January 2009

by 3 comments on "Hell with whoever and whatever"

I have been going through an emotionally turbulent period of time where there are wild swings in emotions. One of the main things causing all this misery is the feeling of being used by someone so mercilessly with a precision a surgeon might envy with his surgical tools. It became obviously clear where my position is among the people whom I live amidst.

People have the tendency to be selfish and self-centered. But when it goes to this bad an extent, I can only rant in helplessness. But the feeling of being used, kills all the sanity inside me.

I have been in worse situations and this seems to top all those and itself every day that I can only gasp for breath.

In these testing times, it is only my fault that I got myself into a big big mess with my schedule, academics and the most important health – mind you I am a diabetic for the past 3 years. And my health is going nowhere but to shatters.

Distressing times such as this, make me think a lot of drastic things like thinking about breaking out of all the shackles and the commitments and living a stress-free life that I want to live. Another thought in me thinks that I should pay back the people causing me this misery in the same coin. But alas, sanity butts in and prevents me from degrading to such cheap levels of behavior.

I am just waiting with “This will change” in my breath and guarded optimism which is helping me survive in this merciless one-heck of a world!

by 0 comments on "Three days of Chetan Bhagat"

I have been spending all my time by doing wrong things at the wrong time, hence I missed out on a lot of things that I like to do and reading books is one of them. My ‘to-read’ book queue had been building up into a monstrous one and as I too was fed up with the routine life, I decided to read some books for a change. I got my hands on Chetan Bhagat’s famous three – Five point someone, One night @ the call center and Three mistakes of my life.

I started with One night @ the call center the day before yesterday. One thing which I immediately felt after reading a few pages was Chetan Bhagat’s style was so similar to the of R.K. Narayanan’s (whose immortal Swami and Friends is one of the best books I have ever read). Very simple and easy to understand language and the plot always goes in a way that we are able to relate something with it. R.K. Narayanan was a genius at that and Chetan Bhagat is a really good one at the same.

Even though the story wasn’t a path-breaking or a mind-boggling one, I still enjoyed reading it because of being able to relate to a lot happening in the story. Five-point someone was slightly better than One night @ the call center coz the plot was over a longer period and the protagonists were students fighting their ways through their college lives like me. :-).

I was tempted to start reading Three mistakes of my life straightaway, but when I was a few pages into it, I realized that I having an overdose of Chetan Bhagat and hence was unable to get myself into the story or enjoy it. So I decided to push it to some time in the near future when I am cured of this very enjoyable Chetan Bhagat overdose. 🙂

Status update: March 6, 2009 – I finished reading “Three mistakes of my life” today and I could conclude that it was the best of the three novels in most ways, but still I couldn’t help feeling cliched about the way Chetan Bhagat has portrayed the female lead characters in all his three novels whereas the male protagonist is shown in an entirely contrasting light.

by 0 comments on "OpenSolaris 2008.11 – A step in the right direction, but beware of impending pitfalls!"

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ BUILD =`uname -v | sed -e “s/snv //” -e “s/[a-z]//”`

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg refresh

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec install entire@0.5.11-0.${BUILD}

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec install SUNWipkg@0.5.11-0.${BUILD}

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg install SUNWinstall-libs

guruprasad@opensolaris-2008.05$ pfexec pkg image-update

This is how we can upgrade from OpenSolaris 2008.05 to OpenSolaris 2008.11 – so says the official OpenSolaris site. Since the release of 2008.11, I have been wanting to install it on my notebook and start using it, but I didn’t have much time to do it. At last, today I decided to do the upgrade and not a fresh install because I would have to install all the software packages again.

All the above commands worked fine and pkg image-update showed that it had to download some 1300 odd MB for the upgrade and the upgrade started. After a couple of hours, when the upgrade was almost over at about 99%, the upgrade failed as the disk was full. 🙁 . So I, tried to free some space and proceed with the upgrade. But then I realized that even after freeing some space, I will have more or less no space left. As if to endorse my thought, the OS promptly froze and hung. So I decided to overwrite the existing installation with the brand new 2008.11 release.After burning the 2008.11 iso onto a CD, I booted into the Live Session and started the installation which was so simple. When the installation was happening, I wanted to try out some things.

My Intel PRO Wireless 3945 ABG adapter worked out of the box as in 2008.05 and it in fact got connected to the available wireless network in a flash without any problems unlike in the previous version where I had some issues with nwamd. I was happy about this and the Gnome Panel applet for the interfaces was nice.And the next surprise was Firefox and there was the latest Firefox 3.0.4 which is a great thing compared to 2008.05 which had 2.0.0.12 if I remember right. And of course as usual drivers for my Nvidia GeForce 8600 M GS card was installed and Compiz-fusion worked out of the box.

I then ran the Device Driver utility and the Audio driver and the ACPI driver which were missing in the previous release were there and working fine and this meant that I had zero driver issues which is really really great.

Also in the previous release the Package Manager was so weak and feeble that it got grayed out every few seconds and it was impossible to use it at all. But this time the package manager works great.

So next, I wanted to install softwares and promptly installed amp-dev, sunstudio,HPC tools and etc. When I wanted to install the divine VLC player, my thoughts immediately turned to LifeWithSolaris repository. But when I added the repository and tried to install softwares I got errors. So I visited that site and found out the IPS repository has temporarily been disabled due to some copyright and licensing issues. I felt like a balloon pricked by a needle and was utterly disappointed. I then added the Blastwave Repository and refreshed the package list and had a lot of my favorite packages showing up in the package list. But unfortunately, when I tried to install any package from Blastwave, all I repeatedly got was HTTP 405 error, probably due to a problem with repository. I really felt dejected and what lifted my spirit was the presence of my favorite Emacs Editor(a lot lot more than an Editor too!), which was missing in the official IPS repository of 2008.05, in the official IPS repository and immediately I installed it.

In the war of editors, my loyalty is definitely to Emacs, which is one of the finest piece of software ever written. So to be able to install Emacs and use it in penSolaris was really really satisfying. I hate having to use GEdit! Then I tried to build VLC from source and gave up some distance into it. When a BeOS and Syllable have their pre-built VLC binaries, it is a pity that we still have to build VLC from source on OpenSolaris. LifeWithSolaris was a respite but it didn’t last too long. 🙁

And one more thing that took the sheen off, was the highly limited nature of the repository and the inability to easily save, reuse and redistribute the packages we download and install. GNU/Linux distros are light years better in this aspect. This is the reason which makes me favor a Ubuntu or a Debian as my primary OS and not OpenSolaris. With further development and a larger community participation over a period of time, this situation may change and we may have great, universal repositories. This must compulsorily happen or else OpenSolaris can never come out of Solaris shadow and grow,spread. It will end up into Solaris stream soon. So I sincerely hope and pray for great progress in OpenSolaris so that it escapes the mentioned ignominy. Issues with multimedia and codecs and a limited repository is the biggest obstacle to OpenSolaris in entering the Desktop environment and growing further. Any normal user will not use a OpenSolaris for DTrace or ZFS when he cannot listen to songs and watch movies in OpenSolaris.

I sincerely hope that people in-charge of OpenSolaris hear this and act accordingly to make OpenSolaris a lot lot better.

Thats it for now, Ciao. 🙂