Prove that real but not virtual

One heck of an exam day.

chanux — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:11:40 +0000

It was another exam in Sam’s school for screwed up youngsters ;) . I was on time and was pretty much ready for it. Exam started when the longer arm of the clock rest on 12. I started answering like any other sane guy would.

Started from the second question and I’ve finished it in 20 -25 minutes. Then I took the next on. It was only 40 or 45 minutes passed when I finish that. Then came some question that needed more attention so I just kept doing them.

Another one down. and at this point I’ve lost track of time. And I can’t clearly remeber how many questions I’ve finished at the time but It should be four. Now that I’ve lost track of time, the only option was to check how much time left. looked at the clock.

JUST FORTY MINUTES?!?! HOLY B+ TREES.

:’( Just forty minutes left and I have two full questions to finish, *including* the question I’m quite challenged by. OK now I’m done. But there’s no way out. I can at least try to make it a wee bit better.

I didn’t panic. Since I knew it’s not gonna do more harm than good if I did. So I did the question number 6. Finished it without much pain and looked at the clock, Just to find out that I’ve got only twenty minutes to face the question number ONE. The hardest one for me as I believed.

I started with part ii of Question one finished without neither big problems nor confidence. Took part iii. My brain is not happy to process at the speed I want. So many hiccups. But I never felt upset or feared (It’s really difficult generate such feelings in a careless bastards mind). Though I wasn’t so confident I finished part iii without a feeling like “I’m gonna get 0 marks for this :(“.

Here comes the question 1 part i. I was somewhat nervous. But dude ma’m didn’t say anything that did sound like the conclusion. I have no clear memory what I did at the time but I remember I came up with a satisfactory answer just by 4.00 O’clock.

But why the hell everyone is still busy. Why ma’m is still silent?. 10 minutes after I was checking this and that. And started to curse the wall clock thinking it shows me the wrong time. There were few minutes that I tried so hard to understand what’s going on. But no clue. Cursed myself for only having the phone to check time (which is switched off right now). Checked the answers again. No new ideas coming. Corrected few mistakes found here and there. Still no idea what’s going on. One moment I thought this should be a dream or an illusion or something I just can’t understand. Another round of checking.

“You have only 30 minutes left”. That’s ma’m. And match over (for me).

Last two papers were on 1.00PM-4.00PM slot. So all this time, I was _believing_ it’s the same game going on today. But it was 2.00PM-5.00PM this time. I thanked whoever deserves for todays paper not being anything like the Software Engineering paper (So much work for so little time). If it was, I don’t think I’d be writing this ;) .

So I have 30 minutes. I can’t go out now, that’s the rule. Found a question that I’ve missed which had 3 marks allocated. Hammered it like Thor. Checked the rest again but nothing new comes in mind. Brain was like totally blocked or maybe it was relaxing.

Came out and told friends. No one believed at first. Some time wasting at cafeteria. Laughter!

It wasn’t all that bad. And again thanks whoever deserves for the paper not being anything even remotely like Software Engineering paper.

Update: The reason why I’m here to sit this exam.

Facelift to my blog.

chanux — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:58:02 +0000

Oh dammit I’m growing old. I removed all the fancy things from my blog. Even the smiley images. Now I start to act like a matured bastard. Oh damn this is not cool ;).

On the other hand I’m happy that I manage to grow up. Somehow.

Cutting the crap, here are some more details about the topic.

The need to reduce extra fat and sugar in my blog was in my todo list for a long time now. But there’s no ideal time other than the exam days :P. So I took time for the long awaited change. I loved my old theme garland. I still do. But I equally love dark themes. Black is new green you know?. And a change is always good. If you are not sure, ask Obama.

It was not really difficult to find a black theme out of the 11 dark themes wordpress has :P. Seriously ONLY ELEVEN dark themes?. That’s not acceptable. Anyway I chose the current theme ChaosTheory because it was the best suiting to my taste, even though it eats up left hand side with post info. I wish the text was on left side. Then it would be easy to read. But anyway, “contentment is bliss”. A wise man once said.

I have added carefully picked items to the bottom of the site. Hope it will help someone who is interested in my blog and well… myself ;). Earlier I was forcing those stuff + many other crap on reader. But that’s not the way I like it anymore. I want to kiss. Oh hold.. hold on a second… I mean Keep It Simple, Stupid. More readers, more pageviews, more clicks are in the vocabulary of money whores anyway.

By the way I want you to know why I say “You should follow me on Twitter” somewhere in the bottom. No I’m not a twitter follower whore either :) .

OK you are done reading this post! Maybe you’d like to check my Tumblelog, right now.

The HeartBroken.

chanux — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:19:04 +0000

I know exactly how it feels when you break your heart. Actually some one else does that for you :). Then you start to feel broken. Start to feel lonely. Start to feel left behind. You want to see the end of the world, soon. Just to get away from the pain. But if you are suffering a broken love or one you just can’t get on with, things just get worse.

You want some one to listen. And you want that someone to react the way you think is right. This is really bad but still really normal. When you hear something not very sweet in your ears from the listener you just avoid her. Simply because you believe she doesn’t understand you. It’s normal that you don’t understand that you are the one who is weak in mind, for the moment.

If the listener keep telling those not so sweet things again and again you start to hate her. ’cause she is shattering your dream world. You just see the happiness surrounding the feeling, not the great pain burning inside. You simply want to suffer it. And there is almost no one who can help some one who enjoys the pain.

You start to live on assumptions. You lose the world around you without knowing. You never realize that there’s a day that all these things end up ’cause all these are just an illusion of nature. And you keep running away from everything else you loved and loved you in return.

Fortunately there is a solution. It’s so simple that you don’t understand. ’cause you think way too hard. And maybe you simply don’t want an answer. You enjoy the pain. But just think simple and tender. And just embrace what you love and still loves you back. You know what you enjoyed before. Just throw yourself in to them. Drown yourself in them.

You still have the scars of the pain. It’s alright. But at least now you don’t burn in that ugly hell. Instead you enjoy life. And believe me, those scars are not there to stay. They go away when you find something better. And you are finding something better. For sure. It’s all relative.

Just listen and think, simple and mild.

NOTE: This is not based on my personal experiences. At least not anything recent. But there are plenty of this kind happening around me. Just wanted to break writers block. And I’ve been tired of writing lot’s of semi-colon ended stuff.

About Image: I love this image. Using on this blog for the second time. Click image to go to deviantart page.

Window focus event for shell scripts.

chanux — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:59:10 +0000

Hacking is always fun. That’s why I always lose focus on everything one interesting hack. That’s why I spent whole last night trying to figure out how to mimic Window focus event in a shell script. Though this is completely new to me, you maybe very much comfortable with implementing it :) . If so please let me know in comments.

Anyway here is my story.

I found this nice command line IM client called centerIM (Thanx @chathuraw for info). Once I got it set up I was just scanning on it’s documentation page & came across this interesting part “External actions & auto-responses“. I wrote a script right away for GUI notifications, inspired by notify.pl script for irssi. Here is the script if you are interested.

Since the load of IM messages was very high at a time & It was useless when the terminal window with centerIM was already focused (which means I’m chatting on centerIM) I was thinking of getting notifications only when centerIM window is not in focus. Few Google searches lead me to very limited resources & I chose xwininfo & xdpyinfo commands for my work.

Workaround: I’m using gnome for now & so gnome-terminal as my terminal emulator. I had to set edit > profilepreferences > Title & command option to keep initial title, in order to have “Terminal” as the terminal window name all the time.

And ran xininfo to get following output.

chanux@nim:~$ xwininfo -name Terminal

xwininfo: Window id: 0x3800003 "Terminal"

 Absolute upper-left X:  0
 Absolute upper-left Y:  52
 Relative upper-left X:  0
 Relative upper-left Y:  27
 Width: 1280
 Height: 691
 Depth: 24
 Visual Class: TrueColor
 Border width: 0
 Class: InputOutput
 Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
 Bit Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
 Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
 Backing Store State: NotUseful
 Save Under State: no
 Map State: IsViewable
 Override Redirect State: no
 Corners:  +0+52  -0+52  -0-25  +0-25
 -geometry 156x37+0+25

This can be used to get the window id of the windw which runs the script.

Then I can find the focused window at the moment as following.

chanux@nim:~$ xdpyinfo |grep focus
focus:  window 0x3800004, revert to Parent

I fetched the window IDs with a little bit more work.

Anyway the problem I had is that, I get 0×3800003 (at this example) or likewise for the Terminal window id & even when the Terminal id is focused I get 0×3800004 as the focused window id. Yes I know with some more work I can manage to handle that & come to a point that I can compare those window Ids to check for the focused window. But I reall like to know why that difference come up. Anyone have an explanantion? Or anyone like to mess with this?

Following is the way I fetched window ids from above outputs

chanux@nim:~$ xwininfo -name "Terminal" | grep xwininfo | cut -d " " -f 4
0x3800003
chanux@nim:~$ xdpyinfo | grep focus | cut -d " " -f 4 | sed s/,//
0x3800004

Join me in MJ ass kissers club.

chanux — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:11:42 +0000

OK, There’s one now. wait.. wait… it was not me. That sage girl defined the club. First of all let’s see who are already in.

Update: Here is a comprehensive list of blog posts on MJ’s death on achcharu.org. (thanx drac for the link) Most of the writers should include the club. Now I really love to be in this club :P .

Dropped in happily:

Doesn’t matter if you are black or white. | Bumble for PM

So this is all I found on a kottu search (query:MJ Michael). If I’ve missed any of you please let me know. And if you think you don’t match the club since you are not upset of MJ’s death, ping me I’ll remove you from the list.

11 posts (edit : at the beginning it was), written by people who are shocked by the death of MJ. I just feel like that’s not enough. I too join the club.

Yesterday I woke up to the news ‘MJ died’ on Fox news or something. First thing I did was switching on my laptop & rushing to the interwebz. My twitter feed didn’t have much info but Twitter search kinda confirmed that I should start to feel upset. Not that I’m a big fan. But I dunno why the hell I feel so bad that MJ is not any more. I can remember I grew up listening to him. Heard those strange stories about him. My uncle had few albums of MJ which I still can remember the cover art of.

I was upset when people call him a child molester. But I just didn’t give a shit. Yeah that’s my kind, “Just don’t give a shit”. But I can’t stop feeling upset of MJ. Maybe that’s because he was a legend, an icon & still he went away that way. Maybe I’m not upset about MJ but the universal truth, “it all comes to an end”. MJ’s death just make it a bit clear I guess. well… I dunno.

So I hope I’m in the club, *drumroll* “MJ ass kissers club”.

Damn it feels so cool here. But I wonder why the “sage girl” is upset about our feelings. We putting on feelings on our blogs which are public, which unfortunately are on kottu, which is sage girl’s personal feed reader. Indi… hey buddy please kick me off. Please do that. Sage girl is upset about what we write. And hope others in the club will also get their blogs out of kottu, just to make sage girls reading experience a bit better.

And by the way guys, sage girl also says like this.

“My blog is mine. I never invited you to read it.” (source. And it’s not the first one)

Now tell me why you put your blog on Kottu? isn’t it kind of an innocent invitation to other kottu readers to read this? Well.. I like when people read my posts, kottu people too. But unlike sage girl *I don’t write for Kottu*. So just think why we should get labeled as ‘ass kissers’ for being on Kottu? (and stuffing sage girls good read heaven a hell).

Anyway sage girl always manages to eclipse her own thoughts by her own thoughts. Sounds freaky but that’s the way it is. Defending her own false facts with another bunch of false facts. What got pissed me off of is aiming bloggers who are free to write & free to be on any social aggregator as long as they don’t harm the community or any terms set by the aggregator so badly. And this not the fucking first time.

I know I’m trying to put too much light on a small bug. But I don’t want to see this happened again & again.

PS: I was trying very hard to not use any offensive words (ex: fuck, fucking, shit) coz I’m practicung to reduce the usage :-S.

Make Twitterfox use the URL shortner that You want.

chanux — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:56:26 +0000

I found This nice howto via @meaningful. Looks like the howto is for older version of Twitterfox. Here goes how to do it on Twitterfox 1.8.1 (The version I use right now)

And I recommend you to update to Twitterfox 1.8.1 coz it’s really improved.

First go here:

/extensions/twitternotifier@naan.net/chrome

[you'll learn howto find your Firefox profile directory (AKA folder) here. There are too many operating systems. I can't cover them all :P ]

There is a file called TwitterFox.jar

Open it & go in to directory called content. There you’ll find the file called twitterfox.js, you better open it with a text editor.

In the top region of the file you’ll find TINYURL_CREATE_API variable. it is set to use tinyurl api by default. I edited it to use my favorite URL shortnet tr.im by editing it to look like this.

var TINYURL_CREATE_API = “http://tr.im/api/trim_simple?url=”;

You can repalce http://tr.im/api/trim_simple?url= with the API of your favorite URL shortner.

You need to restart Firefox for the changes to be effective.

Hope it works ;) . Anything not clear? Just ask in comments.

PS: You may not like to try this but I don’t give a shit :P .

What I learned from past 12+ hours of compiling tamasha?

chanux — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:32:41 +0000

I was compiling Qt from source. And had loads of issues. This is what I learned after all.

1. Errors are chances to learn.

2. Never copy paste command / code blindly from somewhere on the Internet.

Even if it’s very trustworthy source. Copy paste process might produce errors to ruin your day :). Check the code for yourself. Especially beware of commands/codes looking ‘obvious’.

3. When you ask for help give the helper everything.

Not what YOU THINK is useful.
When you get troubles your sanity shakes a bit :).

4. It’s always helpful.. well.. to sleep.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8090730.stm . They are right. Believe me.

5. Sometimes it makes sense to “start it all over again”.

Hunting errors one buy one might probably be a Goose chase.

6. It’s always good to have nice & helpful friends & community around :) .

7. You should never trust a machine.

8. You better have good Internet.

I’m not talking about these guys. ?

Happy Birthday SinhalenFOSS!

chanux — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:10:10 +0000

SinhalenFOSS, Sri Lankas very first tech related podcast, the podcast that I proudly feature in, turned one year yesterday(9th April 2009). We didn’t have big plans for the day but it was truly a big milestone for me. I’m sure the story is same for the other two co-hosts Bud (geekaholic) & Seejay.

We had the episode 21 recorded on last sunday (5th April 2009) but due to my busy schedule I couldn’t finish editing & upload it. Finally there was a hope for uploading it on SinhalenFOSS birthday. But I’m really sorry that I couldn’t make it on time since my father was sick & I had to go to the doc with him. Added to that, I couldn’t stay up all night & finish it off since I was tired of fairly a long journy. Actually I tried to stay awake but failed. However my computer stood awake when I find it on my bed in mid night (Poor thing!).

Anyway I’ll try to finish things up & put the final product in our loving listeners hands As Soon As Possible!. The bits are running in to interwebz right now :) .

It was a pleasant year passed giving me lots of experience, introducing lots of nice people to me, taking my life to another level & best of all, making me very happy for being a part of. It’s all thanks to you dear SinhalenFOSS, I really love you. Wishing you a very happy birthday!

Update: SinhalenFOSS episode 21 is on interwebz now :)

Static DNS with wvdial.

chanux — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:33:21 +0000

It’s over. The fight against the dynamic DNS is over for me now. It took me so long to figure this simple thing out. But I don’t worry, even the big bro Goog couldn’t come up with a satisfying straight answer for my problem. So I myself searched under the mattress & found the pea which took my good night sleep (I’m neither a princess nor prince ;) ).

Sometimes back I had to come up with a pretty shitty solution for a shitty problem. No I didn’t won’t to show how bad my thinking or coding is. But wanted to show how shitty is the service of my ISP. But however the right way to fix all those are here with me. And I’m gonna share it with you.

If you use wvdial to dial up (Ok, now only seven people at most will continue reading this) for your internet connection, and you hate the DNS servers come your way automagically, here’s what to do.

Open /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial with your favorite text editor & comment the line usepeerdns. I mean make it look like #usepeerdns. Now wvdial won’t ask pppd to fetch those crappy DNS addresses again.

So go and edit your /etc/resolv.conf file and add you favorite DNS servers there. Mine looks like following.

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Wonder why I use 127.0.0.1 there? That’s because I’m a happy user of dnsmasq (I recommend you to use it). I used this simple HOWTO to install it on Ubuntu. There should be other guides & HOWTOs which might match you (In case that one doesn’t fit). Just ask big bro Goog.

And other nameservers are of the nice free DNS service OpenDNS.

Send tinyarro.ws on ubiquity.

chanux — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:18:20 +0000

It’s today I found this new URL shortening service tinyarro.ws. It gives you http://➡.ws/blah as the shortened url(yeah.. blah is a random string or you can choose what you like).

I really liked the idea & thought of altering my previously created trim ubiquity command and make a ubiquity command for tinyarro.ws. You can get ubiquity here . If you don’t not know what is ubiquity you can learn more here.

> Install arrow – Ubiquity command <

(If you have ubiquity installed you get a dialog to install the command on top of the page)

OK fellas keep sending tiny arrows :D .

BTW: Tinyarrow for this blog post is http://➡.ws/⇷

Update: tinyarro.ws URLs might not work properly everywhere. Just keep an I on the discussion going on here.