Harsh J

There are days where you wake up normally, read about some violence, politics and gossip. There are other days where you wake up to stuff like this.

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.

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:

• screen
• vim
• gedit
• irssi
• plait
• rtorrent

More soon! I’m loving the consoles!