Wanderings

Moving

2009-02-07T09:57:00.002+05:30

Ok, so I've decided that there is really no point continuing this particular blog. For one thing, I dont really post much. Add to that the fact that the wordpress syndication with blogger (my blog atleast) doesnt really work by any standards, the fact that wordpress now has a much nicer interface, and the fact that I may as well post on my IITK blog instead for the next couple of years, and its pretty much the logical thing to do. I was holding on to this with the intention to keep this longer than the IITK one lasts (as long as I stay there, ie), but its now painfully clear to me that if by then I dont have the ability to host it on my own I should probably just stop blogging.

In case you are one of the few people who read this / are subscribed, I will henceforth be writing (or not writing, as the case may be) at http://blogs.iitk.ac.in/chintal/ . Its RSS feed is at http://blogs.iitk.ac.in/chintal/feed/ .

Note that this does not mean I will be posting more, just that I wont be posting here anymore - so dont hold your breath.

And they all look just the same

2008-07-16T13:51:00.003+05:30

So I'm back in Hyderabad now. Its been a very hectic and interesting last two months, but now I get to relax for the next week or so before the next semester sets in. My life has changed a lot in the last three years, and it seems Hyderabad has too. It seems the generaly advertising scene in Hyderabad is predominantly real estate and housing related. By real estate I don't mean the typical buy-land-in-this-part-of-the-city kind. Instead, they all try to sell you 'luxury homes and bungalows' in so-and-so-part-of-the-city-that-you-never-heard-of-but-is-_the_-up-and-coming-neighbourhood-of-the-city. Even though I emphasize the part of the city they want you to pay truckloads of money to live in, that isnt the part that disturbs me the most. Its nice that the city is growing in many directions, and I sincerely hope the metro rail will come up in time to ease getting from A to B in the already sprawling city. The sad part, however, is that they all remind me of the title song to Weeds (a TV show that I very highly recommend). They all look just the same. Why would I want to pay in 8-digits (INR) and then live in a house which looks _exaclty_ the same as about 900 other houses in the same neighbourhood? One very important thing about luxury is uniqueness. One doesn't go to a 5- or 7-star hotel because it looks and feels exaclty at home, or (this is probably a better analogy) buy a ferrari to have a car that looks exactly like every other ferrari. They go to a posh hotel to feel _different_ from the usual, and buy a ferrari to look _different_ from every other car on the road. Its that shared uniqueness that would bring two ferrari owners together on the street. When was the last time you saw two guys who own a Maruti 800 or a Tata Indica pull over and exchange notes about how their cars behaved? To make things worse, its not just these 900 or so houses that look just the same. More or less _all_ the luxury bungalows on sale across the city look - and probably feel - pretty much the same. Sure, given the contraints of a typical house (so many rooms, the general configuration, then the superstitions dictating the placement of thest rooms, and so on) the number of possible permutations of these designs is very low to start with, but that doesnt mean that I'd be comfortable living in a house whose 'superior quality' requires me to bring out a tri-square and a spirit level to demonstrate. I can still remeber bit and pieces of the discussions that went in when my parents were building our house over 13 years ago... which way should so and so door open, how big should so and so thing be, so on. There are some really, really old houses I've been in where the architecture (and not just the age) tells a story. What we are doing now is very different from what was done years ago. Will these identical houses, over many decades, change and evolve with their owners over time? Will 50, 100 years down the line someone walk down that street where all the houses now are not just dimensionally identical but also the same color and texture and point to one house and say "I like that one. I don't know why, but it just seems like a better home than the one next to it"?

Plasma

2008-07-14T13:27:00.006+05:30

I've been really busy with a whole bunch of stuff, and so dont have time to write about this, but I came across this image on PlanetKDE by Wade Jolson which I just wanted to post.

Just for the record, I haven't used KDE4 since I left campus (any my trusty desktop)... which was sometime in the end of May, but even at that point I was very happy with where Plasma was going. I can't wait to get back and get the latest svn version. I dont know why so many people have issues with the FolderView concept either ... that is exactly what I've really wanted for the last 4 or 5 years.

Help set a world record

2008-06-08T10:08:00.008+05:30

EDIT :: The "official" Download Day (http://spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord)
will start at 1130 PM IST / 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET / 9pm MST

EDIT :: Firefox 3 Launch Date (and thus Download Day) is set at the 17th of June, 2008.

Most of the people who read this blog probably already know that the Firefox3 launch is coming up. You probably also know about the world record effort. In case you don't, then here's the deal - When Firefox2 came out, there were about 1.6 million downloads in the first 24 hours. The folks over Mozilla, SpreadFirefox, and a bunch of other groups in the community want to make the Firefox3 launch especially memorable by trying to push for a Guinness World Record. In order to participate, all you have to really do is download Firefox3, preferably from the Download Day Headquarters.
In the meanwhile :

You can pledge to download Firefox3 on Download Day (the date for which is still in limbo, but it'll probably be sometime in the end of June), also at the headquarters.
If you blog or have a website, you can put up download day buttons and banners and post about it.
If you're one of the social networking types, there are groups/communities in orkut, facebook, myspace, et al. for you to join and use to send mass invitations for. (Just don't blame me if people such as myself but who don't care much for firefox in particular or freedom and good software in general bitch about being sent bulk invitations)
You can follow firefox on twitter for updates.

There are some things to note, though, before you actually go and download :

Please download only once per computer. Even if you do go through the trouble of downloading it a hundred times, not only is it not ethical, it will probably only count as one anyway.
For a download to be counted it should be a complete, successful download. Updates don't count. When I installed the beta some weeks ago it did a pretty good job of bringing my settings and such over from the older install, so there probably won't be much complication in downloading the full installer and reinstalling instead of the update. The difference in bandwidth usage might not be very significant, either, if you are upgrading from Firefox 2.0.x .

As a side note, Firefox3 is a great improvement from Firefox2. I've been using it for quite a while now, and the RAM consumption issues have been reduced significantly. The interface is nice and clean (the defualt theme is, atleast). The settings panels have gone through some shuffling around again, but the one thats there now is noticably better than what I remember of Firefox2's settings, with more options and intuitive placement of stuff (although the proxy settings are still nicely hidden away, unfortunately). The improvements that take the cake for me are the new download manager, which _seems_ nice, although I can't put my finger on why, and the address/search bar. That one you have to use for a while to understand how much better it is than any other browser's address bar, even Firefox's old one.

As a second side note, here are the stats of the last 77 visitors to my blog on blogger. I admit the set of people who would visit my blog is rather biased to begin with, but its still nice to see these kind of numbers.

PIC, First Impressions.

2008-06-05T06:51:00.003+05:30

Although I've had my share of fun with microcontrollers over the last few years, all of it was with AVR controllers, and most of that was with the ATMega16.

Almost 3 years ago, when I first joined the Robocon team, SPS had just started using the ATMega controllers, and we never looked back from then. I had heard of PICs, but never got around to using one, although its touted to be one of the easier microcontrollers to use. Some work I'm doing now had relatively strong reasons for using a PIC - a couple of PIC16F877As were already available, and more significantly, there was a programmer with it. The programmer is usually the bottleneck when it comes to first timers to the ATMega, and I figured since I had a commercial programmer at my disposal, it wouldnt be too much of a pain. I was wrong.

To start off with, searching on the internet for PIC related things seems to return results with an abnormally low signal to noise ratio. Even legitimate results are spread over a wide range of PICs, some now obsolete. Tons of pages are from many, many years ago and are no longer accurate. The pages that seem the most promising sometimes turn out to be AVR related pages.

PICs also seem to have massive dependance on various commercial toolchains. For an AVR, the avrgcc-avrdude toolchain is more or less enough to do a lot of things. There's really good documentation, and due to the fact that is open source, it has excellent community support channels.

SDCC is the only open source compiler that seems to support PICs, but its next to impossible to find sample code with explanations, or even halfway decent tutorials. To top it off, it seems SDCC is at best beta-quality when it comes to PICs at the moment. All the other compilers are commercial, and cost a pretty penny. Evaluation versions do exist, but I generally dont like using those unless there is not viable option, especially when they have restricted functionality. Eagle is one software for which I don't mind using the evaluation version (primarily because its way better than most of its competition), and I have on occasion used the CVAVR eval version when the rest of the team was not comfortable with avrgcc and we were on the clock. It would seem, however, that it is next to impossible to do stuff with the PIC without an endless stream of seemingly arbitrary proprietary software. Some of this software does look pretty nice, to be honest, but I'm still extremely pissed about how circuitous the path to get here has been. AVRs also have a lot of 3rd party compilers and IDEs and such available, but somehow avrgcc stands out in the crowd. Avrfreaks and the avr mailing lists seem to do a wonderful job of keeping things together, and there is always a somewhat authentic source to get information. SDCC for PICs still has a long, long way to get there. All of these issues came up on a windows machine. I have no idea how many hoops I'd have to jump through to get this done on a linux machine, considering the proprietary nature of the compiler, the linker, the programmer...

There are programmer circuits in the open domain, but theres a lot of noise there too. Try to search for in-circuit programming on PICs. It wasnt until I was able to track down the manual of my programmer that I was able to determine that it did, indeed, support ICSP. As for software that does the programming, there are tons of those too. If you dont know what programmer you have, you're going to spend a long time trying to figure out which software will do the job. For a person coming from the usual low-voltage ISP of the AVR family, where high voltage programming is something you do on the rare occasion when you need to fix some terrible mistake in fuse bits, the whole LVP disabling thing of the PIC is a little confusing, unless you're lucky enough to find some text describing the situation early on.

PIC programs also seem a little bit screwed up, with the configuration bits described in each program. Why those bits have to be reset on each program is something beyond me - on AVRs, fuse bits are something we change on rare occasion, and with much care. Although I must admit, the HVP on the PICs does make it easier to fix mistakes at that level.

I've also realized that the internal RC oscillator on the AVRs is also something that is often taken for granted. Thanks to the HVP and the way PICs get programmed, the programming works even when the chip isnt getting its clock properly. Again, thats nice to fix mistakes in setting the configuration bits, but somewhat a pain when you arent sure if your crystal is properly working with the capacitors and such.

Take Your IM With You

2008-03-23T16:40:00.002+05:30

I've been travelling more than usual lately, and theres always something I need to oversee, someone I need to bug about something, and in general make myself available to the occasional IM. Keeping in touch with people isn't really my forte, but for some reason or the other I prefer to leave the communication channels open. The era of the telephone is long past, and that of e-mail and Instant Messaging is on the horizon. E-mail is the best form of communication there is. When properly set up, you have complete logs of all conversations. Its non-intrusive. And perhaps most importantly, its asynchronous. I can take my own sweet time to draft a reply, and do that whenever I feel like doing it. There isnt any buzzing and nudging to irritate you. IM is a little annoying compared to that, with people popping up at arbitrary times demanding an immediate response. Still, its way better than the telephone and much faster than email, which means that almost all the 'work' is coordinated through there. People also tend to be more at ease on IM - I can say 'hello' on IM just for the heck of it, but it seems odd to do that on e-mail.

Both these channels of communication have a certain prerequisite, one that is now fundamental to the way the world works, but where India is still a few steps behind - Internet Connectivity. There are ways to get your mobile carrier to transmit your IMs and emails, but that costs a pretty penny and the experience is far from satisfying. Fortunately, I have a phone with built in WiFi. WiFi is good when you're moving about, and dont have a laptop. Also, if I needed more connectivity, getting GPRS is just a couple of calls (and again, a pile gold) away. Now, whereever I go, my phone goes with me, and if I can get myself hooked in to the wireless networks, and my e-mail is there. (Most of it atleast - Microsoft Exchange 2007's webmail interface is horribly broken on the web browsers on my phone, including Pocket IE, and my institute doesnt have the Mobile version of it installed). Until a month or so ago, I didnt have IM on the phone, though. The only decent client happens to be proprietary, and every time I have to resort to cracking something a little part of me dies. I went without IM for a long while, depending heavily on E-mail. Thats atleast better than not being connected at all.

This is where Bitlbee comes in. Bitlbee is an IRC gateway for Instant messaging. You use an IRC client to connect to one of the public Bitlbee servers, register your IM accounts, and your IRC client turns into a reasonably well functional multi-protocol IM client. This is nice because it has very minimal dependency on the specifics of your hardware or software. All you need is a working internet connection and an IRC client for the platform you have. Fortunately, there are loads or really good IRC clients for pocket PC - I use CodeNorth's Pocket IRC, and recently someone released zsIRC, which seems to be very good too. It even supports conversation logging! Thanks to Bitlbee, I dont have to go to every computer I want to connect from and worry about finding IM clients for every protocol. I just need one - xchat on linux, mIRC on windows, or pocketIRC on my phone. Once I have that, the rest is trivial. I've got wifi at home, so for most of the past week I was able to stay online from my phone, even when, say, someone was using the computer. The only problem was that pocket IRC could only connect to a single IRC server, so I couldnt connect to both bitlbee and freenode at the same time.

IIT Kanpur & Robocon

2008-02-29T04:10:00.001+05:30

Reposted from iitk.misc

WARNING : This is a _very_ long post, and considering that I havent slept in a while, some parts minght not make complete sense.

Disclaimer : The views expressed here are entirely personal and are not necessarily held by every member of both teams going to robocon. In addition, since I really dont know much about what the second team has been doing, none of what I say may be directly applicable to them unless one of them says otherwise. I'm sending a copy of this text to the robocon team I am part of, and if there are any glaring errors or additions to what I say, I hope one of the other members will step in to correct me. I'm not really optimistic of that happening though, since everyone is right now either too busy or too tired.

For those of you dont know what Robocon is (which I recently found out most dont really understand) : Robocon is an international Robotics Competition held annually by the Asia Broadcasters' Union. Doordarshan, being the Indian member of ABU, coordinates the efforts in India and selects one team to go to the internationals, which this year is being held in India itself. A college in Pune called MIT plays host for Robocon in India, thanks to a 5 year contract (this would be their 4th year) with DD. IIT Kanpur was instrumental in bringing Robocon to India about 6 or 7 years ago, and the very first Indian edition was held in our auditorium, with 3 or 4
participating teams. This year, about 40 colleges are registered for robocon india(the registration fee is Rs. 8000, so I expect most of them will show up), and this doesnt seem to count multiple teams from single colleges (as far as I know). Last year, over 290 teams participated for Robocon Vietnam from that country alone. India has never won _anyhing_ in the international
robocon so far.

After seeing two robocons (this will be my third, if I manage to go), I can tell you this much : Robocon is not a festival. There are no food courts, no array of random events, no informal events (except maybe a quiz to entertain the audience between matches) and no song and dance (although I'm told the opening ceremony has a small cultural presentation by the hosts, which I
have not been able to attend either of the times although I very much wanted to. The audience and organizing team does have a lot of beautiful people in it :P). Its not a conference - there are no talks, no presentations, no invited guests other than the judges and maybe the sponsors and at times a few political bigwigs. At best, Robocon is a gruelling 4-5 day period of some food whenever we get a chance to walk to the place they give food, catching a few winks here and there in the pit area, with a rather thin carpet/rug/whatever its called separating you from the bare ground of one of MIT's playground (if thats what you can call that), a heated soldering iron
6 inches from your head (I'm not joking), and someone using a power drill about 3 feet away. The accomodation provided is generally too far away to go to more than once during the visit, thanks to the amount of work that piles up. In this time, teams from all the colleges work round the clock reassembling, testing, and retrofitting robots to add functionality and fine tune their strategies, targeting individual teams and adapting their game plan according to what they think the opponent will do at each match. Things break, and need to be fixed. Bugs show their ugly faces, accidents happen, and tempers are usually on a very short fuse. I've seen some of the most docile people I know erupt in rage during the course of the event.

Now, about IITK @ Robocon'08, the primary subject of the post. First off, since the question has been raised on iitk.fun in a rather sarcastic manner, many people have asked me if it was true. It isn't. Not entirely, anyway. Two IITK Teams will indeed be participating at Robocon'08 India. That said, getting the permission to go there (thanks to the proximity with the midsems, and the overlap of our travel time with one and ahalf days of the midsem exams) has been a roller coaster ride. After meeting with the DOSA, DOAA, SUGC, and finally the Director, we are still not entirely sure who has the authority to approve the leave. Seriously, we don't. It would seem that such a mechanism doesnt exist. I expect that at one point or the other one or more of the above mentioned people will read this post, and to them I apologize for saying what I do here. We understand the constraints each person is under, especially in a system as decentralized as ours is. However, we never expected it would be _so_ hard to get the leave approved (or disapproved, for that matter). What we got from the first three persons was something along the lines of "I really dont have the authority to do that". Note that I personally was not at any of these meetings, so what I heard might be slightly exaggerated. I sincerely hope I am not
misrepresenting the facts. The DOSA, after some convincing, scribbled below the letter requesting leave "I do not encourage the students to miss classes/ examinations. Leave may be granted if the instructors are willing to give make up / prorate etc." Here's the fun part - Instructors are willing to prorate if leave is ratified by competent authority (who I
believe is the SUGC, but I'm not certain of that) and the buck is then passed swiftly back to the Instructors. Finally, Mr. Susmit Sen, Head of the Mechatronics Department (who is the one coordinating our efforts) spoke to the Director, who it seems has permitted 3 members from each of the 2 teams to skip their exams for the competition.

We've worked hard for Robocon this year, and everyone in the team has contributed. Our team has 4 robots, of which 3 are autonomous. At any given time, with all our robots running, there are atleast 7 (and it looks like we might have to add an eight) microcontrollers running on all our robots combined. These robots arent especially small either - while the smallest can be carried by one person, all the others need atleast 2 people to carry them without significant risk of damaging it. The manual needs 3. The simplest robot has only 2 motors on it as of now, with a third looming ominously on the horizon, and the most complicated uses 8 motors, each independently controlled. This isnt counting the one or two test-bed robots on which we work on our algorithms and electronics and crazy mechanisms. We've spent something to the order of 1 lakh rupees on the whole thing, over a period of 6 months. Robots have been built that have since been discarded in favour of faster, lighter, and stabler designs. Electronics have been
made and remade, fixing the problems as and when we find them. Every member of the team can look at any of the 4 robots and point to something that he/she contributed to it. This time the team actually worked as a team (which doesnt mean we didnt disagree with each other, bitch about someone behind their backs, and occasionally pulled rank) and we seem to have things
in some semblance of working order. We dont know if we'll win (and personally, I'd be pleasantly surprised if we did) but things are shaping up to be a relatively good robocon for IIT Kanpur, with, hopefully, some good robotics coming as a result of our efforts. Remember Technokratics, that intra-IITK contest we had last semester? That competition was held primarily to find talent and skill from the first and second year students, which we did find in plenty.

The road to here hasn't been without its pitfalls. The PCB fabrication facility in the EE Department, for example, is a source of great pain for me, personally. I suppose it is a departmental facility in a department that we dont have any relation to, so we should be glad we got we did, but over the last few months, the facility was closed for maintanence for a lot of
time (atleast 3 weeks in Nov-Dec, and is currently down as well). Also, the quality of the PCBs we got were less than optimal (a lot of shorting wires had to manually scratched off), came atleast a week after they were promised, and cost more than what it would have cost to get from Delhi. For anyone wanting to get PCBs printed - I suggest you go straight to Delhi. They might be slightly unfriendly when you say you want just 2 or 3 PCBs, but at the end of the day you'll probably be happier.

The TA labs / Central Workshops (I wasnt personally involved in this affair, so I'm a bit sketchy on the details) were really very helpful when we needed to get stuff machined. For some time in December, the person incharge was unavailable, and after that it turned out that they didnt have the pipe diameter we required. Shantanu went into the city, hunted for the pipe, got it welded, and also got some metal plate machined for the workshop outside (it needed some process/diameter they could not handle or some such thing.

We got a couple of rooms in Hall 9 for working for robocon (for which we paid the hall the rent they asked for). It was really convenient after the 2 or 3 weeks it took to get the room after first submitting the form, until they basically threw us out after something strange happened in the wing our rooms were in. We had nothing to do with that incident (the people who did confessed a day or two later), but we think that was the incident that triggered our eviction thanks to the temporal proximity to the same. I dont believe we were told the reasons for it (other than something along the lines of "I hope you go to Robocon and lose" from one of the wardens (again,
I was not there, so I may be waaay off. Please forgive me / correct me if you know the facts)). We did make a bit of noise (power tools tend to get a bit distracting, I agree) but we almost never worked past 2 AM except on the weekends (and didnt work _everyday_. Maybe 2 weekdays a week over a time average), and work was suspended _entirely_ for the week before midsems. I have a volley ball court outside my room, and I can barely hear myself speak
with my door open most of the time.

However, there are a lot of people who've helped and supported us along the way. Mr. Susmit Sen of the Center for Robotics, who continues to support and guide us even after our miserable performance last year. Dr. Amitabha Mukherjee of the CSE Department, whos been around watching our progress and helped us pick the team at the very beginning. Also, all the professors of ours who havent given a blank no to the leave permission also merit our gratitude. At the same time, I'd like to apologize to all of my professors with regards to my attendance so far : not all of it was because of robocon, though, to be honest. A mention here, also, of all the team members of Robocon Past. The lessons learnt in the years before haven't been lost, and
we hope we've rectified atleast some of them his time. Theres also the many people in the student community who've been generally supportive, whose encouragement helped motivate us when the path ahead looked bleak. And finally, every participant from each college across continents who make robocon the electrifying experience it is - without them, none of us would
have workde so hard, learnt so much, and got into so much trouble.

Regards,
Chintalagiri Shashank
IITK Robocon Team Member,
2006, 2007, (2008?)

Name this post

2008-02-25T22:12:00.004+05:30

Warning/disclaimer : this is a long, arbitrary rant written over bits and pieces over 3 very different days in different places and moods, without any clear picture of what I was writing _about_. Most parts won’t seem to fit the (non-existent) context and some won’t even make sense all by themselves. Read on at your own peril.

There is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse, that goes something like "may you live in interesting times". We do live in a less than ordinary time if you take the complete temporal picture of human civilization as a scale to go by. Of course, its very unlikely that death will rain down from the skies in the form of a squadron of fascist fighter craft, or for a deathly plague to sweep across the lands, killing off a major portion of the population. Although newsmen and governments might make you think otherwise, the likelihood of thermonuclear strike on any target that you hold dear (unless maybe you are an Islamic fundamentalist rooting for the cause of the Al Qaeda and similar groups, in which case you are probably wasting precious time reading this. You should instead consider spending the last few days of your existence in an inebriated bliss in the company of your friendly neighborhood harem before you go blow yourself up in a pointless attempt to get to a heaven that quite possibly doesn't exist) is quite negligible. I suppose there is an outside chance that you might witness a firefight before the end of your time here, but don’t count on it. Nonetheless, we do live in interesting times. Perhaps every era of human history believed that theirs was a time of untamed glory, of wonder and of uniqueness. Things we take for granted today were one novel and perhaps even taboo. Throughout our existence as a race and as a civilization, we've learned, we've killed, and we've learned of new and interesting ways to kill. We've survived bloody wars, cold winters, devastating plagues, droughts, earthquakes and brutal dictatorships. We've seen the rise and fall of imperial juggernauts, of the communists, and even the fascists. Recorded history is littered with accounts of brutality, insanity, and gore that would make a good horror film look like a children's film. One would expect that all of this would have prepared us for today. Apparently, it hasn’t. Fundamental to the human existence is a desire, maybe even a need, to exploit whatever and whoever possible. The human machine thrives not on similarity, but on difference. The average human being will do anything to gain the upper hand, and after that, to enhance one's uniqueness. Our society remains far from utopian, and probably always will - a utopian society in the classical sense will never be allowed to exist, even if some poor misguided soul manages to force its evolution. Its not that people haven’t tried before - and probably more will try until the end of human civilization itself - but that all such attempts are doomed to fail due to tendencies inherent to the human condition. The concept of Absolute Freedom, for example, contains non trivial internal inconsistencies. While the concept of Freedom itself presupposes that of independent thought and independent, otherwise undetermined choice - both of which are problematic in their own rights - lets assume for the moment that they do, in fact exist in a form not too different from that generated by intuition. Absolute freedom, if it were to exist, just might be fine if there were a single consciousness in existence throughout the universe. However, with even two entities with the freedom to choose, the contradictions become impossible to ignore. Assume, for example, the existence of a time where Adam and Eve were the only conscious, intelligent beings in existence Suppose after a particularly annoying fight, Adam decides to detonate a rather large explosive 3 feet away from Eve. If Adam indeed had absolute freedom, he can do so without hindrance. There is no reason, however, to assume that Eve would want the same thing. She _might_, but there is no certainty there, which means the act of Adam using his freedom directly impacts that of Eve. The situation gets much more complicated as the number of players increases, with an exponential increase in the possible interactions between the players. Equality is another concept that isn't especially well thought out. There will always be things needed to be done that noone noone wants to do, and there will always be people who won’t get to do what they want to. The issue of equality is also also far more subjective than the casual observer will notice. For example, which of the these two situations would be more equal - everyone having equal means, as in money, or everyone gets paid appropriately for the work they do. Both represent the ideal situations of very different forms of equality, and are somewhat exclusive of each other. In fact, the way we are going, the utopian society that _might_ be possible may not be in a position to implement equality version 2. Simply put, there will come a time when there wont be enough work to provide gainful employment to every person. the only option at such a point would be to generate work by relatively arbitrary needs, or by by artificially holding back technological progress. Society as we have come to see it st just does not scale across time and size as well as one would hope.

We live in interesting times. Those who've learned to exploit the classical society fight very, very hard to protect it. The resistance to change still exists in most quarters. While the seemingly fundamental things such as equality and freedom rank among the things the leaders of society claim to protect, in many cases the spirit of it is lost or mangled beyond recognition, leaving glorified terms and impressive statements floating around, although there really is nothing of great substance backing it up. Think of it as an iceberg - you see the tip expecting a lot hidden away, but it just so happened that over time the underwater part of it eroded, broke off, or otherwise got lost (and the tip remains held up in the ocean by some magical or artificial force). People have died for freedom. More will die to protect it, and many more will be killed to preserve the word. It turns out that here, now, all that matters are the words. We' clinging on to them, hoping that by saying them over and over again we'll somehow be able to save ourselves. I sometimes wonder how historians of the next millennium will look at our civilization. Often, that chain of thought leads me to wonder how wrong we might be about events of the millenia past - the events that form the basis of religious convictions, cultural bias, and which colour our view of today and of tomorrow.

Everyone has their view of what the world should be like. Most wouldn't be able to agree with another person about this. Since its unlikely we'll ever lock ourselves in a virtual world constructed around our preferences, the world is unlikely to be identical to what the random person wants. There will be people out there who may find the state of affairs to their liking, but its just that the probability of that being _you_ remains bleak. If you need help sleeping after reading this, though, here's something that might help. If the theory of infinite parallel universes works, and that every possible scenario exists in the emsemble of universes, then somewhere (here I use the term some'where' lightly), theres a copy of you living the life you sometimes dream about. Maybe, when you dream (if you dream. I don’t think I've had a pleasant one in quite a while myself, but I can’t be sure) you see glimpses from another universe, possibly one where you're the one laughing at everyone else.

KDE Poster and Flyer

2008-02-19T21:38:00.008+05:30

Nareshov and me drew up a KDE poster and a flyer for FOSSKriti. After searching for one online and not finding one that suited our purpose, we figured we should just make one so that it may be useful to the community at a later point. Here are the images for both :

KDE Poster

KDE Flyer Side 1

KDE Flyer Side 2

The sources for both can be found at http://home.iitk.ac.in/~chintal/downloads/KDE/ and both are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Derivatives and the use of the work for advertising is allowed. If you decide to use these, we'd be delighted if you could drop us a line and let us know.

Free and Open Source Software hits Techkriti

2008-02-17T02:36:00.015+05:30

Techkriti is IIT Kanpur's technical festival. My participation in Techkriti over the years has been varied, to say the least. I participated heavily in random events the first year, sat it out the second thanks to Robocon, and now was part of the organizing team. We organized what was planned to be a small part of Techkriti, something that the folks over at Navya [internal IITK link] always knew was missing but never really did anything about it. FOSSKriti, in all rights, is Arun's baby. He came up with the concept and brought it from the initial "Lets have a FOSS component in Techkriti" to the amazing success the event finally was almost single handedly, with a little help from the rest of us. :)

While the success of the event is quite subjective, I claim FOSSKriti to a success on all fronts because of the following facts :

Over 200 people participated. We didnt have a formal registration structure in place (other than people signing up in a stall in the SAC which was just used to selectively let people in in cases where we were at capacity - people who signed up didnt always show up, and many who didnt sign up did) so we dont have exact numbers, but the Linux Kernel workshop, with the most participation, ran at full capacity both times, with over a 100 people in the lab. There are probably many people who didnt attend that workshop but did the others, but there is no way know for sure.
The participation was, for the most part, active and lively. People asked questions - a reasonably good sign that they seemed to be following the talks. It also seemed at times that the speakers got tired quicker than the audience did (no offence meant to any of you folks, though :) )
People interacted with us outside the framework of the event, met us in the SAC (and not always near our stalls) and spoke to us about FOSS. There were some who said they came to Techkriti only for FOSSKriti. Perhaps they were just being polite, but it did make us feel good. :)
On the 4th day of Techkriti, we gave out almost 200 CDs of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu-KDE4, Knoppix, SuSE, and FOSS for Windows (which Nirbheek compiled for this very purpose)
We had a lot of events, all of which went very well. For the most part they started on time (or atleast reasonably close to it).

FOSSKriti started with the Beagle Hackfest on the first day of Techkriti. When Arun suggested a beagle hackfest, I remember telling him not to expect more than 10 people, and that too only because the event has the word 'hack' in it. It was the first day of the festival, with not all teams on campus and not enough time to publicize it. 60 people showed up. We had to improvise, running around the lab getting more machines set up with the necessary tools. The hackfest went very well, with some good contributions that have been sent upstream for review or will be sent in the days to come. More about this on Arun's blog.

The second day we had a talk on Clutter by Shreyas Srinivasan (who happens to be a really cool guy) which I happened to miss thanks to this unfortunate human requirement called sleep. I'm told we had about 150 people attending the talk, who sat through the whole thing and seemed to be awake through it. After the talk, a bunch of guys started working on a clutter frontend for Beagle.

By the time Day 3 came along, we had all our stalls in the CSE grounds up and running. The day was packed with FOSSKriti events, starting with the Linux Kernel Workshop conducted by Ankita Garg. We expected this one to be a crowd puller, but never realized how much. We had to turn away a lot of people, including all the IITK participants, and still had the Lab packed to the brim. We had planned to conduct the workshop ourself for the on-campus people at a later time, but Ankita agreed to do it all over again, so that evening we had a second workshop where we gave a priority to IITK participants, and _again_ we had to turn away a few people! In between, we had two talks - one about KDE4 for the user, delivered by Piyush Verma (another really cool guy) and a talk about LinuxChix which Ankita delivered. While we filled CS101 for the KDE4 talk, the LinuxChix talk could have had more turnout (in my opinion atleast). Perhaps we'll have to do some looking into the way we publicized the talk and make modifications for next time. We did realize that the talk was a little too close for comfort with a talk by a Nobel Laureate (Grunberg, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2007), and perhaps that kept people away. That night, at 10 PM, we had the RoR workshop, conducted by Saurabh Nanda of Cleartrip, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and a former member of Navya. We started off with people sitting on the floor of CS101, and by the time the near 2-hour talk part of the workshop was done, CS101 was about 80% full. By this time, Nanda was able to build the backend for an OARS like website. We think most of the people who stayed on understood what was going on, which is a much larger number than we had expected. At this point we moved to the lab, where the effects of the long day packed with events was visible in the faces of the participants. Only 25 or 30 of them joined us for the workshop, which went on till about 3 AM.

This brings up to Day 4, which started with the KDE Developer talk which Piyush delivered. This was one talk which I _really_ wanted to attend but missed out on, but I'm told that Piyush built a simple KDE application with pyQt which was well received by the participants, and we hope more people will start contributing to KDE from here :) . The BoF sessions in the afternoon were a great success, with a _lot_ of active participation. The day ended with the Common Lisp workshop conducted by Chaitanya Gupta, also from Cleartrip which also went great, considering that people stayed on even after the Strings show had started.

FOSSKriti could not have been possible without help and support from many sides, including the financial support and (lots of) T-shirts from Cleartrip. Gnome, KDE, Firefox, and the folks over at Opera gave us some too :) The people over at the main computer center and CSE also pitched in, helping us get the labs and all the access we needed on the machines. The Festival Coordinators of Techkriti also deserve a thanks, and perhaps a generic apology - we resorted to a lot of arm-twisting to get the things we needed. Mayur was amazing when things got a bit iffy regarding our speakers' accomodation, and the Transportation Cell did a terrific, terrific job.

The Exam Effect

2007-05-07T18:39:00.000+05:30

Exams have different effects on different aspects of the lives of different people. I've noticed that the enhanced pressure of the pre-exam week seems to have a rather interesting effect on my blog, atleast as far as blogger is concerned.

Lots of posts get started in that week. Just started - the title, maybe a few words on the general structure, a link, perhaps. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, they also seem to get forgotten in the post exam catching-up-with-sleep phase. The result is that my blog has a whole bunch of posts just waiting to be written. Now that I have a few months to kill since all my summer plans have effectively been ruined, I may actually get a chance to get some of these written...

Before that, though, I thought I'd think about why this is happening. This is what I have so far - exams means someone like me can't go on a movie watching spree to cool off because of too much guilt. So instead, there is the occasional checking of email (which tends to becomes more and more frequent). Checking of email has two major components -

Checking IITK email. Relatively safe in the sense of wasting time. Only a few All and Students mails can evoke a strong emotional response
Checking GMail. This I either do from my google homepage, where there is a lot of news (slashdot, digg, normal news, etcetera). A _lot_ of rabbitholes on a single page. Otherwise, if i were to check it on gmail direct, there are a whole bunch of labels with subscriptions to various mailing lists, most of which make for interesting reads, and which in non-exam times may result in trying to compile some fun code that would force me to reinstall my operating system after something goes wrong.

Of course, different people do different things. I _may_ be wrong, but in general I've noticed that praneeth makes one post just before and sometimes one just after exams. Nirbheek seems to blog at a more or less constantly increasing frequency lately, but I'm not sure if its because of the endsems, or just a phase, or if it is a sustained (and sustainable) spurt in activity on his blog. Shatajit posts once in a while, almost always accompanied by a change in his blog's title. It seems to me that many of his posts have a decent correlation to his exams, but since I know IITM's academic calendar only vaguely (and just beause I have a lot of time and am bored does not make me any less lazy) I cant be very sure of this. Harish posts to complain about his exams almost always.

:)

2007-04-25T00:43:00.001+05:30

Bump

2007-01-28T06:04:00.000+05:30

Usually, when I write something here, I do so to say something specific (the fact that the devolve into long-winded explanations is secondary). This is also true of what I do in most other situations . I rarely say anything unless I feel I have something new to add to the discussion or I feel that something being talked about is clearly incorrect- factually or ethically. This time, however, I have nothing specific to say. A vivid description of the various enterprises I seem to be involved in is not an option, either, mainly because I'm rather tired and don't want to think about them any more.

Its been quite a while since I've written here, mainly due to a combination of the above and a case of chronic laziness that has progressively enveloped me over the past months, possibly even years. The fact that my short - term memory is for all practical purposes useless and my concentration span has been reduced to the order of seconds doesn't help either. How I got myself into this situation is irrelevant, the possibility that I've so far been unsuccessful in getting out of it is not as much so. Almost every attempt I've made at beating this thing has had the better of me, and I'm pretty much sick of wallowing in self-pity. The wonderful folks over at the CC have, for reasons known only to them, blocked statcounter on the proxy and so I no longer have to worry about who is reading this - I'll never know anyway.

I refuse to believe that to perform 'well' academically one has to drop more or less all other activities, but it seems the statistics are strongly against me in this regard. There are the occasional cases of overlap, but certainly not enough to mark them as something other than unexplained singularities. (note that by a 'case' i do not mean a 'person'). I'm starting to lose interest in the intricacies of the mind in favour of just getting myself past each day, one day at a time. This apparant and gradual shift in the fundamental principles driving my existence is positively terrifying. The thought of just learning up the damn assignments and getting past the exams is starting to seem to be a better course of action when compared to actually solving the questions, and I'm starting to see the logic in what a majority of the population in this place, and now that I think of it in school as well, do - what I've always hated them for.

I'm used to not getting what I want (and I dont mean that in a material sense) and it would seem that the universe is quite enjoying itself at my expense. Now I know everyone feels the exact same way, and I respect that I am not the only one with a huge set of conflicting values, but this is really getting to be a rather stale joke. I can't remember the last time some problem magically vanished, nor can I think of any serious endeavour which wasnt riddled with headaches of a truly acute nature.

The last few paragraphs said nothing whatsoever, except perhaps confirming the fact that I do have issues with self pity. Yet, its been this waiting to say something meaningful that has brought me to the state I am in now. I'd rather just spend some time in the squalor of the multitude of voices yelling for no apparent reason, completely devoid of purpose and ethics. Perhaps that way I can get the voices in my head to go out, and finally have some time to sort things out inside.

Libnotify popups on Xubuntu / Xfce4

2006-11-22T22:34:00.000+05:30

Getting libnotify popups to work in Xfce took a while for me to get running. While it workd more or less out of the box on ubuntu with gnome, and on many of the other window managers that I had running, nothing from the official repos could give them to me on xubuntu.

Now, libnotify popups are an important thing for me, if only because of gaim-libnotify. gaim-guifications could have bben an option but when I tried them last time I couldnt really stand them, so I figured I'll google around to make libnotify work. I was able to get the gaim-libnotify package straight from the debuntu repos, and they installed without any effort. But then, they wouldnt work. Some looking around showed me that the notification-daemon, which is built for gnome, isnt supported on Xfce. There is, however, a port of it to Xfce

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/notification-daemon-xfce

All i had to do was get the sources from there (download links are somewhere to the bottom of the page) and compile the notification-daemon-xfce. ./compile went smoothly enough. While I had to get the development headers for some things that were needed during compile, all of them were pretty easy to find via apt-cache search. For most of them, if the error says you need xyz, the package in the repos was xyx-dev.

After the make and make-install, I had to run the daemon using (I later added that to /etc/rc.local so that I dont have to do it every time)

/usr/local/libexec/notification-daemon-xfce &

And my popups are back. Not as beautiful as the ones in gnome, I concede, but I'm still trying to figure out how to customize that.

EDIT : I realize the comment on the way it looks was very premature. Now that I've gotten used to it, the 'bubble' theme that used to come with notification-daemon on gnome seems ugly ugly.

EDIT : The thing works on fluxbox as well, assuming you also have xfce installed. Just remember to turn the daemon on. Gnome's notification-daemon also would work on fluxbox, provided you have the necessary gnome packages installed. apt-get does NOT handle those dependencies, though.

Obligatory title

2006-10-16T22:51:00.001+05:30

I Want Out.

A week without Linux

2006-09-07T13:01:00.000+05:30

First Mid Sem Exams are over. The went just as any midsems are meant to go. Bad. But this time, the midsems brought with them some things that made them more terrible than earlier. All the usual midsem effects were apparent - the weird discussions in the DC main chat, people playing volleyball at midnight, the packed library - the whole package. A week before the exams began, I tried fiddling with my Dapper install and accidentally broke it. Instead of spending a couple of nights debugging it, I figured I may as well reinstall. While I was reinstalling, I figured I may as well install Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Knot One had come out a week or so before, and it sounded nice. Really nice. So I download the iso, and burn it, and try to install.

Now, for those of you who don't know what kind of computer I'm using right now, lets just say that its something like 6 years old, and is a laptop (PIII, 800 MHz, 384 MB of RAM). I've been putting off buying my new computer with the hope that Intel will let Indians buy a Conroe in the near future. The CD Writer I have on the writer does pretty well when it comes to reading CDs, or when burning stuff with finite number of files like games and music. But to burn an operating system - and at that something that is effectively a Live CD - is a whole different ball game. To make a long story short, the install failed. Multiple times. Miserably. My GRUB got wiped, so I did it over and over again. I was determined to get Edgy to work. At the nth attempt, It went through the install somehow but it didnt work. The GDM just kept crashing. With the mids looming, I did what I considered the best way out.

I used windows for a week.

Windows is nice. I wont say it isnt. It assumes it knows exactly what you want, and puts everything in a wonderfully inaccessible place. Of all the things about linux I missed while using windows, here are some of the ones that really pushed me a few steps closer to insanity:

Alt + F2

Now, if you've ever used Linux, the application launcher that pops up as soon as you hit that magic key combination is extremely helpful. The fact that it auto-completes the command makes it even better. To find an application in windows, I needed to sift through the start menu - which of course is bloated to unprecendented levels on my laptop thanks to my installing software to make other software work (the more recent attempts were to make the 3B browser work behind Squid which uses Basic authentication - didnt work out too well for me). Vista somewhat fixes that with a startmenu search tool, i concede, but it doesnt feel the same as Alt+F2. And besides, Alt+F2 does more than just launch applications, and the vista start menu search thing is restricted to stuff that is in the start menu. And for those of you who like the windows start menu, or if you just want to look through the many things you installed, the gnome Applications menu and KDEs KMenu are much easier to navigate than the Windows start menu

Multiple Desktops

The fact that you can have multiple desktops in Gnome and KDE is something which does take time to get used to and take full advantage of after years of thinking the way Microsoft made you. Once you get used to it though, its something you can't do without.I've gotten used to having 4 desktops to spread out the multitude of windows that i have open. I like to multitask, and the desktops make it a tad easier. Add compiz into the mix, and well, its amazing the way things organize. The windows environment is relatively stifling, and a pain when you have to keep pressing alt+tab till you find what you need. And even then, the icons used in the Alt+Tab interface arent very descriptive. Vista makes a few improvements in that area, and while the new alt+tab is pretty decent (compiz already has that, btw), flip seems worthless except as a novelty.

Yakuake / Tilda

I've gotten addicted to the terminal. Maybe its because my 'mouse' is a touch pad, or maybe its something else. I just prefer the keyboard for some reason, and the linux terminal is amazing. The windows command line is a sorry excuse for a CLI if you compare is to BASH. And with linux, you get to have a terminal popup at the press of a single button (actually it slides out of the side / top / bottom) and it can go back if you press it again. Thanks to that, more or less everything is accessible without any mouse-clicks what so ever.

Top

When you have a runaway process, its nice to be able to kill it. It makes you feel like you are in control of your computer. The task manager in windows is a quaint little application to do that. Of course, its overhead is probably just as bad as the bit of malicious code IE just found thats changing your accelerated desktop environment into a slide show. Even when you ask it to end an application, it generally responds with the time scales many order of magnitude greater than I am willing to wait. The processes tab is a little better, but then all that shows is a list of (randomly?) named processes, and sometimes it doesnt let you kill the process hogging all the resources anyway. Top and kill in linux works like a charm. It kills the process without any complaining. And it doesnt even assume it know when a process is 'Not Responding' like the task manager in windows does.

There are other things i missed,such as panels, extensive themeing, hotkeys (one that actually respond), and of course apt.

I finally got Edgy to install now. Burnt the cd in a newer laptop and it worked like a charm in the first attempt. The only complications so far are a bad font anti-aliasing problem in firefox which got fixed quite easily, a weird key mapping problem in vi (i'm learning to use nano instead :P) and a misbehaving usplash and GRUB. Since Edgy is still in Alpha these aren't that bad, and they'll be fixed long before the Beta is released hopefully.

Spreading the Word

2006-08-27T02:39:00.000+05:30

Thats what we've been doing lately. (we as in nirbheek, praneeth, and me). As the days go by, the percentage of computers (mostly laptops) running linux (mostly ubuntu) in our immediate vicinity is rising steadily. There has been one complete conversion so far (even I have windows installed - mostly for VoIP - so I don't really expect to have many more Windows-free computers in the near future)

The Navya Lectures, which are technically lectures open to the entire student community (this series was mainly directed towards the Y6 batch (who didn't show up anyway) though and so the little people like us got to do stuff), are basically meant for introducing the new members of the campus community to computers, the computing scene at IIT Kanpur, and to Linux and OSS.

Navya, being an independent body (we're independent from more or less everything) gets to profess it's philosophy at these lectures. This philosophy more often than not is about working with OSS. Almost all the members of the Navya team believe that Linux is better than windows, and thats what we tell the people.

Hopefully, people will see the light. :)
A couple of weeks ago we had 4 laptops in a single room (unfortunately, we had only two ethernet access points and no wireless access so it was kind of painful), all of different makes, and all running Ubuntu. (ok. mine and nirbheek's laptops are included in the 4, but still). I have since changed to Kubuntu for certain reasons though, and am still waiting for the day when I'll have the guts (and VoIP applications for linux that I can get working behind our proxy, among other things) to wipe my windows partition. So far, we've done Ubuntu installs on laptops from HP, Compaq, a Dell and, if you count in my 5 or 6 year old Sony, one of those. So far, its worked like a charm. Each time. Some of the people who now have ubuntu running feel the difference in speed. One of them who goes rarely into ubuntu (give him some time) boasts of how fast and 'cool' his laptop is sometimes (xgl / compiz . Sometimes, you don't need anything more than that to sell it). The free CDs Ubuntu ships have been extremely handy, and the Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide has made our task much much easier. We probably could'nt have done any of it without it.

So far, the only difficulties we've had have been complications with installing wireless adapters on some laptops, which ndiswrapper fixed in most cases (except one wireless card on a dell latitude 620, which i haven't had time to fiddle around with yet), and some weird keyboard mapping problem on the Dell (a few keys refuse to work) and xgl/compiz on Intel chipsets, everything else more or less worked out of the box.

Update : The Dell keyboard mapping problem has been resolved. The keyboard was incorrectly selected. :|

Netgear WG511 Wireless Adapter on Kubuntu

2006-08-20T19:54:00.000+05:30

WARNING : The following guide is for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu 6.06 Dapper LTS. I no longer have a working Netgear511 (friendly advice - dont leave it outside the protective casing and put it in your bag) to test it on Edgy (6.10) . While it _should_ work, I can't guarantee anything. If anyone is successful in making it work in Edgy by this method, please let me know (leave a comment or something)

I got a WG511 (The version number written in tiny letters on the back above the MAC and just below th PCC and Canada IDs is v3.0) using the windows drivers, and ndiswrapper on ubuntu and kubuntu.

#sudo lspci -v
produces, at the very end of the output,

0000:06:00.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890 [Prism GT/Prism Duette] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Netgear WG511 Wireless Adapter
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 56, IRQ 9
Memory at 26000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1

This is how i did it:
#apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
Then, install the drivers on a windows computer - either from the cd they provided or the internet. I got them from the internet. Copy the folder 'Driver' from the windows install (the default install directory is c:/Program Files/Netgear/) to somewhere in your linux drive.

Now, ubuntu recognizes my card and loads the prism54 module automatically. To unload it, do
#modprobe -r prism54
Make sure its unloaded by doing
#dmesg | grep prism54
The last line should tell you that the module has been unloaded.

Now, install the drivers by
#ndiswrapper -i /place_where_you_put_the_driver/Driver/netwg511.INF
(i think that was the filename, verify that in your folder - there will be one or two inf files - pick the one with wg511 in it)

To check if the module got loaded, do
#ndiswrapper -l
Then, if it did load, do the following
#ndiswrapper -m
#modprobe ndiswrapper
The adapter should start working at this point.

You will have to manually remove the prism54 module each time you reboot, or you need to add it to your blacklist. On ubuntu breezy there apparantly was a file in /etc/hotplug/ , and in dapper (the one i use), you use the following command :
#echo 'blacklist prism54' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/my_blacklist

The towel is eggressing

2006-08-16T04:47:00.000+05:30

I haven't had the time to write for a long time now. A very long time. Things have been racing past all around me. And not all in the same direction. It seemed as though I was caught in a swirling pool of assorted samples of hell, all hand picked by satan himself (I say that as a figure of speech, and do not imply a belief in a supernatural being named Satan). I won't go through them one by one here - not because I don't want to bore as quite frankly I don't care even if I do, but instead because I am too lazy to go through the whole thing all over again.
One of the things that has been extremely demanding has been the whole counselling service / ARC / HEC confluence of insanity. Its taken hours of work, heated discussions, antagonization of my batchmates and seniors, and a great deal of energy. Today, the fresher's party finally got over (it was terrible. Y6 is going to have to do much better if it wants to get anywhere) and the ARC is dissolved. The wardens are still going to express thier displeasure in the HEC meetings, but what is happening now is not something which the ARC is going to stop simply because it cannot. We arent even trying now because none of the effort put in till now has been acknowledged (if ANYONE says to me in this regard that you arent thanked for a lot of things, I swear I will make you see the light. The hard way), our existance and actions being frowned upon by one and all - the juniors who've never seen hell, the seniors who still got a chance to interact (and in some cases saved from sever disciplinary action), the wardens who refused to see the full picture, and the counselling service which exists only to confuse the rest of ou in this regard. Its almost dawn now, and a good portion of the first years are still awake. I donot know how many of them have started crying yet, how many have pissed in their pants. Everything imaginable is being done with them save for anything that involves actual physical contact between a senior and a junior. Sutta (by Zeest) was playing at an insanely high volume in more than one wing - and the language people are using makes the song pale in comparison. I donot know how many first years have found their way to hall 1 and hall 5, but I'm certain the number does not tend to zero. Most of the things people are upto now will be unfathomable from the standpoint of a civilized society, and what perverse pleasure these people might derive from this whole process escapes me. The freshmen, who, over the past 12 days have in an environment of near complete protection, are now seeing 'life' as all of the supporters of this form of 'interaction' would claim. Life. In full force.
Academically, my life is stil in the same terrible state its been in for a while now. That is expected to change once I wake up from the deep, probably disturbed slumber I am going to fade into after I write this. My fingers are crossed. :) (again a figure of speech)
The UltraSPARCs have added extra flames to the hell I'm in right now. For all I care, SUN and the Computer Centre, IITK can go burn in hell when their time comes. I've spent too many nights trying to get a bloody OS to install on those computers. Now, I give up. The Hall CC and Y6 can do with as many computers as will work. Y6 is anyway filled with a bunch of morons, who'll have to put in a LOT of effort if they intend to do something (if you ask me what I mean by morons, or how I can make such a general statement, don't expect me to reply - to that or for that matter anything else in the future)
There are more - many more - things that qualify to be on this post, but I'm too tired to write it. I started off this post hoping that it'll help clear up some of the things, but it just isn't working.

How many features are too many?

2006-07-23T13:50:00.000+05:30

This is something I've been thinking of for a little while now. The original title planned was 'How much processing power is too much', but it has since evolved beyond just processors. It reached keyboards as well. (See Microsoft's Ultimate Keyboard and Art. Lebedev's Optimus Keyboard. More on them later)

Now I know that there is no such thing as too much processing power (just as there is no such thing as too large a hard drive) , but there are things like budgetary constraints. For me, also the fact that my parents will be paying for it, so

i feel vaguely uncomfortable asking them to shell out upwards of US$300 for a keyboard, or ~US$999 for an Intel Core2Duo X2800 (at the time this post was concieved, it would have been the AMD Athlon FX-62 at over US$1100, but the expected arrival of the conroe changes things a bit.)
i need to convince them

The important question here is what kind of power does one really need. If you use Office XP, you will know that its rather power hungry. I'm not saying that Microsoft Word completely justifies a multiple core processor (the conroe can handle 4 separate instruction threads) with a 4 MB L2 Cache and unlocked clock multipliers, but I'm just saying that the software companies of today don't really give a fuck about the people who are using older computers, or computers that arent atleast near the pinnacle. Microsoft doesn't, at any rate, as they recently announced ending support for all pre-XP SP2 versions of windows. Users of windows will either have to use Windows XP Sp2, which some people find to be too demanding for their dated computers (people in this part of the world don't really see the need for serious hardware upgrades. they'd rather curse the operating system), or switch to the resource hungry monster that is Vista. Not many groups are as considerate in this regard as the folks over at Canonical, who support the Ubuntu project, and more recently released Xubuntu, which is based on Ubuntu but with the graphics toned down and a lot of the frills chopped off so that it can run on low end systems. Xubuntu does run on some pretty dated machines, and looks a million times better that the Windows 98, or maybe even Windows 95 that are the only (now unsupported) versions of Windows that can run on them (To be perfect honest though, almost everything looks better than 95. Even Win3.1 looks a bit more refined for its time), but it still doesn't really do it, not for me atleast.

As the months go by, with the kind of developments and insanely short release cycles we see for the 'important' linux distros, the future seems to look rather bleak for the typical computer of 6 months ago - the Pentium 4 running at around 2.8 GHz with Intel Integrated graphics or at best a 64 MB AGP card. While these will have to struggle under the load of the ridiculously heavy default/full installs that some linux distros come with lately (FC5 was 5 CDs), I think they will whimper at the prospect of running Aero, and some might even fail to do so (especially those with integrated graphics). Now, it is hard to imagine a Linux distro being heavier than the latest Windows at the same point in time (i'm talking about the normal sensible thought out install, and NOT the kind where you just select all and later find out you have 6 different applications to view PDFs). Also, any computer you might have bought (atleast before 27 July, 2006) will not, under most normal circustances, outlive Vista (Windows development cycles have whole different time scales).

So in my not very informed opinion (seriously I'm not very well informed. Do NOT take this as a buyers guide), the best bet now would be to get something that can run Aero, and then some more. Aero might be a white elephant of sorts, but is can serve as a benchmark. If you can run Aero when it comes out, then you can probably Microsoft Office (or whatever they call it then) on the same computer 3 or 4 years down the line. When I say 'run Aero', I don't mean just possess minimum requirements. To put things in perspective, you can find the minimum requirements for Windows XP here. Imagine running XP on that one. Now, look at the Windows Vista minimum requirements here. Note that the column on the left is to avoid discouraging people with what is a reasonable PC for XP (note thats its way above minimum requirements) from getting Vista (or atleast paying for it). The column on the right is the real thing - the same kind of minimum requirements they gave out for XP.

It is after due consideration, and then lots more, that I've decided to halt deciding on a computer till the Core 2 Duo's situation in India (price, availability... ) are a little clearer. As of now it looks like a E6600 or E6700 seems to be a good idea, with a 512 MB Graphics card. I dont know which graphics card yet, but i was leaning a bit towards an ATI. I'm not sure though, since I'm even less informed about those things (I had Integrated Graphics at home :| ). A couple of gigabytes of DDR2 RAM, and a >150 GB Hard Drive for all the TV shows and random Linux installations are also essential.

Probably by the time I decide on all those things, both the keyboards will be out in the market or atleast people will know a bit more about them and I can decide once and for all that I can't afford them. Microsoft's Ultimate Keyboard looks very, very nice. Has what they claim to be an ergonomic shape (i never used one of those so I can't really comment on it), backlit keys, and is wireless. Again, they claim a rather long range... but i dont see how anyone can see their monitor from that range - either the monitor should be replaced by a projector, or all you do at that range is perhaps control the music. Either way, i guess its good to have it anyway as long as it doesn't cost and arm and a leg. The mouse looks amazing as well. On the downside it doesn't have a numeric keypad, and if I haven't already gotten used to that on my laptop it would have been a deal breaker. The Optimus Keyboard, in my opinion, is the better of the two. Although some people have started to categorize it as vapourware, if it does ever come out it will be amazing. Each key is an individual OLED screen. It would mean incredible levels of key re-mapping, and it could come very, very handy to the casual gamers like me who are sometimes turned off by the huge number of key mappings to remember thanks to game makers' lack of consideration towards the poor human being who has to control it. The accomplished gamers won't need it. They rarely have to think about which key does what, and usually don't even have to look at the keyboard. I used to be like that long long ago, but once the number of keys crossed 10, I gave up trying to remember and just used the mouse wherever possible.

In the end, if you think I'm going on about nothing and the time scales in the industry are much longer than I made them out to be, then i suppose it might be appropriate to mention that both Intel and AMD have announced quad-core processors to hit the market in less than a year. Fun being a consumer isn't it?

Hobbes it is :)

2006-07-16T00:12:00.000+05:30

You scored as Hobbes. You are Hobbes! Resourceful, laid back, optimistic, understanding, and able to put up with Calvin on a day-to-day basis. You are the best type of friend, someone who you can get in fights with and look at comic books with, someone who will send prank letter to you through the amil and someone who leds over cliffs with you. What more could anyone ask for?

Hobbes

54%

Mrs. Wormwood

50%

Susie

46%

Calvin

43%

Mom and Dad

32%

What Calvin & Hobbes character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

The Context

2006-07-14T23:13:00.000+05:30

^ is a very important thing that most people don't seem to acknowledge. How one views something is very much a function of the context in which it is viewed. I have lately come to believe that there is no absolute quality of anything. The almost clichéd saying that Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder has more to it than it may seem to the casual observer. It is interesting how perspective can shape your view of certain things. Its almost as if the place you are in, and the information you have at your disposal, is more important than the thing you are sizing up even when it comes to assessing the thing. All of us have noticed it from time to time. I find the idea of open source very appealing, and so linux looks much much better than windows does (linux is better, I know, but that isn't the point) to me, while to a lay person whose been grown on windows the very concept of linux, with runlevels, the absence of EXEs, a very elaborate command line interface, and the absence of dumb installs that give him zero control can seem a scary proposition. It is also manifested in the emotions that surface when a firefox user, maybe even a firefox fan, tries to explain the advantages of firefox over IE.

This post isnt triggered by either of those, actually. Those were just examples to help non-IITians (at least non-IITKians .... (does anyone else feel we need a simpler name that sounds coherent?)) understand what really triggered it. I had nothing to do and somehow found myself in the IITK counseling service's web site. I downloaded the information brochure for this year's admits and for some reason yet unknown to me i started looking through it. It brought back memories of just a year ago, when i got one just like that. There isnt much different really, a few dates and words changed... most of the sentences are actually identical. But this time, they evoke different emotion. Then, it was a mixture of excitement and hope, with some pride thrown in. This time its a combination of raised eyebrows, some disgust, and lots of contempt. There has been a huge shift in my point of view over the year. Then it was from the outside, seeing only what was projected by the society and magnified many times over by misinformed people who also were on the outside, and was then set in stone by the seal of the (irresponsible?) media. Even though it was from the outside, it was from inside a proverbial well. We refused to see the big picture. Over the last year, I've seen the insides. The parts the people outside never get to see. Sometimes its scary, sometimes its disappointing, and sometimes its depressing. Its like Ian Malcolm says of Site B in the lost world - its the part they don't want you to see. I don't think there is any large scale attempt to veil the problems, its just that although everyone at some level feels their presence, and some say little things about them, there is no large scale mechanism for redressal of the problems. The community as a whole does not yet recognize that there do, in fact, exist certain problems.

And so, another comes in, with the same set of hopes and dreams. In about 20 days, all that'll be fixed and the world will be normal again.

Firefox 2.0 Beta1

2006-07-14T17:55:00.000+05:30

It seems the mozilla foundation has released the Beta 1 of the Firefox web browser. I suppose this may be old news to some of you but this is the first I've heard of it being available for download. Strangely, I could not find mention of its availabilty on the firefox page, where I had once seen the 1.5 beta long ago. The install file is available on Mozilla's ftp though, so it can't be a scam of some sort. I'm downloading it right now (why oh why does it take so long :( ) and if I see anything interesting I'll post it here. (probably will just edit this post instead of messing the place up)

The Balcony

2006-07-12T23:38:00.000+05:30

My room at home was originally designed as a guest room, and I would take over a few years after connstruction. Due to this, the room has a small balcony, which can only be reached through the room. Its different from the large one that goes about 40% around the house. This one is a small, L-shaped bit thats open to the sky and you can see the moon from it. I never really recognized the amount of privacy that afforded. It could have given me a place to think, to brood, maybe even to cry, or to just be alone. Now that I spend most of my time on campus, I wont get many opportunities to use the privilege. As it stands now it was used by me only thrice, once was in the March of 2005, around the 15th I think. That day saw tears, and a lot of self pity. The other was last night, when I just needed a little privacy, and the third is tonight. I just got back in. This compares no way near the March of '05. And nothing ever came close to the March of '05 before, so...

I realize that i may be making a very big mistake by posting this. I don't care anymore.

The Techie's Dream

2006-07-12T02:42:00.000+05:30

Think of the geeky people you know. It may even be yourself. Now, try to think of what these people have in common. Please don't say something like their geekiness, because that doesnt say anything about them. What I'm talking about is the collection of 'junk' these people have. (Fellow geeks, don't take offense at the usage of the word junk. You know I don't mean it that way) This may range from a collection of gadgets and gizmos and parts thereof.

At home, I have 3 drawers (not very large ones, though) full of computer components - hard drives, graphics cards, a 386 is there too on a motherboard. There's a Joystick which connects to the game port (most of you might not even have heard of this... USB killed it, just like it killed the PS/2 and the serial interfaces). Most of this stuff is so outdated that I would not even dream of putting it in my computer. I don't even think some of it can be made to work without a LOT of searching for additional components which went off production almost a decade ago.

In my store room, there's a whole bunch of random things. Broken toys, keyboards (didn't want to waste space in the drawers) motors, wires, cables, connectors, rusted pipes, pieces of wood, decommissioned appliances, screwdrivers (try finding a screwdriver on an IIT campus. you'll realize why it deserves a place on this list) . The works. My dad came years without throwing out stuff, preserving them. I don't think my mom understands why. (This is rather ironic of course, my mom being the one with the masters in technology and the software professional and my dad being the molecular biologist by profession, with an MSc and PhD). You have no idea how useful having a room like that can be, how easy life can be.

So how did I get from the techie's dream to what seems like a junk room to the untrained eye? Well, the room is part of the dream. Rather, it is a techies way of working towards the dream. So what is the dream? It is to have a zone of absolute confidence in the ability to find something, where you can open up your iriver or reformat your computer without the extremely real risk of missing a very crucial bit of equipment or software to throw a spanner in the works. This is the reason why some of us (IITians, and students of other institutions which have atleast as good a campus wide network) feel almost naked, unprotected, and vulnerable outside the canopy of the LAN. The confidence that one can find the screwdriver with the right head (and the fact that the Americans will always use the phillips head, while Indians won't give up on the slotted head doesn't help), the spanner of the correct size, and charged batteries is beyond anything you can have. For obvious reasons, an extremely fast internet connection is a very important necessity.

It is in pursuit of this dream that we never throw anything out. You never know when it might come in handy. It is a terrible feeling to get when you need something and you just remember that you threw it away a week ago. This is why we have a large collection of random stuff. It doesnt matter that most of it either in a pile in a corner (or on the bed) or strewn across the whole of creation (that is just an expression, and does not imply my belief in the act of 'creation' or even in ID). Its just about the confidence that it's there when we need it.

Of course, any self-respecting geek knows exactly what he or she has in his or her posession, and can pinpoint anything's location to within a few minutes of searching.

We can but hope that this quest of ours will succeed one day. Till that day, we will keep amassing the pieces, painstakingly putting them together. Long live the love of technology, and long live our mastery over it.