Ski season starts! yippee!

After a couple of sleepless weeks due to the travails of graduate school, I finally kicked off the ski season last saturday. It is good to be skiing back in Utah after a boring and in-frequent season in the small hills on the eastern part of the country. It seemed pretty comfortable after a long time and spending an afternoon on those intermediate slopes was fun!

Using the CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE combo to kill X

The above combo kills Xserver and gets you out of any window manager incase of an emergency. Though linux rarely goes to the "blue screen of death" mode, I find that this combo is still useful to help you in your hurry :). Beware that I have heard this may not work in Gentoo and some variations.

work, bz, sleep and the monotony!

Monitor, screen, mouse, keyboard! Are these mostly the things I know off? More recently, headphones have become part of this sojourn. Passion, dedication, faith, trust, loyalty, frustration! are these some of the feelings I go through in this inevitable journey? More recently, euphoria has joined the ranks. Fire, zoom, jump, dodge, chat, lose! are these things I get to do when I play bzflag? More recently, winning has become more frequent. Computer, work, emotions, bzflag? are these part of my everyday routine? More recently, Blogging has also become essential!

The banana split that made we wonder..

Banana splits are one of my favorite choices for dessert. On a seemingly normal after I went to the "Squirrel Brothers" ice-cream shop to taste my favorite delicacy. I ordered a split with two scoops and raspberry topping. Just before my first taste, I saw a proud couple come in to the shop with their five children, the oldest being a teenager. The family bought each of the kids a cone and the kids happily ate their choices. This reminded me of two things; the first thought that hit me was the extent to which I missed my family and my kid-brother; the second being a very introspective question? While millions of children around the world would not know if they would have the next morsel, was I having fun because I could afford it for the time-being? As much as I don't like giving up to emotions, the extra money I spent for a banana split could easily have fed many poor children in the world if I had the right intentions. Having said that, I believe it is okay to have fun once in a while, but the people who can afford things should remember to help the ones that cannot. Time will tell if I can make a man out of myself once I can afford more things.

Oh! Argentina! where art thou?

Reflecting a sad day for argentine fans, the world cup loses another one of its beautiful teams in a tense encounter! It is a sad way to go out of a quarter-final on penalties! Football fans will miss the mesmerizing passing game that is so distinctive of south american football!
I will wait for four more years before argentina can challenge for the world cup in africa!

awk tip: simple looping and counting

This blog on "awk" could be very useful for manipulating numbers over simple filters in unix. If this is too obvious for some of you, put in some more tips over the comments section and that will be of great help to the rest of us. I am going to illustrate the use of awk in counting with a simple example. Let us say that the following file "test.txt" contains the expenses of different groups in a company.

> cat test.txt

10 X-group
30 X-group
20 Y-group
22 Z-group
23 X-group

If I wanted to count the expenses of group 'X' , I need to pick up the values of group X and then add them. Instead of writing scripts to do the job, awk can be used effectively to finish the job easily.

> grep "X-group" test.txt | awk 'BEGIN{s=0}{s+=$1}END{print s}'

63

will count the expenses due to group X alone. The "BEGIN" and "END" constructs have been used to start a loop over the group "X" and to count the total sum spent on X.

Shell tip:Bring background processes to the foreground

This is something that most people using linux may have known. Though I have been using linux for a long time now, I did not know how to bring a particular process running in the background (using the & option) to the foreground after I have many background processes running. Let me illustrate this with an example. Let us run two processes in the background and see how we can bring either of them to the foreground.

> top &

> emacs &

Now typing "jobs" will inform you of the bacground processes

>jobs
[1] + Suspended (tty output) top
[2] - Running emacs

It can be observed that each process has a unique id on the left. That can be used to bring the process to the foreground.

> fg %1

will bring "top" to the foreground.


This is something I learnt today and may be helpful to you too, IMHO.

Govt employees unhappy with Jayalalithaa

This happened in 2003 when many government employees in TamilNadu, India went on a long strike with a host of issues including asking for more bonus. The Chief Minister of state made a bold decision (IMHO) and dismissed them because they were **NOT** doing their job (The general opinion is that government employees seldom do their work :)). If you were working in a Multi-national company and did not do your job, it is only fair that you get fired.

I am appalled to see that government employees are upset about being fired when they were really lacking on duty! wake up guys! work for the money you get! do your work first (if that happens), then ask for bonuses :). There is a word called "professionalism", alteast try to find the meaning of the word!

Another Swwwwwaaatchhhh!

Oh! yeah, I got another swatch to add to my portfolio of watches during my recent NewYork trip. This makes it seven watches on my collection and looks like a cruise towards two digits. Click here to see my newest addition.

The Undulating Mind

As I travel on a united airline flight from chicago to austin, I cant help but think of my inability to do any work unless under duress. It took me fifteen minutes to debate whether I should get up from my seat, get the laptop in the bag from the overhead bin, and then, the most difficult part of all: switching it on! Now that I have crossed all the barriers and started typing incomprehensible sentences, my mind wanders off in a direction that is totally undulating, I am thinking of my presentation day after tomorrow, and now, I am worried about buying a car. Then again, I havent really prepared myself for the presentation, and now, Should I buy the car in boston or in salt lake city? Oh, I dont seem to be nervous about my presentation, and now, I wish I had a full time job that would get me a BMW 3 series or a Merc C Class. It is a pity that the mind can process unrelated thoughts at such high speed (Hyper-Hyperthreading!), that I wonder: Will a machine ever replace the most mysterious living thing in this world: The human mind!

Hall of 'Shame': Times Of India, An Indian Newspaper

I wake up in the morning and get online to read some of India's newspapers and by far, the Times of India seems to top the list of the worst papers ever published! If I am talking crap, why does the front page of an Indian newspaper have a quarter page article on Brad Pitt's travel to the Rishikesh to get high (today's issue)? There is definitely "more" critical issues that Indians need to know about. Yeah! Brad pitt's tour needs a mention, but not in the front page!

I just hope that the journalists/editors are more responsible and professional about front page content in the future.

AT&T : vying to be the top telephone backbone

If you have heard of UNIX and C, then you probably know "AT&T"; It has agreed to buy SBC (Cingular wireless)
and the deal would make it the largest telephone company in the US. That is, if the deal goes through! The consumer federation of America is afraid of market monopoly and has urged the antitrust authorities to block the deal. As a long time C programmer, I would love to see the then famous "Ma Bell" research labs merge with the baby bell labs. After all, hasnt the C programming language been useful to us?

Search: car, phone and cray

Back to blogging after a self-imposed exile, I am now actively looking for a bunch of things that light up my otherwise quotidian lifestyle. Why am I looking for CRAY Inc, the yesteryear darling supercomputer company that is a minnow today? Well, the minnow is trying hard to turn the corner and its stock has almost doubled over the last two months. At 2.10$ a share, it might be a worthwhile investment for a short while. Until today, I havent put a penny into the stock market and it looks like an exciting avenue to get into, specially for the thrill of seeing the minnows bounce back!

My samsung e-105 is at the deathbed and am desperately looking for a new cell phone! And, to add to that, I am also looking to buy a used car (oh! grammar check: an used?) and have put in some research into the area. It increasingly looks like people have lost interest in the BIG THREE ( Ford, GM, Chrysler ) with their cars struggling to hold any resale value! The japanese carmakers have stamped their superior reliability in the market, but hey, that means I have shell out more money for them!

"I Bid Adieu" My Uncle!

I had recently been on a visit to India in December to meet all my folks after a year and a half. It was one of the most enjoyable and yet, one of the most sad tours I have had. Just three hours before my trip was over, I heard that my uncle passed away in a road accident! While it left the whole family in tears, I felt sad and shocked by the transience of life! I had met him the previous day and we had completed some shopping and then I came home to wave another bye to him on the phone. To learn that the very same person is no longer alive was a bit difficult to comprehend and it has been the same until today! As much as I would like to accept the fact and move on in life, this incident seems to have left a profound effect on my life!

I bid adieu, my uncle for we have spent a lot of the good times together and it is only sad that you had to leave us at an inappropriate juncture!