Manish’s Scribble Board

Am back on my hot seat after a long gap of five days. The guy who used to blog nearly daily has taken such a long break? Its due to my stuffed schedule. Going to meet relatives, some necessary work, shopping and blah blah blah. There is no end to work. Even today I have to goto station to leave my cousin sis who is leaving for her college. Maybe I get time in the nights to spend my time on this cyber world.

I had thought of learning linux shell scripting and am happy to announce that this ceremony hasnt started still yet. :D  I accept my laziness! I do have idea of this stuff except that there is a need to learn it properly so that I can write proper and efficient scripts. Still have in my possession an eBook written for Korn Shell, but a small note is available for even bash besides anything different from ksh.

More developments had been going on. Results came out on 26th of this month and I was again a proud nine-pointer. Never even did I expect such a high GPA! It was really shocking to see such high scores in my branch while other branch students were crying to get even a decent grade esp electrical students. Marks came like rains to comps students and everyone grabbed the opportunity. I got a B in Operating System and Computer Networks, both papers being core of Computer Science. Having a damn care attitude sometimes help as the syllabus of Networks is quite un-realistic and unpractical. Well semester cleared and hoping to see the next one.

1) Laptop: This is the thing which doesnt need any more description. Who would not love his/her own laptop. That too when it is a platform for me to learn new things. Imagining running from one room to the other’s friend’s room just to get surf the net or get some knowledge. Having my own laptop, am free to do whatever I like, even experiment too.

2) Firefox : Web Browsing had never been so easy and secure. Kudos goes to Firefox browser from Mozilla project. This excellent, robust, secure and free Web Browser has brought light to many people who were tired of that horrible Internet Explorer. Earlier half of the time which people might be doing would be cleaning spywares, viruses and hell lots of malwares from their boxes. I can well remember my earlier days when I used IE, when I had to get my computer formatted every two months or three. When I will start earning, I would surely donate to the Mozilla foundation for bringing out this excellent Free and Open Source software. Is not just a web browser. Its LIFE !!!

3) Wikipedia : “Cant Imagine a World without Wikipedia”. Surely! Whenever I would like to know something about anything I would just point my browser to en.wikipedia.org and make a search. The descriptions are very apt and knowledgeable. Controversial topics are marked properly to distinguish them from known facts. I have even seen many people criticizing that Wikipedia may not become a full encyclopedia like Encarta or Brittanica. I consider it hundreds times more better than these two. Wikipedia was written entirely from scratch and is a fruitful work of people all over the world. Brittanica and Encarta are offline versions, whereas Wikipedia is online allowing us to fetch data from virtually anywhere all over the world. The last word I can say about this great collaborative project is “If people Join hands they can surely change the World”.

4) Google : This term needs no introduction. Google is not just another company. Its a revolution in the field of information and sharing of intellectual property. This company has shown the way that strong will power and determination is required to be at the top of the world. Its search engine gets billions of queries every day, its the power and robustness of Google’s server that it can cope up with all sorts of magic inflation of traffic. It has become synonymous with Web search. “Google the web” is an alias to search the web. Google is no longer a noun, it has achieved dimensions as a verb and an adjective. Just imagine this world without google- “The whole web with load of information, but no one to organize them”

5) Linux : This term is somewhat geeky! Yes! Ask someone whether he/she uses it? They will give you a strange look and say “I dont like to work on that command line, I dont know commands”. This is the general misconceptions which people usually have about this great Operating System. Linux users are regarded as geeks and hackers. They cant even imagine a normal user using it. Now this world is changing, so why not linux too? Just have a try at Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSuse. They are much more secure and properly organized. You wont find yourself desperately pressing three great buttons at each end of the keyboard. Am talking about Ctrl+Alt+Del. Linux doesnt hang as often as you might think provided it has sufficient RAM, even if it hangs that occurs only to the graphical interface, the OS keeps running as it is. To Newcomers I would recommend Ubuntu 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon. Its a great distro which everyone should keep their hands over.

6) My Own Web Site : My Web Site is my identity! Its my web presence! Presently I have two websites hosted on proper shared hosting. These two are www.manishsinha.info which hosts my personal blog and the other is www.manishtech.info which is my technical blog. Apart from that I use this website as a resource to identify myself on the net. I feel proud to have a proper domain name (I understand, there is nothing to be so proud of). The extensions of the domains is .info which signifies information. I had thought of .com but that symbolizes commercial which I cant attach with my informative blogs.

7) Wordpress : Wordpress has really shown the bloggers a new way. When this project was started who knew that it would become the de facto standard of blogging. Today blogging means wordpress. This is the first word that strikes the mind of a blogger when he hears the word “Blog”. The code of this great software package is neatly written, hundreds of themes spice up the look, plugins greatly enhance the functionality. It is highly secure and has surely given a new life to all bloggers.

8 ) PHP and MySQL : No other programming language I enjoyed learning so much as PHP. Java, which is the most famous language for a newbie to learn, didnt even fascinate me as this Open Source scripting language. The power of PHP is immense, its syntax matches with C, though many language constructs are inherited from Java and Perl. PHP alone is not sufficient, it is postfixed with MySQL, a database software tightly integrated with it. This is like a brother and sister relation. While programming on PHP a programmer only thinks of MySQL if he is asked to provide database access to his clients. Such is the power of PHP and MySQL.

9) Broadband Internet Connection : All of the above things could never have been implemented without my own internet connection. At my college I got my private Internet connection from Airtel. At home I had used dial-up connection which very pretty slow and very expensive which limited my browsing habits. After having unlimited bandwidth with Airtel one, I started using more than 30GB of data transfer every month. That’s quite a large number. I understand, but that implies how much information and knowledge i grabbed in.

This surely reflects the changing scenario of Indian politics. Modi has long been accused of using hatred politics and emotional issues for instigating people to garner votes. This time he had no such issues except developments and progress. People have given their verdict. BJP won by two-third majority alone and Congress with allies got some 65 seats.

I dont want to comment on emotional issues which so called intellectual people always think when the name of Modi crops up. These are those category of people who are equally responsible for instigating such acts. If they surely think that Modi is doing wrong, they should give him less coverage. Instead these people make him so much in lime-light that he has really become a hero.

Not only is Narendra Modi a hero, but he deserves to be. Its not that am his supporter, but am not even completely for him. I greatly cherish his plans for prosperous Gujarat. Those Chief Ministers who criticize him for riots should first look into their states, how people in their states live, such a pathetic situation. I could never believe that Surat- the city completely destroyed by plague once is again shining and is set to give even the metros a tough fight. Gujarat is the best place to start a business. Whatsoever be the situation, the reality is that it is that state which has the least terrorism. All other states are affected by some or the other internal security issues like naxalism, terrorism etc except Gujarat. The situation may become such that one day it can even stand on its own without center’s aid, like a free country.

Becoming a bit technical, I re-installed Ubuntu on my system. The other ext3 partition is remaining useless, unless I go back to pave its way for Fedora 8. My APTonCD backup rescued me a lot. Installed all basic softwares like gstreamer, libxine, abiword, geany, bluefish, bluetooth, gnochm, gparted, apache2, mysql5, php5, mod_fastcgi, audacious and many more thus saving my bandwidth. Three Cheers for the APTonCD project.

I know this is quite a new term for the general people. Actually our earth revolves round the sun inclined at angle to the axis. This leads to summers and winters and also unequal length of days and nights. So what you figured out. Today on 22nd night will be longest night of the year named as Winter solstice. I think of going to sleep early to enjoy this long beautiful night, this time this event fell on weekend. Hope all the people in the Northern Hemisphere must be enjoying their long sleep.

And a bit more update, my system is now screwed more heavily. I tried some more experiments and landed in a state that I cant boot Xubuntu Feisty and even Ubuntu Gutsy. I am unable to figure out what to do? Should I do a clean reinstall and lose all the setting and configuration. I have the backup of all the important packages, it is necessary as I have limited bandwidth on my internet connection. Presently am using my backup operating system - “Windows XP” which is the primary OS of more than 85% of this world

When you get at home, its not the time to rest but to meet you relatives, get their good wishes. Today I along with my younger brother went to all relatives and cousins. Felt like I could complete the work in just few hours, but who knows that this guy would be stuck up badly in the Great Indian Culture. I had to reject tea, coffee, snacks, soups and hundreds of such similar offers in the desperate attempt to get back early at home. Getting back, had a sound sleep and got up just now. Looks like my stamina getting weak. Only 3 hours of door to door meeting ceremony and it made me lay flat on the bed.

On the other side, my system is at the same state as it was yesterday. Havnt got time to reinstall, recover and then reinstall. It takes time and the frequent power cuts add to my woes. Presently, there’s no power and my house is powered by the genset which will be switched off at 11PM.

Just now I got a call from my friend “Seema” who is with me in my college, she is doing training at Tata Steel. She narrated her two days experience. Now I feel that the training which I did at BSNL was far better. I didnt have to do anything and got the certificate for free. She was asked to make a graphical application, buttons, radio boxes, retrieving data from excel sheets, integrating databases and hell lots more. My one and a half years of experience says that I would have utterly failed if I was there. Maybe she succeeds. Looks like I am better for those mechanical works. Best of Luck to her…

Well this blunder is not something for which I have to pay heavily, its just that I tried to Install Xubuntu on my system when I had Ubuntu Gutsy and Windows XP already installed. I made one more partition to make place for Xubuntu Feisty. After installing I was shocked to find Ubuntu missing from the GRUB menu. After investigation I found that the new installation has overwritten the kernel image of Gutsy in the boot partition. I didnt even have a backup of it

I was very excited to install one more OS as I didnt wanted myself to get stuck on and only Linux-Ubuntu. Here are some snaps which I took during installation.

I had tried hard to recover this beautiful and sexy OS -Ubuntu Gutsy. One of my friend -Ankur Srivastava sent me the kernel image of Gutsy from his computer. Now I can see the boot screen but no booting :P    I cant reinstall original Gutsy because I have installed a lot of applications and have neatly configured it. Now I dont even want to upgrade.

Finally I am going to recover Gutsy tomorrow, will reinstall Gutsy over Xubuntu, copy the kernel image back to the original installation and if successful, will reinstall xubuntu back over the newly installed Ubuntu. May God be with me!!