How to irritate people - Lesson 1

I am sure all of you must have used gtalk some time or the other. Now, gtalk has this worthless feature which informs you when the other person leaves the conversation. You get a "Blah has left the conversation" update. When you know that the other person uses some client like pidgin (and not the usual gmail chat or gtalk), you can pull of this very irritating trick.

When you get an update of "left the conversation", just send an IM. Most likely, your friend is trying to ignore you and will leave the conversation again (acting as if he/she didn't read it at all). But little does he/she know that he/she just sent a very worthless but useful update to you :D. Send an IM again. If the other person is using pidgin, a window will pop-up and the focus will be shifted there. (For gmail chat and gtalk, it isn't very effective). grrrr irritating! hehe!

Here's a conversation between me and lets call the other person 'bakra', for the sake of protecting his/her identity.

bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai: me too
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai: :)
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai:
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai:
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai:
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai:
bakra has left the conversation.
Jitubhai:

-->bakra goes offline here


lol!
notice the intelligent use of blank messages :D. I bet the "friend" was wondering why the hell the window keeps popping up.
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!

The perfect world ...

I have always been an advocate of eradicating "money" and "progress" from this world. I still hold that they have been the reason for our misery. So, I have this concept, "the perfect world", wherein we all live together as a single big community and there is no money, etc etc. These thoughts of mine surfaced once again when I started reading this book called "Outliers" by "Malcom Gladwell". The first chapter in itself is very good. Do read the first chapter here. It isn't huge. Shouldn't take more than 15 minutes of your precious time. It is a real good read. I do hope to realise my dream sometime :).

My grand dream ...

My ultimate dream is to have a server installed at my place. 16-core. 16 gigs of RAM. 1 petabyte storage space arranged as RAID and 8 Mbit upload and 16-mbit download bandwidth. It will run either Fedora or FreeBSD.
What will I use this machine for? I have no idea!! But, I also imagine myself completely absorbed in some very important and very obscure work which only I will understand. I will talk with conf files so fluently as if they were the languages I speak. Debugging a problem would be like a cakewalk. *Jitesh attaches strace to blah process*. 5 min later *Jitesh finds and fixes the problem*

I will be a big-shot in the OpenSource community and will have commit access to most package repositories. Yet, I will be cool. Watching movies, playing CS and having a super-hot girlfriend.

Some day I'll have so many machines/boards attached to my server that I would have to make a farm of these boards. I'd add manual firewall/iptables rules to give each of them different type of accesses. One of them would probably host a git server, another one an httpd server and stuff like that. I'd have 4-5 virtual machines running on the main machine and bridged with the wan interface. I don't know what the hell they would do. But, they would serve some important purpose.

And after all this is done, I'll wake up and use my shivaji-chya-kaal-cha juna PC which doesn't even have Linux installed on it :( ..sigh!

Its not yet another credit crisis article ...

After the Great Wall Street fall my mail and Reader were flooded with crisis articles. I admit my lack of interest in reading those articles because I couldn't understand half of them and the others were so huge, I got bored half-way. But, today I came across this amazing video which lucidly explains why the crisis started. It isn't wayy to simple and not wayy too difficult. Just perfect and nicely put and entertaining too. Do have a look.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

(Thanks to my good friend Mihir for the link)

If

(came across this amazing poetry. Some of the lines are simply superb!)

If
By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

Matrubhumi and Malena

Recently, I had the privilege of watching two distinguished movies, Matrubhumi and Malena. Both the movies boast of great direction, handling a very precarious topic and powerful acting. And ofcourse both belong to the "cult cinema" category. I won't recommend either, because they also belong to the "brutal cinema" category :). Watch at your own risk.
Both the movies have the same underlying motif : How degenerate can we, as humans, become.

Malena is set in a Sicilian town. It is about the only beautiful woman in the town from the perspective of a boy who has just hit his adolescence. "The beautiful woman" is portrayed by Monica Bellucci, so, you know how beautiful "beautiful" is! :). The director doesn't believe much in subtlety. Some parts of the movie are crude and "crossing the line". But, this crudeness is what helps the movie generate the effect it does.

"Matrubhumi : A nation without women" is set sometime in the future. It assumes that killing the girl child had become prevalent in the Indian villages and imagines a situation when there are no women left. None at all. The movie doesn't indulge in needless scenes of crude violence, but instead uses euphemisms, which makes it bearable. Credit to the director for that. Tulip Joshi has done a great job and so have all the others.

Both the movies are worth an applause, but, both are brutal in their own way. They would make Deepa Mehta's "Water" look tame. If you are into off-beat cinema, do watch Matrubhumi. If it doesn't move you, probably nothing else can. Afterall, movies aren't just meant for entertainment, are they?

Helmets save lives ... and noses

This is the story of a Wednesday.

It was the day of our convocation. We were going to officially get our graduate certificates (and I was going to get my Post-graduate certificate.. you know, genius people are always two years ahead of everyone :P). The clock announced that it was 2:00 pm. Time to go to the university. This particular day, being a very good one for me (for entirely irrelevant reasons) I was in my usual jumping-jack mood. Salil and Sanjyot were waiting for me outside the Marvell building. I was late and Salil called me up (that bastard.. it was all because of him). So, I had to run. I couldn't have missed the luxury of getting a free lift in her car :P.

So, I ran down the stairs to the ground floor. And I decided to take the main entrance. The main entrance is a big glass door at a distance of about 50 feet from the four elevators (that is where the stairs end). At this precise moment, Salil called and so I started running towards the main entrance hardly realising that the doors were made of Saint Gobain glass and were fucking SHUT. (Now that I think of the timing that he called, I doubt whether it was all a set-up :P). I don't think I can continue the story any further. Please, run your imagination as wild as it can, because, yeah, IT HAPPENED ...

Fortunately, there was no one around except two security guards. I bet I could see the smile on the corner of their faces as they came to help me. I hurt my nose, tore my upper lip and a bruise on my scalp. But, I wasn't worried about that. All I was worried about was that I was going to be the butt of the jokes for the next few days :P. And my my! my friends didn't disappoint me at all! :P

Anyway, I am in the process of suing Saint Gobain and passing a bill to make helmets compulsary while walking and running too. Please support my bill!