amunix

My name features as one of the third prize winners' of the "name-my-light" campaign run by Fenix flashlights. They will be sending me an E01 flashlight as a prize. Yay!

after a lot of thinking, i have finally quit from chitpavan, kobraweb, and aparant. i am a misfit.

Okay, so finally I settled down on the Samsung B2100. This phone is known as Marine in India, and Xplorer elsewhere, and claims to be shock-proof, water-proof, dust-proof, and all the toughness it can pack.

So last night I dropped it in a bucket of water and tried to call that number. Bingo, it rang. After about a minute I pulled it out, and wiped it dry. It was perfect. My daughter then banged it on the floor from a height of about 2 feet, and nothing happened. Seems like it is rugged as Samsung claims. Hopefully it lasts longer too. Review in the next post, as I get more familiar with it.

I also see that they have introduced the first solar-chargeable cell-phone (Solar Guru), which has solar-panels on its back. A sunlight charge of 1 hr. gives an approx. talktime of 5-10 minutes, which is not bad especially for those areas that have power-cuts these days. It may click well in the rural zones of India. Apart from that, solar-power is the way to go, and cheers to Samsung for being the first to launch it in India.

I was taking a cvs diff today between two versions of a java file. To my horror, I found out that most of the changes were in the formatting -- adding a space, changing a space to a tab or vice-versa. The real code change was tiny as compared to the white-space changes. It irks me when programmers ignore white-spaces, and add or delete them at will.

As a rule of thumb, cvs diffs' must contain only the code changes, and not the white-space changes. Very few programmers understand this, even experienced ones. :-|

Some movies are famous for their dialogues that run a chill along your spine. But such movies are rare. Very rare. Lately, I saw Taken. It is a story of an ex-special agent's daughter being kidnapped in France, and he (Liam Neeson) trying to rescue her from the clutches of the east-European gang. The movie has a predictable storyline, but some sequences in it are worth watching. For eg., the following dialogue uttered by Neeson to his daughter's kidnapper over phone:

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."

Now *that* makes a movie worth watching!

I saw Slumdog, and I think it is slightly hyped. The movie portrays a skewed picture of India, especially to those who haven't been here (India is much, much more than only filthy slums and beggars). But given that it is directed by a British, this is not a surprise.

Though the soundtrack is good, A. R. Rahman fails to deliver the "Rahman magic" which we are used to (he has much better music than Slumdog, see Rojaa, Lagaan, Bombay). I also object to the brash language used in the movie, which makes it unsuitable for family viewing in India. The movie will not win all the 10 Oscars it has been nominated for -- there are far better movies at the Academy Awards than Slumdog.

Overall, though the story is surely innovative, the movie fails to impress me (but well, who cares anyway? ;-))

Got a professional membership to acm (Association for Computing Machinery) today. I can be reached at agodbole@acm.org too. In the host of benefits as a professional member, access to Communications of the ACM, and over 600 safari books is what interests me. Oh, and not to mention access to ACM's digital library, and the Classic Books.


For developing countries, ACM has a special rate of USD 43, as against USD 198 professional membership. And I guess it is worth every cent!

Don't waste candles in peace marches. Give them to those who do not have electricity instead. It will help them read, and be informed. Being informed is the key to building security.

...to protect ourselves, our people, our assets, our everything. We were, and still are ill-equipped to deal with any kind of emergency - be it human-inflicted, or nature-inflicted. Instead of criticizing our forces, our law-makers, and our politicians, time has come to introspect - where are we heading to? Unless "we" improve, our destination is chaos. Every single Indian has failed, and miserably so.

Giving more ammunition to police, or "better" vests, or establishing more security-related committees is not going to improve our situation. They are smart, they are well-trained, they are well-equipped, and they are *always* going to be one step ahead of us, unless every single individual decides to improve. Security of a nation depends more on every individual, than on the armed forces. Security is a collective activity, and not something to be had only by adding more ammo. People are the weakest link in security, and will always be so.

Resolve today. Resolve *NOW*. Resolve to IMPROVE as an individual. Educate. Be educated. Question. Keep your over-inflated egos aside. Take action. Be informed. Being informed improves trust. Improved trust helps build a secure nation.

We got a FIAT Palio Stile 1.1 SLX (furnace red color) from B.U.Bhandari in Pune. The reasons for going for a FIAT were good engine, and ample cabin space. Diesel was ruled out, as the premium above petrol was way too high. Photos here, here and here.

Anushree turned one on 3rd January, and I wanted to update her latest photos. Finally, they are. Here.

RMS (yeah, Richard Stallman) made a fool of himself on misc@openbsd when he made repeated incorrect statements about OpenBSD. And when people indicated this to him, he tried to shrug them away saying that they were "mistakes" on his part. Theo rightly calls him a "liar" and an "hypocrite".

Whatever respect I had for Richard as a "leader" has rapidly diminished and reached zero. Read it and judge for yourself.

Anushree turns one today. When you have a kid, time is warped. :)

Writing CD
Assuming that your CD device is cd0, and you wish to burn image.iso to the CD, execute the following command "cdio -f cd0c tao image.iso" as superuser.

Writing DVD
Assuming that your DVD device is cd0, and you wish to burn image.iso to the DVD, do the following (as superuser):
1. Install "sysutils/dvd+rw-tools" from ports
2. growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/rcd0c=image.iso
Note that the raw device is used here (rcd0).

More details on burning CDs' or DVDs' through OpenBSD are located in the FAQ here.

Pune's nuisance festival is back. Welcome(!) to ten days of noise pollution, gambling, liquor, bullying, road blocks, traffic chaos (in an already "infrastructure-challenged" city) and political mileages.

Unfortunately, worshipping in public, creating purely nuisance value is considered loyalty-to-your-religion by many.

Ban'k of India's site has been compromised - a malicious JavaScript downloads an executable, which then downloads other malware. As per F-Secure labs, the compromise has not yet been corrected. More here.


You are strongly advised to stay clear of visiting the site, and stop any net-banking activities with Bank of India, until this issue is fixed (hopefully they do it sooner!)

My first port, wcalc (a powerful arbritrary-precision, command-line calculator), got committed today. The PR (problem report) is here. Thanks Martin Wilke (miwi). I will be maintaining wcalc for FreeBSD henceforth. :-)

We finally succeeded in zero'ing on a name for our daughter - Anushree, which means pretty, prosperity, and is another name for Goddess Lakshmi - Hindu Goddess of Wealth. The name is also in tune with our names, all start with the letter A. :)

The concept of "good design" of software is too abstract to be actually realized. For companies that ship software and are legally accountable for it, the idea of "good design" translates to "reasonable design". Let me explain.

** What good characteristics do you wish to have in your software?
General answers that you'd get are:
- simple
- easy-to-use
- robust
- available
- secure
- solves the problem (inherent property, generally assumed)
- economical
- maintainable
- etc., etc., etc..

Given the real life constraints, like go-to-market pressure, revisions, people change, maintainability, it is very difficult (almost impossible) to maximize all the above mentioned properties in finite time. What needs to be done is to strike a balance between all of them, and come up with an optimal solution. For eg., a banking and financial software should be available and secure to the max, but can be okay to be a bit unfriendly, a software game should be user-friendly, but is okay if it is a bit expensive (it is a luxury), and so on.

This optimal balance is what I call a "reasonable design" choice, where, the software meets the needs of all its stakeholders (designers, developers, marketing folks, end-users, etc.)

Will try to expand this article as time permits.

I dual-boot with Windows XP and FreeBSD. Now, I had to re-install XP - which meant that my master boot record (MBR) would be overwritten by Windows XP, and I would lose the ability to dual-boot. Does not matter, as we can always restore the MBR back to the one FreeBSD installed, with the following steps:
1. boot the machine through FreeBSD installation CD 1 (the boot CD)
2. through sysinstall (the FreeBSD installer), go to the Fixit mode
3. start the "live" image, which gives you all the commands
4. issue the following command at the shell prompt:
boot0cfg -B -s [slice_num] [disk]
In my case, the slice_num was 2 (as 1 was for Windows XP), and the disk was ad0.
(boot0cfg -B [disk] will suffice if you don't care for the "default boot selection")
5. exit the Fixit mode, and exit the installer. Remember to remove the boot CD.

You will be again greeted with the famous:
F1 DOS
F2 FreeBSD

Reading this will also help.

Enjoy!