Having gotten used to pixel-smoothed fonts on the Gnome terminal for quite a while now, I opened up an xterm for some reason and ran an htop in it. This different look of the fonts (bitmap fonts?) made me pause for a moment there and say to myself, “wow”.
Category: Software
Nothing much. Mundane. Lethargic. Hopeful. Bleak.
A few days ago, the Students’ Gymkhana in the campus came up with a somewhat “April Fool’s Prank”-like decision when they were serious about dropping Techkriti and Megabucks from the Gymkhana calendar and introducing a “techno-entrepreneurial” festival. Now, don’t ask me what “techno-entrepreneurial” is. At the moment, it sounds like certain people in the campus are catching the Capitalist world’s bugs or something. It’ll probably be a techfest like usual with some gambling in the name of “business”, perhaps. What is sad is that the name “Techkriti” shall no longer be in active use. The Gymkhana President has called for an Open-house meeting on this. I can only hope that those in power don’t kill off Techkriti so easily. Megabucks has been disappointing to some no matter what people claim and Techkriti was just hitting the popularity charts among the technical college croud in this part of the country. Sub-events like FOSSkriti have made a huge mark in the past two years and several corners of the planet recognise FOSSkriti as part of “Techkriti – IITK’s premiere techfest”. Afterall, Megabucks, too, started off as part of Techkriti back in ’98 (approx.) – if reducing the number of events per Gymkhana term is a concern, merging Megabucks back into Techkriti should surely cause less harm than blowing the daylights out of Techkriti itself?
Speaking about the number of events that are organised in the campus; IITK, primarily, is an institute of technology. Some bright young ones recently claimed that so is MIT- and yet, MIT doesn’t restrict itself to activites purely technical in nature. Sure, MIT is a huge place with a large faculty in various fields and all – and more importantly with geniunely interested students. Unlike the scenario in our campus – where research isn’t really a flagmark these days (mind you, we’ve got some excellent professors here and yet most theses or undergraduate final year projects aren’t as awesome as they are elsewhere), the activities in other larger institutes that seemingly betray their name have a good reason to be doing so – there are *people* who’re not, say, selfishly looking for personal gains alone. The local newsgroup has been pretty active at discussing these outright Talibanistic decisions that were made in the present Gymkahana’s first meet. I hope this doesn’t cause too much of a damage in the long run. Slow Talibanisation has been happening right here in the campus for a while and very few seem to notice it. Also, I seriously suggest we drop NNTP altogether and switch to reddit’s code – unless there’s a sizeable population still stuck with console-based nntp-clients.
Galaxy – a controversial event in its own right has been resurrected. Well, it’s good and all. But hey, the end-semester exams are right around the corner. But last night’s “Naruto Fan Quiz” was a welcome addition to the set of mundane events that happen in any cultural fest up here – dancing to crappy tunes, lame drama, etc. About half of L1 was filled up last night. It was a good surprise. But the anime community as such exists in fragments. Could be a good thing if the junior batches put aside differences and for a single community. Oh, but wait, I think they’re mostly fragmented because there hasn’t been enough interaction across batches in the past couple of years (thanks to anti-ragging policies which hasn’t really helped those who actually require it). Meh, whatever.
Apparently, Galaxy was resurrected in the hope that Hall days of respective halls would be put an end to. I mean, honestly, they were all a waste. Cheap, half-assed entertainment, the same old standard party food (various kinds of Indian bread, some panneer, you know, the exact same old food which people never seem to get bored of), obligatory invitations, general noise pollution, and so on. One Galaxy for a few days, in several venues throughout the academic and Outreach area, fought between teams made up of members from a bunch of halls, may not be such a bad idea.
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I happened to notice a particular feature of Google Chrome (yes, I haven’t looked up the list of features of Chrome yet, and I believe that good interaction design is when one doesn’t need to go through a list or read up plenty on – at least on a browser, duh). So, here it is. You may have visited several websites that have a general search box in them. The next time you want to search something in such a box, don’t visit the site as yet. Type the URL, for example: “thepiratebay.com” and notice what appears on the right-end of the address bar.
Now, press TAB as it says, and enter your search keywords. Hit ENTER. Voila. Beat that fat-fugly-browsers.
Something really interesting happened on one my workstations which had this weechat IRC client running on it.
Weechat is this irssi-based IRC client for use on a Linux console. The features page lists certain interesting ones and while I first chose it over irssi, the compelling reason was proper proxy support (authenticated ones). I had little idea on how the “FIFO pipe for remote control” would be helpful- until this happened this morning:
I’m usually connected to the Freenode and Rizon networks. Rizon is primarily the japanese-animation/drama hub for various fansubbing groups. Mostly used for co-ordinating among fansubbers and providing XDCC leech bots. So, here I was, leeching an episode off of a particular bot, and not realising that the download had completed, I moved (mv) the file from the default download location (~/.weechat/dcc) to the approriate directory (~/Backups/Videos/Film). This I did, on another console within screen, I switched back (C-a C-a) to the console where weechat was running and was surprised to see that the file I thought had completely downloaded still going down around 98%. Shocked, I `ls -l ~/Backups/Videos/Film` and get even more shocked to see that the file-size of this moved file had grown a bit. What was happening here? When my disk is out of space and a download breaks due to that, I’d see a “broken pipe” message in the log window, so what happened here, I think, is what they mean by “FIFO pipe for remote control”. Even after I had moved an incomplete, currently downloading file to a new location, the download continued without any usually expected re-actions one would see with software on Windows or software such as LinuxDC++ (locked files).
That was an interesting experience and an interesting feature I’d love to see in more software. Good job, weechat. Copy-pasting off a weechat window is sort of stupid, though, owing to the nicklist on the right and fancier formatting. Overall, it’s been good.