Author: Tarique Sani

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.

I have written about Eric Boutilier Brown and his website Evolving Beauty before but this image of his really had me entranced by its sensuality. (Has nudity – discretion advised)

This man is a genius with camera.

In other things Nagpur is such a dump that they don’t even update the METAR reports. Thus I cannot use any of the applets like wmWeather, KWeather, phpWeather and gkrellmWeather to name a few … … Even the TAF is not complete.

Yesterday was one of those days which once in a while the small quirks of fate serve up.

Yesterday I had to attend the funeral of my eldest aunt who died after having been paralyzed for past 6 years and in semi-coma for nearly a year. The quirk of fate was that her grandson was getting married yesterday as well. It is a huge joint family and it was an arranged marriage. Thankfully sense prevailed and the marriage was delayed by a couple of hours rather than canceled. Since I attended the funeral it would have been rude to not attend the wedding.

Came back at 4:30pm and read that friend laruth is in the midst of the Canberra bush fire There is no news of her since yesterday. We hope she is safe.

It is kind of strange how concerned you can get about people who are just your LJ friends.

Yesterday was also the day SANIsoft turned 5 years old 🙂

Continuing on the Java Sux theme….

Throughout the day been reading a lot on how to optimize the performance of Java. Found a few things on Developer Works IBM site. It is amazing how easily your server RAM will fill up with this thing if you don’t take a whole lot of precautions. Oh Well! I am talking about operations on 1000,000 files over WAN, so actually the whole concept SUX!!!

Yikes!!! Java suxs big time in string handling – If I have to remove whitespaces from between a string(Buffer) I have to write my own method

Duh!