Firefox bugging and more

Well, I return to blogging after a long time and this one is on a request from  one of the very few people who bother to read the crap here  And this mostly-plagiarized post is, perhaps unfittingly,  dedicated to him and the good times and long bulla-sessions, we have had on IITK campus. It has indeed been an honour to know you GS

So, first I reveal a small trick which I found out today. Not a great discovery but a very useful one. My /home partition drive suddenly swelled to 100% and I was clueless as to what happened. It took help from another friend to figure out to use the du command to understand where has the space been consumed. But, the question was which flags and options to be used along with it. And, I think I have found out a pretty decent way to do that. Here’s the command:

bash$ du -h --time --max-depth=1 --time-style=full-iso /.../sample_dir

Let me briefly describe what this does. It outputs the hard-disk size, modification date and time of all the sub-directories at first hierarchical level inside the directory sample_dir. The file-sizes are in easy-to-understand units In this way, you can figure out which directory looks suspicious by its file-size and then go on to inspect that particular sub-directory. Ofcourse, I succeeded in finding that out the culprit Adobe Acrobat (~/.adobe/Acrobat/), which swelled to around 6.5 GB (it’s not a typo ), mainly due to simple word searches in an e-book and such things :O:O

Next is somewhat more common problem and something that took me around 1.5 years to figure out — the pain that Firefox causes when you have something around 30-40 tabs opened and surf for atleast around 12 hours a day :D I continued with it for want of a better browser and could hardly find one which seemed more convincing and also easy to install. Many of my “Windows-friends” insist that I should simply give up on Linux and start using Windows. Sample this:

A windows devotee: well agar tu windows use karta toh problem hi nahi hoti
me (cutting him short): toh main 1-1.5 saal mein bhi nahi jaan paata ki problem kya hai. infact yeah u r rt … main actually kabhi yeh sense hi nahi kar paata ki thr is a problem :D

I confess I’m not that big a nerd to be knowing the details of either Windows or Linux well, but a priori it seems to me that Linux is the choice to go for, anyday Anyways, so firefox would take hell lot of time to start and also become unresponsive quite frequently. On my tweaking-spree today, I decided to check the file-size change that happens to ~/.mozilla just like ~/.adobe, when one is using Firefox and I again found out its size to be somewhat larger than expected. In particular, I located 2 files places.sqlite and urlclassifier3.sqlite (I’m using Firefox 3.0.10 presently), which seemed to be of uncharacteristically large size; 35 and 33 MBs respectively. I googled up and after reading similar rantings on few forums landed up on this gentleman’s page. What he tells is that, to the best of my understanding, there is pretty appreciable amount of web-garbage that accumulates in those 2 files, over time. And it contributes towards slowing firefox down. The way to circumvent this problem, whenever it begins to rear its ugly head, is to close your firefox and clean these files up. Close down your firefox (else it locks these files). From your command line access, navigate to the directory which is your firefox profile and do the following there.

bash$ for z in `ls *.sqlite`; do sqlite3 $z VACUUM; done

And for those who surf heavily like me, if still your places.sqlite is quite large, do the following:

bash$ sqlite3 places.sqlite
SQLite version 3.5.9
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> delete from moz_places where hidden=1 and url like 'http%';
sqlite> .quit
bash$

This shall remove all the old URL addresses that you haven’t used at all in the recent past and shall further purge the file. For me, it reduced the size of ~/.mozilla by around 12 MB.

Most of this post is, as always, for personal reference and I claim no originality whatsoever.

Signing off,

P.S.: I’m yet to figure out how to make Flash and videos work in firefox :(:(

Configuring alpine: a text-based email client

I was vying for a text-based email client ever since I came back to IITK this semester. I knew that there was something called Pine that had been in use for quite sometime now. But then I came to know that now its developers, the team at the University of Washington have stopped developing Pine in favour of a new one Alpine. Ubuntu users can install alpine using Synaptic package manager. For others you may install it after downloading from here. For the rest of this post, I assume that it has been successfully installed on your system. I describe here how to configure Alpine so as to make it working for you. I do it specially for people connecting to internet through some institution’s internet and that too perhaps using proxy’s. Moreover, this post is specially for the benefit of IITK junta, since I had to spend quite a bit of time to configure it, specially for some subtle things.

As soon as the installation is done, you will find a .pinerc file in your parent directory (where your .bashrc is ) Open the .pinerc file and make the following changes at the relevant places:

# Over-rides your full name from Unix password file. Required for PC-Alpine.
personal-name=Your name here
#as you would like it to appear in your outgoing emails.

# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail.
user-domain=iitk.ac.in
# I think it is pretty clear as to what does it mean, you have to put the part after #the '@' of your email address.

# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=smtp.cc.iitk.ac.in/user=yourloginID@iitk.ac.in/novalidate-cert
# The SMTP sever is the one which manages your outgoing mails. For IITK people its #smtp.cc.iitk.ac.in, but in addition to that you have to tell alpine what if your #login ID  on that sever, so put your institute-email address in full over there. The #novalidate-cert tells alpine not to enquire about the security certificates of the #server, as far as I know.

# Path of (local or remote) INBOX, e.g. ={mail.somewhere.edu}inbox
# Normal Unix default is the local INBOX (usually /usr/spool/mail/$USER).
inbox-path={newmailhost.cc.iitk.ac.in/user=yourloginID/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX
#newmailhost.cc.iitk.ac.in is the IMAP server of IITK. you should put your #institution's IMAP server or the server which receives your incoming messages. And #as similar to SMTP server's case above, you have to write down your username, this #time only your login ID without the '@domainname' suffixed to it. ssl is for secure #shell encryption while communicating the message between the IMAP server
#and your system and novalidate-cert is the same as above. INBOX is the name of the #folder you would like your messages to be saved to. Its a good idea to keep the name #of the folder same as #that on the IMAP server.

# Over-rides default path for sent-mail folder
default-fcc={newmailhost.cc.iitk.ac.in/user=yourloginID/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX.Sent
# This is specially for IITK junta. If you would like the messages you send using #alpine to be accessible from locations other than your own PC, then this is the way. #It saves your outgoing messages to the corresponding Sent folder on the IMAP server. #For others, you can also figure out the folder which stores your outgoing messages #on the mail server and mention its pathname here for alpine to locate it. If you #don't exercise this option, all your outgoing messages are saved in the default #'sent-mail' folder on your local system. Also, for the messages that you wish to be #saved somewhere else,you #can override the default folder by giving the path to the #new folder in 'Fcc' column while composing the message.

# Over-rides default path for postponed messages folder
postponed-folder={newmailhost.cc.iitk.ac.in/user=yourloginID/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX.Drafts
#As similar to above, this is to save your drafts, unsent messages, postponed messages #in the corresponding folder on the mail server so as to be accessible from any #location other than your PC too. If you don't exercise this option at all, the #default is a folder named 'postponed-msgs' on your local system.
# Add these customized headers (and possible default values) when composing
customized-hdrs=From: Your name here <yourloginID@iitk.ac.in>,Reply-To: <yourloginID@iitk.ac.in>
#If you don't exercise this option and the username on your local account is different #from your login ID, then by default Alpine uses yourlocalusername@domainname in the #headers of your outgoing messages, which you might not want it to do.


# List of directories where saved-message folders may be. First one is
# the default for Saves.
folder-collections=mail/[],
"IMAP folders" {newmailhost.cc.iitk.ac.in/user=yourloginID/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX.[]
#This is again an optional one. It is to fetch your directories that might have your #messages on the mail server.

I think that pretty much sums up all the necessary modifications required by the .pinerc file, for Alpine to start working. Some further comments are in order:

1) You can customize Alpine much more than this and even use some other facilities like access to newsgroups, but as of now, I haven’t figured out how to do so. You may try doing such things at your own risk.

2) As you will slowly figure out for yourselves and from however small stint that I have had with it, all I can say is that Alpine rocks!!! You can even read in text from the files (yeah only text files as far as I know) on your local systems into your messages, not merely attach them. You are able to sort out mails faster and search for them faster and doesn’t require much use of the mouse. Overall, for people like me who are quite lazy to write and reply to mails otherwise, its a much faster and better way out.

3) I acquired all the above knowledge after applying my own brain along with help from the various sources over the net which I forgot . My primary purpose behind writing this post is for my own future reference along with some possible help for IITK junta.

Sayonara

Bragging

Minasan konnichiwa. Watashi wa Singharu Rawi desu. San nen sei desu. Indo jin desu. Otosan wa Singharu Radhey Shyam desu. Kare wa kaisha-in desu. Okaasan wa Singharu Manzu desu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. Arigato gozaimasu

English: Hi everybody! I am Lovy Singhal. I am third year student. I’m an Indian. My father’s name is Radhey Singhal. He works in a company. My mother’s name is Manju Singhal. Pardon me if I have made any mistake. Thank you.

Ya so as you must have understood by now, this post is to convey to one and all and also brag that I’ve started learning the Japanese. The above introduction is just a random sequence of otherwise meaningful sentences and are quite likely to be full of errors. In particular, I dont know how to write accented letters on WordPress. The course is being offered under the Foreign Language Programme of IITK. So I have learnt only almost this much till now in about 5 classes. :( Yeah, I accept that I wanted to learn French but the seats were occupied but nevertheless I have gr8 respect for Japan as a culture and as a nation and hence decided to learn some little bit of Japanese. Lets c how far it goes. I need not write much about the Japanese script as you can read about it on Wikipedia, but will only say that I cannot more than two three letters of their script(s). So lets c how far I go in this new endeavour of mine. As for now I can only say in part English – part Japanese: Nippon rocks!!!

P.S.: I had written a post related to LaTeX in between, but I found out that the solution had some subtle problems and therefore unpublished the post.

What do you have to say now, Mr. Advani?

Almost during the entire 4.5 years of rule of the UPA government, the largest opposition party (not considering the left parties of course ) in the Parliament BJP has been almost invariably cribbing daily that Manmohan Singh has been the weakest prime minister, India had ever had. They have been led in this campaign of theirs by wannabe-PM L K Advani, with the chant being repeated by other second-ring idiots then.

Most of the prime ministers that we had – right from Nehru till Vajpayee performed pathetically towards the end of their tenures. Nehru’s last days were marred by back stab that he received from China, Indira’s by Sikh separatism leading ultimately to advent of ISI sponsored terrorism, Narasimha Rao’s by corruption charges and Vajpayee’s by his inability to control the Hindutva fundamentalist and fanatic forces, as per his own confession. On the contrary, prime minister Manmohan Singh has shown it again, how he has reached where he has. It is because he completes each of his innings in style and after completing the work that was assigned to him. Regarding completion of the assigned task, Singh’s original job was to see that this strange-looking coalition does not end up in a one-month government, and perhaps also to save Sonia Gandhi from the embarrassment of leading one such. and regarding doing it in style — in all probability, the Congress is not coming back to power in 2009 due to anti-incumbency, highly aggravated by the soaring inflation. So, that means Manmohan Singh hardly has many more days left in office. Perhaps, sensing this fully well in advance, he showed it to the world and to his professional brethren what does it mean to have guts.

For those who can decipher people’s actions, he also gives clear signs of having a good enough knowledge of politics. He knew the numbers can be with him even if the Left walks out, and apparently, he made it clear to Sonia Gandhi that the Congress machinery better indulge in ensuring that they do get those numbers or relieve him of the duty. And as from whatever little that I have seen of Indian politics, I never saw any prime minister (heck even any chief minister) challenging his supporting parties to withdraw support and bring down the govt. If the UPA govt. had left this deal undone, it would have certainly gone down in history as one which was constantly bugged by agents supporting it from outside, and also would have been cited in political sciences’ classes as an example of one of the demerits of coalition politics.

Only time will decide whether this deal is equally beneficial to both the countries or not, and especially so from our perspective, but by going ahead with the deal, Manmohan Singh has stood with his head held upright for a cause that he believes in. Even the first prime minister Nehru who had almost full majority in the Parliament with him couldn’t get many of the bills cleared that he wanted to, Rajeev Gandhi, reportedly, had to go against his own wishes in the Shah Bano case in nullifying the SC judgement and if Vajpayee used to be called as Dhritarashtra of modern era, because of his not-so-mysterious silence at the sorrowful turn of communal events, the only examples that come to my mind with reference to Manmohan Singh are those of Karna from the great Indian epic Mahabharata and Brutus from the ancient Roman empire. Not unlike both of them, his only fault is that he is in the wrong place, but he is still fighting it out in the middle.

So Mr. Advani, are you willing to reconsider you opinion on who has been the weakest prime minister we had had or who might become

Id, Ego and Superego

This is the first time that I’m writing 2 posts in a day. Got not other work to do

In my 4th semester, I had taken a credit course PSY 151: Introduction to Psychology by Dr. Braj Bhushan and the course did help me to organize and better many of the concepts that I had developed by myself, in addition to introduction to many new concepts. One such thing was the concept of id, ego and superego given by Sigmund Freud. I am just proposing here a concept which I don’t know has already been said or not. The concept as to what seems to me is that as the mental age of humans increase, the id and superego merge with superego dominating largely in the newly created structure. I feel the evidence can be seen in our daily-lives in “elderly” people who simply derive pleasure if the set of principles that they have developed over their lifetime is adhered to. These set of principles may vary depending on individuals and their culture etc. e.g. In typical Indian households, most elderly people derive pleasure if they succeed in completing some religious ritual even if it is taxing on their body. It’s perhaps so because the “original ” superego dominates over the “original” ego in that new structure. Again, how soon this merger is accomplished may also perhaps vary amongst different individuals and the culture that they belong to. e.g. amongst the Jains (see this) and the Tibetans (both are sects in South-east Asia), this age might be very low, where they derive pleasures in the extremely tough rituals of the renunciation ceremony.

Would love to hear what others think about this idea.

Post JEE counselling

Do have a deadline to meet tommorrow but cudnt resist writing this post coz I had already written it in the guise of sum other person in sum other context. Various social networkin sites popular in India have their communities related to colleges filled wd such questions during this time of the year. This is a slight variant of the post mentioned above which is relevant for those seekin admission to IITK. I feel tht sum belonging to the smarter-thn-the-rest variety might just Google for IITK environment, IITK culture et cetera stuff and might find this post of mine of sum use 2 thm (Indented ones are a sample type of an omniprevalent fresher’s questions)

>I HAVE FEW QUESTIONS..
And I have few answers to give …

> Q. R ther ne fresher’s party? If yes, when n where?
Yes, we have arranged for a freshers’ party at Landmark … will tht suffice? … or shud v book a tour to Nepal.

>Q. Do u regularily go to Kanpur the city for shoppin or watchin movies?
Yes, IITK admin organizes trips to “Kanpur – the city” twice a week in an air-conditioned luxury bus. A demand has been raised to change tht to cars since bus is too cheapos … As for the movies, we do have shows at IITK audi … I understand its a bit uncomfortable but never mind a full scale media theatre is under construction.

>Q. Do v have 2 bring a laptop?
No, each student is provided a laptop on the first day of registration. For laptop configuration see this site http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/ubuntu?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&dgc=IR&cid=11973&lid=471885

>Q. Wat do u ask us 2 do in raggin?
No, actually the admin here has been much moved after watching the film Munnabhai MBBS and hence here we have a custom of juniors ragging seniors

>Q. How do u celebrate B’Days? (GPL …. ‘g’ pe laat?)
Yes, GPL is done and much more than tht … like KLPD, rapid-fire, etc etc but to get accustomed to tht, u have to arrive here soon … we look fwd eagerly to c u on d campus.

>Q. Which mobile operator has the best network in the region?
Presently, IITK admin is in talks wd Relaince to bring 3G network to d campus asap, but I m afraid it might take sum time. Till thn, u can alwayz njoy free 24 hr landline phone wd ISD facility for each individual inside his/her/their room.

>Q.What about room net , is this facility available for first yr students??
Plz be precise in ur ques … do u mean a mosquito net or internet … For d moment I m assumin it 2 b mosquito net, they r quite gud over here. U also hav d option of havin mosquito xitnguishers sprayed every week inside ur room

>Q.What about dress code??
Do we need to follow any dress code??
Students r allowed only one of these dress combinations:
1) Jodhpuri suit of deep blue color (inspired from ex-Presi of India Dr. Kalaam)
2) only a plain colored undergarment (inspired from western superheroes … those who runnin high on patriotism can as well wear Shaktimaan’s costume)

>Q.how r the hostel rooms??and electricity???
Hostel rooms are BIS (Beaureu of Indian standards, in case u forgot) approved ******* rooms wd all world-class facilities … after payin sum nominal xtra fees, u can as well live in a state-of-art suite built at Landmark.

>Q.What do u do in the eves? play cricket? gym? swim? wat else?
We have snookers club, also ppl do to go for bikin daredevilry to the banks of Ganges many-a-dayz … ppl who r interested also go to discos almost religiously daily … and needless to say, we hav a swimmin complex which houses pools varyin in size from tht for beginners to five Olympic sized pools.

>Q.can someone plz giv me some idea about d placements statistics?
As a matter of policy, it has been decided tht only companies wd minimum turnover of US$1000m and havin business in atleast 3 continents will b allowed to recruit students. I hope u can appreciate our concern for maintainin d levels of xcellence over here.

Please lemme know if u have sum more queries. I will b more thn happy to satisfy thm

And yes I hav indeed written answers to all these questions myself and do claim all d copyrights, irrespective of whrever else u c thm.

Group valued flows: A possible example

@IMSc, Chennai

Am here as an attendee for the NBHM nurture programme. Today, we had a talk by one of the participants, ADG on flows in graphs (ref. Diestel’s Graph Theory). In his talk, he defined the concept of group valued flows. Let there be a function , where is the edge set of the multigraph and is an abelian group. Hence, assigns to each edge of the edgeset , an element in . This concept is an extension of the concept of integral flow in graphs, with in the latter. I won’t go much into the theory itself, but I have some different objectives here.

After the lecture, one of the attendees complained that this notion of group valued flow is too abstract. So, a possible non-trivial example happened to occur to me in which the abelian group doesn’t equal . Consider, a hypothetical mode of communication (I don’t know if one such already exists), in which information happen to travel in the form of nuclei spin in the medium carrying it. So, the source or the transmitter orients the nuclei of the medium those are just adjacent to it, in a particular direction and the fraction of nuclei in that cross section which are oriented in that particular direction determine the magnitude of the spin vector. These nuclei then transfer this spin to their neighbours and reorient themselves randomly in all the directions such that their net spin vector again becomes zero. In this fashion, the information about the nuclei spin can flow through the medium. This flow can hence be thought of as a vector valued flow in which flow in each edge of the graph is given by a vector . Hence, the group happens to be the vector space having the usual addition operation of the vector space as its abelian operation.

P.S. 1) I’ve written this post primarily so that I can refer back to this idea whenever I might need it at some future point of time.

2) This is the first post belonging to the category math on my blog .

3) To write equations and other stuff in in your WordPress blog posts, type $latex yourcodehere $. Though I feel that WordPress doesn’t adjust the sentences involving LaTeX that good, but I have no other option .

Some firsts

As neone amongst you who keep(s) track of this blog might have noticed, I have been making many dx-dx changes to my blog over past few days. I have included a site traffic monitor from tracemyip.org and also one from Clustrmaps. I liked the TraceMyIP widget more obviously because it provides greater detail about the visitors including their IP, exact location, browser, OS, time of visit, pages visited and whether they are online or not. And also u can block ur own IP from being counted. But it is free only for a period of one year I was wishing to do it for a while now, but could figure out today only how to go about it.

The web log from the first day surprises me in addition to the info that the WordPress Blog Stat widget has been givin over last month or so, Today, I had visitors from as far as Copenhagen, Saint George and LA. That simply amazes me. And on the top of it all, somebody amongst them had searched for my name itself. Now, this is something too flattering OK … enuf of gloating. But on a side note, people please do tell me who you are when you have searched for my name and do leave some comments

Also, I have included links to some blogs that I myself read and admire too!

In addition, I am posting today my first photograph, actually a computer generated painting that seems beautiful to me atleast. This is another of the firsts. The painting is a result of some computation carried out in connection with something in asteroseismology. I feel that this is why nature seems to be so beautiful. Such beautiful do these strokes of lines arising from some equations of physics seem. The image was generated from the numerical datae using GNUPLOT version 4.2 and then subsequently edited using GIMP 2.4.5

Signing off

General chit-chat

Ya, finally got sumwht free 2day … was trying to comprehend and modify a FORTRAN code written in French to suit my needs … took me 8 days to do so … I think I took too much time for it … it shud have been done in 1 day … newyz I think, in all probability, its settled as of now

well, I gave this title so as to allow myself the freedom to write many random unrelated things within a single post …

so lemme start by indulging in bashing my current host i.e. HBCSE, Mumbai … v have been given accomodatn in a flat which is at a 25 min walk from the workplace … the toilet thr is 2 ft x 3 feet, no light in d bathroom, no mirror in d house … I giv this elaborate description just to point out the indifferent attitude of the powers tht may b towards such undergraduate research programs … how do u xpect ppl to work in such conditions … is sumthing beyond my level of understandin … Also, in my experience, this seems to be the case wd most of the undergraduate research programs. Altho I must admit tht I m annoyed wd the administrative part of it only … rest everything is very good.

Nextly, it seems tht the most visited and the most useful (perhaps) post on my site is on LaTeX … and also the number of visits seems to have increased tremendously after I switched to the new display theme tht I am usin on my blog page i.e. Chaos Theory. Incidentally, I realised this after making my last post tht my theme is indeed Chaos Theory … now tht I m at it … I think tht d current theme is much better thn the Quentin theme I was using b4 … I had chosen tht to give d blog a royal look

I think I took too much time to write down all d ideas … hence will close it 4 now

Chaos in Philosophy

@HBCSE, Mumbai

Arrived on 27th from Bhilai … attended a lec on chaos theory by Prof. G. Rangarajan of the Dept. of Mathematics at IISc, Bangalore. Cud make sense of most of the things tht he spoke, at the end of the lec, he discussed on the phenomenon of mass extinction of species. It says that the rate of growth of a species population in one geographical region is coupled to that in another geographical region … and if the individuals belonging to same species compete wd each other, than a slight perturbance in d equation (in form of some calamity) leads to a synchronicity between the growth rates of the species in different regions and thereafter mass extinction takes place.

On the other hand, if the individuals of the same species cooperate wd each other, synchronicity isn’t achieved and rescue effect comes into play and the species does surrive in certain pockets of the planet, and then it can again prosper. For more of the mathematics part of it, see this.

This led me to think on how even such higher and deep mathematics also say the same thing as what common sense says. If only, common sense wud have been so common

Good Bye Sem 4

So, here I am after screwin up my Number Theory end-semester paper That too after knowin almost all of d theory …

Finally my fourth semester and with it my sophomore year at IITK is over. Much water flew down d Ganges during this while … It wud b beyond my capacity to enlist each and every event …

But a couple of important ones in a completely random order:

1. I’m gonna get my first F (fakka) of my degree this sem in d course bout which I mntnd in my last post … Probability & Statistics … its sumwht sad considerin tht I never xpected myself 2 be gettin an F … but nevertheless I’ve taken it in my stride. As a result, my whole planning of nxt semester requires a review … lets c
2. One more suicide this yr at IITK … its sad but in no manner was it shockin … as I do c many suicides-tht-may-happen-netime roaming around … and certainly thr r too many cases of suicides-tht-might-have-been … Go on increasing the seats … continue takin students without enuf knowledge and upkeep the screwed up entrance procedures combined with the wonderful environment tht is over here. Btw, wht hasnt been told much in the media is tht the boy was a category student, as is the word goin amongst the ppl who actually knew d guy … he got depressed in his 1st sem after the “institute-organized informal interactn”, and tht the suicide happened due to hanging himself with the door of his room open … I hope tht gives some of u wannabe IITians … a sneak peak in2 life at IITs
3. I did work a lot on my physical fitness in between for a while during the sem … I think tht was actually d most sincere effort towards a goal tht I made durin this entire sem … I m a guy who has never been too much in2 sports … but this sem I did reach a fitness level whr I can run for 5 kms at a stretch, cycle 34 kms within 3 hrs … and such things … how was I to know tht even such a sincere and determined effort wont get me success … this damn hierarchical way of things over here :X
4. Saw a lot of good movies and some bad ones too. Firstly d good ones (again in no order) … Dharm, Khuda Ke liye, Taare Zameen Par, Angoor, Lamhe, Mr & Mrs Iyer, Dor, Proof, Guide, Kitaab (Gulzaar), Golmaal (1979), Maqbool, Pinjar, Sardar (2005), Akele hum Akele tum, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and I guess many more aisi … among the bad ones … thnx 2 our Bollywood distributors and financers, thr wr many too … watch thm at ur own risk … Sheesha, Tashan, One Two Three, U Me aur Hum, Race, Krazzy 4 and others I dont even remember … but yes many of tht category too But all in all, I will thnk IITK forever for d numerous gud movies tht I saw over here and hence refinin my concept of life.
5. The insti also witnessed d annual Gymkhana elections this sem and I curious to hav a closer look … became a part of Election Council – the student body responsible for free and fair conduct of elections … but I was actually shocked and yet not shocked to see the amount of politics being played here … d truth is elections here r fought on regional sentiments, narrow-minded hall loyalties, involves bribery and intimidation of voters, voter impersonation … and havin one’s men inside the election council, play of cards by prominent students, no regards at all to the Lyngdoh Commission and Hon’ble Supreme Court’s guidelines … no regards to the insti rules themselves … and many more of such things
6. Got my passport made finally, a plan I had in my mind since 2nd sem … only 2 get n error in it … and due 2 no fault of mine … I think idiots or creatures worse thn tht sit in d concerned and many such offices :X:X
7. Then thr was Techkriti’08 … simply awesum … d best fest tht I witnessed at IITK … tho it certainly did not escape its share of corruptn, drainin away of money … but thr wr plus points too … got to listen many Nobel laureates … I think tht was precisely one of d very important reason y I wanted to b inside in IIT … but d students had 2 b lured with nothing less thn i-Pods … so as 2 attend such lecs :X
8. In betn, I went to Delhi for a short while after a long gap … saw Delhi Metro and was hooked onto it … symbol for perfectn … I did not mind travellin in a Metro even if tht needed 4 me to take a longer route … salute Padamshri E. Shreedharan … such r d (wo)men India and d world in general needs in plenty … actually only they r (wo)men … rest r just Homo Sapiens
9. then 2day, my WordPress dashboard tells me tht one of my post has been searched by ppl quite often as compared to the performance of my blog till now … thts good and as u can urself c, thts a reason gud enuf for me 2 increase d frequency of my posts
   

Tht is all tht I remember bout d sem as 4 now … I guess I will not b posting nething soon … goin 2 home … and I m not sure if I’ll get as gud net connectivity over thr … another reason y I like IITK

now comin 2 2day … did screw up my NT paprer as said above … got 27/60 pretty bad as per my self-assessment … I fare far above … thn I did carry out 2day after a long time … many of my activities as per d plans made … after d damn xam, shaved myself after around 1.5 mnths … got my bicycle repaired after not attendin 2 it for 2 mnths … thn after around 1 yr or so, got a haircut … and thn as per plans, am also bloggin right now … now I guess I shud pack up,

Home calling … with arms held wide open … but this rooom has 2 b vacated

Signing off,

Lovy

Busy not-mugging

Ok … so it has been a return after a long time wd a very few of my frnds complainin at times tht I hav not been writin ne posts … as a matter of fact I did write in between a few unpublished posts tht r not yet complete Things r not at all fine obviously wd end-sems going on … and tommorrow is yet another boring paper ESO 209: Probability & Statistics … I feel tht tho the subject is gud enuf, the prof is one of d worst things tht can happen to such a nice topic … In all probability, he is not ever gonna read this

Did rather poorly in Algebra … and am quite upset wd myself over it … considerin tht I liked d subject and the instructor … not nemore as far as d instructor is concerned as he made sum remarks tht were not-called-for. Psychology and Discrete maths turned out to be so & so.

am quite bored wd these end-sems … I dont know wht purpose do these mid-sems and end-sems serve as far as my educatn is concerned … OK I wont start wd the same old topic again … made a deal on Olympics stamp today at around 67% premium costin my pocket 3000 INR

xpectin to leave for home on 2nd … so again thr might b a long gap b4 my next post happens. Lookin fwd to spendin some quality time at home wd lots of crucial decsns to b made this time … also n exit from this rather boring place called IITK but will miss my dear friend computer too

Now I should go back after havin vented out sum of my frustration

Lovy

A new friend

Pardon me if my heading has been superfluous … but I guess that is infinitesimaly close to truth of my new comp … Yeah I purchased a new comp this Saturday, and now I hope the posts to this blog will increase somwhat My father deserve all the thanks for the financial aspect of it while a dear friend Anurag Mishra is the one who looked after the technical aspect. I mean it was him who told me what and from whom to buy. I am almost cyber illiterate The configuration is as follows:

ASUS M2N MX SE Motherboard + = 10000/-
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.6 GHz

Kingston DDR2 RAM 667 MHz 2 * 512 MB 1150*2 = 2300/-

Seagate Sata2 250 GB = 3050/-

Samsung 20x Sata DVD+RW = 1450/-

XFX 8500GT 512 MB = 5400/-

Samsung CRT 17″ SyncMaster 794MG = 4700/-

Microsoft Wired Keyboard + Mouse set = 750/-

APC 500VA = 2200/-

iBall Glory ATX = 1450/-

Total (including an external Cabinet Fan) = 31450/-

I guess this might be of use to some of u, but plz note that I am not at all recommending any of these to you as of yet and no legal responsibility lies wd me in case of any unpleasant event caused due to purchasing any or all of these products.

Getting back to comps, I installed ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 on my new comp and for the present have kept it single-boot only.

Signing off for now,

Lovy

Anarchism at its height in one of the world’s best educational institute

This is one of the several mails that I’m used to receive daily, but this perhaps reflects best the state of anarchism that prevails in India’s No. 1 engineering institute, though at somebody’s cost. More comments after the mail …

Dear Friends,
Please go through the following mail which was received by us in the
morning. I thought that it is imperative that we as a part of the campus
community knew what is going on. What good are rules (of whether or not a
person is to be treated in HC) if they lead to death of a child?

--

This is to share an incident which reflects the state of affairs for the
disenfranchised in our Institute of excellence. I suspect this incident
would not be reported by anybody in authority in the Institute and hence
would not reach most of us. In this case too we got to know of it just by
chance, as would be evident from the account, which makes us believe that
occurrence of such incidents may not be a rarity after all, but that is
just not shared with the community. A similar incident happened a month
ago and the sequence of events are much similar. This account is to inform
the community of this incident, acknowledge a feeling of collective shame
that this could occur in an Institute which claims to be the best, and
hopefully to evoke some collective action to prevent such occurrences in
future. I am sure of the facts, as I got to know of it from a first person
account and yet would not name anybody to avoid unnecessary personal
vilification. This is the system and not the individuals involved.

On Sunday morning at about 4.15 am one of the canteen owners of one of the
Halls was going back after work when he chanced upon a crowd of migrant
workers at the security crossing near the Motor Transport/ air strip road.
Apparently a boy, whose family had been employed in the construction site
of the Environment Engineering building had been bitten by something
poisonous (they were not sure whether it was a scorpion or a snake), in
his sleep. The workers including the family consisting of the father a
brother and a younger sister (his mother is no longer alive) had come to
the SIS for help. The boy who was around 12-13 seemed to have been bitten
around 3 in the morning and was alive though unconscious. The SIS guards
(there were around 20-25 of them there) kept urging the  workers to take
the boy to the city hospital but refused to extend any help. The group of
migrant workers did not know anything about the city, and this is usual
because they are brought from far of  places like Malda  and Chhattisgarh
by the contractor and are herded back at the end of their term. The
canteen owner requested the SIS to lend their jeep for transporting the
boy to the Health Center. The SIS guards refused to ask for their jeep
(though several of them had their walkie talkie) and instead told this man
that the boy would not be treated in the Health Center and hence has to be
taken to the city. At this point the Canteen Owner decided to take the boy
in his motorcycle, along with another worker to hold the inert form, to
the Health Center.

At the Health Center, the person at the desk refused to entertain the
case, when he came to know that the boy was not related to an Institute
employee and was neither a student. The canteen owner tried to impress
upon the person that the case was very serious and the boy may just
survive if only the hospital intervened and the formalities and the
expenses could be handled later. He also volunteered to get the health
card of his father who is an Institute employee, as treating guests is
routinely done in the HC. The attendant at the desk refused to comply but
conceded to give the phone number of the doctor on duty. He told the
canteen owner that he may call up the doctor to check if she would treat
the boy, but not to mention that he was calling from the HC, but tell her
that he was calling from one of the Halls.

The canteen owner called the doctor, who when she realized that it
involved the child of worker, was extremely annoyed and said that this
facility was not available to them. When the canteen owner pleaded that
the case was serious and may turn fatal she apparently shouted 'which
language do you understand?' and slammed the phone down.

After that the canteen owner decided to take the child to the city and
requested the hospital attendant to provide the services of the ambulance
so that he could be taken as soon as possible and anyway it is extremely
difficult to negotiate the GT road with an unconscious person. But he was
refused even that. The boy was still alive till that point.

The rest of the story in short - the canteen owner took the boy to a
nearby nursing home in Kalyanpur but that setup was not equipped to handle
snake bites. Then he drove with the unconscious boy all the way to the
Hallett (medical college) - the doctor on duty was much more prompt and
immediately attended to the boy, but unfortunately he had already died.
Then this canteen owner drove all the way back to the campus with a dead
child in the pillion. As he ended his account 'bilkul kuch achcha nahin
lag raha hai tab se - health centre hote hue ek chote se bachche ko marne
de sakten hain - kyun ki woh ek mazdoor ka bachcha hai sirf isiliye?'

--

Who sent this mail is immaterial. The point is do we as the community have
an answer to this? It's not about just shouting out loud against the
people who ignored the poor child's state. It's about identifying what
makes people so insensitive and taking measures so that such inhumanity is
not showcased again. I still hope we are human.

Firstly some full forms to make the above mail more comprehensible …

HC — Health Center, SIS — Security Intelligence Services, GT Road –Grant Trunk Road (Connecting the institute concerned to Kanpur city)

One more thing which has not been said about in the mail is that apparently even if the doctor at HC would have agreed to attend the boy, the boy would have been killed sooner as there are only eight General Physicians at this HC who perhaps do not even qualify to be General Physician … one more incident … last week itself one of the doctor at this HC told one of my batchmate that he was sufferin from malaria, only to be brushed aside by the outside “practising” docs. [:x] … Then, we proudly claim ourselves to be one of the world’s best institute … an institute par xcellence … compare ourselves to MIT and Princeton … the strength of the campus is around 10000 … even going by the Govt. of India’s norms about setting up hospitals based on regions’ population, we should be havin a little better HC than one with only eight General Physicians.

If this isn’t height of anarchism, then plz let me know what else it is?

Inline figures in a LaTeX document

I am trying to do some stuff in LaTeX, in which I wanted to insert figures into my amsart documentclass … Naturally, I could not find that in any standard book and went bout googling for it … still there was not a site which explained it in full although Piet van Oostrum’s documentation about picins was quite helpful. I am writing out here one possible way of doing the same which worked for me, there are other ways too like using wrapfig package. The .sty file can downloaded from here, and put it where your LaTeX compiler looks for packages, then in your .tex file do the following things:

documentclass{article}%I have seen it working wd amsart also

 . . .

usepackage{... , picins, ...}%where ... indicates other packages

then write the following command wherever you need you figure to be there

parpic(width,height)(x-offset,y-offset)[Options][Position]{Picture}

All parameters except the Picture are optional. The picture can be
positioned left or right, boxed with a rectangle, oval, shadowbox,
dashed box, a caption can be given which includes it in the List of
figures.

If the width and height are not given [in which case also no offsets
can be given] or if they are given as 0pt, the actual size of the
Picture is used.

Options can be (default is l):
l – put picture on left side of the paragraph
r – put picture on right side of the paragraph

f – frame the picture
d – put a dashed frame aroud the picture
o – put an \oval around the picture
s – put a shadowbox around the picture
x – put a 3D box around the picture
Max one of each group can be given

Position:
l – put the picture left in the box
r – put the picture right in the box
t – put the picture in the top of the box
b – put the picture in the bottom of the box
Default is centering. It only makes a difference if the width and
height given are bigger than the actual picture. If offsets are
given Position is not used.

Picture can be any LaTeX construct.

I have just now “tested” that the \piccaption option for writing caption to such an inline figure doesn’t work properly and isn’t properly typesetted. The other options mentioned in Piet’s documentation viz. \piccaptioninside, \piccaptionoutside, \piccaptionside and \piccaptiontopside doesn’t work at all on my computer. Also, even without captions, this seems to be an only somewhat satisfying solution and does throw lots of problems like improper alignment of text … text over text, text over figure, problems with size adjustment of figure and so on.

Please note that I have borrowed most of the material from Piet’s documentation itself and have written here so that it might appear on search results more easily. Please comment freely as if this information was of some use to you and if you would like to tell us of some new improvements in a non-technical language, of course

Logicism

Now, this might be the most radical topic to start blogging about. Earlier, the title was Scientism but I have changed it to Logicism for reasons described in a comment. The word scientism was perhaps first coined by Carl Sagan. It suited my need best to give a name to the collective set of ideas and opinions that I have developed over time. I am writing down some of its commandments which deems fit to me. Surely, I don’t intend to write down all of them at one stretch but will be building it brick by brick. I believe that I follow this religion. You are free to make your own opinions about my views, follow or not follow it, and even write to me your comments (or suggest some new commandments). The commandments go like this:

1) Every person’s first duty is towards this human race. Nations, religion, caste, creed, family and gender – all come after that. None of our actions should be towards retro-development of human race. It being said, this doesn’t imply that we humans have a right to exploit other species for our undue benefit. The subspecies Homo Sapiens sapiens, as a whole must act like an elder brother taking care of all its brethren species. However, when it comes to the very existence of human species itself, we should leave no stone upturned to safeguard that, even at the cost of some other creatures.

The First Step

This is my first blogging experience. Though I have read some two or three blogs by some other friends or other people but haven’t myself tried my hands on this thing yet. So, I am sure of committing too many mistakes, breaking too many conventions and norms. I ask everybody’s forgiveness for the same.

The inspiration to start blogging came from my friend Neeraj Singh, an IITM arts student and a very dear friend, along with many others like Vipul Naik, a CMI third year student, S V Kanade, an IITK maths student both of whom I don’t know personally but do admire them a lot and have read their blogs secretly and am simply trying to follow their footsteps by starting one of my own. Besides, I have started this new adventure to develop my writing skills and relieving myself of the indifferent feeling that I develop of people, events, system etc. sometimes or rather many a times. I will try my best to be regularly blogging if I may make out some time from my ill-managed daily-schedule. The blogs, I suppose will be on varied topics and are prone to hurt your feelings. So, please read at your own risk. You are free to comment on my posts or write your views to me personally at any of the following addresses:lsinghal[AT]iitk[DOT]ac[DOT]in , singhalsingle[AT]gmail[DOT]com

But here’s also a bye-law – and that is, that I will allow your comments or will reply to you only if the following criteria are met:

1. you are worthy enough to get a reply from me or your comments to be taken note of.
2. I am worthy enough of replying to you.

so please check beforehand, that you find yourself to satisfy the above two criteria [;)]

So all the axioms and definitions have been made. Now, the theory is to be developed out of them [:P] … I hope it does work out well.