I was having trouble publishing this post. I wonder if I should even put this online. Oh well. I’m getting fucked anyway.

I don’t know how I should feel about coming back here. BA! was my whine blog. It was an outlet for things I couldn’t say directly to people. During class 11 and 12, I needed this blog to keep my sanity. Although writing long winded rants about how you hate the world is nothing to be ashamed of, I felt I had moved on from that stage.

I just realized how wrong I was. And this time, it’s worse than ever.

I never mentioned it anywhere online, but college has been pure Hell. The retards who run educational institutions have no idea what education means. The next three years of my life are officially wasted. Explaining how much this hurts me will take ages, so I won’t delve into that right now. College woes are not what brought me back here.

A few weeks ago, me, m1k3y and Kitallis had a little, um, accident. I messed up, which could potentially have meant trouble for both m1k3y and Kitallis. It wasn’t a big accident. In fact, it was the kind of accident people laugh about after a few weeks. Also, I convinced my parents to drop the issue. But then my parents blamed m1k3y for the trouble because they have always thought he was a “bad influence”. Now m1k3y is pissed at me because my parents think he’s pure evil. At least that’s what I gather from whatever little he has told me. I don’t have much to go by here.

And then I bravely ventured forth to “fix” everything.

I guess I should just stay away from introspective conversations. I’m not too good at them. I wonder how I did, but I have good reason to feel I’ve just made things worse. The parties involved should know that I meant well. It was nothing against you. I was trying to make a point, but I probably failed to communicate that to you. I’m going to try my best to put my point in words, but I don’t know if I’ll succeed. What I’ve been trying to tell so many people is a gut feeling, not a series of facts I can put down in writing. So, here goes nothing at all.

Things are wrong. I know it. We have never been like this. We have always been whiny, narcissistic assholes, of course, but we have never been so … dark. I mean, the stuff we’ve been doing for the past few months is just plain disgusting. We haven’t been ourselves at all. Where’s that energy that made us just do stuff? I clearly remember how we used to just sit around at school and waste time laughing at nothing in particular. Nothing of that sort has happened for a long time. Our discussions used to be intellectual, now they’re about pop culture icons and … you know what. We spend too much time whining about things, and too little time doing anything. Where have the ideas gone? And let’s just not talk about the things Sid and Daddy have been doing.

In short: we’re utterly useless. In fact, we’re liabilities. And I want to fix that. Only, I’m having trouble putting this down in words. I just want to get back to building things and doing cool stuff, and I want to do it with people I care about.

How do I convince everyone that we need to fucking wake up? How do I convince everyone that we’re worth more than what we think we are? How do I get everyone to drop the habits we’ve picked up in the past year and get back to work?

A guy who got into one of the top colleges in the country is wasting his time reading random blogs and playing pool. A creative guy who’s interested in all sorts of things – from reading great books to dancing to crappy 90’s music – has vanished somewhere. A law school undergrad with a brain the size of a planet is probably getting drunk as I write this. A guy who loves building cool things spends his nights stoned. An artist is probably smoking away his life somewhere. A Ruby programmer has suddenly turned sour at the world – for reasons beyond my comprehension. And me? I’m sitting here, writing another long rant which nobody is going to read anyway. I guess everyone is happy in their own way, but I’m certainly not. With the way things are going, we won’t have anything to remember these days by. It’s going to be a dull, gray journey to a lackluster graduation followed by a crappy 9 to 5 job. And then we die.

Quoting Sir Eric Theodore Cartman: “How do I reeeach these keedz?”

I have only this to say:

I know the pieces fit
‘Cause I watched them fall away
Mildewed and smoldering
Fundamentally differing
Pure intention juxtaposed
Will set two lovers’ souls in motion
Disintegrating as it goes
Testing our communication
The light that fueled our fire then
Has a burned a hole between us so
We cannot see to reach an end
Crippling our communication

PS: I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell you how much I look forward to meeting you guys. Everyone. And talk.

I just woke up from my very first nightmare of the year 2009. As of now, it’s also officially one of my worst. Here’s how it goes -

I was using my MacBook to burn a DVD when somebody threw a football at me. I was so absorbed in the activity that I failed to catch the football and it hit my laptop so hard that the lid got unhinged and flew off, landing a few feet away. Strangely enough, I wasn’t mad at all. I just took the wounded MacBook to a nearby repair shop, and the guy agreed to replace the lid for free. Since he didn’t have a lid for the white MacBook, he gave me one from the black MacBook instead. Now my laptop was a one-of-a-kind hybrid of the white and the black MacBooks. It was dead sexy.

Fast forward a few hours. I’m at a party at somebody’s house, using my laptop to show something to my cousins. A lady wearing heavy gold jewelry and an expensive sari walks in with her husband. The husband is middle aged and balding, and looks like the typical management guy. Pointing towards me, the wife exclaims to the husband, “Hey! Even that guy has the same laptop as yours.”. Surprised at how a management guy could own an interracial MacBook, I turn my laptop around to take a better look. It turns out the black lid wasn’t from a black MacBook after all.

The lid now has a pulsating logo that reads – “Dell”.

A week ago I was at my not-too-distant relatives’ house for a 25th marriage anniversary party. As always, I crammed as much food on one of those tiny plates you find at expensive parties and sought for a secluded corner where I could hide from the relatives I didn’t know but who assumed I’d known them my entire life. The rooftop was divided into two halves by a low wall. There were a couple of people drinking on one side, but the other side was dark, devoid of guests and reasonably secluded. I chose a corner and started eating when it hit me – two years ago on this same day I was at a party in this same house standing in this same corner of this same roof. That, obviously, brought on a wave of nostalgia and I went off reminiscing. Now, before you continue reading, let me forewarn you of emo shit. A post like this was long overdue, since there have been many big changes in my life recently. I usually try not to write down stuff like this, but going from school to college has been too big a change for me. Anyway, continuing with the story …

Two years ago, in 2006, things were pretty different at this party. For one, I wasn’t alone on the roof. I had with me Shailesh and Irfan, who were staying over because none of them had anything better to do. Even back at school, I was never alone. At any given time, I had at least 2.7 people around me (that’s the average according to my calculations, like it or not). Even though I was as anti-social then as I am today, I was still on good terms with most of my class and (*gasp*) I knew everyone’s names. My jokes were still funny and I was as confident as ever that I’d get into IIT or, failing that, DCE. Even though he had changed schools, I still got to see Yuyutsu a lot. It had been only a few months since I had met Apoorv, and I was already finding him to be a pain in the ass (and he hasn’t gotten any better over time). Exams were approaching, but I was prepared for whatever the school might throw at me. I barely had any troubles at all.

Fast forward to 2007. Same day, same time. I was annoyed by the fact that I had to take so many exams (see this post), but I was pretty confident that even if I failed the exams at school, I’d still perform well in the competitive examinations coming up in April because I’d been ignoring school and concentrating hard on those instead. Shailesh was no longer hanging out with us because he had chosen to study commerce in grades 11 and 12 and, like us, he was (probably) busy with his coursework, which was very different from ours. Irfan had made a sudden switch to humanities from science, but we still hung out (is “hung out” even right?) together. Me and Apoorv had scrapped our plans of going to the United States for higher education, but Chinmay and Utsav were continuing their efforts for getting a nice scholarship. School was torture, and my jokes only moderately funny. I was stressed out because of the exams, but was still hopeful of making it through. Life was horribly depressing, but with the hope of a great future.

2008. Now Apoorv is at DCE, Shailesh is taking an year off to prepare for God-knows-what examination,  Irfan is at National Law School studying (duh) law, Satyam is still at school, Siddhant is at RV College (Bangalore), Yuyutsu and Chinmay are in NTU (Singapore) and most of the other folks I mentioned are all in much better colleges than I am. I barely get to meet anyone at all, and when I do get to meet them it’s always a subset of these people, never everyone. I’d sworn I’d never touch alcohol, but I was out drinking a day before my birthday. I’m stressed out because I’m *definitely* failing the end-semester exams. There is no hope of a better future because my course at college is a pile crap and I’ll have to deal with it for 4 years. I never cared about cash, but now I’d do anything to scrape together some money I could call my own. At college, I’m surrounded by people who are supposedly my friends, but both them and I know that they’ll desert me at my time of need.

I really miss the old times. Missing classes because there was a competition, out-witting (or trying to out-wit) the Chemistry teacher, trying to sneak out of boring assemblies/speeches/functions, getting thrown out of the Physics lab because we’d forgotten to complete our practical file fifth time in a row, getting thrown out of the Physics lab because we’d forgotten to complete our practical file *sixth* time in a row … I could go on. Oh, and I forgot to mention our quest to break all possible school rules without getting caught and the unspoken agreement on never submitting any assignment on time or, if we could help it, never submitting one at all. Strangely enough, I knew I’d miss school when all this was happening. Even in the most depressing of situations, I could feel that things weren’t going to suddenly get all rosy in college.

*sigh* And life moves on …

I just downloaded MindNode, a mind mapping program for the MacOS. Here’s a screenie.

Now, I’ve used tried several mind mapping programs before, including the popular FreeMind, but I’ve never liked any of them much. Mind mapping programs are supposed to help you chalk out your ideas clearly and succinctly using visual cues to draw attention to important points. Unfortunately enough, most mind mapping software I used tried to throw in feature after feature, and forgot that you cannot think clearly, let alone organize your thoughts, if the software has this clunky interface and no way to quickly add/remove/swap/edit the actual nodes in your mind map.

MindNode is not as portable as FreeMind, but it has a simple and natural interface. The free version has very few features, but it doesn’t really matter to me. All I want to do is build mind maps of what I learn at college, and I don’t care if the program I use to do so doesn’t allow me to attach an image of an unconvincingly bright lightbulb to every node I add to my mind map. MindNode outputs simple, elegant and clear mind maps, which is all that matters.

Oh, exporting to FreeMind is supported, so I can take my maps from my Mac to my Ubuntu machine easily. Sweet.

I just discovered this neat video of an Apple shareholder meeting from the year 1984, remarkable because this was the meeting where Steve Jobs first revealed the Macintosh, the first personal computer sporting a GUI (correct me if I’m wrong here).

Link to video : http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ12vNZ5yMY

Jobs doesn’t really explore the Macintosh interface in too much depth here, but even that brief look at the original Mac got me thinking : what’s different? After 24 years of breakneck development in the computing industry, nothing much has changed in terms of UI and the applications we run on our PCs (or Macs).

Sure, we have the web, and more processing power, and hi-res GUIs. But I’m still asking myself : what does my MacBook do right now which the original Mac couldn’t? Okay, let me rephrase that a little. What does my MacBook do right now which the original Mac couldn’t, provided both systems had an equal amount of processing power? What we’re looking at right here is not lack of good tech, but a lack of good ideas.

In the demo, the original Mac seems to have an image editor, a desktop publishing program, a text-to-speech program and a way to generate visuals programatically. It also has a selection of neat fonts. From what I’ve read on the tubes, I suppose it also has a way to play stored audio (MIDI), print stuff and connect to external devices.

My MacBook runs Photoshop, Scribus, Apple’s own text-to-speech program, and generates visuals programatically using a multitude of graphics APIs (Quartz, OpenGL, SDL …). It can play stored audio using iTunes, print stuff and connect to external devices.

People keep reinventing the same old wheel every year. How many office suites have we seen since 1984? How many media players, desktop publishing programs, spreadsheets, CAD tools and image editors? Hell, you see a new web browser almost every 2 months.

Innovation? Innovation can suck my ass.

All right, it’s not really one click, but sharing your files across a network is now easier than ever before. What I did here hasn’t been tested with Windows, but I suppose it should work okay with it as well since I used Samba. I can’t guarantee 100% compatibility with Windows since I didn’t have to edit any config files and didn’t have to drop down to the CLI to do any of the dirty work, which means I’m low on the gory details of what’s going on under the hood. Now let me cut to the chase.

sudo aptitude install samba

That installs Samba on your Ubuntu box. Now go to Nautilus and right click on the folder you want to share. There will be a “Sharing options” menu entry. Just enable sharing and guest access from the dialogue that pops up, and don’t give write permissions to everybody. The shares are showing up on my Mac (10.5). I’d have tested it with WinXP as well, but it’s currently on it’s monthly crash-vacation so I’ll have to wait until I get the time to reinstall.

Note that you’ll have to have root privileges to share anything outside of your home folder, unless you have given rw permissions to your user for accessing the contents of / (which is very stupid of you). Just hit ALT-F2 and type this to run Nautilus in superuser mode :

gksu nautilus

Now you can share anything on your filesystem.

This is why people choose to avoid me and my friends. By our standards, what follows is a relatively sane chatlog.

Me : Do you have cancer?
Kitallis : Yes
Me : Why?
Kitallis : I had sex
Me : With a camel?
Kitallis : Frog.
Me : I was about to make a CamelCase joke. Now you’ve ruined it.
Me : You’re a sick, sick man.
Kitallis : I was about to not joke. Now you’ve ruined the serious part.
Kitallis : Yes, I have Cancer
Me : Ah. What kind of cancer?
Kitallis : Tadman Cancer
Kitallis : When you do it with a frog, a tadpole comes out of your ass
Kitallis : with the head of a man.
Me : Geez. I’ll be a tunkle!
Me : (a tadpole-uncle)
Kitallis : And you’ll buy him a nice barb-tad doll
Me : Or a tad-maid.

PS: Ignore that stolen Scrubs joke. I was having difficulty coming up with something to out-weird Kitallis.

So far I’ve had to share my PC with my little brother. That meant always having to keep a separate partition for Windows XP, keeping antivirus software up to date and performing mundane maintenance tasks I’ve never had to perform on a Linux system. That also meant constantly having to reinstall GRUB manually each time Windows messed up and I have to reinstall the bitch.

Two months back I got myself a MacBook and learnt my way around the Mac OS. It didn’t take long, since the Mac OS is a UNIX under the hood. I set up my system with all the compilers and text editors I needed using MacPorts. I transferred all my personal data from the PC to the Mac and started using it for most of my programming and reading tasks.

Unfortunately, another problem cropped up. I had a wired internet connection, and my router didn’t allow attaching two computers to it via ethernet cables. This made using the web on both the PC and the Mac impossible, and so the MacBook didn’t see much use.

Until now. I finally bought myself a new Wi-Fi router. Now I can use my beloved MacBook as I see fit. No more sharing, no more Windows and wireless pr0n in the bathroom.

Totally 1337.

A few months ago, I had started learning Common Lisp from the freely available Lisp text Practical Common Lisp. As the following posts might have indicated, I gave up the pursuit in favor of learning Ruby instead. Afterwards I mentioned that I was going to learn a functional programming language, any language, so I could become a “better” programmer. Since then I have been trying to dabble in Haskell, Erlang and OCaml. All of them are interesting languages, and all of them provide wildly differing approaches to whatever problems are supposed to be plaguing programmers these days.

But none of them is Lisp.

I’ve been going through the basics of all these languages one by one just to see which one catches my fancy. I couldn’t go ahead with learning OCaml because of lack of books, and I couldn’t stick with Haskell because even the best books on the language devoted the first 3 or 4 chapters to theory and mucking about in the interactive toplevel and didn’t get into real code until chapter 6 or 7. Erlang has a nice book, but I’ve put learning it off for now.

In the meantime, I kept writing programs in the one language I know and love : Python. In particular, I was trying to solve the problems listed at SPOJ. As I got further into solving the algorithmically intensive problems at SPOJ, Python started to feel limiting. This is partly because even though I know Python, I really don’t have much programming experience. Yet, there always seemed to be just one small feature it lacked. Nothing was actually impossible for me to express in Python, but the way of expressing it usually got unintutive and ugly. This, I repeat, might be because of my own ignorance of advanced Python wizardry, but these small hurdles slowed me down nevertheless.

After all this time, I’m back to reading a Lisp book. And I have realized that all the features I found missing from Python are not only present in Lisp, they are also among the preferred way of doing things. I remember thinking about “programs that write programs” back in 11th grade when I was learning C++. Little did I know that there was actually a language that would let me do just that! The concept of “programs that write programs” is realized in Lisp by the use of macros. I don’t know much about them right now, but I have been given a little sample of what’s in store in chapter 3 of Practical Common Lisp, and I like what I see.

Is it that my mind is used to thinking in a certain way that makes Lisp a natural choice for me, or is Lisp just a super-kickass language that anyone with half a brain would instantly fall in love with? I really can’t say, since I haven’t done much Lisp programming. But I’m sure that for me, the future is full of parentheses.

(By the way, it is said that given enough time, any existing mainstream language will slowly become Lisp. The C++ 0x standard proves this right. Also see Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.)

This is just a collection of thoughts. Don’t expect this post to be organized or well written. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT!

I won’t review the movie here, since you can always watch it yourself and judge. The only thing I can say is that even if you’re not remotely interested in computers and don’t know your KDE from your GNOME, you will still enjoy this movie. Pirates of Silicon Valley is not about computers, but about two men (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) who start from nothing and build technology empires that have changed the landscape of technology for ages to come.

Being an open source guy, I was definitely in favour of Apple and Jobs from the beginning. Sure, Apple has contributed nothing much to the OSS community, and has taken a lot from it, but at least Apple is a company which believes in innovation. They believe in elegance, whether aesthetic or technical. Microsoft, on the other hand, will eat your baby if you don’t watch out. In fact, Microsoft has never ever built something that was groundbreaking or innovative. Every single product Microsoft has forced into the market is a either a replica of some other company’s product, or a product they’ve bought out from some small startup. So, Microsot = evil and Apple = good? Bill Gates = unfeeling dictator hell bent on world domination and Steve Jobs = saint aiming for the salvation of the masses? Right?

Wrong.

Steve Jobs has high aspirations, a vision for where Apple is heading. And he is ready to do anything to achieve that vision. This movie shows how ruthless and unfeeling Jobs can be when people don’t do as he says. At the launch of the Apple Macintosh, Jobs actually splits the company into two halves : the Apple Lisa team and the Macintosh team. Both camps literally froth at the mouth as they tear each other apart, and Jobs laughs in the background. The movie shows how Jobs turns Apple into a cult, a religion, with his followers hanging onto every word he says and ready to do whatever he demands of them. I remember there was a guy in the Apple HQ working on the Mac who hadn’t slept for 52 hours. It was sickening to see how he was terrified of Jobs, and followed his every order like a loyal dog.

In another scene, Jobs stands on a platform and throws Frisbees as his “employees” jump about trying to catch them. Like dogs fighting for a morsel of food.

On the other hand, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are just these two guys with a normal office and a normal staff trying to make a mark. Bill Gates is a stereotype nerd, and Ballmer just wants to make some cash so he can go to strip clubs and get laid. Even as Jobs goes around screaming at his employees and making groundbreaking, innovative “art”, Gates is thinking. When the Apple Lisa comes out, Gates is thinking. Even when Apple becomes a multi-million dollar corporation, Gates is deep in thought. Jobs might be a charismatic visionary, but he is no match for the calculative thinking machine that is Bill Gates. Sure, Microsoft was late to the game (as they always are), but they had something that Apple never had, and will never have : certainty that whatever they are going to do will guarantee success.

Bill Gates convinces IBM that they need his operating system for their personal computer. Bill Gates convinces Jobs that Windows is not a copy of the Mac and that Apple and Microsoft are a big, happy family. Jobs’ charisma loses to Gates’ psychological attacks (“… you have to make them need you …”).

A geeky, nerdy guy with thick glasses and a squeaky voice managed to outperform a charismatic artist, innovator and visionary, and became the world’s richest man. Apple has put out innovation after innovation, yet they have not managed to beat Microsoft yet, even though they clearly had the lead in the beginning. Steve Jobs? Visionary? I don’t think so.

It’s interesting to note that even though Apple has a “culture”, Microsoft employees are still much better off than Apple employees. Microsoft treats their employees like people, while to Apple they are simply tools, a means to an end Steve Jobs has envisioned for Apple. It is also interesting to note that Microsoft is a much more open company than Apple.

No matter what innovations Apple comes up with, Microsoft will develop and inferior copy and still be much more successful than Apple. The last I noticed, Microsoft was the biggest IT company, not Apple.