Month: February 2007

Categories
College Life Mess

Food just sucks

Food just sucks It sucks and it sucks all the time. I hate oil, dirty, spent oil. Today’s lunch in the mess was a combination of the worst horrors. There was rice (probably the safest thing), dal, some sort of sabzi containing peas and diced carrot probably sauted in stinking, spent, burnt oil. .
And, of course, the usual, FAKE sambar. I just can’t tell you how fake that is. Deciding to go for the custom-cooked egg-fried-rice another nightmarish plate was awaiting me. Just about anyone shows up at the egg counter and starts preparing in whatever manner he conjures up in his mind. This time it was someone new. The culprit, unfortunately for him, that made me hate him was the f**ked up oil he used. The bad taste still lingers in my mouth as I write this.

This is kind of dal I expect (which my mom is good at 🙂
And, this is sambar.

Horrific.
reporting from hall5 mess, IITK.

Links for the day:

http://www.route79.com/food/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine_of_Karnataka

Categories
Linux/BSD Software

The quest for performance

Yo,
Several distros such as Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Fedora Core are pretty n00b friendly and desktop-oriented. A lot of optimization must’ve gone through into these distros. Binary packages and nifty package managers are features. Where it hurts or matters most is when you want customizability in the “Gentoo sense” 🙂
Take for example a typical make.conf
you have flags such as USE, CFLAGS, and so on. One of these (which gets automatically highlighted red by vim is LDFLAGS ). MS Windows XP’s GUI et al feels a lot snappier compared to Gnome on my box. After I set the following LDFLAGS and re-emerged world, I’ve started to notice that my Gnome doesn’t suck as badly as it used to. I’ve posted this on the newsgroups (intranet) and people have asked me for benchmarks. But, although I didn’t do any (forgot actually :P) I ‘feel’ a sense of life flowing back into my system.
A lot of googling told me that the Ubuntu developers have also done something similar with their packages. There is an article on LWN that explains LDFLAGS a little. There are a couple of threads on Gentoo Forums.

LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--sort-common -s -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,-z,now"

Make sure you go through the man page of ld for self-satisfaction.

Categories
Linux/BSD Software

Fonts, good ones


Not sure if people who know me have noticed it or not but I seem to be ‘obsessed’ with fonts. The first thing I do whenever I install a linux distro is to go and fetch those apple fonts and set them as the default ones with appropriate settings (autohinting, smoothing, etc.)
The blog post here has the link to the apple fonts and make sure you go through Gentoo-Wiki‘s article.
Here’s my gnome-font-properties‘s screenshot. Notice that I’ve turned off hinting (Hinting: “None” radio button). Try this even if you’re not going to install apple fonts. It give a whole new look to the fonts you might already be using: BitStream Vera or Dejavu.
Happy Gnome-ing 🙂

UPDATE on 25th of Feb, 2007:

Finally, this is how my /etc/fonts/local.conf stands for my Samsung SyncMaster 740N LCD.