Eternal Golden Braid

These days I'm reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, an amazing book about almost everything. It is certainly turning my head into mush, forcing me to think about a lot of things which I had stopped thinking about a long time ago. Since childhood.

The review mentions "some compared reading it to giving birth" . This is true.

The other book I'm messing around with is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs which is another heavy read. Deals with functional programming, lisp and indeed thinking about programming at a very basic level. Challenges a lot of assumptions I had since I started coding, and provides the reasoning behind the others. All in all, a classic.

My mind is being reamed by these two books; and I'm especially happy about it. Maybe out of the reamed mush something good will come out...:)

individual way of life...

The infuriating thing about an individual way of life::

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
                   --Nietzsche

I've noticed this fact all my life. The moment you do something very individualistic, people get very critical. They somehow feel threatened by all the novelty and perhps the courage.

The West has always had a very individualistic culture, but Eastern culture has been more of a collective one. So it is still frowned upon here to do very "whacky" things.

Like the looks I got when I had long hair. . But that was fun: if nothing else the shock value was good enough :)

life gets cooler...

Surpirisngly life just got cooler. As in I stopped working in this emergency mode I always used to.

All my life I've had this two modes of working:

• Chill Out Mode:: Do nothing, chill out, doze off, read interesting stuff and what not
• Emergency Mode:: Shit! The project's due, and we're out of time; hack! hack! hack!

Which, superflous to say, is an extremely stupid way to manage one's life. Somewhere along the line this fact started percolating into my hard-as-rock brain. So now I've started managing my time better, keep on doing little bits and peices of work along the way. And life has suddenly got more pleseant...

all the pics!

http://photos.yahoo.com/vaishalee_a has rest of my pics under "my experiences..." folder...

Emacs OS

Got this image, check it out

(from http://www.grassouille.org/emacs/index.en.html)

Exactly my feeling too! :-D

Laptop is fully functional :)

It is 4 am here in office and the Dell Inspiron 8500 is fully functional with Debian/unstable at last. The only thing not working was the ACPI support; the laptop always ran on full speed and full power, hence getting very hot.

Detailing the stuff I had to do here so I (and possibly others) might benefit in the future again:

1. Get the kernel-source-2.4.20 ACPI patched kernel from http://people.debian.org/~maxx/ . Did a dpkg -i kernel-source-2.4.20_2.4.20-9_all.deb which put a tar.bz2 in /usr/src/. Went ahead and untarred it.
2. The DSDT is broken on the 8500. There are tons of pages on the Net which detail getting stock Redhat 9 kernels to work with the 8500, but no Debian kernels. Which is a pity since the Debian kernels already have the ACPI and other patches applied. So I had to find a fixed DSDT and manually apply it to the kernel souce I had. My BIOS revision is A03 (says so right at the startup),so I got dsdt-i8500-A03-fixed-v2.dsl from http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta/resources/dell-i8500-linux. Then I got the intel iasl compiler (from http://www.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi/downloads/iasl-linux-20030228.tar.gz) and generated a hex file by using $ iasl -tc file.dsl. This gave me file.hex
3. Next according to http://acpi.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HowToOverrideTable (on the ACPI wiki) I edited the file linux/drivers/acpi/osl.c (find out where your osl.c is). Added at the beginning:

   static const
   #include "/tmp/dsdt.hex"
   

   and then after the (already existing) if statement in the function acpi_os_table_override() :

   if (strncmp(existing_table->signature,"DSDT",4))
          *new_table = NULL;
   else *new_table = (acpi_table_header *)AmlCode;
          return AE_OK;
   

   I'm assuming /tmp/dsdt.hex is where you put the hex file we generated. If not, edit accordingly.
4. Now configured the kernel to not use APM and build ACPI as modules
5. Built kernel the debian way [/usr/src/linux] $ make-kpkg --config xconfig --append_to_version=.alpha kernel_image
   (I actually used `--config oldconfig', bit that doesn't matter here) This will generate a kernel-image-2.4.20.alpha_10.00.Custom_i386.deb When you install this package (via dpkg -i) and update you boot-loader (lilo or grub or whatever) on a reboot you will get ACPI support :)

So this coupled with the cpudynd package from debian and some cool scripts from http://mikehardy.net/linux_latitude_d800/acpid-scripts.tar.bz2 the laptop works very well.

pics uploaded!

The pics have arrived! The pics have arrived!

You can see them at Yahoo photos in the folder `Durgam Lake'.

trip to bangalore...

I missed writing about my trip to bangalore. I went there some 2 weeks ago, and had a blast. After a long long time I took a day [friday] off, and caught a bus on thursday evening.

Presto! On Friday morning I reach bangalore. Roshan ("Papa Rosh" aka OCR), being the kind soul he is, came to pick me up from the Bus stand which is almost like 15-20 kms from where they live. Having arrived at their pad, met nkv ("silvermane" aka "nkv rao only") and Jubi. Talked to them a lot. And then we proceeded to open up the laptop (Yay!).

The painful story of Laptop-XP-Debian is recounted somewhere else, so I won't dwell on it here. Me and Jubi went out to some excellent chinese lunch. Came back and slept for 3-4 hours (did I mention the bus I was on was extremely uncomfortable and played a bad movie and I coulnd't get much sleep? I didn't? Good). Evening was again fun as we went out for some dinner with all the guys.

Met G$, mridul, apte after a long time and felt good about it, caught up on what;s been happening. Lots of riding around town. Java City (excellent coffee shop with live music), Oxford bookstore (sit-read-order-tea bookstore with a good slection of books), Ring road.

Sigh, I feel so good just thinking about it :-)

V is gone :-(

My friend V has gone off to bangalore for 4 months. And I'm already missing her. It is fun talking to her, and having verbal fights with her (she does have a sharp tongue ;-) ). Though she cribs like hell about everything when she is in the mood (I'm guilty of that too, but she is incredible: I never knew someone could crib so much!)

She's left today morning. On sunday she wanted to take some pics. Both of us went to this Durgam Cheruyaor lake near the office. She had this good SLR with a really big telephoto lens. And we had a photo-session, with she taking almost 10 mins to focus each time. We more or less shot the entire roll, me on the bike, she on the bike, here and there, bickering all the time about my impatience and her photographic abilities. And I loved every moment of it :-) Gave the roll to be developed today and asked for photo CD to be burned. Let's see how the pics come out...

It is rarely that I go out. She is (or rather, was) the only one who dragged me out to a movie, a dinner, a lunch or just some plain riding around on the bike. I wish I had gone out more with her while she was here. But I was too much into my work (which I get f**ked up either way) and just sleeping.

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony (now where have I heard that...). Now that I've finally decided to go around and enjoy life more, she hikes out of town. *sigh*.

laptop works! Yay!

Finally I got debian up and running. I've been working on GNU/Linux for so long that I've forgotten how to deal with Windows. The most basic, sureshot, nuke-'em kind of solution: Reinstall!

I reinstall XP. Put in the gateway address, the IP address, subnet mask, DNS IPs and viola! It Just Works (TM). So I hastily get Mozilla-Firebird for Windows (can't get no satisfaction from IE6), and start downloading patches, kernel source code, network drivers.

Finally the network under Debian worked. Hastily put in a sources.list for unstable and apt-getted :) But unstable still doesn't have XFree86 4.3 . Got an outside repository from apt-get.org and used that for getting 4.3. After that it was smooth sailing.

These pages were an immense help:

• http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~dsanta/resources/dell-i8500-linux
• http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/G.Wilford/Inspiron8500/
• http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/i8500/

The first link is particularly good. I still haven't got the ACPI to work very well. And X is not accerlerated. But it does come up in 1680x1050x24, which looks great. And unstable quite recent software: gnome/2.2, movie players, games, gnucash.

Here's hoping my hacking will take off from this point onward...