Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

That the more time you spend earning a living, the less time you get to live!

This is another killer combination :) Ever since shifting to a new campus and giving up my old machine, I was desperate to have a working linux on my machine. One attempt at installing it ended up in the bootsector of the harddrive getting corrupted and me losing valuable time which I had to make up by doing overtime. Earlier I thought that it was Linux and Lilo that screwed up the hard-drive, and I got a few ugly looks. But a few other machines have also faced problems, so I'm out of the woods now. Anyway, coming back to the point, I found something called coLinux on our internal community portal. Its something like VMWare, but its open source and works much better. So I installed and configured it. Then I downloaded a debian root image (it needs a root image to work with and I need debian) and presto, I have a working linux running parallel to my windows. The default boot gives a console prompt and it has a another windows command prompt associated with it. I have a phobia of a c...

Here is me in a snap on the KDE website. This one is during the inauguration ceremony of LB 2004. http://ktown.kde.org/~wheeler/images/linux-bangalore-2004/dsc01027.jpg

This was the second time I had been to the Euphoria concert, this first time being in Mood-I in IITB. It was more about hearing live music than anything else. I would have gone even if it had been some other decent band. The thing about live music is, even a mediocre piece sounds good. I'm beginning to belive that the widespread availability of digital music is really killing these live shows. And music is losing, because the recorded versions are not the real thing. The show started a good hour and a half late. But the quality of music was very good. As I said, there is something about live music that makes me like it much more than the same music played on a music player or radio. Not to mention the atmosphere that is present during a live concert of a famous band as Euphoria. They played their trademark numbers and a couple of rock numbers too and had the crowd singing and dancing to their tunes throughout. Unfortunately, their concert was cut short by the police a 11pm, just wh...

Plans are brewing up. Something big lies ahead of us. X-ite is doing really well and we have come pretty far from where we started. But all things have a saturation point. Perhaps X-ite has hit it. Perhaps there is a lot that can still be done with it. But as we keep exploring the unknown seas of perl script goodies and the hazardous rock cliff shores of Xt, we are beginning to see shorelines all around us. It seems like a time to move to newer seas. But what we have in mind is almost as big as a Captain Cook voyage as compared to what we have been doing so far. Its a humongous task to say the least. One step at a time. The first task is going to be to agree upon a good design.

After a loong time I got my hands dirty with some ugly looking C code. Managed to add in a new feature in x3270 in pretty quick time! Feels good, really good.

The next thing that I remember is Homyar shaking me awake the next morning. I was feeling much better and all the exhaustion seemed to gone away. Good thing too, because I was scheduled to give my talk in three hours. The talk before ours was on Gambas (Gambas is mostly basic). Gambas is supposed to be a clone of VB. I dont know how good it really is, but the speaker managed to create a movie player and its RPM package for Suse in three minutes flat. And yes, everythign worked absolutely fine. After that was my talk. There were about 10 people in the hall to listen to us. Out of them, one old fellow kept insisting that working on Mainframes is a horrowing experience and that we had really done a tremendous job in making life easier for other mainframe programs. I can't believe that Abhay and I actually argued with that fellow in favour of mainframes for a while. We met Rajesh (from Infosys) out there. He was one of the audience. All our efforts bearing fruit in Infosys have been la...