Filesystem corruption, FIXED

4-5 days ago, I was listening to music on my laptop (Gentoo), and I had forgotten to plug it in. The battery ran out and the laptop died. (I'd neglected to set up the ACPI events so that it shuts down on low battery)

When I tried to restart, X wasn't comming up. I tracked the problem to some important X file that had been corrupted when power went out to my hard disk (reiserfs). The journal didn't catch the problem, and neither could fsck fix it.

I had to run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree. I read that I should always back up my data before doing this, but I didn't.

reiserfsck fixed the corruption when it rebuilt the tree, and when I rebooted, everything was working as it was before!

I'd like to see Windows fix filesystem corruption that painlessly. Not to mention, Linux filesystems are way more robust than NTFS.

Man do I love my Gentoo.

At the end of the day, business tactics always LOSE to better technology, I HOPE

Intel released their own Dual-Core chip a couple of weeks back. The chip has been benchmarked by GamePC, as reported in Slashdot today. AMD's Opteron Dual Core indeed "thrashed" Intel's new chip in the benchmarks, on I think every single criterion.

Obviously this was a despirate move by Intel to have it's own competition with AMD, and was clearly motivated by business tactics. I hope that the stock prices reflect the vast difference in technology.

FYI: the guy that made Pentium is the cheif techonologist for AMD, I believe. He left after he made the Pentium, and Intel hasn't made any really drastic changes to its architecture since. AMD, on the other hand, has taken the x86 platform to a new height with Hyper Transport technology.

Again, I hope that the vast difference in technology is reflected both in the financial markets, as well as the PC market, in that the larger OEMs like IBM, DELL, and, hey, maybe even Apple, start looking toward the AMD chips.

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Concerns about the origin of the Indian national anthem

I just read something about India's national anthem (a forwarded email; yes, sometimes I do actually open them). Here it is:

Facts about "Jana Gana Mana" - Just a thought for the National Anthem!

How well do you know about it?

I have always wondered who/what is the "adhinayak" and "bharat hagya vidhata", whose praise are we singing. I thought might be the Motherland India – our Mahan Bharat! Our current National Anthem "Jana Gana Mana" is sung throughout the country.

Did you know the following about our National Anthem; well, I didn't: -

To begin with, our National Anthem, Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka, was written by Rabindranath Tagore in honor of King George V and the Queen of England when they visited India in 1919. To honor their visit Pandit Motilal Nehru had the five stanzas included, which are in praise of the King and the Queen. (And most of us think it is in the praise of our great motherland!!!

In the original Bengali verses only those provinces that were under British rule, i.e. Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha etc. were mentioned. None of the then princely states which are now an integral part of India, like Kashmir, Rajasthan, Andhra, Mysore or Kerala find any place! Also neither the Indian Ocean nor the Arabian Sea were included since they were directly under Portuguese rule at that time.

The Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka implies that King George V is the lord of the masses and Bharata Bhagya Vidhata is "the bestower of good fortune". Following is a translation of the five stanzas that glorify the King:

First stanza: (Indian) People wake up remembering your good name and ask for your blessings and they sing your glories. (Tava shubha name jaage;tava shubha aashish maage, gaaye tava jaya gaatha)

Second stanza: Around your throne people of all religions come and give their love and anxiously wait to hear your kind words.

Third stanza: Praise to the King for being the charioteer, for leading the ancient travelers beyond misery.

Fourth stanza: Drowned in the deep ignorance and suffering, poverty-stricken, unconscious country? Waiting for the wink of your eye and your mother's (the Queen's) true protection.

Fifth stanza: In your compassionate plans, the sleeping Bharat (India) will wake up. We bow down to your feet O' Queen, and glory to Rajeshwara (the King).

This whole poem does not indicate any love for the Motherland but depicts a bleak picture. When you sing Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka, whom are you glorifying? Certainly not the Motherland. Is it God? The poem does not indicate that. It is time now to understand the original purpose and the implication of this, rather than blindly sing as has been done over the past fifty years.

Nehru chose the present national anthem as opposed to Vande Mataram because he thought that it would be easier for the band to play!!! It was an absurd reason but Today for that matter bands have advanced and they can very well play any music. So they can as well play Vande Mataram, which is a far better composition in praise of our dear Motherland - India.Wake up, it's high time!

Shouldn't Vande Mataram be our National Anthem????????

Personally, I've always loved our national anthem; not just because of patriotism, but because I always found it to be a beautiful composition, as far as the melody goes. I also love the way the language sounds (I'm somewhat of a linguist). This, however, is shocking to me, and I still haven't fully digested the new information about our song. One argument against the complaint presented above is that whatever it may be for which the song may have been originally composed, today that purpose is no more. Today, the words "jana gaNa mana adhinaayaka jaya hae | bhaarata bhaagya vidhaataa ||" incite strong patriotic emotions in the heart of those with whom the above is concerned. Though the song itself may not have been meant to praise bhaarata (India), the act of singing it does indeed, through what is felt in the heart.

I'd like to hear someone else's comments on this matter though.

Got my TV!!

Yup! Finally got my TV in my apartment! And I get a lot of channels from my cable wire for free!
So it turns out, I get a lot of channels for free (probably by mistake), and I can catch someone else's wireless internet, which is also free. This is gonna save me atleast 50 bucks a month. Pretty decent deal eh? Anyway, I still gotta post up some pics of the place. Will do that soon.

Apartment set-up progress

I've brought my TV, some clothes, and books from home, in my van, to load into my new apartment. Problem is, I need someone's help to bring up the TV, cause it's too damn heavy. Once the TV is set up in there, the apartment's gonna be phat, can't wait. I'll post some photos soon!

Where's the Innovation? surely not with Microsoft!

I'd like to qualify my complaint to the open source developers with one really big complement: OSS is the only place keeping innovation in computing alive. Microsoft has had the same damn interface design since Windows95. Apple has shown awesome innovation, but not so much on the usability front, more so in sexiness. Definately Apple is number one for having the most user-friendly interface, but more than that, it's sexy, cool, sleek, &c. But still Apple doesn't have all of the productivity features that KDE does:

• fully utilised 3 mouse buttons;
• multiple desktops fully integrated with the window manager (MacOS can have multiple desktops with Desktop Manager, but it's somewhat buggy, and doesn't feel as integrated with the DE as in KDE; Windows has never heard of it, well, the mods I found for XP were pretty dysfunctional);
• kioslaves (check out ipod://);
• complete customisability of the panels &c.;
• configuration of window behavior on different types of mouse clicks (activation, raise, &c.);
• Awesome amounts of customizable eye candy;

• SuperKaramba!

  with which you can do incredible things. Check out the GMail applet, and Liquid Weather

  ;
• Kompose, which is basically Expose for KDE. This is a tool that immensely improves productivity, but MSFT?, never heard of it;
• Kat (similar to Spotlight on Tiger);
• Cool translucencey effects built into kwin, if you have a decent gfx card, or a decent processor
• much more that I'm missing here...

The only problem, that is, if you don't want to spend a week or so molding everything to your liking, is that the DEFAULT configuration hasn't been given enough thought, so most users can't take advantage of most of these things. But things are changing! It looks like KDE4 will be awesome (and probably released before Vista), just check out Appeal. As far as Vista goes, unless you have a superfast gfx card, you probably won't notice the difference between it and XP. Wake up Microsoft!

Just read this post on Jonathan Schwartz's weblob . It basically talks about the openning up of the software world, away from MSFT and towards open source, open standards, and network- (internet-) based software. He gives examples such as Limewire, Google Earth, Skype. What a wonderful world it would be, no? Anyone staying somewhat up to date with the computing world has surely seen a huge amount of these same oppinions lately. I think that one of the main underlying themes being expressed with these oppinions is a desire, in people who are enthusiastic about information and computing technologies, is evolving past MSFT. I don't know if anything I've seen, as far as products or services go, can really encroach onto MSFT's domain, which is the OS and the office applications. Yes, yes, I hear you: what about LINUX?? HELLO?? No, I'm not a Microsoftie, I only use Linux on both my desktop and laptop, and I, also, proudly hate MSFT. But the bottom line is this: I can't put Linux on my mom's Thinkpad, and provide her the ease of use that she would get from Windows, and no it's not cause she knows Windows and doesn't know Linux, she knows nothing about either. Trust me, I tried, for a month, to get a Gentoo system that suspends, hibernates, and wakes back up on lid-open lid-close. I just couldn't do it! I'm not even new to Gentoo; I've been running it for 2 years on my machines (and no, I still haven't gotten swsusp2 working). I tried to sell it to her by based on all the incredible added functionality: little things like middle-click pasting, complete customizability, stability (yes, Linux is surely more stable), speed, blah blah blah. She even tried it for a month. But the sad truth is that she, along with 99.9% of the rest of the world doesn't care about all that crap, the don't care too much about translucency in X, tabs in their browsers, open document formats, waiting for 2 less seconds for each of their web pages to render, or having a system optimized for SSE2 on a P4. MOST, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of computer users, just want a simple mail program, a simple browser, and a word processor that can make documents that everyone else can open, and can open everyone elses documents. I use OOo, it's better than Word, but it still doesn't have completely transparent compatibility with what EVERYONE uses: *.doc. What happened in Mass. is a great symbolic step for mankind, sure, but it's not gonna do anything to MSFT for atleast the next decade. DECADE. Firefox is cool, but there are still SOME pages for which I gotta open up IE. IE renders everything. I always have to click a few more times to select the Mozilla plugin, than I would if I were using IE. Konqueror? Konqueror doesn't even get it's own plugins, you have to tell it where to find the Mozilla or Netscape ones. I'm not trying to undermine the efforts of these developers, I personally would rather avoid the webpage than switch to IE, but I'm just gulping down the hard reality. I hate MSFT more than anyone I know, nor do I use any of it's products more than once in a blue moon, but I wouldn't subject my mom, or anyone else who doesn't have it on the life's agenda to be a computer guru, to use Linux (I'm talking about Gentoo, I've never used anything else), atleast not on a laptop. And another reality is that everyone wants a laptop now, the desktop era is gone and done with, point blank. Internet PC's, computers that are just terminals to storage and application space kept somewhere else, if one ever came out that was developed fully, marketted well, and supported well, might infact change all of this, but only if they're cheap enough. You can get a computer these days for 200 bucks. Even if they were selling Internet PC's for 150, I'd rather pay 50 bucks more for something for which I don't have to rely on a high-speed connection to operate (because most people in the world don't have one). Anyway, If someone would just show me a Linux distro that I can install onto a LAPTOP in less than a day, and that will suspend to RAM when I close the lid, and suspend to disk when I tap the power button, I will be the happiest guy on the planet, and will PAY them for it!