Been a good week. I crossed 50 commits to Beagle. They’re all pretty modest contributions, but it’s been awesome fun.

In addition, pkgcore 0.4.4 has my patch to support HTTP proxies for rsync. This was a fun patch to write, small as it is. The code is beautiful, and Brian Harring (ferringb) and Patrick Lauer (bonsaikitten) walked me through a lot of it. Good stuff!

I’ve also been working on splitting the gnome-python* ebuilds to make the dependency trees for packages that use these bindings a lot saner. This has been longer and more painstaking that intended. It wouldn’t even have happened if Jim Ramsay (lack) hadn’t made an excellent start with the gnome-python-desktop split, since all subsequent work was based on that. Hope this is useful to someone, though. :-)

As I said, a good week.

There’s a talk by NRN going on. Got bored and walked off while he was preaching the importance of putting the good of society above our own.

The talk was preceded by a short speech by Arun Shourie. He had the audience in fits, slamming politicians, and actually making the point that NRN was trying to make a lot better. That is some dude, that is.

This is one awesome song.

The power connection in my room was out the last 2 days, so not much activity online. Instead, I played a little squash, some tennis, disgusted myself over billiards, read a little Vonnegut, and generally lounged.

Last night, sainath and I had a visitor in the tree right outside our rooms -- a Common Hoopoe (the Wikipedia entry reminded me that I’d seen one of these in Haroun and the Sea of Stories). The little guy fell asleep somewhere amidst our boring photography session.



( Another one from further behind )

It happens with Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk, xkcd, and A Softer World (I can’t really bring myself to read ASW for long). An alternating feeling of being socked in the gut and then kicked in the head when you’re down. And then wondering, how does he know?.

Then there’s the one about Gandhi.

Oh, and last May, I got one of these:



What is it? Nothing much, other than open to interpretation. :-) The tat’s done by Deep at Dark Arts, Frazer Town, Bangalore. Didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would (some disappointment there). Thanks to derherr for the pointer.

From a random link:

My future wasn’t just stolen. It was taken into a back alley, beaten, raped, stabbed, and then tossed back out into the street to die right in front of my eyes.

Saw some Outlook ratings recently (the page is dead, but cached here) for Engineering colleges. I’ve traditionally held that these rankings are bullshit. Ranks are often handed out on a highest-bidder basis, all else, including metrics, being decided arbitrarily.

Ignoring relative rankings, I scanned through for a list of colleges I recognised. There were a few of repute there, the Bangalore colleges I knew of, and some I knew of from people studying there. And the bottom line is that all the ones I know, in the words of Cartman, suck ass when it comes to education. And maybe that tells us a lot about the state of private education in India. That’s one I’ve sung before, so ‘nuff said.

What I wonder now is whether the next generation of adults is going to be the most cynical in recent history, or if we’re all going to delude ourselves into believing we actually learnt anything (and I don’t mean “lessons in life”) in college because it’s just easier that way.

And maybe it doesn’t even matter. Here, watch some Taylor Mali and feel good about it all.

[A lot of this is going to sound hackneyed and childish. There is language that some might regret reading. Go away.]

Whether working for two years before doing an MTech was a good idea is still somewhat an open question. Well, there are a lot of questions there, but one thing I got was perspective.

Mundanely enough, I understand a lot more about personal finances than I did, and that's a good thing. (I just read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Content is okay, but presentation is very much teh suck)

Secondly, I now have a lot more perspective on how exploitative work life is today (hope a certain friend doing 16-hour days isn't reading this ... if you are, don't tell me I didn't warn you). Whether we want it or not, we all (I'm generalising, so sue me) fall into the trap -- this needs to be done, this is a really important project. Agendas (agendae?), prioritised action items. It's how we're programmed -- hard work good, life bad. So fucking forth.

To what end? More work, greater responsibility (so that's okay), more stress, a litle more money for me, a lot more money for my employer. Corporations continue to exploit customers and consumers. The rich slowly get richer, the cog turns a little faster, that it's master needn't wait so long to rake in that much more. Time with your family? Don't make me laugh. Participate in social activities (there are things other than cocktail parties, cherie)? The Master owns your society, and deigns that you need not participate.

I'm bad at articulating this shit. There are many who are infinitely better. And all for nought. Noam Chomsky likes to think that the revolution is coming. That's a load of bull. No such thing is happening. And I think he Gandhi said something cloyingly optimistic to the effect that The Man is always beaten. Fat fucking chance this times. You've been pwn3d. Deal with it.

Ah yes, it's Chuck Palahniuk that articulates it better. I remember now. Him and a bunch of others.

Alright. Break's over. Back to the wheel, boys and girls.

Home again. End-sem vacations end in less than a week. Was a much-needed break -- the previous semester got very stressful towards the end. Exams were okay. Got very bored towards the end of the last, and left it a little incomplete. [shrug] Thesis topic should be finalised before the year is through. Will update when confirmed. Only two subjects left in the course. Will sit through the choices and see how it goes. Current contenders are Computer Systems Security, Advanced Networks, and Bioinformatics. Am attempting to lug guitar to college. Whee.

Not much book reading done. Lolita. Subject is horribly sick, writing is beyond words. And Nabokov rues the fact that it’s written in English, which isn’t his native language. Possibly reason enough to learn Russian. Prachett’s Carpet People is next, borrowed from Eloor. I’ve till tomorrow to finish it. Need to get hands on some Chuck Pahlaniuk. Our library’s got Fight Club, but it has been (temporarily) purloined by some daft child.

Went to Palakkad for a wedding. God’s own country. There was a strike going on this one day. Went to Malampuzha Dam, three of us on a motorcycle. Nice dam. Cops caught us on the way back. Got off the usual way. Next day, we’re leaving, Dad was haggling with porters. It was interesting to see these people. In most other places, people are openly greedy, openly corrupt, and make no bones about being this way. In Palakkad, though, there seemed to be some strang, skewed morality there. The cop insisted that “we don’t have this sort of thing in Kerala” (refering to bribery) with a whole lot of righteous indignation, before accepting the money (amidst continued protests of honesty, and insisting that a group of 3 people is a congregation). The porters started off with a ridiculous figure for transporting the luggage, but seemed offended when we suggested that this was so (he settled for a third of the original amount, so there is certainly a contradiction there). Maybe it’s just a different negotiation style there, or maybe the people are too proud to have outsiders suggest such atrocious things as “you’re greedy”.

Words of RHCP wisdom -- “Staying high and dry’s more trouble than it’s worth”.
Gurgaon, Kanpur ... here I come. Superman’s Song. Nice.