Category: General

Ok, I think I finally did it. I stopped my laptop from booting up. Now I’m a sad man. After a year of abuse, christmas morn was when it decided it’s just too much to take. I panicked, removed like 27 screws trying to get at its gut. Couldn’t. Yanked, banged, screamed, begged, pleaded – and everything else in between. No use. Still some arbitrary blinking LED pattern is all I can see. Now I have to give it to the “professionals” and have them fix it. And that sucks, because if I lose my data and stuff I’m a dead man. Not just “sad” anymore.

Apart from that, the day has been good. Spoke for ages to parents after a long time. Felt good. Then been feeling guilty about getting stuff and not bothering to take the time to buy things for other people. Now that I have to remedy sometime. Probably next year. There is also this issue regarding something I now call the realm of careability. Not the brightest of nomenclatures, but it has to do. It refers, vaguely, to the set of people who I know I “care” about, and to what degree. It was pretty clear and rigid, I thought. Now I am not so sure. It’s not so bad. I just am scared of not being sure.

Hmm. I just returned from the Lord of the Rings—The Return of the King. Sure, it was expectedly gorgeous, but it was also insanely long and detailed. Tedious almost. It’s 3.5 hours long or some such. It was moving at points, and generally ends happy, so all is well. Yes, I almost shed a tear or too. I will not go into the reasons.

I now have too many questions with the story line, and I hope that’s made me curious enough to survive the book. There were a bunch of interesting teaser previews, The Butterfly Effect and a movie based on Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’. Need to be curious enough about those when they’re out. Sure, the “preview” for the robot movie looked more like an ad for some product. It’s here, if you’re curious.

Ok, the term is kinda sorta officially over. There was this rather insignificant incident near a gas station yesterday. As I was walking by, this person filling up his tank goes “So yo, school’s out?”, you know, I would assume rather surprised to see someone with a backpack on the 23rd? Anyway, I explain to him it’s out and that I am just crazy. And then I decided to not go back to work for the rest of this week at least. Not that I am not going to do anything related to or think about work at home, but just not physically be there.

And I keep hearing this music about how wonderful a time of the year it is. It doesn’t feel inherently anything positive, let alone wonderful. But being the conditioned drones that we are to being brainwashed by marketing drivel, I hope they can help me fake being happy to me. If that makes sense. But then again, there is something inherently happy about holidays.

And so, happy holidays and all that.

For some reason, this group, the HackER “defacement” TeAM or some such have decided that this is a popular enough site worthy of being cracked. So they did. Some things are broken as I’ve restored them from early back ups. Like the site counter has dropped from 11500 odd to 8000 odd. Relatively small stuff like that. And the links on the side were increased later on too. Doesn’t really matter, backed up databases, again.

Jeez. Is it just me or is there this huge cold dose of pent up harsh stuff I haven’t ever experienced been just WAITING to hit me all at the same time? The world’s a lot more fished up than I give it credit for. Thank you so much humanity. I just love having to deal with this too right now. You know, considering how fishing great things have been going (imagine Dorothy, or lil Red Riding Hood skipping along gleefully on this path singing this happy tune without a care in this world – then negate it completely). Thank you so much.

Except he’s not little, nor tells stories.

No points for guessing whose eyes have been on leaky faucet mode all day. I mean it’s quite insane. Happy carol on TV about hope and happiness – tears, stub toe on sofa – tears, stress smoothening f e code still broken – tears, generally sit around – tears. Sometimes it’s coupled with some emotion/memory, sometimes, just tears. I have been drinking even more water and so on to compensate for such bodily fluid loss. I showered for almost a couple of hours in near steam and feel a good deal more relaxed, and more in control of the renegade tear ducts. Shape up little duct thingies, I’m a male, society expects me, and in turn you, to meet some standards. Anyway, all that time I was abusing my skin to feel better about myself; I came up with the old horse wanting to cross the river story. Of course, it’s not the least bit good, but it means something to me.

So we have this old horse that�s always been on one side of this river. Now, I say old, not age wise, but in his head. He’s (yes, it’s a male horse) stuck in his own ways of doing things, and fears deviation. When he was a kid, his master (probably doesn’t exist, and not important to the rest of the story) fitted him with blinders. These were magic blinders. Not only did they force him to only be able to look straight ahead, they also had this intense electromagnet that suitably aligned itself at an angle with the earth’s field and that forced our poor horse’s head to focus only in one direction – the other side of the river. Now, to put things in perspective, this is a cold cold country, Greenland say. The water is frozen, but just so, and it’s not frozen solid enough everywhere. He must be real careful about how he chooses his path to get to the other side, to avoid – freeze drowning. As much as he can turn his eyelids within the blinders� constraint, he can catch the shadow of a rickety bridge. A very rickety bridge. (How does he know this from just the shadow? He’s an intelligent horse, and trained well in structural mechanics.) So now he has a choice, he can choose to carefully plot out his path along the frozen portions of the river, or choose the rickety bridge. The problem being, he understands he is large (though we called him little) and the bridge is definitely rickety, and if it breaks when he’s on it, he’ll crash through the ice and – freeze drown. So given the choice between the rickety bridge he barely can see, and the complicated, long drawn path ahead, he chooses the ice. He may have been wrong, and it was a hard decision to make (for a dumb horse anyway. Come on. Hey, you just said he’s smart. My story. My horsie.) Now, why all this complication to get to the other side you might wonder. He sees luscious grass on the other side. (Now I have no idea about the dietary preferences of horses, but this little/large smart/dumb horse thing needs grass to live.) Now, to must of us regular folk, grass is just part of the scenery. It looks good, and we like it if it’s there, but aren’t terribly annoyed if it isn’t. But not for our horse. That’s his primary diet, and this grass he sees looks perfect, beyond perfect, and wet and juicy. He was dying to eat her it. Not in a, he really wanted to way, it was so much more. It’s like he needed it to live way. (Need I remind you that a horse’s dietary requirements are different?) Now this place is cold. The grass he’s been eyeing and needs to get to feels cold and frigid. Since he’s insanely intelligent and wants to make sure it’s happy, he builds all sorts of contraptions – from those green house domes to keep it warm and unfrigidey, to sprinkler systems with happy nutrients sneakily mixed in the water and other things. But he can’t get across. So he builds another contraption to get them to it, and he does. (If he’s so intelligent, why didn’t he just build something and fly across? Because he’s dumb.) So now as far as he can see, the grass is in its happy place. It still looks luscious. Now there is another strange complication. He doesn’t want to just go across and trample it either. Which was another reason why he didn’t fly across in the first place. He now concentrates a large deal on the icy pond, using all his mental resources (not too much, he’s a HORSE remember?) and plans his path. Very slowly. It is a lot more complicated than he had anticipated, and he was a lot less magically gifted than he had once assumed. But he braved on, charting and mapping and planning and what not. In this time, the horse being myopic as well, he stopped looking at the grass and starts staring at patterns on the ice. (How did he see the grass earlier? He had glasses then. They broke somewhere along the way. Stop it with the annoying questions). During this time, this wasn’t ordinary grass as he’d always realized. It was special. The specialest grass in the land. In any land. (For purposes of assigning a gender to said grass, and for advancement of the story at different points, this said grass is governed by a grass fairy. A female fairy.) It wasn’t stupid grass either. It noticed the new glass bubbles and what not keeping it warm and making it happy. It begins to wonder who might this be? And the fairy with her telescopes spots our friend builder horse on the other side and lets the grass know. (So, since this is always the sequence of events, whenever I say the ‘she saw’. I mean the grass asked the grass fairy, she saw and let the grass know.) Moving along, there comes a point when the grass really wants the horse to be on this side. She starts wondering why the horse doesn’t just cross the damn river? Isn’t there grass there too? Isn’t there grass anywhere else? What gives? Now in order to complicate matters further, the evil master had our horse fitted with these magic blinders when he was born. So the poor horse doesn’t know anything else. He’s so engrossed in his plans to get across (now not focussing on the grass, but everything else in between) that he fails to notice there are a bunch of storms where the grass is cold (cheap construction materials used in the previously mentioned glass houses). She begins to wonder if he even wanted to get across any more. Time moves on. One day our fairy can’t take it any more, and flies across the river to confront the horse to see him furiously working on plans. He explains them to her, and how much he needs to get to the grass, while coming up with his hover pad so that he can be there, eat her it, and not trample it at the same time. Now another rather sad portion of the story I neglected to mention, these blinders weren’t “fitted on” the horse in a regular removable way. He’d been put through extreme surgery to prevent it from falling off. The fairy doesn’t notice this, she keeps attempting to yank off the blinders and show him some of the other shrubs (in a “shrubs are soo much lower grade and unneeded compared to the specialest grass” way) that are right there. While doing this (she’s a VERY strong fairy type) she yanks of part of his facial skin and one of his eyes. There the poor horse stands staring at the grass with the other eye. His eyes all leaky, not tears, but blood.

No, I needn’t have made it gory just at the very last moment. And for those wondering, the fairy and the grass are not the same thing. This is a generic grass fairy that tends to the needs of all grass (or so she thinks). The grass was what the horse really wants to get to. I also forgot to get into how the blinders also further complicated things in explaining to the specialest grass it was the specialest – when all he could ever see was it. That’s for another time, my fingers and head hurt.

Ahh yes, the evil term hasn’t ended yet. You just freaking know the longer it’s dragged out, the more things that can go wrong, will. But then again, it can’t get too much worse. I mean, with a sort of breakup (no, that wasn’t the word used, but you know what you feel), not entirely stellar performances in classes, near non performance at work, what else is left?

Sure, I could be walking down the street where I get hit by a drunk truck driver (not the driver, the truck), hit a power pole and get electrocuted, get through all of this in extreme pain, but alive, and freeze slowly to death in the ice while one eye watches the other being eaten by maggots. Sure, yes, it can be worse if you really concoct situations that are highly unlikely.

It’s like this fishing dark curse. What happened to the glorious times, when people wanted you, all those straight A+’s, travelling around the country talking to smart people?

Life is not fair. Good karma build up is a myth. And I can’t wait for Monday.

There must be something wrong with me. I just saw the movie again. Don’t I realize there is a change the channely button on the remote? Which reminds me, the Hissyfits.

Support small bands.

Contrary to what I expected, my semester isn’t going to be done until Monday, and I am totally fine with it. And in other news, write one insightful email to a list and get stuff like so.

Dear wahgnube,

I just thought I will introduce a popular science magazine to you, which I happen to be involved in running. Science India is in English, and is published by the Swadeshi Science Movement. All of us work for it on a voluntary basis. If you can, please feel free to contribute articles/news items/comments/whatever. You can send them to me or to editor@scienceindia.net. The magazine is meant for lay readers starting from high school students.

You can take a look at the website www.scienceindia.net.

V. Sasi Kumar

Yes, good stuff.

Aww fish it’s 3 already.

This term is almost done, but there is just so much more to do. Things have piled on and on, and I have not been able to stay focussed on one thing long enough to do it, let alone do a decent job. I feel dead and drained, and have nothing to show for it. I am not happy. It’s been horrid, and I can’t wait to get this term over with. I don’t care how “well” I do, just want it done.

I want to lock myself up in some tower somewhere and read. Away from reality. Away from people. Away from all this cold, dull and gloomy weather. Away from all the nonsense around. Just me, and some quality books. No windows, no chirpy non birds, no non sunlight. Nothing. I don’t quite care if it’s the “holiday season” and everybody should be happy celebrating and relaxing or some such. Enough is enough, if I want/need to know, I will.

And yes, I have been terribly frustrated and whiney as a result. Every single person who’s been willing to talk to me, however random they may be, or how little I know they care, has had to put up with quite a bit of me they aren’t used to. Starting off and mostly pulling off 4-5 classes was a bad idea.

Even if I make it through without near failing courses or getting fired, it still is a bad idea.

You know things aren’t going entirely according to plan when your mechanisms for handling TODO lists, which document what you need to do, breaks under the load. This is quite funny if you’re looking at it as someone else, which you are. I never “do” anything, I plan to do, I plan how to do, I document all this in different places and it just sits there. And this is not a very small scale cheap system. It’s rather complicated, spanning 3 computers, lists on the fridge, notes tacked on my wall, stickeys all over the place, among other things. Now on the computers, they get more complicated, from simple text files holding simple tasks, to rather complicated things like those “scheduling programs” that remind you when you need to do something. Anyway, there are meta lists that point to other lists. They are all classified and cross referenced based on levels of importance, similarities of tasks and other criteria. It takes a good portion of my day just making sure all these lists are up to date, and not pointing to something that doesn’t exist, or tasks that have already been completed (yeah right, like that’s ever happened). If I could just put a fraction of the time that goes into these things into actually doing something. More importantly, as a result of this, I can’t “just do anything” just because it popped up and needs to be done. I always have a big set of backlogged stuff that needs to be cleared first, so this enters the queue – vaguely a first come first serve system, barring some changes based on importance, and rarely, whim. For instance, the other day, I heard this song which reminded me of someone. Now I rush back in, and no, don’t shoot off an email. I find the appropriate list and go “Yes this song -> this person -> when it happened”. Done. One month later, it still sits there. And the person’s surely decided I’ve forgotten about them. The smallest of things, I had this rather odd experience when a deer grazed by me a while back. But I didn’t write about then, it just ended up one another list. Now I’ve forgotten about it, and it doesn’t seem all that special or important anymore.

When I said things are going badly in the TODO list management scheme, things are piling up faster than I can jot them down, let alone do them. Lists are being lost, and sets of tasks are being forgotten forever. Sheesh.

For instance, I come home. The place is a mess. The cupboards are bare. The fridge is empty. Anything that remains is way past its expiry date. I have nothing to wear, as nothing’s been washed. There are papers everywhere, but nothing I need can be found. For instance, (this is an example within an example) things look bleak towards getting the MS in my hand this semester. Why? Technicalities. Like I didn’t ask for my undergrad degree from my parents early and give it to the records people fast enough. Or I did ask my parents, and I did get it, and it’s somewhere in this mess. Ah well, I’d never know, until I track down the related lists. At least it wasn’t something terribly important and that can’t wait.

Ah well. Need to look around for roommates, sign or not sign leases, exchange wrongly delivered music, throw old food and buy something to eat, pay bills, find out degree related things from higher level people, catch up on a bunch of mails before people classify me as someone who doesn’t care, find something clean to wear, and most importantly, get some intellectual work done.

Speaking of roommates, males are messy, loud and smelly. And not entirely fun to talk to. If they do talk.

Hmm. This is weird. I want to type something out, but just because. There is no real reason for existence for this set of words. Generally getting active(r) as a higher level mentor sort of free software advocate. I could ramble about that. icc 8 is out, and I can’t wait to get stuff built on it. This is exactly what I need to get into hacking a body of code I’ve been putting of for whatever reason over the past few months. That’s a worthy enough ramble topic too. In this relative downtime, where I’ve not been bothering to update the site in mind numbing frequency with text and pictures, I’ve thought about and tried some stuff as preliminary things leading to future design decisions. They are beginning to fall into place in my head. And after a lot of hullabaloo (is that even a word?), I don’t think there is going to be a tremendous change in the frontend of the site. I will be moving (as much as I know how) to an XHTML based design that looks just about the same. Just a lot leaner and meaner. WordPress will be used to power all pages, not just the weblog. There is an inherent badness with moving. My google rankings have fallen from 3-4 to like 90 for the blog. Need to carefully con another system to get it to behave the way I want to. I’ve got the aggregator up, and will be themeing and moving it to aggreg8.wahgnube.org, to be a central place to get your daily dose of noise from a variety of people. Cranked through the disclaimer again, and now it’s fairly small and readable. Figured out a bunch of stuff about my camera, in this recent (ab)use flurry. Interestingly, it can store images at a much higher quality than I realized it could. (Some 18 MB a picture, as opposed to the 3-4MB I usually shoot at, and the 10-200KB I post on the site.) But then again, it isn’t all rosy, because it takes a good 10 seconds to write the largish images once it’s taken them, and you can’t do anything else with it in that period, like quick successive shots or what not. The little, ok, not little squirrel has run far away. Then there are relatively not tech issues, like premature balding. As in how premature is really premature. Isn’t it premature at any time? Or Christmas, and how many years a guy can get away with the “I don’t know the customs, and therefore am excused from buying you stuff, but has no issues with taking” scheme. Or Family Guy on adultswim being another reason to not sleep early. Not to sound like a homeless person or anything, but I had my first warm meal this weekend after how long, I can’t rememebr. There’s Saddam’s capture, that’s diverting people from the other issues like they were no weapons found, and people responsible for the WTC related incidents are still at large. I tend to not bother about world issues and politics and general news and things like that. But there are some things the media won’t let you not know. Like Paris Hilton doesn’t want to party any more? Aww, poor her.

Meta logging. The future of writing. And no, I don’t have ADD.

It saddens me to see how so many people underestimate how much our minds can grasp over extremely short periods of time.

Bwhahahahahahahahah. Just one more rather major hurdle, and I’m done jumping through hoops for a while. Then things like the picture of the day, verbose posts, generic nonsense and all that should be all back to normal levels.

So here’s the deal. I decide to work, but then I decide to check email. I fancy one mail on the FSF Friends mailing list and decide this is the best of times to unleash my wisdom and experience. Now all that is fine. It’s taken a while and my reply still hasn’t ended up on the list. Now I think it’s been “lost” and I don’t want to go away and hope it will be fine. I have to stare at the stupid mail client till it shows up. Sheesh.

And for whatever reason, I am pasting it here. Just so that I can feel someone read it.

Greetings.

Firstly, it’s nice to hear teachers at colleges taking the initiative. When I was in school/college (and still am for that matter), we weren’t explicitly told about the ideals and goals of these projects, but we were exposed to a good deal of them since there were (and are) labs running these software, and we were using them often.

But, (I don’t quite know whether to refer to you as Balachandran or Sir, so I am going with neither) I am sure once you talk to your students you will be pleasantly surprised how much they have already been exposed to GNU Linux and other Free Software, and how much they have figured out on their own and from other people. From personal experience, anybody who I’ve known to be curious or read any magazine related to computers or technology has popped in a distribution install disc and tried playing with it at home. This has been, again in my experience, in high school, when they have finally decided they are brave enough to partition their hard disk. Many of them have gone on to be full time users.

I think what I am trying to say is, a fair portion of the people, by second year in college have tried it, are using it or have friends who do. It would be nice if you could identify these people, and help them influence people they know to try it, or help them with installation or in other ways. This, I have seen is the easiest way to get people comfortable with it. My parents, for instance, don’t have an issue now with using Mandrake GNU Linux (granted their usual realm of usage doesn’t propagate too much beyond Galeon, gaim, OpenOffice.org and Ximian Evolution on a fairly standard GNOME desktop). But they wouldn’t have made an attempt to get it installed on a machine themselves. Once that is done and everything is set up to “just work”, they are comfortable without proprietary software. Anyway, enough of my personal experiences and to attempt to answer your question in a college setting.

My suggestions include (not all are necessarily feasible, I know):

* First, on the same note as above, organise a local user group for people who use these software, at a college or larger level, so that they can meet once a month or so and help/influence other people. (This is also a sort of social event for the geeky types. We need to get out more. At least this way it’s with like minded people to an extent.)
* If the primary work environment in labs is Windows based (which I am assuming it is) have the lab administrator install a fairly recent GNU Linux distribution on a separate partition and indicate to the students they can boot to it if they want. (Again, I am assuming you do not wish to remove the windows partition just yet). There is usually a rather common misconception that free software is harder to use, because it is free and used only by hackers. Once people try it, they could realize they were not entirely right. Plus there is usually a lot of cool stuff, the GIMP for instance, that can catch people’s fancy. I’d have to say, superficial as it may be, programs like the GIMP and eye-candy in environments such as Enlightenment (no “real” updates in ages) made it cool and fun to use. Which is actually quite important when you are in school.
* As a step leading to what I said above, replace (or install along side) standard windows software (such as MS Office, IE, Outlook Express …) and other proprietary software, with free equivalents (OpenOffice.org, Firebird, Thunderbird …). If people get used to, say OpenOffice.org on windows, and they realize it runs just the same or even better on GNU Linux, they will find it easier, and hence be more willing to make the shift. (Again, in my experience, environments such as Cygwin are generally of very different quality, so please don’t make it a users first experience. They will tend to assume all software on an “actual” GNU Linux environment performs that way.)
* Please don’t force the coursework, in your case (I am assuming programming) to depend on the nuances of a particular compiler or platform (graphics programming for instance). Teach them standard programming practices based on rigorous standards, so people can use the compilers and build chains of their choice. Again hoping this will allow people to delve into GNU software, such as gcc, gdb and make. It will be hard to say, yes, GNU Linux can do this and that, but please code in MS Visual C++ because your assignment requires some win32 specific headers. The same goes for using, say Word to type out reports. Introduce them to Latex or a similar program, which may be harder initially, but once they get the hang of it, the quality of their work will be higher. ( I am not a student in the field of computer science, so am not entirely sure what really goes into the curriculum. The same logic also applies to say, HTML/XHTML, SQL and whatever else the curriculum might contain.)
* As a practice, in general, following the same vein of the previous point, don’t use proprietary or patented formats as far as possible for anything and set an example. If you want to play them, say an audio clip of a talk, use an Ogg Vorbis file and not an MP3. Someone will definitely notice this, and ask you why. Then you can use that as an opportunity to explain the ideals, which I have reiterated as my next point.
* In classes, indicate the ideals and goals behind such projects. They will realize for themselves the technical superiority (or where it is lacking) of these tools in comparison with their proprietary counterparts. Once people understand the ideology, they will appreciate it a lot more. The ones so inclined will also contribute code, financially, bug reports etc.. to help these projects grow.
* And please don’t call it OSS.

I could come up with a few more if I really thought about it, but I will wait to see how people feel about this existing set before I do.

Just another student and FSF associate member from the month he started earning,
Me

balachandran c wrote:

> Hi friends,
>
> I have an opportunity to teach a few courses to computer science students at Engg. college tvm. I would like to know your opinions/ideas on introducing the students to OSS. Though I havent had much interaction with the students yet, i believe that most of the 2nd year guys are not familiar with Gnu/Linux.
>
> PS: Im new here
>
> Balachandran Chandrasekharan

Finally left home for a bit. Spent the last couple of days preparing myself to convince myself to think about getting things ready to work for tomorrow’s test. No matter what people say, I will NOT call it “final exam”. Test does just fine, and just makes it seem a lot more approachable. Anyway in all this getting notes and what not in order, I figured I had stored a bunch of things at work which I hadn’t taken home.

(I know I have issues with starting work upto some 16-24 hours before I have to be done. Stopped fighting it.)

Had to leave to get it. And that sucks, because it’s snowed quite heavily and being outside in general, sucks. For some reason I just remembered scenes (or are they dance sequences.. it doesn’t really matter) from desi movies on tv where the scantily clad heroine has fun rolling around in the snow on some mountain side. Yeah right. I wonder how much they pay her to risk death via hypothermia.