Month: January 2003

I thought that the original did not do proper justice

Had a few minutes to spare this morning and made this, a 640×480 version is here

A lot of friends took the Which OS you are quiz. The most common result seems to be Palm OS 🙂

Hmm… … There are still some whose results I would like to see 😉

Java still sux – If I have to pass a series of commands to runtime I have to first get its outputStream and then write to it!!!

Continuing on the on everything is irrelevant theme – The price you pay to be “in style”

Thong underwear: Vaginal and urinary tract infections
Tight pants: Low sperm count, rash, infection
Body piercing, tattooing: Hepatitis C transmission and other infections, allergy trigger
High-heel shoes: Foot, knee and back problems
Big shoulder bags: Shoulder and back problems
Corsets: Fainting, shortness of breath, atrophy of the back muscles
Fashion magazines: Poor body image, eating disorders

From: https://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/amnews/pick_02/hlsc0805.htm

Things on Aasim’s front are clearing out and though the problem is wider in scope than we expected it is not too serious. The teachers have been very helpful and understanding. Aasim like so many other children in his class is getting affected by the behavior of a few in his class. Unfortunately the teachers could not see it because these few were girls!!!

Talk of being presumptuous. Also, teachers admit that the pressure on children has increased a wee bit lately.

Yeah! worries never stop the motor of this world, so I have been indeed been reading a few things. PHP has had an ncurses extension for some time now but I never really experimented with it as it was very rough round the edges but looks like it has matured now. Interested in making console bases ncurses application written in PHP? Take a look at this tutorial here

Also read up on some techniques to digitally colorize black and white pictures, GIMP, Paintshop, Photopaint will work in any decent image editing software.

Which OS are You?

Went out and got some clothes for Swati. Of course her money (I don’t have any personal wealth) BUT it makes me feel good to select clothes for her.

Aasim was fine throughout the day BUT then at the end of the day he wet his pants… … something he has not done in, can’t remember how long. This time we decided to just not react to it except saying “no probs, lets change your pants”

A talk with the teachers revealed that in general there has been a rash of similar episodes from other children lately. Makes me wonder if it is something pressurizing the kids in school… …

Also would like to figure out if this is a reaction to being denied certain things. Like in the evening it could have been that Dinesh (our office odd job) was not allowed to go to skating with him… …

In other news welcome nandinit Swati’s friend from Mumbai hostel days. I remember her as a feisty girl-woman. Looks like she still remains the same
Disclaimer: have not seen OR met her in 10 years or so….

OMG!

There seems to be a definite problem – Aasim again took scissors and cut his hair today.

I have to give up everything and spend more time with him. We have to talk to his teachers as well. He feels awful when people make fun of him, and his classmates did make fun of him today BUT still he did it… …

Have to find out what he is trying to rebel against? Or is this just attention seeking? Or boredom – It cannot be boredom today as throughout the day he was playing with Dinesh, he talked with the programmers, played with the cat, we talked in the afternoon… …

Of late though I have indeed noticed that he just runs away from the Lab if I enter….

Despite the fact that he has not been ever told by me to go out… …

I guess he wants more time with me. More time with Swati… …

Life Sux!!!

Life is too simple and not really in my favour

Net has been slow thanks to Slapper (?!) I can almost sympathise with the creator… … Hope it gave him a good kick 😀

Finally was able to get mail now 150 of them … …

Aasim, in middle of watching cartoons, most likely out of sheer boredom, butchered his own hair and is now feeling very miserable about it – thanks to me, I am feeling miserable for making him feel miserable – it was his head and he should be free to do whatever he wants as long as it does not physically endanger him, 5, 15, *5 age shouldn’t really matter here… …

The telephone bills are going to be horrendously high from April on wards 80 paisa per minute is not funny…. …. we have to get some kind of broad band by then or we are doomed. We will end up paying something like US$350 to 500 per month an increase of 100%

Have always felt strongly about the subject but never wrote because it was too personal and my writing this, I felt, will not make any difference. But over past few days I have repeatedly thought about the topic and concluded that writing it down at least for sake of later reference would be a good idea.

It is about how RMS and his gang of GNUheads are suppressing freedom. I agree to the fact that GNU has done a significant amount of work in the Free/Libre/Open source software BUT I will *never* agree to calling Linux as GNU/Linux my primary objection is to the use of blackmail and threats to make users and developers fall in line. Ideology comes a poor second when you compare it with doing what is civil, humane and *right*

Freedom to me is being Free to make a choice may it be a choice to remain a slave to M$ but it should be my choice – this is what GNUheads are not allowing by insisting that either we fall in line OR be an outcast. In my experience, in India, the most rabid of the proponents of this line for forceful reasoning are guys who themselves did not develop anything but want the claim to fame, youngsters who are blinded by sheer presence, and clueless philosophasters who are just ga ga over ideology – any ideology. They don’t realize the evil or the extent of evil which is being preached in name of freedom. What is in fact being preached that you give up freedom!!!

$diety help them when they finally discover that how some animals are more equal than others… …

Thank God PHP has a license of its own.

This whole thing took a somewhat personal turn when friend achitnis was forced into not speaking at GNUnify event. You can read about it on his site.

I too feel that Atul should have made all the emails and names public BUT no! Atul is a relic from a bygone era for me. An era of my parents, they would have taken the same stand, paid the same price and saying to them “sometime you gotta fight” would invite rebuke… …

Today we found a teeny weeny, about 28cm long, Common Krait in our garden. Yeah! its a poisonous snake. It was promptly caught photographed, measured and put in a jar to be shown to Aasim.

The Common Krait is one of the poisonous snakes found in India, though it has been really long that I saw one in our garden. It is really fascinating to see differently how a poisonous snake behaves as compared to a non-poisonous one. This one even though a baby just kept trying to lunge and bite and followed people, fingers even though inside a jar… …

Aasim was a bit unhappy that he was not allowed to touch it. Also he has now been warned to be extra careful if he sees a snake and definitely not try to shoo or catch it unless I am around.

Pictures are here

[update]
Prompted by mmk‘s comment I would like to add that the snake was set free as soon as Aasim came back from school and had a look 🙂
[/update]

Today finally after 6 years of faithful service the hard disk on *the computer* with which we started SANIsoft, displayed first symptoms of failure – LILO refused to boot further.

Booting from CDROM of another machine and overwriting did fix the problem but I guess it is time to retire that old friend… … Though it is still a good test bed for Win95 and IE

The complete exercise took almost half the day because we had the time 😉 We opened several other machines as well to tweak them into an optimum collection of hardware on each machine so that we can have a LAN party!!!

It was heartening to note that PHPlib by default takes care of most most of the Top Ten security flaws published at https://www.owasp.org

For those of you who still think that PHPlib is for PHP3 take a look at https://phplib.sourceforge.net/snapshots/ This version uses PHP 4 session and works with register_globals off

Found another interesting article PHP and the OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerabilities Doing a search before starting to write does help – I was just about to write what would have been about 80% what David Sklar has written.