I havn’t been dreaming too much lately, as I havn’t been sleeping too much because of my exams. Last night, I had a very unusual dream.

I was at a newly launched hotel. I was served almost as soon as I had placed the order. I don’t know why, but I knew it was perfectly normal when I was served with a stainless steel box with a door on its front. I opened it, and there was a white box inside it, and on it, were written the words, “All food in this hotel have a low poison as a raw material”. I don’t remember the text clearly, but it was something like this. I took the white box out, opened it, and saw food inside the white box.

Suddenly, the scene changed. I was at a really crowded place and I knew why I was there. It was a procession against the hotel. There were thousands of people, who had come from all parts of the world to protest against this hotel. We were walking on and on, shouting slogans all the time, and I was getting really tired and hungry.

The scene changed again. This time, I was at a huge dining hall for the protesters, that extended towards the horizon in all directions. I was perfectly aware that the food was from that hotel we were protesting against, but that fact didn’t seem to bother me at all. This was very normal for everyone else around me too. The payasam was especially tasty. So I called the “pattar” who was serving payasam and asked him for more. But the payasam was over already. I cursed the hotel for not making enough payasam to satisfy the protesters.

And the dream ended.

I guess there was a lot more to it, but I don’t know how I’m able to remember even this. I also don’t have the slightest idea about how to interpret it.

But it did not affect my day at college in anyway. So, I guess I won’t be taking the trouble to figure out what it means.

God that last post was big! Some effort. Its been a really long time since I blogged, and I’ve been thinking of several things to blog about, but I havn’t been having the patience. Maybe I’l be blogging a lot more in the next 6 months. but not for the next 10 days.. I’l be going home for the holidays. And I’l be staying away from all this crap. Well, thats what people expect me to say.
Bye bye folks! Home, here I come!

I’ve been using Windows XP on my computer for some time before switching to Ubuntu. Ubuntu was really great. Really fast to start up, load apps, everything was cool. But there was one really big problem.

The computer would slow down drastically while copying huge files, and I even lost a few DVDs by trying to start a music player while burning! I thought it was some hardware compatibility issue. “Of course, Ext3 is a great filesystem. Everything that is FOSS is great!”, was what I was thinking. How very wrong I was!

It was because of the really bad design of the Ext3 filesystem! Its not only slow, it also wastes much more space than any other filesystem. On a 160GB partition, around 15GB would be reserved by the file system for its own use! Thats almost 10% of the entire space! What the fuck were the designers thinking?

Anyways, it took me a while to figure out the alternative. ReiserFS!! And when I tried it, it was loads better than Ext3 or NTFS. Actually, I’ve never given much attention to the filesystem, but after Ext3, ReiserFS is like heaven!

Just to do a benchmark, I used a simple script to create 10,000 files on an empty folder. The script took around 8 hours in an Ext3 partition, where as, on an Reiser drive, it took 20 minutes to complete. And from what I read on the internet, Reiser is as stable as Ext3, and is even more fault tolerant!

I just dont know if its possible to convert a partition from Ext3 to ReiserFS without losing data. If it is possible, I’d be really happy to find out how.

Lets hope Ext4 does better than this. Wiki says Ext4 can support volumes that are as big as 1 ExaByte (EB), which is more than a billion GigaBytes (GB). I wonder if there will ever be single volumes that big.

Well, somebody please tell me that its not some patent infringement issue thats preventing Ext3 from performing.