Arch Linux Update Broke

Update on the system with an old Intel graphics chipset succeeded. The packages needed to use the old intel driver were held back.

Gdm would not start. Manual start of X revealed that it wanted libcrypto.so.0.9.8 while openssl was now version 1.0.0.

I decided to experiment with the current intel graphics driver. It was much better but the system still froze twice in a day. Hence, I decided to go back to the previous intel driver.

Downgrading openssl would have affected many more packages. Hence, the idea was to install the older libcrypto libraries as well.

But before doing that, I decided to create a softlink to the current version of libcrypto. As far I could tell from the documentation, some new calls had been added. The old interfaces were unchanged. As I suspected, X came up and the updated system has been working fine now.

This again brings up the issue of how to package the libraries. A package should be able to use a more recent version if it is compatible or allow an older version to be installed in addition to the newer version. Current distributions are just not using the power and flexibility of the shared libraries in Linux.

To the extent possible, a 'normal' user should not have to worry about shared libraries and their versions.

Anxieties

What if I have to implement and execute a task with which I am in disagreement? Will I wind up being disagreeable and quarrel with those around me? To what extent will I need to compromise? At work, the customer specs are the final word. In social scenarios, I suppose, relations play role of the 'customers'.

My father went to the Arya Samaj Mandir almost every Sunday. He would try to influence me but I remain an agnostic.

Fortunately, Arya Samaj is quite a bit less ritualistic than the mainstream. I found myself accommodating the desires of my extended family. The priest was also quite modern and understood my position. The actions expected of me were generally more symbolic than ritualistic.

There was, however, one clear advantage of rituals - they kept the mind occupied and distracted, which, I suppose, was the need at the time.

A time machine would have helped more except as Albert Camus writes in The Fall: "It's too late now. It will always be too late."

Without Comment

Father passes away.

Humour helps in coping

Importance of timely information

Supreme court rejected the plea of a killer for any leniency. Fine, except that the killer had committed suicide 5 years earlier!

I do not know whether the judges were embarrassed about it but effective use of computers would definitely have avoided the pointless, wasted effort.

Can physics help understand India

I chanced upon a headline that a judgement in a case of bombing in 1994 was expected today. Normally, I would have treated it as routine and moved on.

However, I had seen Sean Carroll the Arrow of Time just the night before. Could it be that entropy was increasing faster in India? We know that if justice is delayed, chaos increases. Hence, the theory seems consistent.

Could there be another explanation? What if the Indian administration was moving at close to the speed of light? By general theory of relativity, time would slow down. That would also be consistent with our observations.

I hope that the the LHC experiment will shed more light on the dark matter which surrounds and invades us and we may be able to rule out one of the two theories and improve the theory so that it matches the level expected by David Deutsch

Back in College

This weekend has been great. I have a digital photo frame which can play streaming video. I could easily stream images using Mediatomb. Streaming video was much harder - one major issue was getting the video format right. It is incredible how many variations seem possible. While the video would play perfectly fine when I tested with MythTV, the photo frame had problems.

I could get some videos to play. However, the reliability of playing streaming video was low. The display would often freeze or restart from the beginning. I finally realised that my goal was not streaming. It was to relax and watch some videos without being tied to the desktop. I do not like laptops. As the photo frame has a usb port, I decided to copy the video on a usb drive and play it on the photo frame. This worked quite well.

It would have been more fun to stream but I managed to lie in bed, relax and watch some memorable videos from http://www.ted.com/themes/best_of_the_web.html

Aside from the wonderful presentations by J K Rowling and Steve Jobs, I loved Robert Sapolsky's talk about the uniqueness of humans. I was taken back to my college days and the deeply troubling philosophy course on ethics while watching Michael Sandel. I plan to watch all the lectures in that course. It feels like going back to college :)

Weird Keyboard Malfunction

It was a weird experience. I was working on Arch Linux in a VM( Sun VirtualBox) in a remote X session from a thin client. Suddenly, the keyboard seemed to have stopped working. Function and control keys seemed to work partially. But normal keys were totally ignored. Ctrl-alt-Fn also did not behave correctly.

I naturally assumed that the VM must have caused the problem.

I rebooted the thin client - same behaviour. I switched from LXDE to Gnome. Same behaviour. Rebooted the main machine - still the same scene.

The same user worked fine on the main system; however, I realised later that the desktop was KDE.

I then tried KDE and keys worked fine.

I assumed that I must have updated some package which caused the problem. But the last update was four days ago. Hence, that was not a likely cause. Also, I could use the gnome desktop using an alternate account.

After quite a bit of struggle, I found the problem to be related to SCIM. I must have pressed some short-cut keys which caused the keyboard to seem to be abnormal! At least, I assume so because after using the input pad with the mouse and exiting from SCIM, the keyboard has been working fine.

Hopefully, I will find time to reproduce the problem and add an update to this post.