Solid Smoke

I've a Windows-Linux dual boot setup. I've retained my Windows installation mainly for my mother who keeps resisting the transition to Linux (by 'Linux', I do definitely mean 'GNU/Linux'). Anyway, after Outlook Express choked on her mailbox (full of funny photos and PowerPoint presentations, baby snaps and all those valuable info emails), I have succeeded in porting her to Mozilla Thunderbird. Hoorray! Anyway, that's not the purpose of this post. I've been using POP to fetch my email (both from Yahoo and GMail) with Thunderbird. I'd like to use my email system from both Windows and Linux. So, I've been using a handy Thunderbird setup for the past few years. So, I thought of documenting it in case anybody finds it useful. This page says - 'Mozilla applications store your personal settings, added extensions and themes, and user data such as bookmarks, passwords, cookies and mail in a "profile"' . So, the trick in having your mai...

Just got back home from 'Kaminey'. I was tempted to give it a go after I heard Rajeev Masand on CNN-IBN had given it a 4/5 rating, and called it a 'MUFT-WATCH' (the protagonist in this movie has a speech impairment - he says F for S!). I say, IT IS NOT! The good It's different. The regular 'judwa bhai' formulae of Bollywood are not found here. So, regular viewers of Bollywood junk might quite like this one (I guess that's where the "awesome" reviews come from!) The casting and acting is great. Every single actor has done his/her job rather neatly. Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra have done really well. Even the other less important roles have been done pretty well. I liked the actor who played the drug lord 'Tashi'. The dialogues are very refined and provoke laughter without trying too hard. I couldn't notice and gangster slang (bc/mc) that's so typical of Hindi movies these days. The film is technically superb too - the visua...

കവിയുടെ ആശയം ഗ്രഹിച്ച് കാവ്യം രസിക്കാന്‍ കഴിയുന്നവനാണ് 'സഹൃദയന്‍' - ശബ്ദതാരാവലി എല്ലാ കഥകള്‍ക്കും ഒരു ഗുണപാഠമുണ്ടോ? പണ്ട് സ്കൂളില്‍ പഠിപ്പിച്ചിരുന്ന മിക്ക കഥകള്‍ക്കും ഒരു positive moral lesson ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നതായി തോന്നുന്നു. ഒരു പക്ഷേ ആ കഥകള്‍ പാഠപുസ്തകത്തില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെടുത്തേണ്ടുന്നതിനായ ഒരു അനിവാര്യതയായിരിക്കാം. പരീക്ഷകളില്‍, 'കഥ മെനയാനുള്ള' ചോദ്യങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് കഥയുടെ അവസാനം ഒരു ഗുണപാഠം (moral of the story) കൂടി എഴുതിയാല്‍ കൂടുതല്‍ മാര്‍ക്കുകിട്ടും എന്ന് അദ്ധ്യാപകര്‍ പറഞ്ഞുതന്നിരുന്നു. ഒരു കഥക്ക് ഒരു inference ആവശ്യമാണ് എന്ന് ഇത് സൂചിപ്പിക്കുന്നു. ഞാന്‍ ഈയടുത്തായി കുറേ വായിക്കാന്‍ തുടങ്ങി . മലയാളം ക്ലാസ്സിക്കുകളായിരുന്നു ഏറെയും. പോരാതെ, ഒരുപാടു സിനിമകള്‍ കാണുന്ന കൂട്ടത്തിലാണ് ഞാന്‍. ഇപ്പോള്‍ എനിക്കൊരു സംശയം. എന്താണ് വായനക്കാരനില്‍ നിന്നും എഴുത്തുകാരന്‍ (*കാരന്‍ / *കാരി) പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കുന്നത്? അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഒരു കഥ വായിച്ചു കഴിയുമ്പോള്‍, അതില്‍ നിന്ന് ഒരു പാഠം ഉള്‍ക്കൊള്ളണമെന്നോ, ഒരു നിഗമനത്തില്‍ എത്തിച്ചേരണമെന്നോ ഉണ്ടോ? ഇല്ല എന്നെനിക്കിപ്പോള്‍ തോന്നുന്നു. ഉദാഹരണത്തിന്, ഈയടുത്തിറങ്ങ...

I booked a train ticket for my mother using IRCTC . I was quite (pleasantly) surprised to find the age printed in 3 digits in the Electronic Reservation Slip : I find the zero-padding a bit geeky. The Right Way, IMO, would've been just printing it in 2 or 3 digits depending on the value. ------ It'd be utterly ungrateful if I didn't mention the nice tool I used to grab the above screenshot. It's called Shutter . It's one amazing tool (despite being GNOME!) for quickly creating screenshots. Almost everything you need to do with the grabbed image (adding arrows and text, masking sensitive info etc. etc.) can be done within the same application! Isn't that wonderful? Just that the UI is not all that intuitive :-( PS: A quick piece of info you already knew: the following C code prints the value with zero padding: printf("%03d\n", 54); With cout/C++, the same effect can be achieved with the ugly: cout << setfill('0') <...

Shot inside a vendors' compartment of a local train in Chennai: Yummy!

I just read a post titled Schedule your torrents in Ubuntu on Planet SMC . It uses the sleep command (not specific to Ubuntu) to delay the execution of the torrent client (Deluge). I've been using another method to schedule KTorrent for the past couple of years. I'll post it here, in case anybody finds it useful. There are three things to be done for 'autonomous' KTorrent (or perhaps any other client): Start the client program (KTorrent) at a particular time Make the program start downloading Exit the program gracefully The first problem can be addressed by the 'sleep' method, or using cron . I prefer the latter since I wish to start the downloader everyday. Here's how to do it. The command: crontab -e lets you edit your cron jobs. The vi-like editor allows you to specify the date/time and the command to be executed. For example, the following entry in crontab will execute the 'cp' command at 2:10AM everyday: 10 2 * * * cp /var/log/messages /mn...