Backstory: I quit the job.

Sure there are things to do, projects to work on, people to meet, places to travel. All this needs more than free time to do.

Sitting somewhere enjoying the sun and thinking of the next big strategic move just doesn’t have the propounded results.

Sure I’m having the time of my life all day(Yes, all day. I’ve reset my body to the circadian rhythm)

 
Tomorrow I’ll be heading to the museum.

Crappy gdm it seems now doesn’t let you switch environments at login time, also it won’t let me change my keybooard layout.

Don’t get me started on how I should modify this and that file the get some
functionality that should have been there by default.

Installed blackbox and checked to see if gdm shows it; it didn’t.

First step was to remove gnome-shell using yum.
It removed gnome-panel along with it, there goes my idea of having bluetile with gnome panel.
The gnome panel is pretty awesome, I liked the older one, it’s a bit easier to switch net connections and other things.

Gnome fails to start if gnome-shell is not present, in the other machine I had manually deleted the binary, it complained but worked nevertheless.
Gdm failed to stop and kept restarting, there were these preferences in
/etc/X11/prefdm,
tweaked it to start other display mngr, but it  failed to correctly load the preferred display manager.

Gdm does not relinquish control that easily.

Time to remove gdm and replace with something light.
The lxdm, usable at the first try showing the essentials, option to choose display mngr, language and stuff.

It keeps its conf here /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf
It’s quite handy with many hooks for post and prelogin.

Got in blackbox and started work. Also discovered the nifty Terminal package.

This is what terminals were meant to be tabbed, copy pasta and sleek in full screen with options to disable alt-f, this  means those emacs shortcuts for navigating by word could be used.

I don’t like wallpaper less screens.
To change ‘em in blackbox we have to hunt down Eterm to get its companion packages
Esetroot /usr/share/backgrounds/tree.jpg to set the wallpaper.
The thing is x forgets wallpaper settings.
It may not work having this in xinitrc. This is where our postlogin script succeeds.

If eset doesn’t work you could try
bsetbg -full /usr/share/backgrounds/tree.jpg

Another cool thing was pcmanfm, this seems to be the base for nautilus file browser of the old.
Simple and fast file browser with the neat set of familiar nautilus.

Also you could read http://blog.lxde.org/?p=118 lxsession edit, it shows some nice tweaks to gnome as well.

I’m so used to alt tab switching now that blackbox just does’nt cut it for browsing and terminal work.
Kicked in flux box and the change was complete.

Also if you have traces of gnome on your machine, this
sudo pkexec gnome-power-backlight-helper –set-brightness 0
is helpful the set the brightness when stuck in the virtual ttys.

Another way to change screen brightness using the /proc systems is somewhere in this blog.

Also, if you hate the big nasty window frames/borders brought by gnome3 you should check out maximus.
The rpm available is for fc12 but it works on fc15/16 as well, you could get rid of those and get a clean
window (it’s useless in g3 anyways)

After these changes the machine looks gorgeous. Amazing login speed and very usable.

Gave up on trying different modules. Bought a tiny sapido usb wireless adapter. rtl8192CU aka au-4912 adapter.

The linux driver at http://www.sapido.com.tw/EN/productau4622f.htm  needs a few mods to compile.

The error was with CONFIG_AUTOSUSPEND being set and the block of code that was triggered by this had a call to a struct member that was not defined.
I just disabled the entire code block for now and it compiles clean.
I should also try http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10743817&postcount=23

NetworkManager in Fedora 15 was doing something crazy but eventually gave in.
Fedora I’m disappoint.

Also manufacturers should bloody give drivers. Not going to buy anything by ralink anymore.

Sapido wins.

Now if you want to make Caps_lock into an control key you have to change this file

/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz.

Change the line that says Caps_lock to control and recompress it.

loadkeys   dvorak  now remaps the Caps_lock to  a control.

Gnome3 the horror!!

Was only recently thinking how the old gnome simply worked.  A simple panel for my icons, the simple applets and a simple menu.  I had everything I need there.

Now I need to search endlessly to find the keyboard settings. There’s no way to choose dvorak on the login screen, no shutdown button in sight.

And whats with the grouping of  windows, a simple alt tab switched windows; now I have to wait for the preview and choose the one that I want.  It’s scary to think of what would have happened when I installed bluetile on top of this.

The laptop I’m using has a small screen. Who in their right minds want such big frames for windows.

Did an uninstall of gnome-shell and a semblance of sanity returned.

This reminds me of the long string formulae that out hindi grammar books had. Can’t remember the details but a sentence/phrase encodes a complex rule for writing poems of various kinds. I remember rules that are to be used for evoking various emotions in poems.

Going to take a stab at the book again. The range of things this touches is amazing.

New kind of science

http://mitworld.mit.edu/flash/player/Main.swf?host=cp58255.edgefcs.net&flv=mitw-00152-math-wolfram-newscience-15sep03&preview=http://mitworld.mit.edu//uploads/mitwstill-00152-math-wolfram-newscience-15sep03.jpg

Ideas flow and pseudocode follows concrete implementations. This desire to
help solve their problems sheds many of the responsibilities and decision making
that I usually shoulder when solving my own programming problems.

Some times this have worked even as far a coding in a completely unfamiliar problem.
There is this satisfaction that one gets when you genuinely try to help out
others, you make the problem yours but are not burdened with the chaff that comes
with the problem.

I term this the Out Of Body Problem solving or OOBPS.
The next time a problem crops up I’m gonna just stand back and get into 3rd person view
to get shit done.

I used FrogJs to create the slideshow,  you could see the actual site at here.
Show some love for his paintings.

It feels good to take long walks.
We should do this more often.

I’ve been living in Bangalore for a little more than a couple of years now, haven’t got much to show for the experience though, it’s true I’ve met a bunch of neat people here, been on a couple of nice treks in the vicinity.

Switched a couple of different projects and even a job recently.
Have seen a few keen business people and some clueless bunch.

Got familiar with a couple of languages that I didn’t know before or didn’t know how they are used in large scales.

Been chasing some form of creative explosion that could raise my self-esteem. There were times back in college when I got to play with parsers and it was fun.  Hell, even back in school writing C code to swap values of variables was fun. Now, having gotten myself into a sysad trainee role, I’m not so sure about the fun part.

The other job we had some fun refactoring Zimbra code to do some SOAP stuff and grudgingly package it into a jar in eclipse.

It was refreshing to get SNMP to work and break LDAP and stuff that came with Zimbra. Opennms was fun, setting up your own Openfire at home was neat.

Hell, even the manual labor that we did with AbInitio was way better.   Here though, chasing mindlessly about rpms, compiling stuff from source, spending time writing scripts that I’ll never use again, worrying about traffic, these I can live with.   Being mostly clueless in the arts of administration with puppet and things and that my linux skills  teeters around writing scripts and glue code, I feel useless.

It’s not that I wasn’t feeling this way earlier, its just that these days I don’t see that level of camaraderie in the people I work with now. And this affects me.

There were days when most of us were clueless and collaboration was extreme, where one lacked the other pulled him up. In hindsight: those were good teams and good mentors, got things done even if it was just some enterprise stuff sans glamor, learnt a great deal.

Trying to level up amidst people of great technical prowess who’re short in other areas is proving to be just plain depressing, figuring out how to function as a team that respects and supports each other seems impossible in this divided environment.

All of this is aggravated when you lack the product knowledge.

There’s no fun in trying to install a service, read a blog about how it s built all the while not actually creating something neat, sure this could be my own fault, but I’m not creative enough to magic out solutions to a problem I can’t see.

Places where I see avenues to build something are growing lesser each day. People to bounch ideas off are getting scarcer at work. You have more exicting things to build with people outside work.

You lose sleep trying to do both things, you don’t care about what happens to the world around you, you don’t even go out for a walk. The backlog of things that you had planned to do is ever increasing.

Trying to keep up with these just leaves you frail in the end.

This chase gets tiring after sometime and you wonder is it worth it ?