No ceiling

Comes the morning
When I can feel
That there's nothing left to be concealed
Moving on a scene surreal
No, my heart will never
Will never be far from here

Sure as I am breathing
Sure as I'm sad
I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh
I leave here believing more than I had
And there's a reason I'll be
A reason I'll be back

~ No ceiling by Eddie Vedder from Into the Wild OST

Lost in the wild

I've always had a thing for big open spaces. And since now my means to connect to the world wide web is wire free for the most part, I go online from my terrace. I'm writing this blogpost sitting in the dark, under the stars. The pic above was taken using my laptop's webcam right around sunset. I look a tad happy in that pic(that is something considering the fact that i make a consious effort of to not smile for the camera)... might be the open spaces thing. I'm home alone for half a week. When you are caught in a scenario like that you keep thinking more about yourself and there are fewer distractions to your thought process. I wonder thats why whether all these sanyasis take a hike into the wilderness alone to fulfill their spiritual journeys. Talking about spiritual matters, sitting on a terrace watching the stars is probably the only spiritual thing that I can connect to. There are no gods to pray to, no rituals to do, no stuff to eat, you are just there in that moment. I look around me and I notice one thing, Chennai is very different from trivandrum in the fact that it has a busier airspace. Theres atleast one airplane in the horizon in any minute. But I cant hear them, so they just seem to blend into the landscape. They can be a distraction though, especially when your looking out for stars its like, "Hey what is that kinda bright star near the eastern horizon...must be a planet...it must be saturn...holy shit its moving..what if its a UFO...nah its just a plane". Sometime in the future I intend to take a "Into the Wild" like trip(only I plan to return alive). There is something about going away to far off places alone. I dont know why I'm attracted to the idea, maybe its escapism. Only one way to find out though ;) I just hope I have the courage to decide to do what is necessary, since I've never been much of a "courageous person"

Talking batteries

This post comes out of my necessity to preserve the battery life of my shiny new lenovo. I've heard that the key to preserving battery backup is to make sure you use your battery as much as you can and depend on AC power just to charge your battery. Since i don't run a full-fledged DE like GNOME or KDE there are no notification systems I could leverage to monitor my battery status.

Up until now I had to manually run "acpi" once in a while to check my battery status and take necessary action, and this process was a real pain in the ass especially when you are watching a movie and don't want to be disturbed. Thats why i decided to cough up a little script that would keep monitoring my battery status and "tell me"(literally) when either battery is low or battery has been fully charged.

Prerequisites

• Festival text to speech system: Festival can read out text from stdout and hence is really handy. In Ubuntu/Debian-like systems you can run the following command to install festival.

sudo apt-get install festival

• A small problem with the default installation of festival is that festival by default uses the outdated /dev/dsp to access your sound hardware. Hence festival cant say anything if you are using another application that has sound like mplayer for instance. To fix this you need to get festival to use ALSA. To do that run the following command from terminal.

printf ";use ALSA\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command \"aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r \$SR \$FILE\")\n" > ~/.festivalrc

Now download the following file and extract its content(battmon.sh) into your home directory

http://sites.google.com/site/r4jivn4ir/Home/battmon.tar.gz

Make the script executable by running

chmod +x battmon.sh

Now you need to setup this script to run during login. To accomplish that add the following line to the end of the file .xprofile which is present in your home directory. If such a file is not present create it.

./battmoh.sh &

From the next time you login, this script will keep checking your battery status and "tell you" whether you need to charge your battery or unplug your charger. Do test and let me know if it works :-)

I know it's not alright

I don't want to be the one
The battles always choose
'Cause inside I realize
That I'm the one confused
I don't know what's worth fighting for
Or why I have to scream
I don't know why I instigate
And say what I don't mean
I don't know how I got this way
I know it's not alright
So I'm breaking the habit
I'm breaking the habit
Tonight

The will to will

This is one of them routine backup routines where i dump data from my head into google servers ;) A couple of days back during a "hectic" combined study session at a friend's place we ended up discussing heaven and hell. His point was that during the final "judgment" we are judged on the basis of our "thoughts" and not on our actions. To put that quite simply, it doesn't matter if you are buddha to the rest of the world, a couple of dirty thoughts and your gone. I'd like to play the "unfair" card here. On that spot I didn't argue with his point. But later that day I came across a quote that spawned the thought process which resulted in this blog entry.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. - Arthur Schopenhauer

This quote was listed by Albert Einstein as one of the greatest inspirations in his life. I'd like to approach the whole heaven and hell thingy around this quote. I don't think we have any voluntary control over the exact nature of various thoughts that arise inside our head. What we CAN do is choose whether or not to act on a thought. For eg: If a person gets chucked out of the class for no apparent reason his immediate reaction(inside his head) would be to smack the teacher. But as long as he doesnt act on that thought I think hes the same good person he was before that particular thought spawned. Expand these examples to most of the so called "bad thoughts" and I believe a person can still be the same old good guy. Theres a concept in Zen buddhism which says that the mind is like a river. Rocks may appear in the path of the river and there is nothing the river can do to "avoid" the rock "being there". What the river can do is to acknowledge the rock and flow around it. The rock here is the "bad" thought. I think the actual reason behind the "concept" of heaven and hell now misses the point. It has made people more worried about the consequences of their actions than the act itself.

To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction - Bhagavad Gita

KDE 4.0

When it looked like today would be as boring as ever i decided to go ahead and give KDE 4.0 a try. Googled up and found that KDE 4.0 repos where there for Kubuntu Gutsy and that I could try it out without affecting my perfectly configured KDE 3.5 setup. It was just an 80MB download. I guess its 'coz the KDE 4 version of lots of apps is a work in progress. I logged in to be greeted by the nice and shiny KDE 4 splash screen. Ran into some minor problems when junk apps like kiba dock and avant window navigator started to run at KDE 4 startup. Uninstalling them removed the problem. I'll classify my observations into two categories :D

What I liked in KDE 4.0

• Plasma and Oxygen are truly awwsum. The visual appeal is real nice. Check the above screenshot.
• As someone said somewhere, turning each desktop icon into a widget/plasmoid and enabling features like rotate and all gives the desktop an "organic"/"real life" feel.
• If youve used Microsoft Windows Vista, no matter how cluttered and irritating the OS was, it did sport a very polished and shiny look. KDE 4 is has lived upto that level.
• KDE 4 version of dolphin is faster than its KDE 3.5 backport.
• I liked the new kicker menu. Sports a more organized appearance and finaly doesnt remind me of the windows start button :D
• Truly awwsum set of wallpapers :D :D
  

What I'm skeptical about in KDE 4.0

• Turning each icon into a widget took off the useful right click contextual menu of each icon. Mayb a solution will arise for this in a subsequent version.
• Most KDE 4 apps are a work in progress. I tried out Amarok2. I couldn't get it to scan my music collection. A menu option is there, but nothing happens when i click it. Thankfully amarok and every other KDE3.5 app works just fine in KDE 4.0. So nothings lost :D
• KDE 3.5 used to apply Qt styles to Gtk apps(firefox for eg). That doesnt happen in KDE 4.0. Gtk apps look horribly out of sorts when compared to the new polished KDE apps.
• Even though Kwin(the KDE window manager) now provides compositing support with some GUI effects it is still light years behind the likes of compiz(In terms of features, performace and customizability)

To sum it all up, KDE 4.0.3 has enough and more to keep me excited till 4.1 or 4.2 gets released. +1 for the KDE project :)

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