Mind.random()

The Yin and Yang

Arun — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:02:17 +0000

Last night, I was watching the movie “Street Fighter - The Legend of Chun Li”. Though the storyline is about a girl who takes revenge for the abduction and murder of her father, there was subtle but strong message in the movie. Master Gen, who trains Chun Li in Wushu, was actually a former accomplice of the villain. He mends his ways and tries to make good of his former evil actions. At one point in the movie during the training, he drew the “Yin and Yang” with his legs on sand. How meaningful and thoughful.

I slept over with this thought. After reading the rest of this text, I am sure many would say to themselves “Hey, I’ve been through this” or “I have done this” or even “I was this”. Over a period of time we have all seen the good and the bad side of life and people. Our fight has always been more to prove that other people were wrong than to satisfy our measly ego. In simple words, we are fighting for those people who show their summer side after proving them wrong.

Toggling between the mean Booking supervisor in one station and sweetest and caring Booking Supervisor in another station in Railways, between the exploiting Senior booking clerk who forced me to work his shifts and another Senior Clerk who helped me buy the first branded shirt for my first birthday alone and between the supervisor who made me have lunch everyday at 4 and the supervisor who bothered to bring me lunch everytime he returned from his home in Trichy, between the molesting whores and Khalasis when I slept on the platform and seniors who offered to share their homes for me to stay, between the Police Senior Reporter who bailed me out of the greatest personal problem in my life and the chief reporter who purposefully prevented me from attending classes at 7 in business school saying “I wouldn’t allow you to use this office as your launchpad”, between the Inspector who treated me like $hit just because I was 20 and the DSP who treated me like his son bringing me tea on late nights, between the considerate SP who cared to ask why I refused to take a work and a chief reporter who got me transferred to Sivagangai for the same reason, between the girlfriend who ditched me for my own friend and the girl who attempted suicide for me (I am lucky to have married her) … the list goes on an on… and things arent any better today.

Yesterday, I saw an Indian who shivered and offered his seat for a man who carried a “few days old” infant. The man was standing with the kid for at least 10 seconds in the middle of the train and nobody else bothered. Previously, I used to have the general thought that everybody gets when they travel across seas.. “why am I not good looking?” or “why don’t I belong to that race?”. Those thoughts were long gone and yesterday I felt really proud that I am an Indian. If it were India, the same scene would have been funny. The whole train/bus would have stood. Of course, I don’t deny the existence of those “confused Desis”.

The downside of the past and the way “Yin and Yang” is balanced is painful but I have something to carry for the rest of my life. Somebody quoted, “If a book is able to give you one single point to ponder, then it has served its purpose”. Taking the nature of my job into consideration, I am done reading more than half of the book and have a lot of things to think over. A month ago, I was reading the book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a Professor from Carnegie Mellon, diagnosed as having terminal Pancreatic cancer, having three children - two of them infants. He wrote some valuable notes for his children. The read was emotional. The downside is that he was dying and is trying hard to instill memories of him to his children. The upside - he knows when he is going to die.

PowerISO for Linux (Unrecognized Parameter error)

Arun — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:10:43 +0000

Just realised today that PowerISO (http://www.poweriso.com/download.htm) is available for Linux and its free too. I have a weird feeling of liberation nowadays though i have been using Linux for more than two years now.

The manual goes like this

Usage: poweriso [parameters] [-switches]

list List files and directories in image file. Example: List all files and directories in root direcory of /home/sam/test.iso . Command: poweriso list /home/sam/test.iso / -r

extract

   Extract files/directories from image file.

Example:  Extract all files and directories in root direcory of /home/sam/test.iso

to /home/sam/test recursively.

Command: poweriso extract /home/sam/test.iso / -od /home/sam/test

convert Convert image file to other format. Example: Convert /home/sam/test.daa to standard iso file Command: poweriso convert /home/sam/test.daa -o /home/sam/test.iso -ot iso

Do take note of the “/” before -od and -r. It throws a weird “Unrecognized parameter:”

Middle finger for Microsoft !!!

Arun — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:56:10 +0000

Microsoft is becoming a house of ironies in more ways than one. Sick support of ODF on Office 2007 SP2 has been old news. Now the latest news hanging around is that their search is going to be Hadoop/Hbase based. I am sure you are already thinking “Isnt Hadoop, an Apache project?”. Yes it is. So much for the anti-open source shouts from them.

MS Search = ( ( ((Hadoop)Lucene)Java) + ASF) && (! .Net) && (!Dignity)

That’s their business formula, I guess. I wish i could curse now !!!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/09/201210

Random thoughts

Arun — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:48:11 +0000

1) Read that the open source movement got a big spur during the 2000 slow down and researchers estimate another spur now. Very evident by the increase in the number of participants and projects. Blessing in disguise but lets keep the laid off in our prayers.

2) Planning for integrating IzPack into Snapman over the weekend. Successfully implemented the InfixToPostFix conversion and evaluation algorithm. Need to have more tricks in my bag (Man !! i really wish i got good comp science education)

3) Had trouble running azureus on Jaunty Jantelope (Ubuntu 9.04). Executing from terminal showed that it is looking for open jdk 6. So, just installed Open JDK after uninstalling the gcj. Noob fix but still it solves my problem.

4) Bug # 1 in Ubuntu bugs.. hahhaha https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 Yup. Thats the real bug.

I think i seriously need to develop some expertise to write something daily for my blog.

SnapMan 1.0 released

Arun — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:39:39 +0000

I was looking for something like JScreenSpy for monitoring my laptop’s usage. Unfortunately, there isnt something around except JScreenSpy and a portion of JScreenSpy rewritten in Python (pyScreenSpy). More to my disappointment, I found no source code for the project.

So, I thought I could write something myself and released “SnapMan” yesterday.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/snapman/

Here goes the description of the project

SnapMan is a tiny java program with an integrated timer (opensymphony quartz). It takes snapshots of your desktop in regular intervals and saves it into a specified folder. Intervals and target folder is made configurable. Intervales are all Cron/At compatible.

The code is released under GPL. This is my first “public” code. So, please let me know if i need to improve (or tell me i am nowhere). All constructive and destructive comments are welcome.

I will probably be writing a Cron expression generator this weekend because i find it very difficult to pick up. I specially like the Gnome Scheduler interface (Python) with immediate translations to plain english.

I am also planning to make the target folder of the pictures encrypted (any pointers will be highly appreciated)

Oracle buys Sun — The funny side

Arun — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:05:35 +0000

I was reading this article on slashdot and found this response particularly interesting.

What the fuck is “netbeans”?

They are the seeds of the internet. You plant some and sprinkle them with bits. Eventually they grow into a huge series of tubes. How do you think the internet was created? With lots and lots of netbeans.

RedHat Linux and Solaris, MySQL and Oracle, Bea backed Eclipse and NetBeans, Peoplesoft, Siebel … good for Oracle but doesnt it sound more “Microsofty?”

Loads of fun about hackers

Arun — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:14:43 +0000

Must read. Hilarious !!!

http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

Cuba says “No” to Microsoft

Arun — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:33:19 +0000

Looks like Microsoft is evil in more ways than one.

http://www.osnews.com/story/20963/Cuba_Says_No_More_Microsoft_Joins_the_Linux_Bandwagon

Is brain multicore?

Arun — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:51:33 +0000

I am not a psychologist nor a brain surgeon. But this question has been running over my mind for quite sometime and the real spark to blog about this came in yesterday when i was going through one of the fantastic articles i’ve ever read in recent times (The Free Lunch is over) (The article was published in 2005, however).

Warning : The main intention of the blog is to fool my brain into compiling what it thinks about this subject and not to derive any conclusion. Fell free to leave a comment as to what your brain thinks.

Leaving alone the technical stuff, there was this portion of the article which was intriguing.

…just because it takes one woman nine months to produce a baby doesn’t imply that nine women could produce one baby in one month…..Can you conclude from this that the Human Baby Problem is inherently not amenable to parallelization? Usually people relating this analogy err in quickly concluding that it demonstrates an inherently nonparallel problem, but that’s actually not necessarily correct at all. It is indeed an inherently nonparallel problem if the goal is to produce one child. It is actually an ideally parallelizable problem if the goal is to produce many children! Knowing the real goals can make all the difference.

Fortunately, unlike computer processors, our brains’ benchmark is not in nano or milliseconds but then parallelization is still a problem. Is brain able to process more than two things at the same second, I leave that question to the experts. But what i mean by the brain job parallelization is the ability of the brain to do more than one thing over a period of time, say a month or a year.

I know guys who have been pursuing more than more task, given any point of time in their life. They fare well in academics, sports, music and later you find that they are good in cooking and has the ability to speak more than one language. Absolutely no relationship among the tasks they do. Our brains have a better scheduling algorithm, automatic priority management and most of all, very less that we know stays on our harddisks (sub-conscious), it’s in the memory (conscious) for easy and faster access.

Of course, for argument sake, we could say computers do games, play music, learn and speak more than one language but then deep down under all it understands is two numbers. And computers don’t get tired. Umm. May be, but their brains are always kept cool to do that. We too have a mechanism like that but seldom used.

Recently, i learnt that the 10% usage of the brain is all a myth. And that we actually use 100% of the brain, but not all the time. Rats and Humans aren’t always the same. At least, medically.

(I warned you - no conclusions)

Windows on the Gallows

Arun — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:20:06 +0000

No offence. Being a programmer i understand how hard it is to develop and maintain a simple web application. And creating an operating system is no child’s play. I fully understand. But there are some compelling questions which come to my mind whenever i hear of the news about Windows 7. Leave an offending note if you find my questions too naive.

What did Microsoft have in mind during the release of Vista? That they could change the whole consumption pattern of the PC users? “Vista has come out. Let’s sell all our hardware and buy new ones. Oh yes. Even the one you bought 2 weeks back”. Wow. Didn’t they learn the Windows Me lesson – a bad product will not be bought.

Windows 7, on the preview, looks exactly like Vista with the “Aero” look. I am sorry. My mind maps “Aero” with “Slow”. Microsoft claims that they have considerably reduced the size of the operating system to run on “lesser configured” machines. WOW-Addition by subtraction!!!

As far as my understanding of the Windows OS is concerned, Windows is definitely not modularized. History tells that, that is the reason they came up with the crappy idea called “registry”. If somebody tells me that Linux could work live from a floppy, I won’t feel surprised. But how can they just strip off things from a non-modularized heavyweight like Vista? By pressing the “Delete” key? And don’t tell me that Windows 7 is not an extension of Vista but is a totally new operating system kernel and a whole new architecture. It would sound like IE 7 is definitely not IE 6 because it has tabs.

I seriously doubt whether Windows 7 had the “being lightweight” goal during its planning stages. It looks like it is a marketing strategy. With Mac sales booming up and more people migrating to Linux or even worse downgrading to XP, how are they going to retain their market share. Lots of Corporate customers have already downgraded their OS to XP. Heard that Windows has made a 4% loss on Vista sales. Scoop news is this - Windows 7 was supposed to be released in 2010 and heard today that they are planning to release it in the mid 2009. Pre-release in the history of Microsoft? Unbelievable. I hope you all remember the wait time for Vista after the scheduled release date.

Gadgets all over the desktop instead of the side bar (like Mac), the new touch interface (like apple products), virtual disks (like Solaris) and of course “Linux” like stability — all these doesn’t sound something new. Has Microsoft totally lost creativity? Isn’t this the same house that popularized the WIMP?

Surprisingly, I saw somebody comparing SnowLeopard with Windows 7. Must be Steve Balmer.

In my opinion, Microsoft had their chance and they blew it up. Period.