Category Archives: Just Scribbles

emerge

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“The phoenix must burn to emerge.” ― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

after gone missing for more than 2 years i have emerged back from outer space back to this lively blue green planet. lot of things have changed, both from my end and in the world around me. the geek in me have been shadowed by the responsibilities of a husband and a father. and my work life gives me no more opportunity to be the geek i was. the hacker spirit is long gone and am merely surviving.

this could be another futile attempt to re-emerge, though am no more practicing the craft to be able to write anything of use to anyone. but there are things that i wrote way back that still draws attention of the searching souls and many times prove useful to them. am happy to be of some help, hope i can do much better.

This Blog Is Not Dead

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This blog is not dead, it’s just me who doesn’t post.

I still get an occasional thanks for a very old post and am happy that I could help someone looking desperately for an answer, like I once did.

Life has changed a bit but priorities have changed a lot, what I found curious then have become the way-it-is now and hence my attention have turned towards other things, especially those which have come new into my life. Those who know get the clue, and those who don’t I just hope that I’ll be able to come back in sometime, may be not as much as I was but better than what am.

Till then, singing off…

some time no post catching up

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Three weeks since I moved back to Chennai, the first week went off in settling down in the new rented house with packers and movers shifting stuffs from Bangalore, some electrical, carpentry and plumbing works getting done, Airtel broadband getting installed and a lot more. The next week saw me traveling 60 km a day, to work and back home  put together, leaving me all tired to try doing anything else other than having my dinner and catching some early sleep so I can get up early the next morning and go to work. As Internet is under restricted mode at work, no possibility of catching me up on line during day time from now.

Works been sounding interesting so far. Bought a book on Probability and Statistics and catching up some idea so I would be able to perform better at work. Hopefully would start committing code from Monday. I fortunately landed up a day before the CEO came down from US of A, especially for working with our team’s new efforts for some time. It’s been great going though all I have been doing these 2 weeks was to get into the grove with the rest of the team and the code base.

One of the happy things is that I am not asked to work on a Windows machine but a Centos machine with KDE3.x on it. Also that I get some nice breakfast and lunch, and more importantly coffee/tea/chocolate milk any time I want 😉

Traveled over the newly constructed Guindy Grade Separator aka Fly-over few times from all directions and it is indeed wonderful. Hope lot of such projects keep happening to address the worsening traffic conditions of Chennai. As a downside, they reverted back the one-way rule around Ashok Pillar to the earlier problematic turn-any-side so that all those traffic jams is coming back to embrace us back.

Nothing else interesting enough to be blogged. With around a week left for Jaunty release, need to catch with the junta and all the excitement of yet another Ubuntu release.

digging up

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My mom wanted my good ol’ cupboard to be cleaned up and junk stuffs thrown out so she gets some space to use. This little piece of wood built into the corner of my ex-room has served the past 8 years as a store house of all artifacts right from my child hood, though a few things got their place in the “paran” above.

I have my entire collection of Digit and LFY in it, but don’t know what to do with all these mags which I don’t read anymore. I do not want them to be put to the paper wala.

I dug up the first copied of the magazines which I edited and/or co-authored during my school and college days.  I find them to be totally amateurish and unprofessional now, especially the type facing. But those are precious, and the very experience got me my first job.

I had an entire collection of science and maths books from my schooling. I even picked up one to brush through probability and statistics which I very much need now. And in the deep bottom of all these were all the marriage invitations of my cousins.

I discovered my notes which I had made during my non-academic learning process, especially on microprocessor programming, Matlab, PHP, Python, HTML and CSS, ABAP and lot more. I also found all my puzzle books that I had bought during those days when I attended at least one test/interview every week for getting my first job.

One of the magazines actually had pictures of my college department staffs, super seniors and seniors, and I was trying to figure out how many of theirs names I still do remember. Well, I could remember most of the girls’ names 😉

Finally, I moved up two bags full of (may be around a dozen+) books from the cup board to my existing book shelf, realizing that I will be finding it hard to accommodate the books I buy in the future 😛 I have 3 books on Red Hat Linux and 4 books for C++ (I have 4 books on Python as well, all from O’Rielly) now.

wireless usage – february and march 2009

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The day I read a blog post about setting up vnstat to monitor network usage, I had one setup for my wireless network which I normally use at home. It’s been running for the past two months and been providing some interesting stats on my internet usage at home. Here are some snapshots as of today,

Monthly

vnstat-monthly

Hourly

vnstat-hourly

Daily

vnstat-daily

Looks like my typical use of wireless at home happens between 4 PM to 10 PM on weekdays, maximum being 6PM to 8PM. During weekends am using extra internet as I usually leave my mail client and messenger/IRC on most times. Well, this is just my usage at home which obviously happens in the evenings. Will also have a watch over wired interface which might give day time usage at work.

were you lucky to see this?

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Were you lucky enough to notice what Google gave for your results this evening? Whatever was searched for, below every search result link, there was a warning message, “This site may harm your computer”. Looks like some malware filter got goofed up, but Google got it fixed before I could tell my friends around. For those who missed it, here is a chance to look what we saw…

Google says it's harmful

Google says it's harmful

closing down 2008

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We went to Bamboo Shoots sometime last week and at the end of the lunch they give a Fortune Cookie.  And mine said,

Treat the past, as the past… now is the time to start anew

I feel we should have gone there for New Year lunch, and the above fortune would have suited well. But I take it to be for the new year. 2008 will, in another few hours, become past and all I have to think about is 2009. Am not sure of the starting anew part, though there are indeed few probable things in the list. Whatever be it (may be in another post sometime later),

Wish You All A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year. Hope it turns out to be a very great year for you and all your planned, unplanned endeavours to be successful. 🙂

the book meme

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Though am not in Planet Ubuntu, I thought of adding to the ongoing meme. The rules are simple,

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Here’s mine from Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman,

Whenever information needed to do a task is readily available in the world, the need for us to learn it diminishes.

Well this seems good enough as a reason for using GNU/Linux 😉

it arrived

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When I moved to Bangalore, I managed to bring with me a reasonable collection of books. I had a *free* bookshelf in my earlier house that I could manage to keep them safe somewhere. When I moved down to my current house, what I lacked was a decent bookshelf to stack my books. As a result, they were lying around in my bedroom and mom was always complaining that she couldn’t clean the room because of this. Hence I decided to buy a bookshelf big enough to hold my books. The idea got procrastinated for a few weeks and finally bought one this weekend.

Here is the newly arrived bookshelf and after it got filled with the books I have.

new bookshelf

new bookshelf

filled bookshelf

filled bookshelf

Now I need to bring a few more books from Chennai and get some more to fill the voids here and there 😉

the naming meme

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This happening with two happening planets in the interweb of our blue green planet, the Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, so I thought of putting it into Planet FLOSS India too. Kartik had already posted and here comes mine…

What have you named the computers you own?

My Laptop’s ex-name: Helios (Influenced by Aaron Toponce’s post long back)

My Laptop’s current name: Garuda (Trying to name it after Hindu mythological bird)

I only have a laptop and no other computers, so that’s it. What about you?

Catching up

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Am either lazy or find no time to sit and craft a blog post. Anyways, need to catch up with things once in a while and keep this blog alive.

Ubuntu Developer Week happened between September 1-5 2008 at #ubuntu-classroom in irc.feenode.net. It was very informative and useful, introducing to a wide variety of topics from bugs to patches to coding to testing. I managed to catch up with a few of them, even tried to try it hands on during the session. It was one smilar session that I got used to bug triaging months ago, and this time it was Daniel Holbach blessing me with more gyan about patching and packaging. There were other wonderful sessions on Upstream Bug Linkages by Jorge Castro, a WebKit browser in PyKDE by Riddel, Unit Testing Python code by Lars Wirzenius, Introduction to Bzr by David Futcher, and a lot more. I plan to convert these logs into properly formatted documents and load them to the ubuntu-in wiki. The participation in most of these sessions were awesome, with the opening session by Holback drawing around 200 people to be on the channel. Discovered a lot more ways to contribute to Ubuntu and need to work a lot more on it in coming days.

My dear buddy from ILUGC Aanjhan Ranganathan aka tuxmaniac left India and has safely landed in Swiss soil, even settled down in his accommodation. Will be missing him a lot although he is always present in oru channel #ubuntu-in. He is the one who always gives me lift in his car whenever we both were in Chennai and could attend ILUGC meet. Best wishes to him, as this is one of his long existent dreams which has started happening 🙂

Watched my much awaited KDE Usability Project talk by Celeste during Akademy 2008. Videos for talks from Akademy 2008 are starting to appear and the here mentioned talk can be got as OGG video from here. Looking forward for the video taken during the Usability workshop conducted during Akademy 2008 as well.

That’s it for now, catch you all soon..

lost my buddies

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No.. No.. Nothing sorta bad news. For long time, was having an idea at the back of my mind that my buddies in Pidgin weren’t properly organized. I had multiple entries for the same person, in multiple categories, sometimes even under wrong names when their screen name didn’t give a clue of their actual name. Something drove this feeling too  strong yesterday night that I decided to reorganize my buddy groups. As there were many groups and too many buddies under them, I thought of removing all the groups and starting from scratch. What I didn’t realize was my buddies were within these groups so when I delete them they do not move into some “uncategorized” group but rather get deleted along with the group as well. Only when I removed all the groups I realized that I have lost them all and I have to again add everyone from scratch as well. This is indeed a PITA as I have to first find screen names to add, that too from 3 of my accounts. This was one stupid mistake of mine, I should have myself created one “default’ group and move them all to that before deleting the empty groups.

I somehow managed to add all close buddies to Pidgin again. If you had me in your messenger and hadn’t pinged me since this weekend, please do so I can add you again 🙂