November 11, 2007
Welcome to The Shire
Bilbo Baggins lived here once.
I mean seriously, that place looks beautiful. Some pictures of the house while he was building it.
Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Random | Comments (10)
November 11, 2007
Inferiority Complexes
The way it seems today, everybody has an inferiority complex, and for reasons that are very often all their own. I’ve encountered enough of these people often enough to believe that India is a country full of belief in its own inferiority. There are those who believe in their own inherent
Language inferiors:
I dislike this bit very much. My Tamil is abysmal, really. It’s funnily accented, I frequently put the wrong word in the wrong place and often instead of a word coming out there just comes out a garbled mess of noises, but fortunately I can read, write and communicate just barely enough that I wouldn’t be completely lost in a purely Tamil-speaking neighbourhood. Now here’s the bit, a lot of native Tamil speakers find the way I speak hilarious (I do too) and make no attempt to hide it. The problem comes when it goes the other way. I can’t laugh at a person’s bad English (however bad it is, even if it is super hilarious) without that person being offended, and feeling bad about it. What goes around doesn’t seem to come around. Strange. It sucks to have people going all sad because they can’t speak English properly though, so you better not laugh.
Complexion inferiors:
Of all the people I have met who have trouble with dark skinned people, not one person has been fair skinned. You can see the whole affair in bright colours in a newspaper, in
I have to admit, though, it works in my favour. All the dark skinned people who can’t speak English properly give me more respect than I deserve. I’m not complaining, it’s your call.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I know about caste oppression and stuff like that. I’m particularly talking about reasonably well off people.
Posted by roshan.george under Madras, Musings | Comments (16)
November 7, 2007
Checking if your laptop hard drive is being killed - Fujitsu MHW1200BH
Some laptop hard drives have very aggressive power saving measures programmed into them. As a result, Windows ignores these settings and overwrites it with its own. On Ubuntu though, when you’re in Laptop Mode, the default settings are used unless you actually set it to not park the drive heads, and then there’s the possibility you’ll get a couple of bad sectors if you drop your laptop. Of course, if you’re capable of being careful of your things then you don’t have to worry about dropping your laptop. If your hard-drive is S.M.A.R.T capable then you can use monitoring tools to get the data you need, stored in Load_Cycle_Count. First you have to install smartmontools:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools or select it from Synaptic using the administrator.
Now, check if you have SMART enabled.
sudo smartctl -d ata -i /dev/sda
The output will tell you quite clearly if you have SMART enabled and the model of your drive. Mine, for instance, is:
smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: FUJITSU MHW2100BH
Serial Number: NZ1CT732784D
Firmware Version: 8918
User Capacity: 100,030,242,816 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 4a
Local Time is: Wed Nov 7 20:35:38 2007 IST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
If support is Available, but not Enabled, you may have to wade into your BIOS to change things.
Anyway, then you check your drive health. You can grep for 193 to get Load_Cycle_Count
sudo smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sda
This will give you a list of stuff like this.
Most drive manufacturers say that their drives can handle 600,000 cycles. My Fujitsu MHW2100BH is one of those drives. Considering I’ve had this laptop for atleast 4 months (I can’t remember how long exactly) , 19172 load cycles means I have (600,000 / 19172) × 4 months of stable use left, that’s around 10 years. Works for me :)
And just to see how fast this is increasing, I have a loop running on a terminal that checks the value every 5 minutes (This dude’s idea) and for the past hour it hasn’t changed. That’s made me rather happy. Here’s the loop I use:
while(true); do smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sda | grep 193 >> smart.log; sleep 300; done Naturally, you have to be root. I think the sudo will time out after 15 minutes anyway, that’s why I didn’t use it.
Related bug report.
Prominent page on this topic.
Posted by roshan.george under Tech, Ubuntu | Comments (2)
November 7, 2007
Buncha links - November 07 07
- Damnatus cancelled:They took so much trouble over it, but the copyright system in Germany says that they can’t sign their rights to the company and also that if the company allows them to show the movie they lose power over their copyright, or something like that.
- Retarded laws: Yeah, you’ve read a bunch of retarded laws. These are as amusing as any others you’ve read.
- A DIY CPU [/.] :Pretty impressive. Though the first few comments are hackneyed jokes, the ones following are good. Also, the moderation on some of those comments is pretty funny by itself.
- Mechanical Turk:No FF characters here, the site is touted as ‘Artificial Artifical Intelligence’, and is a decent idea if it weren’t for those few tasks that make it look like another PayPerPost thing. Of course they did look through hundreds of pictures searching for Steve Fossett. I can just imagine a SETI@Turk.
- The DARPA Urban Challenge:Robotic SUVs racing. ‘Nuff said.
And since no post should be imageless:
. I forget where I saw that.
Extra crap:
Interesting /. comment.
Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Random | Comments (2)
November 4, 2007
Online quizzes
I like online quizzes, they reinforce your inflated opinion of yourself :) It was Marc’s smart-ass idea to start with. Well, here are my results, like:
. I’ve got to admit I have no clue who started Myspace. Heck, I can’t even visit it, I seem to be in a banned ip range :D
-
. Yeah, I got confused somewhere. Embarrassing. But I swear occurrence is occurrence and not occurence or whatever. I think
- 68% Geek. This was rigged, I use a Unix-like system by default, and I also broke a laptop trying to fix something else. I’ll try fixing the broke part again in a couple of days. :D
- 31%. No weapons, no nothing, but I swear the power-drill will help. That and, apparently sticking to a leader helps :) I have to admit, you’re tempted to say you wouldn’t drive across town to your loved ones. I think I would, but I answered yes anyway and also swore to shoot them right in the forehead if they turn into a zombie. Nah, can’t do that either. So revised down from 41% to 31%.
. Okay, this is real sad. Eight Grade Science?! I’m almost ashamed to show this. So it isn’t sedimentary rock, fine.
My favourites are the IQ tests which give you super high scores, and also the other ones that don’t even ask for your age. Those are crazy. I must find those sometime, sure cure for despondency.
Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Random | Comments (7)
November 2, 2007
Kontroll - A surreal subterranean story
It’s weird, it really is. The whole movie is set underground, in the stations and tunnels of the Budapest subway, with the lead characters being the ticket collectors. It’s a story about ticket collectors, really. The people in the movie are kind of weird, they treat the ticket examiners like scum, and just push them away on their way out of the station. Sometimes they fight the ticket collectors and win, and sometimes they make fun of them and run away, and other times they just ignore the poor fellows. It looks like a sad life, what a job!
There’s drunks, suits, pimps, mischievous travellers - oh, and there’s also women in pinkish bear costumes who does acts of kindness. The main characters are Bulczú’s team, and each member of that team has some idiosyncrasy or the other. The funniest of the whole lot is the incredibly dense Tibi. The first half of the movie is mostly descriptive, but the real action starts after a while and then the movie starts to center around Bulczú and what he does underground (he lives there, never going up).
It’s hilarious and disturbing, this movie, and the ending is rather … confusing. But if you put your mind to it you can probably think up a plausible explanation. Very nice. Very neat.
Some screencaps:
1. Cut-throat competition? Check.
2. The inevitable crowd
Posted by roshan.george under Art, Movies | Comments (2)
November 1, 2007
A funny little photo - Bhagavad Ajjukam
Some time ago we did a play at the Chinmaya Heritage Centre, Chetpet, for the Dean Foundation. It was for World Hospice and Palliative Care. There were a bunch of other colleges who did some other stuff too, though we managed to watch only one of them go at it, the WCC girls with their A cappella band which was pretty good. It was fun, though a little confusing. I don’t think the play was meant to be done under lights, with mics and all. Not too bad, though it could have been nicer with more than the 9 days we had. The funniest part was Pipe’s ramblings in Sanskrit whenever he forgot his lines, plain hilarious. Aadi and Varma were hilarious too, the little kids loved Aadi’s Yama’s Messenger act! Anyway, yeah, I could go on about everyone but what made me think of this was that today Sundar (our mridangam dude, totally expert, him and Arundhathi, go see their shows sometime), yeah so Sundar, he tells me that we showed on some local Tamil channel. Yay! If I’d known we were on TV, I would have had “HI MOM!” painted on my chest. Nah, I wouldn’t have, but I would’ve liked to. Here’s a little photo of the show which I managed to get out of the Indian Express (October 10, City Express):
So anyway, after our show, this dude Cary was picking out the winners for the raffle with us MCC crowd making a ruckus in the corner over every win. I nearly managed to fool everyone into thinking I was a girl named Amrita and after accepting my prize and giving my acceptance speech I was ready to go back to my seat but the real Amrita’s friends landed up and pinched my rightful prize. Ah well, next time, next time…
Oh and they gave us surplus women’s talcum powder, those nice folks. I liked the abundance of ‘refreshments’ better though. Very hospitable folks. Real hospitable folks.
Posted by roshan.george under Art, Madras, Musings | Comments (29)
November 1, 2007
The Day The Music Died
Sometimes I get in that mood. You know, where you go dig up the old tape cassettes of Rainbow, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, and just for the heck of it, Don McLean. There’s so much brilliance in those years, the riffs tug at you and the wailing solos scream at your soul. Ah, did the Golden Age of Rock pass without anyone noticing?
Posted by roshan.george under Musings, Random | Comments (28)