pjp news

New blog

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:51:28 +0530

Hi,

I got a new Wordpress blog made for me at: http://pjps.wordpress.com

So next time, see you there! :)

Fedora-12: Installation woes

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:00:08 +0530

Hi,

Last Thursday I decided to upgrade my machine to F12. Thanks to recurring persuasion from Rahul, otherwise I take my time to upgrade to a new Fedora. And for its 13 months life cycle, I do it just once an year. :)

Anyway, so after taking back-up of the /home partition, I dumped the latest boot.iso to a USB device and proceeded to reboot my machine.

$ dd if=boot.iso of=/dev/sdb

I always do a clean install including disk partitioning. I like to custom select packages and install just the ones I want and nothing more. That means `# yum upgrade’ doesn’t work for me.

So, the machine rebooted. I stepped through the disk partitioning chore and came to the repository selection screen. I selected the ‘Customise Now’ option and proceeded to click Next button. That’s where Anaconda bite me. There, I accidentally clicked twice on the Next button and BOOM. Anaconda entirely skipped the package selection and went on to resolve dependencies followed by the actual installation, without even confirming it once.

On the package installation screen, there is absolutely no way one can halt the on-going installation, go back, change the package selection, and start again. I wonder why? There are two buttons and , but both are disabled. I don’t know how these disabled buttons help there. I thought at least in the end, after installation is done, the button will come to life and be of some use to me. But nope, after installation, you see a new screen of congratulations prompting you to reboot the machine. Worst was, after going through all this, for some reason the new F12 did not even boot.

Finally I resolved to redo the entire installation, with little extra care this time. And this time, during package selection, for some reason I could not de-select OpenJDK - java-1.6.0-openjdk* - package. I don’t know why do I have to have it.

Shreyank pointed me to this lovely song “Puff the Magic...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:39:59 +0530

Shreyank pointed me to this lovely song “Puff the Magic Dragon”. Nicely composed and sung by Peter, Paul and Mary, it’s a treat to listen to it.

Being human

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:50:16 +0530

Hi,

I stumbled upon George Orwells Reflections on Gandhi, from here. While the essay is certainly interesting; I’m mighty impressed by some of the quotes therein.

—-
”To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”

”The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
—-

Boy…that is succinct!

User comments

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:24:40 +0530

Hi!

What a start of the day, I logged-in today to see this beautiful message on the Pem mailing list.

—-

This is a very good product. Simple, light-weight, but very useful!
Thanks for creating it.

—
Frederick Noronha

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pem/2009-10/msg00000.html

—-

Thank you so much Frederick, really appreciate it.

YEAH…!!! :)

Trip to Bangalore

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:03:49 +0530

Hi! :)

Last week-end was nice. I had Monday off for Dasara festival; I took the Friday off and went to Bangalore. The city I’ve grown to like and now feel nostalgic about. It is quite unusual of me, because generally I don’t feel like going back to places I’ve left behind. Something tells me I’ve become more sensitive lately.

So the journey began on the late evening of Thursday with a heavy splash of water from the heavens and a change of bus I was suppose to catch. They cancelled my bus and moved me to some stupid bus going to Bangalore and run by a transport company. It started late, left me behind at one point while I was having a cup of tea, and took ungodly 22 hours to reach Bangalore. Horrible!

But once there, it didn’t take me long to cheer up. A cup of tea at the usual bakery where you see lots of colourful people passing by was enough. :) We went to see a movie - What’s Your Rashee - and finally I crashed at around 2 O’Clock Saturday morning. On Saturday, after a nice lazy breakfast, we went to Mysore in the afternoon. Mysore is the once place where they celebrate Dasara like a king. Every nook and cranny of the city was bathing in the lights, colourful fountains were dancing at the crossings, sweet-strong perfumes were sprawling the air and the place was just thronged by vibrant bodies. We stayed at a friends villa like house and returned on Sunday evening. Monday went by too fast, after seeing few friends and talking to some on the phone, before I knew, I was on my bus to Pune and it was raining again.

I reached home Tuesday afternoon, after some 14 hrs of bus ride. At home, I dozed off after turning just couple of pages of the book: It’s Not About the Bike - by Lance Armstrong. In the evening, I happened to attend a fantastic Sarod performance by an upcoming artist Sarang. It was magical! :)

GNU Pem

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:00:00 +0530

Hi,

I’m more than happy to announce that pem has now become an official GNU software. The latest release of GNU Pem is available from the new home page

at: http://www.gnu.org/software/pem

It was just after the 0.7.7 release that I noticed, the free software directory entry for pem was still showing the latest release as pem-0.4. Which was released more than two years ago. So I wrote to them, asking them to update the information. And thus began the process of GNUnifying Pem. In the end I received a message saying

—-

Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:17:44 -0400
From: Richard Stallman <…>
To: P J P <…>
Cc: new-gnu@gnu.org, savannah-hackers-private@gnu.org
Subject: GNU pem

I hereby dub pem a GNU package, with you as its maintainer.
…

—-

sounds like the gods speak, doesn’t it? :)

sqz.pl

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:29:32 +0530

Hi,

Yet another script surfaces every now and then from the depths of my treasure. It’s a perl script to remove unwanted characters from file names. sqz.pl comes supremely handy when you have hundreds of files with random characters like spaces, brackets, parenthesis, quotes and what not in their names. Then one command like

$ sqz.pl ‘\”[]() ’ ./*

does the magic. :)

Take a look at it here, may be you’d like it too.

…enjoy! :)

djbdns-1.05.3

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:50:33 +0530

Hi,

I’m happy that after long it’s time to make a new release of djbdns. A project I started working on somewhere in February 2009. Though It happened by chance that I took up djbdns, lately I’ve started to enjoy the work for several reasons.

    - The project makes a perfect candidate for something that I would like to play with.
    - It is small and simple, yet not too easy.
    - It is written in C, which means I know the rules.
    - It provides ample scope to make my hands dirty and learn something I don’t know yet.

still it’s true that so far it has been quite an intermittent activity, especially after the last release. I hope it’ll change soon, for better. Till then, the few important changes in this release are

- Commands include tinydns, tinydns-data, tinydns-edit, tinydns-get, dnstrace and couple more.

- Tinydns now reads from etc/djbdns/tinydns.conf, logs messages to /var/log/tinydns.log
and requires no support from daemontools.

- New manuals written for djbdns, tinydns, tinydns-*.

- All new changes done so far are ported to FreeBSD Unix. So from now onwards, it will work
on FreeBSD and hopefully on other Unixes as well.

Get the latest source here. An F10 rpm here. For any further information click here.

…! :)

Reliance Netconnect on Linux-2.6.30

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:22:30 +0530

Hi! :)

Good part of today was spent configuring the new Reliance Netconnect USB modem, Huawei EC1260, for my F10 machine. The task soon became difficult, for after compiling the PPP support in the kernel, I didn’t know which driver to use for the modem. And thus began the loop of compile - reboot - compile the kernel with different options and drivers. After doing that for some 15 times, now it feels good to write this post while the blue light of the USB modem blinks like a distant star. :)

Anyway, this is what you need -

1. PPP (Point-To-Point) protocol support in the Linux kernel.

2. USB Mass Storage support.

3. USB driver for GSM and CDMA modems.

All these modules are shipped in the kernel source. Once you’ve them compiled in the running kernel, run the following commands as root

# wvdialconf - to create the /etc/wvdial.conf

# Set the phone, username, & password fields in /etc/wvdial.conf.

# wvdial & - to run the pppd daemon, and connect to the internet.

by this time sun was setting down behind the clouds and I was hungry. The day concluded with a game of Basketball at Rakeshs followed by treat of Maggie Noodles from Kashyap. :)

Pem-0.7.7

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:55:00 +0530

Hi,

Time for yet another Pem release. Though there are no *new* features, couple of small bug fixes and code changes recommended in Perl Best Practices(PBP) warranted the release. I haven’t read the book yet, but Perlcritic did the job. :)

Other reason to smile is, Ryan Kavanagh packaged Pem for Debian repositories.

See: http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/pem_0.7.6-1.html

So if you are a Debian user, you can say

# apt-get install pem

Thanks a million to Kartik and Ryan for that.

You could download the latest release from here OR try

# yum install pem

…:)

Command line fu

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:24:28 +0530

Hi,

Rahul mentioned about this site which lists most useful Bash commands as voted by people

See: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

Some of them are just fantastic; It was cool to tweet from the shell.

I like how these simple things act so powerful. :)

Ptrash

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:34:36 +0530

Hi,

Kushal pointed me to this: http://bitc.bme.emory.edu/~lzhou/blogs/?p=71

…YEAH! :)

Literary gems

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:05:24 +0530

Hi,

Yesterday I came across this page and was really pleased about it. Each link in there points to a real gem.

See: http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/roads.html

Biking at 10,000 ft.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:01:47 +0530

Hi, :)

Last week I had a fantastic time participating in the National Himalayan Mountain Biking Expedition organised by YHAI. Plan was to cycle from 3000ft to 10000ft and back(around 80-90 KM) in 5 days. It was fantastic for many reasons. The physically gruelling ride was the very thing to make us smile when we reached to the top. Trust me, the first few moments when you reach there and look around are the most priceless ones. Second, the sheer beauty of Himachal. It’s like you can click in any direction at random and get a poster view of the mountains and the valley. Third, the affordable and systematic planning of YHAI. And lots of other things that made it a fun trip.

We(me & Srini) reached Aut, our base camp near Kullu, via New Delhi, on Sat May 30’th 2009. The camp was set up in a lone building next to the Byasi river. Next day, after a pleasant acclimatisation trek up hill, we were given our spiffy Firefox bikes with 21 gears to play with.

Following four days, I had great fun riding on the mountains and going along the clear water streams. I took bath in the chilly water, had lunch by the river, played Volley ball at 6000 ft, and had spicy Maggie with a hot cup of tea at 10000 ft. :)

Pictures: here

After the thrill of 14 km long river rafting in the chilly waters and a visit to Manikarn Sahib, on Friday evening we(me & Srini) set on a long-long journey back to our respective homes.

Pem-0.7.6

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:20:00 +0530

Hey hi,

I’m really happy these days to see this burst of energy surrounding Pem.
My sincere *thanks* to all who find Pem useful and have conveyed the same
to me.

I’m glad to announce yet another release of Pem; Version 0.7.6
can be accessed from here.

The major change is the new feature to see reports for months between
any two months. So to get the daily reports for months between
February and May, you can say

$ pem -M 2 -N 5 -s

To get the same for last year, you could say

$ pem -Y 8 -M 2 -N 5 -s

To see the monthly report for months from March onwards, you could say

$ pem -M 3 -m

Or if you want to see monthly reports till March, you could say

$ pem -N 3 -m

Thanks so much! :)

Pem-0.7.5

Wed, 13 May 2009 19:25:00 +0530

Hi…:)

Yet another version 0.7.5 of Pem is up and could be accessed from here.

Well…minutes after I released pem-0.7.4 on Monday, Kushal reported a bug saying Pem is not working for him. Probably the fastest bug report I’ve ever received. It was embarrassing, but I had to face it. The bug was in the new filtering feature introduced from pem-0.7.4. It would creep in while filtering records of the type

“Sandwich + coffee” 65.00

using command

$ pem -s coffee

Now what happens is,

    1. Pem converts the description string and the search string into sets
        of words separated by space. ie. From the description above we
        get { sandwich, +, coffee } and from the search string { coffee }.

2. Pem checks if search string set is a subset of the description set
or vice-varsa.

3. If yes, then display that record or move on to the next record.

The disaster happened when matching “+” string as a regular expression, for `+’ sign has it’s own significant interpretation in regular expressions. So the change in 0.7.5 is I escape all the non-alphabet and non-digit characters while doing the string search. :)

Also, I’m happy to inform you that Kushal has pushed these changes to F-9, F-10, F-11, and the F-12 repos. So another easier way to get pem could be

# yum install pem

Thanks Kushal!.

Another reason to be happy is, Pem turns two this week-end. As I remember, Pem was born on the third week-end of May 2007. And since then, it has been extremely useful to me.

I hope you find it too…thanks! :)

Pem-0.7.4

Mon, 11 May 2009 12:56:48 +0530

Hi…!

I’m super excited to tell you that the new version 0.7.4 of Pem is out and could be accessed here. :)

The major improvement in this release is the support for tags or categories. For a long time I had been thinking about doing something with tags, for it had started to get annoying to do

$ pem -s | grep -i bike OR
$ pem -s | grep -i bills

and see nothing but few records. But then there was this strong inertia to keep me from actually do something, until John sent the category patch last month. That was a real catalyst. After that, it was no more “it’s just for me and I can do it any time” business.

So after some fun time doing Perl, I’m really happy to release pem-0.7.4. :) Apart from tags & categories, now pem facilitates filtering of records using tags and/or description. Also there are few changes to the command line options and user manual. Here are couple of pictures showing the new features

categories.png filtering.png

Hope you find it useful…thanks! :)

Funny Kangaroo...:)

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:11:01 +0530

Funny Kangaroo...:)

Choice

Sun, 03 May 2009 13:32:58 +0530

Hi, how are you? :)

Recently I wrote this to someone, “Responsibility is a product of incentive & convenience”; Wherein, incentive is an answer to the question “What’s in it for me?” and convenience is the price you pay. We were generally talking about elections, voting and things. Ever since then, this statement has been coming back to me like a boomerang. And every time I think about it, it sounds true and makes perfect sense to me. In fact, assuming as they say, “we always have a choice”, like say choice of being responsible OR choice of taking action OR being just an onlooker, I think it could be generalised as

choice = incentive x convenience

And somehow, I’m inclined to believe that `convenience’ is more decisive in this equation, is it?