My Tryst with Humanity

Now don't go off imagining all sorts of lofty idealistic trysts..
On Wednesday, Adbul gave me the much anticipated Ubuntu Linux distribution. Much anticipated because this linux was supposed to be a breeze to install and use. It was reputed to recognize all graphics and sound at the first install without much of configuration mumbo-jumbo typically associated with other Linux Distro installs.

The install started out with no special incidents. I already had a dual boot windows 2000/Debian PC (with the sound a little broken on the debian side). So chose the debian root partition for installing the root for ubuntu also. All proceeded well until the parition table screen - here came the first dilemma - there were two options for maintaining existing partitions - 'Do not use' and 'Keep data and use paritition' - I was not sure, if 'Do not use' would leave my existing partition undisturbed or would it remove it from the table and was confused what to use. With Abdul's expert guidance via the phone managed to cross this first hurdle successfully. I had to leave it as 'Do not use'.Here I made my possible first mistake - chosing to be on he bleeding edge of linux, I chose to have ReiserFS for my root partition. Its a new file system, arguably better than ext3 or ext2.

After asking me a few more basic things, it proceeded to install everything under the sun. One good/bad thing was that there was no package selection like the ones you would typically get with other distros. After completing the initial copy of the files, it asked me what boot loader I wanted to use - the recent GRUB or the tried and tested LILO. Again, out of my desire to be always on the latest I chose grub. Now my parttion table is somewhat like this:

C Drive		/dev/hda0	My windows system parition
D Drive		/dev/hda1	NTFS
Linux Root		/dev/hda2	ReiserFS
Ext partition		/dev/hda3
	Linux Swap	/dev/hda4
	E drive	/dev/hda5	NTFS

and for installing grub in other distros, there will be an option called, install the boot loader to MBR or the first sector of the Root Partition. Here I had to give the drive name on which to install Grub - So I gave /dev/hda3(which is my linux parition,as per Grub's Naming standards - which starts from 1 compared to linux's standard 0 based) as the one to install Grub on. Now here comes the bouncer - It just said 'Unknown error in installing Grub to /dev/hda3'. Much like a M$ error message - Technically correct but useless otherwise. I still have no idea what caused it to flunk out like that. Then being the less-confident geek I am, I doubted my mathematical skills and proceeded to reinstall Grub on /dev/hda2 (because of the confusion regarding 0 based or 1 based for the partition naming) and the bloody thing installed fine on my D drive, which is a NTFS partition, which is a strict no-write for Linux (because it does not have the software yet). OK..Cool I thought and proceeded with restarting my system to continue the install towards installing the packages.

On restarting, my bootpart image for booting Linux didnot work and worse still when I chose to boot into windows, it gave the very famous 'Unable to find %SYSTEMROOT%/ntoskrnl.exe'..Please insert a system disk error. My palms started sweating and heart started palpitating more. Worse still it was before 2100 hrs and my manager was sitting behind me. Oh...Did I forget to mention that I was doing this on my work PC.. ;-)It looked like I had properly shot myself on the foot..Similar incidents have happened earlier with my work PC, but during those crises, I had my working Linux install to fall back on, from which I would take backup of all necessary data and proceed with reimaging my system with the official system base image.

Then after a strong cup of piping hot black tea, proceeded with my plan of system recovery..In between, I had to field a couple of questions from my worried manager regarding a nasty hot bug. Then I reinstalled ubuntu again and this time, installed Grub on the hard disk MasterBootRecord(MBR). Now when I proceeded to restart my PC, Thank God, it booted into linux fine, and a small flicker of happiness amidst all this tension, the graphics and sound came up the very first time.

Ok..Good, stepped out of the mess, thought I. Not so fast, boomed God. When I tried to boot into windows again, it did boot up fine but for all practical purposes my D Drive was lost beyong hope. Trying to open D: gave another useless 'help' message. Now I understood the full impact of what had happened, about 25GB of precious data gathered over the years was lost beyond hope, or so it seemed. GRUB had installed on to my D drive corrupting its intial structure. The God of our times, Google helped me find some promising leads one which actually managed to save all my data. It was the NTFS Reader which managed to read all data from my lost D drive and with some disk space on Loan from my team mate Bhushan, I managed to recover all of the data onto his PC. This piece of software is simple yet powerful, it managed to recover data and instead of correcting it insitu, it allows siphoning over the network, thus decreasing chances of any other screwups. So by 0200 hrs, I managed to move all data out, reformat my D: into NTFS and move some essential data back to my D Drive.

When the long running copy was going on I didnot sit idle - I managed to watch the 1969 Italian Job Movie(1969, being the year in which it was released, as opposed to the 2004 ripoff version). The movie starred Michael Caine - the second on of him which I have seen (first being the widly popular 'Blame it on Rio'). A nice movie, relying more on the histrionic talents of the actors rather than the technical wizardry, more common in recent movies.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, sums up my tryst with humanity (It seems, Ubuntu means 'Humanity to Others'). In course of trying to post this, I encountered another nasty DNS resolving issue related to Windoze...but I'll save it for later.

Tuesday Mornings...

Today was a Bharat Bandh. Went to office at the usual time and came back at the usual time, and would probably sleep at the usual time. But the amount time spend online has increased...yes..earlier after coming back from office, I used to watch TV and read some novel and then go to sleep...now as soon as I come from office, I go online and thats it...the only thing recognize after that is probably my backache after about 3 hours.BTW, the bandh was called to protest against the arrest of Kanchi Seer Sri Jayendra Saraswati...gues he didnot have many followers ;-)

Continuing my jEdit evangelism, the real nice thing is that you have so many useful plugins for doing everything without leaving jedit - fire up sqlplus, run a program (as in code-run-debug cycle) and even post to my blog. It also has a plugin called lazy8ledger (now,don't ask me the reason for this name), which is a small accounting software built on top of jedit. I am implementing it to handle/record my personal finances. My grandfather wanted me to meticulously maintain my accounts...so as in the Indian filmi tradtion, I am trying to fulfil his wish. One interesting albeit useful side effect of this is that I have come to realize how much money other people owe me. :-D That was really good and I realised, I'll have to be a Pathan(or Marwadi) for sometime, till I receive all my short term loan receivables.

Despite the hiding India got from a virtually unknown SouthAfrica team, we seem to be recovering well.Hopefully the fog would not spoil the game. This was the first time I came to know of a cricket match being delayed because of fog. Hehehe..The weather Gods must have been really angry.Think they were also planning to take part in the bandh and enforce it.Wonder who's doing all the yagnas. Not Sri Jayendra Saraswati I believe...

Well Folks, Good Night and tomorrow's a Tuesday morning...and I find it equally bad as Monday Mornings...

Lots of updates.

Lots of updates, In descending order of importance:

Got a cable internet connection to my house over the weekend. The logic being that I would now regularize my timings - and would not stay absurdly late in office (as I usually do). Fat Chance. A more observble offshoot may be more regular blogging.

When I took the 256 Kbps connection, I had visions of lightning fast downloads like the bullet train zipping past in one of the ISP commercials....After connecting the cable modem, and connecting to the Net, (with the added hassles of having a zonelabs firewall), my first download of jedit from sourceforge proceeded at a meager 20 kB/s...After much googling landed at a few speed test sites - www.toast.net and www.dslreports.com - the second one is a very good site. They enlightened me that the b in kbps means bits and the download speed which we typically see is measured in kB/s, KiloBytes per second...so my 256 kbps was after all a 35 kB/s line. But still the numbers didnot tally, some 15 kB/s still missing. On further reading found that, a 256 kbps line typically operates a 25 kB/s due to transmission losses in tcp/ip and the underlying ATM network... :-( and to top it, it has a 500 MB download limit. Still the connection is pretty fast (not as fast as I would like) and experienced hands like Abdul say that there is no way to cross 500 MB, if you dont indulge in P2P network clients...

Went home for Diwali and had a good time at home and visited all my favourite temples.

Jedit is one of the best and user friendly text editors I have used. With all the recent hullaballo about Firefox being 'the' browser and firefox evangelism, I think I will become an evangelist for jedit. and here is a big logo:

Get Jedit

Upgraded to jedit 4.2 at office and to my horror realised that it didnot have a jedit.exe for windows file association launching...then found that due to licensing issues or whatever, they have to remove it and as usual, a good samaritan had the work around for it - install a previous version of jedit (one with an .exe file) in the same directory and it would work fine.
Where would this world be if not for work arounds, eh?

Watched 7-G Rainbow Colony, the latest movie from Selvarghavan. Nice Movie, even if not very much believable in some parts. It was too melancholic for taste though. The songs were excellent though.(For my Andhra Readers(as if I have world wide audience), this is the same movie - '7 G Brindhavanamu Colony'). Yuvan Shankar Raja is becoming a force in Tamil Movie Music.

Read a very moving article about Chernobyl and its current status at www.kidofspeed.com. Don't be put off by the first page background...its a really good site with lots of pictures showing the ground reality in Chernobyl and the area affected by the disaster.

Almost forgot...I got promoted as a Project Lead!...

Ok Folks...its almost midnight and gotta sleep...its Monday Morning tomorrow.
ByE