes in the hands of everyone I knew, trying to request a tool song in almost every pub I went to. Copying Tool CDs and giving it to DJs. I have done my share of all that, and no I do not make fun of tool fans, because I am one of them. How else would you explain this post?

EuroOSCon 2006

2006-05-11T02:40:00.000-07:00

Yay! I’ll be speaking at EuroOSCON 2006. Looking forward to meeting old friends and a few KDE people. Might take a vacation after the conference to spend time with marianne.

>Congratulations! You have been accepted as a presenter for
>the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention 2006 at the
>Hotel Le Plaza, September 18, 2006 - September 21, 2006.

Good night, And Good luck review

2006-05-09T23:42:00.000-07:00

Good Night, and Good Luck, is a dramatized account of the public struggle between a CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow and Sentor Joseph McCarthy. The move concentrates on the events between October 1953 and April 1954. During those months, Murrow devoted a number of episodes of his TV show "See It Now" to discrediting McCarthy's persecution of men believed by the Senator to be un-American. After McCarthy targeted Murrow and the newsman was able to disprove the most damning allegations, the Senate elected to investigate McCarthy.

The movie is made in black and white and gives an authentic feel to the whole thing. Its well made, well directed and the actors are amazing. But, the movie should be seen for reasons other than that.

Today's climate of escalating paranoia isn't that different from America of the 1950s, the sense of deja vu is inescapable. Replace the "Communism" of the '50s with "Terrorism" today, and the parallels come right into focus.

Definitely a movie to watch.

home new home

2006-05-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

10 Print "Home"
20 Print "Sweet"
30 Goto 10

So, finally after staying at a friends place for four months, I got myself a place to live, It was tough looking for a place, because, I wanted a place which is close to office, spacious, in a beautiful location (nice trees and all). After nearly 4 months of house hunting I found a place which meets all the above criteria.

I chanced upon this place when my broker guy was showing me a flat in the same building, I didn't much like the flat but when I walked up the stairs I saw this place and the awesome potential it had. Fell in love with the brick wall and the parallel beams on the terrace "roof?".

It was not done. There were no windows or doors, it wasn't even painted. I knew I had to have it. sigh! So, me and premshree started the painful job of convincing the builder to give it on rent to us, and then to give it for rent on a lower price we bargained like little girls and made puppy eyes, and now we have it.

We shifted around 2nd may and began the job of getting the place livable, I bought curtains, cushions and mattress and stuff I never thought I would,

It feels great to have a place of ones own. Here are all the pictures.

sleepy

2006-05-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

Why am I sleepy? I dont want to be ... I dont need it. Why cant we have an alternative to sleep?

quarter pounder with cheese

2006-04-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five, a quarter of a century. It seems really big to me, yes! I had once thought that by twenty-five I'd have written a great book, produced a hit album, would have traveled the world giving autographs and then I'd sit in my shower and commit suicide. Life doesn't always go as you planned. But, I was fourteen and had heard way too much Doors for my age.

Everyone's growing up. I look at my friends, people I've known for years and I wonder how we all became such different people. Everybody is getting married, having kids and so on. They all seem like adults. It's uber-Twilight Zone.

Somebody once told me that twenty-five was when you became an adult and matured. That once you hit twenty-five you would know what you wanted from life, that you would be a person. But I don't. I'm not really an adult. I still read comic books and watch cartoons. I love to play video games and watch the Harry Potter movies. I still have a crush on Uma Thurman. I still think my dad is the smartest man in the whole world. I think fart jokes are funny and I have a Batman on my desk. I still cant sleep without holding a pillow and I think footy pj's are the best thing on the planet. I'm an adult? I'm still the same Pankaj: abrasive, obnoxious, caustic and egocentric.

In the last 25 years, I have spent most of my time with these little machines that I love so much, computers! yes thats what everyone calls them. So I'll dedicate this post to my first machine.

The PB-300 was my fist machine, it booted up with:

10 _

It was so sweet, you turn it on and wrote basic. I wrote many games on this box, It had a small printer and you could connect it to a tape recorder to save the programs on magnetic tapes, the one on which you get music. You could store upto 8 programs simultaneously on it. It was the most awesome machine. It had 2 whole Kilobytes of memory. It was around 1987, I guess. My dad had it since 1983. I used it for 4-5 years. My father spent more money on computers than he did on building his house. I think it was really cool of him, my mother thinks otherwise.

Eating out in bangalore

2006-04-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

The history of every major galactic civilization has passed through three distinct and recognizable phases: those of survival, inquiry, and sophistication. Otherwise known as the ‘How’, ‘Why’, and ‘Where’ phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question: “How can we eat?” The second by the question: “Why do we eat?” And the third by the question: “Where should we have lunch?”

Fear not for there seems to be a comprehensive answer for the third and final question, The Hindu has their restaurant reviews online, here.

Its a huge ass list. :)

Im going to go and checkout all the ones in Bangalore at least. Anyone game?

more movie reviews

2006-04-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've been distracted by house hunting and workload, last week I watched a couple movies on dvd.

Before Sunset

This movie is a sequel to Before Sunrise, the movie in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet in a train and walk around Vienna all night talking about their existential angst. I liked that movie. Before Sunset is a good sequel to it. It takes place ten years later, their whole lets meet six months later thing doesn't work out, and the two characters haven't seen each other since.

The whole movie is a real-time conversation with a similar existential angst, only this time their fears are middle aged. About not meeting the right person/doing the right thing/getting married without thinking. I kind of liked this movie, Its fast and does not stop anywhere ... Its
mushy at times which is forgivable as it ends as soon as the mush begins, Julie Delpy's character wants to solve world poverty, which looks lame and does not go well with the other things she says which is a not so forgivable flaw.

Closer

I still cant decide if I hate this movie or like it, basically it's a story about two couples. They keeps cheating on each other with the members of the other couple, and keep coming back to one another. The screenplay is nothing to write home about, and the dialogs leave much to be desired. The only standout in the movie is the story. It's quite close to reality and almost resonates of a few relationships in my life and others I know. It still leaves the question unanswered though. Why do these people do that to each other? Is it just a story about dishonest, superficial and untrustworthy people who keep betraying each other?

Top ten whiners of the lazyweb

2006-04-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

Well! after a bit of naval grazing, when I could not think of anything to whine about. Riots in the city just because an actor died and the fact that I am using firefox on mac to write this notwithstanding (can it suck more?). I am assured, that this is a bloggable subject.

Without further ado, lets jump into the pot of horror.

JWZ.

Note: ESR was not featured on this list because the oxford dictionary diffrentiates between whiners and cry-babies.

Weekend movie reviews

2006-03-12T22:38:00.000-08:00

I saw five movies this weekend a couple on dvd and three in theater. So here is the list

* The Island.
* The Pink Panther
* Brokeback mountain
* Crash
* Munich

This is what I want to say about The Island and The pink panther they sucked. Bad movies which I wathced because it was saturday afternoon and I was too lazy to get out of bed. I have more to say about the rest though. Brokeback mountain in particular.

Brokeback mountain

WITHOUT any doubt, this movie is overrated and the most hyped-up film to date. Although this movie was adapted from a well-written short story, this movie Sucked and failed terribly in its adaption. There is so much mushiness over the erotism invoked by the guys kissing scene, I aint gay but I know what a passionate kiss is ... and *that* wasnt one.

There was no passion between the two men ... even the sex scenes with women were more detailed and passionate. I really dont know what Ang Lee was thinking, The movie falls short in developing the characters. It provieds no rationale behind their decision to commit to doomed marriages. The guys dont even appear as though they are attracted to each other ... forget emotilonally involved. The center most emotionally moving scenein the movie would probably be the one when the wife witnessed the kissing of the lover boys.

The first half an hour of this movie is like watching a slow japanese art movie about orygamy ... the only difference being that, after watching brokeback mountain you will not learn anything about orygamy.

Bottom line, this movie sucks. If all you want in a movie is two guys making out ... there is better gay porn avaliable.

Crash

Crash is at least 300 times better movie than brokeback mountain, Its a fast paced movie with a brillian plotline, Interlocking stories of Whites, Blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Persians confused as Iranians, Cops and criminals, all defined in one way or another by racism. At times, the connections are a bit too convenient, but in a film as smart and compassionate as this, it's a forgivable flaw.

I will write more about Crash and munich Later, :)

Holy mother of god

2006-02-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

Some guys at Microsoft have no job. But, It looks damn neat. If I were on a gigabit internet I could play carmedegon.

http://preview.local.live.com/

hazaaroN KHwahishaiN 'eisee

2006-02-27T03:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was watching TV with Valerie ... and I had to transliterate this poem by Ghalib on the spot... I couldn't, It was being sung too fast and i could not keep up. It is such a beautiful poem and I could not make her understand it. So, here is my attempt on the translation of this beautiful poem.

I dont understand urdu very well ... so if you think I got something wrong ... do tell.

hazaaroN KHwahishaiN 'eisee
by Mirza Ghalib.

hazaaroN KHwahishaiN 'eisee ke har KHwahish pe dam nikle
bohot nikle mere armaaN lekin phir bhee kam nikle

thousands of desires are such, each one worth dying for,
many I have fulfilled, yet they have been so few,

Dare kyooN mera qaatil kya rahega uskee gardan par
wo KHooN, jo chashm-e-tar se 'umr bhar yooN dam_ba_dam nikle

Why should my killer(lover) be afraid? No one will hold to her nape
the blood which will drip through my eyes all my life

nikalna KHuld se aadam ka sunte aayaiN haiN lekin
bohot be_aabru hokar tere kooche se ham nikle

I have heard about Adam's dismissal from heaven,
with much more humiliation, I left your street.

bharam khul jaaye zaalim tere qaamat ki daraazee ka
agar is turra-e-pur_pech-o-KHam ka pech-o-KHam nikle

tyrant, your true personality will become known to all
if the curls of my hair slip through my turban!

(I guess curls of hair represent complex character.)

magar likhwaaye koee usko KHat, to hamse likhawaaye
huee subah aur ghar se kaan par rakhkar qalam nikle

But, if someone wants to write her a letter, ask me to write,
every morning I leave my house with my pen on my ear.

(difficult to translate ... means thats he still loves her)

huee is daur meiN mansoob mujhse baada_aashaamee
phir aaya wo zamaana, jo jahaaN se jaam-e-jam nikle

that was the time, I turned to drinking,
and then came the time, when my entire world was a drink.

huee jinse tavaqqo KHastagee kee daad paane kee
wo hamse bhee ziyaada KHasta-e-teGH-e-sitam nikle

The one to praise my weakness (of being in love),
turned out to be more injured with the same cruel sword (of love).

mohabbat meiN naheeN hai farq jeene aur marne kaa
usee ko dekh kar jeete haiN jis kaafir pe dam nikle

In love, there is no difference between life and death,
I survive by looking at the heathen for whom I die everyday.

(kaafir == infidel; but, I think that ghalib uses it here to say that she has no faith, that she is evil.)

zara kar jor seene par ki teer-e-pursitam nikle
jo wo nikle to dil nikle, jo dil nikle to dam nikle

stamp my heart to remove the cruel arrow of her love,
for if the arrow comes out, with it will my heart, and with it my life.

KHuda ke waaste parda na kaabe se uThaa zaalim
kaheeN 'eisa na ho yaaN bhee wohee kaafir sanam nikle

For god's sake, don't lift the cover off any secrets you tyrant
the infidel might turn out to be my love!

kahaaN maiKHaane ka darwaaza 'GHalib' aur kahaaN waaiz
par itana jaante haiN kal wo jaata tha ke ham nikle

The preacher and the bar's entrance are way apart
yet I saw him entering the bar as I was leaving!

hazaaroN KHwahishaiN 'eisee ke har KHwahish pe dam nikle
bohot nikle mere armaaN lekin phir bhee kam nikle

thousands of desires are such, each one worth dying for,
many that I have fulfilled, yet they have been so few,

Rammstein Mutter Review

2006-02-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

RAMMSTEIN - MUTTER

Rammstein is one of those bands you either love or hate. Even many of my german friends dont like them too much ... I love them.

For those of you without a clue in German, Mutter is German for Mother. Mutter - their third album was released in 28 Mar 2001, So, why am I reviewing it right now? Because I spent a whole sunday listening to it over and over ... and I have owned this album for a fare 3-4 years and I still love it.

Mutter is lyrically, a very rich album and is a punch in the face of all those who criticize Rammstein for singing dumb lyrics, mostly by people who transliterate the lyrics and miss the context completely. For example, 60% of the so called Rammstein "fans" here in India think that, "Du hast" means "You hate." A good source for good rammstein translations is Herzeleid .

The album starts with the apocalyptic intro to Mein Herz Brennt (My Heart Burns) and builds up to the track's eruptive chorus ... and a really catchy lick which dominates the last part of the song, and the not so fairytale lyrics....

Nun liebe Kinder gebt fein acht           Now, dear children, pay attention
ich bin die Stimme aus dem Kissen    I am the voice from the pillow
ich hab euch etwas mitgebracht         I have brought you something
hab es aus meiner Brust gerissen      I ripped it from my chest

Part of this song is actually taken from a children's show called Das Sandmännchen (The Little Sandman).

The next track Links 2-3-4 "Left two three four" is the german army chant for marching. The song leaves nothing to the imagination and contains everything down to the marching footsteps and war sirens in the background.

In Germany, the band has faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies. The song "Links 2 3 4" was written as a riposte to these claims. According to Kruspe, it means, "'my heart beats on the left, two, three, four.' It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song." (The Grand Rapids Press, July 22, 2001) Of course this is a two-sided thing, since "links, 2, 3, 4" is the usual command in marching practice in the German army, "links" referring to the left foot in that case.

The next song in the album is Sonne (Sun) has a nice sound to it and I love the way it changes tempo in the middle and becomes something enierly different from how it started, the girl in the background is the finest touch one can hope for.

Sonne is followed by Ich will, my favorite track on the album ... which has a cool video too ... Ich will is an awesome song with the rude, loud in the face, Rammstein sound to it.

Do you see me?
Do you understand me?
Do you feel me?
Do you hear me?
I don't understand you

The song is followed by Fuier Fuier (Fire Fire) a heavey and fast pased industrial song and followed by the title track Mutter which, is another great song on the album. The lyrics are dark and disturbing, thats what takes it to the list of best tracks on the album.

If you are still reading this ... there is something seriously wrong with you. Go. Go NOW and buy the album, if you have it play it. If you're playing it ... play it louder and take a bow.

Wir wollen dass ihr uns alles glaubt.

1. mein herz brennt
2. links 2-3-4
3. sonne
4. ich will
5. feuer frei!
6. mutter
7. spieluhr
8. zwitter
9. rein raus
10. adios
11. nebel

A poem for my love

2006-02-16T23:53:00.000-08:00

The moon may kiss the stars so high.
The sun may kiss the bright blue sky
The dew may kiss the morning grass
But you my friend, can
kiss my ass

Yahoo! releases the UI and Anim libraries in Open source

2006-02-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! User Interface and Animation Libraries have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. These are the same libraries that Yahoo! used to build the new Yahoo mail beta.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. Stuff like, Animation, Drag and Drop, User created events and AJAX made easy.

Yahoo! has also released its Yahoo! Design Pattern Library under the same licence. This has Yahoo! style implemetation of Autocomplete in forms, Breadcrumbs, Drag and Drop Modules, Navigation Tabs, Search Pagination and the likes ... Thankyou, good folks at Yahoo!

NIPSA-ed

2006-02-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

I found out today that my photos on flickr were marked NIPSA (Not Appropiate In Public Search Area) by a flickr employee, thus, photos were not available in the public search pool.

http://flickr.com/forums/bugs/18440/

But, now Im un-NIPSA-ed. yay!

Hotjobs on Yahoo! Maps

2006-02-09T23:19:00.000-08:00

I was bored and this idea had been tinkering in my head for a little while now, So yesterday evening I started writing it and before I knew it, it was 10 PM.

Premshree and Philip were going to meet Eric for dinner and I tagged along, we had a light dinner some drinks and a nice chat session, we talked about everything from first computer to girlfriends. and what we would like to do 5 years from now.

When I came back it was almost midnight, I started on the hack again and before I knew it it was 6 am. :)

Basically, it is a set perl scripts that take the Hotjobs XML feed, takes out the address and use the Yahoo! Geocoding API to plot it on Y! Maps.

Yahoo! maps provides a simple webservice to convert street name to geolocation. Its pretty powerful and you could mash up a lot of stuff using it.

Will be putting it for public consumption real soon.

GNUnify 06

2006-02-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Gnunify. I gave a tech talk on Nagios. More importantly, I liked talking about "Why you should hire a FOSS programmer" in a BOF at the end of the first day. It sort of became a tale of my life story and how I got started in FOSS.

Whenever I go to any student conference, My only aim is to look and find that 2% people who I could impress and incite into writing free software. We had quite a crowd at that BOF and yesterday I saw one student from that crown in our local IRC channel. So It was not a failure at least.

I had a lot of fun at Gnunify and I hope I can do it again next year. The students were a lot of fun and very interested in us Yahoos!

Here are the pictures

Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil.

2006-02-02T00:24:00.000-08:00

"The more things change, the more they are the same."

During the past month, a lot changed in my life. I have realized many a things which were just waiting to be noticed ... Only, I had been averting my eyes from them.

I lost many people and gained a bit more wisdom, a fair trade I must say.

I reached out to people I had not talked in years. Some of them had written me off as dead in some drug related "accident." They had changed so much, gotten married, produced kids, moved to another city, indulged in the old in-and-out a bit more ... but, after 15 minutes of conversation, I laughed with them and related with them.

And ... In so, I realized that, I had changed too but, I had remained the same. I still give people the benefit of the doubt. I still believe people are inherently honest and I still enjoy being wet in the rain.

international council of matchpot players

2006-01-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the webpage of the international council of matchpot players.

Disclamer:



All Players of matchpot, even people who are real -- are
entierly fictional. All animal players are impersonated 
... poorly. Matchpot causes brain damage and should not 
be played by anyone at all.

An example of Matchpot.

Madness, I say ... Madness

amaroK Review

2006-01-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

I have always been skeptical of media players and music management softwares ... using a bare minimum player like xmms to play my digital music. I have tried to use quite a few of them, Rythmbox banshee and also giving a fair time to demo's of iTunes and Yahoo Music engine by excited mac and windows weenies.

So, when a friend came to me and said, try amaroK. I said, "Yeah! right!" and blew the idea out with a puff of smoke.

And then, yesterday morning I got stuck in a traffic jam and as a result I didn't feel like writing any kind of code. So, I decided to install amaroK :) Installing it on FreeBSD 4.11 could be only covered under a full fledge technical orientation session. It might scare many people so we will not dwell into the perils of using FreeBSD.

After I installed amaroK was I blown? or was I blown?

The really cool thing about amaroK is, that you can install it and its ready to serve you in its full glory within a couple of minutes.

Tracks are imported into the "collection." The music collection is displayed in the left pane in a file manager like fashion. Tracks must be added to a playlist before one can hear them. There is a playlist tab which has "Smart Playlists" and of course you can create your own.

Unlike most application on Linux eye-candy is not overlooked here, but, actually given as much importance as usability and features. I specially like the "on-screen display" which comes up every time amaroK starts playing a new track, the mouse over on the task bar icon shows the name of the current playing song and also adds a little album cover. A lot of work has gone into creating such a visually appealing tool and it is an effort spent worthwhile.

amaroK copies the winamp/xmms shortcuts and does a better job of it. It adds xmms shortcuts it to a meta key of your choice and you've got "Global Shortcuts." Dont like the current song? dont have to get distracted and switch applications/virtual desktop and find amaroK to skip. Just press WIN+B :) sweet?

And did I tell you it gives you lyrics of the current song in a little box? did I tell you it also does musicminds recommendation? maybe I forgot about the fact that it also looks wikipedia on the artist and shows the information in a little box. and yes I forgot to mention that it automatically downloads album covers from amazon.

I really like amaroK and am really looking forward to 1.4. What I particularly like about amaroK, is, cover/lyrics/tag fetching, the potential value of dynamic mode and its iPod support, of course.

I have linux on my laptop and its also running amaroK now. I noticed that gstreamer is a whole lot more stable than arts, since arts is a piece of junk and unmaintained and comes with overhead.

Some features I'd love to have in it.

1. Burn Playlist.
2. Configurablity for where to get lyrics from.
3. Digging out wikiquotes/wikipedia info and scroll it where the song name traditionally scrolls

Amarok appears to be written by hackers who themselves are truly fond of music. amaroK is a increasingly attractive and capable tool and these guys are just getting their hands warmed up. Cheers! to you guys, you know who you are *clink* *clink*

New years party

2006-01-02T00:39:00.000-08:00

The new years party was a lot of fun me and sabiokap cooked brilliant food. Mutton, Rajma and Chaval. Gopal, teemus and premshree also showed up at a party that lasted from midday 31st till 2nd afternoon.

Photos.

Mine
Gopal

Five Reasons the internet is still in its infancy

2005-12-30T20:36:00.000-08:00

1. OMTP (Omlette Transfer Protocol) not yet supported.

How many times have you woken up besides your laptop and resumed chatting on that IRC session that you dozed off from for a couple of hours? And how many times have you wanted a sunny side up right that very moment? Right! Its a pitty we cant get OMTP to work, IMHO Its a financially sound venture if implemented over MultiCluck.

2. OTS (One Tight Slap-per) not yet bundled with every machine.

How many times have you encountered a cracker, spammer, script kiddie or a clueless bastard with a missconfigured SMTP? or an even more clueless bastard with nothing configured? And How many times have you wanted to give them "One Tigh Slap"™ . We've all been there. And its a shame that the "One Tight Slap-per" is still not standard equipment bundled with every hardware capable of connecting to the interweb.

5. 12 year olds on the Internet

The horror that is unfolding as we speak. The underdeveloped humans, known as "12 Year Olds" are taking the internet by storm. Many leading experts have drawn parallels between the tactics of a 12 year old with those of a terrorists.

How to identify a 12 year old?

To identify a 12 year old ask one of these questions

* What is the difference between cellspacing and cellpadding?
* If a page has to be loaded over all frames in window, what should be the value of TARGET attributes?
* Which one of the following settlement is correct?
o A table cannot contain another table
o A Form can be nested inside another form
* Which HTML tag is used to define an internal style sheet?
* How do you define an inline style?

A 12 year old will immediately google it and find a answer within 30 seconds.

LAN Party

2005-12-30T12:41:00.001-08:00

What do hax0rs do on new years eve? Thats right they have a LAN party ... so here is my very very late invitation to all you guys ... if you are in banaglore on 31 dec 2005. stop by. Criteria for invitation ... If you can crack into the network you're in :D ... its Wifi so even if I dont allow you in the door you've got free internet ... so whats to loose?

People coming with 64 bit machines will get extra ice cream :)

Agenda:

Food. Booze. Gamez

King kong

2005-12-30T05:10:00.000-08:00

I went to see King Kong day before yesterday with esther. I really didnt want to see it but, when she said its directed by Peter Jackson I gave in. I haven't seen much of his stuff except LOTR but I like him, he's a bit crazy and I like that in people, for example, the voice of the nazguls in LOTR is actually his wife screaming.

King Kong is pretty good with the exception of Jack Black, he is irritating at best, who does he pay to get his roles? He cant act to save his life.

Peter Jackson has poked subtle fun at at-least three movies. The first hour he is mostly making fun of Titanic and the likes. The fight sequences with the dinosaurs are awesome. I could just imagine him sitting in a theater watching Jurassic Park and saying to himself, "I can do this better."

The effects are pretty good and believable. Sometimes he gets carried away, as in the dinosaur stampede sequence and then again with the creepy craw-lies. He defiantly gave a lot a attention to details, like Kong biting the tongue of one of the dinos and then the airplanes, Its so easy to make a mess of the movie in the end ... He didnt.
All in all worth a watch ... you aren't going for the excellent story are you?

Cloning a mysql slave

2005-12-13T04:43:00.001-08:00

Or Add a slave in 10 small steps.

MySQL use often grows organically. A single developer may build the company's next killer app on top of MySQL. As the application becomes popular, a way to handle load is to add yet another slave. There is obliviously a limit to how much you can scale with this approach but, generally it works.

I just did a clone a few minutes ago and I'd like to document it, If it helped you drop a line.I assume you have a db master and a db slave and you'd like to add one more.

0. assuming db1.spoonman.com to be the master, db2.spoonman.com to be the slave and db3.spoonman.com to be the server we want add by cloning db2.spoonman.com. Also assuming that a version of Mysql is installed on the machine to be cloned. You can also copy the my.cnf from db2 to db3 and change the server ID field.

Poor man's graph:


                              ____________
                             (   master   )
                             |            |
                             |db1.spoonman|
                ____________/(____________)\____________
               (    slave   )              (   slave    )
               |            |              |            |
               |db2.spoonman|              |db3.spoonman|
               (____________)              (____________)

1. Lock tables in db1.spoonman


mysql> flush tables with read lock;

2. Leave db2.spoonman to catch up. The difference between the master Position
and the slave's Master Log Position should be zero.
e.g on db1.spoonman.com


mysql> show master status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
          File: db1-bin.1603
      Position: 438626804    <-------------

and on db2.spoonman.com:


mysql> show slave status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
        Master_Host: db1.spoonman.com
    Master_Log_File: db1-bin.1603
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 438626804
Exec_master_log_pos: 438626804    <-------------

Note the Master_Log_File and Exec_master_log_pos position down. you can copy paste the output of the SQL statements in a file, we will need them later.

4. Shut down mysql_server in db2.spoonman.com

5. Unlock tables in db1.spoonman.com


mysql> unlock tables;

6. Take snapshot from db2.spoonman.com, login into db2 and type the following command,


-bash-2.05b$ cd /var/mysql                     
-bash-2.05b$ sudo tar -cpvf - .  |  nc -w 60 -l -p 9289

And on db3(target machine) do this, you can use any port which is avaliable to you.


-bash-2.05b$ cd /var/mysql
-bash-2.05b$ nc -w 10 db2.spoonman.com 9289 | sudo tar -xpvf -

7. Start mysql_server on the orignal slave (db2.spoonman.com)

8. Add this to the [mysqld] section of the my.cnf of the target machine (db3.spoonman.com)


skip-slave

9. Start the mysql server on the target box (db3.spoonman.com) and do a


mysql> reset slave;
mysql> change master to 
     MASTER_HOST = 'db1.spoonman.com', 
     MASTER_USER = 'spoonie', 
     MASTER_PASSWORD = 'p4ssword', 
     MASTER_LOG_FILE = 'db1-bin.1603', 
     MASTER_LOG_POS = 438626804;

Here you can use the data you had saved earlier.

10. Cross your fingers and start the new slave ;)

Hope it helped.

Parties

2005-12-07T21:42:00.000-08:00

Last couple of weeks have been like an endless party for me, Im taking a breather from all the beer guzzling to report it ... I have one *ignored* quite angry about it marrianne to attend to this evening.

It all began on Tuesday, when I went to meet mary and gang at Koshy's. Mary who had just began eating around 8:30 pm gave full intentions of eating another three courses and some *death by chocolate* for desert.

Its a known fact that all the goats in nizzamudin run for their lives as soon as mary arrives near the area.

We left koshy's who took three man days to bring the bill, and progressed towards corner house on Richmond road for some ice creams. I reached home at midnight and fell into my bed.

Party two, Wednesday, I was appointed the man-handler for the yahoo stall at foss.in. And after a long day's work of untarring, we headed towards the noble house for dinner. The whole gang was there,

The high point of the dinner being, till and taj gave me some pointers on how to start hacking KDE and as a result I got all inspired downloaded the kpim sources, compiled kicker installed kdevelop and wrote my first KDE app.

Harald was also there, he gave us gyaan on how to exploit apache in memory and then use GET/POST to execute shell commands as root. :)

The other side of the table was busy munching awesome food and discussing PHP for all I know, its hard to say PHP sucks out aloud when rasmus is on the table no matter how far an end. :) Philip was taking care of ordering food and did quite a great job of it. Taj was forever looking in the direction of next beer. The food was really great.

Me taj, till and Sulamita were unfashionably the last ones to leave.

foss.in

2005-12-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

Ok, I have been more than skeptical about foss.in . And since Yahoo! was hosting a stall in the commercial area, I was appointed to man-handle the stall for couple of days.

I must admit, foss.in looked like a well organized and well handled event. Congratulations to all of you guys in the team. There was definitely a commercial aspect to it, but as taj explained to me ... someone needs to pay for it.

It was a good event and I felt sad and guilty of not being a more active part of it, just because I disagreed with a certain part of the way it was organized.

I would always stress on freedom of speech and transparency of accounts (two of the issues I had with foss.in) when it comes to an event about free software. But, work needs to be done and I am sad that I didnt do my bit. You guys definatly put on a great show.

Congrats!

Rammstein Rosenrot Review

2005-11-14T00:13:00.000-08:00

The fifth album from Rammstein, was released on Monday (October 31st). Finally on yesterday I got my hands on Rosenrot. I love these guys. They have a sense of rage in their music. I can relate with it. Of all things it makes me smile. I can *understand* german if I use leo (a dictionary). I convert lyrics using it. English translation of lyrics is not hard to find. But, more than their lyrics I like their music.

I have been listening to Rosenrot ever since I got it. After hearing the excellent "Benzin" single, I was hoping for an album similar in pace, but most of the tracks are similar to the sound they were trying to create with "Mutter". I quite like it ... but, I think that their strength is the heavy fast paced stuff that we have so come to expect of them e.g. "Senshucht."

They have been trying to alter their music style, At first I didn't like Reise Reise but, the album slowly grew on me. Rosenrot is continuation of the work they started with Mutter and Reise,Reise.

For those of you expecting a 'Ich will' or 'du hast' kind of Rammstein, I'm sad to say that the new Rammstein album is not in tune to the sound we have come to associate with them. Its not anything like Herzeleid or Sehnsucht. I like the drums on this album, with Rosenrot it seems like Rammstein has created a whole new sound. Well! not so new but it sounds damn good.

On Rosenrot they show that they're a group of musicians. Rosenrot is even more immense than Reise Reise, They've returned more theatrical and emotional than ever. The grandeur other bands desperately try to achieve with the help-out of symphonic orchestras is realized in the way Rammstein uses guitars, drums and keyboards.

Though I must admit the poor girl trying to sing in english in "Stirb nich vor mir" totally sucks. The album is worth a buy.

Song List:

1. Benzin *****
2. Mann gegen Mann
3. Rosenrot ***
4. Spring ****
5. Wo Bist Du *****
6. Stirb Nicht Vor Mir (Don't Die Before I Do)
7. ZerstÃ
8. Hilf Mir
9. Te Quiero Puta!
10. Feuer und Wasser
11. Ein Lied

"Ich muss zerstoeren, doch es darf nicht mir gehoeren" ("I must destroy, but it shall not belong to me").

Not complex enough

2005-11-10T05:02:00.000-08:00

I was talking to some friends the other day and we passed upon the topic of "not complex enough." Its a disease thats gripping each and everyone around me.

What is this disease? you ask. Its called the complexity disease, where to the victim the proposed solution does not sound complex enough thus, losing its credibility as a good solution.

Lets jump for a few moments into the pot of horror.

A application design is being discussed, the developer suggests that we do logging in XML. Yes! you heard it right, he wants to do application logging in XML. My jaw dropped when I first heard of it as though my muscles were not listening to me anymore.

Why would you want to do application logging in XML? just think of the poor admin guy who has a crashing application and some million hits per second and beeping pages and .... oh! just use your imagination.

A friend wants to design a non webbased application to show some images, like gqview but it'll pull it from somewhere. asks for my advice, I suggest perl-gtk, py-qt. "I was thinking of opengl", comes the reply. I was at a loss for words.

We're designing the application. We dont know what it will do. We are at the design stage. We are coming up with ideas, possible features ... "lets do it in AJAX" says a dude, many agree. I wanted to pull out my hair, one strand at a time.

This dude comes to a IRC channel. his nick is *complexity* you can imagine what follows,

complexity> where can i find the specs for SSH?
complexity> I want to re implement it.
someguy> why?

Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to learn something. But, come on man ... give me a break.

This calls for a quote, "All college students want to do a networking project which translates into write a java chat client and all php programmers have either written or are writing or want to write a CMS."

I could go on forever, but what I am really trying to say is, people just want to do things in a complex way.

I dont know why?

Do they want to show off that they are buzzword complaint? or is it a deeper problem?

Working in a place where most of the people I work with are *clued* or smart enough to not need to show-off. What I have noticed is, they fall victim to the complexity disease because; because they are smart they want to do things in a complex way.

This is what I do when someone shows symptoms of the complexity disease. I take a few steps back and think and suggest a solution that is at least 300 times simpler. Suggesting a simple solution usually leads to varied responses like, "hmm...", "we could do that too", "yes that is another way to look at it."

When what they actually want to say is "Hey thats too simple. I didnt go to IIT to do that." and thinking, "My job actually sucks because Im not doing *hardcore* stuff."

The "hardcore stuff" is yet another beast to be dealt with ... it looks too murky for me to decipher in this post though.

I will leave you with...

Signs and symptoms

The cause of disease is unknown. Many people with complexity disease think they have a sprained wrist at first. They may have experienced some form of trauma, such as use NetBSD for a while. This type of trauma can disrupt the blood flow to the brain. In most people, many vessels supply blood to the brain, but in some people there is only one source and its through the complexity gland. This puts them at greater risk for developing the disease. As the disease progresses, other signs and symptoms are noted, including:

* A painful urge to write perl one liners.
* Limited range of thought process (everything looks like a XML DOM)
* Pain or difficulty in creating sentences without TLAs

ill fate

2005-10-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

I am sick of being sick. I have been lying down on this bed since tuesday night. :(( Cant do anything feel tired and irritated all the time.Wed was a holy holiday and I stayed vertical all day ... I skipped work on thursday went today, felt like crap and came back. Its a freaking common cold which wont go away, What to do? I dont want to be horizontal on the weekend too.

love or addiction

2005-10-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Soon we could buy love injections from the chemist and stab our potential mates with it as Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is just a chemical addiction between people.

Scientists conducted experiments on voles and the details are fascinating. When prairie voles have sex, two hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin are released. If prairie voles are given an injection of the hormones, but prevented from having sex, they will still form a preference for their chosen partner. In other words, researchers can make prairie voles fall in love—or whatever the vole equivalent of this is—with an injection.

The brain has a reward system designed to make voles (and people and other animals) do what they ought to. Without it, they might forget to eat, drink and have sex—with disastrous results. That animals continue to do these things is because they make them feel good. And they feel good because of the release of a chemical called dopamine into the brain. Sure enough, when a female prairie vole mates, there is a 50% increase in the level of dopamine in the reward centre of her brain.

Similarly, when a male rat has sex it feels good to him because of the dopamine. He learns that sex is enjoyable, and seeks out more of it based on how it happened the first time. But, in contrast to the prairie vole, at no time do rats learn to associate sex with a particular female. Rats are not monogamous. This is where the vasopressin and oxytocin come in. They are involved in parts of the brain that help to pick out the salient features used to identify individuals. If the gene for oxytocin is knocked out of a mouse before birth, that mouse will become a social amnesiac and have no memory of the other mice it meets.

In 2000, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love. They took students who said they were madly in love, put them into a brain scanner, and looked at their patterns of brain activity.

The brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke.

Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

Sun and Google to promote openoffice

2005-10-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

According to Yahoo news (link ) Sun and Google, said they would jointly promote Java Desktop and Open Office, Sun's operating system and office productivity software systems.

"Working with Google will make our technologies available more broadly, increase options for user, lower barriers, and expand participation worldwide," Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun, said at a joint news conference in Silicon Valley.

Are They jumping into the pit for more and more and more or are they simply asking for a smackdown from Microsoft now? The news article says Openoffice ... but I think it would be Staroffice.

Coffee

2005-10-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

I am a coffee addict. An obsessive compulsive coffee lover. So, when I moved to Bangalore, Karnataka I had a grin of about a foot on both sides of my face.

When I go to do monthly shopping with roommates, approximately half of the shopping time is spent on deciding the coffee mix. I give more instructions to the coffee lady than to my hair dresser.

Every now and then when I buy coffee accompanied with a stranger, when I give the complex details of my fav mix to the coffee-lady, they are invariably amused. So, anyways here is what I take, Quarter part Peaberry mixed with Plantation A and no chicory of course.

Amusing? X-( I dont think so.

Yahoo mail beta

2005-09-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Most of us use some kind of webmail, while traveling or as our main email program. Webmail has come a long way since hotmail. The Webmail programs of yest years have long been inferior to email programs like thunderbird lets not go into mutt or gnus. :) Webmail is usually short on features, storage and clumsy to use. Its a poor man's connectivity mechanism.

Its been changing for a little while now, many people have been experimenting with providing a desktop application like look and feel and ease of use. and still be platform/browser independent.

Google started the trend with their webmail, using the XML HTTP Request object they got rid of the "loading a new page with every click" phenomenon. They could not however, turn gmail from a set of simple web pages into something resembling the fluidity of desktop application.

The only thing they were successful in doing was, to make 1GB the new free storage limit. Everyone responded by pushing their storage limits higher. The only one who won that battle was the user.

Now, it was Yahoo!'s turn to go beyond storage. The new Yahoo! mail beta lifts the functionality well beyond the expectations set by a webmail user. A list,

There's a preview pane, that allows you to view the contents of an email without opening it.
You can open multiple emails at once in little tabs inside the webpage.
You can drag and drop messages into folders you create.
You can right-click on various items.
You can delete multiple messages at once by selecting them and clicking on a trash-can icon or using the delete key.
Most desktop application like short cuts work.
you can use mouse-wheel to scroll through messages or rhe preview pane.

The current version does not support threading, threading is an important feature, its easy to get it horribly wrong, like gmail where all messages with subject "hi" will end up as the same conversation. It makes the gmail experience a nightmare. It has its Plus points also, a year long conversation with a person, is at your finger tips.

I think Yahoo's new email program rocks :) and Gmail is in for a tough time.

WHAT THE BLUG?

2005-09-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

I have never been a part of the BLUG but, meeting certain people at LBs always left a bad taste in my mouth.

Kingsly John has written an eye opening letter to the Free Software and Open Source Community and specifically to the organizers of FOSS.IN. Many of us are already familiar with the exploits of certain individuals who were in the BLUG. But this letter puts everything in crystal clear perspective.

Here is the link http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug/

I Feel

2005-09-14T05:29:00.000-07:00

distressful, hateful, infamous, enormous, counter, reprehensible,distressing, rank, noisome, hopeless, dirty, lumpen, blameworthy,measly, egregious,meretricious, harmful, sore, foul, dismaying, out of humor, in bad humor, cut up, dismal, arrant, ruthful,petty, moving, schlock, disconsolate, cheap, slummy,mournful, horrible, gimcracky, squalid, opposing, pitiful, low-down, sharp, uncheerful, dreadful, trashy, indolent, out of sorts,woeful, shameful, cheesy, contemptible, despairing, depraved, untoward,trying, scruffy, comfortless,sorrowful,unsmiling, joyless,unmirthful, painful, cheerless, atrocious, common, despicable, depressing, slumlike, bitter, deep-troubled, unmentionable, lamentable, valueless, afflictive, detestable, unclean, stressful, rubbishy, uncheery, touching, woebegone, scuzzy,sinister,heart-struck,filthy, opposite, base, execrable, desolate, detrimental, unjoyful, opposed, afflicted, grim, mean, flagrant, forlorn, heartsick, discomforting, uncomfortable,terrible, grave, loathsome, gross, nasty, worst, sad, scrubby, worthless, sorry,sorryish,miserable, scurvy, nefarious,rigorous,
shabby, beneath contempt, pitiable, difficult, inimical, odious, vile, adverse,grievous, conflicting, beggarly, mangy, paltry,melancholy, pathetic, fetid, repulsive, lousy, saddening, counteractive, abominable, hard, little, gaudy, brutal,unfavorable,scabby, in opposition,
beastly, horrid, offensive, shocking, dolorific, rueful, bleak, awful, scandalous, monstrous, poky, twopenny, notorious, obnoxious,antagonistic, trumpery, troublous, despondent, too bad, deplorable,contrary, heinous, sordid,mirthless, humorless, low, stricken, pleasureless, ignoble, rotten, disgusting, debased,abject, heart-stricken,dolorous,poor, discontented, crushed, dire, depressive, villainous, small, fulsome, servile, infestive,troublesome, dolorogenic, outrageous, degraded, crummy, suicidal, scummy,hostile,regrettable, piteous, unhappy, reptilian, dreary, poignant, doleful,affecting, shoddy.

death of a language

2005-09-12T02:28:00.000-07:00

Everyone is crying about the *lack* of interest in hindi literature, You know why it is happening? I was in delhi last week, the biggest and the biggest hindi speaking city of the country. I was looking for a book (rag darbari), a hindi book, the fact that I knew the name of the book meant It was a pretty popular work.

And there we were, we checked out all of the biggest bookshops of the city, eight shops, four in khan market and four in CP, bookworm, galgotia ... all of them. They had the English translation of the book but not the hindi one. How is one supposed to read a hindi book when its not available?

Where is the "Any key?"

2005-08-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

Google talk

2005-08-24T00:14:00.000-07:00

Google's new IM service is live. Its Jabber-compatible (will work by default with gaim), you need a GMail address.

I dont know whats the big deal. its weak looking interface ... the voice feature is avaliable only on windows. even skype is better than this. Yahoo has all these features and more ... avatars for example.

Its just a case of one company making people go gaga about its products. its a same crappy IM with a protocol that has been around for 4 years. When jabber came out no one was excited because it was an intiative on the parts of some open source developers. Now google does it and somehow its cool. I really dont get it. its stupid to the point of being painful.

What is the "wow" all about? Its all because it's *google*. I ask "Whats the big deal?" people reply "yeah.. but it's *google*." There was this guy on the slashdot who said, "basically because it's google EVERYONE will have it in a week.. first the techies, then their friends.. then anyone who wants to be cool."

whats so cool about it? how is it cool? it's not cool. it's google. The fact remains, there's something attractive about anything google does ... in time, it'll lose the charm and something new will come to replace it. Google has that *thing* ... like coke and pepsi because google has managed to retain that 'underdog' feel. Clean interface. They dont put any adv on their website but put those ugly text adv's on almost all of the websites in the world.

The only thing cool about it is, Google is competing head on with the services that yahoo, aol, and msn provide. Only that they are doing it using open standards, and allowing third party clients. Now thats cool.

It requires TLS to connect. TLS is basically SSL, with negotiation for clients that don't support SSL. Without enabling TLS you will not be allowed to connect to Google Talk Server. now thats cool. I mean I am sick of chatting in plain text. I discuss some very personal stuff over IM. I dont want it to be travelling in plain text.

This is a step forward, but that doesn't actually protect your conversations from Google. Third parties between you and Google's server won't be able to monitor your conversations, but Google itself will, which is just as undesirable. Against this I would prefer gaim-encrypt. which is *cool*.

Update TLS is only for authentication. The actual conversation is unencrypted.

DebConf Bangalore

2005-08-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's I went to Bangalore's first Debian Developer's conference. The event did not have high visibility, About a hundred people turned up.

The meet was a dull and boring experience for me. I met some people who were very enthu about GNU and debian. Everyone was talking about how great Emacs is and who all has wiped RMS's ass. They were a very enthusiastic bunch of people, but no one was actually intrested in taking up some work.

I took some pictures ate a pack of chips, showed off my ubuntu t-shirt and came back. It was highly dissatisfying.
Pictures are here

NetBSD On a Toaster

2005-08-17T03:02:00.000-07:00

Well! this is what we all have been waiting for, after a decade of running on almost everything NetBSD has conquered the last frontier, It now runs on a toaster.

The toaster on display now in the NetBSD booth at the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, is as high-tech as they come. This toaster features a 4 line LCD, USB keyboard, 10/100 ethernet port and a RS232 serial port for the external console. The toaster's internal circuit boards have been bypassed and routed through the CPU board allowing NetBSD complete control over the toaster's features. A keyboard connects through a USB port on the side of the toaster and the 4x40 LCD displays a NetBSD/toaster login prompt. The burner element is also controlled by the TS-7200 via an internal relay. Unlike previous NetBSD toasters which were nothing more than a glorified PC case-mod, this toaster can actually toast bread!

link

Hainanese Chicken Rice

2005-08-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

This is an absolutely delicious dish, its amazing involves almost no oil. The original recipe calls for fried rice or something. I dont like fried rice and I dont cook difficult stuff, so here is my recipe.

Pankaj's Chicken Rice
If you can do two three things together then you can make this dish in about an hour. Trust me An hour is not really a lot of time for such an lip smacking dish.

What you need

* Half a Chicken
* Some Sesame Oil
* Soy Sauce
* One pack Maggie chicken cubes
* 1 Clove Garlic
* 100gm Ginger
* 50 gm red chilly powder
* 2 cloves Garlic
* one small cabbage
* Rice

Method

Start with the rice, we'll make steamed rice, the best resource on how to make steamed rice I have found is Madhu menon's recipe. you can start with that.

Once you have put the rice away for 30 mins. you can do this.

Take a big pot and fill it with water and put the chicken for boiling. thats right we'll boil the chicken for 15 minutes. meanwhile, take all of the ginger, leave one small piece, garlic and 50 gm red chilly powder, 3 cubes of maggie chicken cubes and put them in a mixer and grind it till it becomes a sauce like paste.

When 15 mins are over and the chicken is done, take the pieces out and spread some sesame oil on them. keep aside. You can make the steamed rice now. Crush and add that one piece of ginger to the rice :). It'll take about 15 minutes.

you can also put some chopped cabbage in the leftover water you boiled chicken in and make some soup. Add a little salt as you dint when you were boiling the chicken.

Serve as shown in the above picture. with soy sauce, our ginger sauce, some rice, chicken and soup.

Ubuntu Hoary

2005-07-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

I have two sets of unbuntu Hoary 5.04 for Power PC That are going to waste, post and claim.

war of the worlds review

2005-07-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

I saw the movie "War of the worlds" yesterday, a film based loosely on a book written by H G Wells. In case you're not familiar with his writing, the only thing that is common between the movie and the book is the title.

This has to be the worst movie I have seen since "White Noise." The only difference being Spielberg spared Morrison from turning in his grave. This movie sucked so much I can not possibly type it down.

Where to start? First, the good things about this movie:
1. special effects.

It took me like an hour to write that last sentence because everything about this movie was shitty, except for the special effects, OK! we get it, we get it. you can make building go down, you can show lightning and aliens and we will all think they are real. bow before speilberg and his CGI team. But, what happened to narrating a story?

Story? what story? the tripods are buried in the ground for million years, aliens have been monitoring humans for million of years and they come from some planet start killing people and then they die by themselves. well! if they were monitoring humans and this planet for millions of years they could at least have figured out that the environment does not suit them. either speilberg is dumb or he thinks everyone else is.

What really pisses me off is that the "reviews" of the movie are all like *brilliant* *great movie* WTF? what did they pay you to write all the crap? here is what a jerk has to say about the movie,

The destruction of buildings by the tripods is top notch. The film kept a real sense of B-movie charm, especially when you see how the tripod's laser disposes of humans. There is also one long shot where Spielberg has the camera pan around a speeding car, all the while following the conversation between Tom and his kids. This shot blew me away.

yeah! swell jackass.

This movie has to be on the list of top 10 worst movies i have ever seen.

pure unadulterated bullshit

2005-07-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

Well since he is ESR even his bullshit will be slashdotted and commented on, in the interview ESR keeps speaking bullshit. an example,

Question: It seems that Red Hat is selling its GNU/Linux distribution under a sort of user license that limits the freedom No. 2 provided by the GPL. The short version of the story, as I was told, is that if I buy a CD/DVD with the last Red Hat version and I make an ISO from that and put that online, I'll get sued.

ESR, "Damn, that's clever and sneaky. I like it." , "Red Hat gets a fence around its product, but all the community objectives of open source licensing are still met."

What are the community objectives of Open source ESR? "Redhat's stock should go up?"

He speaks more bullshit in the interview. But, I dont have the time,energy or interest to explain, great job ESR keep the bullshit coming.

ESR is trying to bullshit his way in to make people believe that it doesn't matter if some company steals open source software and uses it to create a proprietary product. The advantages that Open Source have over proprietary software are so great that companies that engage in that kind of activity still won't be able to compete against Open Source. *that is why we dont need GPL and stop producing software under GPL* Nice bullshit jackass.

Guess what?

GPL prohibits a third party from making any product using any license other than the GPL. None of the other licenses out there give the kind of protection against misuse of the work of a developer, if the author of the work chooses to share it with others, other people do not obtain any privilege to then take that same material and make it proprietary and thats why linux is popular and is being contributed to.

Note that ESR always uses the term "Open Source Software" and not "Free Software" because talking about "free software" would not be consistent with the views of corporate demographic who tend to frown upon stupid formalities such as "freedom."

Great job, keep producing bullshit jackass.

cut copy paste anyone

2005-07-01T01:55:00.000-07:00

Ok lets face it ... cut copy paste is how most of us write our code... I dont mean copying other people's stuff and name it yours but to go back to previously written code to copy small pieces from . and to cut examples in the cookbook and modify them. I do it all the time, when i need to get something quick and dirty out of the oven by 5 pm.

So here is koders.com It searches code :) I liked it. maybe you will too.

apple pancakes

2005-06-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

Today morning I woke up with a hangover and decided to make myself and marianne very very nice breakfast ... apple pancakes will be it i decided... they turned out very very good. here is my recipe....

Here is what you need:

* 2 big Apples peeled and sliced
* a cup of milk
* 4 eggs
* half a cup flour
* some cinnamon (sticks not powder) and sesame
* sugar salt
* butter

Here is what you do:
Put two teaspoon sugar 4 sticks of cinnamon and a teaspoon of sesame in the mixer and grind them.
Take two cubes of butter (50 gms) and put it in a pan ... heat a bit ... put the sliced apples and the grinded things in the pan and saute till apples are soft ... 4-5 minutes dont burn the apples or wait for them to be brown. Take off and put aside.

Break eggs, seprate the yolk from the white and beat the white till it foams up... add yolk and milk and flour little by little and keep beating till you have a good batter.

Take a big flat pan and put some butter on it pour half a cup of batter spread it ... wait a minute for it to settle and put some of the cinnamon apple mixture on it ... put more batter on top of it and heat till the pancake is brown ... flip it... cook some more ... you have a pancake.

PS: Making this well has a lot to do with intution, if you dont cook, dont try it. If you do, you know what i mean.

frost post

2005-06-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

Ok! I know its not something to jump up and down about ... since slashdot might as well change their punchline to "News about google ... who cares if it matters?" but, since i have never gottent it before so im kinda kicked ... here's my First Post on slashdot.

weekend in goa

2005-06-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

So last thursday I decided to go to goa for a weekend on a shoe-string budget(read 2K.) Marianne quickly agreed that it was a great Ideee (read idea). We packed our bags and caught the first BUS leaving from bangalore to goa. The bus left at arounf 6:30 on friday eve and we were in goa around 11am saturday.

We decided to go to Calangute Beach and stay at the "Calangute Residency Annexe." It is a nice place with clean room and sheets and is two minutes from the beach. Nice place to stay, 300 bucks a night, much recommended.

As everyone on TV was blaring about rain and thunderstorms what not, we decided to buy some sun screen and lie in the sun. The mansoon was there no doubt, but it was sunny for quite a while to lie down or swim. we did both. Ate plenty of nice nice food at a place called 'capricon' and had juliette for dinner at a plae near a chaple called indiana or something.

We booked our tickets back to bangalore, and monday morning around 11am. We were in bangalore.

Pictures...

hash-linux-india-meetup

2005-06-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Since we all had such a blast at the last meetup, I thought we should do it again. So, it is set on sunday 12th june hash-linux-india shall rock pecos starting 12 noon. Bigbeard is visiting us from delhi. There is only one rule, anyone appearing without beer money shall be fed to the bug blatter beast of trall. even if you dont hang out at hash linux-india and dont know/care about linux, you're still invited. :)

Location: Pecos, Brigade road.
Date: 12/06/2005
Time: noon
Dresscode: Vendorwear.
Contact: My phone number. what do you mean you dont know it? come to #linux-india.
Agenda: Beer
Update!!
Pictures... look for all of them at flickr ....

Procrastination....

2005-06-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Top ten reasons for procrastination....

1._

Apple and x86

2005-06-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

So Apple did the unthinkable , in a shocking news they are ditching IBM and moving away from powerpc's towards Intel.

Is apple moving towards x86? Mac OS X does and has run natively on x86 since its inception. All applications will work well by doing a simple recompile. you still have to buy the Transition kit though.

Quoting from,
"However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.

Yeah! here comes the mod chips.

Netgear WG511 and Ndiswrapper

2005-06-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a Netgear WG511 pcmci network card. Making it work on linux was a bitch, so I suggest you stay away from it. If you are a unfortunate owner of the card, read on.

Firstly, there are two types of cards that Netgear sells as WG511 one is "Made in Tiwan" the other is "Made in China" I have used both, the tiwan card works out of the box with prism54 driver and if you have one "Made in Tiwan" you wont be reading this. The "Made in China" card can be made to work using ndiswrapper and the driver provided in the netgear cd, just use the Windows 2000 driver.

So you want a step by step guide huh?

NetgearWG511AndNdiswrapper
SetupNdiswrapperHowto

Oh! mama

2005-05-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

Oh mama... Time to reveal the truth, I work for Yahoo! Why do I manage a blog on a Google service? because Its better than yahoo 360! When 360 becomes what I expect from a blog ... the last post on this blog will be "My real blog is here." I used to have a livejournal account too.

I have resisted for a long time and I am not going to do a us vs. them. But, seriously In comparision to My Yahoo! Google homepage is a big fat joke. it's increadibly lame... looks like a hack some dude pulled off last weekend and unleashed on the world after debugging it over the week.

Adult Disneyland

2005-05-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

San Francisco a secular haven, located at one of the world's most stunning locations and a brilliant sunny yet chilly climate. The people who built it bequeathed the current denizens a city of outstanding grace and grandeur.

San Francisco to me represents the ultimate expression of a new urban area -- the transient city. Dominated by the rich, the young and people serving them. It is not populated by the middle class, does not boast of a diverse set of industries but, is dominated by a wealthy elite, part-time sojourners, hordes of tourists and those who serve them. The city that makes its living selling luxury.

San francisco to me brings back a nostalgic memory of Agra, the city I spent my adolescence in, an urban city, dominated by the rich, the spendthrift young and those living off them. Such cities have emerged across the world, but perhaps none is so in-the-face as San Francisco. Perhaps, that has something to do with it being American.

The wealth of San Francisco comes not from being an economic powerhouse but by being the preferred residence of those who can choose where they live. What does San Francisco do? Not much by traditional standards. It exists not primarily to inhabit people or to conduct business, It is a theme park for restaurants. This city seems little more than a distant, overpriced urban amusement park.

San francisco tries very hard yet fails to be a center for the arts or culture. This may be because great artistic centers usually arise not from conscious promotion of bohemianism but as the result of a vibrant commercial culture and a middle class. Resort towns, no matter how well-endowed, don't do well as creative centers.

There is a growing and going to be ample demand for a unique adult disneyland for people who can buy the best urban lifestyle money can buy. San Francisco is the city that knows how to be that.
bash-2.05b$

San francisco Marijuana day

2005-05-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

I was roaming around town and bumped into Pot smokers of san francisco, united to protest against the current laws that make marijuana smoking illegal. the ~~party~~ protest was much fun. People relaxing and roaming around with banners and selling tshirts, there was some post pot art too. Check out the pictures ...

Its my happy birthday to you

2005-04-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

:D Yeah! I am 24 today ... feels kind of wierd. But, Im not
complaining. I guess... I dont regret the choices I'v made.
Well! this is the best I'v ever felt on my birthday, if I
were to compare all 24 of them. so there...

me visit de SF

2005-04-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

here are some pics from me visit to SF...

EU

2005-04-01T02:40:00.000-08:00

Acer Aspire 1362 review

2005-02-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

A week ago I bought an Acer 1362. Lets get the geek quotient out of the way first, it has a AMD Sempron 2800 processor which does 1.6 Gigahertz, a 40GB hard disk drive, 512MB ram, and a DVD reader and cd-writer and it costs me around 40K Rs and is weights around 3.5 kgs. It comes installed with a linux kernel image and some other stuff.It has a pcmci thingy where iv added the wifi card because it does not come with one. it has four usb ports, ps/2, firewire. pcmci It comes without a floppy drive. Acer page

Ok, Its not your most impressive system configuration I know, but lets see what I will use it for: I use vi to code and gcc/g++/perl to compile my code with, I will use this box for mainly writing code for my free s/w projects, maybe some gnome patches and a perl project I do.

I will also(read mostly) use it to listen to music and watch dvd’s. So, this is why I was impressed with this box, it has a 15.4” TFT display, its huge and it is a good display. I loved it as soon as I saw it. The speakers are so damn good they give competition to the Thomson stereo system that I have at home.

The video card leaves your heart in pain, this must be the only compromise I made by buying this laptop. The video card SUCKS. It shares 64MB ram out of the main memory and is a crawler, I haven’t tried going above 1024x768 mostly because Im most comfortable in this resolution but I dont think that it can do it. If you are a gamer, stay away.

When I tried watching a dvd with mplayer it crawled when I did a –fs and –zoom, I had to go and do a –framedrop to watch the dvd. This sucked. So, I compiled mplayer with vesa support and tried full screen on that this time there was no slow motion crap the move worked fine and no framedrop was observable. I will try to recompile mplayer with other option and see what happens once I have time.

As I mentioned, It comes installed with a linux kernel image and some other stuff, It didn’t come with a x windowing system. Acer guys told me that I would have to download the “Linux OS” from the acer website and they gave 100Hrs of internet to me free with the laptop for that purpose. He was however more then willing to install Windows XP from me from a *original* windows cd. I didn’t ask him if I had to pay for the Installation from the *original* windows cd. I guess you get the hint.

So Anyways, There was no documentation with the machine which stated how to download the “Linux OS” and neither could I find it on acer’s website. I was desprate to use my box so I installed ubuntu from a cd that was lying around. Everything got detected even the scroll keys on the touchpad worked. The laptop has no problem with anything and it has not crashed once and works really nicely.

This laptop is huge, I like this, it gives me a false sense of belief that it’s a sturdy box. Plus its heavy and when you put your hands on it to work it does not *run away* a problem I face with most mac’s and IBM’s. Unlike the dell the casing is not cheap bendable plastic. It is good.

Acer designers must be really dumb because there is so much space that they could have fit two full size keyboards but, No they had to fuck up. They have added a modifier key [fn] which you have to use to get to some of the keys which have a key of their own on normal keys… using a combination to get to [home] [end] is really irritating if you are a smoker like me and at times have only one had to do things with, it can get a little getting used to and it’s a good stretching exercise for your fingers.

So, finally I think that I didn’t make a mistake by buying this box. It has good speakers/good display around 3hrs of batter backup 2 if you are watching a dvd (its enough to take you till the end :). Disk space is an issue but 40 gigs is more then enough to store code/email the music I anyways store in a 120 gig external drive. It’s a nice box and I recommend it.

Why I considered buying it was because I saw the Sempron vs. centrino reviews.. google for it.

2005-01-07T02:19:00.000-08:00

Donald Agarrat has posted a brilliant photoset of Composites, where he sits in rooms, wanders the city, and generally just hangs out with himself...or sometimes friends, hanging out with their selves. Great stuff!

Metal radio

2005-01-07T01:47:00.000-08:00

When you have heard everything there *is* to hear. It is time to find metal and you have only one ally: research. Finding out what sources whose tastes you recognize are listening to and what do they think about a new release can tell you whether it is something you might like.

So, for a long time, I was looking for a radiostation with little chatter and more stuff and I found it on Live365. I have been listening to "The Darkest hours" for some time now.

This chap who talks on it is europian I guess, the fact that neither do I remember his name nor do I know where he(ee as he would pronounce it brit? irish? i dont know) is from must be taken as a great compliment to him and a hint towards how little noise is on the station. Well! he does sometimes comes up with a list of performances that are happening around. which irritates the hell out of me because, I cant go for a single one of them. Me being stuck on this miserable part of the world.

The music they play is awersome, a mix of old and new stuff. Check out the Playlist.

There is a bit of advertisement on the station. They keep cribbing you become a VIP member. I dont mind it too much though.

Google LiveSearch

2005-01-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Bitflux livesearch Google has also started something neat only with a dinosaur of a search engine behind it. here.

There will be time

2005-01-03T20:51:00.000-08:00

Elliot, I must say was an idiot, period. Here, i have said it. I think Elliot was an idiot for saying, "there will be time" actually, "there will be hope." Even if there is no time for you and me. There is hope that, there will be time.