Depressing use of technology

The parking lot at the Chandigarh airport is computerised!

You get a ticket on entering the airport - NOT the parking lot. If you leave within 5 minutes, you pay nothing. If you are in the airport longer than 5 minutes, you pay Rs. 25/ (50 cents) on exiting.

The problem - it is a small airport. There is only one exit from the parking lot and another exit in case you do not enter the parking lot.

It is pretty obvious that the traffic the arrival of vehicles will follow a statistical pattern but the exit is deterministic. People want to leave as soon as the plane arrives. Hence, the exiting from the parking lot is a pain! It is easier to exit if one does not enter the parking lot.

Technology has achieved the remarkable goal of making the life of people who park miserable while rewarding the folks who create chaos on the unloading/loading curb :)

Oh, well, at least the airport is using software and the two exit points and the entry point are even NETWORKED :)

Impact of OpenSUSE 12.1 on Tumbleweed

My major motivation for trying Tumbleweed was to have an Arch Linux like distribution but with delta packages. Although delta rpms were only available for the packages in the 11.4 repository and not in the Tumbleweed repository, I continued to be interested in seeing how the 'rolling' model will evolve along with the other distributions of OpenSUSE.

The release of 12.1 distribution had a larger impact on Tumbleweed than I had expected. It was literally a distribution upgrade, no different from 11.4 to 12.1. Tumbleweed repository was emptied and based on 12.1 repository. All packages were upgraded. I had hoped that the Tumbleweed distribution to be very close to the 12.1 and the upgrade should have been minimal even though I had wondered how they will manage versions across repositories.

In the current upgrade, I had to change the repository to point to the current repository instead of 11.4. The current repository is now a symbolic repository so in future no change in the repository information will be needed. However, at least at present, Tumbleweed does not really appear to be a rolling distribution. It is more like the base with some updates, so, not particularly interesting. It is better to use Ubuntu with ppa's.

I will keep watching and may be Tumbleweed will evolve into an interesting alternative. At present, I continue to stick to Fedora and Arch Linux at home and Ubuntu at work.

First Experiments with Ubuntu 11.10

The upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 went through smoothly on Lenovo S10-3 netbook. It looks very similar to 11.04. An application would normally use the full screen as expected. I tried to start a new application and couldn't. No matter where or how hard I pushed the mouse, the dash would not appear.

Finally, I remembered the 'window' key! Having found the workaround, I have not had a chance to experiment with it more as I normally use Arch Linux on the netbook and Fedora on the desktop.

At IIT, Ropar, the default desktops are Ubuntu. So, I decided that I would try to upgrade my LTS desktop to oneiric. I certainly wasn't going to upgrade in steps. The choice was between a fresh installation or an forced update and do what is not recommended - strongly.

The latter is more fun and I hoped to learn something. I changed the sources file to use the oneiric repositories. My installation was fairly simple so I did not expect any significant issues. At worst, some packages would be broken.

Unfortunately, the upgrade failed - too many errors. The last error was a fairly simple error of some conflict in a file in two packages. I made the mistake of rebooting inspite of the broken packages!

The system no longer boots - not even grub menu :(

Well, I will now have to do a fresh installation - and haven't understood what went wrong.

Fedora 15 takes too long to boot: traced to Systemd?

I filed a bug report - "System takes over 2 additional minutes to boot after updating to kernel 2.6.38.8-35".

This was in July. The problem was erratic. If I tried to trace it, it seemed to disappear. It persisted even after upgrading to 2.6.40. In fact, it seemed to be more consistent. Removing VirtualBox 'solved' the problem but not for long.

Then finally an entry in the system log messages helped!

Oct 25 15:22:28 amd avahi-daemon[1792]: Registering new address record for fe80::217:31ff:fe93:e65a on eth0.*.
Oct 25 15:27:26 amd systemd[1]: network.service operation timed out.  Terminating.

Fortunately, I had not rebooted the system and let it try to boot for over 5 minutes.


It led to the realisation that I had been running network service even though it was not needed any more when using NetworkManager.

Now for the last three days, the system has been booting fine after I disabled the network service.

I will wait a few more days before filing a bug report against systemd - just to be sure.

Facebook makes me younger!

I admit that I am not very good at using using Facebook or knowing what it is asking. However, I was somewhat amused by the status update that I had added Padre Conceicao College to my educational qualifications.

How did it happen?

I got a request that some of my Facebook friends have said that they were at the college at the same time as I. It wanted me to confirm that fact. It seemed like a trivial issue and I confirmed it.

Facebook said that this fact has been added to my profile. What! I did not state that. Oh, well. I do not take Facebook seriously so it mattered little.

So, now I have said to the world that I was a student at this college at the age of 55 when in fact my relationship with the friends was that they were in the classes I was teaching :)

User Interfaces and Familiarity

Getting used to a new interface can be hard, even if it not Gnome3 or KDE4.

I just realised it after 4 years of using my car that the petrol gauge is not linear! I haven't been driving much - less than 10,000 KM in 4 years. Even then I felt silly.

These days, I am driving to Ropar (approx 50KM from Chandigarh) thrice a week and noticed that the petrol seemed to deplete rapidly after reaching the midway point. I was thinking whether there is a problem and then I noticed for the first time that there is an icon at the mid-way point. The icon is of a petrol pump - clearly implying that it is time to fill up :)

Oh, well. Works as intended.

Rsync - What on earth did I do!

I created a new document related to a course I am teaching on my netbook. I rsync'd my netbook to the desktop. To my horror, the lecture notes I had prepared on the desktop were over-written by the version on the netbook.

Why can't software prevent me from doing something so dumb.

Well, I should have examined the implications more carefully for bi-directional rsync.

Another often used flag not included in -a is -u, which says not to overwrite newer files. If we wanted to do a Briefcase style synchronization, we need -u, and we need to do the rsync in two directions:

rsync -aHu a/* b
rsync -aHu b/* a