Just another blog!

Well, here is the post that most of my friends would have tired hearing me repeat. However, there really are no good OSs out there that can truly satisfy my requirements. So, a course that I am currently completing discusses the POSIX API, and the UNIX system. For trying out any of the concepts in the course, I would need to have at least a Linux installation. But which one should I choose? I require my Linux installation to be friendly, so GNOME is a must. Moreover, it must have support for easily installing non-free software, like Adobe Reader, EAGLE, flash, MP3 plugins etc. It should be stable and functional, and should be fast, efficient, and better than Windows :) in terms of speed and power management. Naturally, there are three contenders. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE. Ubuntu Debian based, Ubuntu seems to be the distro of choice for many who are switching from Windows to Linux. It has many features that facilitate an easy migration, especially ability to shrink Windows partitions, t...

Hi again! So, with a new blog, I suppose that there is a lot to learn. The thing that I learnt with the first two posts was that the compose window of this particular blog in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. As soon as I understood this, I switched to the plain HTML editor. Why do I do this? What is the harm in WYSIWYG? The simple answer is that document markup languages like HTML or LaTeX define the structure of the document which is invariant of how it is rendered. The document may be printed on A4 paper, or posted on the web, or viewed as a PDF file. Moreover, if anyone wants the headings to be in a different font, or a different size, the style may be changed, but the document structure remains the same. The main difference between WYSIWYG editors and markup languages is the separation of document content from the formatting. Take the example of a website that I have created. The website uses HTML for markup and CSS for style. Now, if I want to change the layout ...

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself. A powerful quote from Bob Dylan. It reminds me of Billy Collins. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. Recent analysis in the reading literature class got me thinking about this point. Are we really doing justice to the piece of literature that we are reading by analyzing it? Or are we not doing justice to what the author had planned for us. In our constant process of finding meaning in everything, we tend to find a little too much meaning in everything. So much that sometimes I feel that most of us are like the portrayal of John Nash in the movie, A beautiful mind. Of course, we do not imagine that the CIA has engaged us to find hidden messages in newspapers, but we do tend to try find meaning in everything. Be it in the behaviour of our friends, or in any pic...

There are good blogs, and there are bad. And there are some that you cannot keep from thinking about. The blog that you are reading falls under the latter category. Written by an extremely obnoxious person, this blog promises to talk about things that the author feels strongly about, whether it is about Facebook’s changing privacy policies, or about a visit by Saint iGNUtius (of the holy church of Emacs) to his college, or about the fact that he could not install Ubuntu on his computer, because of the existence of the windows pagefile that prevented him from resizing his partition. In short, it promises to be like any other blog, completely useless. This is apparent from the title of the blog itself - Just another blog! The author believes himself to be a brilliant programmer, supportive of the FOSS movement, from the cliched way he has used the 80’s software joke of recursive names. Frankly who cares if GNU is not UNIX? I mean, ANU too is not UNIX. I mean, I agree that recursion may h...