Manish’s Scribble Board

Winter is in full swing here at Ranchi, my hometown and the temperature yesterday was 6°C. My bones can really feel the cold. I usually get up at late noon but today was extraordinary- got up ar 8:15AM to drop my mother at college. Returned back to find that none of my friends are online. Am just wandering around this huge internet.

I have been working over shell programming when I got stuck up with running Internet on my ubuntu. It connects through PPPoE to the outside world. The configuration software is very dumb and the connection sometimes terminates or conflicts amongst many child processes that spawn when I retry to enable the connection. The other headache is that USB doesnt work on ubuntu. The DataOne people have given a driver source code, excited by this, i tried to compile it, again and again. To my utter surprise i found that the driver was for 2.4 kernel. Now which latest distro used 2.4 kernel? All home users use 2.6 version and these people just bundled a driver for namesake. What hypocrisy??

Well today Night Mars is going to come closest to earth which will be best view until 2016. The orange planet passes our earth every 26 months. At the closest approach mars will be some 55 million miles. Is it too close? Well! For astronomical distances, it can be.

And a setback for torrenters! TorrentSpy has lost a lawsuit in California for alleged copyright infringements. Earlier they had blocked access to US users to prevent conflict of US and EU privacy laws. TorrentSpy had argued that they dont keep copyrighted information on their servers, their servers just keep trackers for tracking users. The copyrighted data is on users systems. This case looks like Napster lawsuit. This time Motion Pictures Association of America has filed lawsuits after trying hard on PIrateBay.org . Kudos to Piratebay for their valour, they dont fear the authorities and even mock at the legal notices by publicly posting them at their sites.  TorrentSpy had earlier been files $30,000 and was warned of its activities. This is not the beginning or end of file sharing era. All major file sharing software/firms have faced the brunt of laws. Be it Kaaza for spyware /adwares or TorrentSpy ,Piratebay and Napster for music and movie sharing. This battle will continue.

So finally am back at home after this tedious journey of more than 60 hours

Last semester will be remembered for all the useless and crap activities at the beginning. I wasted a hell lot of time with net zero productivity. Finally at the last, when the semester was drawing to a close we started Linux Users Group which is turning out to be quite fruitful and innovative. I havnt decided yet what I will be doing this winter break. Any new decisions will be put up ASAP.

Regards….

So the semester exams finishes at last. Dont ask how it went. It just passed by

So more great news. Today results of our labs were announced. I was greatly overjoyed to get the knowledge of  scoring A+ in all three of the labs. An achievement which only a few students enjoyed this time. Well its not much of excitement as I screwed up my theory papers which carry more credits. Still dont know when this damn result will come out, but I just want it to be with the University chaps for more than two weeks atleast. Till then I will have chance to breathe the fresh air at my home.

On the technical side, finally after waiting a long time, my Ubuntu got a whooping 192MB of security and softwares updates. A thing which I was waiting for long. The reason was not just security flaws! I was stuck up at Firefox 2.0.0.6 while the whole world was enjoying 2.0.0.11 This pack of security updates contained updates for each and every possible softwares which is bundled with this great OS.

Am leaving for my hometown “Ranchi” on 13th night. I have my train from Mangalore at 9:30PM. Will reach Ranchi at 9AM on 16th December. Will be leaving for Manipal on 11th January to reach this damn place on 14th Jan to get the air and so called enjoyment of the great sixth semester. Am really frustated of friends and relatives asking that same dumb question- “Sixth Semester! Then the companies would be coming for placements?”. Man! Let them come. We will take care of them duly and our smart and intelligent Placement Director is there to handle all the sensitive matters. Keep checking for more updates on my so called Placements

So finally a big headache is over. Am very much relaxed after giving this Operating System paper which was my most hated paper theoretically and most loved paper practically. Who will say that the person who keeps promoting Linux himself gets so less marks in this paper and has least internals of all papers. Just one more paper left -”Computer Networks” on Tuesday. Leaving home on 13th (Thursday)

Yesterday even paper I didnt get rest, left for railway concession, a whooping 5 to 9:30PM shift was something I never expected. Finally came to room, got a movie and watched it till 4AM. I was really tired, still

On the sports end, Yuvraj and Ganguly played the test match like they were in a 20-20 match. Even Pathan reached a century and no more comments on Dada! He achieved in making his debut double century. The return of the Dada!

This is my first attempt of live blogging. It will be for the sports religion of India-”Cricket”. The Men in Blue showed up an excellent performance yesterday. Ganguly came back in his aggresive form (104 runs) to say “Greg! Here goes my end of career… :D”. Greg Chappell is a loser. Even Jaffer and Laxman scored centuries. Dhoni and Dravid half-centuries. The one person unlucky was again Sachin who missed his century. Wasim Jaffar was the man to hit a double-century.

On the other side, Pakistan lost their wickets in the beginning as Misbah came back to their rescue. Akmal is giving him full support. Presently they are on 84* and 83* respectively. They might even save the follow on!

So here starts my end semester exams! One paper over called “Theory of Computation” which is more famously known as “Automata”. Things didnt go “bad to worse” as usual as nothing came from the portion of syllabus which I left. Summing up the paper was good and I expect to get decent score. Hope to perform well this semester.

I just completed my experiments on my Linux box after hopelessly trying to run simple flash animations. I understand this is a very simple thing, the problem was lying behind a broken gnash plugin for flash (I prefer free softwares on my free Ubuntu).

Now reporting from LUG-Manipal. Things are going on quite well, Anomit wrote a post “Installing WAMP on your Windows“. This was very important since most of the newcomers in this field dont know how to run Wordpress, MediaWiki,phpBB and other softwares. I understand this is a bit spoon feeding but this story wont continute long.

Well just got up from a movie, it was excellent! Three hours of complete utilization. Cherished every moment of it. Oh! I forgot to name the movie. Its an old one “The Great Escape”.