Hari's Corner

I have to ditch Opera for the time being since there is not yet a 64-bit version available. Anybody else annoyed with this lack of 64-bit versions of proprietary software (Adobe Flash comes to mind instantly)? I tried the gnash plugin for Firefox in Linux, but it is a bit buggy and doesn't work as well as the proprietary Flash. Kudos for the effort though and I hope they manage to develop a full-fledged FOSS replacement for Flash soon. Not that I am a big fan of Flash, but most video sites seem to rely on this technology at the moment.

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There is a certain attitude required for selling. There are some shopkeepers who seem to understand customer psychology better than others, almost intuitively. How often have you gone inside a shop and found that the man behind the counter or the shop-assistant is less than enthusiastic about selling you something? You would imagine this happens in busy shops where they hardly have the time to serve individual customers, but it always seems to happen in the least crowded shops. Now I know the reason for the lack of customers. It's all in the attitude of selling.

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I hate saying this, but I actually seem to enjoy Vista for its eye-candy. Since getting my new laptop, I've been burdened with this resource hog that sucks memory and CPU cycles with amazing efficiency, but I decided not to remove it for these reasons:

1. It's a genuine OEM version and I paid for it in the price of the laptop. Besides I happen to have some Windows games which I might enjoy from time to time.
2. I can dual boot with Debian. At least Vista was good enough to provide a partition-shrinking tool which allowed me to set up Linux without any issues. I was quite amazed that Microsoft could be so kind.
3. Oh, and that GUI glass effect is quite cool...

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The pattern for this blog seems to be a lot of posts in a rush, followed by a period of quiet. I cannot help it. Ideas keep getting stale over time and I have to constantly keep thinking of new ways to engross my readers. This "random thoughts" section is just one more idea which I plan to use as a filler between the heavy-duty stuff.

Papa Hari News Service

In a striking development in the now famous Cat vs. Mouse case, an out-of-court settlement was reached after days of legal wrangling, when the cat finally ate the mouse in front of his lawyers and a large crowd of onlookers and mediapersons.

A month ago, the mouse, which was said to be fighting depression as a result of being disowned by his rich aunt who had left him out of her Will, had walked up a cat and demanded that he be eaten. When the cat had refused he had danced in front of him and refused to go away when threatened with dire consequences. The mouse had persisted, with the result that the cat had sued the mouse for a sum of $1 million alleging nuisance and harrassment. The case had attracted world-wide attention as the case of "the cat who didn't eat the mouse."

Reporters from Papa Hari News caught up with the cat and managed to secure an exclusive interview on the back wall of the court where the cat was seen stretching and relaxing after the settlement. Obviously digesting the mouse, the cat was in a good mood as he answered questions related to the case. Here's a transcript of the interview.

Q: Good afternoon, Mr. Cat. How do you feel after the settlement? A: Miaaaawwww... Q: Thank you Mr. Cat. Would you be kind enough to tell our readers how much agony you went through during this case and what prompted you to settle on terms which benefitted the defendant more than yourself? A: Meeeeow... Q: That's wonderful. And finally how did the mouse taste? And what are your plans for the future? A: Pfffft... ssssssssssss...

At this point, the cat jumped to the other side and left the scene. However, our reporters did catch up with the cat's lawyers who informed us that the cat was going back to his old house and wouldn't hold anything against the mouse's bereaved family. Stating that all that the cat desired was to be "left in peace" the lawyers said that the judge was actually going to decide in favour of the cat before the surprising settlement took place. However, after the cat had learned of the poor mouse's history and the reasons behind his intrusive actions, he had felt so bad that he had magnanimously decided to settle in terms which were favourable to his opponent. "I hope he (the cat) is not left with a bitter taste in the mouth as a result of this," quipped the clerk of the court, when pressed for his views.

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In other news, thousands of curious onlookers gathered outside the house of Mr. and Mrs. Mola when it was discovered that Mr. Mola had actually helped his wife with household chores on a day when there was an important football match scheduled on television. News of this extraordinary event had reached the offices of Papa Hari News Service through their 10-year old son. When contacted by this news service, several experts and amateurs alike advanced their own theories to explain the seemingly impossible.

Mr. Kokka, a lawyer by profession, advanced the obvious view that Mrs. Mola had probably threatened Mr. Mola with divorce proceedings in order to secure his cooperation, but neighbours quickly rubbished the theory by stating that it would take more that "a mere threat of divorce" to move Mr. Mola from his seat on that fateful day. Reactions varied slightly but most neighbours had nothing but biting contempt for this theory.

On the other hand, several media-persons speculated that Mr. Mola's favourite team had probably been receiving a severe pounding at the hands of their opponents and that had disgusted him enough to turn off the television and forced him to seek solace in mundane activity. While sounding more plausible than the first explanation, this too was dismissed as it was reliably learnt that Mr. Mola had the habit of switching loyalties in the midst of a game in order to support the team which was winning.

A few sceptics also advanced the theory that Mr. Mola was probably not a football fan and that this incident had been hyped up for the benefit of the media, but this dumb idea was quickly drowned in a sea of indignant protests.

All speculation was finally laid to rest when a Papa Hari News reporter had the brilliant idea of asking Mr. Mola himself for the reason behind his inexplicable conduct. While at first reluctant to reveal his inner secret to the world, he finally came out with the meek-sounding explanation that the game had been called off due to bad weather and that his wife had dragged him by the seat of his pants into the kitchen when he was found dozing in his sofa while the Annual Spelling Bee was being telecast on ESPN.

Several scientists who had come down to study the phenomena on the spot left unobtrusively as the crowd melted away.

As a fairly experienced Linux user, I keep discovering from time to time that the command line is a real boon at times when the GUI lets me down.

An example from my own recent experience to illustrate the point:

I wanted to rip and convert one of my new DVDs for the iPod Video. I always use acidrip, which is a Perl/GTK front end to mencoder. It hides a very complex command line in a fairly usable GUI. However, acidrip has its limitations. Why? It uses another command-line program called lsdvd which tries to read all the track information on the DVD to allow the user to choose which track/chapter to rip. This works nearly all the time, but the odd DVD does not have menu entries. In fact, the DVD I purchased recently didn't have any readable menus. As a result, acidrip aborted with an error message even at the DVD scanning stage and I couldn't continue. Other ripping GUI tools also use the same command line program to read the menus. I thought I was at an end and that the DVD was corrupt, but I found that I could play the individual .vob files using mplayer. I came to the realization that the only way I could rip was by directly using mencoder. And since I have to manually enter the chapter number in the mencoder command line, there is no necessity to scan the DVD entries. Needless to say, the process was successful. I managed to rip the movie although I was unable to do so with the usual GUI tool for the purpose. I can quote a dozen similar examples where GUI apps have let me down, but I think the point is quite clear.

I have to admit that having to mess with the command line isn't a walk in the park, particularly with complex applications like mencoder. Here is the kind of command I issued to rip a DVD chapter to my hard-drive.

mencoder dvd://5 -dvd-device /dev/hdc -vf scale=320:240 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=64 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=300 -o rip-file.mpg

If you read the mencoder man page, you would realize how long it took me to figure out each of these command line parameters simply because it is huge and required a lot of scrolling up and down. I didn't relish the prospect initially. It was a long, tedious process to get the options right but I had to do it this way or not at all and I didnt want to admit defeat knowing fully well that it was not an insurmountable problem. In fact, once I figured out enough to execute the command successfully, I felt that it was actually a better way to rip and encode because I had greater control over the individual codec features. I'm convinced that the power and flexibility of mencoder can never be experienced in a mere GUI. Any GUI that attempts to incorporate every single feature of mencoder will be 100 times more complex than mencoder itself.

The command line is a necessary part of the Linux experience. To be sure, beyond the initial system configuration, you can manage 90% of your tasks within a GUI and not all command line tools are as insanely complex as mencoder. But there will be situations where the GUI is insufficient, inadequate or just plain useless. At such times it will be not only be necessary, but actually desirable to fall back on the command line. If I could figure out the basics of mencoder in less than an hour, surely it would take a fraction of that time to learn other more basic, but essential tools. One common situation is when X refuses to start up after an upgrade and you need to tweak/configure its settings. Most new Linux users unfamiliar with the command line will end up wasting a lot of time reinstalling Linux to fix what is probably a trivial issue. On the other hand, experienced Linux users will know that editing one or two lines in xorg.conf can fix the issue. I still remember the days when I used to soft-reboot the computer to quit vim (in pure text mode). Thankfully I quickly realized that to survive in a Unix environment a basic working knowledge of command-line text editors will go a long way.

The other big advantage of familiarity with the command line is that it is also the most common aspect of all Unix-like operating systems. If you learn the basics of bash or sh, you can work with most Linux and *BSD systems. And this will definitely add to your knowledge and skill-set. Familiarity a variety of *nix Operating Systems can be extremely beneficial to your curriculum-vitae, particularly if you're in the IT/CS field.

Here is my personal list of essential command line skills:

1. All the base POSIX commands.
2. Knowledge of any command line text editor. nano/pico are very simple, easy to use editors while vim is a more powerful programmers' editor.
3. Knowledge of virtual terminals. Easy to use, yet extremely handy and convenient.
4. Knowledge of a text-based web browser like links or lynx (useful for browsing online documentation in the absence of an X server).
5. A little bit of scripting knowledge. Shell-scripting or basic Perl/Python scripting will do.

My advice to all new Linux users is to occasionally explore the command line and learn a little bit from time to time. It is a tiresome chore and it requires a degree of tedious memorization, but there are always man pages to help out which eases the learning curve somewhat and not everybody needs to become an expert. But when something in the GUI lets you down, you will always have a fail-safe option to fall back upon.

Here's the next edition of Geeky and Meeky, entitled Antique value.

Once again, a look at some old, but notable posts I've made in the past.

A small note before I proceed. Because I really didn't have a dedicated audience back then (and even now, I count myself lucky to have a couple of active readers at any given time), I only think it's right that I try and revive at least some of the better-written ones for the benefit of new readers. So if some of you feel that I am recycling my old articles, you are (in a sense) right. But at the same time, this kind of thing also allows me to look back at what I was thinking back then and I find it interesting to add my comments on the same topics now. So hopefully you should find it interesting as well. I just don't want to link to my old articles without comment.

With that in mind, here are some posts from the month of August 2005.

Indian Cricket needs to move on - Incidentally it was my first cricket post on this blog. The interesting thing is, much of what I wrote back then seems relevant even today. Recently I even started a cricket blog to write about the game, but I have no interest in it now. Cricket no longer interests me. In fact, even back then I was kind of tentative about the whole thing and the World Cup 2007 fiasco sealed the deal for me. Besides, quite apart from my own lack of motivation on this score, I found that my regular readers were not exactly jumping up and down in anticipation of my cricketing wisdom.

XML and mainstream web development - Ahhh... XML. That beautiful meta-markup language that always fascinates me. In that article I actually wrote about the pitfalls of using XML in mainstream web design but at the same time acknowledged its sheer scope and power. I felt that XML might never become mainstream in web development. I still feel the same today although I myself feel a lot more comfortable with the underlying concepts. But XML still needs a programmer mentality and not a web-design mentality. Ah, well... at least with XHTML we have a cleaner, neater web markup language than plain old HTML.

Let's get back on track! - now this is an unusual article. Actually it was part of my (now defunct) LiteraryForums.org newsletter. I was getting extremely frustrated at the slow growth of the forum and the fact that I was pouring in tons of time and effort into it. Although things haven't changed much today, my attitude has undergone a considerable change. I have come to accept that LiteraryForums.org will remain a quiet, peaceful community with marginal activity. In fact, in many ways, I like it that way.

Customizing your Linux firewall - this is just a normal software article. Here I highlighted guarddog, which is a pretty neat, powerful GUI front-end to iptables. Those Linux users who find the iptables command line tool too cryptic or difficult will find this an extremely useful configuration utility. Even today I simply cannot figure out how to write my own firewall script from scratch. I cannot be bothered to.

Just an update on my reviews site harishankar.org. I've now created a new site updates feed which you can subscribe to so that you can get the latest changes and review additions conveniently.

I've chosen Atom 1.0 as the feed format (instead of RSS), because I like it better. The feed validates properly with W3C's Feed Validator, so hopefully there should be no problem. If you are unable to use your feed reader with this format, please let me know and I'll add a regular RSS feed as well.