I posted a while back that I moved to Arch (from Ubuntu) on my Netbook. That was almost two months back. My Arch experiment, sadly, didn’t work out for long. I moved back to Ubuntu within a couple of week’s time. Why?

1. Lack of binary packages. I had to build quite a few packages from source because there were no binary packages available. The tilting point was when I figured there were no binary packges for mit-scheme! Ofcourse, I could’ve just used AUR and built them from source, but…
2. Building from source on my Netbook sucks. ATOM + Slow Hard Drive -> I’m nuts waiting for stuff to compile. The AUR is basically useless to me.

Hello Ubuntu! (I also hate Unity ‘coz it takes up precious screen space – might move to something else soon)

TL;DR: Arch doesn’t have enough binary packages and building on a netbook sucks

I, along with about a 100 other classmates of mine, went on an Industrial Visit to Kerala a few weeks back. It was a 3 day, 4 night affair – and was incredibly fun and refreshing. New friendships were forged, old ones rekindled, temptations resisted, a thousand pictures clicked (thanks to @RohitP’s camera), group dynamics studied and incredible fun had. It was very refreshing (for the most part), and I realized just why vacations are important.

I plan on visiting [Athrapalli Falls][afalls] again as soon as I possibly can. Being in fast moving, (relatively) cold water is an incredibly experience I’m glad I didn’t miss. You shouldn’t either.

One of the major advantages of my netbook is that I can actually use it in class, under the desk – and most staff won’t notice ;) And even if they do, I can easily and neatly close the lid, put it in standby and become innocent good boy :D

I’ve zoned out from what’s happening in class a long time back. I just looked up, and it’s something I really do like (withheld to protect the name of subject). It’s being taught in a ‘marks-oriented’ way – “You need to write this for this much marks, and that for that much mark. Don’t you dare to miss this line, then YOU WILL GET ZERO MARKS!’. I look around. Most people are either texting others, or dutifully copying down what is being written on the board (which itself is copied from some TextBook). I zone out again.

8 hours a day. Waking up everyday at an ungodly 6 AM. Around 2 Lakhs not counting auxillary expenses. 2 hour commute that makes you wish you were dead, after giving you an awful back pain. A huge set of lessons in politics.

I wonder what I’m getting out of this. What anybody is getting out of this.

I’m blogging from Arch Linux :D

I’ve been meaning to setup Arch on my netbook for a while, after hearing a lot of people rave about how awesome pacman is and how fast their system is. I didn’t want to spend time on moving to a new distro during my GSoC, so I kept putting it off. Yesterday Ubuntu borked on my netbook for some weird reason (I suspect it was my friend Rathna sitting on it, but might have been because I was thinking of moving to Vim too) – and I took the opportunity to install Arch. After some messing around, and some help from #archlinux, I was able to get myself a commandline that also connected to the Internet via wifi. Yay!

I tried out LXDE first, instead of my usual GNOME – and found that it was incredibly unpolished (compared to GNOME). So after a bit of a struggle (AND READING DOCS! (and yes, my problem was dbus)), I got a minimal (very application-less) GNOME up and running. And yes, it is way faster. And yes, the packages are newer (and shinier!). And #archlinux was helpful :)

I’ve had to (understand and) edit a fair amount of config files to get myself a working system. It’s been a fun and informative journey – and I expect it will continue to be. My entire Linux experience so far has been with Ubuntu (hell, even the server I administer runs Ubuntu!), so coming to this world of required-and-encouraged config file editing is doing me good :)

I’m enjoying it :) If you’re a geek who loves fast text scrolling on an LCD (and you also have the time), you too would.

So, I now have a motorbike!

It’s a Bajaj Platina, and bought off GSoC money from my cousin Sudar. I’ve been learning to ride for a while, and it’s been good. Had my first accident a while back, and started riding again a few days back.

I’m still very conscious about riding. I still think before clutching, braking, changing gears, etc. It hasn’t been internalized in the same way typing on a Keyboard has been – with enough practice (and accidents!) I guess I’ll be able to just ‘think’ left and make my bike go left. Focus is also a major issue right now – I’ve to consciously keep reminding myself to check for everything on the road – it doesn’t quite come automatically yet. Enough time should fix this too.

So far I’ve logged about 12 km on the bike – and should be doing more pretty soon. The Platina is no performance bike – but it will solve my major problem of walking the last mile when using public transport. Will try posting more up-to-date ‘bike logs’ whenever I make significant trips.

Will post pictures when I have a decent camera – which should also be not far off.

Note: Real Bikers – don’t sneer. I’m just a noob :)

Google Summer of Code ended a while back. Me (and most on #gsoc) agreed on one thing – WHERE DID THOSE 3 MONTHS GO? Amazing time it was – thanks to _ke (Who is frolicking somewhere in Thailand right now), fargiolas and the rest of the GNOME guys (#clutter, #gstreamer and #gtk+ yay!) for making it awesome. #hackers-india was a great venting place too :)

Cheese‘s master needs quite a bit of work before it can be included in GNOME 3.0 – and I plan on doing most of that. It’s fun – demoing it at college is a huge hit. Looks like eventually, my original goal for Cheese might be met ;)

Right now, I’m decompressing, and basically not doing anything at all – except getting a bike, and sorting out some personal issues. Should be back coding (and blogging) soon. Have a huge post on GSoC experience coming up.

aeoo 221 points222 points223 points 1 day ago* [-]

recognize that work is something you do to live and isn’t your whole life

Let’s examine this as objectively as we can manage. Lets assume a 40 hour work week where the employer pays for lunch, as the employer should be doing, which results in a real 8 hour day instead of a 9 hour day. Of course a 9 hour day will work even more in favor of my argument.

You need to sleep 7 to 8 hours to be healthy, on average. Let’s say 7.5. Then you need to do maintenance, such as taking a shower, getting dressed, handling bills and other inane things that can’t possibly count for having a life. Most maintenance, other than some amount of shitting and pissing, falls on the off-work time. Then you have a commute. Let’s say you have a 30 minute commute one way, which means 1 hour both ways. Let’s add up and subtract. 7.5 + 1 hour maintenance + 1.5 hours for two decent meals (breakfast and supper, and I am assuming the employer will pay for the lunch). + 1 hour commute and we get 11 hours taken up by various bullshit that we normally don’t count as “having a life.” 24 hours – 11 = 13 hours left. Out of that time, your employer gets 7 hours (because they pay for lunch, and let’s say they don’t want to count lunch as a productive hour just like we don’t count eating food as having a life on our off-work time either, which makes it fair n square), and 1 hour is “wasted” on lunch. So you are away from home for 8 hours. So (24 – 11) – 8 = (13) – 8 = 5. So you get 5 hours of time which we can describe as “having a life.” Your employer gets 7 hours, if the employer pays for lunch, as they should be doing. You lose and your employer wins when it comes to quantity.

If the employer refuses to pay for lunch, then you are absent from home 9 hours, then the equation becomes (24 – 11) – 9 = 4: you get 4 hours and your employer gets 8. In this case you lose much harder than in the previous case.

Now let’s talk about quality. Quality is just as important, if perhaps even not more important, than quantity. In most cases, for a normal scenario of a day shift, 9 to 5 shift, the quality of the 9 to 5 time slot is much, much better than the quality of the 5:30 to 10:30 slot. Why is that? It should be obvious. When you wake up, you are fresh, your mind is most clear at the beginning of the day. At work, you accumulate stress and get tired. So you come home tired and wasted after a hard day’s of work.

So your employer not only gets more hours on a work day, it also gets higher quality hours too. In a week there are also 2 days off. Of course on those days you also have more chores to do that you’ve been putting off on the work days, and plus you need to recuperate from all the stress you’ve been accumulating the entire work week.

If you’re in the USA, your vacation time is likely non-existent (2 weeks and grudgingly it increases to 3 after many years). If you’re in Europe, you probably get 1-2 months vacation time right off the bat, which goes a long way toward ameliorating the problem we are discussing. In many industries it’s also the case that even the weekend doesn’t belong to you. You are on-call, or you have to work the weekend, whatever. Having a commute that’s more than 30 minutes one way drastically alters the balance of the formula as well.

So, at least if you are in the USA, chances are you spent your life for the sake of the employer and not for your own sake. There is no balance to speak of. The balance is a myth and a mirage and a dream. In Europe, people may have something that resembles balance due to their more generous law-mandated vacation time and other labor protections.

Epic comment on Reddit

And one of the reasons I’m queasy about what I will be doing two years down the line when I finish college. Ruling out traditional IT Jobs appears to limit my choices a bit – since I don’t have a brand name college to hang on to. The major reason I’m pushing myself hard to do a lot of things (and have fun in the process!) for the next two years.

I want what I work on to be part of my life – and not as something that I should escape from so I can have a life. I’ll make sure that’s possible :)

If you had read my Cheese GSoC proposal, it would’ve stressed on one major point – make Cheese sexy.

Two days ago, one of my classmates spent 5 minutes on the bus using Cheese and trying out different effects (and poses!). Today, my brother spent 20 minutes trying to get the perfect combination of style and vagueness for his Facebook profile picture – using Cheese. He then asked me to create an account for him in Ubuntu (he was an exclusively Win7 user till then) before leaving.

I’m still not where I want to be (the girls haven’t gone gaga over it…yet!), but I know very well that I am on the right path.

And a major milestone in that path is the release of Cheese 2.31.1. The ‘release’ means that the code is now stable enough to be actually shown off. The major features (rewrite in Vala, use Clutter, user defined Effects and most importantly, Live Previews) are in working condition. We are no longer walking through a minefield of segfaults. You can build it and show it off. When something breaks and you tell us, we’ll most probably not reply with ‘yeah, we know that. We’ll fix it when we get to it’. The road to Cheese 3.0 has begun.

So, what’s all in this release?

1. Rewrite of the UI code. We removed the entire old src/ folder, and rewrote everything from scratch. Using Vala. Why? Because ~7000 lines of C code is now ~1500 lines of Vala code. And the Vala code has more features (Live preview, for one!). The Vala compiler is pretty mature – only one ‘real’ bug so far (rest have been mostly binding bugs, fixed with single line of code changes). And #vala has been incredibly helpful too! And we are re-using most of the ‘backend’ code (Camera detection, pipeline linking, etc) – it is still in C, and writing Vala bindings was incredibly simple.

2. Move from Gtk to Clutter for display. Means I can do stuff like overlay semi-transparent text on top of the effects. Or have animated page transitions. Or (in the future), use OpenGL effects without having to do an extra to-fro copy from memory. Have drop shadows for everything. Make the effects tilt and rotate around when hovered over. Etc, etc, etc. Clutter is the major contributor to the ‘sexy’ part.

3. User created effects. Effects are no longer hardcoded. A simple 4 line text file and enthusiasm for reading documentation is all that is required to create your own effect. The effects are based on GStreamer, and are very flexible – you can create something as simple as monochrome + hue, or something as complex as face detection + extra limb addition to specific people :P

4. Live Streaming – biggie. All effects are arranged in grids of 3×3 in multiple pages that you can swipe through. Simply clicking one will activate it pretty much instantaneously. No more ‘select effect, apply, no-it-sucks, let’s go back and do it again’ games :)

I made a quick screencast to show the new Live preview stuff to those of you too lazy to actually get the source and compile. And the subject is a pink+green teddy bear sitting on my white netbook. (And the weird stuff that turns up after I exit fullscreen is a bug in RecordMyDesktop – and is an incentive for you to actually get the source and check it out :P)

These are the four major features that are new. All the other parts of previous Cheese UI have also been implemented (preferences, thumbnail viewer, fullscreen, wide mode, device detection, etc.)

As for the next release – keep looking out for it, it will land soon! It will primarily be a bug fix and code cleanup release – fixing crashes, UI inconsistencies and making sure everything works as intended.

A lot of late night hackery (mostly because my college takes up 10 hours of ‘regular’ time) has gone into this release – so check it out here and tell us what you think. Especially about the parts that suck. Especially useful would be if you can get someone non-technical to sit in front of Cheese, observe where all they fail (and succeed) and then report your observations back to us.

    "I can't tell you how wonderful it was - I walked into this room, and it was full of people like me"
                

I would give an arm, a leg, an eye and other assorted body parts if I could find such a room. And live there.

Hackerpace Chennai or The Startup Center better turn up fast :)

I used gist to publish my GSoC proposal. Diffs, easy to show off, and Markdown support – made gist perfect for me to make modifications and get feedback easily.

It is the first ‘real’ document I’ve written – it actually had a tangible effect.

Now that I don’t need to make any modifications, I’ve moved it to my site.