kerneljack's diary

Okay, so here I am after a million years! I’m sitting right now absolutely tired upstairs in my house in Karachi. As always, it’s 5:00 in the morning. This is the only way I could get the damn internet connection working at a proper speed. Last year, it was really easy to connect and use the internet, but this year it seems that so many people have moved to the internet that it is almost impossible to connect at normal times. So, what else is new?

I spend the last two days at my cousin’s house and while I was there I also managed to end up with diarrhea! That was really like HELL! So I finally ate a proper meal today. I also went to the dentist today and I need two more fillings

Well, no doughnuts! It’s a good thing, actually since I need to lose some weight. Wishful thinking! My mom will never let me, and when we go to Pakistan, my relatives won’t let me! There was a time when FAT people were fashionable, more than 150 years ago, I think. I wish the world was like that right now. Then at least DARRYL would be justified!!! (calm down, puffy!).

So, I received emails from both Darryl and Evangi today, and I finally found gratification in the fact that people are actually interested in the crap that I put on this page! I’m happy that you guys actually read this, you know … and it feels nice, of course. Duh. And the other links on the left will have to wait for some time, since I presently have NO idea what to put on them.

Well, some more articles! This time I actually found out about a really cool robot that they are working on at M.I.T called Kismet. It’s a robot that interacts with people and shows emotional response. It’s cool, and cute too. Follow the link if you’re interested: Kismet Home Page

I haven’t managed to study much, I spent all day today writing letters to relatives and I’m supposed to go to Siddiqi’s house today to help him with his new PC, but it’s already 10:30 pm right now and I don’t think I’ll be going today

Well, if any of you noticed, I added one of the pictures to my site a few days ago. It’s the same pic I described in the previous posting. I have a lot more now, but, alas, not enough time to touch them up and upload them with this 15-minute connection. I’ll try my best, though.

So many things have been happening all over the world this past year, especially in the Science/Health/Technology sector. I’ve been reading up on developments these past few days and I’m very impressed with the pace at which the world is moving. Popular Science’s web site has a feature story going on about ‘The Best Of What’s New’. I urge everyone to go and read it. They have catalogued all of the new stuff they consider to be the coolest not only in the area of technology, but also in other professions. Check out the aritcle at: www.popsci.com/bown/index.html . And check out their main Web page, too – they have a lot of interesting stories: www.popsci.com. One of them is the story about DNA detectives. Apparently, they should be able to examine DNA right at the scene of a crime, and thus identify the criminal immediately.

I read an excellent article over at Scientific American about the new Oxygen project which has just been started over at M.I.T. It was written by none other than Michael Dertouzous (yes, he’s Greek), the Director of M.I.T’s Computer Science department for the past 25 years!! His article starts of with him sitting in an aeroplane right next to Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the Web) and Ron Rivest (inventor of RSA encryption). Shit! (x50).

Anyway, so the Oxygen project’s basic goal is to allow us to do a lot more with a lot less and to totally change current computing habits so that computing becomes absolutely ubiquituous. This will NOT be done by wearing strange suits and donning gloves and goggles, as some people predict. It will be achieved by a combination of hand-held devices, wall-mounted devices, and a large internetwork that will be created between them. If you’re really interested, (you should be!) check it out at: www.sciam.com. Sorry, but I don’t have a link to take you directly to the article. You’ll have to find it, but it’s on the first page anyway

And finally, check out Discover magazine’s tenth annual awards for technological innovation. They have some other really nice stories too, specifically about the human brain. It’s at www.discover.com.

I finally bought Sarah McLachlan’s new Mirrorball CD, and it is really great; Darryl, you must go buy it! And yes, I’ve already MP3ed it! Darryl, if you want, I can MAIL you the MP3z!! The songs I like so far are: Building a Mystery, Hold On, Good Enough, I Will Remember You, Adia, I Love You, The Path of Thorns, Sweet Surrender, and Angel.

I’ll be going with Siddiqi in about fifteen minutes to finalize his new PC purchase. Ah … another trip to Mosadia Plaza … another doughnut … well, maybe not this time. Let’s see.

Ok, so I kept almost true to my promise today. I studied JavaScript in the morning and I studied Motif in the evening. I also managed to watch a bit of Alien Resurrection in between. That’s an excellent movie. I’m studying up on JavaScript and HTML in order to become a little bit proficient in web page design and programming. I hope I’m not wasting my time.

I was really surprised when my dad scanned one of the pictures from the graduation and brought them home. It’s a picture of me, Nitin, Siddiqi and Christiana standing together. He made it brighter, fixed some red eye problems and I scaled the final pic down to around 20k. It looks quite good now. As soon as I get a few more, I’ll start putting them up. Fixing the picture and setting up my web page once again consumed almost an hour of my time

Well, another delay. I’ve been upto so many different things in the past days and many new things have happened. A few days ago I got my video card changed since it wasn’t working properly in linux. I thought about getting one that uses the Riva TNT chipset, but I wasn’t sure if that was properly supported in linux and I didn’t want to piss the salesman off by returning it. So I found that my only likely choice was the Diamond FireGL Pro 1000. Yes, it sounds fancy, but it isn’t so fancy. It’s an accelerated Open GL card, but it’s almost 1 and a half years old. It’s based on the Permedia 2 chipset and it’s now a lot of fun when I run enlightenment. I’m really beginning to love this window manager, even though it lacks many things, but a lot of work is being done on it and soon it will be the best out there, I hope. If any of you want to go check it out: http://www.enlightenment.org

The pictures of the graduation night arrived yesterday and I for one like them a lot. I’ll try to put them up here soon. Let’s see how soon I can get them scanned and scaled. I’ll have to do some retouching too, since the originals are a bit dark and many people have red-eye problems.

Because of the video card change, I’m now running my desktop at 800×600 pixels since for some reason, the my eyes can no longer handle 1024×768. I think the new video card and my old monitor don’t mesh. They can’t agree on a stable enough refresh rate. And when I looked at my web site at the lower resolution, everything was messed up. I had thought I fixed that before, but anyway, I had to fix it again. I hope it looks better now.

On the GTK+/Qt front, another new member has been added: Motif! Damn, I thought I had it almost figured out when I learn that Motif is really really important and I should probably learn that instead. So I’m going to try to finish off Motif ASAP and then I’ll move on to GTK. I’ll just have to do both. Thanks to Jamie Zawinski for letting me know how important it really is. He was the head of the Mozilla project over at Netscape. Mozilla is the name of their soon to be released Open source browser. He quit because he doesn’t like Netscape much anymore and since Mozilla was stagnating. I also tend not to like any BIG companies. He is really a very gifted programmer. Check out his website at the following address: www.jwz.org

Today my mom made one of my favourite dishes: Dal Gosht. It’s dal with meat, for those of you who don’t know. It goes great with rice and some salad. I’ve been eating too much almost daily nowadays, now that my mom is here to spoil me! And my weight is going up really really fast.

I’m getting confused and tense over the Qt/GTK+ programming issue. I still haven’t decided on which one to use and the fact that GNOME uses GTK only for it’s UI makes things even worse. I must choose something within the next few days. To that end, I spent a lot of time today looking at various web sites which document these toolkits as well as GNOME.

I finally met up with Siddiqi today! We went to Mosadia Plaza, which is another one of my birth places ) That’s where I upgraded my computer from, and that is where Siddiqi might buy his next PC from. I introduced him to the guy there, and together we decided on his next PC. Modem update: After I got my modem to work in linux, it didn’t work in Windoze! Damn! So I had to remove it again and re-enable Plug and Pray. Then it worked in Windows but NOT in linux. I was about ready to pull my hair out. I decided to disable the Plug and Play feature on the motherboard using the BIOS and disabled PnP on the modem as well. Then, I deleted the COM2 port in Windows and restarted the computer. Somehow (I’m still not sure how or why) it worked and now my modem works in both OSes. That’s a good thing, since I don’t have much hair to begin with!

Whenever I go to Mosadia I am tempted by the smells in the air emanating from the Al Baik Broasted Chicken restaurant and from the Donut shops. Yes, everytime I go there I NEVER leave without eating a donut. They are always so soft and fresh. Even the guys at the computer shops expect me to come in at any moment with a donut in my hand (or my mouth)!

Later we went to the Megastar music store, where we looked around and I listened to Sarah McLachlan’s latest, Mirrorball. It is SO excellent! And Siddiqi wanted to buy the new Backstreet Boys, but we wanted to use his special member card, so we decided to wait until next time. He came to my new house then, and we got on the Internet looking for fonts for his project since he had forgotten to copy them. My mom made tea and brought some other stuff along with it. My good friends in Cyprus actually bought a cream/custard pie for me in Cyprus and sent it along with Siddiqi! That was really sweet of you, guys, I liked that a lot! I finally got my hands on the excellent Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This book has won several awards for its excellence and it is one of the few eye-opening books in computer science today. Thank you very much, Darryl.

As I was writing this a while ago, my mom came and tried really hard to understand what I was doing. She tried to read what was on the screen but she couldn’t, so I had to explain to her what I was doing. When she found out that I was writing about what I ate today, she got really excited and shouted at the computer: Stew! Stew! Tell them I’ll make stew for you tomorrow. That was really sweet.

Somehow I got really really tired yesterday and went to sleep early. But I didn’t manage to wake up early. After prayers I came back home, ate lunch and slept again! My mom forced me to wake up after 3 or 4 hours.

What happened later was really cool: I got my modem working under linux! I had to open up the computer and remove the modem to disable Plug and Play and to reassign the IRQs. I used COM2 for the modem and COM1 for the mouse. Yes, under Windows everything is detected automatically for you (hopefully!) and you never know what’s going on. Not so in linux. You must know a lot about your configuration and must be willing to get down and dirty to succeed with linux. Even after setting up the modem, I still had to update my links and permissions in /dev to make everything work properly.

I didn’t manage to talk to Siddiqi today. My mom called and they weren’t home (in case you’re wondering, Evangi).

I have a lot of letters and emails to write, so I guess that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. Oh, and I watched ‘Wag the Dog’ yesterday on my PC using Video CDs. It’s a really cool movie, and I had only watched half of it in Cyprus.

Yes, I’m still alive and well … I’ve been having some PC problems lately. I had to slow down the video card in my PC to make it run under X in Linux. And my modem isn’t working in linux for some reason. I HAVE to fix that fast. I hate copying files to my Winshit partition and then uploading them.

Got a nice and long email from Evangi today. And I also found out that I had sent her sister an email on the wrong address. I guess it’s easy to confuse ‘n’ with ‘nn’. And another one from Darrly. Hey man … it was nice to read your email and all. Are you really so bored? Why don’t you go running in the streets flapping your arms up and down? Maybe you’ll attract some attention! You might lose some weight, too ) I need some Mariola bad!

So that’s pretty much it. I was reading up on TCP/IP and some linux. Good to know that’s over with. Tomorrow is holy day again. I hope I wake up earlier this time. Or maybe I won’t go to sleep, you know me )

Today was Friday, our holy day, and of course I was sleeping until 12! The prayer was about to start in half an hour and I had to rush to take a shower, eat some breakfast (??) and get dressed (actually, I got dressed before the breakfast). Then off to pray I went.

Afterwards, and after lunch, I once again connected and finally received an email from Evangi!! Great. I sent a reply telling her I’ll have to get back to her later.

After reading the news, I downloaded a tutorial for the GTK toolkit, which Enlightenment and GNOME use for their GUI. Tried and successfully compiled the first example (they were kind enough to supply Makefiles). I like GTK so far, and the programs and the source code looks so sexy! But now I don’t know which one to learn, GTK or Qt? I’ll have to ask someone. Still later on, I read a bit of the Linux Programmer’s Guide, which I downloaded in postscript form. That thing is really incomplete.

Finally today I hope I will be able to go jogging. Keep fingers crossed, yessss???

My friends read something from Nostradamus and they are certain that something BIG is going to happen on the 4th of July. Let’s see. Two days to go

Today was basically a dull day, I spent most of it reading news articles on the Internet and I downloaded a tutorial for the Qt programming toolkit, which KDE uses to display its windows and stuff. I read some of it and tried out the first example but it didn’t compile so I left it and then I had to go out. I wish they supplied Makefiles with the examples.

We went to Jarir bookstore, which, as Siddiqi will gladly tell you is where I should have been born! Any bookstore will do, actually. First off I picked up a card to send to Karachi since my cousin has successfully passed her exams and I wanted to congratulate her. Then I went to the software section and asked if they sold linux. They told me it was for around 200 riyals!! Linux is a free operating system and here these guys are trying to make money off of it. I am now going to try and distribute free copies of linux to people so that they don’t get ripped off. Anyway, I found a few interesting books, nothing much else. No need to buy magazines since I can read them on the internet anyway.

Later on I had to go jogging but as it was already 11 o’clock at night, we had to go home. We watched a bit of Sgt. Bilko. I was up again until 4:00 writing emails to my friends