Month: July 2002

Found in the list of people who have me as their friend and since I don’t really have any personal friends apart from … Of Course 🙂 Got curious… …

I really liked what I read….

Hop over to https://justlikethat.blogspot.com to find more.

Read a review of the movie “Bend it like Beckham” written by her at https://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002/jul/12bend.htm

After running my internet gateway for almost 2 years with only TCP Wrappers for protection (and without any incidence) and scared me enough to implement some ipchains – yeah I know they have been superceded by iptables but then that is a different story.

Amongst other things I discovered in a conversation with Vaibhav that VMWare on my RH 7.3 was old – upgrading to 3.1.1 worked…

Posting this using LochJournal – I still dont like the interface

It is almost mid night, hot, humid and no electricity since past 5 hours. I am sitting in dark, the emergency lamps have long burnt out, writing this on my palm PocketLJ

May be I should go to the office, there I can watch a movie – the UPS will last for ages if I run just one machine. Pity we dont have a table fan… I could have slept then, if I am not mistaken a fan consumes just about the same amount of electricity as a computer?

MSEB guys say that entire UP, MP and most of Maharashtra is blacked out – sabotage?

The morning papers will tell about it – that is if they get published!!!
[UPDATE]
https://www.rediff.com/news/2002/jul/30power1.htm
[/UPDATE]

Saturday and Sunday went past in a dull misty haze of movies combined with nostalgia and talking a lot with Swati. In-fact we started the the weekend on Friday night when we stayed awake till 3:45 am….

First we watched Devdas – more about the movie later – Then there was a good print of our teenage classic – Blue Lagoon (1980) – which we wanted to copy, so we fiddled around with CD drives and CD writer till 2 AM when we could finally copy it.

To test the copy I fired up Xine and ended watching the complete movie holding hands – I don’t remember when it was last we did that ….

Swati manages to run into the weirdest of bugs. There is a bug with gimp-print which gives streaky prints when connected to a SMB printer given a particular set of hardware. I have side stepped the issue by shifting the printer to her machine and making it a CUPS server!! Will file a bug report once I am able to isolate and replicate the hardware on another machine.

Thanks to Atul and Shanu for all the help.

BTW we also discovered that CUPS cannot use a SMB printer and Winduhs prior to 2K cannot print to a CUPS printer queue.

Among other things saw Attack of the Clones. The movie is good only for providing the continuity to the saga. There are several sequences where I felt that the FXs were overdone just to the sake of FXs

I had to happen! The only person who uses printer to any significant degree in the office is unable to print properly from Linux !!!

Same setup, same drivers, printer on same machine works perfectly from every other Linux/Windows machine

Unfortunately it works properly from that very machine when booted in Windows and still more unfortunate the trouble started when the machine was upgraded to RH 7.3 from RH 7.2

Redoing a complete forced upgrade did not work either – will have to try a reinstall

No point for guessing whose machine this is 😉

Micro Payments are the need of the hour!!

I was just doing some rough calculations about the downloads of my Open Source softwares and figured that even if I got 25 Cents for 25% of the downloads that have happened over the past two and quarter years I would be sitting over nearly $100K

Man I can live like a king on that kind of dough!

Thankfully at least I don’t have to pay for the bandwidth…

Yeah! we are talking about 1.6 million downloads, agreed there is a lot of ifs and buts involved… Heck whats wrong in dreaming that one day it will be true!!

https://www.evolvingbeauty.com is the website of Eric Boutilier Brown, a Canadian photographer who specializes in photographing nudes in black and white.

This man’s talent is amazing!! I have been following his work for past two years and he has consistently improved on his quality and technique.

I can personally vouch for the fact that photographing nudes is a very tough job and is very tiring for the model. Even the simplest of shots which appear very candid may take hours of planning, BUT Eric simply seems to go on and on.

The website itself is very well organized into distinct sections, plus there is a photo diary which he maintains on the site which is filled with interesting technical bits and pieces.

My personal favorites are the sections titled Thalamus and Amortis

BTW Eric recently got married – congratulations to him!!!

An wide-angle analysis of the situation suggests a rather alarming thing… …

I am kind of burning out mentally, and need to take a break from my programming work, I am sure my shrink friends will say that I am headed for a breakdown.

Sounds logical – the feeling of boredom is the mind’s way of telling that it no longer wants this milieu – Ever since I stopped going to to the clinic my schedule essentially consists of waking up walking next doors working like mad powered by the adrenalin rush of dead lines, new ideas and client demands. Thankfully Swati has been particular about food and walks so the damage is not much physically, but signs are there – I have put on about 5 Kgs mainly around the middle – Ugh!

So the solution is to expedite the completion of my OPD, more physical exercise, and taking up my old hobby of sketching a bit seriously. Yes nice old fashioned way with paper and pencil.

Life seems to be stuck in a vortex of anachronistic emotions.

Weeks are passing by so swiftly that I hardly seem to notice the gaps between weekends. There is a lot of work, good programming work, at the end of the day I am dead tired BUT I am also so very bored!!

Even right now I am sitting amidst carcasses of two machine upgrading Linux on third, while doing some emergency bug swatting for a client. I know a lot of guys who would want to swap places with me BUT the fact is that I am bored!!!

I am bored with??

No, let us put it this way – I feel futile, only that I know nothing will run here if I am not present…

I need to do some thing different something different and creative