I’ve been observing the road while I ride my old bike between my home and office (good job right?) and I’ve come to the conclusion that the autorickshaw drivers are almost always responsible for slowing down the rest on the roads. Unoccupied autos are even worse. They loiter around on the road driving in a jovial, not-really-busy way which comes to those of us who’re in a hurry as some sort of a mockery. Previously, I thought the new (and rising) breed of car driving population (many a time with just one person in the car) were the real culprits.

Bangalore is riddled with one-ways and “speedbreakers”. The one-ways are sort of understandable; they not only double the (band)width which helps in “ironing” out the traffic over a long distance, they rule out the accidents that may occur in a two-way road without a divider. The speedbreakers on the other hand, suck big time. They slow down four-wheelers (like cars) a lot. Think about all the gear-switching, the fuel consumption and most importantly, time wasted. It’s terrible.

I started hating autos more after seeing what they’re capable of. Apart from the sort of inconsiderate driving mentioned above, they’re a dangerous in a “worst-of-both-worlds” sense. Autos are three-wheelers (here in India): their width is slightly less than that of the substandard Maruti 800 and instead of a steering wheel, they have a two-wheeler-style handle. So, what this means to you on the road is, there’s this three-wheeler almost as wide as a car that’s going to invariably (if you’re used to it) or unexpectedly (if you’re new to it) perform sharp sideward movements (abrupt right or left turns) like the ones two-wheelers are capable of. Such awkward, dangerous movements are to be expected from an auto in front of you when there’s a red-signal up ahead and the vehicles in your flow are all slowing down and that auto tries to fit in (as if we’re all in a best-possible-packing competition (filesystem fragmentation reference >_>)) with the vehicles around it.

So, yeah, autorickshaw drivers are the first set of roadusers to hate. They’re way too many in the first place and safe autorickshaw drivers are just as rare as the availability hygienic fresh juice parlours in Bangalore.

Next, four-wheeler drivers who’re driving alone (come on!)

And then this is something mostly autorickshaws do, but I’ve seen two-wheelers and four-wheelers guilty of it too: Parking in the most inappropriate locations which causes traffic slowdown. Jeez. Outright stupidity or socially-inconsiderate: usually a combination of both.

Lane driving is something almost nobody respects. Some four-wheeler drivers do, but they’re rare. That short-term gain one might get by taking that abrupt turn or cutting someone else off from his course on the road drastically affects the general flow of traffic on the road. Long-term throughput is affected. I’m not going to talk about the benefits of using public transport. It’s something that should be fairly obvious (Of course, the lack of sufficient public transport isn’t an excuse to not do something about it. It’s your tax money. Oh, do you even pay taxes?)

Many a time, I’ve felt like stopping right there and blasting the offender on the spot. Alas, I’m neither that courageous nor patient nor capable of putting my message across successfully enough to actually make the person stop being a douche on the road in the future. Here’s to hoping that this blog post is going to help. Cheers!

I’ve been using Debian squeeze/sid for a while now (with apt-pinning) and for the past few days I’ve been facing the “no space left to write” problem. I used the default LVM2-based disk partitioning scheme offered by the Debian installer. I thought it was okay to have a 6.5G root partition and the rest for the swap and my home partitions. Looks like 6.5G wasn’t enough for me. And the root and home partitions used the ext4(!) file-systems.

Now, here’s how you go about reducing your home’s size and increasing your root’s size.

1. Reduce the filesystem size of the partition which has enough free space to spare using resize2fs.
2. Then reduce the logical volume in which this filesystem resides using lvreduce.
3. Now extend the logical volume in which the “starving” filesystem resides  using lvextend by the same amount you used in step 2.
4. Then simply issue resize2fs /dev/VGNAME/LVNAME which should simply fill up the unallocated space in the logical volume it resides.
5. (optional), if your reduced filesystem doesn’t mount due to a block-size mismatch, e2fsck it and apply step 4. to it.

Glad that it all worked out fine. I didn’t have to use a live cd to do this (was too lazy for that anyway). I dropped into a vt, unmounted my home (which has the “important” data) and performed steps 1 and 2 on it. My root was still mounted while I did steps 3 and 4 on it.

I haven’t looked up at how you play with LISP using Vim. Not really interested either since I’m committed to Emacs *rolls eyes*.
So, assuming you’ve already done aptitude install emacs23, Let’s go ahead and aptitude install sbcl cl-asdf slime. When in doubt aptitude show sbcl or aptitude show cl-asdf.

My motivation for this post in the first place was to document the quirks with the installation I was facing last night. If you happen to notice the following with the above aptitude install:

Setting up cl-asdf (1:20090819-3) ...
Reinstalling for sbcl
Recompiling Common Lisp Controller for sbcl
/usr/lib/common-lisp/bin/sbcl.sh loading and dumping clc.
; loading system definition from /usr/lib/sbcl/sb-grovel/sb-grovel.asd into
; #
; registering # as SB-GROVEL
;
; compilation unit aborted
; caught 1 fatal ERROR condition

Error running init-common-lisp-controller-v4: Lock on package SB-IMPL violated
when interning NATIVE-FILE-KIND.
See also:
The SBCL Manual, Node "Package Locks"
mv: cannot stat `sbcl-new.core': No such file or directory
FAILED
Done rebuilding
Setting up cl-swank (1:20090908-1) ...
Setting up emacs (23.1+1-4) ...
Setting up sbcl (1:1.0.25.0-1) ...
/usr/lib/common-lisp/bin/sbcl.sh loading and dumping clc.
; loading system definition from /usr/lib/sbcl/sb-grovel/sb-grovel.asd into
; #
; registering # as SB-GROVEL
;
; compilation unit aborted
; caught 1 fatal ERROR condition

Error running init-common-lisp-controller-v4: Lock on package SB-IMPL violated
when interning NATIVE-FILE-KIND.
See also:
The SBCL Manual, Node "Package Locks"
mv: cannot stat `sbcl-new.core': No such file or directory
FAILED

Your slime setup isn’t going to be functional. Fret not. Read on.

From Debian BTS bug #549528

=======BEGIN PATCH===================
--- /usr/share/common-lisp/source/common-lisp-controller/post-sysdef-install.lisp.orig 2009-10-21 14:42:00.000000000 -0400
+++ /usr/share/common-lisp/source/common-lisp-controller/post-sysdef-install.lisp 2009-10-21 14:40:59.000000000 -0400
@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@
#+sbcl
(defun get-owner-and-mode (directory)
(when (eq :directory
- (sb-impl::native-file-kind (namestring directory)))
+ (sb-impl::unix-file-kind (namestring directory)))
;; check who owns it
(multiple-value-bind (res dev ino mode nlink uid gid rdev size atime mtime)
(sb-unix:unix-stat (namestring directory))
=======END PATCH=================

Followed by,

dpkg-reconfigure cl-asdf
dpkg-reconfigure sbcl

Append the following to your .emacs, if you haven’t already.
;; Slime
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/common-list/source/slime/")
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

And your Emacs is ready to roll.

I don’t know if it’s just me but there are these days in an week where I tend to worry so much that my productivity drops to near-stagnation. Just nothing seems to happen other than a tense me appearing tense. Anyway, I’m just recovering from a somewhat unhappy experience with my Karmic Beta installation on my laptop. Yes, it’s another ooh-nareshov-does-another-distro-shift post. And here’s what happened.

First, I get a call from Vadiraj on a Wednesday morning, out of the blue, from Goa. Apparently, his friend and he planned a noon-trip to this place just to score something that’s allegedly only available there (in India, i.e.). He wanted me to do a quick Google to give him some pointers. Unsuspend my laptop, I did. To connect to the internet through my USB modem, it failed. No matter what I tried – wvdial, pppd, NetworkManager – I couldn’t connect. And I went on a reboot-and-try spree. No luck. All that happened was me end up with a laptop that’d get stuck at boot trying to fsck my filesystem. Enraged, I was.

I reach office and start moving my stuff off of my laptop preparing for a fresh-install. Of, *shudder*, Arch Linux. Installation was pretty straight forward. But I didn’t really enjoy it as much I did Gentoo or FreeBSD. Not to mention all that sorcery trying to get my USB modem to work being unsuccessful. (At some point I had udev identifying my device as a CDMA modem and hal identify it as a GSM modem).

That night, no internet. The next day, installed Debian testing. But I had the same darned problem of being unable to tap my touchpad to click on, you know, things. The GNOME which Debian-testing featured didn’t have that tab under System > Preferences > Mouse where I could enable “Tap to click”. A quick Google suggested the use of GSynaptics – which had a “Tapping” tab where I promptly enabled “Enable Tapping” and had my Aha-moment.

Phew.

Oh, and, today I get a pay-your-internet-bill reminder. And I did it within minutes of seeing this. And here I am, about seven hours after I did that and back from a pretty decent string chamber orchestra organised by the Bangalore School of Music for raising funds for the Karnataka-floods relief, blogging about why my USB modem wasn’t working and the things I did in the past few days.

And regarding my worries. Wanda the Fish, the fortune teller had this to say:

First thing Wanda, the fortune teller, said.

P.S.: That was my first click on the Wanda-the-Fish GNOME applet after installing fortune-mod earlier today.

P.P.S.: On the upside, I got a chance to do a fresh ext4 install after all this.

On Friday last week I happened to upgrade certain packages on my erstwhile Jaunty installation on my laptop. For some strange reason my touchpad ceased to work. I couldn’t move the mouse pointer. I couldn’t even get onto good ole’ Google because I couldn’t click on NetworkManager and select the radio button next to my CDMA USB modem entry!

The next day I issued a ‘do-release-upgrade’ and headed out to watch Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” with Debayan and Vignesh. After I returned there was still an hour to go and so I continued to bootstrap my Debian-armel on the SD card for the Beagle board. And when it was all over, I had Karmic!

So, the touchpad worked now. Somewhat. I couldn’t tap on the touchpad to click on things like the menubar entries and so on. Turns out that Systems > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad has a button which says “Enable mouse clicks with touchpad” disabled by default. I, on the other hand, could make my way through up to this point with the keyboard alone and enabled it. Phew.

The improvements from Jaunty are, as expected, quite a lot. And visibly so.

Take the shiny new 2.6.31 kernel, for example. It boots fast. And supports kernel mode setting for the revamped X. The improvements are so obvious that you can’t afford to not say “wow”. I haven’t done the “full-screen flash video” test yet, but I do like the snappiness when I switch between virtual consoles and X. Once again, I can live with the minimal compiz that’s turned on by default on an Ubuntu installation. Oh, and I did have another oh-that’s-new moment with the volume control. It doesn’t look like the old one but it does look like an incomplete version of the Windows 7-style volume manager. I couldn’t find a way to mute my laptop speakers and let all sound be audible only via my earphones. Thankfully, alsamixer works.

UPDATE: It turns out that selecting “Analog Headphones” under Sound Preferences > Output does the trick.

So far so good. Upgrading moar. Oh, and don’t forget ‘do-release-upgrade -d’ in a screen session. Also, E17 looks kickass.

On reading Rubenérd’s post on Australian public transport, I wrote up a quick comment and at the last minute decided to make my own blog post instead.

The Metro-Rail construction work in Bangalore is going at a very slow pace and since it’s being constructed right in the middle of several important “link” roads, traffic is dismal at times. And, Bangalore also happens to be the hub for most “high-end”, multi-national company-employed settlers who flaunt their cars and whatnot in these congested roads often driving with nobody else (what a waste!)

Additionally, there are these “Think Big. Live Big. Buy an SUV” car loan schemes which are advertised on radios too. Long traffic jams are an everyday reality.

As I was researching information for this blog post, I hit upon this. Yes! Bangalore might end up having both metro-rail and mono-rail. It’s an interesting combination given the radially outgoing roads of Bangalore and the ring-roads that connect them at several places.

Public transport is more or less bearable in the southern Indian states, Maharashtra and Goa. (Unsure about the other states). The problem with buses is specific to the crowded mess of a city called Bangalore with its myriad of one-ways and outright stupid traffic sense of the auto-rickshaw drivers. Many college-going students end up wasting a lot of time just trying to commute between their homes and colleges. The alternate modes of transport which I believe are sensibly conceived should help Bangalore breathe well again.

Having gotten used to pixel-smoothed fonts on the Gnome terminal for quite a while now, I opened up an xterm for some reason and ran an htop in it. This different look of the fonts (bitmap fonts?) made me pause for a moment there and say to myself, “wow”.

Two accidents involving women driving the car and men on the two wheelers who were the receiving end of the damage.

One happened on last Saturday – around 10:30-ish in the morning; and the other, this morning (10:20-ish).

The woman doesn’t look who’s closing in along with her and takes blind or uninformed turns to the right/left. In both the cases the men who drove the bikes had their bikes on the floor. Fallen. Today’s case was most likely a high velocity impact! The glass of the windows of the car had shattered. Poor guy couldn’t really fight back at the woman. Things like these reinforce popular stereotypes such as “women can’t drive”. Come on! How can someone who’s driving a car not pay attention to who’s driving around the car? Huh?

Take a good look at that map. Oh, and take a look at Bangalore’s colour too. Done?

Now look at this:

Subject: BARKER AT FUGA TONIGHT (12TH SEPT SAT)

STRAP IN : High energy house session at FUGA tonight with DJ ROHIT BARKER on the console. With a bag full of hot new house tunes Barker is itching to bang it out at Fuga tonight. Come by for a fun sat night out.

GUESTLIST : +9198860xxxx
Strictly couples and single ladies only.

0xfff.

On Independence Day

Time. Remember not to complain about it.

On August 15th, Terence drew something really interesting during the painting competition that was organised at our office. It was a view of our hands: the left one holding a dice and the right one holding an hourglass. I don’t quite remember the complete explanation he gave about his poster, but part of it went like this: The dice represents randomness in life and the hourglass, time. And taking chances at the right time is what we have in our hands. A simple, yet powerful message. Additional points for being wise enough to be able to distinguish between what you can do and what you can’t.

Let’s not talk about my poster.

I’m not sure how this is other dog loving countries across the world, but certain observations which I’ve made in the past few months are:

1. Most rich dog owners do not own Indian breeds – but mostly non-native breeds.

2. Far too many stray dogs.

Questions:

1. Do the other dog loving countries tend to not own their own native breeds and, say, prefer Indian breeds?

2. Are there just as many stray dogs in such countries?

Other, possibly related questions:

1. What’s with the recent trend of blonde dancers in Bollywood *cough* dance sequences?

2. What’s with the sudden influx of all the fugly Indian counterparts of North American style reality shows on TV?

3. Why am I even writing about such things on my blog?

Other

Bought a bunch of popular science books (Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose). Yes, I’m not really a reader but I’d love to pick up the habbit. On a related note: due to poor internets at home and office, I’m hereby bankrupt in the Anime department. There are shows I’d love to watch. I guess I’ll have to wait for better times.

Bad news

My kittie was killed by three dogs on 14th night – the night before the Independence day. It had hardly lived for twenty days in our house. My mom, sis and I are dearly missing him. Oh, and, those three dogs were stray dogs. They’re currently employed as watch dogs by immigrant masons who’re illegally staying in the same locality where we are.