Category: Personal

Categories
Linux/BSD Personal

Updates as of 23rd Oct. ’09

I don’t know if it’s just me but there are these days in an week where I tend to worry so much that my productivity drops to near-stagnation. Just nothing seems to happen other than a tense me appearing tense. Anyway, I’m just recovering from a somewhat unhappy experience with my Karmic Beta installation on my laptop. Yes, it’s another ooh-nareshov-does-another-distro-shift post. And here’s what happened.

First, I get a call from Vadiraj on a Wednesday morning, out of the blue, from Goa. Apparently, his friend and he planned a noon-trip to this place just to score something that’s allegedly only available there (in India, i.e.). He wanted me to do a quick Google to give him some pointers. Unsuspend my laptop, I did. To connect to the internet through my USB modem, it failed. No matter what I tried – wvdial, pppd, NetworkManager – I couldn’t connect. And I went on a reboot-and-try spree. No luck. All that happened was me end up with a laptop that’d get stuck at boot trying to fsck my filesystem. Enraged, I was.

I reach office and start moving my stuff off of my laptop preparing for a fresh-install. Of, *shudder*, Arch Linux. Installation was pretty straight forward. But I didn’t really enjoy it as much I did Gentoo or FreeBSD. Not to mention all that sorcery trying to get my USB modem to work being unsuccessful. (At some point I had udev identifying my device as a CDMA modem and hal identify it as a GSM modem).

That night, no internet. The next day, installed Debian testing. But I had the same darned problem of being unable to tap my touchpad to click on, you know, things. The GNOME which Debian-testing featured didn’t have that tab under System > Preferences > Mouse where I could enable “Tap to click”. A quick Google suggested the use of GSynaptics – which had a “Tapping” tab where I promptly enabled “Enable Tapping” and had my Aha-moment.

Phew.

Oh, and, today I get a pay-your-internet-bill reminder. And I did it within minutes of seeing this. And here I am, about seven hours after I did that and back from a pretty decent string chamber orchestra organised by the Bangalore School of Music for raising funds for the Karnataka-floods relief, blogging about why my USB modem wasn’t working and the things I did in the past few days.

And regarding my worries. Wanda the Fish, the fortune teller had this to say:

First thing Wanda, the fortune teller, said.
First thing Wanda, the fortune teller, said.

P.S.: That was my first click on the Wanda-the-Fish GNOME applet after installing fortune-mod earlier today.

P.P.S.: On the upside, I got a chance to do a fresh ext4 install after all this.

Categories
Personal Work Life Worldly Matters

Updates as of 3rd Sep, ’09

On Independence Day

Time. Remember not to complain about it.

On August 15th, Terence drew something really interesting during the painting competition that was organised at our office. It was a view of our hands: the left one holding a dice and the right one holding an hourglass. I don’t quite remember the complete explanation he gave about his poster, but part of it went like this: The dice represents randomness in life and the hourglass, time. And taking chances at the right time is what we have in our hands. A simple, yet powerful message. Additional points for being wise enough to be able to distinguish between what you can do and what you can’t.

Let’s not talk about my poster.

I’m not sure how this is other dog loving countries across the world, but certain observations which I’ve made in the past few months are:

1. Most rich dog owners do not own Indian breeds – but mostly non-native breeds.

2. Far too many stray dogs.

Questions:

1. Do the other dog loving countries tend to not own their own native breeds and, say, prefer Indian breeds?

2. Are there just as many stray dogs in such countries?

Other, possibly related questions:

1. What’s with the recent trend of blonde dancers in Bollywood *cough* dance sequences?

2. What’s with the sudden influx of all the fugly Indian counterparts of North American style reality shows on TV?

3. Why am I even writing about such things on my blog?

Other

Bought a bunch of popular science books (Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose). Yes, I’m not really a reader but I’d love to pick up the habbit. On a related note: due to poor internets at home and office, I’m hereby bankrupt in the Anime department. There are shows I’d love to watch. I guess I’ll have to wait for better times.

Bad news

My kittie was killed by three dogs on 14th night – the night before the Independence day. It had hardly lived for twenty days in our house. My mom, sis and I are dearly missing him. Oh, and, those three dogs were stray dogs. They’re currently employed as watch dogs by immigrant masons who’re illegally staying in the same locality where we are.

Kitten

Categories
Home Personal Travel Work Life

Updates as of 23rd July, ’09

It’s been a long time since my long post and unsurpisingly, I’ve hardly had anyone enquire about my blogging status – barring a workmate who told me I should continue blogging. I was going to anyway. It’s just that the sweet pleasures of having a 1Gbps internet connection isn’t available anymore.

I landed in Bengaluru on 2nd June. For about a two weeks there was no internet. I looked into the various options that were available – the usual ADSL connections from BSNL, Airtel, TATA or the CDMA datacards from TATA, Reliance. I signed up for TATA’s ADSL and after getting a demo on TATA’s Photon+ (CDMA datacard), I decided to cancel the ADSL connection and go with Photon+. Pros: Good speeds for the price, cons: no scheme with unlimited downloads available.

Anyway. On 18th Jun Tirupam and I left Bengaluru for Thrissur. The occasion being Vishnu’s marriage! It was good to see familiar faces in a setting such as this. Lalit, Mitesh, Ankit: it was good to see you all again. Thrissur, as a place, wasn’t half as bad. Kerala as a state seems to be gifted with plenty of natural resources – the greenery, water, weather. Given such naturally endowed excesses, it probably makes the society somewhat mature and financially pretty well off compared to the neighbouring state – Tamil Nadu – which continues to be a large exporter of ground-level labourers (I realise that it’s not that simple, but, yes, Keralites are lucky).

Moving back to Bengaluru now, I’m still identity-less. My College’s I-card has expired, and more importantly is of no use here. I have no driving license yet. No PAN card or any of those fancy things yet. Recently, Nilekani has taken up a role in the Indian government to work on an nationwide ID card for all. I wish him all the luck and I hope I get one soon. I’ve even postponed buying that TATA DoCoMo SIM for that!

Oh, and, I’ve started working in a Free Software company now. I’ve still got a long way to go before I shed my lazy lifestyle that I had so gotten used to in college. Work needs to be done.

Lately, my blog posts have become less technical. Those Howtos and whinefests have seen a decline. I’m hoping to fix that soon as I can. I’ve been looking at how Kerberos, LDAP and ejabberd are expected to work together and since it’s taken me more than a week I think it deserves a blog post. Well, Kerberos is optional at the moment, but it’s something I’m hoping to understand why and where it’d be useful. Makes me miss Gentoo now – where I’d know exactly what’s changing. dpkg-reconfigure, although friendly, does things and assumes certain defaults which I have no idea if they’re sane or not. More on that later.

Work place is a really cool place. I had an image of cubicles and serious faces but this is kind of homely and somewhat relaxed. We even play some football on the rooftop once in a while. I miss some good folks whom I spent a lot of time with during the last few months at college – Settem, Basit, and co. and Shanks.

Last Saturday, I caught up with Tirupam and we went to visit UB City. It’s a fabulous, albeit affluent, supermall. We looked around, window shopping mostly and settled with having a close-to-authentic pizza at an Italian restaurant up there. As it turned dark, some live music lightened up the place. It’s good to see Bengaluru getting more and more musical.

A couple of days before that meet, I was looking for a music store that dealt with double bass. Lucky me. There was a place right behind my work place. Unlucky me. It costs quite a bit (he quoted 16K – which by international standards is very cheap and probably not even worth it; but I’m just a beginner – and I told him that I’d be back when I had the money). I’m having trouble deciding if I should go with a modern bass guitar or with a somewhat large and bulky double bass. Bengaluru is kind of crowded too, moving around with such a thing, in a bus, would be interesting, if not dangerous. Oh, and boo at all the affluent folk who travel alone in their cars on every-busy streets of the city.

Must get back to work.