Harsh J

@having fun with microblogging, status-blogging, whatever twitter is.

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 is generating quite some hype, and there’s no better site than Heroes Revealed to follow the updates, trailers, promos and of course, spoilers.

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!

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*

Found that GTK’s Aurora engine is pretty better at theming than any other engine.

You can look for the package gtk-engines-aurora in your distribution and install it. I loved the tooltips shading and other nice bluish things it had to offer, and also liked the dark theme that accompanies the package. Pretty neat stuff.

Back from mars, I haven’t been doing much lately, and have moved my residence. The downtime of internet due to that also rid me of my internet addiction strangely and I feel like cooking in the evenings. Yes, very scary!

And about scary, 11:37 doesn’t follow me as often as before but I do notice it every other day. But do notice the post’s time.

Watched Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the theaters and found it to be very bad. I did not like the alien touch given to it, not to mention the legend of the crystal skull. Previous movies (With the possible exception of temple of doom - but hey it had great action!)  had better artifacts more historically popular than the crystal skull and that’s why I like em more. This one was meh.

Iron Man was a total mechanical candy, it was sweeter than Robocop, much sweeter. The boss fight not counting, the movie satisfied my interests with just the scene where he first wears his Mark III suit. It was the smoothest thing I’ve ever seen on CGI. I’d watch it on the big screen repeatedly for that sequence alone. Heck, maybe get a HD copy of it too, when its out.

Finally, saw Forbidden Kingdom today. It was good too, if not great. But I do hope there’s no sequel to it. It ended well for once, I don’t wish a sequel to spoil it up. Well unless Jet Li decides to return somehow. The best moments in the movie were only when Jet and Jackie do their attacks against one another. Rest, including the vengeful girl and the monkey king, were sort of meh but did not spoil the fun much. Though there could have been lesser oriental decors and make up. Jackie ought to do a Splinter role in any Turtles movie, he would totally suit Splinter.

Now getting back to the interstellar space, the place where most of you never bother (Bother, not dare) to go, it feels good to have settled down to a distribution and even better to know its Gentoo, of all Linux variants there are. Sure, configuring it took around a week (Only and still my first try) but the system now no longer needs to update via those ISO methods, like Ubuntu or others need for a better experience. I’m rolling with it as it goes!

Beginning to respect cross-platform-ness, I have jumped down into the Qt/KDE river, though I still haven’t managed to get KDE 4.1 installed (Yeah Gentoo does have SOME bad points about it, but otherwise its the best for settling down upon, no version numbers nothing, you are what you’ve got.)

Programming with Qt is quite a pain for someone not used to Object Oriented stuff, but the stuff it can do does not make you give up and let go. Have started a blog on the same, and you will find the link here and content there when its ready enough.

Sorry am I getting too random here? I’ll continue over in another post then.

Image says all, and was found on this link.