Inspirated

If there ever was an insanely staggering year in terms of unexpected geekological developments, it has to be 2009. Since January I have regularly been taken aback by news such as record labels dropping DRM, Duke Nukem Forever finally bowing out; Microsoft confessing that ActiveX is retarded from security’s point of view, Google Apps moving out of beta, VLC reaching 1.0, Chrome OS’ announcement, XHTML Part Deux’s quiet death, HTML 5 and CSS 3’s adoption in major browsers and well; defying all expectations, Inspirated’s browser hit stats managing to keep their head high even in the half-yearly round-up. It’s been about 136,000 hits on the blog from Firefox alone, markedly more than twice the IE hits. The first time I noticed the vulpine victory I did dedicate a post to the stats. Nevertheless, consistency achieved over six months just gives me another chance to gloat about it.

I don’t know if this is at long last the year of Linux on desktop, but one thing is for sure: only a final release of GNU Hurd now stands between our planet and the apocalypse. If that does happen, however, please make sure that you refer to the calamity by its correct technical term “GNU/Apocalpyse” and not just the ignorant layman’s phrase which totally undermines the FSF’s impact on universe’s evolution.

A couple of days back, I had to buy a laptop for my dad. Now, deciding one for him was infinitely easier than doing so for myself since the obsession with smaller screens wasn’t playing any role here. In fact, what he ended up liking was a 15.6″ behemoth which, upon comparison, could easily swallow my 12.1″ and 8″ notebooks and still have space left for my cellphone.

The purchase was made at eXtra. Before my dad finalized it though, the salesman asked me if I would like to have the laptop setup with “original Windows Vista, original Anti-Virus software with all the updates, original office and configured with all the drivers for SR 365 only”.

This immediately raised a few points in my head:

• Dad happens to be as much of a computer guy as I am an electronics’ (although I have some extra credentials, such as scoring a hat-trick of flunking performances at the university in a single course related to electronics). I really didn’t want him to be bothered with all the “Windows Genuine Advantage” pile of crap later on.
• I would be saved the trouble of downloading, installing, cracking, patching and updating a “clean” Windows installation — regardless of the fact that I find it quite amusing whenever someone refers to a Windows installation as “clean”.
• Around $100 would be a good bargain considering retail prices of all the softwares mentioned.

Then, a few counter-points:

• Until that moment, I had been totally oblivious to Compaq laptops coming without having any pre-installed operating system. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I myself had settled for an OS-less Fujitsu-Siemens notebook few years ago, which gave me very handsome physical as well as technical specs for the cash I spent. Back then, I was also pleasantly surprised when my Linux From Scratch system got migrated to the new machine using only bash, netcat and tar; making it usable on the very day of notebook’s acquisition.
• I harbor a particular distrust for salesmen who speak too fast.

The counter-points outweighed the originals, and I decided to go with an empty laptop. Got home, downloaded and burned a cracked copy of XP SP3, only to find out that the laptop wasn’t empty at all. It already had a working Vista & Co. on it which only required setting up the initial time and localization settings. Immediately, I recalled other unsuspecting customers at the counter who did pay the extra charges for getting their laptops “ready”.

Fortunately for my dad, my time-telling prowess wasn’t as valuable as the salesman’s so I didn’t ask him $100 for it. Unfortunately, he’ll now have to cope with Vista.

“Windows: Microsoft’s tax on computing neophytes.”

“Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.” — from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9 (10th Edition)

I guess the surprise is over, allowing me to label the results as “consistent”:

<Aerdan> that's essentially what SoC is doing, tbh; offering students a 500 bribe to contribute.
<nenolod> 500?
<nenolod> no
<nenolod> it's 4500
<Aerdan> ah, the joys of Conspire
<Aerdan> that was $4500 before Conspire ate it. :D
<krkhan> how does conspire eat 000
<krkhan> oh :P

Going through statistics for the current year, found this little pleasant surprise:

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” — Wernher von Braun

As soon as the next semester rolls over, I will be joining nexGIN RC as a research student. My task will be to participate in developmental efforts on the National ICT R&D funded project “An Intelligent Secure Kernel for Next Generation Mobile Computing Devices”. Here’s an excerpt from the project’s executive summary:

The project aims to develop secure kernel framework that enable self-monitoring, and consequently self-healing operation for an operating system of mobile devices. This is expected to produce a fully functional Secure Linux Kernel that will be run on tablet PCs / smartphones. The developed framework will be fully aware of system conditions and resource usage and will schedule different threads intelligently based on each thread/process’ behavior, thus providing a truly secure computing experience in which malware that manages to escape detection by intrusion detection systems gets thwarted in the scheduler.

From the looks of it, there will be substantial poking around Linux involved in this one. So even though my research area primarily revolved around back-heeled through balls, spoon-chip goals, splendid crosses, powerful curlers, Totti, De Rossi, Batistuta, Montella, Ibrahimovic and Cruyff until now, I’ll be trying to redirect the efforts towards kernel development. What could possibly be more fun? Oh yes, watching Roma top the Champions League Group A ahead of Chelsea, but digressing that much isn’t suitable for a single post ;) .

I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side.

It just happens. Within a span of four weeks, I crash my car, my glasses break, my contacts — mere day after I wore them for the first time — tear and then, my laptop dies.

And with that, my online frequency drops even lower. To the point where I have not signed into MSN for about 3 weeks now. The desktop is there, and I will most probably get my laptop back within another fortnight too. But neither of the optimist bits is applicable to the heavily customized and mutilated Fedora+LFS distribution I had on my laptop. From X.org to Firefox, everything was compiled and customized for my build environment. In fact, I had been dragging around the same distribution for about two years now. When I had to switch from the desktop an year ago, I just transferred images of the whole drive using netcat and modified it later on to suite the mobile hardware. Now that it’s lost, I’m looking forward to trying out other distributions. After I get my notebook back in my hands, I’ll likely be choosing between Fedora (attractive again because of the upcoming deca-release), Gentoo or Slackware. If I have to inevitably setup everything again, at the very least I should be having a learning experience with something fresh.