Roight.

An amazing Antaragni just got over, and the semester-end is just around the corner. This kind of thing usually brings about two mixed feelings - the tension associated with the End-Semester exams, and the holidays that follow the aforementioned ordeal.

How would I rate this semester? If you asked me to describe that in one word, I would quote Zero Punctuation and "tell you to stop being such a twap", but if pressed (and I'm plagiarising off of him again), I think I'd go with "Schizophrenic" "Inconsistent".

The semester started off with me boistering with confidence that I wouldn't screw my acads this time again, but I ended up doing that anyway, and in some ways, worse than I had ever done before. However, unlike the previous times I had done so, this semester wasn't fraught with guilt or sadness for me, and on the contrary, this could've been said to be my best semester yet if I hadn't kicked college education in the nuts again. And this is why my first semester remains to be my best semester here yet.

"What could possibly alleviate sucky acads?" you ask? Well, I can tell you it has nothing to do with "love", so you can take that thought out of your mind and stuff it in a sticky petri dish in a dumpy lab in Indonesia for further perusal on students who have a ratio of girls higher than 1:50 in their college.

Roight.

Now that we have that clear, lets see what made me happy this semester. To be frank, I don't really remember, and my memory of most things before my trip home is incoherent to say the least. One plausible theory is that I reset my memory to forget the unpleasant things that happened to me before my vacation, and now that I dig deeper in my head, I feel bubbles of despair bubbling up again.
Hush. Lest the bubbles grow.

Lets look at what all I can remember without disturbing those friendly-bubbles (yes, they are friendly, even if not in the short term).

Good news:

• I'm a Beagle developer now~! Thanks to Arun Raghavan for first introducing me to Beagle, and getting me interested in it, Debajyoti Bera for constantly encouraging me while working with him on Beagle's fancy new webinterface, and Kevin Kubasik for giving me my first boost into Beagle while working on Beagle's Ubuntu Gutsy packages :)


• gnome-system-tools is (mostly) working on gentoo again! This is thanks to eva (gentoo's gnome herd) and garnacho (system-tools-backends' maintainer). I didn't contribute any code, but the fact that I was there to witness its development (and help in some testing), gives me joy :)

Laziness news:

• I've been too lazy to work on the article for Gnome Journal even though I've promised the editors at least one article for the next issue :(


• After making strides with Necoro on #gentoo-guis on Catapult, I sorta drifted off for a while (thanks to my vacation and Antaragni), and I haven't really thought about the project, not looked at the code, and not even contacted Necoro...


• I had said that I would be working on a Gentoo backend for PackageKit, but I haven't done monkey balls in that direction :|


• Slacked off testing/helping out in the stabilisation of the now ~arch GNOME 2.20 in gentoo..

And I'm too tired/sleepy this evening to catch up on these right now. And the cold I have isn't helping either :-/

Monstrously hungry as well; time for dinner.

Maybe tomorrow will be more conducive to fix my acads and my laziness (It'd better be. English assignment due on Wednesday).

Exams and a Questionnaire

Right. So the exams are over, and now I'm too tired to even move. So I'm just sitting here listening to Schubert (I love my speakers, and I love Nodame Cantabile), waiting for tomorrow so I can go home for a week of vacations.


About the questionnaire, I originally found it on Naresh's blog, and thought I'd give it a spin. Here are the results:


Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 38%
Visual : 61%
Left : 52%
Right : 47%

Nirbheek, you exhibit an even balance between left- and right- hemisphere dominance and a slight preference for visual over auditory processing. With a score this balanced, it is likely that you would have slightly different results each time you complete this self-assessment quiz.

You are a well-rounded person, distinctly individualistic and artistic, an active and multidimensional learner. At the same time, you are logical and disciplined, can operate well within an organization, and are sensitive towards others without losing objectivity. You are organized and goal-directed. Although a "thinking" individual, you "take in" entire situations readily and can act on intuition.

You sometimes tend to vacillate in your learning styles. Learning might take you longer than someone of equal intellect, but you will tend to be more thorough and retain the material longer than those other individuals. You will alternate between logic and impulse. This vacillation will not normally be intentional or deliberate, so you may experience anxiety in situations where you are not certain which aspect of yourself will be called on.

With a slight preference for visual processing, you tend to be encompassing in your perceptions, process along multidimensional paths and be active in your attacking of situations or learning.

Overall, you should feel content with your life and yourself. You are, perhaps, a little too critical of yourself -- and of others -- while maintaining an "openness" which tempers that tendency. Indecisiveness is a problem and your creativity may not be in keeping with your potential. Being a pragmatist, you downplay this aspect of yourself and focus on the more immediate, obvious and the more functional

So, they claim to have deduced the above  4 5 paragraphs from 20 questions. Though they sound very 'true-ish', I generally take these kind of things with a fistful of salt.

Hence, IMHO, an utter load of crap.

Fancy icons and a launchpad branch

"Fancy" new icon for the Beagle Webinterface! ;)





Okay, yeah, I know I just added a blue "W" to the original logo :P

This is the "flag-logo" of the launchpad team and bzr branch that I created after dBera suggested it. It contains experimental being-worked-on^[1] code that might not be suitable for svn trunk. Besides that, it gives me more freedom to experiment and get feedback from people, since my patches don't have to go through dBera to the beagle svn trunk and trouble him each time I try something new :)

Also, Here's a treat for all those who read my blog - Pink by Aerosmith:




1. Midsems coming, which will be followed by a midsem break. So there will be a period of low activity followed by a mega-commit when I get back from home.

Webbeagle, TheOneBackend, PackageKit, and God

1. Read about Webbeagle.


2. Read about TheOneBackend


3. Read about PackageKit


4. Read about God.

1. => dBera's illegitimate child, and something I have been hacking on for the past 2 weeks.


2. => Necoro's illegitimate child, and something that will be hacked on in the future


3. => Hughsie's illegitimate child, and something I will be writing a portage backend for.


4. => A very interesting way of looking at everything.