Second ammendment

Justices Rule For Individual Gun Rights

I don’t know what to think of this. On one hand, my libertarian leanings make me think that gun-control is wrong; the civilians should be able to carry out a armed revolt against the government. It is admirable that the United States had such a radical/revolutionary clause in their constitution. On the other hand, guns in the hands of people just doesn’t make sense. People argue that guns in the hands of people who can’t use them responsibly gives gun-ownership a bad name. But when you live in Atlanta and hear of students getting mugged at gun-point (with a sawed-off shotgun no less), gun ownership seems just wrong. Guns probably made sense in the USA 200 years ago but it doesn’t make any sense in the present day to me. It is an antiquated idea that should be disposed off. Make love not war Perhaps my libertarian friends can disabuse me of my notions.

Corporate talk

Paul Buchheit’s list of corporate values:

- Don’t be evil

- Don’t be stupid

- Change the world

- Make a bunch of money

Geek Learnings of Unix for make benefit glorious head of kunal

One of the best things about being a grad student is the fact that currently I have 3 machines at my disposal. Three linux machines have really brought out the Unix geek in me. I will try to document some cool tips that I have grokked from the interwebs. Without much ado, here are some learnings -

1. Coloured grep

Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before? This should be a standard IMHO. Just invoke grep with the option –color=tty for a coloured output. I have created an alias for this and put it in my .bashrc.

alias grep='grep --color=tty'

2. SSH

With multiple computers at your disposal, SSH is a necessity. One great feature of SSH is the ability to authenticate using public key. Not only is this method more secure than passwords, but it is also painless.

This page on Debian administration explains how easy it is to set up public key authentication.

3. Screen

I am a complete newbie to screen but it seems like an awesome tool. Screen is a great way to have persistent command line sessions. If you want to reconnect to your work terminal from your laptop or another machine, screen is just the solution. screen -dr is a real savior.

But Why?

I am a big fan of open standards and open source in general. As a consequence, I get a lot of questions like “Why would anyone give away valuable software for free?”

Boost provides an excellent answer:

Businesses and other organizations often prefer to have code developed, maintained, and improved in the open source community when it does not contain technology specific to their application domain, because it allows them to focus more development resources on their core business.

Individuals contribute for the technical challenge, to hone their technical skills, for the sense of community, as part of their graduate school programs, as a way around geographic isolation, to enhance their employment opportunities, and as advertisements for their consulting services. There are probably as many reasons as there are individuals. Some of the apparently individual contributions come from employees of support companies with contracts from businesses or other organizations who have an interest in seeing that a library is well-maintained.

While it isn’t very difficult to imagine why open source software works, it is much harder to explain why Wikipedia works as there are fewer incentives at play. Very few infact. But wikipedia still works and it serves as an excellent starting point for finding information about absolutely anything. Maybe it is the sense of giving back to the community that makes it work or maybe something else. I can’t put my finger on what makes it work. The following joke I think sums up the mystery of wikipedia perfectly

The problem with Wikipedia is that it never works in theory, it only works in practice!

Linkin Park = rock ?

It seems Linkin Park is hugely popular in India. At least thats what Google Music Trends says. There is even someone called Mithoon in the top 20 songs in the rock genre! I surely hope that this is not representative of the average music listener in India.

Now I know why

When Dell started offering Ubuntu Linux on their computers recently, people were surprised. So was I. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux was also vary when Dell initially put the idea of offering some Linux distribution on their computers. So, when Dell actually started selling the computers, everyone was pleasantly surprised.

I think I know why Dell is offering Linux. Read this. Michael Dell uses Ubuntu on his laptop! Just proves that anyone who uses a good Linux distribution will become an instant fan and will start evangelizing

Of course, it is entirely possible that Michael Dell installed Linux after they decided to put it on their machines to test it, but I am happier with the other explanation.

Wake up and smell the Java!

Sun open sources Java. Wohoo!

That too under GPL! Now, we can expect faster Java and easier integration into Linux.

Ahh! That one

I love Calvin & Hobbes. I love the philosophical undertones in many of the comic strips created by the sublime genius of Bill Waterson. Many times it so happens that I want to go back and read a particular strip. Inspite of living in an age where finding information on obscure topics is a mindless task, unfortunately finding a particular comic strip is almost impossible for many reasons. Thankfully, I found just the right tool to do my bidding.

http://www.transmogrifier.org/ch/comics/search.cgi

Update: Another C&H search engine (thanks to Anish) http://reemst.com/calvin_and_hobbes/stripsearch

Linux and the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel design process
Read Greg KH’s talk on the Linux kernel here.

Slashdot moderator!!!

I have finally arrived!  Today while reading a slashdot article, I came across this message:

You have moderator access and 5 points (expire on 2006-07-25). Welcome to those of you just joining: please read the moderator guidelines for instructions.

I have done some meta moderation for slashdot before but I am getting the ‘privilege’ of moderating the great forums of slashdot for the first time. It seems that they are offering moderator access to almost all users nowadays.

Sometimes I think I get insane amount of pleasure from the most idiotic things. Ahh, well …