Running on

Its been quite some time since I've updated this page. A lot has changed since the last post I made. The last entry was posted from the terrace of my lovely Chennai home. Quite a lot things have changed(quite fast) since then. I've moved a couple of timezones to the east and life is going pretty fine. I've always wanted to write detailed entries of what I'm up-to( you know....with life). But it turns out I'm a lousy(lazy too) writer. There is something that I realized during my feeble attempts to abstract my state of existence into a single blog post. There is always a song that does the job far better than I could have ever done. So here goes!!. The track is "Running on empty" by "Jackson Browne". Replace the 65 in the song with 2005 and 69 with 2009 and it fits ;)

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels

Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields

In sixty-five I was seventeen and running up one-on-one

I don't know where I'm running now, I'm just running on

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive

Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive

In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own

I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Everyone I know, everywhere I go

People need some reason to believe

I don't know about anyone but me

If it takes all night, that'll be all right

If I can get you to smile before I leave

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels

I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels

I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through

Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Honey you really tempt me

You know the way you look so kind

I'd love to stick around but I'm running behind

You know I don't even know what I'm hoping to find

Running into the sun but I'm running behind

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 :)

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.

Last post of this year

Listening to: Stan Bush - On my own
State of mind: Solitude, general desperation coupled with frustration

• Venjaramood suraj rox. Haven't laughed that hard in ages.
• I only own my mind. But why on earth am I not in control of the only thing thats truly mine?
• Psychology is something thats meant to drive you psycho ;)
• Goodbye 2007. You shall rest as a bits and pieces of hypertext in these pages.
  

Memory snapshot

Listening to: Tiamat - Brighter than the sun
General mood: Reflective
No. of current conversations : 1
Comments

• The internet brought people close to each other, but in some level it took people farther away from themselves.(this is just my opinion)
• December nights are damn cold.
  

High hopes......

Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river

Forever and ever..............................

2k7 log file

• Went through a certain period of time in which i successfully wrote and passed 4 university exams in 3 days, a period i affectionately labeled 'Black week'. I still consider this to be one of my greatest academic achievements after joining engineering.

• Won the first(and possibly the last) ever programming contest i attended. All i had to do was write a c++ program to crack a Caesar Cipher. Put in the money i won into procuring my first mobile, a Motorola W220.
• Went for my second Ragam and thankfully we managed to procure a 3rd for eastern orchestra. But rahul dude, surely missed ur amazing vox :D
• Watched most of my friends getting placed. It wasnt much fun sitting at home for about 4 months and regretting about those supplies as each job goes whizzing past your ear.
• Attended my first interview successfully and finally got placed. A BIG thank you to lotsa ppl. Ain't mentioning names, coz they'll know anyway.
• Wandered trivandrum city for about 2-3 weeks trying to get sponsorship money for western orchestra in crossroads. Finally met target after loooots of marikkals.
• I'd also like to thank the entity which was responsible for the beautiful rain that happened while western orchestra was going on from the bottom of my heart.
  
• Went to lotsa places this year. Bonacaud, peppara, chowara, meenmutty and all. Was nice.
• Got through my seminar kinda successfully. Feedback tells me i was good at confusing than convincing..anyways :D
• The "main project" happened and i consider this among the most 'educating' times of my life.
• It made me realize how hard it is for certain people to accept their mistakes.
• I was also introduced to a certain race of people who are well versed in the art form where they accept their mistakes ONLY to you and then quite successfully manage to turn tables onto you in front of others behind your back. FYI that hurts more than good old fashioned classic backstabbing.
  
• The no. of faces i have to smile at also took a hit during this year due to above mentioned instances.
  
• First impressions aren't always true.(this statement holds both ways)
  
• Managed to revive my long lost hobby of stargazing.
• Bought a new mobile for "project purposes". With that my dream of owning an mp3 player was also realized.
  
• Flipped in and out of many belief systems(religiously i.e).
  
• The good side of the above point was that i got to read a lot(online i.e) about various aspects of religion,god blah blah.
• Discovered a new passion in photography.
• Supplies again :D
• Two ubuntu releases in this year and it just keeps getting better and better. Managed to convert many people to linux.
• Yanni is simply awwsum!
• Cut up vegetables for the first time in my life. Thanx to kenny's mom :D
  
• Got hooked to the old tv series Cosmos.
• I worship Carl Sagan.
• Attended the engagement of a classmate.

Core dump

"You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go"

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

"Sing with me
Sing for the year
Sing for the laughter
sing for the tear
Sing it with me
Just for today
Maybe tomorrow,The good Lord will take you away..."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah ~x(

American Pie: beta house is just porn with comedy. But who the hell cares anyway. Who on earth reads this? Why on earth am i still typing. Just stop!. I said STOOOOOPP