Closure! Closure! Closure – Argh :-/

Argh. Much against the ministrations of 1-cyclopropyl-6-fluoro-4-oxo-7-piperazin-1-yl-quinoline-3-carboxylic acid, N-(4-Nitro-2-phenoxyphenyl)methanesulfonamide and the other things that the Doctor prescribed, I’m not asleep yet. Well, in a little while I will be – but I need to get this rant out of my system before I join company with Morpheus. I would also like to rant about the brainless bastards in the neighbourhood who believe in celebrating religious (and other) occasions by unleashing a high-decibel Himesh Reshammiya assault that drowns out the sound of everything else. I’ll save that for later, however.

Warning: I am mathematically illiterate, more or less.

I was idly reading through my ancient copy of Hoffman & Kunze (finally!), and exercising my ageing grey cells with some of the exercises, when something got me worried. There was one exercise (a trivial one, going by what I’d scribbled in the margin ages ago) that required the reader to prove that every field of characteristic zero contained a copy of the rational number field. Now, this is trivial to prove if the definition of a field includes the property of closure – namely, . (It does, by the way.). The trouble was, I’d neglected to read through the first page-and-a-half in Chapter 1 of H&K properly, and was left thinking that a field need not necessarily have closure. I wasted a day in thinking of ways to prove the damn thing without assuming closure, before I came to the conclusion that it was impossible. I then did what I should have done two days ago – sieved through the text with a fine tooth-comb to discover that H&K indeed mention closure, but not in so few words.

This is the kind of stupid mistake that would make a professional mathematician throw up upon hearing of it. Right now, I feel like hitting myself on the head with a stick. Or maybe a heavy large-print hardbound copy of H&K. One of the greatest regrets that I have is not taking up RVR’s linear algebra course – in hindsight, perhaps it was just as well – my being a student in his class would’ve probably given the poor man a coronary.

Saved!

By the skin of my teeth, or however it is that the saying goes.

My better half had expressed her desire to learn that old game which involves thirty-two wooden pieces on an 8×8 wooden board. Not having the requisite board and pieces at hand, I proposed that I install the appropriate software on my laptop for her pleasure, instead. Having thus paved the way for the disaster that followed, I proceeded to weigh my options. Good old Xboard was too plain, I thought. Instead, I wanted to try out the jazzy new Knights, KDE’s chess frontend. The only hitch was, I was running a pretty old KDE – KDE 3.5.5, and Knights wanted 3.5.7 instead. No hassle, I thought. I then tried a pkgsrc pkg_add -uu on KDE *while* I was running KDE, and all hell broke loose…

To make matters worse, I discovered that I’d not saved a copy of the pkgsrc tree from which I’d installed all my packages, having preferred to install the binaries directly from a pkgsrc server. The aforementioned server had also ditched the said binaries, them being too old to keep. Whatever was available on the server wouldn’t install on my box, thanks to there being unmet dependencies. To fix the damn dependencies, I’d have to reinstall just about everything on my box. The pain involved in doing so made my head go woozy. I would have gone ahead – had it not been for the realization that doing so would result in a hefty internet bill as well.

Around 4-odd hours of banging my head on the wall, and I’m now without KDE. I somehow managed to get Windowmaker installed and running, and thankfully all KDE apps work – it’s just that I’m unable to start KDE itself. I don’t miss KDE’s eye candy much, WMaker is far more lightweight. Now I need to figure out exactly what went wrong – and how to fix it. Till then, I have WMaker and all the other KDE apps that I really need (like Konsole, Konqueror, Korganizer and Kstars. Kstars is irreplaceable, I’d be more or less heartbroken without Konsole – though xterm compiled with the right options actually would do in a pinch. Konqueror I like because I can make it understand hjkl, and Korganizer I need at work. I HATE Outlook.).

Of course, I *could* have survived at work with just twm and xterm – could’ve shipped the eye-candy intensive shit to Windows boxes elsewhere at work, and rdesktop’d to them – but that would’ve been painful. Damn this corporate-policy-mandates-windows crap. If it hadn’t been for Outlook, I wouldn’t have tried to install KDE in the first place. Oh well.

Moral of the story? Start hacking away at pkgsrc, K – you’re using it too often and have started to stretch it to its limits.

Reliance?

At long last I have enough bandwidth and time on my hands to blog. Time wasn’t really so much of a problem as bandwidth was in the recent past. Thanks to the vagaries of Reliance Broadband, I was left with zero bandwidth when I really needed it. Right now, I’m blogging from my parents’ house further down south in Coimbatore, where I’ve come down for a weekend visit. Such is the sorry state of my affairs that I have to travel five hundred kilometers or so to connect to the internet.

My Father, the most gadget-savvy person of the previous generation in my family, still has the Knoppix 4.0 that I installed on his computer a year or so ago. It still runs fine, and he’s happy to get connected to the ‘net by clicking on a green thing, use Firefox, and disconnect by clicking on a red thing. (Of course, the green and red things are courtesy yours truly – thank goodness for KDE’s letting you associate shell scripts with taskbar buttons :). It’s a strange feeling – I can truthfully brag that my Dad runs Linux! Of course, when I have a kid of my own (s)he’ll (probably) be able to brag that every box at home runs a different kind of Unix. Then again, it’s not quite the same thing. My Dad runs Linux :)

Right now, I’m happy that I’m connected, and fuming at Reliance Broadband. This time when the morons called me up to ask for the cheque (I never understood why they call up to remind folks who always pay their bill on time), I told them to please come down and take their stuff and shove it wherever they found it the most painful and inconvenient. (Not in so many words, of course). I didn’t pay the bill either. Wonder of wonders, an hour or so later, someone from Reliance called me up to try and troubleshoot my connection. I’m just left without an explanation as to why they couldn’t get this done the first time I called them up. Anyway, I’m on the lookout for another ISP in my area… if I get one, I’m gonna switch. I’ve just about had it with Reliance. The bloody thing works just fine as long as it’s up – the moment the connection snaps, you have no idea how many days or weeks it’s gonna take to come back. Their customer service folks are always sorry and apologetic, but nothing more happens! Not until you call ‘em up and tell them to disconnect your connection and/or refuse to pay the bill. It’s not that the internet is a luxury… there are times when I just *had* to work from home, but couldn’t, because the bloody broadband wasn’t up! None of which stops these guys from calling up and bloody demanding payment for their bill! Haven’t they heard about “payment for services rendered”?

Anil, you just lost a good customer.

Post Scriptum
Of course, these kind of things always happen to yours truly. Just like yesterday evening when I saw how clear the skies were here, and how unpolluted by city light they were. Antares was RED, and Jupiter was really, REALLY bright. All of Cygnus was visible, and the cloudy patch of sky where Andromeda was located was CLEAR. And yes, I’d left the bloody telescope back home in cloudy Bangalore. Drat.

Firewalled :(

ARGH!

The administrator minion bots of the Empire that controls my workplace have struck. Ports that allowed one to connect to the outside world have now been blocked by these mindless bots. Which means that I’m now unable to run cvsup to update my DragonFly source tree.

I have to think of other means of updating my DF source tree now. Nothing irritates me more than someone forcing me to think!

Also discovered that most of the posts that I imported from my previous blog have had their formatting mangled horrendously here. I just don’t have the time to go and fix every one of my sixty-four last posts. Moreover, the “visual rich editor” that WP offers doesn’t have a quick-fix “justify right AND left” button.

Grrrr.

Update:
Thanks to the ever helpful and friendly DF mailing list, I am now armed with other ways of updating my DF source tree :) Snapshots of the source are available for download as tarballs, and there’s mercurial. I also discovered that plain vanilla CVS works. I’m going the mercurial way.

Banned

Looks like blogspot is one of the blog sites “banned” by the Government of India.So how is it that I’m blogging away to glory here?

Apparently the idiot Babu who signed the orders for the ban and his idiot minions who implemented it didn’t know enough. Good for me, heheh!

What the heck were they thinking when they banned blogs? What did they hope to achieve? I wonder if they know the answers to these questions themselves. I read somewhere that the ban had been lifted, but it looks like nobody has told my ISP that. Morons.

I, who normally suffer from an acute case of verbal diarrhoea am now at a loss for words. I am incensed at the ban, I don’t know what more to say/write.

More soon.

Bomb-ay

Blasts in Bombay, yet again. News arrives pretty late at night. I am woken up from my sleep by an urgent phone call from home. I’m asked if I am all right, I say groggily that I am, I’m a good few hundred KM away from Bombay.

Sick with anger and sorrow as TV channels spew out familiar images of death and devastation.

Dead telephone lines. Now sick with worry as a significant branch of my Mother’s family has Mumbai as its habitat. As do a couple of my close friends.

Relief as phone lines work and everybody is safe and sound. More sorrow as disturbing images unfold on the television. What kind of sick minds can think of doing this? Heartening to see and read that people in Bombay, even though they are considered “rude” by the likes of a certain Digest, rushed to help the injured. I admit that I am not a fan of Bombay – but you have to hand it to the denizens of that jungle, they do help one another out in times of need.

Bombay is almost back to normal today. Trains are running, people are back to doing whatever they were.

Tomorrow is another day.

What am I?

Hmmm. This question came to me as questions always do when I sit at my computer past midnight listening to great music. I wish I did this more often (listen to great music, that is).Some answers:

- I’m a lazy bum and a natural slacker.
- I’m an atheist.
- I’m NOT a vegetarian. Neither am I a teetotaller.
- I’m NOT a hindu. [1]
- I’m a hacker wannabe.
- I’m a foodie.
- I’m a music lover. In more ways than one.

(more answers coming soon).

Post Scriptum:
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous asked me: Shouldn’t you be saying “I’m also not a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist etc. etc. in addition to not being a Hindu”. Sigh. Okay, here’s the deal: At one point of time, I subscribed to Hinduism as a religion. Now I don’t. Since I never did subscribe to the views of other religions, why should I disown them? The fact that I’m an atheist implies that I disown *all* religions.

–
[1] Also see this.

11 July 2006 – 1

It’s been a depressing week, for more reasons than one.I’m dreading the thought of spending one more month alone at home without my wife around.

I’d been planning to hit the gym (as part of my half-hearted efforts to lose weight) three weeks ago. It never happened :)

I lost all respect for Michael Crichton after I read his State of Fear. Easily one of the crappiest, if not *the* crappiest book I’ve read. Ever.

After four weeks of neglect, the apartment (I can’t bring myself to call it *my* apartment – I rent it out from someone else!) had degenerated into a biohazard area. I donned my protective outfit (old tee and tracks) and spent all of a day and a half cleaning it up. At the end of the exercise (pun completely intended) I was in intimate conversation with muscles and nerve endings that I never even knew existed. The conversation is far from over yet. The floors are shiny white now, though. Except for the part of the floor near the door… damn I need to get a doormat. And there goes the spotless white floor… there’s no way in hell I’m going to try cleaning this place up again. Not for another week, at least.

The Usual Disclaimer

From childhood, I’ve always been told to watch my tongue. With good reason, mind you. My parents always used to tell me, “If you don’t watch that tongue of yours, it’ll land you in trouble some day”. They were of course, referring to my constant complaints about how the food tasted at home, but little did they know that their words would ring true in a different way, years later!A few of my friends here in Pune have read my blog, and are curious about a phrase of my coinage – “The Most Moral State of Maharashtra”. This phrase occurs frequently in my posts, and the context of its occurrences are usually not very complimentary. Needless to say, many of my Maharashtrian friends are overcome with ire.

Which is how I came to write this short explanation-cum-disclaimer:

Anatomy of a Bad joke

I once read that you can tell much about a city by reading its newspapers. This axiom does not seem to hold good in Pune, going by the eagerness displayed by newspapers here to cannibalize articles from newspapers and magazines abroad, with utter disregard for the confusion that the reader undergoes when he or she reads them. Neither do the newspapers acknowledge their sources; it is only when one encounters supermarkets in a village, the local Starbucks[1], and other such strange creatures in these articles that one understands that they have been lifted lock, stock and three smoking barrels from some third-rate Yankee rag.