Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods – The Strange Rise of Modern India, is a brutally neutral perspective about India from an outsider’s point of view. It is not another fanboy account of India and its spirituality, neither does it make a punching bag out of my country. But despite my inner self telling me that most of what he said was true, the patriot (fanboy if you may) in me wanted to refuse to believe some of the stuff in the book. I was half way through the book as my train pulled into Trivandrum Central…

It had rained non-stop for 4 hours; that was ample time for the entire area around the railway station to get flooded, again. There wasn’t a way out with water everywhere. My dad had come to pick me, but there was no way that he could drive up to the station, unless our Maruthi could instantly transform itself into a hovercraft. So he parked up 1 km away on higher ground and waited. I was getting restless so I decided to wade through the water and walk to the place. So laptop on one hand and a heavy bag of clothes in the other, I started the painful journey. I soon realized that it was such a stupid thing to do, but by then I had already passed the point of no-return. One broken slab somewhere, and I would have atleast fractured a leg. Thankfully nothing happened and I found our car after half an hour of swimming in the city center.

Driving back, I now had no doubt about what Mr. Luce had said about our government. It really is a mystery how our country runs. The ‘water’ problem of Thampanoor (the railway station and surrounding areas) is legendary. I’ve been hearing about this since I learnt to put 2 and 2 together. With all this technology around and Trivandrum even trying to be twinned up with Barcelona (ha!) its just amazing that our administration is not able to solve this pre-historic problem. I have read about many a project trying to fix this problem, spending millions of rupees, but to what end? 15 minutes of rain (no, I am not exaggerating) and Thampanoor becomes a lake.

I’ve always been of the opinion that its not right to keep blaming the system for every flaw and doing nothing ourselves as citizens. But there are somethings that the system has to work out by itself. This is just a prime example. It’s so sad, so much public money went to the drain (pun intended) for no use. Maybe its true, as Luce implies and as one of my colleagues quipped, if the problem is solved, how will the government ’servants’ fill their pockets? No more flooding = no more projects = no more money to steal.

For the love of my city, someone with power please do something. I feel powerless, except to shout.

No I am not talking about a spiritual trip to Australia or about the animal; Karmic Koala is the latest version of the Linux distro Ubuntu

So I decided to switch to Linux on my laptop; since I found it much better suited for programming than Windows 7. First thing I tried was to run Linux on a VirtualBox environment; though it did work quite beautifully; it still wasn’t ‘perfect’. Therefore I decided to do an actual install; and I chose Ubuntu as it is now more or less the de-facto Linux distro for a desktop (and also since I had a Ubuntu CD lying around). It was an adventure of sorts, so I decided to document all that I did; as a note for myself and also for any of you who wants to do this. But then if you don’t want to read the technical bla-bla; you can go right to the point here.

Pre-installation woes

The first problem was that somehow my hard disk was partitioned as a ‘Dynamic’ volume; which is Microsoft proprietary and I had trouble getting the Ubuntu installation to understand this. So my first task was to revert the ‘Dynamic’ disk to ‘Simple’. It wasn’t as simple as I thought. But thanks to the Google, I managed to find a way. It involved using a low level hex editor to directly edit the values in the partition table. Detailed instructions are here. Now came another problem; as soon as I rebooted to Windows 7, only my first partition was visible. I was a bit scared that all my data was lost, but then I found this wonderful tool called as TestDisk. It scanned my disks and fixed my partition table for me. What a relief! I did a reboot and my happiness was short-lived – Windows 7 won’t boot anymore! Now I have lost my OS too. But this wasn’t as tricky as I thought. To fix that all I had to do was to boot with a Windows 7 setup disk and do a repair (the option comes right after you select the language). So now I finally had a working system with ‘Basic’ disks. Ubuntu now installed as a breeze and all was well.. that’s what I thought.

Post-installation woes

Now once Ubuntu was up and running, my display wasn’t working optimally. But to fix that all I had to do was to install the non-open-source drivers from ATI (which is easy to do from Ubuntu, look under System->Admin->Hardware Drivers). A happy few hours went by and it was time to watch IPL on YouTube when I realized that my sound card was not working. This was a major pain, I spent another few hours trying to figure this one out. The Ubuntu forum said that the solution was to install the backport drivers for ALSA.

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic

Reboot and lo I had sound! But wait… my display driver is gone now. And now it was not possible to activate it anymore. The problem (my best guess, I am no linux guru) was that the ALSA install also updated my linux kernel version, which wasn’t supported by the display drivers. After another reboot into the older linux kernel version, I finally nailed it. The trick was to install the proper backport version instead of the karmic-generic one. The command is now:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.31-14-generic

You’ll have to replace the ‘2.6.31-14′ part to your linux kernel release number; which you can find by typing ‘uname -r’ on the terminal. Now I had sound and light! Awesome; finally a full fledged linux installation.

Coming to the point…
If you want a real free (as in speech or as in beer) alternative to your Windows or Mac, then Ubuntu is your answer. It is an awesome OS and not just for programmers. The performance is really really impressive and it looks and works clean and secure. But then again is it really ready for the common user? Unfortunately I think not. I am a tech guy, and computers are my bread-and-butter, but even for me the installation was such a headache. For a normal user, this would be a roadblock preventing them from going any further. That’s just a pity. Ubuntu is a real alternative with a solid foundation, but if only it polished some of those rough edges…

My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6 2020ax and the Ubuntu version I tried to install was Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Not my original idea.. but this is cool …

… and I can show off only while it lasts

Try it yourself; if you lack the trust :p

Your first company, the one that handed you your first paycheck, is always special. And for me Bosch was special; not just for that but for a lot of other reasons too.

For starters it gave me my first glimpse into the real world of software engineering. It taught me a lot of things; that I didn’t know existed before; it taught me professionalism; and above all it gave me a lot of new friends. But all good things has to come to an end one day and last friday was that for me.

And it was not just Bosch I had to say bye to – also to the city that was my home for 4 years. I had reservations about Bangalore when I first came in; but looking back at it; hmm.. it was an awesome place. The fun we had.. the many friends I gained.. I’m eternally indebted to this city for all that. It was a great experience to say the least. There were many unforgettable incidents; many great memories; some bad ones; but I think I would remember the good ones longer than the others. And that’s what matters.

So adieu Bangalore; as I go on to explore the challenges of Gurgaon and then Kochi. And adieu Bosch, and to the challenges of mobMe.

Last time I went home, I was browsing through a treasure chest of old photo albums. Among them I noticed a few pictures of my dad and his friends when they visited Agra and the Taj Mahal; some 30 years ago. They all looked so special; capturing the excitement of each moment perfectly.

My thoughts went to the thousands of photographs I had taken over the years with my camera. Did those photographs have those qualities? Off course, some of them do, but they are lost within the numerous ordinary ones I had taken. Cameras have come a long way since my dad’s bachelor days, the technology has improved beyond recognition – but have they lost that magic touch? During the age of the film camera; you always thought twice before clicking. You always waited for the right moment, adjusted the frame to the right position, because each click made a dent in your pocket. Digital cameras? Who cares; click, click, click. Maybe one of them will be your perfect shot. You will think, I’ll delete the others later. Usually ‘later’ comes quite late, and invariably your patience runs out while trying to weed out all those unwanted pictures and those real gems get caught in a pile of junk. Years later you will find yourself in the same situation as I am – a few hundred good pictures in a total of ten thousand; faced with that daunting task called as ‘filtering’.

So what do we do? I have a solution. Take prints of your best photos. As soon as you are about to transfer those pics from your camera earmark the best ones and take those prints. It brings back economics into photography. And now you are forced to think twice; just like the good old days. You’ll be left with a few albums of those nice clicks; that you can enjoy over and over again. I know the environmentalist in me is screaming inside; but hey; it is only a few sheets of paper; I’ll make it up some other way. Or you tell me another solution; this is the only one I have

So finally I have dedicated some time to do research for this post. Here you go

1999, sometime in November, armed with a brand new 28.8 kbps dial-up internet connection, I began my first endeavour on the Internet. I uploaded my first webpage. I still remember how exciting it was back then; to see my HTMLs being served for the first time to people around the world. So here I present a ‘Rusty’ museum of sorts; with screenshots of how this website evolved into what you see now. It was a great nostalgic trip back; seeing all these sites again

Click on the images to zoom

November 1999

This was the first version; hosted at spaceports.com. I was still learning how things were working. Notice the awful choice of colours!

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November 2000

Even worse colour comibination; but now with more content and also the hottest retro thing on the web – Java! (the left nav bar)

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February 2001

Things are getting way better now; the colours don’t hurt the eyes much. Not too much improvement with the content though; except for the embaressing bio-data up front

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September 2001

The first ‘real’ design. Java is gone, CSS comes in. Design is still very teenage; with a goofy name for the site ‘SmileHouse’! But this really special; because this was when I started writing my blog I had also shifted to a much better host called DigitalRice.

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August 2002

CSS skills have improved beyond recognition! I really loved this design. The site has become more dynamic; as I had finally learned some PHP. The blogging system there was hand coded in PHP. And this time the site moved to paid hosting; even though I never really paid It was hosted for me by Vishnu and Vivek at sig9.com

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October 2003

And finally the base for the current design. I also dumped my buggy blog engine for Wordpress. And around 1.5 years after this; I finally had registered a domain for myself. The hosting also slowly shifted to asmallorange.com; with the space provided by Anand bhai. It has remained there ever since.

You can also browse some of the sites from the Internet archive:

• 2001 – 2003
• 2003 – 2006
• 2006 – 2009

It was hardwork to get this done; I had to find my old hard disks; then get it working and so on.. but it was all worth it. Special thanks to Shyam for letting me plug-in my dusty 10 year old HDD on his PC!