Why do they do this?

Of course, Somalia would need more focus first. That country badly needs prosperity if it is to have any citizens left over the next few years. The plight of these countries sometimes makes me think colonialism is not bad at all. War, poverty, hunger, gah.

Anyways, my semester exams are nearing and here are the announced dates for B.Tech IT (The course I am in)

Anna University Timetable for U.G. (B.Tech IT) 5th semester

• 06/11/08 - Telecommunication Systems
• 10/11/08 - Database Management Systems [DBMS]
• 13/11/08 - Object Oriented Analysis and Design [OOAD]
• 17/11/08 - Operating Systems [OS]
• 20/11/08 - Computer Networks
• 24/11/08 - Environmental Science and Engineering [EVS]

The resulting pattern is oddly nice, 3-2-3-2-3 day gaps.

I’ve been busy being lazy lately, and very lazy indeed. Though I managed to finish up my lab work and other things, I’ve not written down even a small function for self’s sake. While resolving that now, I’ve also moved from Gentoo to ArchLinux having learnt enough and wanting a functional distro now rather than a testing one.

Arch is very fast at installing things, too fast to even compare it with something! But I could be wrong, having not used any other distro for like 8 months now. But comparing to how apt, yum and smart had behaved on my system earlier, pacman is the creamy layer on the cake!

I need to do some serious studying on system calls and the memory management parts of Operating Systems, else this semester would seem a total waste for me. Telecommunication Systems didn’t turn out to be bad at all, its very interesting, being application-oriented. OOAD and DBMS passed by without notice since they are more necessities to learn than something you can ‘try and experiment’ with. Networks has me in a puzzle with so many header formats, but it was great to finally learn something in that field. I’ve got to implement programs to understand the standards more, which I haven’t till date. The EVS class ender with ‘An Inconvinient Truth’ being played was a fantastic way. That pretty much sums up my current semester. The semester where I literally fell asleep in class twice.

Now onto implementing some system calls in C, for the OS lab examinations.

For donor passes contact:

• Jainendra Chouraria - +91 98400 37945
• Sunil Shah - +91 98401 21000

Donor Passes are also available at:

• Reliance Communication - 18, Ritherdon Road, Chennai - 7
• Photo Optic - Doveton Tower, Chennai - 7. Ph: 044 26421479
• Bipin Jewellers - 66, N.S.C. Bose Road, Chennai - 1. Ph: 044 25355600
• Tower Opticians - Anna Nagar East, (Near Naidu Hall), Chennai - 40. Ph: 044 26288996
• Cheda Foods - Ormes Road, Kilpauk, Chennai - 10.

For more details, mail to aone@eth.net

Though am not totally addicted to it, its good to post short thoughts or replies at Twitter. I still find the place a bit weird to browse through but I’m beginning to get a hang of it, unfortunately not while I’m mobile. I think that’s the best point of Twitter, a scribble pad to post upon as you travel.

Twitter - Cause birds "tweet"?

I’ve had many nice ideas, thoughts and such while travelling but never have I cultivated the so-said good habit of carrying around a small notebook to scribble them upon. I find that quite odd to do, non-wash-proof kind of odd. Twitter, however, with the advance of the mobile devices into every man’s pockets, promises to help cultivating the same habit in a digital way. I need to setup the texting feature and give it a spin, and also try some gprs methods while am at it.

On my desktop I use Ping.fm for “tweeting”, as they like to call it, and I use it along with Bitlbee. Nice integration into one single irssi IRC interface. Ok I got a bit off the topic there, admitted. I’m turning quite the jargon guy here I notice, but I can’t really help changing that back, but yes I can dumb stuff down a bit maybe.

So, more tiny updates at my Twitter account - QwertyManiac

Heroes - Season 3 - Villains

Hope what they promised us, that the villains shown in there would be far worse than even Sylar, is really true. Atleast the first episode spoiler pointed a little bit in that direction, but not many new characters were revealed in it.

And the promo poster looks awesome, to add pretty redundantly.

Previously Meanwile, on Lost, Locke’s death has smashed all the left-over interest I had left by the third season. The moving of the island was a nice thing to see though, and so was Benjamin’s departure. Lost has some good music in it at times. I wouldn’t be watching this show anymore though, am done with the madness it keeps on adding in. Yes I’ve been saying this every season from the second but this time I just won’t!

The other shows I used to watch (Aliens in America, Bionic Woman) have both gone out of production and have not been taken up for another season. That’s just great, both were good shows!

First off, music.

3 Doors Down

3 Doors Down

This band is pure awesomeness, rock awesomeness specifically!

Though their latest self-titled album had released a few months ago, I only got them this week and every track on it is splendid and not even one makes me skip to the next! The only other album that I’ve enjoyed so much would be Flipsyde’s We The People. Here’s their Last.fm page if you are interested in trying them out.

However, there is always a favorite no matter how much you like all the tracks on an album and mine were It’s Not My Time and She Don’t Want The World.

Their older album, Away from the Sun was also good, with great tracks like When I’m Gone and Here Without You. Nice music!

Didn’t like the even-older album The Better Life though.

Off to Programming.

Ruby

Ruby Programming Language

I messed around with Ruby a few days. It’s brilliant, and nearly as easy as Python is. But it didn’t fit me so well that I’d shift from Python to it. My prime reason to try it was for seeing how good Ruby On Rails development could be, my interest being sparked by the rave reviews its been getting. It sure is good, web-dev stuff but I’ll go ahead with Django finally.

But doing things in Ruby is sorta easier than in Python. Sort of. But I haven’t poked around much to be sure if it wins over Python or not. Ruby is definitely more Object-Oriented than Python, with every darn thing being an object. With a good editor, ruby files look great and are easy to read as well. Might explore more with it at Project Euler perhaps.

Now for some more KDE4 mixup.

KDE’s Dolphin is a boon for external-storage device users with its neat split screen feature and not to mention the tabbing power. I’d say this is overkill, giving both! And if that were not enough, there’s a button

KDE's Dolphin File Manager

that would launch the terminal below the window in another splitter pane. This power feels good to handle, too good. Ironically for me, its philosophy page says otherwise. Ark, the KDE’s default archive-extract/create program is just not good. It fails at basic tasks and stalls while extracting from split RAR files, but thanks to it am more comfortable with the unrar and tar command line programs now.

Am building Amarok 2 (Alpha 2 - 1.86) as I type this now. Will write about it in a later post, if I manage to get it built and running properly. KTouch is another nice application, for improving your touch-typing skills and am addicted to KBattleShip and KHangMan in my free time, for some educative-arcade fun.

Finally, about my life. (Hey who said all above is for people with no life?!)

Not much is happening at college except for some mild interest of mine rising up for IBM’s TGMC 2008, but I most probably won’t be doing any worthwhile thing in it, I don’t like being forced into Java and accompanying technologies from IBM. This Java thing can form another post actually, haha.

Implementing those OS Job-scheduling algorithms in a preemptive manner in C is a nice practice though the syllabus doesn’t clearly require it. And what is this whole Rational Rose thing, I never get it why designing the construct of a software project is easier this way than hard-coding it down from scratch, I find it too confusing drawing diagrams!

Saw some old Sonic the Hedgehog videos thats been doing some spikes lately, and also saw Hancock and The Dark Knight off which the latter was the most awesome movie ever! Its IMDb rating is justified IMO, with Heath Ledger’s death clearly contributing a lot to it.

Thats all for this syscall of random. *Urgh, goes back to the OS Concepts book*

• Google Reader Notifier
• Gmail Manager
• Adblock Plus
• FireFTP
• Gears
• Stylish

Off the list, I do not care much about Adblock Plus or Google Gears except for the fact they made browsing easy to look at and faster respectively. Can do without them. (I know Opera has a way of blocking too, but am not interested in blocking ads for a while now, maybe when I get irritated by them again.). And Stylish like features is obviously well built into Opera, so 3 tasks done by default.

Coming to Gmail Manager and FireFTP, for Gmail Manager I looked for desktop packages called kcheckgmail and other widgets but some refused to work while the other required a dependency I was not willing to install. As always when this happens I headed to Qt-Apps and got myself QGmailNotifier. Built it with a [qmake - make and make install] and I was ready to launch qgmailnotifier and work well it did. Qt applications always ftw for me! For FireFTP, the existing Dolphin and Konqueror of my KDE sufficed. I created an FTP folder for my site and a WebDAV one for SourceForge and it were done, again too simply.

The only thing missing now is a notifier for Google Reader. Maybe I’ll look into sources of some widgets and combine it with QGmailNotifier. But I guess that’d have to wait. Could there be an alternative way?

No Opera widgets please, they are just not how I need it. It has to be either a desktop tray software or a notifier within the browser in some toolbar as an icon.

KDE 4.1.0

Its pretty much usable now than when I had tried before (4.0 alpha). I like the new way of selecting files Dolphin has to offer, a nice round clicker that appears on hover. Besides that, Dolphin’s file-preview has improved a whole lot, giving previews for almost anything under that hard-drive cover.

Plasmoids are nice things, but I feel they waste too much space and aren’t always persistent with their configuration options - making me have to re-enter my preferences all the time. But its good, I’ve even gotten used to KDE-Twitter as my desktop twittering application. But the Plasma and Plasmoids are a very unstable feature of KDE right now, with changes happening in the svn every other day.

I’ve been a GNOME user all these days, so the shift to KDE 4 was very much troublesome. In installation terms I mean. I don’t have, nor would like to have, KDE3 libs installed so am pretty much stuck with only what KDE4 wishes to offer and am using only those. Its got Okular (PDF Viewer), K3B (Burn Baby Burn) and GwenView (Image Viewer) and these suffice for my daily tasks as of now since I rely on irssi/bitlbee/ncmpc and rtorrent command-line applications for the other deeds of mine.

The worst part of KDE is the how it makes GTK applications look. You’ll have a hard time with Firefox, a really hard time. I tried for around 4 hours changing GTK styles, cycling through many and installing some more, but in the end I had to build Opera-Qt4 and be done with Firefox 3. It were slow too, on my Prescott P4 3.0 GHz system anyway. Will use Firefox again when I get my new PC. Opera is being okayish, I’ve hidden the menus so that it doesn’t look ugly too.

My Desktop

KDE4 Desktop

Konsole still needs a lot of work as a terminal emulator. Kate is awesome and I even configured it for my liking and it was way easier to theme it than it were for Gedit. I’ll quit using Kate in a few days as I learn more of vim (I’ve been very slow on this part) so there goes another KDE dependency.

About the media players, my KDE set had two basic ones included in it - Dragon and Juk. Dragon is a simple Video/CD/DVD player while Juk plays my music files. The quality exhibited by Dragon was far less than what MPlayer could show (I use SMPlayer as my MPlayer frontend) but nevertheless, its basic interface covered many features including video enhancements while playing etc. Juk on the other hand was nice as a media player but I feel it could do better with a differently styled media-browser than the vanilla Winamp style one it uses. Plus since it had no Last.fm integration, I decided not to set it as my default player and continued to use MPD/MPC.

The Control Center has gone away to be replaced with System Settings. It still lacks a switch to take you to root level for modifying certain special properties but that can be done via a sudo command from the command line. Apart from that the entire management application seems fine with a nice new interface for configuring things. I especially like the new color-setting interfaces available across KDE4.

Will be using this for quite some time, seeing how much its improved from KDE 4.0.0, I would be expecting it to get far better over the next 2 releases to become one of the best DE ever. GTK/GNOME seems far behind KDE’s awesomeness and  Qt’s cross-platform power, way far behind.

Freedom WIN

Found in Okular (KDE4)

Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!

Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.

The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?

Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!

Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.

Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!

I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.

You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.