It sure is difficult to get things moving after a long break! Be it work, or be it blogging.

Are you also like me, trying out at blogging after a long unexpected avoidable break? Well, everyone else has survived this period at some point of time or the other! So why can’t you?!

Most often it is the “don’t know where to start issue”. Here is a list of things which I intend to do after my break.

1. Read other blogs: It is a social world. You can’t survive confined to your own blog. Find blogs and bloggers who share your interests.

2. Comment on others posts: After finding blogs and bloggers sharing your interests, share your perspective about what has been posted. Let the comments be creative, meaningful and useful to someone else who visits that post later. An interesting comment can invite readers to your blog!

3. Convert long comments to blog posts: If you find that you are about to post a comment that is long enough to be a blog post then, make it a blog post. To have some continuity for your post, share a link to the original post that inspired the article out of you. There is nothing bad about sharing others links on your blog. You are in no way doing any harm to anyone!

4. Stop whining and publish: Are you publishing less and complaining more about your writing style or lack of content? Write whatever comes to your mind. Anything and everything. Just let your mind on a rampage. After you think you are done (say around 2 pages, you set the limits!), get up, go for a walk, watch some serial, clear your mind and come back. Sit down and read the article from the beginning. You will get the topic to rant about on your blog!

There are 4 best ways I found to put myself back on track

How was your comeback? Care to share?

Technorati Tags: block, blog, break, resume

Following suit with the Common Aptitude Test for management programs in the country, CBSE decides to make the All India Engineering Entrance Examination an online examination. Indeed a bold move considering the number of candidates appearing every year. I gave the Online CAT test this year, and was glad it all went smooth and glitch free.

I came across this article in The Hindu yesterday.

The tag line goes like this, “Given the digital divide, is it feasible or fair for an undergraduate entrance exam to go this way?”

There still exists digital divide among Indian youth, especially among those aiming to pursue an Engineering degree?

It isn’t like Indian students pursuing engineering degree today are exposed to computers only after they join college. Even if they don’t have the skill set to program and use linux, they should definitely be acquainted with using the keyboard, mouse and the monitor!

At least that alone is what you need to attend online exams. You should be able to use the mouse, point it at the buttons and click! Even though we claim it to be a no paper pen test, yet all the rough work is done on paper only!

From the article in Hindu:

However, a lot of thought and debate needs to go into any move to make it an entirely paperless exam, the lecturer added. She explains that in two of the three pre-university colleges that she has taught in, students are not computer-literate. Even if they are, it is only to the extent of browsing or checking the e-mail. “To be able to do an exam online, that too at a consistent speed and level of accuracy, requires a fair amount of familiarity with computers. A large section of society is really not there yet, and we must wait for the digital divide to collapse before any such thing is attempted.”

What?! They can browse the internet, socialize on facebook/orkut, and check and compose emails, but that is just not enough! They need to be more familiar with computers?! How much more familiar should they be?

You tell me? Is there a digital divide among Indian youth?

Technorati Tags: aieee, cat, computers, digital, entrance, india

Yes, it is related to the latest release of Ubuntu. Called Lucid Lynx.

This Long Term Release (meaning it will be supported for a longer duration), was very promising.

But I faced lot of problems initially. The problems were because Ubuntu isn’t very cool with proprietary drivers, and I have Nvidia cards on my Compaq.

Also though on most other computers like Dell and Acer, the boot up and shut down time been shaved, but on Compaq it takes close to 1 minute. It takes about 20 seconds for Grub to show up!!!

My woes didn’t end there. Wireless didn’t work out of the box. And after installing Graphics drivers, boot splash screens became low resolution.

Hash Mismatch!

So I thought, I’ll reinstall and after that when I try to update, it complains about Hash Mismatch. First I thought it was because of my internet connection which through a proxy and behind a villainous firewall. But soon I discovered that there were some serious issues with the repository servers and that the Netherlands server didn’t have any problems.

Switching my server in System > Administration > Software Sources to a Netherlands connection saved me from more trouble. Phew! (By the time I found this out, I had done about 6 reinstalls, jumping between 32 and 64 bits thinking sometimes that the CD was corrupt!)

Thanks to Netherlands server, All iz Well now!

Now busy with new customizations. OMG! Docky has become so cool!

Technorati Tags: lucid, ubuntu

History is a wonderful way to keep track of what we did or where we went. Sometimes, we aren’t interested in having the history logged so that we can maintain some sort of secret activity. But trust me, at times it is very very useful.

But what use is history without the time when the activity took place! Time and Place play very important role. In bash history, the Time can be of great use to know, when a particular command was run.

This get extremely handy, when on a server and you need to find out when a particular command was run.

I guess you have figured out what I am getting to! Yes, time stamps in Bash History.

In shell set this environment variable

$ HISTTIMEFORMAT=”$d-%m-%y %T “

and then run history!

$ history

You will get the time stamp of when the command in your history was run!

Cool huh?

Technorati Tags: history, Linux, time stamp

First, let me tell you what let me to find this out. About what this is, you’ll soon know.

My friend borrowed my laptop, to try out OS codes for her OS lab examination. When she returned the laptop after a couple of days, I noticed that, my Desktop had moved! Yes, instead of the normal /home/jithinkr/Desktop/ it was now pointing to /home/jithinkr/Codes/Desktop/!

I tried moving the Desktop back to where it was supposed to be, but in my attempts, I ended up deleting all the files I had on my Desktop! Well, that indeed was a big loss, because I had forgotten what all files were there on my desktop. (Though the shell and the locate command came in handy to remind me what those files where. Wish I knew some way to recover them.  ).

Now my Desktop was pointing to /home/jithinkr and hence all the Documents, Pictures and Videos folders were being displayed on the Desktop.

This was something I never expected to happen .

After some surfing, I came to know of the file, where all these paths are configured. It’s here :

/home/<username>/.config/user-dirs.dirs

The content of this files was :

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update

# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you’re

# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run

# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR=”$HOME/yyy”, where yyy is a shell-escaped

# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR=”/yyy”, where /yyy is an

# absolute path. No other format is supported.

#

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=”$HOME”

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR=”$HOME/Downloads”

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR=”$HOME/Templates”

XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR=”$HOME/Public”

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR=”$HOME/Documents”

XDG_MUSIC_DIR=”$HOME/Music”

XDG_PICTURES_DIR=”$HOME/Pictures”

XDG_VIDEOS_DIR=”$HOME/Videos”

Technorati Tags: config, desktop, home, Linux