White Dove Remix (Feat. Grey Dove)

So we have a new network administrator. One BOFH kind. And the first thing that he did was change all the networks to class B (I wonder why) and block Gmail, and chat programs.

So we installed a back up system based on older technologies.

Grey dove
Fly with the wind
Take my chat under your wings
For the world to know
That GTalk will not die
Where the proxies cry

<Message START>
Na na
Na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na
Na na na na
Na na na na na
<MESSAGE END>

SEND: Disconnect packet: Invalid packet header.

Life is …

I was walking towards my lab when I saw pilgrimhawk howering around in Lab 2. Its been quite some time since I talked to him. There was this long pongal vacation, and when everybody chose to go home, I reluctantly stayed back. I never wanted to stay back. I wanted to go some place. Some place far, but near enough so that I can come back on time to prepare for my classes. But that did not happen. Sometimes I can’t decide if I am lazy or just too tired.

I walk into the lab and he greets me with his friendly wave calling out “Shivankuttiyeeee….” Now here is a man who has been bitten time and again by the travel bug and the shutter bug. So I wondered aloud as to what he might have been doing during the Pongal break. He tells me he spent a quiet time with his family.
“And what about you Shiv.” I did not have much of a great time in college and thats exactly what I told him. “Sometimes, I think I need a break.”
“So, who is stopping you from taking a break” he asks me.
“I was planning to go to Pollachi and shoot some wildlife.”
“And?”
“Did not do it this time. Thats ok. Maybe I will go there during the next holiday break.”
He looks at me without saying anything. Uncomfortable silence.
I quickly add “I am sure planning to go next time, even if nobody comes with me.” Some how I feel this is a better response.
In a sudden pensive mood, he tells me “You know Shiv, a friend of mine always used to tell me that life for most of us is a postponement!”

It did not hit me then, but after I walked out of the lab, that final sentence hit me like a brick wall. Sometimes certain simple words can become a powerful mantra. Sometimes certain simple words become meditation. Sometimes certain simple words reveal so much it forces to look at your life from a different perspective.

Its not funny, Google !!

 And a few thoughts from the world’s best search engine on sensor programming…..

NO I DID NOT MEAN CONTRACEPTIVE !!! Stupid Alogorithm !

Doodle Doodle

Its been three days now, or maybe a week. I dont’t really know, but Floyd has been asking me these same questions again and again.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Three days before the college opens I have shift the entire programming course from Java to C.

Cold comfort for change?

And guess what, I get a message thats supposed to come around two hours later.

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have you found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

Emacs, Fedora and ttfs

It all started with finding a good font for programming in emacs. I don’t know why, but the default things that come with the Linux distributions are so uncool that they are reason enough not to use open source. I have been spending some time on this, even posted on the fedora forums but then nobody could help me. Well, the only help I got was from the debian dude.

According to my “extensive research”, most people prefer the terminus font. Since I spent considerable amount of time on this, I thought it might be a good idea to document it. And the fact that I am sitting here alone in the lab on a fine christmas morning is reason enough for justifying this act of total boredom.

The Terminus font (http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/terminus-font-4.14.tar.gz), created by Dimitar Zhekov, is the best monospaced bitmap font ever. I goofed up by trying to install the font from Dimitar’s website and thats when I decided to search for a ttf version of the font.

A bit of googling gave me the ttf version of the font. You can download the terminus fonts here. Make sure you download the ttf version and not the tar.gz file. The following commands work only for ttf fonts.

In Fedora, the fonts used by all users are in /usr/share/fonts folder. Since the font we have downloaded is a ttf or truetype font, lets make a folder called truetype in the fonts directory.

# mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Now lets move the ttf file that you have downloaded into this directory. Or you can directly download the ttf files into this directory.

# cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
# wget http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/Terminus.ttf
# wget wget http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/TerminusBold.ttf

Ok, so we have all the fonts in the folder. The next step is to create an index of all the scalable fonts that we have downloaded so that the font server can use them.

# mkfontscale && mkfontdir

This will create 2 files fonts.scale and fonts.dir. Now update the font cache.

# fc-cache -fv

The new directory /usr/share/fonts/truetype has to be added to the X11 font path.

# chkfontpath –add /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Some applications will not recognize the newly installed fonts until the X server is restarted. So restart the X font server.

# /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart

Running chkfontpath command without any arguments should now list /usr/share/fonts/truetype also.

To use this font in emacs, you can run xfontsel and select it from there. Type xfontsel in the command line

# xfontsel

Click on fmly. If you have installed it properly, terminus should be listed there.
Click on wght and select medium. Select other options as you might want it. Click on the select button to copy the font specification into your clipboard. The following specification looks good: -*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

And if you are wondering how it looks like, here is a screenshot:

Interesting Links
1. The Terminus Font
2. Installing ttf fonts on Redhat based systems
3. What are TrueType fonts

This time that year

City of joy. A lovable professor and an amazing collegue. Few very generous and hospitable students. Artists, poets, open air theater. Mishtir ke dokans (sweet shops). Puris and alu. Scrambled eggs. Breakfast of bread toast with butter. The holy ashram of Sri Ramakrishna. 15 minutes with Ma Sharada. A moment of silence with River Hooghly. A very old school. Sweets for lunch. That walk along Howrah bridge. Alipur zoo. More sweets. Victoria Memorial. Madusoodan Manch. Dinner with the Professor and his students. A box of sweets for home.
And…. a poem in gratitude…

Sweet Kolkata fills my soul
Fans my flame, my heart burns like coal
I have to write, I have to write
Without pausing for respite

Of bustling roads, rickshaws and trams
Sweetly puntuated with “mishtir ke dokans”
I have to write, I have to write
Without pausing for respite

Of her many sons, the British Raj feared
Countless stories Hooghly gently whispers
I have to write, I have to wite
Without pausing for respite

Of the city that inspired Tagore’s art
Ma Kali dancing in Paramahansa’s heart
I have to write, I have to write
Without pausing for respite

I have to write, I have to write
Without pausing for respite
Of a city of many wonderful things
For you, Kolkata, I spill my ink

A Bird Story

 

 

Winter

I was always very skeptical about haiku. Haiku is a form of traditional Japanese poetry. A haiku poem consists of only three lines that almost never rhyme. Haikus are based on nature and more commonly seasons in nature. They are meant to convey the essence of an experience or feeling.

So you may ask, what is so great about a poem which does not rhyme and that has only three lines. Well, I was asking that same question. A poem with three lines that do not rhyme, how can that make sense ? Take a look at a haiku by Matsuo Basho:
old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water
The Japs must really be high on sake when they wrote that.

And it so happened that when I was browsing vidya, our inhouse digital library and I found a reference to a photography site by Ray Rasmussen. Now I did not go through all the links there. All I did was go to the page that said “Haiku – Spring photography”. It took me to a nice and simple page. At the center was a nice and simple photograph of a small branch with some leaves. Under the photograph, neatly printed in white were three lines:
my spring is just this:
a single bamboo shoot
a willow branch
- Issa

My, how that changes things. Suddenly I am painfully aware of my blindness.

And then I started walking back to my hostel and I found this:

Frost this morning and
a cold wind, scatters leaves like
broken promises
- Charles de Lint

Flickr and Smugmug

Ok, so I don’t have a camera yet. But I have still managed to create quite a huge collection of photographs by begging cameras from colleagues, friends and students. They say necessity is the mother of invention. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that necessity sure is the mother of shamelessness. Now that my colleagues avoid me, and students would rather prefer failing exams than lending me a camera, I am left with nothing to do other than organizing my “priceless” photo collection.

I was a firm believer that we don’t need corporates and websites to manage our data. A hard disk crash, two machine transfers and umpteen windows installations forced me change my perceptions. I need some place to back up my stuff.

Do you like choices? I think the world would be a simpler place if everybody had just one option. I was always uncomfortable with choices. Perhaps it must be because a question of choice has no perfect answer.
So will it be coffee or tea.
Will you take it with milk or no milk.
Will you have 2 cubes of sugar or three.
Shall I install Fedora or Ubuntu.
Do you need Gnome or KDE

And now I am faced with one more dilemma:
Shall I upgrade my flickr account, or should I purchase a smugmug account

Led Zeppelin says:
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.

Pep Talk

Mentor: I know your problem, you think too much.

Me: My profession requires me to do that.

Mentor: You should be like the birds in the sky. They neither sow nor reap. There are always free.

Me: My boss is like that, a bird in the sky.

Mentor: Really?

Me: Yeah, he keeps dropping shit on people’s heads.

Mentor: Session ended. I don’t think you have to come back next week.