Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

May 10, 2009

Watched the new Star Trek movie today

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:11 PM

Finally watched the new Star Trek Movie today. Wanted to watch it since the day it came out but for some stupid reason the movie distributors are on strike so no new movies have been released in India for the past 1 month and there is no end in sight so far. 🙁

Anyways, I liked the movie.

BTW: The rest of the post might contain spoilers so if you haven’t seen the movie I recommend that you don’t read the rest of the post.

Not going to discuss much of the movie as it will probably spoil it for some. But still. you have been warned.

The first few minutes of the movie didn’t really make sense but after that the movie started picking up. What I found strange was that the Star Fleet decided to send the cadets to actual starships even though they weren’t trained. Where was the rest of the StarFleet? Why did they have to send the cadets to a planet that was being attacked and not the actual fleet?

Also at the end of the movie, how did Kirk go straight to being a Captain from a Cadet? What happened to the ranks in the middle? What about the rest of them, shouldn’t they also have gotten similar rank boosts?

Anyway, all said and done it was a decent movie and not the disaster I was expecting. Definitely better than the last two movies.

– Suramya

May 7, 2009

Finally Voted today

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:39 PM

After ~10 years (2 elections) of never being in the country when the elections were held I finally was in town during the elections and voted. 🙂

We got up at 8am and went to the sector 44 community center that was the local polling booth. There weren’t a lot of people there at the time (only about 7-8) but it was still early as the voting started at 7am.

Security wise the elections was decent. I don’t know how secure the machine itself but I don’t think its possible easily for one person to enter more than one vote (which used to happen with paper votes). Now when a person enters their vote a loud buzz would sound telling people that a vote had been cast. So if a person tried entering multiple votes they would first have to figure out how to switch the machine back on after a vote had been cast (It is activated by a guy sitting outside who verifies your ID) then they would have to disable the buzzer that sounds when votes are cast.

Total time to vote, about 30 mins. This includes the time to drive there and back with a stop to buy groceries on the way back.

– Suramya

May 5, 2009

My experience using a system with 378MB of RAM

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:29 PM

My laptop charger died so I have been using my old desktop for a while now at home. This is a 1 GHz machine with 350MB of RAM running Debian. At first I was a bit worried that the system wouldn’t support my working habits because of the low RAM but while using it I have realized that Debian works great with ~378MB of RAM. Obviously the system is not as responsive as it would be with 1GB of RAM but its definitely usable.

Actually it works fine with 250MB also, as my 128 MB RAM chip died I had to take it out and I could still use the system with a single 250MB chip. This is with Firefox (with upto 8-10 tabs), Thunderbird, uTorrent (using wine), Konqueror and Konsole (multiple sessions) running. I could even watch videos without issues. Though a couple of times I did have to close Firefox when viewing a video because the video would take ages to startup.

The main issue I had during this time was with Firefox. I found that I would have to restart it after using it for a while (day or so) or when I went to a page with a lot of flash. It used an average of about 130MB of RAM on my system. At times it went up to 60% usage on 378MB (according to top). [Don’t feel like calculating it right now]

Flash was a pain during this time. Pages with a lot of Flash slowed the system down to a crawl. So it looks like a lot of the memory leakage/excessive memory use in Firefox has to do with the Flash plugin in use.

If this machine was running XP or any other flavor of windows apart from 98/95 etc it would have been completely unusable. I did try booting into windows XP on this system to do some OCR (I can’t seem to find a good OCR client in Linux) but the system was pretty much unusable with about 2-5 second wait while opening windows etc.

My usage is a lot more intensive than most regular users so for a normal user Linux will be even more responsive. I mean does average Joe have 10 Tabs open at the same time while OpenOffice is converting a 95 MB document to HTML? (Don’t ask. It was a PDF converted to .doc which I needed in html) Oh and I usually listen to music when I work so Amarok was also running in the background at the time.

BTW, in case you are wondering I am running KDE v3.5.10 so its not an old version and most of the effects are still on (Except for the transparent panel, which I find annoying)

Another thing I learnt was that USB transfers take longer if you have low RAM for some reason. Atleast they do when you are using a USB pendrive, my external harddisk seems to work with the same speed even with low RAM.

So if you have an old machine, don’t throw it. Install Linux on it and donate it to someone or use it as a extra server or something.

– Suramya

PS: I have finally upgraded the RAM on this system to 1GB so it works even better. 🙂

April 23, 2009

Cooking and me

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:52 PM

Most of my friends know that cooking and me don’t go well together. Its not that I can’t cook, just that I tend to get distracted or get lazy and just order out. Infact the main thing I am good at during cooking is chopping stuff up including onions (They don’t make my eyes water) so…

A couple of years ago Surabhi and Vinit were on their way home so they called me to ask me to start boiling rice so that they could make something when they got back home. So I got the instructions over the phone and put the rice on the stove and went to my room to work on the computer and then completely forgot about the rice. Surabhi and Vinit got stuck in traffic and were delayed for a few hours.

About an hour or two later I thought that I smelled smoke. At first I ignored it thinking I was imagining things. Then I thought maybe the neighbours were burning something. Finally after about 15 mins I suddenly realized that I had put the rice to boil. Ran to the kitchen and found it completely filled with smoke. Turns out that all the water had boiled away, then the rice got heated, got burnt and finally was converted to charcoal.

I had to open all the windows in the apartment and setup fans to get rid of the smoke. To make it all the more fun, this happened in the winter so the temperature outside was below zero (probably in the -5 to -15 deg C range) so the apartment became freezing cold. When Surabhi and Vinit got home we made an unspoken agreement that they would never again ask me to cook without supervision.

That all said, I do know how to make sandwiches and Omelettes. But prefer to avoid cooking.

By now you must be wondering why all this talk about cooking all of a sudden. Right? I was browsing the web and saw the following comic strip at Sinfest and it reminded me of the above incident and led to this post:

Now that I am back in India having to cook for myself is no longer an issue. Having a maid cook for you rocks. 🙂

– Suramya

April 21, 2009

Common misconception about the kind of books people read

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 3:12 AM

A common misconception that people have is that while boys/men read ‘dirty’ magazines/books girls don’t do that and I have heard loads of comments about this from my friends, online in book forums etc. From what I have seen this is utter nonsense. Yes, guys read dirty magazines but atleast they are known and clearly visible/marked as such. Girls tend to hide their dirty magazines/novels under the title of ‘Romance novels’.

You are probably wondering, how could I possibly know this, right? No. I don’t read Romance novels. However I love Paranormal books, unfortunately a lot of the paranormal books are actually Paranormal Romances which has given me a lot closer look at the Romance novel genre that I ever wanted. I am not saying all these paranormal romances are bad, just that some of them are very explicit and some don’t have any story at all, just sex.

The last few Anita Blake novels by Laurell K Hamilton are a good example. In another one of the books I read, the summary of the book was awesome: Something about demons appearing randomly in this one village and a hunter who would go out and kill them. Can’t remember the author’s name or the name of the book but it sounded really interesting. When I actually read the book I found out that out of 100 pages 80 pages were descriptions of really explicit sex and the remaining 20 pages was the actual story line. Needless to say I was pretty irritated with the book. Other examples are the Dark Realm series by Delilah Devlin, books by Lydia Parks etc.

I have no issues with people reading erotica. Its their choice. But don’t label erotica as “Paranormal Romance” or Romance and then act all superior/snotty and pretend that you are reading something different.

This blog is read by people of all ages otherwise I would post an extract from one of these books. If you have some time read one of these books, then come and tell me that they are not porn novels masquerading as “Romance” novels.

This was something I had been meaning to blog about for a long time and I have finally gotten around to doing it. Yay Me 🙂

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 20, 2009

Choice. What the ‘Desktop wars’ are all about

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 4:55 AM

I was reading an article on Linux Journal titled “I am switching back to Windows” and my reaction was “ok. So?” I am tired of reading articles about how switching to Linux rocks or how windows is much better/or worse. Personally I think people should use whatever they are most comfortable with and stop bothering the rest of us.

I personally like Linux, have been using it almost constantly since 1999. My sister likes Vista (which I really hate). That’s her choice and I am fine with it. I like the way linux works and if I don’t like something about it or some software on it I can change it or download something new.

But that doesn’t mean that I think Windows is bad. I had to switch back to it for a year when I worked with a company that did .NET development and I liked it. Actually I got used to it, which is pretty much the same thing.

When I switched jobs after that I decided to switch back to Linux and it was a pain, mainly because I had forgotten a lot of Linux and had to search for a lot of stuff (This is where keeping notes/blog entries helped) plus it was the first time I was installing it on a laptop and that caused some issues. (Mainly with the wireless). That’s the main problem with switching to Linux. People are used to of working on Windows and that makes it hard for them to use Linux because the system doesn’t react the way they are used to.

But then again it was my choice to switch and that’s the whole idea behind the Linux philosophy (atleast as I see it) You have the ability to make a choice (And you get free stuff. Which is always good 😉 ). You don’t like Windows fine. Try Linux. You don’t like Redhat, try Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora or Slackware or Linux Mint. If that’s not to your liking try a Mac or try Solaris. The choices are endless and that’s what makes life interesting. Choice. Do I read this book or that? Do I drive to work or work from home? Do I wear formals or casuals? Do I use KDE or Gnome?

You don’t like Linux based software use Windows software on Linux. For example now even though I use Linux I still use some Windows based software like EditPlus. Its one of the best editors I have used: Its fast/simple and does exactly what I want it to. Before you start sprouting off about how I should try Linux based editors and not contaminate Linux with Windows based software, let me tell you. I have used Emacs/Vi/Kate/Keditor/Pico/nano. Vi is awesome for working on the command line to make a quick edit, but I don’t like it for extended work. Emacs is very powerful but is overkill for the stuff I need to do. The rest are too limited. So I use EditPlus. Plus I like having the same set of software on both my Linux and Windows systems. Makes life simpler when I have to switch between the two.

Ah well, this is all for now. BTW, if the above post didn’t make sense then I blame it on the solar radiation and not on my inability to type sense at 4:45 am 😉

Cya.

– Suramya

April 13, 2009

First post from a phone

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:49 PM

This post is the first time i am posting to the blog from my phone. First impression, Opera mini rocks. It is very fast and responsive. Secondly I wish that this phone had a QWERTY keyboard. Typing on this keypad is hard.

I am currently at Nidhika’s wedding where she is getting ready so i have been kicked out of the room for obvious reasons. So i am passing time by surfing the web on my phone.

This is all for now as i am getting tired of typing on this keypad.

– Suramya

April 11, 2009

Limiting sales/downloads to a particular platform sucks

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 1:43 AM

As I mentioned earlier in a post I have recently started listening to audio books (mainly because at that time I was feeling too sick to read or work on the computer). Since then I have read(heard) a couple of them and most of them were pretty good. For me mp3 is the best medium as I can use it on any platform i.e. I can listen to them on my computer/phone/CD player in car.

A couple of days ago I was going through John Scalzi’s blog and I saw a note that METAtropolis (A novel he edited) had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was available for a free download at Audible.com (Still available for free as of 11th April 2009) I decided to go ahead and download it. This was because
a) The book sounded very interesting
b) It was free
c) The book sounded interesting.

So I went ahead and registered on the site and tried to download the book. I must have spent a good 1/2 hour on the site trying to download it on my Linux system but was unable to do so. At first the stupid site kept trying to force me to install a windows program on my system even when I told it that I wanted to listen to it as an MP3 or on a CD player. Then finally I somehow convinced the system to allow me to download but alas I still didn’t get to listen to the book. What I got was a 300 byte file with a weird name and a .py extension containing a long text string that looked like part of a URL.

Ultimately I gave up. If I had paid for the book I would have been really upset. I still fail to understand why they want me to download a program on my system before letting me download a mp3 file that can be played on any system.

In any case I don’t think I will be downloading/purchasing any more books from them in the near future.

– Suramya

April 7, 2009

Are we there yet?

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 11:29 PM

Its that time of the week when you start missing the weekend and start waiting for the next one. Or in other words:

– Suramya

April 6, 2009

Nice advertisements by Shoppers Stop

Filed under: Humor — Tags: , — Suramya @ 4:20 AM

Shoppers Stop has some really nice advertisements. So I took pics and wanted to share them with you. Although what they have to do with Shoppers Stop is still a mystery to me but they are certainly eye catching and memorable so I guess they server their purpose.

Shopperstop advertisements

I had blogged about their advertisements earlier.

– Suramya

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