Memoirs of a QWERTY Keyboard
Some bands/artists I enjoy listening to, for this current factor of time in which I enjoy trance/derivatives/near-trance:
Psst. I left last.fm for … nothing, just left it. Like I left Twitter and Facebook. They are for people with no time and I got plenty, plenty, plenty.
The topics remain unrelated, as always.
Another random update, in both time and space.
I’ve got less than a week left before I’m officially over due-date for a 50% working demo of my undergraduate project, hah. I hate it when they give me so many holidays – I get lazy and am too lazy to do anything about it too, hence a quicksand.
Guess the year has a lot of music stored in it for me, as my 21 has begun with plenty of those.
I have nothing against religion, but I absolutely dislike this missionary nearby with its loud volume and irregular sermons. It’s been three years since I told myself I’d get used to it, and not a day of those go by where am not thinking of ways to get their speaker wires cut. I’ve thought of the rat training too, so I am going insane due to that – yep. Then there’s this renovation fixation the people around me are having with their not-comfy-enough homes, and that’s making the head ache. I probably think I’ve mutated and have acquired a higher hearing sense.
Anyhow, back to work now. Here’s my current desktop, plastic as usual.
It just won’t work. You know that after messing around for over 2 hours.
Update: You can also get rid of PulseAudio completely and shift to OSSv4, a much better sound system with equivalent features, by following the guide at this link.
This guide (or something like it) is for you if your MPD’s errors.log (/var/log/mpd/errors.log) has these lines, and if you are an Ubuntu user (8.10, the Intrepid Ibex):
Jan 08 16:30 : Cannot connect to server in PulseAudio output "Pulse Device" (attempt 1): Connection refused
Officially, as per the MPD Wiki, the fix is pretty straightforward, to add the ‘mpd’ user to the pulse group. By doing the following:
sudo usermod -a -G pulse mpd
sudo usermod -a -G pulse-access mpd
sudo usermod -a -G pulse-rt mpd
Additionally change the related part of your /etc/mpd.conf to look like:
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "My Pulse Device"
}
Also edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and add the following line at its end:
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1
This should usually fix it, but if not there’s another way. Load up paprefs and select the options that say:
Enable network access to local sound devices
Don't require authentication
Still not fixed? Well, its time to give up and get back to ALSA. Yes, the good old ALSA that respects you. To do this, change your Sound configuration (Found at System > Preferences > Sound) to look like this:
Set all to ALSA.
Once done, reset your /etc/mpd.conf back to reflect the following:
audio_output {
type "alsa"
driver "esd"
name "My ALSA Device"
}
Restart MPD after each change to /etc/mpd.conf of course.
That _must_ work. But I have no idea what else it might render useless, which I hope does not happen.
Welcome to yet another random, rand(), whatever 
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*
After I discovered the existence of this very wonderful screen program a few months ago, I’d always been trying to use more and more simple command-line / console based programs rather than those GUI heavyweights which both use up resources and clutter my desktop.
At first I learned vim basics via vimtutor, but I gave up using it as a default text editor and still preferred the gedit warmth. But vim was powerful, no doubt, and definitely more faster than moving your mouse around to activate events and work with dialog boxes. But it just didn’t fit well with me that I launch it each time I need to dump some text or write something up quickly. Only while programming something up did I summon its need. The jump to console applications here was not so good!
Next up, I tried the most popular thing screen is famous for, the IRC client called irssi. This one simply blew me away. After all, in an IRC you do nothing with a mouse, all you do is talk with the keyboard, and run commands too with it. So why the GUI, I wondered, and ditched the good old XChat and its various scripts for a much more simple console interface, the mighty irssi. Running it within a screen session gave me more comfort of not having an icon blinking or simply residing on my tray or various other bars and that I could connect to the session anytime I desired. Takes about ~1 MB for one server (irc.freenode.net) with 4 channels auto connected. Jump to console applications for IRC – Very good!
Next up was the media requirements. While video was out of the question, cause I can _never_ give up Mplayer+GUI whatever comes my way, I looked at Console based audio players to satisfy this urge. I did some research on popular and non popular ones and am currently using Plait, which I think is the perfect thing I’d need. Its revolutionary, and is based on a hinting system. It (plaiter) takes about 600~ KB of my RAM for a list of 10 songs. Directly streams them to the audio device or any even an online stream if desired, at no or very less resource costs! An example follows:
$ plait staind not outside
Now this command above will play all songs in my library which are by Staind but will not play those songs matching the name Outside.
Awesome isn't it?
The shift here, for music, is still quite a bumpy one so far since pausing / stopping is a bit tedious but I have made ways for it by mapping my keyboard’s (a Samsung SDM4500P) multimedia keys to its commands. More about this in some other post over time here.
The last thing I’ve shifted to a console application is the beautiful rTorrent client. This client is an amazing one. Its light as irssi, perhaps even lighter, cause its just taking ~1 MB of my RAM and its got all the features of a good client including PEX and DHT in it. Only issue with it is in its torrent list managemen. Its still under heavy and active development with very clean documentation so that shouldn’t be an issue for too long, and am happy with this anyway. Moreover, rTorrent uniquely is different cause it directly transfers from your file-system to the network stack, and vice versa, so very minimal amount of memory is used! Console based application for torrents – fairly good!
I’ll blog about each of these items and more as I encounter simpler alternatives to my major tasks soon here, detailing on how to install them, set them up and other usage details. Very soon. 
A final list of software I’ve talked about in this post:
More soon! I’m loving the consoles! 
