the brook

From PC World:

Perhaps most exciting could be Firefox’s ability to support writing an e-mail in, for example, Gmail while offline, with the data sent later when a user is connected to the Internet again. Ultimately, Mozilla engineers are aiming for an integration between the browser and Web-based services that is as smooth running as a desktop application.

If this actually works out, Firefox 3.0 will be a real big deal, and leave others like IE7 still farther behind. It’s about time too, that web-applications started driving better browser development.

Thanks to Magical, now I don’t have to open iCal or go to the dashboard to get a decent calendar. Found this via AppleMatters.

‘She hit me on the head with the rock again.’
‘I think I can confirm that that was my daughter.’
‘Sweet kid.’
‘You have to get to know her,’ said Arthur.
‘She eases up does she?’
‘No,’ said Arthur, `but you get a better sense of when to duck.’

– From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Sort of like life.

As usual, I have a backlog of a number of books to review, but I brought this one forward because it’s one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read.

The book revolves around a poet, Ka, who returns to his homeland from exile - and travels to the remote town of Kars, ostensibly to investigate local troubles in this remote place. It is a short journey of a few days, but it irrevocably changes his life.

It is a novel with many themes - small town politics in Turkey, tensions between secular and religious factions, the development of a poet, love, revolution - the list goes on. But, at the heart of it - I found it to be a book that tries to answer the question - “What drives human beings to do what they do?” The story takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey that unearths not an answer to the question, but unending layers of questions that only show how complex the question can be. I really can’t make myself clearer than this, so there I shall leave my readers to explore.

It is a rather depressing, if not disturbing book - made more so by the spectacular quality of writing; which immerses the reader in the author’s world to a degree I have rarely experienced before. In lesser books, one fights through the fog of words to come up with a clear picture - with this book, it is as if the words did not exist. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel prize for literature, and after reading this book, I can understand why.

Rating: 4.5 / 5

Got to hand it to the Kiwis. Chased down 346/5 with one wicket and 3 balls to spare. What can I say?

And I had plans for work this afternoon. Man proposed, McCullum and McMillian disposed, usually to the long-on fence.

Two years ago, I decided I was tired of Windows. I was already running Linux full time at lab, part-time at home, and nearly full-time on my trusty old Thinkpad T23. And so I did something that, back then, was quite unheard of - I started thinking about switching to a Mac.

I knew not a single person who was using a Mac, I’d never seen a Mac being used except as a 14-year old (one of my friends had a Macintosh running System 7.3). But I had heard all about it, mainly on slashdot, and was impressed with what people had to say. I spent a couple of months researching on what served for software on the Mac, attended a few seminars and workshops on the Mac; and finally wrote the following on my blog:

no, i don’t think i’m ready to buy an apple just yet. though its cool (and i was really excited at seeing all the new stuff), my work and play are going on pretty smoothly on linux and windows respectively. apple is for when i have 3K with no better use for it than to play on a new platform with.

– Me, January 18th, 2005

Less than a month later, it was all over but the squealing.

For two years plus a day or three, it’s been a great journey. Mostly, I’ve loved my Powerbook, on rare occasions hated it, occasionally compromised and yes - I did eventually make a dual-boot system with Linux on it. For a year and a half, it was my primary computer without doubt, and I did virtually everything except game on it. For the last six months, it’s been more of a useful toy - for photography, some writing and Powerpoint. But it’s something I can survive on completely if I have to.

The positives are many. The best - solid build quality. My laptop feels as good as new on my lap - keyboard response, screen brightness, speaker quality, everything - nothing feels the least bit aged. My battery was recalled and replaced sometime last year but even after 1.5 years, there was no noticeable decrease in charge retention capacity.

Next - Mac OS X. As solid, stable and good-looking an OS as one can hope to see. I’m running on a PowerPC G4 processor. The G4 architecture first debuted in 1999 - more than seven years ago - and my applications never skip a beat (well, maybe Firefox does once in a while but thats Firefox). Unless I run code benchmarks on this thing, it’s hard to tell how old a CPU my laptop is using. And of course there’s all the eye candy - which I was initially enamoured by, but don’t care for anymore. I hardly use Expose, my Dashboard is permanently turned off. But for those who like looks, OS X is as pretty as anything out there - though I haven’t seen Vista up close yet.

Finally - things just work. The best hardware/software integration I have ever seen on any platform. Wireless just works, external monitor support is nothing short of amazing, and I’ve never had to go hunting for a driver. This will probably be the one thing that will keep me stuck on the Mac platform when I upgrade my laptop.

There are a few negatives too. The biggest one is lack of hardware options. In the laptop space right now, Apple doesn’t have a laptop that I’m completely happy with. The Macbook Pros are too big - but the Macbooks have that glossy reflective screen that I can’t stand and are limited to Intel onboard graphics. In the desktop space, you either get a highly performance limited Mac Mini, or an iMac. If you already have a good monitor and are looking for a Mac tower - you have no option but to go for the ridiculously expensive Mac Pro systems.

For people who love to tweak their OS to the extreme, the Mac will feel stifling. It’s just not as hackable as Linux, and in some ways even less so than Windows. You do get a lot of customizability both out of the box and due to the BSD base - but there are limits to this.

Frankly, if Linux would become top-notch in terms of laptop hardware support (external monitors, hibernate support and so on), and get a few more applications (Photoshop, presentation, voice/video chatting apps), I would switch back to a Thinkpad. While OS X is fun, Linux is what makes me feel at home. Until then though, the Mac is a more than able replacement.

I think if there’s a technology equivalent of the poverty line, it should be having to live without subversion. Yet when I logged into a compute node assigned to us since we started clamouring for clock cycles, the first thing I see is: “bash: svn: command not found”. Ouch. What did I do to deserve this?

Anyway compiling svn on this machine was a bit of a chore, so I’m just writing it down for reference. The normal way to compile is to get the subversion-1.x.x and subversion-deps-1.x.x files, untar/gunzip them (they extract into the same subversion-1.x.x directory), run autogen.sh, run ./configure, make and make install. I got caught while running make due to one of the dependencies and the error was:

.../neon/src/.libs/libneon.a(ne_request.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

I found the solution in the comments of this blog post. The subversion-deps archive extracts a subdir called “neon” into the subversion source folder. The workaround is to go into the neon subdir, run ./configure –enable-shared && make && make install (i also used –prefix=$HOME/usr for both this and the top-level ./configure). Once this is done, go back to the top-level source directory, run autogen.sh, ./configure, make and make install as usual and it should work.