May you live in interesting times.

Nicolas Copernicus had shown that our home planet, the Earth, is not at the centre of the solar system, but rather a relatively small planet, lost among ranks of a sundry group. Any hope of the concept of 'speciality of human race' (anthropocentricism) that remained among certain fanatical philosophers, was constantly put under stress as facts like our earth not being at the centre of our galaxy, our galaxy not being at the centre of The Local Group of galaxies and our galaxy cluster not being at the centre of the universe, were dicovered successively.

The Copernican theory, in itself being profound, induced more spectacular scientific cornerstones to be created. One of those is the prediction, discovery and subsequent mapping of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Another, not very known, observation is by Richard Gott, who used the non-speciality of an observer's view of an event to predict the longetivity of the event. Of course, the theory, being based on mathematical constructs and not on some vaticinatoring knowledge, there's always a confidence level associated with the prediction. This prediction works only so long as the observer is observing the said event at its non-special time of existence.

To understand this wierd condition (non-speciality), an understanding of the Standard Normal Curve is in order. If you are thinking, "Math? Run like hell!", then don't bother running. I am only going to tell you what I know, which is more like English

If you make a large number of observations which have some true random noise, then the results tend to arrange themselves in a bell-shaped curve called the Normal Curve. The curve shows up no matter the range or the data being observed. The curve aligns itself over the data with it's peak or apex right on top of the average of the observations. If u take a chunk of the curve about the central line of the curve, then the area of the chunk gives the confidence level in percentage that the next observation lies within this region.
So, for example, given a range from 5 to 15, with average at 10, you can predict with approximately 0% confidence that the value is 10, or with 68% confidence that the value lies in the range of 9 to 11, or with 95% confidence that it lies within 8 to 12, and so on. But the requirement is that the randomness involved be really random, and not be because of special circumstances that can be accounted for.

Note that, you cannot, however, predict anything with 100% confidence that the value lies inside the range of 5 to 15. This is because the curve's property of never "touching down" at any value. It just goes on to infinity on either side. I guess that if it didn't, then we would all be cassandras (and her male counterparts).

Now that the primer has been laid down, here's the actual content. Richard Gott says that if you are an observer who 'just happened' to observe an event/entity at a non-special part of the object's existence, (that is, neither on the day of its conception not on the day of some event (like war) that could destroy the entity), then your observervation can be mapped in a standard curve which stretches from the entity's creation to it's (future) destruction. And, considering that your visit is non-special (for example, you didn't invited to witness its end), then this situation bears no significant difference to the curve in the above paragraph. Which means, we can apply the same prediction-with-confidence-level trick here too. The resulting prediction will tell you, with some confidence, in which percentage of the entity's lifetime you are observing. From this data, you can predict the entity's lifetime, again, with some confidence.

The title of this post, 'May you live in interesting times', is supposedly a chinese curse. I don't know. But this post gives it a whole new evil dimension. Since you are required to be an observer at non-special times of the entity to make a prediction about it, you can conversely say that the as long as you can predict the longetivity of something, the entity will remains relatively unchanged. Take the act of predicting the longetivity of humanity. If you are eligible to predict, then you are observing it at a non-special or non-interesting time. But if u are living in interesting times, then you can't predict anything because you belong in humanity and something big (possibly bad?) is going to happen to it. Give me boring times any day!

A go at Google:
So now, how about we predict something? Something like Google's existence? Googl has been around since September, 1998. I am making this observation on November, 2005. Since there's nothing special about me observing google today, I can say with 95% confidence that Google will last for more than 2.25 months but less than 281 years.
You can predict the logetivity of other companies, human race, organizations, your relationship or how long your college/university will last, if that will give you pleasure.

Dear Suse,

A week ago, I went to ConneXions, Annanagar to buy some interesting book and other miscellany (including a cool mouse pad, whose review will follow). I noticed that Suse 10.0 OSS version dvd was bundled along with the November issue of Linux For You magazine. Since this was during my XP formatathon, I purchased it to try it out.
I installed it in some 8GB of unpartitioned space I had. I don't think there's any point in talking about the installation part, as linux installation, for the past couple years, had been simple enough to go through (except for some wierdo distros aimed at sooper-nerds). Maybe it could've been worse if I had tried to install linux on my raid-0 array. Infact, suse told me that I have a software raid contrary to what my BIOS informs her! Whatever. Since I didn't want to install in the raid partition, the install went uneventfully (if u don't count successfully installing linux as an event, that is). For those who want to have a look at the install though, here's a flash movie :)
One thing I noticed at boot up was that now there's a splash screen with progress indicator. Newbees rejoiced, as they would've found a bunch of growing dots less intimidating than the pages of scrolling dos text à la hollywood style or a progress barless screen that I was used to. Of course, this feature might've been introduced in earlier versions and I only noticed now. But I was annoyed that some things stayed the same. I mean, even after so many years since I last checked out linux, why should I still manually enter the monitor frequencies when I don't have to do so in any of the windows OS?

Yast2
Imagine having to know how to extract vcd frames from a vcd just to watch a movie. Many geeks reading this may be able to do so. But you are not the main market for the vcd industry. The average joe who just want things to work, are the ones, fortunately or unfortunately.
Following this analogy, I would say that linux is a right pain when you want to install anything in it. With utilities like Yast, this has almost been eradicated. Yast2 was good. The apropos style searching for programs and drivers is appreciable. Only thing that you have to do manually is to seek out installation sources: the path to software packages on the Internet or local disks. This step too could've been automated with something similar to GWebCache in gnutella so that we get only the recent list of servers hosting some essential packages, or atleast the packages that come with the DVD.
Another thing with Yast was that, by default the installation source had one entry named 'cdrom' something. But it didn't search my DVD drive at all, even though that's where I installed it from. Later, when I added "dvd:\" or something like that (after googling), I was able to search for some dependencies in the DVD drive. Also, it took minutes to refresh from all the Installation sources (3 sites and dvd). Maybe because of slow sites.
The first thing I did with yast was to download Nvidia driver for suse. I would've had a tad trouble finding drivers for my old ATi card (9700pro), but, thankfully, NVidia pays equal importance to linux version of its drivers. With or without the drivers, the way linux renders everything onscreen has been, somehow, delightfully different. I tell you what, you take the same webpage and view it in linux and in windows and compare the quality for yourself. My friend Balakrishnan used to say the same thing of linux when he tried to make me abandon windows forever. Not just the visuals, the sound is different too. And again, it's delightfully so, as the volume goes higher and sounds more amplified without any jarring artifacts. I couldn't believe it was the same computer that ran under windows the first time I ran linux and I've just rediscovered that feeling.

Multimedia keys and Mouse buttons
Other things that I've gotten quite used to in the windows world, but couldn't figure out in the linux "woerld" were my keyboard's multimedia keys and my mouse's forward & backward buttons [link]. There were tutorials to make the mouse buttons work by changing the mappings in Xwindow. I followed the example for a 6 button mouse, but it turned out that my mouse was 7 button. I haven't gotten round to try the new mapping yet.

The same's the story with my keyboard special keys too. Tried quite a few advises from various forums, but all of them had wireless multimedia keyboard and none of their advice worked on my wired one.

AmaroK
I love iTunes (you won't like it only if u haven't tried it). There's, of course, a Mac version too. But sadly, there's no iTunes for linux, yet. Just what Apple means by it, I don't know. I searched around and found that crossover office users can now enjoy itunes on linux. But I found a worthy temporary place-holder for iTunes, called Amarok. I could connect to my last.fm account using its intrinsic plugin. It uses recommended music based on my history of songs in the 'dynamic mode'. Kinda Ok feature, but tends to annoy you by repeating songs over and over. It's got an OK interface. With so many features spread over horizontal and vertical tabs, it could tend to be complex and non-intuitive. For example, I can't figure out how to “uncheck” a song to keep it from playing. And it's context menu could do with some more entries, like what iTunes has. But I loved the automatic lyric display (based on some OSS plugin which lets you submit lyrics), artist/album/title search (using some interface to wikipedia) and context functionality that displays the various context in which the current song appears. I would love to have some of these features in iTunes.
I couldn't find any codec installed by default that would play my mp3 or mov (quicktime) collection. So I had to install a windows codec collection called w32codec-all that really did contain almost all of the plugins necessary. My media collection is in a space-sparse 80GB harddrive in NTFS format. Amarok had a very good album art manager which, unfortunately, couldn't write to the NTFS media drive. The last time I checked, there was only support for over-writing files in NTFS. But maybe I would've found a fully supported ntfs write driver if I had searched for it in Yast.

FireFox
The onboard nvidia ethernet card was detected correctly. But I was looking all over to setup a ppoe conection. Finally found it under the ATM devices setup. A minor observation, and nothing more, in firefox is that, double-clicking the address bar in the Windows version selects the text till a delimiter. But in linux it selects the entire text. It was a bit annoying as I was used to do this to quicky select and change the last value in the url (like, http://forum.com/?forum=32) to quicly move among sub forums.

At the end of the day, Suse's Yast rules and the new versions of Gnome and KDE look promising. Though I am sure I haven't enjoyed anything that is exclusive to Suse 10 version, it will be the future patches, apps and derivative distros released by the OSS community that will make the impact of the OSS decision felt better. Already there is an OS effort called SUPER (Suse Performance Enhanced Release) to release a slimmer and nimbler Suse. I only checked out the gnome desktop. Many seem to favour the KDE environment, but I find gnome to be less cluttered and simple.
But I am still not using linux as main OS because I don't want to hassle with making visual studio, my games and other apps that I use to work in linux. It's the general laziness prevalent among windows users.

Charles Darwin in Chennai?

Annanagar Talk, a local news paper, reported that on Nov 14, the great-great-grand daughter of, none other than, Charles Dariwin himself was going to do a book reading session here in Chennai. And specifically, in Annanagar, my neighbourhood! She was also supposed to have an interactive session after the event.

In all my excitment, I forgot to glimpse at the title of the book she was to read out. Well, I did glimpse at it later and it was "Tigers in Red weather".

Ruth Padel, as it turns out, disappointingly to me, don't talk much about Evolution in her book or in her after-book-read-interactive-session. Rather, her book is supposed to be a travelogue of sorts delineating the various places tigers live and focuses on the "physical, scientific and political significance of the tiger" and is versed well for the 'spiritually kindled' and the 'poetic-eyed'. Old people, in other words.
Shame. I was hoping to get a glimpse of Charles Darwin's spirit in her eyes as she builds on her great ancestor's ideas. Maybe He still glints in her genes, but I defer the chance to meet her if she's going to ramble on her books only. I've got more significant tasks planned for the evening. Like going to a Food fest FoodPro2005 at the Chennai Trade Centre, for example. I always wanted to see a chocolate fountain.

But anyways, it great to hear that she will be around in my neighbourhood and she'll always be welcome.

Windows Themed Format-athon (WTF?)

When you get a BSOD immediately after login, you know you messed up with some startup service or file. You also know that long and dreary nights of non-fun filled activities involving smuggling your precious data files away from Windows' reaches, formatting and reformating, lie ahead.

Of course, one should not ignore the fact that Windows normally does not act abnormal without due provocation. But the causes sometimes are so varied and takes time to brew that you just can't point at a single software/file. I usually leave my favourite BitTorrent client, Azureus, downloading all night. Recently, due to the less than fit power lines (kudos to the torrents of rain), the torrents of files would stop because of abrupt power-cuts at night. Couple this with a slightly under-rated UPS and WINDOWS, et voila, you've got BSOD.

I also suspect my FlyAKite OS skin that I recently installed. But I am not so sure of that because I logged in via safe mode and tried disabling all services, uninstalling the said skinning software, moved mouse to usb, disconected some usb devices, moved the mouse back to ps/2, tried the "Most recent settings that worked" in the boot menu (though, as I understand, it will only get you to the login screen) to no avail.

Windows was beeping very strongly at me: "REINSTALL!"

So, reinstall I did.

I wanted to make this into a "Newbee Desktop Windows XP User's Guide to Reinstalling Windows Without having to Rebuild Data" (NDWXPUGRWWHRD). So here goes:

First off, it was Safe mode again to backup the "Document and Settings" folder and some python source files.

Before I had my this 320GB worth of HDD space, I used to allocate the bare minimum of space to the Windows partition. Usually lesser than 5GB. Windows XP has a special folder called "Documents and Settings" (D&S) folder to encourage applications to store all their data files like save games, settings, cache, user profiles, etc. I used to rage over this idea. I mean, if I asked a program to install in one folder, why does it store its heavy data files in the windows partition that is already bare on free space? But now, it makes sense, somewhat. When you want to reinstall the program files later when you reinstall Windows, or when your partition that contains the 'runnables' get deleted, you can still reinstall the programs and continue working (or playing, incase of games) as if nothing has interfered. So the lesson of the day is that "Documents and Settings" folder is good. Or is it really? There is a possiblity that your Windows partition hard drive may crash. In this case, _all_ your programs' settings are lost. This is the problem of centralization. But with HDD crashes becoming almost negligible these days, I don't see a significant threat here.

Unfortunately, it was not all smooth sailing for me. It was quite sometime since I last partitioned my HDD and this led to some partition confusions. First of all, I had an Active partition on the second HDD where I keep my Linux OS (which I hardly use). But the Windows partition lies in the first HDD's partiton which I keep as the first boot drive. I wanted to format my old windows partition and also awad the active partition status to C:\. For this I used DOS Partition magic since this was a raid-0 partition and can't be recognized by a dos boot disk. But when I formatted and started the install, my raid array was in disarray: *Who formatted my d: ?* (which was on the same drive as my windows was in) D'oh! That'll teach me to do these things while nodding off at the screen.

Fearing more damage and possible incompatiblity with win98/linux installation, I left changing the Active status for a later time. But now windows won't install. It kept saying

"To install Windows XP on the partition you selected, setup must write some startup files to the disk:
<disk name>
However this disk does not contain a Windows XP compatible partition."

The obvious solution was to make the RAIDed partition as Active. But I had another idea: disable the 'active' hard disk and keep only the RAID HDD. It worked and no more whining from XP that the partition is not XP compatible!

I must mention this little quirk with ASUS raid driver disk. A file called idecoi.dll (IDE Co-Installer) was not getting copied onto the windows folder during install. It seems this file is faulty in the asus's motherboard cd! Since I've installed Windows on my system before(duh!), I knew that this problem exists and that the idecoi.dll's absence don't worry any app. I even renamed a gif as idecoi.dll and copied it onto the system32.dll as place-keeper and later replaced it with one found in the website.

There was a rather pleasant interlude with one Suse, looking captivating in brilliant green. But that is another story!

With Windows XP back in the box and the remaining HDDs re-enabled in the BIOS, it was time to reinstall the applications to register themselves in the registry. But the D:\, where I installed applications, was gone and formatted (all 139GB of it!). So I downloaded and installed some recovery tools. I had more than installed programs in this partition: 3D studio Max files, video and movie files, some audio, some ini files, renders, etc. I tried "PC file Inspecter"(free), "Zero Assumption Recovery"(paid), "Recover My Files"(paid) and, based on a tip-off, "File Scavenger 3.0 (paid)". In the end, it was "File Scavenger" that worked the fastest and best among the others. I would definetly recommend it for NTFS-based recoveries.

Apart from backing-up the D&S folder, I also backed-up some settings using the *Files and settings transfer wizard*. It does more or less the same thing as backing up the D&S folder, but in a MS kind of way. So, soon after I recovered my d: partition, I reinstalled the programs and started this wizard to import back my old settings. But, alas, it goeth:

"The location you specified does not contain stored information" (!)

no matter if I pointed it to the same folder, its immediate parent or it's child folder.

Even my favourite iTunes's recovery system was behaving bad. iTunes has the option of saving the entire music library (including rating, playcount and other plaer-added meta details) to a special "song list.txt" file to be restored later. But on importing this list, I get:

"The file cannot be imported. Unknown error occured (-50)"

Reason: No idea! But since iTunes saved its config and song list in the D&S\My Music folder, I was able to recover it anyways. I just copied this folder over the one in windows as a whole(A mistake as I later realized), and we have normality!

There were no hiccups with the recovery; Firefox, Limewire, Azureus, Gaim, Opera, Mercora, Adobe suite, Macromedia suite and others worked as they used to. Even all the plugins that I installed the last time were there.

So the BIG lesson here is, try and back-up the D&S folder at any cost. Even take periodic backups of it to a hdd or a cd/dvd. Do this even if you are taking an application-provided export feature. Also remember that not all applications store their settings in the D&S folder. Among other things to take back-up of, the ini files in the directory where you installed the application is a good idea too. I did so with my 3D studio max and now it has the same UI and other settings.
(As of my writing, I had already done another reformat and reinstall. Details in next blog post.)

The input animal.

My usually white Microsoft Internet keyboard was looking a bit dark, being toned-down by layers of dust and oil (courtesy, my hyper-active sebaceous glands). Since I've been looking forward to rid my keyboard of 'keyboard dandruff' for sometime anyway, I got a screwdriver, some soap water in a mug and some shaggedy old rags for the clean up. After painstakingly removing all the keys, I washed them individually in the soap water, put them out for drying in the shade and then wiped each key seperately with a clean cloth. Try doing it sometime and you will be surprised how much pain can accumulate in your fingers in one day!

I gave my 'input animal', aka my Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical, a quick sponge bath too. But, alas, my keyboard had drowned in the sudden deluge of my loving care, while my corded pet survived. The keyboard had lost sense under the space key and the up arrow key. I tried to go on with these handicaps at hand for sometime. But, as is usual in a murphy-law-abiding universe, there suddenly seemed to be too many things that involved the use of precisely those keys that went kaput. So, interring the fallen keyboard in its original box, rather unceremoniously, I embarked on a journey that would help me buy a new and better kbd.

My mouse, though surviving my rigorous clean-up unscathed, was never in an awe-inspiring state. The middle scroll wheel, feeling that it hasn't been scratched for sometime, decides to scroll down one notch, by itself. It's especially irritating when you are playing Quake III arena, and you find yourself with a gauntlet when you were sure that you were holding a rocket launcher just a while ago. Or, when trying to follow a confusing IEEE paper, you suddenly don't have a clue of what the sentence you were reading means (quite understandable?), just to realise that the mouse had taken the liberty of scrolling down a few lines. So I planned on making it a double purchase of keyboard and mouse.


The mouse hunt:
I always wanted one of them mouses that had plenty of buttons on the sides. They looked cool. And I could do with a mouse with higher resolution as well, as I can cover more screen real-estate with as little wrist movement, and hence fatigue, as possible. For the keyboard, I wanted one with more accessible special shortcut keys than the current one. My desktop (like in wooden furniture) has a sliding pad for keeping the keyboard and I don't always extend it to the fullest. So the top-row special shortcut keys were seldom used. I also want the keyboard to be comfortable for 24/7 coding and gaming. So a palm-rest is compulsory. Initially I wanted a white keyboard as I am quite a nocturnal (read: 24/7) computer user. But, the model I came to like (more for it's cost-effectiveness than the drool-factor) looked not quite 'neat' in white. So I embraced the black one instead.

Next, there's the issue of chorded and non-chorded 'mouse devices'. (courtesy microsoft support. I didn't know if it was mice or mouses.). I've never tried a cordless mouse. I didn't know if they would be practical, as in
- battery life (how long before I have to recharge),
- range (I hear bluetooth ones can have a large enough range),
- orientation(u know, without the tail that I was used to),
- latency (I've heard ppl in forums talking about a noticeable lag in high speed fps games)
- etc (?)

So, after much online and offline window shopping, I bought an iBall Laser mouse. Like the one below:

Pretty neat, IMHO. And my HOs are freakin' damn good :p

Being a laser mouse, it works on the principle of 'Laser Interferometry'. Based on what I can put together, a laser mouse basically splits a single beam of laser and bounces one beam on the mouse-pad surface and the other onto a standard reflector assembly. When the beams are recombined, they form an interference pattern. An interference pattern is formed because of constructive and destructive interference of light waves. This pattern changes based on the path length of one beam. No prizes for guessing that it is the beam that went out of the mouse. Depending on the laser's wavelength and the quality of the sensor, it seems that you can monitor movements as small as few nanometers! Imagine the cursor moving accross the screen just because a clump of atoms moved under the mouse!(yeah, I am exaggerating.) In any case, the interferometer used in our 'mouse devices' are dirt cheap ones [link], so no worry.

According to the iballonline website, this mouse features:

• a 1600cpi (counts per inch) laser which, I am told, is 30 times better than my old optical mouse. This helps very much if u have a large screen resolution and frequently run out of mouse pad space to move that cursor accross the screen.

• 6700 frames/sec scan rate gives you great control over the mouse cursor's position. This is especially important in intense online FPS gaming sessions, where it's virtually a matter of your mouse's speed that determines whether you ar your enemy gets headshot.

• Upto 20 Gs of acceleration recognized. This too aids in moving that cursor where you want.

• Laser interferometry's resolution is so high that the mouse can see bumps where you cannot. This means that you can use even your ordinary opaque mirror or glass sheet as mouse pad!

• The mouse also features 6 buttons: 3 normal buttons, 2 butons on the side for 'forward' and 'backward' navigation (in browsers, itunes, etc) and one MS Office shortcuts button. This last button displys a circle of shortcuts for a fixed number of tasks. I am not so sure whether OO.org users will be pleased though as I was not able to change the list of office icons displayed. When u click this 6th button inside one of the MS Office apps supported, you will get a different set of shortcuts. There is an utility provided for changing this shortcut list though. Here's a couple of screenshots of the shortcut lists; first is the generic one and the next is the one you will see inside MS Word.

The mouse, being as radical as it is, needs some getting used to at first:
The first thing to get over is the fact that, your mouse is a *very* twitchy little creature that is over-enthusiastic to go to wherever you want it to. It might make you think of your previous mouse a stuborn mule. But all the lightning response can get to you, as you need to allow some slack for your 'positioning muscle' 's waver. So in desktop modes, you may be better off scaling down the sensitivity a bit. Else you will find yourself overshooting your target. You can max the sensitivity before starting a game.
The second issue is a bit more of a complaint. Even with a very high resolution mouse like this, you will often find that you need to "lift and drop" the mouse to the center of the mouse pad. But with this mouse, the laser's range is a bit too high, which effectively increases the "lift height" during such operations. The manufacturer can amend this situation. I know this because, the logitech lazer mouse devices used to suffer from this very same issue. Now they have the issue no more.
The mouse cost me Rs.725 after a quick haggle from Rs.780. But a forum friend told me that his friend had bought it for Rs.600 :( I am no good at bargainig.....barganing....whatever.

Keying the (i)tunes:
Coming to my new keyboard, there isn't much to say. Not that it isn't good. I love my new keyboard, but it isn't exactly new technology. Here's my keyboard's profile. And here's a photo of it which I was able to google up:

I really like the multimedia buttons on it as I always run iTunes in the background. It used to be tough, for example, to move to the next song if I wasn't in the mood for the current song, or if I wanted to pause the song when I answer the phone or door. The volume control is also god-sent as my speaker unit usually involves a bit of a stretch to reach.Now I can just minimize iTunes to system tray and be working in Visual Studio or in 3D Studio Max and still be able to control iTunes as if it were on the foreground! It seems impossible to think that I lived without these facilities for so long. But I have to mention that, sometimes, the keyboard seems to be unable to find the iTunes window to send the api calls to. But after I bring the itunes window to the front once, the issue dissolves.

There are a variety of other shortcut keys, as you can see, and they are totally configurable. Absolute control indeed. The function keys are actually 'dual-function' keys (heh). By default, the function keys behave as shortcuts for various word processing and email related tasks like undo, redo, new, open, close, reply, forward, send, spell, save and print. To turn this upside down world the right side up, press the F-Lock toggle key and you get back your old Function key functionality. Interestingly, the Scroll-Lock LED is missing. In its place is an LED to indicate to you the state of the F-Lock key. Who cares? I can truthfully say that I never used scroll-lock, except to check if the LED glowed, perhaps.


My next keyboard?
Assuming this keyboard lasts for more than a year, I would like to buy the new Microsoft keyboard with built-in zoom slider and other cool features. But I would not say no to this drool-inducing piece of gadget, the Optimus, too. Take a look:

Drab? I see that you under-estimate the optimus. You see, the Optimus has an OLED key surface. It means that, not only can you change a key's function via software, you can actually change the key's display (color, font, image, animated icon) too! Now, it's no longer drab, is it? And, you've got to love that extra block of colorful keys.

Here's the optimus in Quake 3 mode :p~

Here's a look at the colorful block:

For the money-minded:
Microsoft Multimedia keyboard = Rs.1050
iBall Laser Precise mouse = Rs.725