I’m back at home after travelling almost ten days – ACM ICPC at Coimbatore, One day at Ooty, the last FOSS.in at Bangalore, Nonameconf at Bangalore, and finally chilling out losing at XBox 360 Takken at the [Zynga][z] office.

One thing I’ve realized sharply is that “Life will take you to interesting places and make you do interesting things, if only you let it“

I realized that my days were being pretty much the same all day. I’ve shook up a lot of things – quit many ‘safe’ stuff I was doing so I could go try stupid, freaky things – I don’t know what. Should be fun and interesting.

What stupid, crazy, freaky and incredibly interesting things you have done?

Watch two rather handsome1 dudes (daniel and andreas) in this screencast where they show off some more effects (thanks to fargiolas!). Newer effects are easier to add (feels awesome that that was my work) – and more will be on their way :)

footnote: 1: Professional opinion from one of my lady friends :P

I moved to Vim from Emacs a while back. I realized I was not using emacs to its fullest extent – I was using it as ‘just a text editor’, and alt-tabbing to gnome-terminal for most of my work. I was using one tool per job anyway, so why not go all the way and use a text editor for a text editor instead of yet another operating system :P

Also, and perhaps more importantly – on my rather small Netbook, pressing combos felt awkward to me (I know it shouldn’t have, but it did). Much better (atleast so far) with vim than Emacs. Since most of my coding these days seems to be done on this small and underpowered machine, and my wrists were hurting anyway, I switched.

Muscle memory is still set to emacs (hit C-k several times when it should’ve been d$), but I guess I’ll eventually get back to being fast enough in vim :)

Last time I was on vim, I was just getting used to Linux, and switched to emacs a few months after. I wonder if I’ll switch again in the future.

TL;DR: Moved from Emacs to Vim ‘coz I felt like it.

“Why does Cheese have a maximum photo count of 100 in burst mode?” questions have popped up quite a few times on the cheese list. It is just a teeny, tiny bug – fixed in master.

The work around is simple:

Till Cheese 2.32

Raise it to whatever value you want in line 8 of /usr/share/cheese/cheese-prefs.ui.

(If you don’t know what version you are running, check Help -> About)

(Fix is just raising the limit from 100 to something that most people will likely not hit. If they do hit it – well, line 40 on /usr/share/cheese/cheese-prefs.ui :D)

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.