Jul 03

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

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

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

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

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

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May 11

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

The manual goes like this

PowerISO   Copyright(C) 2004-2008 PowerISO Computing, Inc
Type poweriso -? for help

Usage:    poweriso <command> [parameters] [-switches]

<Commands>

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

extract <image file> <dir/file name>   Extract files/directories from image file.
Example:  Extract all files and directories in root direcory of /home/sam/test.iso
to /home/sam/test recursively.

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

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

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

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May 10

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

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

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

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

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

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Apr 29

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

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

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

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

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

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Apr 24

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

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

Here goes the description of the project 

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

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

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

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

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