Perils of inaction

Getting a Michigan driving license was at the back of mind for quite a some time. In fact, I ha decided that I will get it in the winter break. But I am just too lazy when it comes to doing things that are not so important in near future. And this time my lethargy has cost me dearly.
As said earlier, I wanted get the driving license in December but I just slept through the entire winter break. By the time I finally gathered enough enthusiasm to get the license, it was January 14. The writing test went smoothly and I cleared it without much of pain. All I had to do now is go to the testing center and give a driving test. It would have taken hardly two hours. But my lethargy struck back. I had six long months to give the driving test(written test score is valid for six months). So I never really bothered to do it soon. Last week Michigan State changed the requirements for getting a driver's license. Now a person must be a citizen or a permanent resident of USA (i.e.Green card holder) in order to qualify for driving license. However weird the rule may seem, it was a government rule. So basically people like me CANNOT have a driving license.
Ahhhh.......if only I had shown a little more seriousness about getting this done :-( I hate myself.....

Orkuto ergo sum

Renè Decartes once famously said "Cogito Ergo Sum" (I think therefore I exist). Today this may be rephrased as "Orkuto Ergo Sum" (first word is my gift to latin). Day by day, I see that people are becoming more and more dependent on orkut/facebook. They don't ask for email ids or phone numbers... they ask for orkut ids. I was shocked when I came to know that CATA (Capital Area Transportation Authority - Organization which manages Public Transport in Lansing) too has a facebook profile. It is very interesting how technology changes (I wanted to write takes over but may be its a bit early to say that) our lives....

So close yet ....

Grad schools usually have no chicks or very few of them... Back in Kharagpur our entire batch of 13 grad-students consisted only of males. So its quite an event to have a nice chick in your course...

Thats why I was quite excited when this nice chick walked in our class the other day. Ahhh, finally there are more motivations to go to the class other than just building strong foundation for research.....

Next day, while I was in meeting with my adviser the same girl walks in. She was going to work under my adviser in the same field. Wow... thats luck. She also happens to have graduated. Is this a divine signal asking me to take some action ?

My adviser decides that I should team up with her for our course project.... Boy...can it get better than this.........

And then Mr. Murphy strikes........ She happens to be happily married for two years...
:-( I think I should rather concentrate on my research.....

Disaster

I have only one course this sem. That means two lectures per week. One of them was on Thursday 12:40 PM...
Here is what happened this thurday :

Thursday 1:00AM - Started watching a movie (dhol). I had some work to finish but I was just not feeling like doing it...
1:30AM - The movie was quite boring...so I decided to do the work instead...
3:30AM - Finished the work ... went to bed
5:00AM - Didn't get any sleep whatsoever... so resumed watching movie.
6:00AM - Second half was bearable... I won't call this total waste of time. Again went to bed to try and get some sleep
7:30Am - Still.. could not sleep....... Got up and had a morning tea with arvind (my roomie). Had breakfast. Again decided to try to sleep for some time. So put an alarm for 10:30AM and slept.
10:30AM - "Ahhh Still 2 hours for the class.......let me have a small nap......"
1:00PM - I woke up with a start .....!@#$%

Worst of all..... The professor teaching the course happens to be my adviser and this was his second lecture of the term....

USB pendrive can be washed!!!

I may forget my wallet , but I never forget to carry my usb flash drive (Transcend Jetflash 1G... not something I can boast of, but still...). I find it handy to have it with me in case there is a need to transfer stuff . It is much lighter than my lappy and It's faster and much more convenient than a CD.
To make the long story short, I always have it in my pocket and last week I forgot to take it out when I laundered my clothes. So it underwent a nice 40 minutes hot water wash. I came to about this only when I was putting my clothes in the dryer. And to be frank, blood froze in my veins for a whole minute, when I realized what I had done. I had few important PDFs some, songs and most importantly my graphics project in it. I literally kept it on my room heater for two full days ......... for drying :-) On the third, I put it in my lappy.............and it worked as good as it ever had. Not a single byte was lost. Now thats what I would call true data-clean-up.

Moral of the story : You can wash a pendrive ......just make sure to dry it before use :-)

Time management

Every morning I wake up and say to myself, 'There are 16 more hours of the day left so I have plenty of time for everything I want to do today'. But by the time the day ends I realize that I have managed to do hardly 25% of the things I wanted to..... I just don't understand where does time fly ....
I need to learn time management.........................................................................

ALSA pains

They say that ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is the future for multimedia sound systems in linux. But somehow, I am yet to see a fully functional and elegantly installed ALSA system. The problem is not installation of the basic system but upgrading it. More than once, I have seen ALSA just falling apart during an upgrade. First, it happened with my Suse. But I was doing a manual upgrade back then. Yesterday, I did an automated upgrade of my kubuntu (I wanted to play with adept and friends), and ALSA just broke. And this time it wasn't me.... I did what adept suggested me to do
Invariably I ended up compiling my own ALSA which is a PITA. Anyways, Now I have a working sound system but for some reason flash plugin has been muted. God knows how to fix that. I believe flash plugins use esd instead of alsa or oss. And I have absolutely no experience with esd. In fact I never had it installed on my box (but my flash had sound until yesterday). One thing is clear though ... youtube is not all that fun without sound...

P.S.
Meanwhile to all those who are suffering because of unavailability of 64 bit Flash player and Java plugins, here is the simplest way to get it.It simply installs a 32 bit browser and related plugins. The best thing about it is all you need to do is answer a few questions. This should keep us happy till the official 64 bit software is out.

32 or 64?

Let me accept that. I had always fancied 64 bit processors. 16 billion billion .... Theoretically thats the maximum integer they can handle. How many of us can even imagine a number that big. In fact, the reason why I have 64 bit processor in my lappy is ..... it is 64 bit :-D

But I must say, the world is still not prepared for it yet. And also may be as individuals people like me never really need that kind of processing capability, at least not in near future (I should take a defensive stance here... even god almighty may not predict future of technology considering the mind boggling speed it is advancing at). Anyways, the point which I am trying to make is you may have a 64bit processors but they may still be no better their good old 32bit counterparts. For two reasons :

1. How many applications really need 64bit processing ?
2. Even if they do, do we have a enough softwares around ?

Though I am not a expert in microprocessors and do not how exactly a 64 bit processor functions, but I cannot think of a particular application that is made for a normal PC user and requires really great processing power in terms of word size. What does a normal PC user need ? Word-processors, Spread sheets, Mediaplayers, Internet....I can't think of anything more. Multimedia is probably the only field where we may use 64bit processors to actually enhance performance. I will not include the networking applications here because the available bandwidth is still a more important issue than the processing power of the equipment, in my opinion.

And as a result of this, we still don't see many 64bit applications around. Most of them are probably recompiled versions of the same source code. Because I do not see any significant performance gain in general... In fact, just a few days back I realized that Adobe Flash Player does not have a 64 bit distribution (not at least in GNU/Linux, I don't know about Windows) and they haven't yet given any expected date of its release either. In fact, I haven't seen many Windows 64 bit distributions around. And I daresay, the only reason for having a lot of 64bit GNU/Linux distros is that most of GNU/Linux users happen to be geeks or techo-freaks.

All this makes me wonder whether it makes any sense to put in more and more bits in the wordsize ? Won't it be rather useful to have more cores and more processors. Because we definitely need more parallel-processing power. As I type this, I have at least five applications running on my desktop in addition to all those daemons running in background.

Intel, AMD, Sun.......... I am waiting for quad-core PCs.

Comments, Criticisms are welcome....

P.S.
I cannot think of a good title for this post.... I will appreciate if someone can help me with that

P.P.S.

Day by day,the length of my post has been increasing. May be I have started liking blogging or may be I just love writing about technology :-D

Alvida Suse

Suse had been my preferred linux distro for last three years. Though there were a lot of things I did not like, it was only distribution other than Fedora and Mandrake which had entire off-line RPM based installation kit. People who have grown up without internet or with dial-up network (whose optimal connection speed does not shoot above 128Kbps) will understand importance of having an offline installation kit. I usually find Suse much intuitive and easy than Fedora. But I should agree that I never had any opportunity to use Mandrake. But Suse had its drawbacks. I think their release cycle is slow and they for some reason do not distribute RPMs of a lot of popular softwares. In fact, I found that Suse RPMs are most defficult to get (if Novell themselves do not distribute them). And if you are using a x86_64... God bless you.

I had made up my mind to replace Suse with kubuntu but was being lazy to do so. The final nail in Suse's coffin came when I decided to update my Suse distribution including the kernel. I was expecteing graphics drivers and Alsa ro break (because I had custom-compiled them) but no that was not enough. My wireless lan (I was usinf ndiswrapper) collapsed. Despite reinstalling Alsa, Amarok kept crashing. And today evening,even my ethernet went down. It wasn't really a problem in Suse, but I had a scapegoat already infamous for previous crashes :-D

So finally my favourite distribution of three years was laid to rest. I installed kubuntu. The main reason being large user base (which just increased by one :-) ) and ease of updating and maintaining stuff.....

So here I am, writing this post from freshly installed kubuntu system. The most amazing thing about linux systems is if you just keep your /home and / on separate partitions, you can just keep changing the distros without affecting any of your personalize settings. I still do not understand why Windows does not allow to have "documents and settings" folder on separate partition. It will save Windows use a lot of trouble. Not that I care about it... Just a passing thought.

Alvida Suse...May your soul rest in peace....

Chaiiiiiiiiii

I just realized that the university dairy store (besides cheap and yummy Ice-creams) also serves chai tea (i.e. Indian tea with milk and cream). And to my surprise it is good in all terms of acceptability.
I never really appreciated this amazing drink due to its over abundance India. But now coming to think of it, I realize how I miss tea. Somehow the black coffee (which is the "default" coffee here) doesn't appeal to me.
Oh how I missed chai.....