It’s been a year!

Whoops! My third post in probably as many minutes.

I just realised, my blog has been in existence for exactly one year.

Haha! Ha haha ha. Ha haha ha. Haha. (Think Mandark from Dexter’s Lab.)

Over the course of the last year, the quality of my writing has gone from decent to good to barely readable. Hopefully I get my funnybone back in action soon.

I haven’t been doing anything very interesting of late, apart from a lot of reading and a little random hacking amounting to nothing. Let’s see, there were two really good books that I laid my hands on – the first one being Anthony Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour”, and the other was R. K. Laxman’s “Brushing Up The Years”. I re-read Foucault’s Pendulum and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I’m currently trying to get through Knuth’s monumental Algorithms text, but haven’t been able to cross the first section of the first chapter. Sigh. If you’re the touchy type – Chapter 1 is in the first volume, and the chapters are spread over serially across the volumes. So there.

Ah well. Nothing much has changed in the last year :). Haha.

What’s in a name (again?)

I have a funny feeling I’m repeating that title. Oh well, let that be as it is.

The other day there was this funny discussion at work about how the choice of a machine’s hostname reflects the tastes of its owner. Huh.

Now let me see, what names have I baptised my boxes with?

The first box I ever had was called isadora. That was when I was in college. Isadora first ran slack 2.1 and then later Red Hat 5.0.

Isadora stayed with me all through my first job and when I went to the institute with Tree Lined Avenues. She died there. The box I had at the lab there wasn’t named by me, so I’ll let that pass. Then came my second job, I didn’t like it much there and I don’t remember what I called my box there either.

Then came Pune and my third job, which I like quite a lot :) Along with that job came isadora’s successor, gollum. Gollum has other names, depending upon the OS that runs on it. Under WinBloze/Cygwin it becomes gandalf. Under FreeBSD it becomes gollum, and under NetBSD (which is the OS I use mostly at home), it’s sangeet.

At work I had sri, now odin. I also have komban, mukan and the soon to be born mannangatti.

Those are the hostnames I’ve blessed my machines with over the last eight years, now what does that say about me? Nothing much, I guess :)

R I P Appu

Last month, a good friend of ours passed away.

He was more than a friend, he was practically part of my extended family.

Never asked for much more than a little attention; he always gave much more than he got.

I still can’t believe he’s gone.

Appu was my better half’s pet dog of twelve years.

Sleep in peace, Appu.