Hari's Corner

From the time I began to maintain my personal accounts, I used GnuCash for my personal accounting needs in the beginning. Later I shifted to KMyMoney. KMyMoney has a slightly different view of accounting than GnuCash and I believe it is more tailored to home users with no prior experience of accounting. Having said that, GnuCash is intuitive enough for users who have a basic idea of a double-entry book-keeping system and has enough features to expand into a mini-ERP. Both are excellent software, but recently I felt the need to return to GnuCash, because I no longer use KDE as my desktop system and pulling out KDE dependencies just for KMyMoney (about 100 MB worth of packages from the Debian repository) seemed a bit overkill.

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Successful lawyers, especially court practitioners, always face situations where two cases in two different courts might clash on the same date. And the problem is that the lawyer is not always in control of court schedules and it is not possible to predict such clashes any time in advance. Planning is rarely possible, because the courts decide the hearing dates, not the lawyers. Of course, lawyers can and do frequently request a particular date if they know in advance that another date chosen by the court might clash with other cases, but this is not all that common.

It is inevitable that dates of court hearings will clash and there will come a time when he/she has to choose which case is more important or rather, which case has reached a stage where adequate representation is a must. Sometimes, it is possible to get adjournments but on other occasions, the case might have reached a stage where no further adjournment is possible and the only way to proceed with the case is to represent effectively. Of course the other factor is the importance of the client. In some cases, it would be absolutely vital to attend each and every hearing of the case, whether or not the stage is crucial or not. This is where court practitioners face a dilemma. The solution to the problem is not always easy to find.

There are, of course, ways and means to deal with the situation. If you are an important enough advocate/barrister/attorney you would have one or more assisting juniors who could attend to different cases while you focus on the important ones. On the other hand, those who are not big enough or senior enough to be able to call upon the assistance of juniors will have to rely on the goodwill of peers/friends to represent the matter in court for that particular hearing. Of course, such representation will rarely be effective as the representing counsel will not be in any position to deal with the ins and outs of the case, but it is better than no representation at all. Some judges are more difficult than others with respect to representing counsel, but if the case has not reached a particularly critical stage and such requests for adjournments haven't been made before, they will usually grant adjournment. 

Now of course, this kind of thing might not be possible in all countries. Each legal system is different and every country has a different kind of approach in handling cases. In some countries, an entire trial might be conducted in a couple of days by a judge sitting with a jury, while in other countries where a jury system doesn't exist, this kind of trial, where an entire day is set aside for one or two cases, might be rare and frequent short adjournments are more common.

All the same, being a court practitioner requires skill, especially in the art of being in two places at once. Whatever magic is used to conjure that effect, the end result must be that no case goes unrepresented at a vital stage.

Anyway, a bit of an intermission from my regular postings, I thought I'd share the battery life of my Android 2.3 Sony Xperia Ray phone. Here's a screenshot - quite self explanatory.

Yes, that's 5 days, 8 hours 41 minutes and 30 seconds with 31% battery left. It is a kind of a record of sorts, but anyway, the secret is probably that I don't use it too much for other than voice calling and SMS. Waste of an Android? Probably, but I still use apps occasionally: I just don't use it as a plaything. I actually don't even have JuiceDefender or similar programs running. I didn't get much of a boost from them (not suprisingly) since I already squeeze so much life.

So here are some of the reasons, I think I get so much battery backup:

• Lowest screen brightness except when I go outdoors.
• Only 2G connection. Use mostly WiFi for browsing at home and turn it off when not needed.
• Moderate use of voice calls and SMS.
• Rarely play games or use battery draining kind of apps.
• Most of the time, the phone is in idle.

Anyway, I wonder if any of my readers get more than a few days of battery life from an Android phone. Share your experiences here.

My geekier side, having asserted itself this weekend, I have once again plunged myself into a *BSD once again. This time, I had chosen NetBSD, being a nice, clean Free UNIX of the BSD family and geeky enough. Having downloaded the image for the USB image media (one hates burning CDs these days, even if they're cheap) for the latest version 5.1.2, I proceeded at once to install it beside Vista on my old laptop.

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One of those long standing issues that almost never make it to mainstream headlines, but continue to be debated on online forums and communities by hardcore hackers as well as free software/open source supporters is the ideological and practical differences between Free Software as espoused by Richard M. Stallman and his GNU/FSF movement and the Open Source Initiative, co-founded and initially presided over by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens as a reaction against what they perceived as an impractical moral and excessively preachy, pseudo-religious philosophy espoused by Stallman in promoting the message of software freedom. Indeed a lot of online debates seem to indicate that:

• Open Source is nothing but Free Software minus the moral, ethical posturing of software freedom, the preaching and extremely uncompromising attitude of its founder and members.
• Open Source is the pragmatic, marketing wing of Free Software which uses its message to reach a wider audience.
• Open Source and Free Software simply highlight the different aspects of software freedom/openness while promoting the same ends.

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My attempt at a portrait of Sri Aurobindo.