Bheekling's Rantings

GNOME 3 on Gentoo and related news

2011-03-04T15:25:00.000+05:30

As those of you who follow the Gentoo GNOME Overlay know, GNOME 3 is shaping up nicely in the overlay, and runs according to upstream's intentions quite well. Whatever is missing should be filed as a bug and will be taken care of. :-)

Now that it's been a few days since the release cycle entered UI freeze, we have been able to evaluate whether or not you folks (i.e., our users), will be able to transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without too much pain. We came to the conclusion that there is no particular hurry to let go of GNOME 2.32, and that we should wait for things to settle down before unleashing GNOME 3 on our users.

Hence, this blog post serves as a notice for all Gentoo GNOME users about the fact that the addition of the latest GNOME to ~arch in the Gentoo portage tree will be delayed much more than usual. People who wish to be early-birds and try out GNOME 3 (and help with bugs!) should check out the Gentoo GNOME Overlay (layman -a gnome).

One of the reasons for this is that besides the inevitable (temporary) feature regressions, parts of the design of GNOME 3 are still a work-in-progress, and some of the existing designs aren't fully implemented yet. For instance, file management is currently in a half-way state, network-manager-applet is still being used, and the fallback mode needs work. In addition, a11y support in GNOME Shell is incomplete, and from what I can make out, it's not in a "shippable" state.

However, the list will definitely change before the final release. Things are in a fluid state at the moment, with upstream maintainers working hard at fixing bugs before the final freeze (you should help them in this!).

Another reason for the delay is that the influx of GNOME 3 libraries which need to be installed alongside GNOME 2 libraries means that the dependencies of a lot of in-tree ebuilds need to be adjusted. This is mostly straightforward work; except where slotting of libraries was not feasible, and porting to GTK+3 will need to be done. To ease the transition, and allow porting, GNOME 3.0 will probably be added to the tree hard-masked, or stay in the overlay till the work is done.

Looking at how things are moving, the upper limit for when GNOME 3 will get added to the ~arch tree is the 3.2 release. I have a personal stake in this, since I particularly love GTK+3, GSettings, GDBus, and GNOME Shell. I somehow feel an OCD need to see everything ported away from GTK+2/GConf/dbus-glib/bonobo/libunique towards GTK+3/GSettings/GDBus/GtkApplication. :D

In related news, thanks to the efforts of Amadeusz Żołnowski (aidecoe), Plymouth is now in the tree! I tried it out, and it seems to work quite well. I'd love to see the Gentoo community create more Gentoo-centric themes for it. The absence of Larry the Cow was sorely felt. :-)

Some of you may remember my last blog post, which was about systemd on Gentoo. Fellow dev Greg KH has taken up the mantle of getting systemd into the tree. Thanks to everyone on the bug report for making systemd work on Gentoo, and thanks to Greg for volunteering to get it into the tree!

Here's to a very exciting 2011 year!

Systemd in Gentoo

2010-08-26T06:47:00.001+05:30

A lot of folks are raving about the next generation in init systems (aka systemd), and how it's (almost certainly) going to be the default init system for Fedora 14 (paid article, subscribe to LWN to read! [or wait a week]). It also seems that OpenSuse will be moving to systemd sometime in the near future (don't take my word for this though), and Debian has at least considered it. It is also well-known that Ubuntu will not be using systemd for the foreseeable future.

So where is Gentoo in all this? Our current init system is baselayout-1 in the stable tree, and openrc in the ~arch tree. The maintainer-wanted bug for systemd has been quite active with users posting preliminary ebuilds for it. The bug itself currently has >30 folks CCed (including me), and 86 votes. So users are definitely very interested in seeing systemd in Gentoo. However, it will take a lot of work before systemd can enter portage even as a masked ebuild.

Even after systemd enters portage, it is extremely unlikely that it will become the default init system for reasons that are listed below. Some developers are strongly in favour of moving from baselayout-1 to systemd, while some think it's a pile of crap that Gentoo should stay far away from. Neither of these opinions is shared by the majority of Gentoo devs. (that includes me :-)

In all likelihood, the end result will be that openrc will finally go stable (replacing baselayout-1), and if any developers are willing to spend the massive amount of time and effort required to make systemd usable in Gentoo, systemd will become an optional init system, strongly recommended for desktops/laptops.

Now why can't we throw out baselayout-1 as well as openrc and just use systemd? I was going to make a full list of the reasons, but as I was making it, I realised that I don't know enough details about systemd's requirements, what all it provides, what parts of Baselayout would need to be rewritten, how much porting of the tree (and systemd) would be needed, etc. So instead of hand-waving, I'll just list "needs several volunteer developers" as the blocker for now :)

I'm tempted to list myself as a future volunteer, but I won't do such a thing yet. Rest assured that if I do end up working on this, I'll be sure to blog about it. Although it is probably just a matter of "time" ;)

Managing alternate browsers

2010-04-20T17:41:00.000+05:30

For a while now, I've battled with the many problems of having too many tabs open in Firefox. One of them is faced when I want to view a link I saw on IRC, IM, Twitter, etc, and Firefox isn't running.

I click on the link; and wait. And wait. And wait. And finally Firefox pops up! But it's unusable because it's too busy loading 3 windows and 200 tabs. I just want to view this one link, I don't want the other 200 links to be opened!

For this use-case, I usually keep alternate browsers; Epiphany and/or Chromium. So I copy the link, open one of the browsers that won't open a bazillion tabs, and paste the link there. This is obviously somewhat annoying to do; and causes frustration when I forget that I don't have Firefox running and accidentally click on a link. *click* [wait] "huh? OH SHI-" *computer slows down to a crawl*

The final straw was when I realised that some clients don't let me right-click -> copy links. So I wrote a small script to make the right decision for me whenever I click on a link so I can stop worrying about behemoth-launching. Now I've set the script as my "default browser" so that all links are sent straight to it, and the proper action is taken.

What it does; is it checks if one of your browsers (listed in $ORDER in the script) is already open, and opens the link in that. For instance; if Firefox is already open, you're probably using it; and you want the link to open in that. If Firefox is not, but Epiphany is already open, best to open it in Epiphany; etc.

If no browsers are open; it tries to open the link in one of the lightweight "alternate" browsers that you have (listed in $SPAWN in the script).

Set the script as your default browser, and it shall feed hungry kittens. It certainly did so for me ;)

Freenode Fails.

2010-03-22T15:36:00.000+05:30

So, if you don't know what freenode is, you can stop reading right now; you won't find it interesting at all.

Out of the rest of you, those who use freenode regularly must've been around when for 2-3 days, we all faced massive netsplits due to javascript spam. Funnily enough, the solution for that problem was bloody easy:

iptables -m u32 --u32 0x0>>0x16&0x3c@0xc>>0x1a&0x3c@0x0=0x504f5354 -m recent --set --name lastmeasure --rsource -j DROP

Yes. That's it, and freenode couldn't do it for unspecified reasons. They kept telling us "Oh, we'll be moving to ircd-seven soon, and it'll be fixed then". I bought it. Everyone did. And true, no more spam and netsplits! For now.

But of course, the total failure level didn't improve at all. Now, people who don't auto-identify have a life of pain up their hands. Here's what happens when you identify after you've joined a channel:

* NICK (~HOSTNAME@IP ADDRESS) has quit: Changing host
* NICK (~HOSTNAME@CLOAK) has joined #CHANNEL

Yeah... your ip address gets displayed to everyone in the channel.

No, I lied, it doesn't get displayed to everyone. Everyone except you can see it. So you don't even know your ip address is getting displayed to everyone and quite possibly being logged in the channel. NOW WHOSE HARE-BRAINED IDEA WAS THAT?

Their "solution" for this? "Please use auto-identify, and no, we don't care about the reasons behind you not auto-identifying in the first place."

Oh, but there's more. If you have nick protection turned on, if you don't identify within 30 secs, your nick gets changed to GuestXXXX right? And the nick you were using gets "protected" right? With the move to ircd-seven, someone had to bright idea to make it "protected" against use by ANYONE including YOU. So you're left nickless unless you do a Quick Draw McGraw after logging in.

Dudes. WTF?

And don't give me the bullshit about "It's a free service, you get what you paid for". Other free networks get this right without getting funding from Canonical and hardware from Osuosl.

Random observations about Communication

2010-03-10T06:11:00.000+05:30

So, this post is not really technical, but I'm posting it to the Gentoo planet anyway because it applies to the social part of Gentoo. I see a lot of people making the same mistakes that I once did, or saw people make while interacting socially within Gentoo. This post is not in response to someone in particular; more like in response to the "feeling" I get.

Communication Problems (technical): when communicating over inefficient media such as email or IRC, keep in mind that the other person has no way of knowing what you meant, or felt, when you said something. Due to this, it is easy to cause insult, and even easier to be misunderstood or misquoted. No one knows your mood when you type on the net.
Solution: Make ample usage of smileys; make it clear what you mean, in as few words as reasonable. When on the receiving end, give the other person the benefit of doubt. It's quite easy to misunderstand what someone said. When in doubt, re-read and re-interpret.

Communication Problems (social): I've personally found that the root cause of 110% of arguments that escalate is a severe and dire lack of proper and clear communication. People are just unable to express what they mean, what they want, and what they are thinking in clear, easy-to-understand terms. Part of the problem is that "clear, easy-to-understand terms" vary among people. The other part is that different people think in different ways, and English is usually not their native language.
Solution: To be able to communicate effectively with someone, you need to understand how they think first. This is obviously too much work to do with everyone you meet, but if you're going to be working with or around someone; take the time out to empathize with their world-view. If you want to convince someone of your opinion, put yourself in their shoes and see it through their eyes.

Communication Problems (length): This is one problem that seems to plague people a lot, and often they don't even know it. Writing 4 paragraphs when 1 would've sufficed is a bigger problem than just writing one cryptic word. A lot of analogies are coming to my mind right now to explain this, but I'm going to go with this: 'tl;dr'.
Solution: When you write something, keep in mind that time is a precious commodity, and by writing a long mail/response, you will waste their time if they choose to read it. And hence, most people will not read it. If you want them to read it; spend some of your time and make it easier to read. Make it short.

Communication Problems (rage): E-mails written and IRC conversations conducted in anger. You read an email, see someone make a commit, or just something they said on IRC; and you go into RAGE mode. It makes you furious. You don't understand how the guy can be so bloody stupid. Maybe it's the last frickin' straw. You flip off and start shouting. The other side may be oblivious to your distress; or worse, they flip off as well. When the dust settles, pandas and kittens make sad faces at your blood pressure and the decisions you made.
Solution I've been on both the rage-side and the rage-causing side, and I can tell you this: It doesn't help anyone. If you get angry at someone on the internet, stop. Stop and get off the computer. Come back later. If you cause someone to get angry, pause. Pause and figure out why. Think to yourself; maybe you're wrong, maybe they misunderstood you, maybe they had a bad day. But first off, calm the other guy down. Stop arguing, and take a walk. Come back later and try to reconcile your differences. Fact: 149% of arguments lead to burnout and heart disease.

Now, I don't expect people to keep all this in mind all the time. Hell, I'm writing this now, but I know I'll never be able to stick to this 100%. The point I'm trying to make is that You're Fallible. Everyone is. Just keep that in mind all the time, and just remember the above things vaguely (you can bookmark it for reference!). I'm sure we can all do better than we're doing right now.

Gentoo Mozilla Team meeting decisions

2010-02-22T02:23:00.002+05:30

On Feb 21st, Sunday, the Gentoo Mozilla Team had an informal meeting to discuss some of the recent changes which have a large-ish impact on users. Below is a list of them and the decisions that were taken. After the list is a description of each decision.

SQLite with Firefox: Firefox will use the bundled sqlite by default. Users can select the system-wide sqlite by setting USE=system-sqlite.

Ebuilds for Extensions in-tree: The Gentoo Mozilla team will not ship ebuilds for extensions such as noscript and weave anymore. We will only have ebuilds for extensions which are linux-specific and compiled; such as enigmail.

Firefox and Thunderbird Alphas and Betas: In addition to the overlay, we are going to start placing alphas and betas of Firefox and Thunderbird in the tree with a package.mask and a big fat ewarn during installation. Adventurous users are encouraged try them out but report bugs only in the Gentoo bugzilla. Do not go to upstream unless we ask you.

NOTE: These ebuilds will not have language packs since upstream does not release packs for these.

NSS/NSPR Changes: This involves various cleanups to the ebuild, and moving of the libraries from ${libdir}/{nss/nspr} to ${libdir} and removal of the /etc/env.d/08{nss,nspr} LDPATH entries alongwith corresponding changes in firefox-bin and thunderbird-bin launchers. These changes should be completely transparent to the user.

Revival of #gentoo-moz @ FreeNode: The mozilla team has expanded in recent times, and with that we have decided to revive the ages-old #gentoo-moz irc channel. Users are welcome to idle, discuss, and ask for help on that channel. Come on over!

Why we made these decisions:

SQLite with Firefox: We've done flip-flops on using the system-installed sqlite for for XULRunner and Firefox. Initially, we used the internal one, but folks reported bugs about that (we prefer not to use bundled libraries), so we switched to the system sqlite.

Then with the next version of Firefox, people started reporting major bugs with using the system sqlite and we temporarily disabled it. Once the problems were resolved, we added USE=+sqlite to use the system-installed sqlite by default.

Recently, another issue cropped up: upstream mozilla was getting bug reports that the sqlite db was insecure, and trivial tools like grep could be used to get (private) deleted information from it. They traced that to distros using the system sqlite which didn't have support for SQLITE_SECURE_DELETE. They then made that a mandatory configure check with 3.6 (and we added a dep on the system sqlite for it). Soon, we started getting bug reports from people who did not want that enabled system-wide (since it zeroes out the data when deleting it, which has a performance penalty). Upstream made it clear that they would not make the check optional.

In the end, we decided to make firefox use the internal sqlite by default, and allow the user to select the system installed sqlite via USE=sytem-sqlite if they are ok with secure-delete being on system-wide.

Ebuilds for Extensions in-tree: We found that a number of extensions were being released at a very swift rate which meant two things:

Bumping ebuilds was very tedious, which led to them becoming stale very quickly
Judging whether an ebuild can go stable was not possible, and most often the extension developers just want the users to use the latest release.

This offset the benefit of users being able to install extensions system-wide and have it managed by portage. Users can still manually install and manage system-wide extensions if they so wish. They are also free to copy the old ebuilds to their local overlays and use them if they wish.

Firefox and Thunderbird Alphas and Betas: Mozilla Upstream has been complaining that their betas and release candidates don't get much testing on Linux since all the distros ship only the final releases. This means that bugs are caught very late, and aren't fixed till the next major version. To help with this, we've decided to revise our release strategy and give a bit more visibility to our alphas and betas (which are generally kept in the overlay) by pushing them to the tree under package.mask, and with large ewarns all over the place. Users are strongly advised NOT to report bugs with these directly to upstream. Please use the Gentoo Bugzilla.

NSS/NSPR Changes: the libraries for nss and nspr were installed in a prefix due to collisions with other packages (libssl.a for instance). Recently, Google decided to use portage for cross-compiling and managing ChromeOS. This combined with some bugs reported with NSS/NSPR led to some investigation, and a voluntary review of the ebuilds.

This led to a number of changes which included disabling static libraries for NSS and NSPR, and moving the rest to ${libdir}. Further details on the changes and their "why" are listed on the review bugs linked above.

The Gift of Attention

2010-02-21T23:51:00.000+05:30

I cannot stress this enough. When someone asks you to listen, listen to them. When they ask you to listen to their favourite song, or to a song they think is beautiful, listen to them and listen to it. When they show you something that moves them, look at it and try to see how it moved them. They find it special, and are sharing it with you because they find something in you that is special. Don't squander that special gift away. Spend a little time. You'll understand them better.

Haruki Murakami

2010-02-19T21:10:00.001+05:30

When I was a kid, in 2^nd grade, my dad was posted in the Himalayas. Families weren't allowed there, so I used to live with my mother at her mother's house. Right above the bed where I used to sleep with my grandmother, was this strange painting of a house. The canvas was a dark cloth, and the painting was made of light-grey outlines of a hill with a house on it. It had a slanting roof and a chimney with a hand coming out of it. I used to stare at this terrifying picture every night while going to sleep. It was much later that I realised it was actually smoke that was coming out of the chimney. Smoke that looked very convincingly like a hand.

Whenever I think of this picture, feelings of horror are mixed with the beautiful memories of living with my grandmother. Listening to the watchman making his rounds around the houses, listening to tales spun by my grandma, peeking outside the vertical-tilting window to see the moonlit houses. That green Russian folktales book I had, and Baba-Yaga. Chasing dust-mites in beams of light, playing with a 1991 calendar; with faint memories of something big going on. The house in the painting itself must have featured in many of my dreams and my nightmares. All these memories mix and mingle to evoke feelings from every corner of my brain. I am left with tears in my eyes, heaviness in my heart, and regret in my mind that all of it is now gone.

And somehow, everytime I finish a short story by Haruki Murakami; all these feelings rush up to me. Whether the story had a happy ending, or challenged my stomach; the nostalgia, the beauty, the love, all rushes up to me. Each story reminds me of my love for thunderstorms. For stormy nights, that are spent alone. Loneliness that I cannot bear, but the feeling of which I love.

I remember so much that I just want to lose myself in my memories.

That is Haruki Murakami for me.

A New Haven for Journalists

2010-02-17T23:44:00.001+05:30

I'd always imagined that change in human society is conservative by default. That radical change can only happen under radical circumstances. Unfortunately, I've also seen that one should never underestimate human idiocy (see republican senators in the US).

In the middle of enormously counter-productive responses to the Financial Crisis that overwhelmed economies all over the world, we have Iceland. Iceland was probably the worst-hit in the chaos. Bankruptcy for the citizens, rioting in the streets; a little better than the worst that can happen.

These extreme circumstances, along with the role WikiLeaks played in uncovering the reasons for the hard fall the Iceland economy took have now led to the government proposing legislation which will make it a safe haven for free speech and journalism. Go ahead and read the articles linked in this blog post.

I'm no journalist, but I know the importance of keeping whistle-blowers safe.

EDIT: Pointed out by sid0; FAQ about the legislation. A must-read.

Infibeam Rocks.

2010-02-09T05:35:00.000+05:30

Some of you who follow me on twitter might remember something I tweeted about on Feb 6th:

Crap. Bought the wrong book on Infibeam and there's no way to cancel after making payment. Worse, I already have this book x-( #fail

This is essentially what happens when you buy stuff on the Internet at 5am after not sleeping all night preparing for an exam. I selected the (wrong) book, paid for it using Paypal, and soon afterwards, realised that I wanted the second part of this book (Foundation Analysis). Checked their FAQ to find to my dismay that they don't support cancellation of orders after payment has been made.

Needless to say, I'm a student, and students are poor(er). So I was sitting around semi-depressed wondering how to sell the book off at a minimal cost loss after I get it. On a whim, I decided to tweet about it (I generally don't tweet much; mostly passive reading).

After giving my exam, I noticed two missed calls on my phone from a strange number. I decided to wait for them (whoever they were) to call me again. A couple of hours later, I get another phone call; but this time it gets cut before I can pick it up. A few minutes later I get the following email:

Dear Nirbheek Chauhan ,

Order Id : [REMOVED]

Title : [REMOVED BOOK TITLE]

We have received your request for cancellation of above order through twitter.com. So we are offering you your ordered amount as prepaid credit to your Infibeam account which can be used for next purchase.
Please allow us for the same. So we can credit your account accordingly.
We also tried to reach you through given no. [REMOVED MOBILE NO.], but could not get response.
Thank you for shopping with us! You can contact us anytime using http://www.infibeam.com/ContactUs.action

Sincerely,

Infibeam.com Customer Service
Fresh Way to Buy, Sell and Rent

My reaction -- :O :D :O :D

Yesterday evening, they cancelled my order and refunded the amount I had paid as prepaid-credit which I can now use to buy the other book that I wanted to buy!

I don't know about you, but I'm very impressed by their customer service. The fact that they took the initiative to monitor twitter for tweets mentioning "Infibeam" for any problems that users face is a strong indication that they aren't just some random E-Store. They have definitely made permanent customer out of me!

On a related note, I've found that their book prices are usually less than or equal to those on flipkart.com . Another reason to use them ;)

What The Bloody--

2010-01-22T16:25:00.000+05:30

So I drive back home, open reddit, and what do I see?

US Supreme Court ruling comes down - Corporations are people with free speech and have the protected right to bribe politicians

The story currently has 5,200 upvotes, and 2,744 comments.

MSNBC says:

In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down laws that banned corporations from using their own money to support or oppose candidates for public office.

Nice, let's go have some cake.

Folks, this is another example of a place where the concept of "Free Speech" is not applicable.

"Free Speech"

2010-01-22T10:37:00.001+05:30

No, it does not mean you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, to whoever you want. Nor does it mean that everyone has to allow you to do any of that.

Free speech means that your (democratic, republic, or whatever) government should not restrict your right to criticize them, organisations, people, practices, or society in general.

Things not covered in Free Speech (open for debate):

Slander
What rules you impose in your house
What companies impose on employees
What comments you allow on your blog
etc.

So, the next time someone posts something about Free Speech on their blog, but has moderation and/or deletes posts; think twice before calling them a hypocrite.

No, I'm not going to link to the place where I saw this happen; I don't have an axe to grind.

EDIT: I just noticed I had comments which I hadn't moderated yet (moderation for posts older than X days); sorry about that folks. I seem to not get mail for that thing. Relevant Lesson: Don't attribute to malice which can be attributed to stupidity.

"Global Warming"

2009-12-25T00:19:00.000+05:30

Damn, there's a lot of confusion, contradicting statements, idiocy, corruption, and lolwut around this topic. Now, I've done an Environmental Engineering course. Hence as an expert who is expertly placed, you can trust me to wade through this muck and give you the right answer.

Let's start from the top. The Greenhouse Effect. No, you won't need Wikipedia for this one. It's simple.

Most things in this world are opaque. Which means they don't allow light to pass through them. The wavelengths of visible light they don't absorb gives them their color.

Gases are mostly transparent due to their low density. This is different from colourless, which means that most gases do not absorb visible light. But when you have a huge amount of air, such as an atmosphere, "transparent" becomes irrelevant.

Different gases in the atmosphere absorb different wavelengths of light. What happens when they absorb it? They re-emit it in a different direction, and often with a different wavelength. Water Vapour, CO₂, Methane, Ozone are the major players in this. They absorb visible light and infrared light, and re-emit it as infrared. This is called the Greenhouse effect.

This is a good thing. Without the greenhouse effect, we could not survive. Temperatures on our planet would be extreme, with the average temperature being sub-zero. The major contributor to our survival is water vapour, which keeps a large amount of thermal radiation around Earth.

Disaster strikes when someone decides to pump a bazillion litres of CO₂ into the atmosphere every year. What does this do? It's complicated. Complicated enough that we don't know for sure the dynamics of everything it does. It's not as simple as rocking a cradle. The global climate is a chaotic system. Even tiny changes in the initial conditions magnify exponentially and change the result completely. This is why BBC doesn't show more than a week's forecast in weather.

We never just say "OK, T°C increase in global temperature in X years" "Polar ice caps will melt in Y years". That's what uninformed news outlets say. They try to dumb the results and predictions down for the general public, and in the process make them incomplete, inaccurate, or wrong.

This is also why scientists' predictions concerning climate change seem to be "wrong" most of the time. This leads the naive public to assume that we're talking out of our collective arses, and that Climate Change is bogus. And when we try to explain what we meant, people go "NYA NYA NYA, YOU'RE WRONG, NOW STOP MAKING EXCUSES AND SHUT UP". And that's what we do. Because we know we're right. That's the thing about science. It doesn't matter what you think, the truth will stay the truth.

Here's the truth. We don't know exactly what's happening (yes dears, present tense) thanks to our shortsightedness. But we're all bloody damn sure about one thing. Whatever's happening isn't good for us. That's why it's called "Anthropogenic Climate Change" (man-made and not-good-for-man).

Now that I'm done being all dramatic and apocalyptic, I notice I forgot to mention all that stuff about Albedo, Positive feedback loops, Quasi-static equilibrium, cyclic climate change, frog in boiling water, etc. Oh well. Maybe if everyone paid attention in college, I wouldn't have to start from the top and get bogged down in the basics before getting to the interesting stuff.

What's missing in Btrfs

2009-10-25T22:03:00.000+05:30

So, after being completely betrayed[1] by Ext4 not once, but twice, I decided to evaluate my FS options for /home .

FAT* are not an option, neither is NTFS.
Ext2 is primitive and HFS/HFS+ is just not Linux.
JFS is nice, but (atleast parted) doesn't support grow/shrink.
I've used XFS before, and found it to be more reliable than Ext4. However, deleting dirs with thousands of small files is too slow (a common operation when compiling)
ZFS would've been an option if my earlier experiences with ZFS-FUSE weren't so horrid.
Did not even consider NILFS. It's too new, and I don't know much about it.

It ended up being a choice between the reliable Ext3, or the new-fangled Btrfs. Why Btrfs? Because I've been using it as my Gentoo Distfiles and Portage tmpdir since v0.16, and found it to be the /most/ resilient to power failures of all my partitions.

I ended up selecting Ext3 for /home, but let's see why.

What's missing in Btrfs:

Growing the filesystem to the "left" of the partition. The error message when you try this is cryptic (common in btrfs-progs). However, since for other FSes this essentially involves "move to left and grow to right", I suppose the "move" part is what's missing in btrfsctl.
Pathetic ENOSPC handling. It either throws an ENOSPC at around 75% or when the metadata space fills up. Not sure which, but it's supposedly fixed for 2.6.32.
Volumes once created cannot be deleted. Again, fixed in 2.6.32.
Parted doesn't support editing/creating Btrfs partitions. Support for detecting it was proposed recently; but, I still don't see it in either "master" or "next". This is not a Btrfs problem, but certainly affects whether I'd use it.
There were other minor irritants (with btrfs-progs, mostly), but those will go away with time

Ext3 might have bad performance (especially w.r.t fsync), but atleast it's more reliable. In conclusion, I'll use Ext3 in data=ordered mode for /home till 2.6.33 is out; and then I'll convert my Ext3 partition to Btrfs and forever be happy :}

1. betrayed == sending everything into /lost+found after a forced fsck due to an earlier fsck after a power failure

I don't understand this

2009-06-09T13:43:00.000+05:30

And the fun part is, that I can't understand it. Why? Because even though I'm in college, I can't read or understand Physics papers. The learning curve is too steep.

Learning curve for physics too steep? Just pick up a book about it and read it!

Sure, and to understand the physics involved from the basics, I must learn the math involved. And once I've gone through 3 books for the math, I'd still not be able to understand peer-reviewed physics papers.

What's left? What more do you need to know?

To dive into a peer-reviewed paper, I need to be familiar with the language and syntax that they use. It's almost unreadable to a newcomer to the field. Is it just this paper or does every paper use such convoluted language and bury the facts in irrelevant claims, fancy language and dramatic bold text?

If I somehow get used to that stuff, I need to be familiar every paper of the 5 kazillion or so that it references. Especially so when it references other papers by the same author.

Bah. Anyway, I was trying to read some of the papers published by the ~~people~~ guy at Black Light Power. To see for myself what kind of credence to associate with his claims.

And they're just impossible to read.

I do not like hand-waving, and I do not like pretty pictures or videos. I would like my questions to be answered, or given the means to answer them myself. Papers are supposed to be a way to do that, and I can't. So I don't know what to make of his extraordinary claims.

In case you were wondering what his claims were, he's just about claiming that 40 years of QM is inaccurate because they cannot reconcile with some of his experimental observations (which have been published in peer-reviewed papers, not that I trust anything unless I can see the arguments for myself). Now, this would be something revolutionary, but there's too much such stuff going around, and it's difficult to differentiate the physicists from the crackpots.

All in all, I don't have a clue. He's right that people have a hard time getting away from their dearest theories, and I have been embarrassed by the fact that QM is one thing that no one learns, but rather "Accepts" in school and through college since the Math involved isn't taught at that level.

But really, the only way to challenge something as widely-accepted as HUP, you need a mountain of evidence (Occam's Razor and all that).

Breaking the monotony

2008-11-04T20:51:00.002+05:30

Oh, HAI

I has other interests too !!!

And now, for the complimentary my life is as screwed up (if not more) than yours link!

This post brought to you by the people complaining of extreme geekiness in this blog
Yes, I know I cheated, but I'm in a hurry here :p

GDM 2.24 aka SMB (Shoot Me Bloody)

2008-10-31T15:56:00.003+05:30

That's the name of my proposed WorkOut for FOSS.IN/2008.

What is it about?
It's about getting GDM 2.24 in good enough shape to be considered for adoption by Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian, *BSD; and not just Fedora and Foresight.

What's wrong with GDM 2.24?
Strictly speaking, there's nothing *wrong* with it. It works flawlessly on my system (except for the daemonisation bug/regression, which I had to patch up manually). I've been using it as my primary display manager since 2.23.1, and it has improved to the point of bug-free-ness.

However, there are reasons why most distros are shipping the older 2.20* series GDM instead. The aim of this WorkOut is to make inroads into fixing those problems.

That's all fine, but what *exactly* is wrong with GDM 2.24?
Oh, right. I should impose a hand-waving embargo on myself ;p

History: Sometime around the GNOME 2.18 release cycle, the GDM developers decided that it was high-time someone fixed all the problems with GDM and rewrote it from scratch. For this reason, a rewrite of GDM was started; aiming for the 2.22 release cycle.

However, during 2.22 cycle, GDM 2.20 was shipped due to several regressions. When GDM 2.24 was proposed, it caused intense debates involving the release team. However, it was included since the feature regressions were deemed minor enough.

Some of the regressions are listed below:

Lack of Themeing support: The architecture of the new GDM is very different from that of the old GDM. And hence, there is no way to "port" the older themes to the newer GDM, and there is currently no inbuilt support for themeing either.
No `gdmsetup`: The older gdmsetup had several security bugs, and hence was not ported to the new GDM. The configuration file is still the same however, so this is not a really large regression since there's no theming support anyway.
No XDMCP Chooser in the login screen: This is quite self-explanatory
No support for timed-logins: This is being worked on actively in-trunk
No support for backends other than PAM: This means that distributions like Slackware, *BSD, etc cannot use GDM 2.24

The aim of this WorkOut is to fix the above listed regressions, and some of the other regression bugs, TODOs, Visual Glitches, etc. And maybe even add some new features ;)

Details about the How, and When will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

~Nirbheek, hoping to see you during the discussions and @foss.in :)

An important announcement

2008-09-18T20:43:00.005+05:30

We interrupt your regular lazy-webbing to make ~~this~~ two important announcements:

A) AutotuA 0.0.1 released! Try it out and report bugs (if you can't follow the instructions in the link given, your services will be required when 0.0.2 is released :)

B) IMO, the two best distros in this world are:

Foresight Linux
- Ken Vandine (one of many) is effing awesome
Gentoo
- The GNOME Team
- Brent Baude (ranger): master-of-the-PPC-arch
- Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz): X11, Council, and Desktop Team Emperor
- Raúl Porcel (armin76): generic bitch; maintains half the arches and Firefox
- Robin H. Johnson (robbat2): Infra demi-god
- Zac Medico (zmedico): Portage demi-god

All these people are just too awesome (and too overworked) for words.If I hadn't got myself deep into Gentoo (which led to SoC too), I would've gone to Foresight :)

~Nirbheek,
Who has high hopes for AutotuA, and also hopes the best of Foresight and conary can be brought to Gentoo.

PS: Donnie, congrats once again! ;)

The much-delayed post

2008-06-19T13:07:00.004+05:30

*Very* late, this post is. I hope it's not too late yet :)

I'm talking about something that was much-talked about, and people are probably following some of the suggestions made about this, but I think there should be some sort of standardisation.

Here's the header I use for all my GSoC code:


# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et :
# Copyright: 2008 Gentoo Foundation
# Author(s): Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com>
# License: GPL-2
# 
# Immortal lh!
#

I encourage all of you to adopt the last two lines in your headers as well :D

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

2008-06-17T21:31:00.003+05:30

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would've liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the "gsoc" label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I'm Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as "slacker #1" by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur's tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You've probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you've heard about "FOSSKriti" :D

PS: We'll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p

<3 X, PulseAudio, and DAAP

2008-04-27T06:43:00.005+05:30

So, right now, I'm sitting at my comp listening to Norah Jones. But this isn't like any other music-listening time. Right now, I'm:

Logged into a lab computer via XDMCP: I could've used VNC, but that would've required someone to be logged-in on the lab comp.

Using my laptop's PulseAudio as the lab computer's default PulseAudio sink: This makes the lab computer's PulseAudio send all sound to my laptop's PulseAudio by default.

Connected to my laptop's DAAP share from the lab computer's Rhythmbox: The music on my laptop becomes accessible from the lab computer's Rhythmbox.

This setup results in me playing Norah Jones on the lab computer, and listening to it here :)

Google Summer of Code, Gentoo

2008-04-24T16:24:00.007+05:30

Right after the GSoC results were announced, Anant Narayanan sent an email to the gentoo-soc ML welcoming the students with lots of good advice about how to proceed, what all they can expect, and what all they're expected to do. Thanks Anant!

The only thing about that email that irked me was that third party source code management systems such as code.google.com, sf.net, and repo.or.cz were recommended for hosting the source code. Now, for a small project that does not have much in the name of Infra, this would be acceptable, but for a full-fledged organisation with a dedicated infra team, this looks quite shoddy (this probably happened due to insufficient communication between gentoo-soc and gentoo-infra). And on top of that, projects getting distributed across several repositories makes it impossible to find the code during and after SoC is finished. For instance, I am completely unable to find the code for a lot of the SoC 2007 projects.

Now, I understand that Gentoo Infra is very short-staffed and overworked at the moment, and hosting dedicated Trac setups for all the students is not an easy task. So I poked my mentor Patrick Lauer and asked him if he could host Redmine at gentooexperimental which could then be used as a central place for tracking/hosting all the Gentoo SoC projects. He agreed, but his dislike of Rails meant that I would have to do the setup and manage it.

And so it was done, and an email sent to the list. soc.gentooexperimental.org now hosts Redmine for project management.

After a small chat with Donnie Berkholz on IRC, we agreed that hosting the source code under Gentoo Infra and using Redmine for the rest of the stuff would be best. OTOH, Alec Warner was in favour of giving the students full freedom with hosting their projects as long as the place of their choice was usable. I replied to his email suggesting that in the interest of keeping the projects accessible from one place, people who want to do their development somewhere else be asked to create a dummy project at soc.ge.o which points to the place where the actual development is taking place.

Let's see how things turn out.

Wheeeeeeeeeee

2008-04-22T04:20:00.004+05:30

So today was the day.
An insane night, on an insane channel.

So we were promised Cake.
Which got a bit delayed,
but the end we got a plate
Which was truly worth the wait

Translation: I've gotten accepted into GSoC, and the community bonding period has begun!

A couple of people I know got accepted as well -- Satya, Ramnik, and Siddarth. This will be a fun summer *grin*.

I was going through the abstracts of the accepted applications in orgs that interest me, and I found the following to be *very* interesting (in no specific order):

Vim: On-the-fly Code Checker for Vim

I don't need to say anything about this -- it's simply wonderful.

Pidgin: Master password support for pidgin

Finally, I won't have to type in three passwords when I start Pidgin. gnome-keyring integration ftw!

GNOME: Reducing memory fragmentation in GNOME

Reduced memory is always more than welcome, and it's not an easy task at all :)

GNOME: SuperRandom: a predictive listening plugin for Rhythmbox

This should be interesting. I currently have to manually form lists of songs I like to listen to. Time will tell how well this project fruits.

GNOME: Make Evolution use Seahorse widgets for encryption and key selection

No more UI blocking, and no more f-ugly password prompts! Fun, fun, fun =)

GNOME: Integrated Media Management for GNOME

This has always been a major missing feature in GNOME. This gets implemented, and I owe the student+mentor(s) a beer each *g*

GStreamer: Media service to transcode video and audio in different formats

If this integrates well with the above GNOME project, things will take a turn for the better w.r.t media in GNOME.

Moinmoin: Extending moin's groups to LDAP and other external sources.

We use MoinMoin for our internal wiki, and authentication is done against LDAP. So needless to say, this project will make management of roles using LDAP groups quite straightforward.

BZFlag: BZFWeb, a web-based BZFS admin interface.

Just today we were talking about implementing a basic web interface for BZFlag in Django over the summer, and this thing comes up :)
Although our idea was to let people select server options using the webinterface, and then connect to the server, this project would be a good thing to keep an eye on.

FFmpeg: Generic frame-level multithreading support

This will rock for everyone with more than one core. This doesn't include me, but includes the Navya Server ;)

portage/pkgcore rhyme

2008-04-15T10:22:00.003+05:30

Please don't kill me for the bad rhyming :)

I sit down to emerge -av
It churns through the dependencies
I get frustrated in 2 minutes
pmerge -a is what was amiss

I alias `emerge` to spit out a warning
that a crappy PM is what I'm invoking
Now I'll remember to always use;
pmerge so my time's not abused!

Comments on the crappiness of these lines are welcome.
More such rhymes revolving around Gentoo are even more welcome ;)

'tis a time to rejoice

2008-04-09T12:58:00.003+05:30

net-libs/xulrunner-1.9_beta5 and www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0_beta5 are in-tree!

If you wanna pat someone's back, hop onto #gentoo-bugs and holler for armin76 :)

mewants

2008-04-06T17:56:00.005+05:30

Give them to me.

Far too true:

2008-04-01T08:51:00.001+05:30

Listening to: I am Turning Into God by Trent Reznor, remixed by chris_himself

A Few of Today's Webcomics...

2008-03-31T10:26:00.008+05:30

...made me laugh unusually hard =)

UserFriendly

xkcd: Convincing Pickup Line

Wondermark

PS:


if (understood ${UserFriendly_joke} || understood ${xkcd_tooltip}) \
&& is_girl; then 
    sendmail ${blog_author}
fi

rohitj and #fosskriti

2008-03-31T07:06:00.006+05:30

So it all started sometime ago when rohitj said that someone should kick him from #fosskriti because the channel was distracting him too much

<rohitj> kick me from this channel. else I am seeing it again and again
<hippieindamakin8> :)))
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (User terminated!)
* devilsadvocate removes channel operator status from devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate grins

So, it was all started by devilsadvocate, and now rohitj can't spend too long on the channel without getting repeatedly kicked :D

* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<hippieindamakin8> hey rohitj welcome back
<rohitj> thank you thank you
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (bye bye! :P)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling
<bheekling> This is fun :>
* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<rohitj> thank you bheekling
<rohitj> now stop it
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
<rohitj> :P
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (again! wheee)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling

This is phun >:->

portage-talk, gsoc, gentoo, ntgwn, and more

2008-03-30T03:21:00.004+05:30

A lot has been happening in the past two weeks, but I'll (try to) keep the post relatively short.

portage-talk - A "library" of bash functions that can be used to talk to Portage (the tree + package db). It's basically for use in bash scripts to get data about installed packages, ebuilds, etc. It aims to be blazing fast and have minimal dependencies (nothing beyond bash + coreutils). This also means that the code isn't very pretty ;)

I've been hacking on it on and off over the past week, and hope to have it good enough shape to shamelessly boast about it to more people :)

GSoC - So, tomorrow is the deadline for submitting apps (which is likely to be extended following tradition ;). I submitted my abstract and proposal yesterday, and I'm currently keeping my fingers tightly crossed (along with the occasional running around in circles screaming and giggling at the same time).

Steev and Patrick & Patrick and Steev have expressed interest in co-mentoring me (Gentoo projects have two mentors); let's see how everything turns out :)

Satya also applied for GSoC this time. Her proposed project is the deceptively simple-looking idea to rewrite/extend Bootchart using Systemtap. Her mentor-if-she-gets-selected is Eugene Teo, who (going by what she's been telling me) has been an excellent (pre-project-acceptance) mentor; who is extremely patient, understanding, and an overall gem of a guy.

GNOME 2.22.0 is (mostly) in-tree - The Gentoo GNOME Herd has almost completed moving GNOME 2.22 from the overlay to the tree. They have done a wonderful job by fixing a ton of bugs in just this month. As soon as all the bugs blocking the GNOME 2.22 tracker are resolved, and a few more reds converted to green on the gnome-2.22 status page, GNOME 2.22 will be unmasked, and users will be able to revel in the joy that is 2.22 :)

Not The GWN - New issue released by Patrick!

xulrunner-1.9 and mozilla-firefox-3 will be added to portage (p.masked) by armin76 when the beta5 is released :-)

rohitj wrote an XChat plugin for dpaste (and has been bugging the rest of us to try it out for the past two days ;)

More stuff that I can't remember :-/

Update:

Another NTGWN issue

released by Patrick

Raghu Dixit's Tribe...

2008-03-25T13:17:00.006+05:30

... a very apt name for the social network of a band with aptitude (some folks might see the horrible Debian pun here ;P).
So, today (or yesterday?), the Tribe was opened to public.

And it looks darn good for a website created by one man. I would have refused to believe it was coded in just a few weeks while juggling 5 different things at once, but the dirty secret made the story believable ;)

So, all of you guys who have listened to Raghu Dixit, go and join right now.

And, all of you guys who haven't listened to Raghu Dixit, go and listen now.

The beauty of Pearl Jam

2008-03-12T18:10:00.007+05:30

Riot Act - sends a shiver through my entire body whenever I listen to the album.

Midsems - II got over today. The exam I did best in was CE452. This really doesn't tell you much about my performance if you think about it. Marks will come soon, but I'll be home for a week by then. A very short week with 4 days spent travelling.
But I'm not complaining. I've long since learnt that vacations, no matter how long, are always too short. Now I just take whatever I get and don't complain.

Midsems usually have a very peculiar effect on people in the campus. The Newsgroup's activity peaks with posts longer than some people's notes being posted every couple of minutes. The most interesting threads are always during the midsems.

People start to behave oddly and message people things such as below:

someone: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
someone: I AM AN IDIOT
someone: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
someone:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
someone: HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA

And other people somehow find themselves mirroring the same feelings..

I don't know why I suddenly find Pearl Jam so blissful again. For 2 whole months, I didn't listen to Pearl Jam because it used to make me too depressed. Now I can't get enough of it. Radiohead still depresses me though, so I'm not listening to that. It's been 4 months I think.

In any case, I guess I should go out and roam around aimlessly for a while. The weather is too beautiful.

If only I could take Pearl Jam + Altec Lansing Bass with me outside as well...

-------x-------

PS: GNOME 2.22 releases today.

Updated:

:-)

I love you guys

2008-03-11T01:47:00.004+05:30

Creationists can't fail Earth Science: Oklahoma

That's the spirit lads! I'd love to see more bills like this passed in the US, it's excellent news for the rest of us. Who wouldn't want to see the Big Bully shoot itself repeatedly in the foot without even noticing it? Anyone not in the US who currently feels dismayed by news items such as these should instead whoop for joy! Remember, anything bad that happens to the US is good news for everyone else :-)

/me hosts a party in honour of this

wth?

2008-03-04T18:12:00.006+05:30

Gosh, it's been a month since I last blogged, and that too while this has been a very blogpost-philic month. FOSSKriti started and got over, freed.in was attended and praised for high-quality talks while the Indian FOSS community was boo-ed for low attendance at the same. FOSDEM came and went, and left several hundred hangovers in Europe.

I became aware of LinuxChix's Indian Chapter, was delighted to know about it, and decided to become a part of the community, and spread the word :)
I also became painfully aware of how much damage a vocal minority can do to a community that's starting up. I constantly winced during the flamewars on the Gentoo mailing lists during it's "Great Fall", as some have come to call it (though I disagree with them). Seeing the same munitions being deployed on the LC-IN ML gives me a depressing premonition of disaster.

The GDM 2.22 rewrite wasn't finished in time for inclusion in GNOME 2.22 (Hard Code Freeze), but gvfs managed to port more stuff and also get a "working" ftp backend, removing another bug from the 2.22 blocker bugs list.

The Xorg people were shouted at for not taking care of hald/dbus restarts, and patches were committed to fix the issue.

Gentoo Trustees were elected, and the results were expected and hilarious at the same time :-)
GSoC '08 was announced, and applications were invited from the various Open Source projects.
Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò framed his (and coincidentally my) thoughts about devs participating in GSoC (better than I could have) in a mail to the ML.

Beagle is still pondering about GSoC -- let's see how that turns out :)

*bheekling realises that the above paras are probably missing stuff, are somewhat anachronistic, terse, overflowing with links, and lacking continuity, but he believes that a jumbled-up link-eyebleed post is better than a forever procrastinated one :P

Fossकृति!

2008-01-30T22:43:00.000+05:30

See that logo on the right at the bottom of the side-bar?

You don't? Scroll down a bit.

Arey, the one that's Black and Orange, (was made by me =), and looks like this:

Yep, that's right, we're having FOSSKriti at Techkriti '08 (IITK's Tech festival) from 13th to 17th Feb.

We're going to have Talks, HackFests, BoFs, Workshops, and goodies. If you're going to Techkriti, be sure to drop by.

It's the first time it's being held, so it'll certainly be an interesting event - especially with the Beagle/dashboard Hackfest Arun and I plan to organise ;)

Planning on having loads of fun that weekend,

~bheekling :^)

Right Where It Belongs

2008-01-29T09:00:00.000+05:30

If you haven't, listen to the song and read the lyrics. They contain such power that can only be exuded by NiN songs.

Two versions, listen to both of them if you can, else the first one.

Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth

See the animal in it's cage that you built
Are you sure what side you're on
Better not look him too closely in the eye
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all
Right where it belongs

[Chorus]
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems
What if all the world you think you know
Is an elaborate dream
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you wanted to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afriad to see?

What if all the world's inside of your heart
Just creations of your own
Your devils and your gods
All the living and the dead
And you really are alone
You can live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the words
Are you hiding in the dreams?

[Chorus]

げんしけん (Genshiken)

2008-01-25T11:17:00.000+05:30

The title is the name of an Anime about a club called 現代視覚文化研究会 (Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyūkai). The English translation usually used is Society for Study of Modern Visual Culture.
However, the Modern era was the 1980s-90s, and hence I prefer the translation Society for Study of Contemporary Visual Culture instead. This opinion is, of course, not entirely my own (hah, almost had you fooled into thinking I was an expert on this stuff), but was brought around by two separate pieces of information I gathered from two completely different sources.

The story is long, so please bear with me.

It started off in September of 2007- oh, wait. I think I can make this shorter. There you go.

Hmmm, that link isn't very descriptive. Oh well, I'll just explain it.

Well, it started off sometime in Sept '07 (ah, the past gives me such nostalgia.. though since it's such a recent past, this probably isn't a good sign O_O), nareshov and I simultaneously had a sudden burst of energy, and decided to form an Anime cum Manga Club. There were several examples of precedence, so we knew it could be done. Plus, the Films and Media Council was undergoing a restructuring, so it was the best time for a new club to bloom.
So, we went to Prof. Suchitra Mathur for advice on how to proceed. Why? Simply because she was only person related to non-technical stuff that we both knew well enough to approach, and who we knew would actually be interested in it too :)

We talked to her, she told us that although she cannot back us officially (since she was already into the Book Club, Meander, and countless other things), but that we were welcome to come anytime for advice, and that we had her "blessings" so to speak ;) For official backing (which is good/required while forming a club), she advised us to meet Prof. Satyaki Roy who was (and is) the Faculty advisor for the FMC. Coincidentally, Naresh knew him quite well, having done a course under him. We then discussed (at length) the aims of the club with Ma'am, and she convinced us (to cut a long story short) to broaden our scope to include several kinds of Visual Culture; not just Anime and Manga, and as a consequence, forming a bridge between all the clubs under the FMC (since it covers all forms of contemporary culture), and other clubs as well, such as the Book Club (manga/comics).

We then proceeded to meet Prof. Roy with a renewed sense of purpose, and with a grand design in mind. A design with a purpose, and a design. Wait, I already used those two words didn't I? Crap, too tired to change them too.

Damn, I should hurry up and finish this post before I collapse on this keyboard.

Right, so he extended it even further to include things like the artwork on the back of trucks, and accepted it with open arms :P

And, then the FMC Secy got über-excited about the whole thing, and we talked about various stuff, and then put a preliminary writeup about the Club infront of the Students' Senate at the next meeting. Happy Ending: We'll be an official club starting next sem :)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the whole point of this post; the name of the club is SSCVC, pronounced Genshiken :}

Oh, and the Modern/Contemporary thing I mentioned before was revealed to us by Prof. Satyaki Roy.
The second piece of information (that I found out about in passing), was that the translation was not "official", and was merely the one that the fansubbers had used. So, the proper meaning was probably "contemporary".

EOF

TesseracT and the Techkriti T-Shirt

2008-01-21T01:07:00.000+05:30

Well, it got over a few days back, and now I can relax... Oh crap, exams this week >_<

Anyway, here's a limerick, and if you can solve it (and you weren't playing TesseracT), you're allowed to.. bah.

A firefox extension, a fountain of memes,
the abode of randomness, and pervy dreams.
'twas hacked, and a movie made,
people were banned, and anons hailed.
Copies exist, but the original's the same,
all that's posted is completely insane!

On a somewhat-related note, people from my college are going insane on a google doc, frantically brainstorming on quotes for the Techkriti T-Shirt =)

Some samples (mostly original):

"They googled geek... and found me."

Front: "Resistance is futile."
Back: "(when < 1 Ohm)"

(all bloody and gory) "We fragged the punchline"

"In case of Big Crunch, follow me"

"I have a fractional Erdos number. And I don't know what that means."

Two T-Shirts:
1. Front: "Theoretician," Back: "Warning: Experiments may fail with me around."
2. Front: "Experimentalist," Back: "Warning: Proofs may develop fallacies with me around."

"Made entirely from recycled atoms"

"Don't be a Carnot Follower, believe in 100% efficiency"

"Watt is the unit of power?"

"Rome was created in 7 days; We create tomorrow in 4" (Techkriti goes on for 4 days)

"Absolute zero is cool"

"Heisenberg: Schrödinger's Cat is Dead. No, wait. Schrödinger's Cat is Not Dead. No, wait..."

"Art is 'I'; science is 'we'"

"I am all that is left of a witty quote."

"%s/God/Me"

"A Physicist is someone who averages the first 3 terms of a divergent series"

"This quote was generated by a program"

And, towards the end, a meta quote/haiku ;)

Hundreds of quotes,
On a google doc,
The haiku made it. ~Nirbheek

And then more quotes :P

"Heisenberg rules - probably"

"Haven't Lost My Mind; It's Backed Up on a Disk Somewhere"

However, it's been hours, and they still haven't decided on a final yet. I guess that's relegated to the next blog post then ;)

Tekkon Kinkreet

2008-01-13T09:49:00.000+05:30

Sunday. The most dreaded day of the week, for it's followed by a new work week.
Sundays make me sad.

If you're thinking of watching a movie sometime soon, put Tekkin Kinkreet at the top of your list. I watched the movie today morning, and the movie has the best animation I have ever seen in any animated movie. The art style, though very different, reminded me of the form characteristic of Mononoke.

Snaps really don't do justice to the movie, best is to watch a few minutes snipped from the starting of the movie:

High-res version

Art, Media, Games

2007-11-12T12:54:00.003+05:30

This post is dedicated to all the stuff that awes me with its brlliance. These are a few which in recent memory have caused me to "stop and stare" or just ROTFLMAO =)

toe: I've talked of them before :)

Nine Inch Nails, "The Downward Spiral". Freaky Score. Do Listen.

Audrey Kawasaki: Her paintings are simply bewitching, all the detail is concentrated on the faces and the expressions are of such depth that I finally understand the term "drown in her eyes".

Ramya Shankar: Arun sent me a few songs that she once made (sang and recorded with friends playing instruments). I was really impressed by how her amatuer-recorded songs sounded as professional as songs on which lakhs have been spent. Excellent tunes and amazing vocals.
You can find some of them here.

"renamed_Back_rR" has to be my favourite of the ones I've heard so far, and its right here, below :)

Paul Robertson: He makes videos based on Sprite Animations as a hobby and posts them on his visual blog. His art has various themes, and I like most of his stuff. Here's a video that I adore; It's called "Devil Eyes":

Portal: The. Most. Fun. Game. I. Have. Ever. Played.
More fun than old video games or even The Curse of Monkey Island. It is simply hilarious and has excellent gameplay. The concept is basically that you have a gun which can create a portal between two flat planes (not on all materials however) which you can then throw stuff through or walk through yourself.
It's based on the Source Engine, so the physics is very accurate, and the game itself is designed very well. The fun part are its surrealistic humour, the AI controlling the facility you're in and the ending song.
Installing Windows to play it was completely worth it :D

Here's the ending song, "Still Alive". It's by Jonathon Coulton, sung by Ellen McLain, and is one of the best Game Ending songs ever ^_^

WARNING, CONTAINS SPOILERS.

You can download a high-res one here (13MB)

The previous 48 hours

2007-11-08T17:58:00.000+05:30

Were eventful to say the least :)
Started off with an emergency puzzle-website-making spree by us on orders from our great Techkriti team. Our work was to design the website and think up puzzles for its content. In 24 hours. :P
This was for the online event TesseracT for which I was supposedly one of the three coordinators (the other two were Utkarsh and Teja). We three sat throughout the night, got questions, made the website, and then went to our normal day-routine without sleep. We thought we'd just finish up some of the stuff left and launch the website at night - pretty much everything was ready.
I asked the students' server admin Naresh to install mod_perl on the server in the afternoon since the submit script between the static xml+xsl pages used Perl to do the checking of the answers. He was somewhat busy, but was able to start the setting up. In the end, the website came up half an hour late due to a variety of problems (and some frantic debugging) on our side and the server side.

The real trouble started when the website did come up.
Now, here I must tell you that the students' server is the biggest piece of crap in the server room in the Computer Center. It has 500MB of.. swap and 256MB of RAM. It runs FreeBSD, and that was probably the reason why it ran at all in the hours of agony that followed.

Within minutes of the site being released, we found that the server had become excruciatingly slow. At first we thought it must be purely because of the sudden increase in hits, but we soon realised something was horribly wrong. The first culprit that came to mind was the Perl script that we were using. We checked the code and came to the conclusion that nothing could be wrong with it; all it did was a foreach over a hash with 10 entries :P Running it on another server showed us no abnormal behaviour, apache never went above 0.1% CPU.

In the meanwhile, the server had stopped responding to anything but pings, and was refusing to initiate ssh connections. And the bloody thing was locked inside a server room, so we didn't have physical access to it at all. The only guy who had an ssh connection open to the server was me, and that too out of pure chance - Praneeth (Flash, video, sound, and overall suckiness warning for the blog) (Praneeth was the other admin) had uploaded my ssh key onto the techkriti account so I could upload the TesseracT website (pure chance because the uploading would've normally been done by the webteam). Unfortunately, the user 'techkriti' was not in the wheel group, and hence could not `su -`, so the user was practically useless. The only thing I could run was `top` which showed us that the machine was out of memory :|

Naresh: are you logged into students
?
me: Yeah
no commands are working
Naresh: fine
me: they take forever to execute
hey
I have top running
it shows 1% CPU :|
Naresh: ?!
me: Yes.
CPU states: 4.0% user, 0.0% nice, 20.1% system, 0.0% interrupt, 75.9% idle
Mem: 134M Active, 27M Inact, 83M Wired, 608K Cache, 35M Buf, 656K Free
Swap: 487M Total, 483M Used, 3692K Free, 99% Inuse, 1704K In, 332K Out
memory
Naresh: fuck
me: ?
Does it have htop?
Naresh: no
out of memory right?
me: Yeah

Arun called me up after a while asking what had happened. After we discussed the situation, he suggested we try `ssh root@localhost`. That sounded like an excellent idea at that time, but for some reason, we did an `su praneeth` instead (Praneeth had come over to where I was in the meanwhile), and then did an `su -`. Mind you, both these commands took ~30 mins to run. While we were waiting for them to finish, we setup TesseracT on an internal server so that at least the campus people could play it.
Oh, and in hindsight, `ssh root@localhost` would not have worked since the machine was refusing ssh connections :)

When we finally had root access on the server, we issued an `apachectl stop`, which took ~ 1 1/2 hours to run. And when it had finished, something very strange happened; mod_perl stopped working, and the main Techkriti page came back up. This was quite a disaster actually, as hundreds of people who were waiting for next.pl to load suddenly saw the file load into their browsers, and thanks to my stupidity, saw the answers as well ~_~
Arun told me soon afterwards (as I had realised to an immense sense of stupidity when mod_perl stopped working), that I should have put the answers in a separate file. Oh well, lesson learnt for the main event (this was just the prelims with no official registration or prize money).

After this, I ran top with root and saw that stocksim (Crappy Java program, run by the Business Club people for online stock thingies) was one of the culprits - it was using >225MB of memory. The other culprit, as Praneeth theorised, was the mod_perl itself. He said he had read that the mod_perl on FreeBSD was buggy and prone to high memory usage.

We decided to kill stocksim and take our chances with the mod_perl again. As Naresh was working on the thing, something happened, and the server went down, and this time, it _really_ went down - I'm not sure what happened, but the end result was that now we could do nothing about the server.

Arun and I decided to give techkriti's IP address to the temporary server till the next morning. Arun did all the vhosts stuff and in 15 mins, techkriti.org was "back up" - it just had the following message:

Okay, our server died on us. This is a temp server.<br/>
While we restore the Techkriti website, Play <a href="tesserac>/">TesseracT</a> :)

TesseracT was back up for the world! ;)

Praneeth had been trying to restore/reinstall the old phpbb that was on the temporary server (which was our Navya server (internal link) actually ;), and had gotten tired, given up, and gone back to his room. After >32 hours of staying awake, I was in no mood to finish his work. All three of us lumbered back to our respective rooms from the CSE deptt at ~3am.

We did, however, have enough energy to take a 60 second exposure picture of a flowering tree behind the CC on the way back ^_^

We found this photo to be such a beauty in the midst of our sullen tiredness, that we decided to make this the last page in the puzzle - which I did right after I got back to my room :)

As things stand now, the students' server is back up, and mod_perl is off on the server. So TesseracT is down for everyone outside IITK. People inside IITK can still play it at http://navya.junta.iitk.ac.in/tesseract .

On a different note, I read this here

The decision to use Tracker by default in Ubuntu rather than the similar Beagle indexing system is somewhat controversial. Beagle can index more content and provides a more functional search tool with features like date sorting. Beagle is already included in popular Linux distributions like OpenSUSE and has been tested more extensively.

I've been wondering for the past few months if this was the result of Tracker fanboyism, Mono-hatred, or Ubuntu's experimentalism.

Update: Pics! :)

Update 2: Utkarsh's flashback on the thing; mostly stuff that I didn't write in detail about above.

PS: New Navya Server = 2 Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.4GHz Processors, 8GB RAM, 500GB SATA hdd.
Speed = Compiling MySQL (gentoo) takes 6 mins (compared to 25mins on my Pentium M, 1GB laptop).

Today I discovered..

2007-11-03T08:17:00.000+05:30

To my extreme chagrin...

That my laptop cannot boot off USB drives :|

Roight.

2007-10-29T18:57:00.000+05:30

An amazing Antaragni just got over, and the semester-end is just around the corner. This kind of thing usually brings about two mixed feelings - the tension associated with the End-Semester exams, and the holidays that follow the aforementioned ordeal.

How would I rate this semester? If you asked me to describe that in one word, I would quote Zero Punctuation and "tell you to stop being such a twap", but if pressed (and I'm plagiarising off of him again), I think I'd go with ~~"Schizophrenic"~~ "Inconsistent".

The semester started off with me boistering with confidence that I wouldn't screw my acads this time again, but I ended up doing that anyway, and in some ways, worse than I had ever done before. However, unlike the previous times I had done so, this semester wasn't fraught with guilt or sadness for me, and on the contrary, this could've been said to be my best semester yet if I hadn't kicked college education in the nuts again. And this is why my first semester remains to be my best semester here yet.

"What could possibly alleviate sucky acads?" you ask? Well, I can tell you it has nothing to do with "love", so you can take that thought out of your mind and stuff it in a sticky petri dish in a dumpy lab in Indonesia for further perusal on students who have a ratio of girls higher than 1:50 in their college.

Roight.

Now that we have that clear, lets see what made me happy this semester. To be frank, I don't really remember, and my memory of most things before my trip home is incoherent to say the least. One plausible theory is that I reset my memory to forget the unpleasant things that happened to me before my vacation, and now that I dig deeper in my head, I feel bubbles of despair bubbling up again.
Hush. Lest the bubbles grow.

Lets look at what all I can remember without disturbing those friendly-bubbles (yes, they are friendly, even if not in the short term).

Good news:

I'm a Beagle developer now~! Thanks to Arun Raghavan for first introducing me to Beagle, and getting me interested in it, Debajyoti Bera for constantly encouraging me while working with him on Beagle's fancy new webinterface, and Kevin Kubasik for giving me my first boost into Beagle while working on Beagle's Ubuntu Gutsy packages :)

gnome-system-tools is (mostly) working on gentoo again! This is thanks to eva (gentoo's gnome herd) and garnacho (system-tools-backends' maintainer). I didn't contribute any code, but the fact that I was there to witness its development (and help in some testing), gives me joy :)

Laziness news:

I've been too lazy to work on the article for Gnome Journal even though I've promised the editors at least one article for the next issue :(

After making strides with Necoro on #gentoo-guis on Catapult, I sorta drifted off for a while (thanks to my vacation and Antaragni), and I haven't really thought about the project, not looked at the code, and not even contacted Necoro...

I had said that I would be working on a Gentoo backend for PackageKit, but I haven't done monkey balls in that direction :|

Slacked off testing/helping out in the stabilisation of the now ~arch GNOME 2.20 in gentoo..

And I'm too tired/sleepy this evening to catch up on these right now. And the cold I have isn't helping either :-/

Monstrously hungry as well; time for dinner.

Maybe tomorrow will be more conducive to fix my acads and my laziness (It'd better be. English assignment due on Wednesday).

Exams and a Questionnaire

2007-10-11T13:03:00.000+05:30

Right. So the exams are over, and now I'm too tired to even move. So I'm just sitting here listening to Schubert (I love my speakers, and I love Nodame Cantabile), waiting for tomorrow so I can go home for a week of vacations.

About the questionnaire, I originally found it on Naresh's blog, and thought I'd give it a spin. Here are the results:

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 38%
Visual : 61%
Left : 52%
Right : 47%

Nirbheek, you exhibit an even balance between left- and right- hemisphere dominance and a slight preference for visual over auditory processing. With a score this balanced, it is likely that you would have slightly different results each time you complete this self-assessment quiz.

You are a well-rounded person, distinctly individualistic and artistic, an active and multidimensional learner. At the same time, you are logical and disciplined, can operate well within an organization, and are sensitive towards others without losing objectivity. You are organized and goal-directed. Although a "thinking" individual, you "take in" entire situations readily and can act on intuition.

You sometimes tend to vacillate in your learning styles. Learning might take you longer than someone of equal intellect, but you will tend to be more thorough and retain the material longer than those other individuals. You will alternate between logic and impulse. This vacillation will not normally be intentional or deliberate, so you may experience anxiety in situations where you are not certain which aspect of yourself will be called on.

With a slight preference for visual processing, you tend to be encompassing in your perceptions, process along multidimensional paths and be active in your attacking of situations or learning.

Overall, you should feel content with your life and yourself. You are, perhaps, a little too critical of yourself -- and of others -- while maintaining an "openness" which tempers that tendency. Indecisiveness is a problem and your creativity may not be in keeping with your potential. Being a pragmatist, you downplay this aspect of yourself and focus on the more immediate, obvious and the more functional

So, they claim to have deduced the above 4 5 paragraphs from 20 questions. Though they sound very 'true-ish', I generally take these kind of things with a fistful of salt.

Hence, IMHO, an utter load of crap.

Fancy icons and a launchpad branch

2007-10-04T19:59:00.000+05:30

"Fancy" new icon for the Beagle Webinterface! ;)

Okay, yeah, I know I just added a blue "W" to the original logo :P

This is the "flag-logo" of the launchpad team and bzr branch that I created after dBera suggested it. It contains experimental being-worked-on^[1] code that might not be suitable for svn trunk. Besides that, it gives me more freedom to experiment and get feedback from people, since my patches don't have to go through dBera to the beagle svn trunk and trouble him each time I try something new :)

Also, Here's a treat for all those who read my blog - Pink by Aerosmith:

1. Midsems coming, which will be followed by a midsem break. So there will be a period of low activity followed by a mega-commit when I get back from home.

Webbeagle, TheOneBackend, PackageKit, and God

2007-10-03T16:55:00.000+05:30

Read about Webbeagle.

Read about TheOneBackend

Read about PackageKit

Read about God.

=> dBera's illegitimate child, and something I have been hacking on for the past 2 weeks.

=> Necoro's illegitimate child, and something that will be hacked on in the future

=> Hughsie's illegitimate child, and something I will be writing a portage backend for.

=> A very interesting way of looking at everything.

One Backend fer 'em all

2007-09-21T14:25:00.000+05:30

I had always looked at Ubuntu's 'Add/Remove Programs' app (gnome-app-install) and wondered whether it would ever become cross-platform and bring its unique simplicity to other desktops. Then, a few days ago, I came across PackageKit on #gnome-journal. At first I could not believe what I was reading, the cross-platform application installer I had always fantasized of was here at last! Over time, my enthusiasm faded.

Discussions with Necoro on #gentoo-guis caused my opinion about PackageKit's awesomeness to lessen as I realised that in its current state, PackageKit's simplicity undermines the main feature of Gentoo -- choice. There is currently no way to map USE flags to PackageKit's UI or its backend (although I think it could probably be abstract-ised in some way). Gentoo without USE flags is... what can I say?

It was after this discussion that Necoro came up with this brilliant plan of having one backend to support all the GUIs for Package Management in Gentoo. He then emailed a couple of people and posted his ideas on the gentoo-guis Mailing List.

His basic idea is that GUIs should be able to concentrate on getting the UI right and not having to worry about the talking with Portage/Paludis/pkgcore part. They all do the exact same thing there anyways (though some disagree ;), so lets save a lot of duplicated effort and give them One (highly optimised) Backend which they can all use, and after that they can happily concentrate on getting the UI to "Just Work" or whatever :)
Another big advantage of this is that any GUI using the backend will then support _all_ the Package Managers supported by Gentoo, a very desirable feature.
Its a great idea, and the architecture for it started out in a DBus-fanboyish style ;)

Package Managers
|
(bindings)
|
V
Provider Daemons
(in the same language as the Package Manager)
|
(DBus)
|
V
Backend Daemon (Python)
|
(DBus)
|
V
GUIs (Any Language)

This kind of crazy architecture was "envisioned" as a solution to the multitude of languages that were being used to make the Package Managers (Python, C, Perl) as well as the GUIs (Python, C, Haskell). Then, araujo brought us back to our senses by thumping us on the head with the proverbial `C_bindings_dammit!` hammer :)
The architecture then transformed into the much much cleaner

Package Managers
|
($lang-to-C Bindings)
|
V
Backend Daemon (in C)
|
(???)
|
V
GUIs (Any Language)

And so we come to the point of debate, namely, (???). Should the interfacing between the Backend Daemon and the GUIs be via bindings (in the same way as with the Package Managers), or should it be via DBus?

Some points in favour of bindings:

No need for a daemon backend process

Probably Faster

Might be easier to integrate into existing GUIs

The points in favour of DBus:

Interface/Communication becomes very simple due to the nature of DBus. Its communication based model means things can be kept abstract, slim, and trim ;)
(for an example, see the DBus interface of packagekit)

Now that the communication is completely clear, making UIs for it becomes easier, For an example, see this Ars Technica article on DBus + Pidgin.
Another example would be a (almost trivial) systray applet which could notify you of new updates :)

And then, best of all, integration with other apps (like beagle -- tell it to not index when emerging, or deskbar -- install an application by typing its name) becomes possible and opens so many channels of opportunity.

Plus, DBus just sounds so darn cool =P

All in all, I'd like to propose the following architecture, which could also - with some work - accommodate itself as a PackageKit backend interfacer for _all_ the Gentoo Package Managers at once :)

A Gutsy update for Beagle ;)

2007-09-06T07:12:00.000+05:30

I've recently started to help the beagle people a little with the testing of the Ubuntu Gutsy branch. Over a period of time, things had started going wrong, and beagle had gotten hit with the much-feared ftbfs bug(fail to build from source). That's when the beagle team went into hyper mode, when I joined in to help, and when after loads of work from the devs and some ubuntu-dev-nudging from kkubasik, the branch is now back in order! We'll be trying to break upstream version freeze for beagle since the current beagle in the repositories is simply broken...

kkubasik has made updated debs for gutsy on his PPA, you can use them by adding the following repositories:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kkubasik/ubuntu gutsy main

Do remember to remove them when beagle gets updated in Gutsy! (Keep an eye on this blog for when to do so :)

A 3rd person perspective.

2007-08-22T02:16:00.000+05:30

Imagine you're sitting; doing something - reading this blog. Now, look at yourself from a 3rd person perspective looking at yourself reading this blog. Now look at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself reading this blog. Recurse, till you get tired of recursion. I do that sometimes; when I want to stop thinking.
It never works :)

I haven't been posting much to this blog lately, and its not because I am too lazy, as I at first thought, nor because I don't have anything coming to my mind, nor that I don't have anything to say. Its because I think every blog post out in my head now. I mean, why do we blog? Or wait, set that aside; how do we feel after we blog about something?

We forget about it.

I have been "posting" in my head for really forever now, but of late it has become a regular ritual. I'm walking, I think of something, think about it for a while, then I think how it would look like in an article for Meander(our college magazine), or as a Diary entry, or just as a blog post. And in doing so, I sort of 'write the article', or the entry, or the blog post, and once its done, I... just forget it.

Right before going for my midnight dinner(from which I just came back), I watched the movie "A Waking Life". Its an excellent movie. If you like excellent movies, and trust me when I say its one, go and watch it now before you read the rest of this post.

Its about someone who is 'stuck' in a dream. Whenever he wakes up, he finds himself dreaming again. Its not the kind of "Groundhog Day" kind of movie, its a movie which starts off as being about what could be anything, and ends with us wondering if the Protagonist is dead. The movie in itself is an experience, it has an abstract plot, an abstract setting, abstract dialog, and an abstract ending.

As the movie progressed, I listened to the dialog intently, all the time being delighted that all that I had thought (and forgotten) over the years was being echoed and mirrored in the movie by the characters. The political, social and anthropological views and opinions, the concept of Free Will, everything, everything was mind bogglingly familiar, all echoes of what I had always believed. And then there were other things that I had never thought of, like the collective conscious, the concept that we might just live the entire rest of our life in the last 6-12 mins before our brain follows our body in death.

It made me think how it would be like to be dead and dreaming. I put myself in such a position, imagined how it would be.
At first, I found myself dismayed that all I was doing was worthless, that it was all for naught. That whatever I do was not going to be remembered, and that it would not really benefit society in any way. Then I realised that everything is about 'me'. Why would I want to do something that benefits society? Because it would make me feel good. And does society really matter? Isn't it all you? You want society to matter, so it does. There is no absolute scale by which to go, it is all YOU.
So I made myself think that whatever I would do in my perpetual dream would be fruitful -- because I would want it to be that way. And I came to the conclusion that it would be bliss; a rare chance to do whatever I wanted.

In this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics.

2007-08-18T22:28:00.000+05:30

... said Homer Simpson.
A story was published on /. today about a Nuclear Reactor in Alabama powering down due to increased river water temperature which made cooling inefficient. Here's a sample comment on why the reactor needs so much cooling.

Waste heat? Why not just figure out a way to turn waste heat into energy to avoid heating the river up unnecessarily?

And, its modded 4, insightful.
I mean, WTF!? Did these people go to school or not?!

More such comments here, here, and here :|

Edit: The comment I mentioned is now down to 1, Insightful. It was modded 'insightful' 5 times, modded 'overrated' 3 times and 'troll' 2 times, and everyone starts off at 1 =)

teh suck

2007-08-05T22:04:00.000+05:30

The previous blog post was really... useless :|
Too long, too descriptive, too jargon-ish for the n00b, and not enough info to keep a knowledgeable reader engrossed. Maybe someday I'll rewrite these thoughts in a site somewhere.
Speaking of sites, me and a couple of friends have bought some webspace. But I haven't really gotten around to do anything with it though :P

What is "Free"?

2007-08-05T04:59:00.000+05:30

"Think free, as in free speech, not free beer."
    ~ Richard M. Stallman

"Free beer?" you ask. "Think free," Superflex members helpfully explained at the launch, "as in free software."
    ~ Wired.com, on "Free Beer"

---

"Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry."
    ~ www.creativecommons.org

"[...] works licensed solely under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license are not free [...]"
    ~ debian-legal

---

Everyone contradicts everyone else over what is "Free", and what is not. Some have a very broad definition of the word "Free" which includes free food coupons and even gifts, while others talk about the Freedom of speech. This is basically Gratis vs Libre. But, even within Libre, there is a lot of inconsistency and misunderstanding. From here on, I am going to assume you are well-versed with the concept of "Free Software". If you're not, skim through the wikipedia article on it first.

In the above two sets of quotes, the seeming contradiction is of a different nature in both. In the first set, its a misunderstanding (and a play on words ;), while the second is a clash of ideas.

"Free beer" means beer "on the house", because the bartender has a crush on you, just won a lottery, or is simply in a good mood. And then we have "Free Beer". Beer where the recipe is Free, people all around the world contribute to it to make it better, and a new improved "version" of the beer is released every 6 months.

In the second set of quotes, on one hand we have the uber-paranoid Debian (not that that's a bad thing), and on the other hand, we have the Creative Commons people who had a more conservative view of the concept of the word "Free". They have since then (with version 3.0 of their license) fixed the problem and made it more in-line with the commonly held definition of "Free".

"What is this definition of Free you talk about?", you ask. Hmm, I'm not really an expert on that, so I'll just talk about "Free Software" (about which I know enough to blabber for a while at least ;).
"Okay, what the hell is the definition of Free Software then?", you say. Well, a lot of people seem to think Free Software means Open Source, which is incorrect. There are things that are Open Source and are far from free. They show you the source code, but you cannot modify it, redistribute it, or infact do anything with it except use it. That might seem fine to you, but it doesn't really work. The power of Free Software is behind the fact that anyone can edit it and improve it. So Free Software is a subset of Open Source.

Now, even within Free Software, there are several definitions of 'Free'. We have the GPL, the LGPL, the BSD license, the MIT license, et al. They are not just licenses, they are definitions of "Free".

The GPL created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) says

"If any code distributed under me is reused anywhere, and if that work is distributed as well, then it must be under me as well".

This might sound very restrictive, and in fact this is why some people dislike it, but that clause is to keep software free. Kind of like Fundamental Rights, the Right to be Free...

This kind of license is strong copyleft.

Now, the word "reuse" is ambiguous. Does it only mean using code directly in your program? Or does it also include linking to it? Turns out, the GPL applies to both of these. The only thing that is excluded is run-time linking to libraries. For the case of linking, the FSF created the LGPL (Library GPL)

"Use me as GPLed code unless you're just linking to me, in which case, go forth and link."

However, the terms are much more complicated than this overly simplistic sentence. This is mostly for libraries like codecs, etc which are made to be used by a lot of different software, hence the need to make them usable by non-GPL code. However, the creators of the license now recommend you to use the GPL for certain kinds of libraries. See here for why.

This kind of license is copyleft.

And then we have the BSD license

"I am Free Code, use me.".

That's it. That's the gist of the license, the code is Free as in Libre, but you are also free to subjugate it if you want :) Thats how Apple was able to take OpenBSD, make Mac OS X out of it and not have to release the source code for it.
In this sense, it has less restrictions than the GPL. For one definition of "restriction".

This kind of license is called copycenter. Kinda like, copying-center ;)

And finally, we have the public domain.

"I'm just lying around here, use me."

Things in the public domain are "Free" under ALL definitions of free. Its just there, not "owned" by anybody. Examples of things like this are mathematics. No one "owns" mathematics, no one can own mathematics, even if you invent something in it (like, say calculus) you can't "own" it, its all under the public domain.
In most countries, copyrighted/patented works become a part of the public domain after 20 years. However, the laws are complex and are different in all countries. See here for details.

This stuff is copy-everything =)

So, what do you think is Free?

Hey, long time no see!

2007-07-28T06:07:00.000+05:30

Hello people, hello blog, sorry I've been a bit disinclined to post lately which basically stemmed from laziness (I think). If there is anything to apologize about, I apologize for it. Gah.
Why can't people talk in "mind-talk"? A thought takes a bloody infinite number of words to reproduce exactly. Whoever invented talking deserves to get stuck in an infinite game of pacman :X
I was born too early. I should've been born 40 years from now, or when we became a Type-II Kardashev civilisation.
Why in the gobsmacked world is our net so slow nowadays?
And gaaah, my mood just changed so I won't be completing this post.

gasp

2007-07-17T11:31:00.000+05:30

This is gonna be an "OMG I haven't posted in almost a month" post.

OMG I haven't posted in almost a month.

Damien Rice..

2007-05-27T16:29:00.000+05:30

His songs are beautiful beyond belief; beaten only by the immortal Coldplay. They make me want to curl up and smile :)

9 Crimes, my favourite song and video by him.

Volcano,

Cannonball.

I haven't embedded them because flash really slows things down, and my blog is already slow as it is.

Emoticons ^_^

2007-05-27T15:44:00.000+05:30

[00] (.)(.) - No points for guessing ;)
Naresh will understand this one (^^)

:} - A cute little wide smile.
Naresh introduced me to this, and its my second most fav. Used frequently by him as well

*_* - Smile till your eyes become tiny
I have only seen Elina use this. And that too under rare circumstances

:) - Smile :)
Immortal. Used frequently by Arun

:'D - Laughing till you cry
Hilarity! Utkarsh uses this when he's ROTFLMAOing

:P - Tonguey
Always applicable :P. Used by me, Utkarsh, Praneeth, SidPrak, Elina, Naresh etc at random :P

:D - Laugh
Misused by Praneeth to the point where I have started hating it.

:| - :|
Probably Chintal's favourite emoticon, he uses it ~88% of his conversations. :}

=;=;
A complete mystery to me.^* Used by SidPrak to end every conversation. Which is followed by a ":P" by me :}

A lot of people don't have any characteristic smileys. And some never use any at all. But almost everyone has used ":)" sometime or the other...

^* Its supposed to mean something in Yahoo, but since i don't use it, I'm not sure what :P

Opera

2007-05-26T00:35:00.000+05:30

I concede. Opera is better than Firefox in many ways, though I still prefer Firefox :P
One of these is the way non-ascii URIs are handled in the location bar. Goto http://hi.wikipedia.org - You location bar will look something like this:

Yuck.
Lets look at how Opera renders it.

Better innit? Lets look at the Japanese wikipedia...

Bleash.

Much better.

This said, both display the actual article in the exact same way, and the problem is probably linked to bug #150376 in Mozilla Firefox. Not assigned to anyone, but it'll probably be fixed soon.

Feelings.

2007-05-23T21:11:00.000+05:30

Listening to the song that had been stuck in your head all day on Altec Lansing speakers.
Hearing someone mirror the exact same opinions as you in a group argument.
Listening to one of your favourite songs play at a party/club.
Meeting an old friend/crush after years of no contact.
The smell of the first rain falling on dry ground.
Walking into an Air Conditioned ATM at 1 in the afternoon.
Finding a more efficient way of doing something and having everyone agree with you on it.
Glancing at a pretty girl in the crowd and finding her looking at you as well.
Discovering a hard core Harry Potter fan and talking gleefully about how amazing the books are.

These and more are what keep me going through everything ^_^

Why Linux? - I 1/2 ~ Why *BSD & OpenSolaris?

2007-05-22T00:34:00.000+05:30

Why do experienced Linux users want to shift to {Open,Free,Net}BSD or OpenSolaris? They're non-intuitive to Linux users, have in general crappy hardware support (except for the wireless drivers in *BSD), and take up a lot of work setting up and getting used to. I'm not talking about "trying out" new stuff, thats an understandable thing, everyone likes to do that. I do it all the time. I'm talking about shifting to another OS.
You might say "same applies to people who shift from Windows to Linux". And you're right! To a certain extent.
Windows to Linux is an exception for reasons which I'll be introducing later; probably towards the end of this series of posts. All I'll say is that its related to "choice".

We have Ubuntu - A distro any newbie can use. And since any n00b can use Ubuntu, long time users of Ubuntu no longer feel "special", people who use Linux have normally been people with a desire to be "different". And they are no longer "different". So they shift to something a bit more unusual; say Gentoo, Slackware, or, for the truly masochistic, LFS (Linux From Scratch). What about those who've been using Gentoo all along? They don't want to get closer to all those Linux n00bs, they go one step higher. They shift to *BSD or OpenSolaris.

Yes Naresh, I'm looking at you. Gentoo traitor. :P

Why Linux? - I

2007-05-17T19:02:00.000+05:30

Why should I?

1. Windows is enough for me, never had any problems with it, why bother?
2. Stuff doesn't work on Linux, I won't be able to do the stuff that I do on windows.
3. Linux is not user-friendly/easy to use. I'll end up spending all my time fixing problems with it.
4. How can software made by people for free even begin to compare with software made by big corporations?
5. I'll have to use the console to do everything, how do you expect me to remember all those commands?
6. Everything will be too alien, there's too much of a learning curve.
7. The installation is too painful.

Why do people?

1. They are fascinated by the concept of "Open Source" and its philosophy.
2. They like hacking code, and like playing around with code. Hence they like Open Source.
3. They have to work on Linux/Unix (Yes, most academic work is done on Unix/Linux).
4. They run servers (Linux/Unix/BSD are perfect for servers. I'll come to this later)
There are two more reasons which I will introduce later.

We(Navya) recently held our semester-ly Lecture Series. The lecture was opened by Ankit Rohatgi, where he talked about the philosophy of open source, free software and choice. After ~1/2 hour, I was on stage. I began my lecture (no ppt :P) with

Okay. I'm an engineer. I don't care about the boring philosophy of Open Source, its intricacies and the hype around it. I'm a simple engineer who has to work on Linux, for whatever reason, and hence has to use Linux. And I'm here to show you how you can do all that. And more.

I then started off with the basic things people do on Windows; listen to music, watch movies, use GTalk or Yahoo!, check mail, surf the web, etc and showed them that it could be done with the same ease on Linux as well. I then asked them what else they do on Windows, and then proceeded to show them how it works on Linux as well (and in some cases, better than windows).

The height of the lecture was when one guy asked me if we could use usb keys/music players on Linux. I whipped out Naresh's mp3 player (which I had borrowed from him) and plugged it into the usb port of the laptop I was using to give the lecture. An icon showed up on the desktop showing the usb drive and a window popped up with its contents. I then opened Rhythmbox, which had detected it as an mp3 player and proceeded to play music from it. Sound any different from Windows?

Some people wanted to know if one can play games on Linux. Here's a list of open source games for Linux. For other games, there's Wine and Cedega. All in all, unless you're a hardcore gamer, you will be able to play 90% of the games you play on windows on Linux.
For completeness, lets list it all out^[1] (for Ubuntu, the most popular flavour of Linux):

Daily Use:

Web Browsing ~ Firefox*#(default)

Music ~ Rhythmbox#(default), Exaile

Movies ~ Totem(default), MPlayer*#, VLC*

IM ~ Pidgin^[2]*#(defacto standard), Gajim, Tapioca

E-mail ~ Evolution(default), Thunderbird*#(most popular)

Image editing ~ GIMP*#(default)

CD-Burning ~ Nautilus^[3](default), Gnomebaker, Brasero#

Document Editing ~ OpenOffice*#(default, compatible with MS Office)

PDF Reader ~ Evince(default), Acrobat Reader*#

Photo Album management ~ Picasa*, F-Spot(default)

p2p Software ~ Azureus*#, Linuxdcpp#

Desktop Search ~ Beagle#, Tracker

Desktop Applets ~ Gdesklets

Advanced Use:

C/C++ Compiler ~ gcc#(default, the best in the world)

Java Compiler ~ Sun-JDK*#(most popular), gcj(default)

Integrated Desktop Environment ~ Eclipse*, Netbeans*, many more

Vector Graphics Editor ~ Inkscape*#

3D-Modelling ~ Blender*#

Computer Algebra Systems ~ Matlab*, Octave*#

Non-Linear Video Editing ~ Avidemux*#, Cinelerra

Non-Linear Audio Editing ~ Audacity*#

Linear Video Editing ~ mencoder*#

Many, many, many more.

* Cross-Platform
# Used by me
"Default" means default in Ubuntu.

This obliterates Point no. 2 of "Why Should I?". I'll talk about Point no. 3 in my next post. About Point no. 4,

How many of you have used Firefox? Most of you probably use it everyday. Can you still say that Free Software is inferior to Proprietary Software? If you do, "Why Linux? - III" will elaborate how Free Software is superior to Proprietary Software.

1. I've listed this for Gnome, a desktop environment. Its not something an end-user needs to bother himself about, so I'll talk about desktop environments later.
2. Formerly called Gaim.
3. Nautilus isn't actually a CD-Burning software, its the file manager of Gnome. Similar to "Explorer" of Windows. You can use it to drag-drop and burn stuff.

MCIS

2007-05-13T11:45:00.000+05:30

And thats how today's morning started. I hadn't slept last night, unlike last night (or was I merely thinking so?), things were going wrong. Sadistically wrong. My best efforts couldn't stop me from making blunders or being subject to them. It was hot, it still is, I was missing something, but I couldn't say what. I felt as though something was wrong; was this a dream?
Then I came across this page. Momentary delight, I was floating. "Surreal", "Leaf", "Interpretive" was what I chose, and it led me to a sight worth beholding. A rush of colour and emotion, I was overwhelmed. And right before that, it said unto me, "Hello surreal leaf, you are who you are (thank you for being here)".
But things are now as they were... If only they would emulate a time further back.

I long for the time when, I long for the time when;
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness releases me.

EDIT: Come to think of it, the webpage actually made me feel worse... No points for guessing why :)

Toe - New Sentimentality EP

2007-04-27T05:54:00.000+05:30

Some of you have seen this video,

and if you haven't, you should.

Some of you will know that as soon as I saw it, I went gaga over the song and the band. I can say for a certainty that this song has changed my music taste forever. This and the webcomic Questionable Content :P

Now, after months of searching (actually, a month of giving up and not searching), I have finally found the album. Here it is, for your listening pleasure :)

Toe - New Sentimentality EP

The song in the video, Goodbye ~

Tsunagaru Haruka Achira ~

1_21 ~

New Sentimentality ~

The river Arun

2007-04-26T03:18:00.000+05:30

Arun is a river in Nepal.

And thats all I know about it. And apparently so does wikipedia. Now, since I know as much as wikipedia on this topic, I will surely get at least a B in tomorrow's CE242 (Geosciences) exam.
I mean, if wikipedia can't get a B, I don't know who can. The wisdom of the crowds has to count for something... Right? Right?

<bonecrunchingdryness>Yeah, right.</bonecrunchingdryness>

The other sex.

2007-04-23T17:01:00.000+05:30

I was reading panel 508 (SPOILER ALERT!) of "Questionable Content" and the last frame made me realize how utterly complicated girls can be. There was a time when I thought I had begun to understand them, but now I see the futility of any such attempt. You might be blessed by some initial moderate success that could swell your ego at having "Gone where no man has gone before and stayed straight", but thats before the inevitable crash and burn after which you rhythmically bang your head on a wall trying to figure out when the Universe stopped obeying the basic laws of Logic.

Also, you'll find that it takes up all of your CPU cycles to come up with a bad first order, valid for Δt → 0 approximation for what they mean. In O(nⁿ) time.

I have spent hours trying to figure out what to do in situations involving the fairer sex and have always failed miserably. People have told me I don't know how to "be smooth", that I am tactless, that although I see subtle hints, I always misread them, and that I will probably never be in a relationship because of this :P

<in denial>What the heck, not like it really matters.</in denial>

tweet.

2007-04-23T02:54:00.000+05:30

Tweet, tweet. Tweet.

Some changes.

2007-04-22T07:46:00.000+05:30

I have thought on this for quite some time and have decided to expand the content I post here to include stuff which would usually go to my "other", anon blog. I've decided to turn that blog into a secondary field of activity, posting only my deepest thoughts there.
Poetry/prose/lit-freak-fodder will now come here instead of going there. Unless it matches the first filter. :P

Also, I wish to streamline the content on this blog. No posts like this one and this one, and more like this one and this one :P

PS: This might also mean much shorter titles in general :P

xkcd junkie reporting live...

2007-04-21T03:03:00.000+05:30

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY

Intrigued?

:)

double-u-tee-eff-maite ~ Procrastination

2007-04-16T06:49:00.000+05:30

Yes, that is the only reason I am writing this post. Seriously. Its not because my head is about to burst from 10 hours of Korn and RATM. Its not because I have two English Assignments to submit in 9 hours which I have no inclination to complete. It is not because I have lost interest in everything worth doing or not worth doing as well for that matter. I won't go into a detailed description of what all I have lost to lethargy and how. I think the following five points should suffice to press my case.

I have lost Rs ~50,000 in competition prize money this sem just because I was too lazy to get up and go for them.

I have lost too many friends this semester (and the last) because I was too lazy. Worse, I don't care.
Even when I do.

I have successfully reduced my grades by one notch in all my subjects because I was too lazy to submit assignments/go for quizzes.

When was the last time I did my laundry?

I'm gonna end this post here.

double-u-tee-eff-maite

2007-04-16T05:22:00.000+05:30

So much to say, and so little inclination to do so :P

Yay

2007-04-07T20:54:00.000+05:30

Here comes a random post your way! If you don't have anything to say, type away to glory! Let the souls of a million proverbial monkeys fill you! Let creativity go to hell, let probability rule! I love ending sentences in exclamation marks!! Like this!! And this!!! And this!!!!
Okay, I should probably stop. Doing this ie! He He He.
Right.
Okay.
Hmmm.
Hehehe.
Right.
Okay.
Hmmm.
hehehe.
>:P
Baaah

You can have an entire conversation with these words, as I am willing to show anyone who is jobless enough to ask me.
Beware though, if I'm not so inclined as to suffer with you, I might put a chatbot on and go machao bhasad somewhere :P
"Machao Bhasad" is a holy term holier than the ten commandments. Though I believe the words "No Pissing here" on a yellow wall are holier than those most unworthy ten.
The Holy Words mean creating havoc. In basic words, which I dislike, and I would've started up on a long winded slightly humorous, mostly boring, gory description of the term if it weren't for the Open Music Concert for which I'm already late by 3 mins. So adios, ciao and good byeses.

Cya later!

Read me, Like me, Read me not

2007-03-30T09:36:00.000+05:30

There are three kinds of literature. One is which consists of must-reads for everyone. Which contain wise thought and will lead to a general betterment of all that read it. The poems of Robert Frost, written in a relatively simple language and essays such as Francis Bacon's "Of Studies" are good examples of these.
The second are those which cannot be appreciated by the lay mind and are purely works of art. They might not even be liked by all connoisseurs of literature. They often contain radical ideas and techniques, and are often intriguing to say the least. Examples include Franz Kafka's Surreal stories and Emily Dickinson's Lachrymose Poetry.
The third kind is that of literature purposefully written in a manner that appeals to only a specific section of the masses. These contains lessons and learnings that would do great harm if they were to be taken seriously by the wrong people.
A case in point is Emerson's Essay "Self-Reliance". If fools were to live by the essay, we would be surrounded by idiots who would abide by their own distorted version of the essay, living out their lives refusing to believe anything anyone says and refusing to follow basic social norms and laws.
For this very reason, I believe that the essay has been written in a convoluted style with curious word play, double negatives, heavy use of Old English and Unorthodox use of current English.
A fool would either be unable to understand it, or else would get frustrated by his constant need to refer to a dictionary.

Okay ~ Part 1

2007-03-26T09:02:00.000+05:30

Here goes...
People couldn't care less about anything that doesn't concern their immediate future or doesn't affect them directly. People lack foresight, are too busy living their lives to bother. People go around getting manipulated like pawns by people who do look ahead. People have a short memory, live in the present, caring about neither the past nor the future. The overflow of information around us brought by the Media and the Internet causes our "information filters" and our memory to grow, respectively, stricter and shorter day by day.
How many people remember what they ate for lunch yesterday? What they wore a week ago? When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me there was a time when people did. Those were the times when people had so little to think about, to worry about, and to remember. No TV, little radio, the occasional newspaper.
Look at today. TV with a hundred+ channels, the almost never ending Internet, magazines, celebrity gossip, and everything the media flings at us.
With all the noise, only things that are the most hyped about come out on top.

Sure, thats what news and gossip is about right? The latest? But what about things that DO matter? Like our country's budget? How many people know about that? Or if they know, care about it? Will it affect their vote? Will they even vote? I'm drifting here. Back to the point.
Humans survive change by three means:

Resisting it

Adaptation

Evolution

People have constantly tried to resist change. Its an instinct. When they can't, they adapt for now and start to evolve. But evolution takes time, and when change occurs too rapidly, adaptation is the only way out.
But adaptation has its limits. You cannot change physical capacity with adaptation. You can only optimize it to a certain extent. And that's what's happening. We are getting stretched out. We cannot handle this world we have created.

People are lost.

Democracy will lose its meaning (almost has), Society its point (pretty soon), the Media will become a medium of pure entertainment (already has) and everything will decay (most of it is already is). The powerful will slowly become more powerful while we just sit and stare. It will happen too slowly for much notice, and before we know it, we will lose everything we stand for. Freedom, equality, justice, and life.

Boink.

2007-03-07T13:57:00.000+05:30

Blog Post to tell you all that I am still alive.
I just have waaay too much to write about. When that happens, there are two kinds of reactions by people. Either they go on a blogging spree, or they stop blogging.
I'm too lazy to do the former :P

The New Ten Commandments

2007-02-26T06:14:00.000+05:30

I recently read this post by DC Simpson on his blog "Bird Brains". He talks about how people have come up with a more moral version of the well-known Ten Commandments. I cannot help but agree with him on this point.

Go on, read the post.

Bleah

2007-02-17T04:29:00.001+05:30

Bleah Bleah Bleah.

Yay!

2007-02-07T15:58:00.000+05:30

My Exams are over!
A chance to slog harder till the next midsem has arrived!
Hooray for all masochists! =P

You see, I actually end up studying the least during midsems. I finished Quake 4 in two days. Yesterday and day before. I actually finished it and then went to write my TA201 exam in the morning today :x
Now that its over, all I can think about is going to class tomorrow and doing my lab report(s). *roll eyes*
Oh well. Doesn't matter when you study as long as you do study :)

Prof. Noam Chomsky

2007-02-03T18:23:00.000+05:30

I think I might just start worshipping this guy...

Also, take a look at this cartoon taken from www.idrewthis.org

My First Post...

2007-01-27T19:03:00.000+05:30

...in a LONG time.

Bheekling's Rantings

GNOME 3 on Gentoo and related news

Systemd in Gentoo

Managing alternate browsers

Freenode Fails.

Random observations about Communication

Gentoo Mozilla Team meeting decisions

The Gift of Attention

Haruki Murakami

A New Haven for Journalists

Infibeam Rocks.

What The Bloody--

"Free Speech"

"Global Warming"

What's missing in Btrfs

What's missing in Btrfs:

I don't understand this

Breaking the monotony

GDM 2.24 aka SMB (Shoot Me Bloody)

An important announcement

The much-delayed post

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

<3 X, PulseAudio, and DAAP

Google Summer of Code, Gentoo

Wheeeeeeeeeee

portage/pkgcore rhyme

'tis a time to rejoice

mewants

Far too true:

A Few of Today's Webcomics...

rohitj and #fosskriti

portage-talk, gsoc, gentoo, ntgwn, and more

Raghu Dixit's Tribe...

The beauty of Pearl Jam

I love you guys

wth?

Fossकृति!

Right Where It Belongs

げんしけん (Genshiken)

TesseracT and the Techkriti T-Shirt

Tekkon Kinkreet

Art, Media, Games

The previous 48 hours

Today I discovered..

Roight.

Exams and a Questionnaire

Fancy icons and a launchpad branch

Webbeagle, TheOneBackend, PackageKit, and God

One Backend fer 'em all

A Gutsy update for Beagle ;)

A 3rd person perspective.

In this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics.

teh suck

What is "Free"?

Hey, long time no see!

*gasp*

Damien Rice..

Emoticons ^_^

Opera

Feelings.

Why Linux? - I 1/2 ~ Why *BSD & OpenSolaris?

Why Linux? - I

Why should I?

Why do people?

MCIS

Toe - New Sentimentality EP

The river Arun

The other sex.

tweet.

Some changes.

xkcd junkie reporting live...

double-u-tee-eff-maite ~ Procrastination

double-u-tee-eff-maite

Yay

Read me, Like me, Read me not

Okay ~ Part 1

People are lost.

Boink.

The New Ten Commandments

Bleah

gasp