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 :)

ഞാനാരാ..

Controlling your Linux PC with your presence

Well the title may be a "bit" misleading. Its literally true as long as you have a bluetooth enabled mobile phone with you. I got the idea of controlling the pc depending on the presence of a Bluetooth enabled phone from KBlueMon, a KDE app that locks the screen if a specified device disappears. It didnt work as well as I would have liked and i wanted the app to do a little bit more. So i decided to try my hand in writing a small no-GUI tool using the BlueZ GNU/Linux Bluetooth stack, that would pause amarok when I(my phone) left the area and would start playback again when I'm around.

Prerequisites:

• A Bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Bluetooth needs to be turned on but it need'nt be discoverable once you know your phones unique bluetooth id.
• Standard issue bluetooth dongle hooked up to your pc
• Any recent GNU/Linux distro(2.6* kernel). I use Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
• bluez-utils and libbluetooth-dev installed

I tried many methods for checking whether a device with known bluetooth id is present. The standard hcitool query method was too slow for my purpose. Hence i decided to use a small function provided by the Bluez C development headers. The hci_read_remote_name function is a reverse DNS of sorts. It queries and returns the human readable name of a bluetooth device given its bluetooth address. The bluetooth address is set in the code(too lazy:D). To find out your phones bluetooth id, make it discoverable and run "hcitool scan" from terminal. Rest of the explanation is there in the code. Compile it using the option -lbluetooth

Eg: $g++ -o sense.bin sense.cpp -lbluetooth

To Do: Integrate into system tray and a GUI with many more functions maybe.

Have been running the program for some hours in my pc now. Every time i leave the area with my phone playback stops and when I'm back, playback resumes(WWE style >:) ). Do try this one out if you can and lemme know how it goes :)


Update: Bluetooth id of device to be tracked is now specified as a command line argument.

./bluesense.bin 00:17:E3:A3:59:CB

Also now it performs an extra check if device not found just to ensure the absence of the device before taking any action. This was needed as sometimes the phone takes sometime to respond to successive queries and hence may end up not responding to some queries.

Download code from http://rapidshare.com/files/98519247/bluesense0.2.cpp.html

Live for nothing, or die for something.....Your call

I've been a HUGE fan of Rambo ever since school. The fourth rambo film turned me from a rambo fan to a rambo fanatic. Heres something i found when I was googling about rambo and sly stallone in general. These are supposedly sly's 10 tips for life. Ponder on.

10. Believe it! Truly, it can be done and it will.

9. Every day -- every few hours -- see your vision materializing.

8. Don't discuss your dreams. Pursue them!

7. If other people can steal your idea, most likely they will.

6. Don't be afraid of embarrassment while pursuing your goal. It's all part of being committed.

5. Being naïve in business and in understanding human nature is a recipe for disaster.

4. Study people's success stories hard. Study their failures even harder.

3. Enthusiasm is like a wonderful disease -- keep spreading it until everyone is infected.

2. Only choose a goal that -- if you had to -- you'd gladly pursue for free. In order to achieve success, you've got to follow your passion.

1. Most important: If it's not broken, break it. That's how new discoveries are made. That's why everything that changes life is called a breakthrough.

Contemplate

Carl Sagan: What would you, as a Buddhist, do if a discovery in science conflicted with a Buddhist doctrine?

The Dalai Lama: Even Buddha was said to question his teachings. Buddhists rely on doctrine as "findings" rather than as "scripture." If through thorough investigation things become clear, only then is it time to accept and believe.

War.... War never changes

That line in the title is the opening dialog of one of the greatest games I've ever played, Fallout(and its sequel Fallout 2). I played that game in my old pc, a Pentium 133MHz CPU with about 16 megabytes of main memory. So i need not elaborate about the graphical quality of the game as compared to current standards. But the game was simply an overwhelming experience. It was based on a post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear war had seemingly destroyed everything.I used to be the kind of person who believed in the early to bed principle while i was at school. And the first time i broke the 10'o clock barrier willingly was for this game. That wasnt the only new thing that game held for me. It made me fall in love with this incredible genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Ever since the eerie experience that Fallout was, I've loved every piece of post-apo fiction ive come across. There are 2 things that attract me to the concept of an apocalypse. First and foremost its awesome. In the sense its like someone hit a reset button on the entire 'system'. Everything you know about takes a whole different course of existence. Second its the idea of being on your own, no one to dictate you, no one to give advices,.. NO ONE.
The line in the title is very relevant to our present lives. It has come to some never ending relentless war. A never ending war against evaluation systems designed to test how good you are compared to your peers. Be it exams, jobs, training etc etc. This is why i crave for an apocalypse. Because then you are left with just one goal....to survive. Thats why I've pondered on the idea of a personal apocalypse. An apocalypse for the personality that is YOU or ME. An self triggered event which involves re-evaluating everything you have or you thought you had. If this post sounds nihilistic to you, I don't care :)

The obsession

Is something that resembles the human consciousness in a very superficial and maybe primitive way, worth dedicating a lifetime? When i keep hitting the F5 button 10 times within 20 mins on one single page, is it plain addiction or is it the dire desperation to just listen to what someone has to say one some topic under the sun? The malayalam phrase "akkare pacha" has a whole new meaning to me. When I'm talking to someone, i just wanna storm out and be alone. When I'm alone its back to the key F5. To quote Mr. Bing "One of life's greeeaat unanswerable questions!!"

Inspire

Day 7671

My name is Rajiv Nair. I'm a survivor living in what was once called 'God's own country'. I'm broadcasting on all blogger frequencies. Everyday I'll be at my keyboard thinking about typing out stuff like this. I can provide you with my twisted insights on everythings thats going around me. If there's anybody out there..............anybody......... please. You are not alone.