Category: Live Journal Entries

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!

A little bit more – Dr Hook 1973

When your body’s had enough of me
And I’m laying flat out on the floor
When you think I’ve loved you all I can
I’m gonna love you a little bit more

Come on over and lay by my side
I’ve got to be touching you.
Let me rub your tired shoulders
The way I used to do.

Look into my eyes and give me that smile
The one that always turns me on
And let me take your hair down
Cause we’re staying up to greet the sun.

And when your body’s had enough of me
And I’m laying flat out on the floor
When you think I’ve loved you all I can
I’m gonna love you a little bit more

Got to say a few things that have been on my mind
You know where my mind has been
I guess I learned my lessons
And now’s the time to begin

So if you’re feelin’ alright and you’re ready for me
I know that I’m ready for you
We better get it on now
Cause we got our whole life to live through

And when your body’s had enough of me
And I’m layin’ flat out on the floor
When you think I’ve loved you all I can
I’m gonna love you a little bit more

When your body’s had enough of me
And I’m layin’ flat out on the floor?

Thanks to vaibhav I also caught the bug 🙂

I first heard this song when I was 13, my elder brother had purchased the LP record for the album. Then, I remember, having thought of the song as a bit scandalous. By 15 I wanted to find a soul mate for whom I could play this song. Since that, been there done that, have her as my wife and had almost forgotten the song… …

Guess time for playing it again – since past 2 days have been feeling very grumpy, irritable and pressured for no distinct reason 🙁

BTW read more about Dr Hook here.

Sooner or later your son will be better at doing most of the things that you do now.

Aasim already is at it – He can fly a kite better than me and almost as well as his mother

Here are some pictures that I took of him yesterday. They are really funny because he is not allowed for reasons of safety to stand on top of the car.