Author: Haris Ibrahim K. V.

by

HULK SMASH!

Alright now, this post is not for the faint hearted or for those sissies. This is for those kick ass cartoon lovers out there who loves to see some serious butt kicking!

Ooookay… Let’s get down to business.

Personally, instead of putting the title for the video below as “The avengers VS the Hulk”, they should’ve put it as “The Avengers getting creamed!”

So, here is the fun. I mean, Captain America is the wonder boy. He’s got the super serum and he always knows what is the right thing to do given any situation. But over here.. Oh boy, he charges in on the Hulk!! The idiot! Fortunately he lives to regret his mistake thanks to Betty.

Ah, Iron man… Haven’t we all heard of the sweet millionaire who doesn’t have a heart? I’m glad he doesn’t have one coz it wouldn’t have survived the humiliation he gets here. He has all the cool modern technologically advanced bull-shit on him and whatever pride this son of a gun has in his so called “armor of gold”, the hulk beats all of it to an unrecognizable pulp!

Thor!!! Oh the high and mighty God he is! You know something cool about this guy? Well, apart from looking like a complete loser, he has an ultra super-cool hammer with him. Designed for a God, it is I believe. The kicker is, it cannot be lifted by anyone but him. Maybe some sorta emotional attachment an’ all but I dunno… And guess what? The HULK not only lifts it but smacks it right across his kisser knocking the all high and mighty Thor out!!! So much for his hammer. Ha!!

Goliath and the little one. You see, Goliath can turn into this huge giant sized giant which makes him “feel” that he is really big and powerful. I guess that makes him a bit over confident. Well, the Hulk sure opens his gates of reality for him .Glad Hulk didn’t decide to have a go at his family jewels! And as for the little one (I don’t know her name), I think she is the only one who was fortunate enough to at least even start annoying hulk. Nice going with getting into his ear laddie!

There are two other boneheads in there who are absolutely delusional. They shoot Hulk with guns! Oh sweet mother of mercy isn’t that just wonderful?

I mean come on!! We all know that the madder the Hulk gets the stronger he gets. And what are these idiots doing going after him without a plan?? I hope they have at least learnt that by now after getting the heroic thrashing that was coming to them. If you ask me, they asked for it bro. They’ve got peanuts for brains!

One of the most enjoyable cartoon scenes that I’ve ever seen in my life! Had a really good time watching it with my brother. šŸ™‚

by

The world is mine too.

When those times come when you feel down in the dumps, when you feel that you’re not significant in this wild world where there are so many great and successful people, the easiest way that you find to comfort yourself is to think, “I’m neither special nor worth anything”, and go back to watching a movie to hide your own mind from your own failure. In a nut shell, you lie to yourself.

Is that how you want to spend your entire life? Don’t you wish to know what you are a part of?

When one night in such a mood I wandered out of my home for a stroll, I happened to look up at the sky. Oh, the wonder that I witnessed! The shining stars lighting the sky… It is not words that convey what you feel. It has not been taught to you what beauty is and how beauty is defined. But at sights like those, you behold the beauty. And when you stand admiring it, the veil that covers what lies beneath slowly lifts and your heart feels that beauty… The glory of the creation that you are and that what you witness. You realize you too are a part of something that is truly, really wonderful.

Why do the stars twinkle and why does the moon shine if not for you? How are you not significant to them? They light your way and soothe your heart just as they do any other person’s. Are you not special if they are there to help you through? Are you not special if such beauty exists right before your eyes for you to witness?

I do not try to solve your problems or provide you with all the life’s answers that you need to know. But when one finds some sort of an answer to a common problem, I believe he should share it so that at least one out there gets his thoughts ignited. And maybe that one person blazes his trail to find the answers that we seek. I do believe that is pretty much how the spirit of open source and free software works.

I wanted to write this post for quite a while now. But I couldn’t get the proper incentive. But then I happened to see the wonder that you’re about to witness below. Then I knew I had a lot to be thankful for and that no matter what anyone said, we all are special in our own ways.

We all have much to be thankful for…

He made an example out of his life. Let’s make one out of ours too.

by

Firefox download getting stuck. ‘wget’ to the rescue!

The firefox download manager has been giving me quite a headache whenever I try to do big downloads. Even if it is a 70MB download, after 25 or so MB, it gets stuck. Then I have to pause and hit continue for the download to proceed again. It so happens that many times an error occurs and I can’t continue the download from where it got stuck and I have to download the whole thing again… and again… and again…

Ha! But I’m not to be trifled with. Not as long as ‘wget’ is there! ‘wget’ is a GNU free software package that is used for retrieving files over the web. If you have got it installed, then all you have to do is to get the download link and use wget to download it.

In order to get the download link, right click on whichever download you want in the firefox download manager. There will be an option ‘copy download link’. Click on it.

Then open a terminal and go to whichever folder you want the file downloaded to. Assuming it is in the Desktop, type the following command at the prompt:

haris@asylum:~/Desktop$ wget <paste the download link>

Now even if it gets stuck in the middle, you can resume from wherever it was interrupted by giving the option ‘-c’ to ‘wget’. That is, the command will be like

haris@asylum:~/Desktop$ wget -c <paste the download link>

And there it continues beautifully.

by

A surprising blood test.

I was new in town and wasn’t accustomed to the way of life there. I was getting along fine. Making friends, talking with strangers and getting to know them and all.

However, one unfortunate day, I got the flu. My body temperature began to rise and I happened to consult a nearby doctor. He prescribed a tablet temporarily and told me to get my blood tested.

Fine. A medical laboratory was within the vicinity and I went there with the doctor’s prescription.

It was a small lab. Entering into it, the reception desk was to the left and there was a settee for the patients to wait on the right. Someone was already sitting there and I shared the seat with him.

I expected a nurse to come out from the room within with a needle and a rubber tube in her hand in order to take my blood. But waiting for about ten minutes, no nurse came. Instead, the door opened and a tall and handsome man came into the waiting area. He was quite tall, dressed in a long black coat just like the ones that were wore by the old British royal families. A graceful scent came flowing from him and everything suddenly seemed much more joyful. It was as if there was nothing more to worry about now that he was there even though he was a complete stranger to me.

He had a warm smile on his face which made me feel comfortable. It was reassuring that everything was fine. With that smile on his face, he slowly came near me, laid his hand on my shoulder and sat beside me. I was really honored that a person like him would take the time to notice me.

“You have come to have your blood tested son?”, he asked with an air of self-importance.

“Umm.. Yes kind sir. I have come for that.”, I replied.

The smile on his face widened and I turned my face to look at the door expecting a nurse to come at any moment now.

At that moment, I was vaguely aware of a slight warmth on my neck. I realized that it was his breath. But why? I asked myself. I dare not turn and cross a man like him. I sat like a statue staring at the door itself.

His breath came nearer and nearer and then all of a sudden, “ARGH!”, I screamed!

He bit my neck!

I jumped up in disgust and stared at him. He was sitting there calmly gargling something in his mouth. I looked at the other person sitting there and he was engrossed in the magazine that he was going through. I did not know what to do.

After rinsing for a while, he took out a test tube from his coat pocket and spat into it. There was half a test tube of blood!

“Please take a seat son. I’ll give you the results in a few moments.”, he said.

I was in a trance. I sat down looking at him. He gave me a sponge and made my hand hold it where he had bitten. He went over to the reception and took a pen and paper.

He took a small sip from the test tube and after a few questioning looks and a bit of gargling, swallowed it. He wrote something down on the paper. He repeated this process until he had emptied the entire test tube.

Finally he folded the paper in which he had jotted down a lot of stuff and handed it over to me. “Here you go son. You’re fine. Just a slight fever. It’ll pass soon. Go and show it to the doctor. See you.”

With that, he went back into the room. I was thunderstruck at the whole ordeal and could not decide what to do. What in the world had just happened? I had no clue. I just had to make myself believe that this was how things worked out over there. I walked out of the lab holding the piece of paper the handsome man had given me free of charge.

Vampires taking courses?

Seems like I still have a lot of catching up to do in this new life of mine.

by

Configuring wireless (Wi-Fi) on Debian squeeze.

Before beginning the post, I would like to convey my gratitude to Ershad who has been there for me whenever I was in need of assistance.

INSTALLING SQUEEZE

It so happened that one fine day I decided to do my entire main project in the Debian distro. As if to motivate me, Debian came out with their latest release 6.0, squeeze, just then itself. So I decided to go with it.

I downloaded the CD-ROM iso from this site and made a bootable flash with it. I installed it in my netbook in the middle of which it fetched about 1120 packages from the net (which inhibited all my work for almost three long hours) and installed them. I hadn’t created the ‘root’ account deciding to use ‘sudo’ for administrative privileges whenever I needed them.

The installation was successful and I booted into it. Everything was fine. There stood the bluetooth applet proudly in the notification area alongside whom stood the network manager applet displaying the message ‘wired connection auto eth0 active’. Life was good.

Happily when I was just about to retire back to my room, I pulled out the Ethernet cable. And to my dismay I noted that the internet was disconnected. That is, the Wi-Fi connectivity was not there.

I tried left clicking on the applet and it did not show any wireless reception. I realized that my system was not detecting the presence of my modem’s wireless signal in the vicinity. The problem? Wireless not working in Debian 6.0, squeeze.

I had feeling that the trail I was about to blaze was going to be long and hard.

THE QUEST BEGINS

What was the first thing to do? Google for the problem, of course. All the sites that I referred to told me to install the package ‘wireless-tools’ before going any further. Well, I went ahead and installed it.

sudo apt-get install wireless-tools

It installed peacefully. I remembered that there was a command called ‘iwconfig’ within this package. So just to try out what it did, I typed in ‘iw’ and pressed tab for the tab completion. Nothing happened.

Huh?

I typed the entire thing in as ‘iwconfig’ and hit enter. I was greeted with a friendly message.

bash: iwconfig: command not found

What!?

Okay, so the package was not installed? I had no clue. Just to try it, I typed in ‘ifconfig’ and hit enter whose output was no more helpful than a banana peel.

bash: ifconfig: command not found

So where the heck were these packages?? Being as irritated as I was, I don’t know why, but I craved for more power and accessed my root account with ‘sudo -i’. Ha! And then in that flow I simply just typed in ‘iw’ and tried tab completion and viola! There it was! ‘ifconfig’ was there too.

Debian really doesn’t appreciate its local ignorant users tinkering with super cool tools I guess. After that moment onwards, everything that I did was as root.

However, I really was sitting without any clue so as to what to do next. But then I noticed that Ershad was online by this time. We entered into a casual chat me mocking his status message in gtalk. His status was, ” ‘Reboot’ has the magical power of fixing issues sometimes šŸ˜‰ “. Although in my case, ‘suspend’ was a magician too. However, after a while, I presented my problem to him.

He asked me which was my wlan hardware. I, being the genius that I am, had no clue what he was talking about. He told me to run the following command.

dmesg | grep -i wireless

Its output was:

[ 13.312354] eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 5.60.48.36

Ah! So there it was. My wlan device was Broadcom and its model number was BCM4315. He mentioned that Broadcom needed proprietary drivers in order to work. He also mentioned that Broadcom had gone open source lately and its drivers were available in the latest Linux kernel releases. The article regarding that is here.

So I had two options. One, to fix the wireless issue by installing the driver and playing with the wireless tools. Second, by updating my kernel by downloading and compiling the latest stable version.

The second option sounded too much fun. But if doing that fixed the wireless issue, I thought that it would deny me the chance of learning what all would happen in manually trying to fix the wireless issue by itself. So I promised I would compile the kernel separately after fixing my wireless and thus decided to go with my option numero uno.

THE DRIVER HUNT

I googled for a way to install the Broadcom drivers and found quite a good description in this page. I had to add a non free repo to my Debian repository. So by accessing my /etc/apt/sources.list file, I added the following line to it.

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free

Mind you, I am doing everything in root. After saving the file, I ran:

apt-get update

and then installed the package that I required by doing:

apt-get install firmware-brcm80211Ā 

The installation finished successfully. And since the driver is a part of the kernel, you needed to load it into the kernel. For that we do:

modprobe -r brcm80211 ; modprobe brcm80211

Alright. I was good to go. But wasn’t that too easy? Yes it was. And as such, something was bound to go wrong and guess what? It did! Nothing had changed except that I had wasted a huge amount of my time. So what went wrong?

An obvious fact that my device was BCM4315 and not brcm80211! Oh how silly I was!

THE CORRECT DRIVER (or chauffeur?)

I was narrowing down to the point where my answer lay. I could feel that the end was near. Googling for BCM4315 drivers, I found the site here. The names of the drivers that the BCM43xx series wanted was given there. And I, in all the happiness, went and installed the first one.

apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

It started to work. Yes! Was I done? Oh no… Of course not. The installation showed an error. And the line that caught my eye was:

Not supported low-power chip with PCI id 14e4:4315!

Whoa! They had mentioned something about the PCI id not being sufficient enough to identify the chipset. And that itself caused the problem. So I followed the next link they had provided and reached here.

I learned a few things over here. One was that the PCI id was a pair of hexadecimal numbers just like the one that we saw above. (14e4:4315). The first four indicated the vendor and the last four indicated the device. But I hadn’t figured this out then. It was after I did the following command that I understood it.

lspci -vnn | grep 14e4

Its output was:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Ā Ā  Ā Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:04b5]

And there in the first square brackets was the PCI id. It was the same one as earlier. The following table lists whether mine is supported or not.Ā  (I have italicized and made bold my PCI id in the table). And the table says mine is supported.

PCI-ID Supported? Chip ID Modes PHY version Alternative
14e4:0576 no BCM43224 ? ? wl (aka STA)
14e4:4301 yes (b43legacy) BCM4301 b B
14e4:4306 yes (b43legacy) BCM4306/2 b/g G
14e4:4307 yes BCM4306/3 b/g G
14e4:4311 yes BCM4311 b/g G wl
14e4:4312 yes BCM4311 a/b/g G (r8) wl
14e4:4313 not tested BCM4311 a ? wl
14e4:4315 yes (2.6.33+) BCM4312 b/g LP (r1) wl
14e4:4318 yes BCM4318 b/g G (r7)
14e4:4319 yes BCM4318 a/b/g G
14e4:4320 yes (b43legacy) BCM4306/2 b/g G
14e4:4320 yes BCM4306/3 ? ?
14e4:4320 (USB) no (USB device) BCM4320 a/g ? rndis_wlan
14e4:4321 partially in 2.6.39+ BCM4321 ? N (r2)
14e4:4322 no BCM4322 b/g/n N (r4)
14e4:4323 (USB) no (USB device) BCM4323 a/b/g/n ? ndiswrapper
14e4:4324 yes (b43legacy) BCM4306 ? G (r1/2)
14e4:4325 not tested BCM4306 ? ?
14e4:4328 partially in 2.6.39+ BCM4321 b/g/n N (r2) wl
14e4:4329 partially in 2.6.39+ BCM4321 b/g/n N (r1) wl/brcm80211
14e4:432a not tested BCM4321 ? N wl
14e4:432b partially in 2.6.39+ BCM4322 ? N (r4) wl
14e4:432c not tested BCM4322 ? N wl
14e4:432d not tested BCM4322 ? N wl
14e4:4331 no (WIP) BCM4331 ? HT (r1)
14e4:4353 yes (3.1+) BCM43224 a/b/g/n N (r6) wl/brcm80211
14e4:4357 yes (3.1+) BCM43225 a/b/g/n? N (r6) wl/brcm80211
14e4:4358 not tested BCM43227 ? ? wl
14e4:4359 not tested BCM43228 ? ? wl
14e4:435a not tested ? ? ? wl
14e4:4727 no BCM4313 b/g/n LCN (r1) wl/brcm80211
14e4:5354 not tested ? b/g LP
14e4:a99d not tested BCM43421? ? ? wl

Now what? Mine is supported so what do I do? I again went back to the site from where I had mentioned earlier I had installed the first command shown. And there, a careful reading revealed to me that it was the second one that I had to install and I did:

apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer

Thank goodness! The installation was completed successfully. And in order load the driver into the kernel, I did

modprobe b43

modprobe b43legacy

Alright the drivers were loaded nice and smooth. But there remained the task of actually getting our good old wireless device up and running. And as for that matter, what we have to do, quite literally, is:

ifconfig wlan0 up

Viola! I was done! Was I? Yes I was! Left-clicking on the network manager applet now showed my modem’s Wi-Fi signal! But when clicking it, nothing happened. It was then that I remembered the magic Ershad had taught me. Reboot!

I rebooted my system and here I am blogging from my room while my modem is sitting way far away in the hall.

It was a day well spent. šŸ™‚

by

32 or 64 bit? The magic of pointers.

Thinking and talking about the issue of whether my OS is 32-bit or a 64-bit one, I found out there were many ways to know that. But we discuss none of them over here. Here we discuss a cool way in order to find it out.

We all know about pointers in C right? It points to a memory location. That is it holds an address whose contents maybe dereferenced using the ‘*’ operator. There I already said it! The pointer stores an address.

But what is the size of an address? And who determines it?

That is where the matter of 32 and 64 bit comes in. A 32-bit OS means that its addresses are of size 32-bits and it can address upto 2^32 memory locations. As such, a maximum of 4GB. In a previous post of mine, I have mentioned the fact of the file system FAT32 not supporting files larger than 4GB. It is because that file system uses 32-bit addressing.

But our concern is with the OS. The OS determines the addressing and as such, a 32-bit OS allocates 32 bits to a pointer whereas a 64-bit OS allocates 64 bits to a pointer.

We can exploit this allocation to find out if the OS running on our system is 32 or 64 bit. For that, we write a small C code as follows:

#include<stdio.h>

int main(){

Ā Ā Ā Ā  int *p;

Ā Ā Ā Ā  printf(“Size is : %d\n”, sizeof(p));

Ā Ā Ā Ā  return 0;

}

Compile the code using gcc as:

gcc filename.c

And run it as:

./a.out

See what number you get as your output. If it is 4, your OS is 32-bit and if it 8, your OS is 64-bit. This is because the 4 and 8 are shown in bytes.

I was hoping to get a way of knowing what my system’s architecture is. But this method can only recognize the OS and not the system.

Happy hacking!

by

An unusual paragraph.

What is so unusual about this paragraph? It is so fairly obvious that you wouldn’t know it at your first try. So what must you do? Right! Try again and again without giving up at all. Go through it again and you will find out what is that much amazing about this paragraph. Just sit vigilantly and scan through top to bottom staring at all of this and it shall dawn upon you. You might not gain any cool information or so going through this, but all in all, this paragraph has a shock to part. You might think what I am upto by making you go through this crap, but mark my words, at last coming to know what fact lay so plainly in front of you, will probably kill you. Frankly, if you had Batman’s instincts, you could by now sit back and sip a cup of your most tasty drink. I stop now. If you still got nothing as a solution, do drop a mail. May your skills grow always.

by

Etsuko’s picnic. (In the memory of August 6th, 1945)

“Tomorrow we’re going on a picnic!”, thought the 4-year-old Etsuko in excitement hugging her teddy.

Etsuko was the only child of the Shimizu couple. A beautiful child who was the world of her mom and dad. It was almost time for starting her school education. But her mom wanted her near for an year more to give her all her love all the time.

She would wake up in the mornings and be with her mom while watering the garden. She had even planted a sapling which was bearing leaves. Her first experience of a new life coming into existence on God’s Green Earth. But little did she knew how easily one could be taken away as well.

She was aware of her mom and dad discussing something that day. “Grown-up matters”, she thought and she continued playing with her doll house. She was aware that something she couldn’t understand was going on out there. A child’s curiousness took her doubts to her dad who consoled her saying that it was picnic time in their country and everyone was busy going on picnic in huge planes. That was satisfying enough for her and she was thrilled that they were going on one the very next day.

She saw her mom and dad packing. She retired for the day and fell asleep listening to her dad reciting her a poem…

The next day she woke up early only to find that her mom and dad were already up and walking about. She waited for a while hoping that her mom would go to water the garden. But she did not come to her disappointment. So she decided to water the sapling on her own and went out with the watering kettle into the garden.

She heard a few unusual cries from strange birds. She stroke the new leaf gently watering at its root with care. She sat and looked up at the flying planes wondering where she would be going today. She thought of the new and strange place that would greet her and how she would take care of her sapling if she was to go there. She arrived at the conclusion that mom must have already thought about it. Its a thought all of us have. You don’t get to be mom and dad unless you can fix everything.

It was five minutes past eight. They already had breakfast and she noticed a bit of anxiety on both of their faces. Her mom agreed that she had asked their neighbor to take care of the sapling while they were away.

Etsuko went out to bid good bye to her sapling.

It was past eight thirty…

She bent down, sat on her knees, held the newly sprouted leaf and went close to kiss it.

Suddenly she felt a rumble, something like a quake. It was natural to have slight quake now and then and she was not alarmed. But the thundering sound that accompanied the quake made her freeze.

“Etsuko!!!”, she heard her dad shouting.

She looked back at her home. She saw her dad running towards her. Her mom was behind him. She started to stand up to run towards them. Her body rose and her limbs started to move…

But the flash came.

She saw her dad and mom falling down choking and screaming. She tried to shout but found that no voice came. She fell… And the last thing that she saw was the leaf burning away.

——————————————

In the memory of all the innocent people who died with dreams just like us on that unfortunate day on which ‘little boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:45am.

August 6th. Hiroshima day.

by

Cloud – A menace? The future of cloud computing.

If you still haven’t figured out the new look and personality (not to mention existence) of the word that used to refer to the beautiful white, sponge like stuff hanging high above your heads since the day of your birth, then you are yet to welcome a new caretaker into your lives.

Cloud computing – the buzz word these days. Everything is being taken over to the Internet. And getting that to be the maximum is what the cloud does.

The idea is just like renting space to do your work. You don’t need to worry about the infrastructure at all. You just pay the money and say you need this much memory, hard disk space, processor power and so on along with other software services that you might need like compilers and text editors. Once you’ve paid, you’ll be given all this whose maintenance will be their responsibility and you just need to concentrate only on your work, which will be simply writing code mostly.

However, something here scares me very much personally. You can visualize the cloud like a huge building where everything is available. All you have to do is to ask for a place in it, thereby which they will allocate a small portion of the building for you, walk in through the front door and do your stuff. You’re not the only one who is going to be availing this facility. So thousands and millions of people (or rather renters) are going to be there side by side with you.

Now what scares me is this. What happens if they close the front door?

People, cloud is where a few people will cluster together and provide all the services that we need. All our works, personal informations, everything will be out there with some others. What if ‘they’ decide to take over the world? It will be the end of the world as we know it. Is this a plan for 2012? Lot of questions and zero answers. Only time will tell.

I feel the whole situation like Sauron waiting for the Ring and instead of trying to destroy it, all of us are desperately trying to get it back to him.

by

Disk drive with UUID = # not yet ready or present. (Hibernation option missing!)

I’ve been greeted with that error message for quite a long time now on my Ubuntu loading screen and it was today that I finally fixed it.

I do not know the entire technical details of what all is going on, but I just want to share what I did so that it may help someone out there.

This error came the day when I installed Debian on a primary partition. My Hard disk right now is as follows:

I installed Debian by partitioning the third primary partition into two ( 7 and 7), thus having a total of four primary partitions. It worked fine. But thereafter whenever I booted into Ubuntu, I got the aforementioned error message. Not only that, but the hibernation option was missing too. Even though I copied the Debian partition back into the extended partition at /dev/sda10 (see figure) using Gparted, the problem still persisted.

I figured out it had something to do with my fstab file. You can get yours at /etc/fstab. In this file, along with the partitions present for /, /home and /var (see the figure) , it showed the same UUID that was in the error message with a comment saying that ‘swap was initially on /dev/sda8 at the time of installation’.

Heck it was still there. So somehow its UUID had got twisted. How that happened, I have no clue.

So here is what I did.

I have 11.04 installed side by side. So I mounted that and accessed its fstab file. There it had the swap partition defined well as follows:

UUID=31b658b3-4a87-454f-b514-6dd5d647a159 noneĀ Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā  swapĀ Ā Ā  swĀ Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā  0Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā  0

I copied that into the fstab file of my ubuntu 10.04 replacing the error UUID. Saved it and there was no more error message the next time I booted. Plus, the hibernation option came back. (NOTE: In order to edit the fstab file, you need to open it as root. So do sudo gedit fstab)

So all you have to do is to replace the UUID. To find out the UUID of a partition you can do:

sudo blkid /dev/sda#

and you will get that partition’s UUID. Gparted can also provide you with this information.

Hope that helps.

by

Two is one!

Thoufeeq and Hisham were in one room in their hostel. Of course, it was a four-person room, but we need not concern ourselves with the other two people in their room right now.

Their life is such that these two people never wake up at the same time in the morning. Either Thoufeeq or Hisham wakes up earlier than the other. Whoever wakes up goes, brushes, finishes his morning chores and comes back. Then the other one goes through the same process and both of them together have breakast and leave for college happily.

It so happened that one blessed day, by all that is wonderful in this world, these two people woke up together! Well, it is life and you can’t expect things to be always the same. So that is fine. But what happened next, quite isn’t.

They woke up, sat up in their beds rubbing their eyes wondering where they are. After a while both coming to their senses, got up from their beds, stretched their arms giving a yawn and went to the shelf where they keep their tooth brushes in a cup.

Both reached the shelf, extended their hands, reached the cup and you know what happened? Both held the same brush.

——————————————————————-

Dedicated to all my friends living at my hostel. Life at MH simply rocks and it is something I’ll proudly look back upon. It is sure to bring a grin on my face.

by

An Engineering problem.

Having studied the Engineering B. Tech course, I’m bound to say something about it. And I couldn’t find a more apt title than the one above.

People have the problem of inertia too. Not only objects. The tendency to continue the state that he is already in unless some external force acts on him. But unlike objects, man has a quite complicated, yet wonderful, very securely kept collection of cells and tissues, called brain, in his head. That can give all the force that a man would want in order to change his state. But it is very sad that how little of us uses that unlimited potential to come out of the inertia we are so comfortably wound up in and do something different. Really sad.

But we are not completely to blame. A philosophy that I read in a book called “Sophie’s World” comes to mind. In that he says that the world is like a big rabbit. We live deep within the Rabbit’s fur in the quiet comfort without any trouble. Of course, we can live like that. But there are those who climb the fur. A fur that is not that steady. But these people climb it no matter what. Slowly, bit by bit. And finally they reach the tip of the fur, revealing to them the light and wonders that lie around! And that is when we see and know where and who we are. We realize the long paths that are still to be trodden.

Now, coming to the Engineering problem, talking as one of the students, we never are willing to take that risk factor. Let me try to make it more clear.

The Engineering curriculum and the syllabus that we have to go through in order to get our degree is quite vast and challenging. And the so called teachers make it only harder for us with all their rules, assignments, personal egos and stuff. This being the case, a student naturally becomes afraid to try something out of the way. To try something new. To take a risk.

He is afraid because a risk demands a bit. It demands a lot of his time. His brain power. A lot of effort and the results are doubtful too. All this don’t put up much of a fight to make you give up when you think of all the work that you’ve got to do for college the next day. So you just stop thinking about this new idea of yours and get back to the good old life where everything is already laid out. You take the same path that your elders, seniors have taken and you end up as another brick in the wall. (Listen to the song “Another brick in the wall” by “Pink Floyd”)

But unless you take the risk and climb the fur, you’re never going to grow or see the wonders that lie around you.

Unless you keep trying out stuff, you never will be blessed with new ideas. And the new ideas you get this way are those ideas that take off and make you a millionaire! You might think if you’ve got it in you to have ideas like those. But that exactly is the point. There might be something out there that you’re having a hard time doing. And when you find an easy way around it, that is the idea that people like you never could figure out! And that is your ticket out into the world out there waiting for you.

So my friends, don’t go easy on an idea that comes into your mind however stupid that you think it might be. Sit on it. Dream on it. And most importantly, work on it. Even if that idea doesn’t come to realization, you’re going to get something new, a new path, from the one that you showed courage to forge in the first place.

Now let’s get going!

by

Motivation.

A word that means so much and yet the word that people don’t even think about.

A gesture or just a word is all that you need to do it. And the beauty is that any of us can do it.

It sometimes may change the life of a person completely. But it seems people either don’t realize that or maybe they just don’t think about it. All the things that we think that are important in our life, all the things that we hold dear to us, we do not include this in any of it.

Of course, to get it, other people will have to put their minds to it. But to give? Do we need an excuse to give it? Not at all. The moment you see one of your friends or those younger than you trying hard to achieve something, is it really hard to go and tell him, “Good work lad!! Keep at it!”, without being sarcastic?

Well, maybe it is a bit hard. But that is not to be taken as an excuse.

A word from a teacher to a student who is trying hard to get a program right. A word to your friend who is trying to accomplish something that most people haven’t. A word to those younger than you when they are trying heads over heels to learn something that you already know. The list goes on and on…

But take my word for it. The difference that you make when you give motivation is not meager. It gives meaning and hope to and rekindles the spirit of the soul who is trying to make a difference. When he gets tired and is about to give up, your words will make the fire in his heart burn with more yearning to strive for what he believes needs to be done.

However, I do believe giving motivation requires some degree of self-respect. What you have done and accomplished in your life will make the tone of, “Good work!”, sound how it should. Otherwise definitely sarcasm will enter your voice. And that will create an adverse effect. Whatever spirit with which your friend was working will be shot dead and he will quit trying for sure.

Chances are limitless. Even if you have not thought about it till today, opportunities will come your way by the truckload tomorrow and the day after.

Just make sure you don’t fail to do your duty.

by

When I learn to sit, I will sit to learn.

It just came to me one fine day morning while going to college.

It says a lot. The main problem that we face today, especially this generation, is the problem of distraction. Concentrating on one thing is quite alien to us. Mobile phones being the main villain, music, friends and lack of dedication are the other factors that ruin us bit by bit (or byte by byte, as one of my friends put it).

We don’t know how to sit on something. To ready our mind for understanding the matter at hand. Of course, the first criticism I’m going to get is, “Still we get good marks”. That is totally irrelevant and stupid. I’m not even getting into the matter of scoring marks because you can really know the difference between data stored in a RAM and ROM. Also, you feel the difference when just simply talking with a person who knows what he is talking about. Me and one of my friends lately talked about the three kinds of people that we see around us. They are:

  1. One who knows and knows that he knows. He is wise. Follow him.
  2. One who knows not and knows that he knows not. He is simple. Teach him.
  3. One who knows not and knows not that he knows not. He is a fool. Shun him.

Getting back to the point, instead of us telling others or the elders telling their young ones to “sit and learn”, they must first teach them to “learn to sit”. Because only if we are going to sit dedicatedly can we learn something the way it should be learned.

We do hear stories of great people who read through a book just once and answer any question asked from within. It is because they know how to sit with concentration on what they are doing. People like us, who don’t know how to sit, well, need I elaborate our case?

Meditation, throwing away distractions and telling those who interrupt you to get lost in a nice way are the only ways through which we’re going to learn how to sit. Its not like the life of many hang in balance if you keep your phone switched off for a while. And if it is so, you really need to reconsider your life as a student.

Hoping you and I learn to sit soon do I hope wise people will walk on the face of Earth again.

by

Brotherhood of MH.

MH, the letters that sent a shiver through all the first year students studying at my college.

I’ve been a part of it. Yeah right. Got lots of memories.

Let me take you to the scene. MH 1. The right wing. Room 99. That’s where I belong.

When I came here, I was very well equipped. Bucket, cup, brush, paste, pen, pencil, scale, A4s and what not! I had my own soap too!

But the brotherhood of MH was more than any other that I ever saw.

One fine day morning just after shifting to 99, one of my neighbours came and asked me for my bucket and cup so that he could bath. Me being a good sport handed it right over to him. That marked the beginning.

Soon I was clueless so as to what happened. Well, not only clueless but bucketless, cupless, soapless, pasteless, penless, paperless and thank God they didn’t take away my under garments. But I’m not to be trifled with! I joined the game and soon I was making everyone bucketless and cupless! There was no ownership for anything and no asking for permission of anything. If you want it, then you are its owner. Such was the brotherhood of MH.

But all this while I was under a secret hope that they would come back to me. My bucket and cup. They were with me from the very first day of mine at college. And that hope was finally rewarded today!

When I was up at 6 in the morning and going to wash my face, I happened to look at the opposite wing. There she was!! My bucket! In the hands of a senior going to the toilet. My breathe quickened, my walk turned into a run and my adrenaline was pumped. I was like a hero trying to save his loved one from a villain. Running in slow motion, I caught him.

“My bucket!”, said I in a tone of authority. He had no choice but to give it as my name written on it was still visible, barely.

Triumphantly, I went back to my room.

When it was time to bath (at about 8), one of my neighbours (who was my first year room mate) came and told me, “Kaaks, I have a surprise for you.”

(Slow music playing in the background and a holy light shining in through the door)

And there it was! My cup in all its glory!!

IĀ  jumped and grabbed it from him.

As I said, finally my hope has been rewarded. Both now rest safely under my cot. Hope they be there till I shift into single rooms.