Share. Inspire. Enjoy.

When one feels nostalgic, I anticipate the same from the near future for nostalgia had no meaning in my life. There was no beautiful past to look back to, except for a few traces that I cherish. All I have is just the hope and desire for a better future for those I live for, for those I would die for...

[ Thank you lazyweb for letting me silently vent... ]

While watching an episode of Bleach, I was kind of moved by what Mizuiro says:

"Sometimes I think that everyone on this planet is connected together with countless chords,
just like patients on IVs after surgery. We try so hard from getting those chords severed.
But despite our best efforts, they always wind up being severed.
And it's very hard to set up a new connection with some people.
I still can't do it..."

Amazing how a cartoon (i would rather say, animated) series communicates many fundamental philosophies of life so intricately through such substantial and engaging characters they've created and held on to. The above one may not be the best of things said in Bleach... Just that I had this blog open and it struck me to write about it today.

Love Bleach! God bless all you animators, story writers, art directors and everyone else working on it!

And on second thoughts... I held back an entry I made about ATMs of a bank that played some music to my ears until I could be sure that my opinion doesn't get me into legal trouble. WTH, i don't use those anyway! :P


"Everything that's legal is not necessarily "right" and everything that's "right" is not necessarily legal"
-- Someone :P

I realized a bit too late that there are broken links on my blog ( http://kamalx.livejournal.com/1953.html ), thanks to the fact that I forgot to restore all the files to their right places, when Eficacy website was recently moved to a better hosting service.

Although, since I also rearranged the entire structure of the site, these files will eventually be moved elsewhere, but will surely be easily accessible even through the old links, just in case you stumble upon some old cache.

My sincere apologies to all who attempted to download the wallpapers and encountered a 404 error instead. The images have been restored to their respective locations and may be downloaded henceforth. Please feel free to take another look :) and do let me know how you like the wallpaper.


देर आए दुरुस्त आए  ;)

This was one of the projects i would cherish for a long long time :)

A full fledged Wordpress based website+blog for a friend (and often times a guide to me), Aanjhan (tuxmaniac), http://www.tuxmaniac.com/ was launched today. This further reaffirms my belief in the awesome platform that Wordpress is, the awesome tool that Inkscape is (yes, every bit of the design, except photography, was planned and executed in Inkscape!), and my other tools. Thanks to all the folks who have ever worked and contributed to the FOSS tools i use for my everyday work ( Inkscape, GIMP, Geany, GNU nano, GIT, Imagemagick's command line awesomeness, Firebug (oh, can a web-designer breathe without this one?), Firefox and of course, all this running on my Ubuntu box!  :). That of course wasn't an exhaustive list, it goes on and on... But you get the picture right? :)

This also further reaffirms my belief in the way we worked on this project and managed to pull it off from start to completion within 12 days!
Aanjhan is currently a Masters student at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland and I work out of this beautiful place near Trombay, Mumbai. We discussed every bit of this website only on text chat (IRC) or on email, and never felt it was insufficient in anyway, be it Aanjhan briefing me or I getting back to him for queries or us discussing something while working on it, live!

Thanks to Aanjhan for giving me this awesome opportunity and of course, for his collaboration in terms of to-the-point, efficient and effective feedback; that is the secret of a complete Wordpress custom theme within 12 days flat!

Lack of sleep is getting on my nerves, literally! But i still tend to avoid sleep and stay up as much as i can. I have already started seeing stuff!
Bad!

Last few nights i have been working on a project that has got me really interested, as in, I just loved to work on it. A Custom Wordpress theme + website which is scheduled to go up by tomorrow.

Just downloaded and installed the nightly unstable build of Google's Chromium browser for Linux from http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel (Scroll down to find the links to the 32 and 64 bit debian packages). So far I find it's pretty slick. The only thing that hurts at the moment is that the font rendering is pretty ugly and 'windowsy' in that all text is aliased. No anti-aliasing like the rest of my Linux desktop and the other browsers like Opera, Firefox and Konqueror. Hope this is a temporary flaw and will soon be fixed (by the final release at least!).

Here's how stuff looks in the build i downloaded today:

Not bad, not bad at all!!
Also, I made this post from my newly installed cool browser :D
 

Hmm. Difficult proposition!

The ability to delegate just the right thing to just the right people is a very important part of growth strategy of any SME.

Dependency: a network of efficient and trusty folks.

Unfortunately, for about quarter of a century, I neither had that ability nor that network of people. And those two reasons made me such a DIY guy (not *very* efficient though, but still a DIY guy)!

Now it seems to get harder to keep the flame burning! I seemingly want to do everything there is to do in the world myself. Time for some change.

Good bye independence.

Today was particularly still, something I totally dislike.  And I am writing just for the sake of writing, just because I have a blog. I wouldn't normally do that, but this is reminding myself that I can do something better, something more fruitful than this. This also reminds me that I do have a blog to write on :D

This still night, no winds, no motion, it drifts my mind into gloominess. Struggling to create some motion - chaotic let it be, i need to get moving already!

Yeah, this comes from a lazy fellow who hasn't moved his ass off his chair since he can remember; this event follows a long period of physical idleness and the fact that I still can't touch my toes keeping my knees straight, I was kind of afraid about a tough trek. But well, more important was that I have to break the idleness somewhere and this is the first opportunity i got after i decided that, so i said "bring it on"  :)

Not much to describe here, constraints of time bar me from posting  a complete writeup on this super-interesting experience just yet. I will be posting it by the next week end though. Till then, let the pictures do the talking...

Thanks to Anurag for handing me the camera, I got an opportunity to click away whatever I liked, although this was my first point and shoot experience, so please pardon if i have some 'photography-crimes' during this course...
Here's the link to all the pics → [ Pictures from trek to Dhak Bahiri - http://www.flickr.com/photos/anuragp/sets/72157616126885248/ ]

And I must point out here that when it comes to difficult treks, Point-And-Shoot cameras rock!!! There's no way you could click some of those pictures with a DSLR or some super expensive film camera up there where you're hanging on to a cliff for your dear life 2500 ft above ground level looking at the steep slope right under your feet :D

I plan to post more on my first trek with the trekkers :) So please stay tuned..
Cheers!

[ Edit: October 2, 09 ] That next weekend never came :P
Although I think I am learning to blog lately :)

Its been quite a while since i was thinking of having a DeviantArt account and posting some art work there. So I went to register today and it threw an error in my face saying in big bold letters "Banned"..



Well it must have been for a reason! Clicking on more information took me to the page that explains what might be wrong and what may be the ways out of it..

This is what they have to say:


Sad! A lot of people can't register with Deviantart in India (or more of south-east Asia even; unconfirmed though) as the IP range 121.245.x.x remains banned by them.

Ah! foss.in/2008 ends. But the fun goes on. I am not a good writer, but
will sure write about how I liked it after a while.

Reached back home on the night of Nov 30th after a 22 hr long fun-filled
train journey :) Not that I had much choice this time around, but even if
I do have a choice, I would prefer a long train journey to a half an hour
flight :P

Important things that make it that much fun it is: Fun co-passengers &&
good food in your bag (forget about getting it in the train!) && well,
you gotta be as crazy as I to enjoy it :P

But well, you do get tired doing nothing, so if its about going to work
the very next day. screwed! :)

So the next day at home was dull and not very productive. May be partly
attributable to the thermal shocks with the weather changes.

Not really well even now, but sure to get back up in business from tomorrow
morning.

Cheers to the foss folks though, for the awesome event they made foss.in/2008!

foss.in! Long awaited event for all the foss hackers in India! Well, I am not a hacker per se, but this event has always interested me. And this time around, although they've changed the format to make sure - well.. about something...(bleh!) - i am still taking my long awaited break! I think I need this one to stay sane and keep going.

The last time I took a break from my work desk was June 2007 and well, that was a bit painful in the end. The repercussions still remain to shake me up..

This break, for a change can only have positive consequences ftw :D

See ya at Bangalore :)

I'll be back to have more fun on Nov 30, 08. Work? You work! I just have fun
(I'll miss my comp though :( )

With so much appreciation for "The KDE Indic Localisation" poster, I felt tempted to make wallpapers for the same as well, more so because Pradeepto also hinted me about wallpapers being demanded ;) and... this is my favorite poster as well :)

Thank you all for the appreciation; the wallpapers are available for download from the following links :)




Many thanks to Pradeepto, Anurag and our `little KDE-In team` ;) who brainstormed together and provided constructive feedback. Many thanks to Anurag for hosting the huge posters that I may not have been able to host. And by the way, if you want to print these, please use the high res (300 dpi) versions linked here and some more posters with 300 dpi print resolution here (all at size A3).

Here's a nice blog entry at JacksonFish i found while looking for a few cartoon character images online.
http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2007/10/10/the-details-of-character-creation/
Pretty informative for concept artists, character designers. Will keep adding links in the category as and
when i find them.

This is about the beginning of my beautiful journey into the world of FOSS.. :)
Of course that can't be summed up in a single post.. so this is numbered.. and i give myself the liberty of extending it to n number of posts.. :P

One fine day, i went to a crappy MTNL customer service center to inquire about their newly advertised Garuda internet connection on FW phones. Well, that connection ended up with a bad and sad twist that only worsened my standpoint on MTNL. But I got something else there that will remain with me for life.. :)

I met a guy, Devaranjan, there who, I guessed, is quite enthusiastic about FOSS. And indeed, I thank him for introducing me to this world that was previously unknown to me.

He helped me with a Ubuntu 6.06 CD. He gave me a comprehensive primer on using it. He invited me to join the LUG mailing lists. And he told me about the Anushaktinagar Knowledge Network that he has painstakingly put up and still maintains. And he informed me about a LUG meeting at HBCSE that was my first.

The LUG mailing list was the place where I got priceless insight into the way things are happening with GNU/Linux. The technical knowledge base and the huge user-base that exists in this world. I was moved.

Of course, initially I did not completely understand the philosophy that drives this movement in the computer world and was quite unaware about how passionate its members are about FOSS, GNU/Linux and all the things that go with it. But, well, that was just the beginning, it still is; I have a long way to go.

There are so many nice people I met, both online and offline (viz a viz) and really enjoyed getting involved. More on this later.

All these events have started an entirely new era of computing in my personal world, and my sincere gratitude goes to Dev, for booting me into FOSS. :)
Thanks bro.
Cheers!

Well i received this in mail a few weeks ago.. Sounds pretty interesting...
And, i can't think of anything else to write about at the moment so i thought to share this wonderful mail with you all... Remember, if you start reading it.. read it in its totality.. you'll really wonder.. i promise. :)

And yep! Don't cheat.. you'll spoil the fun. ;)

TWO TOUGH QUESTIONS:
 
 Question 1:
 If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis; would you recommend that she have an abortion?
 
 
 Read the next question before scrolling down to the answer of this one. [[ Amateurs built the Ark...Professionals built the Titanic!]]