Art, Media, Games

This post is dedicated to all the stuff that awes me with its brlliance. These are a few which in recent memory have caused me to "stop and stare" or just ROTFLMAO =)

toe: I've talked of them before :)

Nine Inch Nails, "The Downward Spiral". Freaky Score. Do Listen.




Audrey Kawasaki: Her paintings are simply bewitching, all the detail is concentrated on the faces and the expressions are of such depth that I finally understand the term "drown in her eyes".



Ramya Shankar: Arun sent me a few songs that she once made (sang and recorded with friends playing instruments). I was really impressed by how her amatuer-recorded songs sounded as professional as songs on which lakhs have been spent. Excellent tunes and amazing vocals.
You can find some of them here.

"renamed_Back_rR" has to be my favourite of the ones I've heard so far, and its right here, below :)



Paul Robertson: He makes videos based on Sprite Animations as a hobby and posts them on his visual blog. His art has various themes, and I like most of his stuff. Here's a video that I adore; It's called "Devil Eyes":



Portal: The. Most. Fun. Game. I. Have. Ever. Played.
More fun than old video games or even The Curse of Monkey Island. It is simply hilarious and has excellent gameplay. The concept is basically that you have a gun which can create a portal between two flat planes (not on all materials however) which you can then throw stuff through or walk through yourself.
It's based on the Source Engine, so the physics is very accurate, and the game itself is designed very well. The fun part are its surrealistic humour, the AI controlling the facility you're in and the ending song.
Installing Windows to play it was completely worth it :D

Here's the ending song, "Still Alive". It's by Jonathon Coulton, sung by Ellen McLain, and is one of the best Game Ending songs ever ^_^

WARNING, CONTAINS SPOILERS.





You can download a high-res one here (13MB)

The previous 48 hours

Were eventful to say the least :)
Started off with an emergency puzzle-website-making spree by us on orders from our great Techkriti team. Our work was to design the website and think up puzzles for its content. In 24 hours. :P
This was for the online event TesseracT for which I was supposedly one of the three coordinators (the other two were Utkarsh and Teja). We three sat throughout the night, got questions, made the website, and then went to our normal day-routine without sleep. We thought we'd just finish up some of the stuff left and launch the website at night - pretty much everything was ready.
I asked the students' server admin Naresh to install mod_perl on the server in the afternoon since the submit script between the static xml+xsl pages used Perl to do the checking of the answers. He was somewhat busy, but was able to start the setting up. In the end, the website came up half an hour late due to a variety of problems (and some frantic debugging) on our side and the server side.

The real trouble started when the website did come up.
Now, here I must tell you that the students' server is the biggest piece of crap in the server room in the Computer Center. It has 500MB of.. swap and 256MB of RAM. It runs FreeBSD, and that was probably the reason why it ran at all in the hours of agony that followed.

Within minutes of the site being released, we found that the server had become excruciatingly slow. At first we thought it must be purely because of the sudden increase in hits, but we soon realised something was horribly wrong. The first culprit that came to mind was the Perl script that we were using. We checked the code and came to the conclusion that nothing could be wrong with it; all it did was a foreach over a hash with 10 entries :P Running it on another server showed us no abnormal behaviour, apache never went above 0.1% CPU.

In the meanwhile, the server had stopped responding to anything but pings, and was refusing to initiate ssh connections. And the bloody thing was locked inside a server room, so we didn't have physical access to it at all. The only guy who had an ssh connection open to the server was me, and that too out of pure chance - Praneeth (Flash, video, sound, and overall suckiness warning for the blog) (Praneeth was the other admin) had uploaded my ssh key onto the techkriti account so I could upload the TesseracT website (pure chance because the uploading would've normally been done by the webteam). Unfortunately, the user 'techkriti' was not in the wheel group, and hence could not `su -`, so the user was practically useless. The only thing I could run was `top` which showed us that the machine was out of memory :|

Naresh: are you logged into students
?
me: Yeah
no commands are working
Naresh: fine
me: they take forever to execute
hey
I have top running
it shows 1% CPU :|
Naresh: ?!
me: Yes.
CPU states: 4.0% user, 0.0% nice, 20.1% system, 0.0% interrupt, 75.9% idle
Mem: 134M Active, 27M Inact, 83M Wired, 608K Cache, 35M Buf, 656K Free
Swap: 487M Total, 483M Used, 3692K Free, 99% Inuse, 1704K In, 332K Out
memory
Naresh: fuck
me: ?
Does it have htop?
Naresh: no
out of memory right?
me: Yeah

Arun called me up after a while asking what had happened. After we discussed the situation, he suggested we try `ssh root@localhost`. That sounded like an excellent idea at that time, but for some reason, we did an `su praneeth` instead (Praneeth had come over to where I was in the meanwhile), and then did an `su -`. Mind you, both these commands took ~30 mins to run. While we were waiting for them to finish, we setup TesseracT on an internal server so that at least the campus people could play it.
Oh, and in hindsight, `ssh root@localhost` would not have worked since the machine was refusing ssh connections :)

When we finally had root access on the server, we issued an `apachectl stop`, which took ~ 1 1/2 hours to run. And when it had finished, something very strange happened; mod_perl stopped working, and the main Techkriti page came back up. This was quite a disaster actually, as hundreds of people who were waiting for next.pl to load suddenly saw the file load into their browsers, and thanks to my stupidity, saw the answers as well ~_~
Arun told me soon afterwards (as I had realised to an immense sense of stupidity when mod_perl stopped working), that I should have put the answers in a separate file. Oh well, lesson learnt for the main event (this was just the prelims with no official registration or prize money).

After this, I ran top with root and saw that stocksim (Crappy Java program, run by the Business Club people for online stock thingies) was one of the culprits - it was using >225MB of memory. The other culprit, as Praneeth theorised, was the mod_perl itself. He said he had read that the mod_perl on FreeBSD was buggy and prone to high memory usage.

We decided to kill stocksim and take our chances with the mod_perl again. As Naresh was working on the thing, something happened, and the server went down, and this time, it _really_ went down - I'm not sure what happened, but the end result was that now we could do nothing about the server.

Arun and I decided to give techkriti's IP address to the temporary server till the next morning. Arun did all the vhosts stuff and in 15 mins, techkriti.org was "back up" - it just had the following message:

Okay, our server died on us. This is a temp server.<br/>
While we restore the Techkriti website, Play <a href="tesserac>/">TesseracT</a> :)

TesseracT was back up for the world! ;)

Praneeth had been trying to restore/reinstall the old phpbb that was on the temporary server (which was our Navya server (internal link) actually ;), and had gotten tired, given up, and gone back to his room. After >32 hours of staying awake, I was in no mood to finish his work. All three of us lumbered back to our respective rooms from the CSE deptt at ~3am.

We did, however, have enough energy to take a 60 second exposure picture of a flowering tree behind the CC on the way back ^_^



We found this photo to be such a beauty in the midst of our sullen tiredness, that we decided to make this the last page in the puzzle - which I did right after I got back to my room :)

As things stand now, the students' server is back up, and mod_perl is off on the server. So TesseracT is down for everyone outside IITK. People inside IITK can still play it at http://navya.junta.iitk.ac.in/tesseract .

On a different note, I read this here

The decision to use Tracker by default in Ubuntu rather than the similar Beagle indexing system is somewhat controversial. Beagle can index more content and provides a more functional search tool with features like date sorting. Beagle is already included in popular Linux distributions like OpenSUSE and has been tested more extensively.

I've been wondering for the past few months if this was the result of Tracker fanboyism, Mono-hatred, or Ubuntu's experimentalism.

Update: Pics! :)

Update 2: Utkarsh's flashback on the thing; mostly stuff that I didn't write in detail about above.

PS: New Navya Server = 2 Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.4GHz Processors, 8GB RAM, 500GB SATA hdd.
Speed = Compiling MySQL (gentoo) takes 6 mins (compared to 25mins on my Pentium M, 1GB laptop).

Today I discovered..

To my extreme chagrin...

That my laptop cannot boot off USB drives :|

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.