Th.oughts

Sarah PalinThe country I belong to has made me a person with the slightest interest in politics. Such is the fate of politics back in India; the people's representatives, the opposition and ofcourse the politics involved, I simply gave up. As far as my senses take me, I remember myself as a person who likes to think that politics is somewhere around the same side of the coin as religion. So, at a time when the entire United States of America is talking about the presidential race, I have always loved to remain in my cocoon of gadgets, guitars and movies pretending that I really enjoyed people's views on Obama or Mccain or whoever whatever else.

Today, though was an entirely different day. Due to some unexplainable forces, I had a strong urge to click on this link which was an interview of Sarah Palin , the republican candidate for the US vice president. As far as becoming the president or vice president is concerned, the majority of people think that she's doesn't have that impressive a profile and somewhere down the lines, I had started to think like that too. This interview bolstered my opinion like nothing else. But more importantly, this interview made me realize that there _are_ flaws in every democratic system (not just India!)

Now, to the real deal. The interviewer all through out was making sure if Palin if aware what she was getting into if she becomes the vice president (or president) and at every step, Palin responded the same way I would respond if I was asked a question on web technologies during a job interview. Like a child who really tries hard to impress the crowd, she tried and she failed. But what really blew over was when the interviewer asked her views on the Bush doctrine . Palin _actually_ fumbled but was trying hard to show that she knows what she's doing and then she just came up with a very generic answer like a kindergarten kid. To come to the point, this is not about how much she knows, this is about the fact that she doesn't know as much to become the president or vice president of the United States of America. And the worst part is: she doesn't realize it!

If Sarah Palin gets to the country's reins, may be she will give in her best, work like a dog, never ever sleep but the fact would always remain the same: She's not just ready yet! I have just three words: God bless America!

First go here if you have no idea what I am talking about.

Step 1

Get the Make controller kit ;) Get the power supply too, it's more convenient than connecting the USB cable.

Step 2

Get the Olimex jtag-usb-tiny from Sparkfun Electronics . It's the cheapest way to get started, trust me! Also get a
USB cable A to B while you are there. You will thank me later.

Ok, I rarely find any use of the Thinklight that's supposedly there to help you type in the dark (isn't the light from the LCD screen enough ?). Then, I came across this really cool pidgin plugin called pidgin-blinklight by Joachim Breitner that blinks the thinklight when you receive a new message. Honestly, that's the perfect usage, the light can possibly find, keeping in mind the fact that I hate my sound card to be disturbed when I am doing something serious, err.. watching a movie or playing a game i meant!

I did feel the need to make some changes to the original sources. Notably, I wanted the light to blink until I do not see the pending message. Also, there was a silly path error that prevented me from writing to /proc/acpi/ibm/light as a normal user. I am also now linking against pidgin libraries unlike the original sources that link only to libpurple and so I thought it makes sense to provide the whole sources rather than a patch. You can find it here. You can get the sources yourself by running git clone git://makefile.in/pidgin-blinklight.git

Note that the sources are quite beta but nevertheless they solve my purpose :)

Being the time of the year when finances have made a bad hit on me, life couldn't have been better without a credit card scam. Yes, you heard it right, finally I made the grand entry to the list of people who have been scammed. All the usual bragging about specializing in Computer Security was now worth two cents or may be less.

The best browser ever, landed on earth today but while big daddy was busy asking everyone to do their homework to get ready for the party, he failed to do his own.

First and foremost, as all of us came know a little later, the download day was not just 17th June, 2008; it was 17th June 2008 at 10:00 am PDT. No one ever cared to inform that important piece of shit. All big daddy wanted was a 1 million downloads in 24 hours, he didn't care how frustrated you would be to find out that you don't see your download at 12 am of June 17th, local time. And no Sir, I am not asking you to take care of all the time zones here, a simple countdown timer on the website would have been enough. Moral of the story: Big Daddy, you came up with something really impressive, you made us do our homework, but you failed to do your own!

Now, everyone knows that the digg effect is not just limited to sites on Digg's front page. Anyone can feel it; especially when you want 1 million downloaders to come to your site when you release the most anticipated browser ever, what on earth were you thinking ?! It's never going to be a breeze. Everyone knows that! Again, you failed to do your homework! Moral of the story: You promised us all the good things on June 17th, and all the good things you did give, but; the overall experience was somewhat dissapointing :(

Ok, now that my rant is over, I am off to start enjoying my brand new browser :)

Based on my weird ideas, I cooked up a small scipt that will save me some time by automatically versioning new files that come up in my home directory. You "may/may not" have any use for it but if you want to have a peek, it's right here. Feel free to modify or use it for something else (that is weirder).

What it does : It compares and finds out a list of newly created files/directories, asks whether to add them (or ignore them) and then commits the changes and pushes it to my Amazon S3 drive. You will want to take care of the paths in there that are specific to my system.

Have fun!

So, I was recently talking to a colleague of mine who has spent a good number of years in the defense industry. As he was reminiscing the good old days, the conversation gradually drifted to a more interesting discussion about a guy who was a software developer: It was the cold war era and there was this critical monitoring system (with some version of MULTICS running on it) that needed an important kernel update. And the catch: the system can't be switched off even for a second and (probably) it was a core update or may be LKMs didn't exist then :)

So, our smart guy did something that no one had ever done in those times. He built a system with an exactly similar configuration and made whatever changes needed to the kernel. Then, he compiled it and came up with a binary diff between the changed kernel and the original one. The next step: Yes, you guessed it, he identified sections of the running kernel where there have been changes and set the non-executable bits on them (in the critical system). After that, it was just a matter of applying the patch. And there you are! the system stayed on as it always was :)

PS: I am really not sure how possible it is with today's OSes but I find the whole idea quite fascinating.

Backing up your home directory is very essential, and the cream is not just the data that you save out there, but the milestones that keep track of how your data changes over time. That is what actually gets you the best possible data restore. Oh! and don't get me wrong, I am not talking about keeping track of your deleted impressive movie collection or mp3s; there are a tons of ways to handle them. If you are not getting my idea, think emails, think resumes, think an article you have been working on and also think of a lot of other useful things that you could possibly imagine.

Orkut sucks! Once, an interesting social networking site that I have used often to reunite with old friends, it has become a haven for spammers and suckers that are eager to try out their idiotic javascript nuisances. Yes, I am talking about the scrapbook: once an interesting feature, it's now like a symlink to my mail spam folder. I mean, why on earth do they allow javascript in the scrapbook ? Can I disable it somehow ? Even if I can, why is it hidden somewhere in the depths of the Marina Trench because I simply can't FIND it! Hey,the scrapbook is meant to be used to drop off a small message to someone, right ? Why has it to do some javascript coolness or madness to be more precise. And you know what, that (madness) is absolutely ok with me. What's not ok is that with all the spam floating around in my spambook(Oh yes, I am fed up of deleting them), I miss out on the genuine get-in-touch and say-hi-how-are-you scraps that my friends send me once in while.

Orkut dev team ! I know you are a brilliant bunch of people out there. Please please do something about it. I really don't want to delete my account because it's the best address book I can ever have (had)!

UPDATE: Here's something which is a more serious concern: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gU98JC3pwFFdUMNRnqQ_CNA7u25g

Equalize ? Ring a bell ? No ? Ignore the crap or else read on!