pandita putra

Blogging elsewhere

2007-04-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

Finallly, fed up of having to remember multiple usernames and passwords, I'm using the "Login to Blogger using gmail account" feature to create a new blog. So please visit packetdrop.blogspot.com. I'll only be updating that blog from now on. :-)

And hopefully, the new one will be more frequently updated than this one :-)

Looooong time :-)

2006-03-23T01:38:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since i update this blog... Lots of things have happened since then! I moved to Hyderabad. Went on road trips, played Holi and had lots of fun. Details later...

Pizza woes

2005-07-26T03:04:00.000-07:00

Mukta and I were at home on a saturday and felt like having pizza. So called up the 2333333 number which is the online telephone directory and took phone nos. of US Pizza, Pizza Corner and Dominoes, all of which are situated in Jayanagar. These places are about 4.5km from our house, but only Pizza Corner delivers to our locality..!

Finally we ordered the pizzas and we got it 1.5 hours after we ordered the pizzas... Waiting for something for that long is painful. Especially when its food and you are hungry... :-(

And this is saturday afternoon, when the traffic is pretty much very low and driving from Pizza Corner to our house is only about 20-30 mins. I don't think I'll ever order a pizza for home delivery. Its faster to actually go to MG Rd and have pizza at one of the numerous outlets there. That'll be faster I guess :-)

yANa

2005-07-23T00:23:00.000-07:00

Basavesh, Mukta and I had been to Sirsi for a friend's wedding. So decided to go to yANa. This place is amazing! It's about an hour's drive from Sirsi. There are actually a couple of routes to get there. The one we took was the longer route because we thought that the road would be good. And the road was good, for the most part. But the last 17km was awful. This route is really good if you plan to walk all the way to yANa. It's a very scenic route. But the road itself is horrible. I was very afraid to take my Santro the full distance, but mustered up enough courage to get there with ample goading by people coming back from yANa. Couldn't enjoy the view much because of the concentration that was required to drive. Once we reached there, we felt it was well worth it.

We walked a couple of kilometers to get to the temple on a hillock. The rock formations are really cool! The walk to the temple itself was really good. There's a stream that runs by along the path. Rocks form the landscape on the other side. I would want to go there again. But this time I plan to camp there for a day or two. I think I'll buy a house on a lonely hillock on the Western Ghats some day. :-)

Blossom...

2005-02-28T02:15:00.000-08:00

... book house!

This is the name of the book shop that I "found" on Church Street! Actually, Harsha told me about it the other day and I went over on Saturday to check it out. Its an awesome bookshop! If you are in Bangalore, you really shouldn't miss it. It is like bringing together Gangaram's and the MG Rd foot path, if you know what I mean. But the point is it is an awesome bookshop with a great collection. The owner is surprisingly an Engineering grad with a very good knowledge about books. The place is stacked with books from floor to ceiling.

There is this book "The Citadel" by A.J. Cronin which I was searching for a long time. And it was so heartening to find the book at Blossom book house! I think I'll keep going there every month or so from now on. In other news, Harsha has finally finished with his GATE exams. Now he is job-hunting. He has also recommended Herman Hesse's works to me. So let's see, I'll probably carry one when I go to Honnavar next!

Vasantahabba cancelled :(

2005-02-03T18:31:00.000-08:00

Vasantahabba, the festival of Spring, which is usually held every year on the first Saturday of February has been cancelled this time owing to the Tsunami disaster. Mukta and I were very keyed up about this event after we attended it last year for the first time. Last year it was Prabu who had informed us about it, and man, it was awesome.

New Year!

2005-01-06T00:39:00.000-08:00

Yay! My wounds from the fall I had on my bike have healed.
Seems like a perfect new year gift! I was not able to ride the
bike for the last couple of weeks thanks to my knee. Now it
seems a little better, so I have been riding the bike from
Monday :-).

Aside, Nitin arrived from Delhi and met us on Monday. Great
to see him back! He offered to give his Canon EOS 2k to me.
I've warned him about a painfully slow repayment.

The new year brings with it the rush of memories (some good,
some not so good) of a year gone by. 2004 has been a worthwhile
year on my personal front. I got married! I made some very
good and interesting friends. Hoping this year is as good...

Slip-n-slide

2004-12-21T19:10:00.000-08:00

I had my first fall from my bike the day-before yesterday!
Nothing serious, just a couple of bruises on my knee and
jaw that hurt a bit :). Some idiot on a scooter rushed in
from one of the side roads and I had to brake hard to avoid
hitting him, and there was some sand lying on the road...
so there goes my perfect record of 13000km on my bike :(

Something very interesting is, I had a fall from my scooter
around the same time last year! Last time around, I was
wearing jeans, so the knee didnt hurt all that much. But
this time my well-ironed Van Huesen trousers have been
reduced to bermudas :(

Madhugiri

2004-12-14T00:15:00.000-08:00

The other day, Andi Kleen (yes! the kernel hacker :) ) and I went to Madhugiri.
I picked up Andi from his hotel and we set off to Madhugiri on my dear Pulsar!
We made there in good time (read fast riding ;-) ). We climbed all the way up
the hill and then made our way back down. The whole thing took about
3.5 - 4 hrs. The speed (or lack thereof) was because both of us were low
on stamina. Me lower than Andi anyways, and I probably slowed down
the climb. Now, the Madhugiri betta (hill) is the tallest monolith in Asia.
That's not all, there's one place where you have to move horizontally
where the face of the rock is almost vertical. There are steps carved
out of stone, but the fear is for real (at least for me, Andi was unfettered).
Now, if climbing up on this path was difficult, this part of the path was
downright scary for me while climbing down, and the strong winds didn't
help! That apart, Andi really liked the hill and was happy that we did it.

Now, the sad part - Both of us forgot to take our cameras. So, Madhugiri
remains to be cherished in our memories. Also, Andi got a sun-burn on his
face. His face was _red_. I think it is difficult for us, Indians, to think of
some face as red... But this was my first look at somebody's red face due
to a sunburn.

We guys are planning to go on a bike trip from Bangalore. The round trip
is expected to be around 1200km. The tentative route is
Blore->Mys->Coorg->Mlore->Honnavar->Jog Falls->Blore...
So, nitin, wanna join?

more later...

Kernel Hacker...

2004-12-05T21:49:00.000-08:00

... not me! But I'm getting there... :) Well, I got a really big boost in
inspiration to work on the kernel last week. I was at Linux-Bangalore/
2004 and got a chance to speak to Andi Kleen, kernel hacker! Man!
I think I have to keep speaking to such guys every once in a while.
This guy is cool! Basavesh fell for his Athlon64 laptop... :) Among
other things, I learnt that Andi is interested in History. He started
writing a Common Lisp interepreter once...! It gets better, he also
wrote a C-compiler... Man, I felt like a worm speaking to him. And,
he is all of 27yrs. I felt like kicking myself at what I have (not)
achieved in life till now.

I also liked Andrew Cowie's second talk titled "Tales from the Dark
Side of the Moon". He is a very good speaker. But this year's Linux-
Bangalore wasnt very smooth for the organizers. For details of all
the stupid stuff they had to put up with, visit Harald Welte's blog.

yay!!! e17 in cvs....!

2004-11-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

Yo! I checked raster's website today and saw that he has put e17 in cvs! I hadn't checked his website for the last two days, no wonder I missed it earlier. Now, I'll be able to show off the coolest desktop on earth to my colleagues and friends! Thanks to the enlightenment team. :-D

Another interesting piece of news is that Nat Friedman has broken his wrist (I think) and has got titanium inserted into his hand... $18,000 ... whoa! Wonder when I'll start earning that kinda money! ;-)

Linux-Bangalore 2004 is going to happen between Dec 1st and 3rd. 3 days' freedom from office, yay! There are lots of talks scheduled. The number being somewhere in the vicinity of 40 (too lazy to count them, there are just too many). Herald Welte and Brian Behlendorf among the speakers.

thats it for now... bbl

TV on GNU/Linux...!

2004-11-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

Yo!!! TV on my GNU/Linux installation is finally working!
But I deserve a kick in the butt. Thanks for Nitin who put
me on the right track for troubleshooting the issue. I
hate it when I do this.... I forgot to check syslog :(

Nitin suggested that I insmod the bttv driver and see if
syslog records any errors. So I got around to removing the
bttv module first, then inserted the module with the card=37
option. The module got inserted without any hitch and syslog
didnt report any errors. But what caught my eye was a line
which said "using tuner=-1". Now I was sure that I had given
tuner type=5 in modules.conf. So removed the tuner module as
well and then inserted it back by
insmod tuner type=5

Then I check syslog and aha! I see a line "tuner type forced
to 5 (PAL-BG...". Now I was pretty sure that xawtv would work.
I ran scantv and sure enough it picked up all the channels.
THen I ran xawtv. But this time there was no video, but only
audio... Thankfully xawtv gave a very informative warning
message that both DGA and GLX were not enabled in the xserver.
SO i had comment out a line that disable DGA and uncomment
a line to enable GLX in the xorg.conf (yup, me running xorg
6.8), restart the xserver and voila! Now, days of the Windows
installation on my PC are numbered... :-D

Boy! Am i happy.....

Windows nirvana

2004-11-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

The one issue I had with my old PC was that I couldnt get the sound card
to work on GNU/Linux. Recently, I upgraded my computer, and with the
upgrade came a TV tuner card. Now, I cant get the TV card to work on
Linux.... :(

* If I can get the TV card to work on Linux, I can safely delete the Windows
partition residing on my hard drive forever! (sigh! what a nice thought...).
The TV card I have is a Prolink Pixelview PlayTV Pro (It uses the bt878 chip
with a Philips tuner). Now, wherever I search, people seem to have no
problems getting this card to work. Somehow, its not so here. I have loaded
the bttv module, the tuner module, have chosen the correct card and tuner
type but still no go. Some people on the net have put up that PAL and
Europe-west table works for India. But not only have I tried these, but all
other frequency tables that xawtv provides. I also installed tvtime, which
doesnt rely on any table, but scans the whole range of frequencies, but still
no go.... :( Any body who's got this to work? I believe this is a pretty common
card around here.

* Another issue that has me puzzled is the sound. When I use either
mpg123/xine/xmms, they refuse to play anything. But then one day I compiled
mplayer and it seems to have no problem playing the videos and ogg's and
mp3's that I have got. mpg123 though says "No supported rate found" before
quitting. Odd....

When will I find mukti from windows....????

In the pursuit of Metaphysics of Quality...

2004-11-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

I am spending more time reading Lila than anything else.
And these are the most satisfying moments of the day! A
lot of questions which arose while reading Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance have been answered in Lila.

Aside, I have recently been very interested in learning
Sanskrit. What better way to learn Sanskrit in this age
time than relying on the internet? So I decided to google
around for online Sanskrit resources. I am pretty impressed
at the amount of information available on the net about
Sansktrit. Anybody seriously interested can indeed learn
the language using the net! A good start would be here:
http://sanskrit.gde.to/
There are other sites as well, but I made my start here.
During my search, I also found that there is a German
gentleman who has a sanskrit website!(http://sanskritweb.de)
I am also very impressed by SankarAchArya's bhaja govindaM.

Hopefully I'll start learning the vedas sometime soon :)

Random Access

2004-10-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

The grey matter called brain! The grey matter sitting inside my body works a little unlike others I guess... should I contact GOD for a free replacement (or at least a free service ;-) )? While I would have liked to learn something about Quality or Morals or both while reading Lila, the only thing that has made sense till this far in the book is Phaedrus's "random access". Random access, is a method deviced by Phaedrus to keep track of all the notes he wants to build up as his next book (Metaphysics of Quality). Ah well, I always knew there was something wrong with my grey matter...

Speaking of free replacements, I sure as hell hope that I would be getting one for my motherboard at least. The nVidia nforce2 ethernet controller just gave up on me the other day. So I'll probably be taking that for replacement today...

On the up-side, Basavesh has done it again! I dont know how he gets this knack of finding _good_ stuff on the net. He downloaded lots of mp3's of some really good keynotes and other stuff... So, Nitin, don't be surprised to see a _big_ increase in my CD collection when you return :)

Human Understanding

2004-10-14T23:07:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to reading Lila (a book by Robert Persig) today. I sort of can relate to some of the stuff that Persig writes in Lila... One of the interesting things that set me thinking about, when I read the first few pages was about human understanding. Now, set a concept in front of a person, the way he percieves/thinks/understands the concept could be very different the way you thought about the same thing... Set forth the same concept in front of the same person at a different point of time, he might gain a new insight about the same thing... Does that mean that his understanding has improved? What is improvement? What is right? ah, well.. so many questions....

Aside, I am very happy today. Basavesh downloaded the SICP lecture videos!!!! Got around to listening to the first lecture... THE most thrilling feeling I've had since I started reading the book. I cant believe that I am listening to the same person who wrote the exalted book! This is one case where technology has been put to good use ;-)

Lindec'04

2004-10-08T02:22:00.000-07:00

OK, this is quite late to talk about Lindec (happened almost 3 weeks back). But it was worth going there just for attending Nat's talk. Man! This guy rocks!! His first talk was a general one about how he started hacking and some of his hacks... Well, came to know that the "transparency" hack (on xterm) was his!! Later the e team incorporated this hack into Eterm... He also told about raster's famous typos on IRC ;-). Nat also demoed a typo-corrector of sorts which he had written when he used to hang out on #linux... overall, it was a satisfying weekend.

blogging!!!

2004-10-06T23:10:00.000-07:00

Aha! started blogging!!