Walk Alone

I’m happy happy happy!

The hardware guy has returned my video card and my Gladiator DVD! My system is complete! I ‘ve to look into installing some nvidia thingy to get a better look at the card’s capabilities.

As for the scheduled upgrade, just like from 7.04 to 7.10, 7.10 to 8.04 has gone smoothly. In case you are wondering why I had to do a clean install for 7.04: I assembled my current machine in late March 2007 - 7.04 was just in time to be the first OS to be loaded on to this machine.

The upgrade pulled 463 MB from the net in spite of having the alternate CD at its disposal. I ran the update-upgrade sequence a couple of more times to get the third party repos up to the mark.

No major surprises except for XMMS, which is replaced by Audacious. And it may be the novelty of the upgrade, but things look even more glossy than in Ubuntu 7.10.

Life is good.

No software is perfect, not even Linux. For Ubuntu 8.04 coming out tomorrow, here are a few eccentricities I hope will disappear.

• The desktop doesn’t arrange the icons in a grid - at least, not as well as Windows does it. The current ‘grid’ looks like it was laid out by a toddler; its that loose. And while the devs are at it, can they do something about the overlapping text for adjacent icons?
• Whenever I edit a file on the Desktop, its icon moves to the upper left corner on its own. What gives?
• The balloon popup with the update notification icon is nice, but maybe it should be pointing at the orange update icon, not at some other icon in the notification area.
• I use an ADSL net connection and run Apache on localhost. Now get this: in Firefox, without an active ADSL net connection, I can’t visit localhost. The page times out! The Apache access log shows no request made to apache to serve a page. It works in Epiphany without any problems!
• When playing a video file, the video stream goes kaput. Reopening the video (in any player) doesn’t help; I still get the weird pink snowing static. Restarting X server solves the problem. To be fair, this has occurred exactly two times in two years.

Now you may ask (with justification) why I haven’t filed bug reports. None of the above are predictable or reproducible, as far as I know. The last one has occurred just two times in two years - if I were the developer, I would shrug it off. For the rest, I’m pretty sure I’m missing some config setting somewhere.

Be ready to open up your torrents.

The best version of Ubuntu ever is coming out; right on schedule on 24th April.

This time around, I ‘m in two minds - go for GNOME or go for KDE, specifically, KDE 4.  The facts that KDE 4  is still  not complete and that the only clean way to go from GNOME to KDE is to reformat are keeping me in the GNOME camp for now. No time to experiment. No time to backup data and restore.

An OS upgrade is also the time when I take a good, hard look at my machine and decide on any upgrades to the hardware. I have added a 250 GB SATA hard disk (Western Digital) and a new keyboard to my machine in honor of the Hardy Heron. I had other reasons too - I sorely needed the storage space. As for the keyboard, the one connected to my dad’s machine was getting clunky. You would have to apply about as much force as you would put on a circuit breaker to switch it on. It took the fun out of using the PC. So my comfy Logitech keyboard goes to my dad, while I got a Samsung Pleomax. While it doesn’t have the brand, it had a compact form factor and smooth, consistent tactile feedback.

The third thing I bought - a USB Bluetooth dongle - was a stillborn. It didn’t even get detected. A pity, really. The stores offer you no other brand than the el cheapo Chinese one. This was my second attempt, incidentally, to get a useful Bluetooth experience. The first dongle petered out in a couple of weeks… So now, I ‘m a huge fan of the USB cable. It just works!

In other news, I tried Wammu to backup my SE z550i. It did read the contacts and messages correctly, but was not able to restore the messages from backups (I did not attempt the contacts). I filed a bug - it seems to be a copy of an existing one. Let’s see if I can ever get my messages back on to the phone.

My lean and mean rig is still incomplete. Yes, one year after I paid money for it and got it delivered, I still haven’t received the NVIDIA GeForce 7100 graphics card. It went kaput one week after delivery and has been in “repair” ever since. I have given up hope of ever seeing it again. To add insult to injury, the computer guy (who has also failed to return my original DVD of Gladiator - see a pattern here?) calls me frequently for “Linux advice”. Call me a sucker for … whatever; but the times I have asked him about it, I was promised it would be delivered in a week. Lesson has been learnt.

This new Samsung keyboard has a few buttons I need to explore - power, sleep, wake, turbo and the Win keys. I should be able to map them to do something useful.

Quite a few of my friends work in TCS. I might know some code-coolie in Infosys and Wipro too, given the way these companies vacuum up students during on-campus placement drives. I pity them. These companies have just sold their souls to the devil.

Maybe they view it as a case of level-headed pragmatism winning against naive idealism.

But some hard questions need to be asked.

• Do they know what a standard is?
• Were they not aware that ODF got there first with unanimous approval?
• Are they aware that against all definitions of a standard, OOXML can’t be completely implemented by an ISV because of references to Microsoft’s proprietary file formats?
• Were they sleeping while Microsoft subverted the ISO process? Or maybe they are hand in glove with Microsoft? Preferred partners, channel partners and all that sales stuff.

Here are twenty reasons - listed out succinctly because we all know how busy these companies are churning out software - why you should say NO to OOXML.

Tsk. Tsk. My dream employers’ list just grew shorter by three.

Is it any good having a racing team in F1 called Force India? What is Indian about this team other than its owner and its colors? Formula racing is the ultimate symbiosis of engineering and passion - in which other sport does a human pilot half a ton of exquisite engineering to speeds in excess of 300 kmph? Where is the Indian talent in Force India’s engineering? Where is the Indian passion in its driving?

Is this all we can do? Are we so devoid of talent that we have to bank on a billionaire’s purchasing power?

We, Indians, are sure buying up a lot of ready-made pieces. Mittal buys up steel companies in Europe. Tata grabs Rover and Jaguar in Britain. Mallya grabs Midland F1.

And over a billion people pat themselves on their collective back.

As kid, I used to hear an anecdote.

America dug out a lump of iron ore and shipped it to Germany. Germany refined the ore into an ingot and flew it to Japan. Japan machine-tooled the ingot into a perfect square plate and sent it to India.

And India stamped “Made In India” on the plate.

Now that I think of it, I can guess why cricket feels good. Sure, our boys are unreliable. Maybe they are not the best that is out there. But, they are our boys - Indians. And when they win, India wins. When they win, more people than a billionaire and his stockholders win.