Uploading old articles to web

I finally completed pushing the various articles I had written for Linux for You since 2005 to my web site.

It is amazing how the directories get so cluttered. It took a day to sort and select just 20 files!

Arch Linux - An update

The season for the upgrades has started. Ubuntu 10.04 is around the corner. Fedora 13 alpha is also out. So, it is time to examine what has happened to my parents' system.

Arch Linux has not given any problems. The kernel and OpenOffice on their system is more recent than on mine. The old xorg and intel display drivers continue to work.

An update solved the permissions issue with pulseaudio. The user no longer has to be a part of the audio group. The most recent update has completely replaced policykit package by polkit.

Updates take longer in the absence of something similar to delta-rpm on Fedora.

I wonder how long before delta packages are the norm on all distributions.

Why numbering should start at zero

Possibly because I learnt programming in Fortran and Pascal, starting an index with 0 and the syntax of Python range statement had seemed unnatural to me. So, it was nice to come across Dijkstra's Why numbering should start at zero.

Now, I am a convert and nice to unlearn Fortran.

"Adhering to convention a) yields, when starting with subscript 1, the subscript range 1 ≤ i < N+1; starting with 0, however, gives the nicer range 0 ≤ i < N. So let us let our ordinals start at zero: an element's ordinal (subscript) equals the number of elements preceding it in the sequence. And the moral of the story is that we had better regard —after all those centuries!— zero as a most natural number."

Same solution to all problems

Listening - actually ignoring - the parliamentary debate on reservation, I felt that the only solution our politicians could see for any social ill was reservation!

I was reminded of the following comments by Dijkstra's in Humble Programmer
"""
I have run a a little programming experiment with really experienced volunteers, but something quite unintended and quite unexpected turned up. None of my volunteers found the obvious and most elegant solution. Upon closer analysis this turned out to have a common source: their notion of repetition was so tightly connected to the idea of an associated controlled variable to be stepped up, that they were mentally blocked from seeing the obvious. Their solutions were less efficient, needlessly hard to understand, and it took them a very long time to find them.
"""

Working in the Winter Sunlight

Winter sun in North India really feels nice. It seems silly to be sitting in a cold, dark room when I could be enjoying the final few days of sunlight before it gets miserably hot.

I tried using my netbook but it was virtually invisible. There seems to be hope - OLPC-like hybrid screens on commercial netbooks. "Put simply, we've never seen a laptop display look as good in broad daylight as Pixel Qi's display"

My next netbook will have to have such a screen!

Discovering Stuff one Likes

I didn't realize that I liked 'literature' until a college friend suggested I read Albert Camus' The Outsider. He also suggested Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I discovered that I had a liking for European modern classics. Had he not made that suggestion, I would have missed a lot.

The other 'discovery' was by casual browsing - I do not know why I was attracted to Ian McEwan's First Love, Last Rites. It had just been published and I knew nothing about the author. But these were among the most memorable and weirdest stories I have ever read. I have continued to enjoy most of what McEwan has written, particularly, Enduring Love, Saturday and Atonement.

I find casual browsing very hard now. There is too many chaos in book stores. It is hard to find one rack which is likely to have books which fit my brain.

So, a recent 'discovery' was thanks to Amazon. I looked at the books bought by people who bought Ian McEwan's novels and found Kazuo Ishiguro's When We were Orphans and The Remains of the Day. It is amazing how he plays with human memories.

Last but not least, I 'discovered' Python by reading Eric Raymond's article, Why Python?

But I still don't know why I chose one recommendation and not another. Did I try others but remember only the ones which worked?

Importance of DIY

Squid wouldn't start after rebooting. Seemed strange - missing files and directories.

And then it struck me. After installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I had optimised the installation and changed /var/log /tmp to temp file systems! Squid wouldn't start because it needed /var/log/squid. So, the problem could be resolved very quickly.

I am finding that I now understand Fedora and Ubuntu distributions better after working with Arch Linux!