LinuxLala’s Temple of Wisdom

That blog posts that begin as an extension of the post title make for quite an interesting read. Not surprisingly, I’m the only one who does this sort of a thing. I’ve done this quite often in the past, mostly in posts announcing one of my articles on Linux.com. For all the English teachers in the world, for all the books, guides, tutorials, howtos, documentation and help on grammar and syntax of any language, there seems to be no coherent writing-style for blogs.

The blogosphere, truly allows people to be unique. Some may argue that the speech patterns for each individual are unique as well. I, however disagree. If you focus your attention on random conversations, and at some point attempt to make some sense from it all, you’ll discover that you can always, with unnerving accuracy, group people into categories based on their speech pattern, their choice of connecting-words, the words they use most frequently and how they blend their native language into the sentences they are speaking in some foreign language.

The most common example of this, perhaps, is ‘yaar’, the desi word for friend. It’s also used as a connect-word and as something you use in a sentence to refer to friends or to finish off your expression of shock and/or surprise (come on yaar, what’re you saying yaar, stop this yaar).

So, if you are attentive enough, you can fairly accurately place people into various groups. And these groups can be age, work, education (where they studied), marital status, etc. Needless to say, you don’t need to hear a person to be able to place her in one of the two predominant groups: male and female. (OK, I apologize for this sorry-a$$ joke interrupting the interesting observation and breaking your concentration.)

Because of this lack of grammar or writing style for the blogosphere, people have absolute freedom to write whatever however. Yes, you read that right. People have the freedom to write whatever they want, and they can write it however they want. It’s not so simple with speech, since people learn to ape popular phrases and begin using catchwords just because everyone around them is. That’s why it’s so easy to tell what group a person belongs to. For instance, having never been to a college, I’ve always called a Samosa a Samosa. But, college kids in Delhi, don’t call it that. They have some other excuse of a name for it, which makes perfect sense to them and their group/peers, but is as alien for people like me to understand as the Vulcan salute.

Of course, you can group people into various sections based on their choice of clothes, music that they like, celebs they think are fashionable, their political orientation, etc. but there’s no fun in that. But, to be able to judge someone solely on their speech pattern is quite a talent.

So, at the end of the day, what’s the purpose of this post? Isn’t it obvious? I’m simply asking you to be more attentive!

Begin Disclaimer — I’m a Trek fan. I use vi. — End Disclaimer

Here’s an interesting question: do you change your nick every time you step away from your desk, when logged into any IRC channel or any other IM protocol? I mean, what if you’re only going to take a leak and come right back? That shouldn’t take long. It’s not a complicated procedure. And what if you’re planning a very short trip to the kitchen, the run-in, grab and get out kind, the whole premise of which is to make sure you’re not caught, by your wife/husband/mom/kid/brother/sister?

I for one, don’t change my nick for such trifles. Any time I change my nick to linuxlala-afk or set IM status to Away, you can rest assured I won’t be back, not in the near future in any case. When I take the pains to announce I’m going away, do you really expect me to finish things off quickly and get right back? No sireee, not me! When I go away, I stay away, for at least long enough to justify the nick change.

Unfortunately, any time I don’t change my nick and go away, I still take my sweet time to return. This is not always deliberate on my part. Most times what happens is that the short trip to the kitchen turns into a delightful and engrossing indulgence that craves company. So, anything I’m taking a bite of (biscuit, glass of juice, some other snack), I go around the house offering to everybody else. If they say yes, not only do I prepare it for them, I spend some quality time with them, discussing random tid-bits, for as is probably the case with all of you, my parents don’t IM. As a result, what was supposed to be a quick in and out operation, becomes a long break that just won’t end. What’s worse, not once during the long break do I feel guilty for not changing my nick as a service to others.

Anyway, I thought that was going to be the last example, but believe it or not, someone just rang the bell, and I had to run out to see who it was. Obviously I didn’t change my nick before I ran off. In case you’re curious, it was the errand boy from the local medicine shop here to drop off some of dad’s medicines. Since we live in a world where monetary exchange is an absolute must to buy anything, I spent the next few minutes hunting for cash to pay the fellow for the pills. If you think I once gave thought to anybody who might’ve been inconvenienced by me not changing my nick, you’ve not been paying attention to anything I’ve written in the first three grafs. Go back and reread my dear fellow.

As this was going to be a totally useless post from the word go, I don’t have anything further or meaningful to bring this post to a conclusion. You can continue to change your nick every time you move away from the keyboard, or you can be ruthless and carefree as I am. The choice is yours to make, because at the end of the day, there can be only two kinds of people who IM, those who change their nicks for trivial reasons and those who don’t. Take your pick and be proud.

I somehow managed to bribe Sayamindu into adding my feed to Planet Floss India. Yay! The details of the deal are for now locked away in a not-too-big chest hidden in a place frequented by the scarecrows.

I am, even as I type this, looking for a picture (to make up the hackergotchi) that wouldn’t put people to deep sleep upon seeing it (don’t ask me how I manage to do this, it’s a trick the scarecrows taught me). There are however plenty pics of mine on Flickr if you’re in a hurry. How’d these get there? I’m not supposed to throw names here, so all I’ll say is that some people are desperate to spread the horror around and it’s all their doing.

See you around the next blog post.

Cheers!

Update: So I messed up the post title. I spelled planet as plant. All a man can say at this time is: it wasn’t my fault. The scarecrows must’ve done it. Honest!

My latest article in now live on Linux.com. This time I talk about FSlint, a nifty little tool that helps you clean your filesystem by pointing out junk in the form of empty directories, corrupt symlinks, files with bad names, duplicate and temp files, and more.

Enjoy the article and clean up your systems.

Cheers!

That’s the title of my article about UberScript, the amazing XChat plugin. Ever since coming across UberScript, I’ve only heard great things about it. It really is a fantastic little tool that many people appreciate. Certainly makes my XChat experience more pleasant.

Enjoy the article and have fun with UberScript.

Cheers!

I wrote an article for Linux.com about the IRC meeting held on the 24th by the FSF Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab. The purpose of the meet was to address some of the recent FUD surrounding GPLv3 and also to answer any questions about it or the other new licenses.

GeekyBodhi submitted the article to Slashdot, and it got selected and was on t he main page yesterday! This is only my second article to be /. worthy. The last time too I was talking about GPLv3.

Enjoy the article people. It makes some things concerning GPLv3, such as Section 7 (additional terms) and Section 11 (patents) very clear. And in case you have some doubts about the license, please send them to licensing@fsf.org.

Cheers!

I’m immensely excited about Fedora 8. What excites me you ask. Well, I’ll tell you.

1. The “werewolf” release

Just about everybody and their kids nanny know by now that “werewolf” is one of the names in contention for Fedora 8. Spooky, did you say? Fantastic says I. It didn’t surprise me that werewolf was a contender for the release, knowing the naming process for Fedora (the name must be relevant and somehow associated with the past release). Fedora “moonshine” 7 and now Fedora “werewolf” 8. You now know my vote

2. Codec Buddy

This has been creating quite a buzz. It’s got me talking as well. Nicu Buculei blogged today how some people give up on Fedora because it doesn’t ship all the multimedia codecs out of the box. It’s sad but true. I’m sure Codec Buddy answers Fedora’s critics who’s only gripe with Fedora is multimedia.

3. Network Manager

Good news folks. After all the good work put into improving the Network Manager tool, you will now be able to experience such awesomeness.

4. IcedTea

Originally created by the Open Source Java team at Red Hat, IcedTea offers a modified GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) Firefox plugin and offers enhanced performance.

5. Improved Pirut

The graphical Add/Remove software tool now lets you enable/disable the software repositories thanks to the shiny “Edit Repositories” button.

Go Fedora!

My latest article on Linux.com discusses the fantastic Nautilus-actions extension for Nautilus.

There are literally dozens of plugins and extensions for Nautilus, the default file manager on the GNOME desktop environment, but there is just one that allows you to customize the Nautilus context menu items. The Nautilus-actions extension enables you to add customized entries to the context menu such that, when you right-click a file, the context menu will show options specific to that file.

The article was posted on LXer earlier today and now there’s another story that refers not only my article on Nautilus-actions but also a previous article.

Cheers!

So everybody over at Planet Fedora is running the brain test. Not that I blame them. It’s only 20 questions and so I too took the plunge. But while everybody else seems to have got a fairly decent response, here’s what answering the 20 questions yielded for me:

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 56%
Visual : 43%
Left : 61%
Right : 38%

No matter which side of your brain is dominant, M i n d W a r e can strengthen your emotional brain power by helping you understand how you feel about yourself.

Now what test do I take to determine whether I’m capable of deciphering this bull.

This post is not going to discuss my harrowing experience of staying up late one night. Rather, it’s about how staying up late frequently over a long period of time has affected my sleeping pattern.

The story starts some four years ago. I had just passed out from high school and started grad school. Staying up late so I could study and do things that I love (read: investing time in Linux) soon became a habit. Around that time, I would usually hit the bed at 01:00 or 01:30 and wake up around 09:00. This continued for about a year or so. I used to however, occasionally stay up till 03:00 and 04:00 wasn’t such a big surprise either.

I then changed my sleeping pattern to a far more flexible state: staying up for as long as was necessary and then catching up on my sleep during the day. This meant that I went to bed early in the morning and slept till about 11:00 or 13:00, or even later at times. This was however not a deliberate decision. I had for many months now been trying to bring my sleeping schedule back on track, but I failed at it miserably. You see, even if I went to bed at 23:00 or 01:00, I still couldn’t sleep till after 04:00 or 05:00. And that meant I would wake up around one or two in the afternoon.

Let me now tell you about more recent happenings. This is from about eight months ago. I was on a very acceptable schedule — getting up around 10:00 and hitting the bed a little after 00:00. I was still sleeping on average about nine hours a day, but as long as I wasn’t up all night I was at peace.

But out of the blue, for no reason at all, I just couldn’t sleep one night. So I went to bed at 7 A.M. Naturally, I woke up after lunch. This then became the routine. I would go to bed around mid-night (sometime sooner) and after struggling to find sleep, get up in the middle of the night and stay up all night, struggling to kill time. You see, at this point, I couldn’t do anything. I was tired, my mind wouldn’t work and so I couldn’t write anything. This continued for some weeks when I decided I just won’t go to sleep one day. So, on Sunday night I didn’t go to sleep, I couldn’t in any case. The whole of Monday was naturally quite a drag, but I somehow managed. I went to bed on Monday around eleven and peacefully got out of bed at 5 A.M. on a beautiful Tuesday morning. I felt fresh and I managed to get some work done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t sleep Tuesday night at all, so the whole of Wednesday was a drag, since I had decided against going to bed at seven in the morning. This pattern of sleeping every alternate day continued for about ten days after which my schedule had returned to normal.

I was going to bed before mid-night and getting up at five or five-thirty in the morning. Life was great.

Then, the work load increased and I was forced to stay up till midnight and even 01:00 at times to meet dead lines. I still however was getting up at no later than five-thirty, which meant on occasion I only got four hours of sleep at night. As is the case everywhere, change is the only constant. I was forced to work till two or three at night and that again meant my sleeping pattern was in turmoil. I don’t exactly recall what I was going through at that time, but I assure you life was hell.

A couple of months ago, I again did the sleeping on alternate nights to bring some order to my sleeping pattern. Magically, it worked again. I was back to getting up at five or five-thirty in the morning and I was getting about six-seven hours of sleep everyday.

But, it was not to be. Out of the blue, for no reason I can think of, I just couldn’t sleep one night. I stayed in bed however and finally found sleep around 5 A.M. Crap! I woke up around 2 P.M, having spent nearly 14 hours in the bed. This then became routine. I would go to bed early because I felt tired and couldn’t think straight, but was unable to get any sleep. I also tried the sleeping every alternate day routine, but that didn’t work: I was just so tired to keep it up and would always hit the bed by 8 or 9 A.M. As a result, I got up at 3 or 4 or even 5 P.M. at times. Life as I knew it was over.

Fortunately, I managed to turn things around once again, and I was again able to get up at 5:30 in the morning. Usually I would sleep till about 07:00 but on average I got up before 06:00. But for the past few weeks now, I’m back on the “can’t sleep after I hit the bed routine”. This despite my going to bed around mid-night.

Now, from these past four years, I’ve learned some important lessons, the most important of which is to not to mess up with your sleeping pattern. Now I know many people who stay up all night partying and what not, but I seriously can’t imagine how they manage it.

I should probably also mention at this point that I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. In a few more words, I’ve never smoked a cigarette and I’ve never even had a beer.

My current schedule, as of today is: I went to bed around 2 A.M. but couldn’t sleep till about 4 A.M. I then was vaguely aware of every sound around me till about 07:30. But from then till about 13:00 I was totally out, as if I was drugged.

So I woke up today at one-thirty P.M. and I’ve no clue when I’ll hit the bed again.

Just to make this narrative complete, let me also mention the time when I was on medication for cough/cold/fever etc. Most of the drugs to combat cough/cold as you know are sleep inducing. Any anti-allergy pill will typically knock you out for several hours. Even when I was taking these pills, I couldn’t sleep at night. That meant that even if I tried sleeping every other day, I didn’t get any peaceful sleep.

So, the purpose of this entire post is to urge everyone who reads this to not mess up their sleeping patterns. Try to get in bed and find sleep before mid-night and try to get up early in the morning. And do some exercise.

I’ve invested quite a bit into building my own gym, but with a sleeping pattern like this, I don’t know what a good time to eat and workout is!