linux tricks

http://www.efytimes.com/e1/creativenews.asp?edid=118717

Gmail Glitch Is Causing Thousands Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account

Bungee experience at Rishikesh

I was at home in Delhi. Though I was on vaccations, but most of my friends had their daily offices to attend and I was also busy with some unofficial works of mine (If you are going home on vaccations, its actually not vaccations 🙂 ). Anyways, so I planned with a friend of mine Pankaj, to go to Rishikesh on the weekend and make the vaccations worthwhile by doing some adventurous activities. And the only planning we did was that there was no plan other than leaving on friday night, October the 18th. Caught the bus from ISBT and we were on the way to Rishikesh. While we were chatting and most of the passengers were sleeping, there was this one particular passenger who had got the ears of dogs. Even though we tried to keep our voice down, he would always bring his hand up in the air rotating in form of making a chakra in the air from 3 seats ahead of us. I am pretty sure he was drunk as sometimes when we were staring outside the window not talking, he hears our voices and does the hand thing again. Anyways, we reached the Rishikesh quite early in the morning around 3 AM and had a nap in the waiting room till the sun came out. Took the autorickshaw till Lakshman Jhoola where there were many agent offices who can arrange for the adventure activities. There was this one particular guy at MB Adventures who gave us pretty good deal. There are two places where you can start the river Rafting in Holy Ganges, Brahmpuri which involves 12 Km Rafting and Shivpuri which involves 17 KM of distance. We went to Shivpuri. Between Shivpuri and Brahmpuri comes 6 high tides.

At Brahmpuri, you can have a light food like Maggie. There is one cliff from which you can make a jump in Ganges. It would had been around 4-6 meters high. Standing on the edge, right before taking a jump, the fear you will feel is completely different. Also the experience of zero gravity for that 1-2 second is entirely different. Though I tried 6 jumps but each time before jump, I could feel that fear again. Pankaj took 3 jumps and he looked more confident than I was before taking jumps.

From Brahmpuri to the office of the MB adventure, there comes another 3 high tides. We were done with Rafting around 1’o clock. Now the time was to face the actual fear. Bungee jumping in Rishikesh is done from a height of 83m. We reached the bungee point. Pankaj was afraid that he might back out if I would go first. So he decided to have the jump before me. While he was getting geared up, I was chatting with one of the Bungee professionals Martina, who comes all the way from Switzerland. She was all encouraging. In Rishikesh Bungee, you get 2 chances to take the jump. If you wont be able to take the jump, your jump will be cancelled. Pankaj could not take the jump in the first go and its not an unusual thing as its a scary show looking down from that height. Mark, another Bungee professional from NewZealand, consoled him and asked me to cheer my friend for jump. He took the jump and now it was my turn. I was pretty confident till the point I reached the edge. Standing there looking down while Mark counting from behind, I can tell you it scares a shit out of you. Anyways, I made myself firm and took the jump. Its an elastic rope and you get bounced back three to four times. In first fall, for those 3-4 seconds, I did not know where I was. All the blood getting circulated in the entire body, adrenaline rushing towards your brain. It was quite amazing feeling. You will even forget to shout :-).

Bungee Jumping Video

After the jump, they give you a water bottle and a badge saying “I have got guts”. You need to trek back to the office. After Bungee, we decided to go for flying fox. We both were tied together on Ropeway and in seconds, we were flying over the Ganges like we see Hanuman flying in ramayana. Flying above the river, hills, it was a view to behold. Came the end of the journey by having a dinner at Rajasthani Hotel and we were back on the roads towards Delhi with wonderful memories.

A trip to Pondicherry, Mahabalipuram and Yelagiri

Visiting places is always wonderful but what makes it more wonderful is the people who are accompanying you to those places.
A long weekend was coming on Aug 9th. As usually happens with IT people in Bangalore, any long weekend is ticket to some outstation. Like all many, we planned to go for pondicherry. On the way back, we planned to go for Mahablipuram and do a trek in Yelagiri. We booked a Qualis and left from Bangalore on thursday evening. Lucky for us that we had Bhavana who can communicate in South Indian languages and our driver Sateesh was not that good with Hindi or English. It turned out that Sateesh was a talkative person and since other than Bhavana nobody knew Kannada, so she had to listen and translate each time he said something.
An overnight journey on the typical Indian Roads meant nobody got a good sleep. Mehetab was in front guiding the driver throughout the night using google maps. Biplob and Himanshu enjoyed the bumps on the backseats while me, Bhavana and Monica occupied the middle seats. Whole night, Mehetab kept on writing something deep in his phone which he showed to me few days later. Quite a piece he wrote.
Morning 6’o clock, we were in pondicherry at Auro Beach.

The big ocean, Bay of Bengal, was in front of us. I had a morning run on the beach and soon the beach was not scenic. There were polythene bags lying all around, people attending the call of nature. So we turned back to our hotel to get fresh and go find a Mosque so that Mehetab could attend the morning prayers of Eid-Al-Fitr. While he was attending the prayers, we found this small place, which looked like some temple from outside, to get the morning breakfast. We got poori-sabzi for the breakfast along with some vadas and idly and being from New Delhi, I would say I found the taste to be way better than I could have had ever imagined. After breakfast, we all were feeling sleepy. Since we had to wait for Mehetab to complete the Namaaz, myself, Himanshu and Biplob decided to have a nap in vehicle itself while Monica and Bhavana decided to get a walk in the city.
It was noon time and we were at Auro Ashram. It is a silent place where followers of Shri Aurobindo comes to visit his mausoleum and meditate. Photography is not allowed there. One can get some books about the life of Sri Aurobindo and the mother, which are also available in many foreign languages. Ashram is quite beautiful. You can find a no. of varieties of Cactus which looks very beautiful. One can easily make this observation that Pondicherry is not like the other cities with Beaches but it has its own calmness. Its a good place to get relaxed and just do nothing. After Auro Ashram, we headed towards Promenade beach while taking some walks in the streets of Pudducherry. There are several ministries located near the Promenade beach area. Governer’s house looks like a big white church from outside. This area of pondi is also known as French Colony. A lot of houses bears the name plates in french. There is one big park in the same locality which adds the beauty to it.

Promenade is not like other regular beaches. Its a rocky beach where government has put big stones to keep the city safe against the big waves. Just sit on the rocks and listen to some poetry. I am sure that many philosophers have got their wisdom thoughts sitting at that place. There are hawkers around selling lots of eataries. Soon we departed for Auroville, a place which is known as “a different world altogether inside pondicherry”. There is a big Matre Mandir under construction and is told to have the soils from 80+ countries. As per the running projet, the temple is in form of a big golden sphere and will be surrounded by a no. of beautiful gardens each garden bearing a theme suggested by The Mother, Mirra Alfassa.

On your way to Matre Mandir from Auroville, you will find a no. of stones bearing the picture of some flower with a philosophical quote.
It had been a lot of sightseeing since morning and now was some fun time. So we went to Paradise beach, had the swimming gears on and jumped in the Ocean. This was the only beach in pondi which was a bit cleaner than other beaches but still no match to the Arabic Ocean Beaches. Following the paradise, there is a private beach, Kailash Beach, where guards keep patrolling and wont let people from other beaches to enter. Me and Mehetab wanted to have a run on the shores, so we decided to go through the water. We had a run of around 8-10 KM covering 3-4 beaches.

We came back to Promenade beach for our dinner and had a beautiful night walk afterwards on the MG Road.

Never check-in to a hotel early in the morning because it follows the early morning checkout also which was quite painful next day. Anyways, getting ready early, breakfast at same temple like small place, we went to Promenade back as some of us had to shop.

While others were busy shopping, me and Mehetab walked around and found french Institute of Pondicherry. Its a huge building with a sea facing library, only library where students would love to sit for hours 😛 .
On our way to Mahabalipuram, we had lunch at chettinad hotel where you can find Chicken, Mutton and Fish Gravies without Chicken, Mutton and Fish 😉 (I can have a laugh being a vegetarian 🙂 ).

Evening 5’o clock, we were in Mahabalipuram admiring the historical structures some of which were made of single stones. After Tsunami, many ancient temples have been unearthed in Mahabalipuram. Main temple is in need of saving as the sea winds are leading to the corrosion of stones.
It was getting late at night so we decided to have night stay in Kanchipuram and started for Yelagiri around 3’o clock in the morning. On our way to uphill, me and Mehetab decided to get down while there was still 4Km left to cover and decided to go through all the bushes and rocks doing a trek of our own, making our own way. Getting scratched, bleeding but enjoying the path.

Then we just rested in Yelagiri for the day. Lying there in music fountain park, talking about our childhood and making the discovery of OLAKUTTI, we all had a great fun.

A trip, at the start of which many of us didn’t know each other, brought us closer to each other and made new friends.

http://www.mapr.com/blog/10-open-source-projects-you-need-to-know-about

http://www.mapr.com/blog/10-open-source-projects-you-need-to-know-about

for those who loves to change the pixels

If you are one of those people  who likes to edit the images and fond of open source softwares, you have a no. of alternatives available. With GIMP being the most known in the community, there are other options also available like:

Darktable

digiKam

fotoxx

f-spot

photivo

rawStudio

RawTherapee

Shotwell

UFRaw

For summarized features of each of these softwares, Read Here.

For Hobbyist Kernel developers

As many of the kernel developers do the job only based on their interest, this year kernel summit is the chance to tell your story. 3 hobbyist programmers will be sent for the kernel summit this year. Last date to send the proposal is 24th Aug.

Visit the following links for more details:

http://www.zdnet.com/linux-reaches-out-to-hobbyist-developers-7000019529/

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137653359232088&w=2

6 Days without a Penny

I am writing this story but it may not be important to you. You may not find it as interesting as other similar stories. This is nothing but an experiment I did with myself few days back.
Day1
From previous day cycling trip to nandi hills, I had spent every single coin of my pocket. I wanted to take some cash out of ATM before entering the office but I forgot to take out. In the lunch time, I realised that I dont have any cash. I handed over my sodexo coupon,which had only 80/- left,to the lunch coupon distributor. In the evening I decided to have the dinner also at office and ordered a veg noodles worth 25/-. Now I had only 10/- left in my sodexo a/c. Anyways day ended and I returned home without realising that I had not taken out any cash out of ATM.
Day2
From the previous day, we had a movie planned for this morning followed by team lunch. I reached office on my cycle and from there we all went to Koramangala in my colleague’s car. We had a heavy lunch at CPK. In the evening, Karthik (my friend from Novell) called me to go out as this was gonna be his last week in bangalore. We had some snacks and we were back at home by 10. He stayed at my place for that night along with another Friend Argha, who had joined a company recently and was staying temporarily with me from last few days. In the night, I realised that I have spent two days without a single coin in my purse. I remembered Mehetab’s words about one of his friend who has a list of todo’s one of which says, travel to a city with less than $10 in pocket. I thought why not extend it for few days and see if I can spend this time without any cash, with the resources whatever I had.
Day3
Morning started as usual. Reached the office and started the work. In the lunchtime, I realised I don’t have enough balance in my sodexo card to buy the lunch. To my luck, I had paid for one of my colleague’s lunch on last friday and he remembered to pay for mine this time. We have evening snacks served at our office with other soft drinks available 24Hrs. So evening time food was not a problem.  In the evening, Argha called me that he will be staying with his parents, who were visiting Bangalore for the weekend, from tomorrow till weekend and then he will directly fly to the USA. (His company is sending him for the 3 months training). So he wanted to have a dinner together for the last time before he leaves. We had dinner at Punjabi’s. After dinner, we were walking through the Thippasandra Market when I saw a T – shirt with some catchy line. I wanted to buy that T-shirt but since I had decided to not spend any money, that was the first time I realised how tough its going to be. Ate well and slept well. The day was over.
Day4
Reached office around 11AM and had the morning hot beverage from the office machine. Around 1’o clock went to cafetaria hoping that Sodexo card has been recharged with this month’s amount and yes it was. Left the office around 7PM. So now what to do for the dinner? I decided to skip the dinner that night. Watched the movie on my laptop and went for a sleep. I was really missing Karthik and Argha on this eve.
Day5
Usual daily rituals. Nothing was extraordinary other than the fact that today was friday and on friday’s evening, we have a beer bash. So I left early again in the evening to avoid the beer bash. Reaching home, I was feeling very hungry. I started searching for the eatables. All I could find was some grams. I watered whatever all were there for some time and ate some of them. Ok, so this was going out of hand. Being the weekdays, it was a bit easy but extrapolating the situation to the weekend, its going to be an impossible tasks. It could not go on like this and so I decided to have tomorrow as the last day of this journey.
Day6
Comparatively it was easier than the last two days. I had leftover watered grams from last night. I cooked those grams and prepared a curry similar to one my mom prepares. The amount was enough for the entire day along with some chapatis I cooked. In evening I prepared some black tea as evening snacks. Going to the bed for sleep, I had a feeling of satisfaction that I have done what I thought of.
Day7
I had to goto the temple and for that I had to catch the bus which needs purchasing of a ticket that means, I had to take the cash out of ATM. Wait I could go on cycle. Naah, 6 days, enough, it was insane. After coming downstairs, I ran to the IDBI ATM and took out the Rs 900/-.Very next moment I was holding those notes in my hand, I smelled them. That smell of those fresh notes was incredible. Right after coming back from temple, I ran to the T-shirt shop but that T-shirt was gone. I was sad but I was happy also that I was able to control my will. I hadn’t lost that grip over myself yet.

Do you like wine? You may like this Darling :-)

First of all, we are not talking about the bottled beverage which is famous around the world but we are talking about the famous linux software wine which is used to run the windows applications on linux. Similar to wine, there is a new project started which is trying to emulate the layer for OS-X applications. Though there are almost all the OS-X applications have an alternative in linux but some user just wants to use the original apps as they are comfortable with those. Here is the project page.

Basic execution is similar to wine though the projects also aims to provide ABI compatible set of libraries and framework as available in OS-X. Project is in very initial steps.

[Movie Review]Ship Of Theseus : A brilliant effort from Indian Cinema

[SPOILER ALERT]

A lot has already been written about the movie. More than through promotion, people went to watch the movie just because of word of mouth. Movie starts with quoting an ancient paradox about Ship of Theseus – If the parts of a ship are replaced, bit-by-bit, is it still the same ship?

This flick by Anand Gandhi consists of three stories. The first one is about a girl who is blind and shares a passion towards photography. This part of the movie shows some highly technological devices likes of camera telling coordinates, special printing machine for blind people among others. Some of these are fictional invention. After the girl went through the eye operation, she finds that the pictures she is taking with her vision back, are not that good than the ones she took earlier. Apart from the main theme of the movie, this also conveys the message that imagination is much more powerful than de facto beauty.

The second story is about a monk who is fighting against the grave experiments on animals in the pretext of testing medicine. Later he suffers from the same disease but refuses to take the medicines as the companies producing those medicines do not follow the guidelines towards animal testing. Character of the monk is being played superbly. The belief, discussions on religion, some hilarious conversations between the advocate’s son and the monk, display of the pain in illness, hallucinations etc. are some points which affects you most in this story. Dialogues like “I am an atheist but i believe in the karma of the soul” push your thoughts further.

The last story is about a stock market guy from Rajasthan who visits Mumbai for a kidney operation. Later he finds out about a guy whose kidney was stolen during an appendix operation and wonders whether he has got that kidney. He tries to find out. Though he could confirm that he has got it from a genuine donor, he now wants to help the guy. The problems he faces to find the actual recipient and the harsh truth of “value of money” are very well shown.

Though the direct theme of the movie concentrate on the message of organ donation, the thread which connects all the stories is ironical. As per the philosophy of the ship of Theseus, Theseus owned the ship but none of the  parts of this ship belonged to the ship when it was first made. Similarly, in first story girl was a photographer when she was blind but after getting the eyes, it doesn’t interest her anymore. For the second story, the monk finally accepts the medicines for his treatment whereas in the last one, the guy who always thinks about money transcends his natural mindset to help the guy.

Overall, it’s a fantastic movie. It is one of those movies which every time you watch, presents you a new and different perspective.