This is the first time I’m staying away from home for Diwali. There were lots of awesome fireworks in the sky and I loved watching them. I went for a short walk in the evening to T-Nagar to get dinner. Although the smoke and pollution from the fire works almost knocked me out, I was happy to see that people were compensating for the pollution they were causing by not going any where. The roads were absolutely free, so less pollution from traffic.

I don’t understand how poor people without ACs could have slept that night, but to hell with them. We can’t compromise on the fun!! It was good entertainment to watch the cool fireworks on the sky – people were kinda competing with eachother – showing off.

They’re all liars who say the end of the world is near. We’ve been celebrating Diwali for thousands of years, after all. Nothing has happened yet. And even if the world is going to end, it isn’t going to end in the next 60 years, and that is long enough for me.

My parents and grand parents have taught me why we celebrate diwali, but I honestly don’t remember.But that’s ok, because I still remember the basics (lol), and I still remember that people do fireworks on Diwali. I love the idea of religious faith and I respect my religion, but just like every other good thing about religions that these foolish non-religious bastards have ruined, Diwali too, will just be a sad and depressing day for me. Yea, and noisy too.

Web browsers have always excited me. Whenever there is a new browser release, I’d have tried it as soon as possible. I guess it must be because web browsers are the most successful opensource software for the average computer user. Firefox while being extremely easy and friendly, is an extremely powerful and completely customisable tool. And as far as I know, it is much more popular than Internet Explorer.

I like Google because they have great ideals. They promote open source development and support open source projects and developers. So I was really excited when I heard about project Chromium. The browser was finally released as public beta a few days back, but only windows binaries are available for download.

It was announced somewhere that linux binaries would be released soon. So I went to their project page planning to download the source and building the binaries, but the sources are not ready either. Infact, building what is available would give us a command line ‘all tests pass’ executable.

Linux is the biggest Open Source operating system in the world, and no piece of code made however public can claim to be truely free unless it has a port that works in Linux! What’s the point of developing an open source software if the open source enthusiasts have to get on a windows computer to test it?

Well in the eyes of the public, developing Open Source software makes them look like revolutionaries, working against Microsoft, and by developing for windows, they can reach the masses. Its like Apple releasing a Safari beta for windows first just because more people can try it.

Bad Google. But guess what. There are a few good signs too. It claims to crash proof because each page is opened as a separate process which can be separately closed when it stops responding, without affecting the rest of your pages. And it has the all new V8 JavaScript engine which google claims to be 10 times faster than Firefox 3.0′s engine. It would be nice working in it, if only Google would let us.

By the way, I wonder if any browser would comeup with a way of using Python for clientside scripting.  I love the damn language so much.

Here’s a very quick post. I am at college today. Came here to get my certificates and ended up giving a lecture to my juniors about the food, clothes, tools and money related to the animation industry. I’m sure all of them were bored to hell, I could see it in their faces. But I had fun doing it. I’m waiting to do the same to the final years. I’ve always liked torturing people. They let me sit in the computer lab in the meantime.  And thus, I got some time to write another entirely pointless blog post.

I met Tippu, the Tamil movie playback singer. He had come to our office to do some recording for one of our shortfilms, and shaked hands with me. I guess he was a little curious about my name. But too bad, no photographs this time either

This is my first post in a very long time. Exactly a month has passed since I joined Accel Animation Studios as a junior engineer in R&D. And this period has been the most exciting period of my life till now. I have been thinking of writing something for a while, but time has been short and when I did have time, I was too tired to write.

So I’ll just write everything I remember right now.

I came to Chennai on the 30th of May on a special day time train. I was fortunate enough to get a scientist working at the Kalpakkam Nuclear power plant in Chennai in my next seat. This was my first meeting with a nuclear scientist, and I had a great time talking to him. There was only one thing that was not right in the journey. Since it was a daytime train, I had booked a ticket only on the chair car, so there were no switches for the lights in the compartment. When the ticket collector finally arrived to check our tickets, I asked him to switch off the lights. He was a smart looking young man, wearing a blazer and a tie, still his response was that it was not his duty. I was really annoyed and if I had an internet connection right then, I would have made him not worth living. But it happens all the time. Nothing to worry about.

So once I reached Chennai, I boarded at Rathna Lodge opposite T-Nagar Bus Terminal for a few days, until I found this place at Nandanam. I wouldn’t recommend Rathna Lodge to anyone. The place was terribly dirty.

I went to the office on the 2nd of last month and met with Mr.Muralidharan, the CTO of the company. I was showed around and then I was told that there were two other people in the R&D department, and that they had gone to our Trivandrum studio regarding the feature film that we’re working on, and so I was packed off to Trivandrum right the next day. Things were much easier at Trivandrum because the company took care of transport and accommodation. An American called Peter Burlington, working for our company was also staying at the Guest House with us.

Our Studio is located at the Kinfra Video Park in Trivandrum, and the only other studio in the campus is Mohanlal’s Vismaya Max. Since we don’t have a canteen at our office, we go to the Vismaya Max canteen for breakfast and lunch. One day, as we were finishing breakfast, someone just came and asked what lal sir could get for breakfast. I understood that Mohanlal was at the studio, but I really didn’t expect Mohanlal, my most favourite actor, to walk into the canteen right infront of me. He came so close to me and then walked on to sit at a table near the window.

I was totally dumbstruck, I managed to smile at him and he smiled back and nodded. Only later did I realize that I could have got a photograph with him, or atleast given him a handshake. But no worries. Everyone says he comes often. I’m getting along with the job very well, and will get to go to Trivandrum again. I’ll get a photograph with him then.

After getting back to Chennai, I have been learning to create procedural shaders, and I’m getting kinda good at it. Thinking from an artistic perspective and analysing materials all need some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you get sort of addicted to it.

This has been my daily schedule for the past two weeks: Getup at 8 AM, reach office by 9;30 AM, lunch by 1 PM, office ends at 6:30 PM. After that, I play table tennis or carrom with colleagues at office, get dinner at 9 PM, reach home by 10 PM, and get to bed by 12 AM. Father bought a bike, a second hand Suzuki Fiero for me and sent me, and that takes care of my transportation problems. The only problem with bike riding in Chennai is that you have to wear a helmet always and that sucks. My head gets all soaked with sweat. And I’ve already paid 300 rupees in total as fine, for disobeying various traffic rules. You can’t take a free left in several places, and you can’t take a U turn in most places. And there’s a flyover under construction right in my way to office, but the roads should be really convenient once the flyover is ready.

I stayed up till 12:45 AM last night, because I got to the end of the novel `The Hungry Tide` by Amitav Ghosh – which I bought at Trivandrum and have been reading for the past 2 weeks – and I couldn’t stop until I finished it. I’ll write a review to the novel within the end of this week.

If you follow my blog regularly, you would have known that my father has brought a new computer running Ubuntu, and that I have completed my BE degree course and have brought my computer home from college.

At home, we have a broadband Internet connection that we share between the two computers. Here’s how I setup my father’s computer as a gateway for my computer.

Both computers had an inbuilt ethernet port and we bought an extra ethernet card for my father’s computer and use it as an internet gateway. Sharing internet on two windows computers is a very straight forward procedure. You just have to connect the broadband modem to one of the ethernet ports and use additional ethernet ports to connect other computers to the gateway.

In Linux however, this doesn’t work automatically. Port forwarding is disabled by default in Ubuntu. This has to be enabled if the computer should forward packets it recieves to other computers. Here’s how this is done.

On the computer you want to use a gateway

1. You need to connect the internet cable to eth1 and the client computer to eth0. Since the computer has two network cards, you have to figure out which one is connected to the internet and which one to the other computer. Here’s an easy way to do this
   1. Pull out the cable connecting the two computers
   2. Goto Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal and enter the following command

   $ sudo ifconfig

   3. You will be shown 2 or more sections with eth0 and eth1 being the first two. In the two sections, one of them will have a line similar to this:

   inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

   4. The section that has this line is the one connected to the internet. If this is in eth0, remove the internet cable and plug it in the other ethernet port and the cable from the client to eth0. If it is in eth1, you can connect the client cable back to its original port
2. Next you have to give a static ip address to eth0. In terminal, type

$ sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

3. And add the following lines to the file and save it

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.8.16.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 10.8.16.0
network 10.8.16.0

4. This will assign the static ip address 10.8.16.1 to eth0, but these changes take effect only after a reboot. To use these settings temporarily for the current session, use the command

$ sudo ifconfig eth0 10.8.16.1

5. Once your network card serving the client has a static ip address, the next thing to do would be to enable port forwarding:
   1. Goto terminal and open the local startup script as root. To do this, type

   $ sudo gedit /etc/rc.local


   2. Add the following lines before the exit 0 line in the file.

   sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
/sbin/iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables --table nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

   3. Before closing the script, make sure it is enabled. See the first line of the script. If it isn’t present already, just add a '-e' to the first line so that it would look like '#!/bin/sh -e'
6. That’s all you have to do on the server. Just do a restart for the settings to take effect. If that’s not possible, you have to execute all the commands you have added to the rc.local script one by one for all of them to take effect

On the client

1. Go to System -> Administration -> Network There should be a wired connection. Select it and click ‘properties’. Choose ‘Static IP Address’ in the Configuration list box.
2. Use 10.8.16.2 as the ip address and set the gateway address to 10.8.16.1
3. Network manager should give you a subnet mask automatically. You won’t have to change that.

This should be enough. This is what I did. If this doesn’t seem to work, just let me know and I’ll help you out.

P.S. You can use a Windows computer to connect to Internet through the linux gateway too. Nothing needs to be changed on the server. Just make 10.8.16.2 the IP address of the client in LAN Settings which can be found in Network Connections. Also, set 10.8.16.1 as the default network gateway address.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone often, but I usually screw up the Synaptic Package Manager in my computer very often. Most often, there errors are due to some stupid packages that don’t get installed properly or have some compatibility issues with other installed packages.

The most grave error is this:

sahasranaman@sahasranaman-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install flock
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: The package awcommon needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it.

When apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager gives this error, I would always have to reinstall Ubuntu because there is no direct way to correct this. A few days ago, I came across this hack to correct all package related errors in Synaptic Package Manager.

There is a file in Debian based Operating Systems called /var/lib/dpkg/status that stores a list of all installed packages. It is a text file in Human-Readable format. All you have to do is to remove the entry of the software package that is causing trouble from the list. Here’s a step by step procedure that can help you solve the problem:

• Press Alt + F2 to open the “Run Command” dialog box.
• In the Run Command dialog box, type gksu gedit /var/lib/dpkg/status and hit Enter.
• Type your password when asked. This step opens the package list in a text editor.
• In the text editor, look for the package that is causing the trouble. Press Ctrl + F to find the package that you want to remove
• Once you find the entry of that particular package, remove it completely.

For example, if I want to remove a package called finger, I start removing from the line

Package: finger

and remove all lines upto the start of the next Package entry.

I’m not sure if this is the best way to solve such problems, because what we actually do here is remove the entry from the list of packages installed without actually uninstalling it, but it does the trick anyway.

My father bought his first computer a few weeks back. They had given a free Ubuntu 7.10 CD, but had not installed any operating system. My guess is that they hadn’t installed Linux on the computers is that they expected the users to install pirated Windows on purchase. When companies give computers with Windows preinstalled, why can’t they install Ubuntu, which is faster and easier to install?

Anyways, upon my recommendation, my father decided to install Linux. And right now, he’s browsing and listen to Carnatic music on Rhythmbox. And he’s safe online. Nothing can really hurt his computer, he won’t have crashes and so, won’t have to wait for the engineer to come and fix his computer. He thinks Firefox, OpenOffice.org, spell check and stuff are really easy to use, but needs to get used to the cut-copy-paste thingy.

So if your parents are buying a new computer or are having trouble with their Windows installation, I’d suggest that you install an easy to use Linux distro like Ubuntu on their computer. Please don’t try to teach them all things you do to keep viruses away from your windows computer, they’d find learning a new operating system much easier.