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A few writers, a few snacks and a lot of Gyan.

One of the greatest joys in life is that of meeting people with common interests (Not on facebook, thank you!). This is the exact reason why I signed up for the writing workshop by Gaurav and Nisha. First of all, thanks to Ashwan, a man of many talents, my colleague at HasGeek, for bringing the workshop to my attention.

As much I love working and being a part of HasGeek, I was constantly wondering whether the city had something else to offer me. The last two days have been wonderful and the city assured me that there were wonderful things that it had to offer. I just had to get out, open my eyes, and look.

A few writers, 9 to be specific, including yours truly (if you can call me a writer) got together at a certain open, airy and yet shady place to share their passion for writing as well as to help each other out. Gaurav and Nisha, the ones who organized and brought together all of us.

Gaurav was this calm person with a gentle voice and a wonderful smile who sat there, listening carefully to whatever was being said and discussed, to offer advice out of his long years of experience. It was evident that he had the big picture in his mind and it would be years before I could get even somewhere close.

Nisha, on the other hand, had this very outspoken attitude which got through to all of us. A very friendly person who had almost the same amount of experience as Gaurav, she was pouring out suggestions of various books to read that none of us had even heard of before. The critiques they both gave for our works were very thought out and clean that we could identify where we were doing it wrong.

In no particular order, here comes the rest of the crew.

Azeem, a good looking, well built fellow who was an avid lover of fiction. All through the two days, he kept fictionalizing whatever was thrown to him and he did a marvelous job at that too. It is always heart warming to see motivated people who yearn to achieve something and as such, I hope he soon finds his graphic designer and gets his comic book published asap.

Deepak, the plump man with a wonderful humor sense whose writings were more directed towards the little hilarious things that happen in one’s life. We almost never tend to pay attention to those little things that brings a grin on our face. He captures those moments wonderfully with his writing, at the end, leaving all of us laughing, and making us think of those little incidents in our own lives.

Ranju, the cute lady hailing from Chennai. Words flow from her fingers so smoothly and yet so meaningfully and hilariously that you feel alive listening to her read out her writing. It is admirable to see how wonderfully she establishes her thoughts through a few quick sentences. I’m never going to forget how she merged the blog writer’s and drunk guy’s story into one!

Sam (I wonder where Frodo is. Also, her real name evades me at the moment). Maybe I am wrong describing her as nervous, but her face lights up with emotion, be it laughter or tension, when she expresses her thoughts. A writer seeking to find that perfect rhythm which would entirely convey her ideas to the world, she was a lively character through both the days.

Lalana, PrintOooooo! I don’t know why I put it like that, but I just did. Hey, it is “sosaysharis” after all. Just kidding. Well, frankly, I really enjoyed listening to her talk. She had this highly animated style of saying things that you could never feel ambiguous about the feeling that she was trying to convey with her words. A lady with a really nice smile, in her writings, I felt envious of finding the one thing that I always sought. The attention to detail and the vivid descriptions which capture the imagery of a scene so beautifully. Someday, I hope to write like that.

Last but not the least, Leanne Pais! WhooHoo! “The girl who kept turning back to assure me that she knew how to drive and her brakes were working”. Man she is going to kill me for this! Oh yeah, the only girl in the world who has had the privilege of having me on her bike. He he… I could have said that she was the first girl with whom I rode on a bike but hey, I’ve just been to a writing workshop and I should write things differently. All in all, her suicidal story (or “The story about one guy committing suicide”, as she would have me put it. Lol!) and the ghost who was enjoying his own funeral really made us all stand on our toes. I hope she finishes her work and gets them published soon.

It was a fun two days. Even though I had attended the workshop with writing just fantasy stories in mind, the way they structured the course and the feedback that they gave ended up in me writing up a small, non-fiction story from my life itself.

The idea was to pick one of those embarrassing moments of your life that had a lot of potential to be written but, you were too embarrassed to write about it. I roughly drafted one such incident that I had when I was a kid and wrote it down in about 250 words, as per their request.

They made us elaborate what we had written to double the size. That was interesting because you had to elaborate the already laid out content. Trying to do that (and in my case it was pushing the limits), I realized it was possible to breathe life into your story in more than one way. Setting the scene, including those tiny bits of information that you think has no relevance at first, etc, came out.

The critiquing of this piece was done seriously. No one held back and the thoughts we shared on each others’ pieces were really helpful for the next re-write that we did. Both Gaurav and Nisha were extremely serious in pointing out the subtle tweaks that could have made the stories better.

After this round was over, we were asked to re-write the story once more. The difference that sprouted in everyone’s writing was unbelievable! I never thought I could put more description into what I had already written, but, following the advice that all of them gave me, I really did make the scene more descriptive. I will post my piece shortly so that you can see what I mean.

It was an awesome experience and extremely fun. Thanks again to Gaurav and Nisha for putting this together. I look forward to more such gatherings in the future.

Cheers guys!

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Debian – Choosing between stable, unstable and testing.

After installing Debian, one of the problems that I faced was which version to use. Version as in stable, unstable or testing. Since I personally knew a Debian developer, Praveen A, I turned to him for guidance. The reason why I got into this state was because I found out that Debian squeeze stable had python 2.6 in its repositories. However, I wanted python 2.7 for my work.

I asked him what these versions mean and how I could switch between them. He gave me the following explanation:

“Sid is where all development happens, all new packages come there. Then it moves to testing when certain requirements are satisfied. At a certain point focus is shifted to fix all bugs in testing and this is called freeze.

So main distributions are stable, testing and unstable. There are nicknames for each. Unstable is always called sid – that kid in toy story who always break things. Current stable is squeeze, testing is wheezy and next testing is jessie. When wheezy becomes stable, squeeze becomes old stable and jessie becomes testing. A copy of testing is made and it is called stable, testing is renamed and freeze is lifted for next release cycle.

So change to testing means change stable/squeeze with testing/wheezy in /etc/sources.list and do apt-get/aptitude update and dist-upgrade. If you choose wheezy, you’ll get stable when it is stable, if you choose testing, you’ll always be on testing. Same for sid as well.”

Since testing sounded stabler than unstable, I decided to go with testing. So here is how my /etc/apt/sources.list looks like:


#

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.5 _Squeeze_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20120512-13:45]/ squeeze main

# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main
# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing-updates main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing-updates main

I’m still not sure whether I should add any other repositories, but as of now, this has worked well for me. Once you make the changes to the sources.list file, you have to run:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Prepare yourself for long hours of download. It took me almost 8 hours to have my distro upgraded. Have fun!

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Fare thee well Ubuntu. The Debian reign begins! (No wonder people don’t use GNU/Linux)

After six long years, I have finally let go of Ubuntu. For three years I had stuck with 10.04, which was stable and had a really good performance. 12.04 came along and ruined it all. Bad system performance, bugs every which where and crashing almost all the time. It was an LTS release and I had decided to stick with it whatever happened. I tried my best to get along well. However, I simply could not let my old laptop take anymore punishment. I had to help him out and I did.

Debian was the answer of course. Old and mature, stable and more than everything, apt! The real question was which desktop manager to use. Gnome was out of the question. Since the time they changed the old Gnome into Gnome classic, I had hated it. Since I had heard about XFCE from quite a few people, I decided to go with it.

I just have one thing to say – No wonder why people don’t use Linux distros. There was one serious hacker in my office while I was attempting it. I went to him for advice on installing a certain package and his first question was, “Why would you do this to yourself?”. That really ticked me off into getting this thing working. Finally, I’m happy to say that I have done it.

Of course, it took me almost five days to get the thing up and running. Googling, tweaking, persistence and what not. The first issue that I faced was of course, networking. However, it was the same old story and you can read about it here.

I’ll write about the different tweaks that I did and other issues that I faced in my coming posts. Otherwise this one will go on and on.

Cheers folks! The Debian days are here.

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Perseverance, sacrifice and friendship.

Life has changed for me and suddenly I have this feeling that I’m at the driver seat. Till now I was just a passenger and the paths were already laid out. I just had to go with the flow and I was sure to reach where I was heading. However, today it is not like that anymore. There is no “system” that I can just blindly follow. I have to think, figure out what I am doing and what I should be doing.

It feels good.

One of the things that I have missed is writing. The frequency at which I blog has come down considerably. I used to think that I wold naturally find time for it. I understand it is not so. Keeping things in perspective and finding time for what you want to do is becoming a more and more challenging task with each passing day. Time is flowing by and unless I act quick, things might reach a point where the currents would be too strong to swim back.

I find myself in the company of a man who has a vision. The yearning to bring about a change in the way things are. A strong and silent man who does not even show any signs of the slightest of frustrations on his face. I find myself in the company of a man who follows his dream of bringing together a community. I’m still ignorant of how all it came to be. But what I am sure of is that he is not alone.

I see a woman who loves her husband dearly. A woman who sacrifices her time and her career just to see her husband succeed. From many have I heard how lovely it was to behold such a relationship among all the hurried life in the city. She is always in search of what her place in such a surrounding is. Her thoughts go far beyond the pleasant smile that she wears all the time on her face. Her thoughts go here.

A motherly figure to all of us, I see a woman who strives to teach her two little children the ways of life. A kind hearted and empathetic person whom you could turn to whenever you feel life is too much to take. She will bring you back to reality, advising you for the best.

Three brothers. One who has traveled around the world much. Biology is at his heart, knowledge he has of almost everything, enthusiastic he is about tech and more than everything, cool he is! Whatever problem pops up somewhere, let it be tech, life, logistics, inventory, people, everyone’s first option would be to turn to him and the wonderful thing is, he always has an answer, and that too, a really sensible one.

One who loves mother Earth. His love for her reflects in his ways with the ones around him. A cute brother, always watching out for you, ready to help you at any moment. People like him increases your trust in humanity. You start to understand what it is like to be there for someone when you are with him. Relations, what ties the whole world together, he holds each and everyone he has, close to his heart.

One who loves to be one among us. His tech thoughts as well as jovial nature deep behind all the well kept. cool looking hair, beard and mustache, he is always ready for a laugh whatever mind boggling thing was up. Always ready to lend a hand, he hates bugs. Both in software and in real life. He exterminates both of them quite skilfully.

Last but not the least, imagineer. The silent, creative girl who works magic out of her fingers. Designs and art are her mastery and she conjures them up from thin air. Extremely quick in picking things up, a guaranteed wonderful designer who is soon to be famous. She is blooming to one beautiful flower from the cute bud that she was.

Kiran, Zainab, Radha, Ashwan, Sajjad, Krace and Praseetha, respectfully. HasGeek. Oh, and yours truly too.

It was amazing to see the dedication and sincerity with which everyone performed their roles last month over the two huge events. Perseverance, I saw in all of them. Mentally taxed, physically tired, ill, none of them were ready to quit and take a rest. There were things that needed to be done and they knew they were the ones who had to do it. There were no backseats. Working late into 3am, they sat and slept when everything was finally set. I realized that there was more to life than just watching out for yourself.

Sacrifice. That is how you work as a team. One for all and all for one. You are there for him and he is there for you. That is how it works. Of course you can call in sick and go lie down. But that was not a decision any of them were ready to make. They stuck together and pulled through. Many had lost track of time and many were taken ill. They got over it, and they did it.

However, all this comes with a price. All of these has a side effect. A beautiful one at that too. The bonds that were made. Small jokes in between rush hours, little chats over dinner and tea, they found themselves amongst a group of people who had something in common. They all wanted to make this happen. And they did.

I never expected to be a part of something this diverse. I still wonder where I am going to fit in. Hey, but what’s the rush? Life has just started for me and I want to make this happen as much as all of them.

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The forsaken God.

Me and my friend were coming back after having purchased a lot of stuff for the party next day. Both of us were not in the best of moods as it had been a long day. The market place was so crowded, dusty and congested that the words “personal space” did not have any meaning there. As if all this was not enough, the hot noon sun did not help the cause at all.

With all the goodies in hand, just when we reached the place where we had parked our vehicle, my friend remembered that he had forgot something. He asked me to stay with all the stuff over there so that he could hurry over to the market once again and get it. I agreed and he went back.

The Animal was God to the people there. They worshiped it and would spend a few seconds in prayer if they were to see it standing somewhere. Some would even touch it and take its blessings. Some would even go to the extent of running upto it when it pees. They take a little in their hands and drink. A little bit more they would take and rub on their heads.

When my friend left me waiting for him, The Animal was lying down in front of me. I saw people hurrying here and there, busy with their jobs and errands, people who were carrying things from one place to another, people who were running to make both ends meet and others who were simply out shopping. All these people, without fail, were paying their respects to The Animal. I kept staring in awe.

After waiting for 10 minutes, The Animal, which was lying there in front of me, slowly got up and to my amazement, it was really huge. It remained calm and it was a nice experience to see the huge Animal so close. I closely looked at all its features. Even when I was at it, people were coming, paying their respect in the middle of all their hurry, and leaving.

I kept on looking at it. Finishing its head, body and tail, I finally reached its legs. I was always fascinated by hoofs. How it stood out from the rest of their body. I had a sort of belief inside my conscience that they were even made of metal! So in all that amazement, I looked at its hooves. The legs in the front and the left one at the back was fine. However, what met my eyes when I looked at its rear left leg made me twitch.

It was sort of disintegrated. Powdered and loosely held together, you could say.  It had swarms of flies all over it and covering it entirely. They were buzzing around its hoof too, trying to find a place to sit on it. The Animal stood on its 3 legs and the one with the rotten hoof just touched the ground.

It stood there for 5 minutes and then, I noticed that it was trying to move. It slightly made a forward gesture, strengthening its front legs. However, when it came to the point where it had to exert pressure on the damaged leg, it could not. The flies were still swarming on it and The Animal now and then moved its leg a little to shoo them away. Still all of them came back on it instantly.

For about ten minutes, it tried hard to move forward, but failing in its attempt each time when the point came where it had to use its damaged leg. All this time, people were coming and going, paying respect to it. Only a few of them taking time to notice its leg and not even one coming forth to help their God. After ten minutes of staggering, The Animal once again lay down at the same place, again to be worshiped and respected by many, but not to be helped by any. My friend returned and we were on our way.

The Animal was the forsaken God.

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My first week at Bangalore!

I actually started writing this post a week ago. However, I got caught up in my work and had to postpone it till now. So it has been two weeks since I’ve been here and the next three paragraphs were written a week ago.

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This might be the most treacherous thing to do – sitting and blogging on a hacknight day! But hey, everyone works on what interests them and I work on what interests me. So I guess I’m good.

Now, coming to my first week at Bangalore, I’m living. I mean, life at hasgeek has been so much fun that I actually feel that I’m with a family away from family. After sitting at home crawled up in my bed for almost three months, my life sure has taken one heck of a turn at this point. I have walked almost 13 kilometers within three days since I got here! Not only that, but being at CIS (the Center for Internet and Society) itself is absolutely wonderful. The lovely house with a lawn at the back and a really calm atmosphere…

However, for all the loveliness at work, the commute in Bangalore is killing me. I mean, at home, when I figure out I have to travel 7kms to get to someplace, I think, “Okay, just a 10 minute trip. I can make it anytime I want to and get there”. Ah! Little did I realize that such was not the case in Bangalore. It takes me a minimum of half an hour (if everything is well) and a maximum of one hour and  thirty minutes to get to my office.

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Coming back to the present. The above is the basic story of my commute. Well, that is going to be a problem only till I get a cycle/motorcycle or until I move to a place near to my office. So I guess that is fine.

What comes after traffic, my office, if you could call it that, is a really nice place. For one thing, it is not an office building or anything. It is a rented house. Hence you have the lounge, the office room, the kitchen, toilets, bed rooms and most pleasant of all, a lawn! At times when sitting at the office gets too monotonous, we get the bats and the net, and play badminton. It is sort of an open building. “Open” as in anyone can come in anytime, get the wi fi and work from there. Pretty cool. We are on the top floor and on the ground floor, it is CIS.

The time I decided to join the company was awesome as in they had two of their biggest events lined up within 4 weeks! Days got suddenly busy and before I knew it, I was talking to serious geeks, handling participant registrations, working on logistics and working on what all were coming up. All the work was made enjoyable by the ones whom I was working with. 8 of us HasGeek is going strong.

JSFoo and it’s Hacknight is over and it was plenty fun. Here is to the future!

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Is execution important than vision?

I had a pretty tiring day.

Being at the town, I started walking from a certain point, under the blazing hot noon sun, visiting each and every slipper shop on the way, trying to get hold of a certain brand which I had been using till now. I walked and I walked and to my surprise and dismay, reached back at exactly the point that I had started, without any luck whatsoever. Tired and wounded, not to mention disappointed, I went and had a drink. I sat and rested my overworked feet for a while. I got up again and started walking towards the bus stand in order to catch a home bound bus.

Just when I had taken 4 or 5 steps, there was this shop to my left. Out of inertia of having asked at each and every shop that had slippers in them, I simply stood outside and with an air of sarcasm , asked the owner whether he had the brand that I was looking for. I got what I was looking for from there.

The lesson that I learned from this happening is that always start the things that you want to do just before you  are  actually going to start doing it. In the philosophical sense, this thought has many implications. However, having experienced this first hand in real life, I’m bound to start applying this thought to the various aspects of life.

Anyway, that was just the icing of the cake and the above three paragraphs were not in my mind at all until I thought about how to begin this post that I wanted to write.

Reaching back home, I turned on my laptop and checked my mails. I happened to stumble upon this thread. I simply went through the replies and happened to click this link, with no particular reason. That was Diaspora page of Jishnu. Since I was tired from the day’s happenings and wanted to rest, I was simply browsing and as such, scrolled down along his posts. There I stumbled upon the following video, which is the primary reason for this blog post.

Usually I had this idea of talks by technical people getting boring and monotonous. This was exactly the opposite. Moreover, this was not a talk but rather a sort of Q&A session. I was not planning to sit through it completely, but the more I listened, the more I got interested to listen to the rest and hence, I finished it in one shot.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Linus is the epitome of perfection or anything of the sort. He maybe, he maybe not. I just wanted to think and improvise on some of the things that he mentioned during that session and that is exactly what I am going to do.

The fist and foremost being the title of the blog post. Is execution more important than vision? Vision as in, a dream of how something should be.

Well, according to Linus, he personally was in favor of getting things done rather than thinking and dreaming constantly of a bright future and end up doing bits and pieces. He takes the analogy of a man walking, looking at the stars. He has vision. However, unfortunately, he fails to see the potholes that are in the way that he walks because he is not looking down. Hence, he stumbles upon them and falls down. Linus does not completely criticize visionaries too as it is possible that the path that guy is walking upon might not have potholes and as such, he will achieve his vision.

This is a very interesting point because everyone can have ideas. People can have tons of awesome ideas. They can dream of things that should happen and keep on dreaming. As much as I admit that you should dream until your dreams come true, sometimes (most of the times), people simply end up only dreaming. That does not help.

What makes you different, or better, worthy of being alive, is when you get things done. Linus even quoted Edison where he said, “Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”. That is more or less true. Passion, inspiration, dreams, ambitions, etc all are just thoughts in the wind until you work hard for it, and achieve it.

With this thought in mind, I thought about how I have been over the past year and it was quite interesting to see the difference.

  • Started my blog – “Yet another guy who has access to Internet registers yet another blog on wordpress”
  • Wrote posts – “Yet another blogger who has to put in his blog, everything that happens to him”
  • Wrote posts consistently – “Hmm… Yet another consistent blogger”
  • Wrote stories – “Most definitely not a personal diary”
  • Technical posts – “Not just philosophy and stories. Useful posts”
  • Crossed 100 posts in a year – “Wow, I did not expect this guy to keep at this for so long. Still…”
  • Published a book – “Awesome. This guy is actually getting things done”

I sure as hell would like to meet that omnipresent dude who commented on my stages of blogging. However, the point that I was trying to make was that even though I hadn’t realized it till now, I was following my passion and getting things done.  I needed this push as I have in my drafts, 4 incomplete posts that I started writing and half way through, started thinking about how it should be and the impact that it should bring about to a reader. That thought is good, but it should not be as strong so as to pose a hindrance to what you are doing. Otherwise it ends up as the case mentioned earlier. I have these amazing vision and thoughts but I’m not actually doing anything for it. Now that I have that idea in my head, I’ll be finishing those posts soon.

Hence, as much as it is important to have a vision, it is as important to get things done as well.

Another interesting thing that he mentioned is being open about your feelings regarding something. He quoted his own example for this statement which was that one guy who worked on a certain kernel feature, got suicidal when Linus told him that the kernel did not want that feature. This would not have happened if people clearly knew about how Linus wanted the project to be.

I was not a big fan of extremism. However, taking into consideration the above scenario, there are times where being an extremist pays off. I mean, him being like that in regard to his project does not mean that he is like that with his family. The point being that there are occasions where you should stand like the Pole star and there are occasion where you should be diplomatic. I mean, Linus could have called that guy for a cup of coffee and started the, “Listen, I knew you’ve worked really hard” thing, but seriously, that attitude would have left the entire kernel project in once heck of a mess.

To the question of whether all the students should be made aware of the open source movement, his answer was thought provoking. The point is that everyone need not be made to learn programming or anything of th sort. However, the ones who have the spark in them should be given the chance and the proper encouragement for learning and improvising on it. He mentioned the cheap Raspberry pi board available where out of 100 boards, 99 of them might be lying in the dust. Still, the important thing is that one board gave an interested person the opportunity to learn and that is what matters.

This is true in real life also. When you try to do something for the people, instead of worrying and spending time on getting everyone involved and interested, you should be more set and concentrate on helping out those who are genuinely interested. We tend to forget that in our path of achieving a “noble cause”. Once you get through to those who are interested and when they start to do wonders, the influence will become bigger and will spread.

Well, that’s about it I guess. That session was something that I desperately needed and I’m glad I did not stumble upon it any later.

Thanks Linus.

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SMC annual meet, in the memory of Jinesh – MES kutipuram.

Each time being at that college among those students, you really feel rejuvenated.

On September 29th, MatriCS, the association (an awesome one at that!) under the Computer Science department at MES College of Engineering had it’s inauguration as well as was the host for the SMC annual meet. These two days are those that I don’t want to forget in a hurry. Hence, I thought I’d just write down about how it went so that next year when we meet, we might be able to have a nice laugh at what all happened this year.

I was not actually expecting a formal event and as such when I suddenly came to realize that the event was at the auditorium, it felt a bit weird. However, the moment I met Riyas, the third year CS student there who was extremely enthusiastic about getting things done, I knew things were going to get better. He had this friendly way of welcoming people and getting them to fit in without any trouble. I hope he keeps that spirit up because the society needs people like him. There was Hiran ettan (met him for the first time) and some other lady and Riyas took all the three of us into the hall.

I could sense the tension of the organizers to get things started in time, realizing at the last moment that certain people who were supposed to talk at the event, were not going to show up (Boy, I really hate when people do that). I had myself been in similar situations before and it was heart warming to see everything, more or less, going smooth. Shamsir, the current chairman of the association was getting everything together with an air of command. A jovial, innocent fellow who is as much enthusiastic as Riyas in getting things done.

My wishes and prayers to both of them.

I’m not going to go about describing each and everything that happened. You can find the itinerary of the event over here.

It was an awesome auditorium and there was a small session regarding OCRs, which were helpful for the blind people to use computers. I marveled at how the organizers thought of incorporating such a talk into the event. To know that the time had come where Computer Engineers had a real part to play in the society, gave us a feeling of responsibility.

29th of September was a special day because it had been exactly a year since Jinesh had passed away. The SMC members did an excellent job at collecting all the articles and blog posts written by Jinesh and compiling them into one single book under the name of “Logbook of an observer”. A hard copy of the book was handed over to his Father at the ceremony and people who knew him personally as well as through the net talked about him. Another person named “Shyam” was also mentioned who had this sincere love for our mother tongue. Knowing that people like them existed and how much they had influenced the world around them in the short time they were here, was really inspiring.

One of the other mention worthy (really mention worthy) things about the event was to get to see people in real life! And that is awesome. I mean, a few days ago, a guy called Ani Peter asked for help regarding translation on the SMC mailing list. I decided to help him out and with my inexperienced typing, helped out a tiny bit.

I was looking forward to meeting him at the event. With this thought in mind, I was sitting there in the second row of the auditorium pretty much alone. The speeches were going on and when it got monotonous, I happened to get a glimpse at the laptop of the lady who was sitting beside me. She was the one who was with Hiran ettan earlier. Her laptop booted and displayed the login screen. Just above the login screen was written “Ani Peter”.

Augh!

The point being, it is nice (and necessary!)  to meet people in real life. Hrishikesh (a really jovial and friendly guy), the artistic Ark Arjun, Hiran ettan, Manoj, Rajeesh ettan (An ultra cool guy with an awesome attitude), the sisterly Ani Peter, Adhil (whom I had briefly met for Chakkakuutaan), Manu (the renowned MES geek) were the ones among the newly-seen-in-real-life people.

It was heart warming to see Praveen ettan, Ershad, Nakul, Musfir, Sadiq, Anish, Kiran (well, I’ve been seeing this guy everyday for a month now, but still I was glad to see him at MES). Also the guys from MES itself. I’ not that good with names, so forgive me if I have accidentally left someone out. Yahul, Rahul, Navin, Sohail and the other young hacksters there who all added to the bright and wonderful atmosphere there.

The afternoon sessions of the first day were informal ones and I felt right at home. Anish talked about the Free Software philosophy and Hrishi came forward with introducing Diaspora and the free movie initiatives. Well, one of the troubles that the speakers always face is the problem of making the session interactive. When they ask something and the audience sit as if they had no clue what was going on, it usually becomes a bit depressing. However, little did they realize Musfir was one among the crowd!

He just would not sit taking everything that the speakers said for granted. He shot out with his questions and the whole session was completely interactive. It was nice to discuss and talk about philosophies. The Open movie initiative was really interesting and we all sat and saw the movie tears of steel.

However, there was something that bothered me with the whole ordeal. I was quite worried about the message that was reaching the students. I mean, the people who were giving the talks were really good programmers and developers. They gave talks on the matters that affected what they were working on. I felt that the technical part of the message was not getting through to the students. The feeling that the free software community was growing as a political party based on ideals and philosophies without the hacker spirit actually being there was somehow becoming more and more evident. I’m sure there might be an alternative explanation to this, but I’ve been seeing this trend (with me too!) growing up.

As if to counter my thought, the second day witnessed two wonderful workshops. One was on Shell scripting by Rajeesh ettan, which was extremely informative as he explained in detail many aspects of how the shell worked and its configurations along with the basic, practical funda of how to use the shell to script something. It has ticked me off into learning it and I’m sure be giving it a shot now.

This was followed by Ershad’s workshop on git, which was superb as usual. The sessions were wound up at about 1.30 with trophies being awarded to the SMC people who helped out with the events and sessions. We all had a few informal chats and I bid my farewell to everyone then.

I missed the hacknight on the first day which, as I was able to gather from the people who attended it, was extremely fun. I also missed the afternoon session on the second day which was on Remote Desktop and Networks. Hoping to read the details of both from some place else.

All through the event, I really missed Sajith sir. I’m sure all the students there missed him too. Here is praying and hoping that he will have his troubles settled and his wishes granted.

A heart warming experience. Something that students of MES can be proud of. I hope that they keep the spirit and enthusiasm flowing in the future as well.

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Rupet’s dolls.

When I heard Rupet’s dolls had finally hit the store, I was so excited that I just had to immediately see my friend to share the excitement. Nidiya lived a few houses down the lane. I turned off the TV, told my Mom that I’d be back in a jiffy, got hold of my umbrella as we were continuously having rains, and hurried onto Nidiya’s home.

Just as I rang the bell, I could hear a lot of voices from within her home. Standing there wondering what all the hassle was about, the door opened and I heard Nidiya bidding her Mom a quick goodbye. It was never a good sign for me if she was excited. Mainly because she starts going off on wild goose chases and I’m usually the one she drags along with her. Although it is absolutely lovely to be with such an enthusiastic girl, I sometimes do feel what the point of all of it is.

“Hasna, what a surprise!”, she cried upon seeing me standing there without a clue.

“Hey Nidu, what’s up with all the hurrying? Moreover, why does my sixth sense tell me that you were on your way to fetch me to accompany you on one of your so called “who-buried-the-treasure-over-here hunt” instead of simply a “treasure hunt”?”

“Ha ha ha”, Nidiya chuckled warmly. Whenever she smiles, I look at her and lose myself in a few moments of thought at how beautiful and adorable she looks. Especially while smiling. It is a good thing for me because when we both walk together, all the boys look at her and usually do not even pay the slightest of attention to yours truly. I admit that it kind of hurts, but I guess it is better that way in the long run. Anyway, I came out of the spell that her beauty had put on me and smiled back.

“Ever the loyal friend”, she continued, “However, the truth is that we don’t have time. Remember that fact about how the latest multi core processors could do processes in parallel? We even had a debate about it two months back.”, she said, winking at me.

“What! That was two months ago and we had left it then and there agreeing to how hardware parallelism was achieved! Don’t tell me you have gone off on one of your irrelevant tangents regarding this too.”

“Ha! Good news for you then because I have!”, she said sarcastically. “I’ve been reading upon it a lot and doing a lot of research on the matter. Downloading simulators, talking to people online, discussing in online communities and what not. However, here is the drill. I’ve finally tracked it down to Mr. Shafik! Can you believe that?”. There was fire in her eyes as she finished saying that. A look that said that she was blind to everything else now that she was so close to the truth. You people might be wondering what that look is but trust me, I know her and I haven’t seen another person in my life with such zeal and enthusiasm for learning. She just wouldn’t rest until she got to the very core of it.

“Shafik, our  milkman? Cool!”, I said dumbly.

“Augh! No you silly little girl.”, she blurted out extremely irritated. I loved doing that to her. “Mr. Shafik from our own University! Don’t tell me you don’t know the person. Apparently, he was one of the design consultants in the manufacture of the processor!”, she continued in full excitement. I knew what was going to come and just as I had that thought, she said, “So let’s go! No time to waste.”. Ah, there it was. So much for the excitement that I went there with. My mind was on fire thinking how I could show my excitement at Rupet’s dolls. To mention going and seeing toys over learning about processors was a shameful thing for an Engineering student. Still, I too was not one who gave up that easily.

“Wo, wo, wo, hold on. I came here in my own excitement. We’ll go to the University now, but on one condition. As soon as we get back that you’ll come with me to see the Rupet’s dolls exhibition in town! They are out, can you believe it!?”. Now I was sounding excited.

“Yeah sure”, said Nidiya. “I’m not sure what those are but I’m sure they will be worth seeing if they got your attention. Now let us go!”.

We went to the university and got back in the afternoon. She had her fill when Shafik explained to her the core semantics and details of the implementation. Content and happy with her research efforts, she had that “pleased with one’s self” look on her face. However, I was not done yet.

“Let’s go for the exhibit!”, I said disturbing her train of thoughts. She felt irritated on being pulled away from her world. Since it was me who did it, she kept it to herself and gave me one of her lovely smiles.

“Let’s grab some lunch and we’ll be on our way”, she said.

We had lunch and caught the bus to town. We could see posters and billboards of Rupet’s dolls all along the way. They had given it a pretty wonderful publicity for over month now through TV and newspapers. Everyone was anxious to get their hands on them as much I was. We reached town and went to the central supermarket where the first batch of toys had arrived that day morning.

I was scared that this might bore Nidiya too much and I was beginning to feel bad about dragging her over there. The rush at the market was unbelievable and it took almost half an hour to find our way through the crowd into the market. Just as we entered it, I stood as if I was struck with lightning. Trying hard to digest what I had just witnessed, I slowly turned and looked at Nidu. I felt relieved on seeing her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Bringing her along was not a disappointment after all.

“I need a closer look”, she said and hurried over to one of the dolls on the show stand. I followed her and what we both beheld put us in a trance. The dolls were so life like that it was almost indistinguishable from a real human! You could even see the nerves on the hands slightly protruding. The palm of the doll’s hands were so masterfully crafted that each and every line was perfectly visible. Even the nails had the slight pink tint to them. Their eyes seemed to have life in them. The light lines on the lips, the eyebrows, and even the hair on the skin was there and that too in a perfectly normal nature that you would not at feel like you were looking at a doll at all. I even began to think these might be real life dwarfs standing there to trick us and tried pinching and slightly piercing one with my pin. They did not stir. They were dolls.

“Hasna, this is absolutely awesome!”, Nidiya cried. I too had not expected to witness such a marvel.

“Let’s check out the others!”, I said and dragged her away to see the other dolls.

Each one was better than the previous one. The price of the dolls were a tad bit too much for ordinary people, and hence we contended ourselves with just looking at them. We had spent more than two hours there savoring the sight when I noticed that it was getting dark out.

“Hey Nidu, we should get going. First you did not want to come, now you don’t want to go?”, I mocked her. She did not reply, but went straight over to one of the representatives and asked him,

“Sir, where do you get these dolls from?”

“From Rupet, Of course!”, the representative replied with a laugh.

“I mean do you know the place where they come from? Do you directly order it from Rupet himself?”

“Well, their agents came and gave us their number. We rang them and placed an order and here we are!”, he again ended with a smile.

I pulled her away from him and we got out of the market. However, she was already drawn towards the dolls. She kept looking back at the market as we hurried to catch the homebound bus.

“Wow, now those were some cool dolls I say!”, I said trying to show my amazement. Nidiya just nodded and let out a slight hum without giving any reply. “Hey, snap out of it Nidu”, I shook her.

She came back from the world she was in and gave me a weird look. I started feeling extremely disturbed because I had seen that look before in her eyes. It meant that she was hooked onto that matter and she would never give up on it unless she understood every aspect of it.

We got down at the stop near our homes. I asked her not to keep any of this in mind and tried to get her mind back onto the matter of processors. On our way home, I was relieved when she suddenly started telling me about what Mr. Shafik had told her about it. The enthusiasm with which she explained the matter really would get the person hearing her interested in it. Suffice to say, I was all about processors.

Days passed and one day, I was surprised to hear from her mom asking me whether Nidu had called upon me or whether I had any idea where she was. It was study leave for us and we had not seen each other for almost a week now. I grew concerned and asked her mom what was going on. She told me that Nidiya had something on her mind and would spend a lot of time walking here and there muttering to herself. I was not alarmed at that because she usually was like that. However when her mother told me that she had been making quite a few trips to the super market lately, I started to feel a bit worried.

I went over to the super market and inquired whether such a girl had come there. What they told me raised my anxiety even further. It seems she had talked them into giving her the distributor’s phone number. “What is she planning on doing? Learn the craft from the masters?”, I thought. That girl never knew when to let go of something. I did not waste much time. I called the distributors and got their address. I hurried over there and saw the managing director.

I asked him whether a girl had come to him inquiring about Rupet’s dolls.

“Ah yes madame. A pretty young girl had come inquiring about it. However, we do not have direct contact with Rupet’s dolls. We get a call from a number consistently every week and we place our orders then. We never used to call back. She made us give her that number and she went away with a chuckle. That is all I know.”

Nidiya went missing from then on. Nothing can express the guilt and grief that I have bore over the years. It has been 18 years since then. I have relocated to another country and have been settled there for the past three years now. To my surprise, today morning it was the grand opening of Rupet’s toys here in central city. There was a huge crowd at the mall. I went over to the mall which brought back all those bitter memories.

I got in and looked at the dolls. One doll caught my eye. It had a special black dress. I looked at it. It’s skin was so fair and smooth. It had the hands of a sweet little girl and the figure of a beautiful young lady. I felt something horrible within me just then. In that sense of fright, I slowly took the doll. My hands shivered. Slowly I turned it around, and beheld one of the most beautiful faces that I have ever seen in my life.

It was Nidiya.

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Yet another one of my sister’s weird dreams.

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There is nothing better to lift your spirits than a loving sister.

Ahem..

Well, having finished college, being at home, I usually spend quite a lot of time in front of my computer. That is how I got to publish my book, how I blog regularly, etc.

Lately, I have signed up for an Online course on Programming Languages offered by brown university. You can find the details here. Hence I dedicatedly started spending more time in front of the computer. I watch the online classes, read the lecture notes, work out the exercises, do the daily quizzles, work on the weekly assignments and so on.

Two days ago, at exactly 3.30am in the morning, the Universe (Yes!) kinda felt that I was too happy and content with what I was doing, and decided to toy with me. At that exact moment, a fever built up, my stomach started rumbling and I started vomiting too! Things could not get any worse.

Somehow I managed till morning and woke everyone up and told them my condition. My sister being a doctor, made me take an analgesic to lower the fever. When I was a bit more stable, she prescribed a few antibiotics that I started to take right then itself.

I was so totally dehydrated and weakened that I was bed-ridden for the two days. I would sleep, watch some cartoon or movie to distract my mind from the nausea, suffice to say I was in front of my laptop itself.

Yesterday afternoon, my sister came back from her work and saw me lying down watching an episode of “Mind your language”. She, very lovingly, came towards me, took a pen, opened up one of my old records and took a blank page, and drew me the following picture!

Just so that you couldn’t read any : Haris.

What are you doing?

Assignment.

Watching video.

Work.

Blogging.

Nothing.

Reading.

Studying.

I have a fever.

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Ah, I love her. She is one super awesome cool lady. When life gives her lemon, she makes chicken curry with it!

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He is Me.

One day early morning, two people happened to cross each other’s path. One of them was returning home after spending the whole night in prayers and worship while the other person was returning home after a night of ‘shameful’ activities.

Upon seeing each other, the first person thought, “Oh! That poor man must be tired from having prayed all night long”.

Ironically, the second person thought, “Heh, looking at him coming so innocently. Like I don’t know what he has been upto”.

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Similar to all the posts that I write, this one does not convey a meaning that is absolutely correct. I’m putting down what I have learned from my personal experiences as well as from the people I’ve met in my life. This only is meant to offer you a different perspective of the normal things that we live through each and everyday. Hence if you disagree or have a completely different take on the matter, you are more than welcome to share them.

The idea that I’m trying to convey is that whenever you really feel that a person is bad, that is because that “badness” exists within you. I’m not talking about what you say about a person in public or to your friends. I’m talking about the thoughts that you have in your conscience regarding a person that you see. When you doubt him for something bad, you usually think that you are having such a verdict because you have experience. However, most of the times, I have found the truth of the matter to be that you come up with that verdict because you yourself are a victim of that.

Interestingly, this not only applies to the negative side of things. When you can genuinely think good about a person, I’ve felt that it is possible mostly because you have that goodness within you. However, it might be well for you and me if we drop this positive side of things because otherwise you will most probably start being arrogant about how good you are. You know what I mean right? Too much of self-righteousness might creep up and nothing can make a person more annoying than that.

Hence the next time you think bad about someone and judge him (which is one nasty thing to do) at least try to give him the benefit of the doubt. Just like that, when you sit there gloomy thinking that how bad and unfair the world around you is, maybe it is time to look within you and start making a few changes starting with the man in the mirror himself.

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The tech savvy kid.

We were at my uncle’s home for a family gathering. We had a great feast at noon and were spending the afternoon time chit chatting with each other.

In the midst of this, one of my cousin sisters’ daughter, who was 3 years old, was sitting on the bed in one of the rooms, shouting and making noise trying to get some attention. She used to play with her mom’s mobile phone and she wanted that. However, her mom was a bit busy at that moment.

My sister noticed this. She went towards the little kid and after a few pampering words, gave the little one her phone, which was the ordinary one with the keypad and all.

The little one took the phone from my sis smiling, looked at it and then, started to swipe her cute fingers on the screen, wondering why nothing was happening.

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Imitation – The innovation inhibitor.

We often hear people say, “Wow, he is so cool. I wanna be like him”. I’m not ruling myself out of that group. I too have thoughts on the same line. However, what does that line actually mean? To what extent are you willing to “be like him”?

When you think about it, there is a certain inborn skill associated with each and every human being. The skill of innovation. By default, this skill is there because the human mind cannot be chained. However, a lot of forces are out there that are set on manipulating our thoughts so as to fit into the ‘plan’. The availability of entertainment and pleasure at our finger tips makes it really hard to get ourselves to think for ourselves. We think for the people that we see and involuntarily, we act so as to fit into the ‘plan’ too. The books “Brave new world” by Aldous Huxley and “1984” by George Orwell might be worth mentioning here.

Now there are people among us who, even though at the mercy of technology at his fingertips, do not retire into their comfort zones and succumb to the pleasure there. Some among us actually think about the things that needs to be done instead of the things that you should be doing anyway. I’m not saying that thinking about things that you should be doing anyway is a bad thing, but just that they do not bring about a change in the world.

However, the few among us who really do think might have been motivated and inspired by certain people. This is the context in which I would like to talk about the meaning of the line I said at the beginning of this post.

When we try to imitate a certain person whom we are motivated and inspired by, we are actually cheating ourselves into inhibiting our skill of innovation. Mind you, obeying and imitating are not the same thing. So do not confuse one with the other. Now coming back to the point, the person we are imitating brought about a change in the world because he thought of things that did not fit into the ‘plan’. He thought of a new way to do things and without fear, he made his thoughts into action and those actions, as much as it might have shocked people, showed them that things could be done differently, as well as thought of differently.

Thinking about it, it was not his actions as such what brought about the change, but rather, it was the way in which he thought. Hence when we imitate that person, we are actually forgetting and disregarding the actual message that that person gave the world. Instead of being inspired and motivated by how that person could even think about doing such a thing, we talk of that person as an inspiration and do the things that he has already done. In the current world where you live, what he did might not be even in the slightest sense, do good to you or anyone around you.

The point that I am trying to make is that you do not know what sort of a situation in the life of the person that you are trying to imitate made him do the things that he did. He had reacted to certain happenings that were going on during his time and in the world around him. What we should learn and understand is how he thought of what he did in such a circumstance. Unless we do that, simply doing the things that he did might not have any relevance to who you are, the time that you live in, and where you live.

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Compiling the Linux kernel for BeagleBoard-XM

First of all, this post is not about building an Angstrom distribution (Linux OS that is known to run well on embedded devices) from scratch. This about compiling a Linux kernel source which you can boot from using your Angstrom distro. I’m assuming that you already have a working Angstrom MMC with you. I used the one that came along with the BeagleBoard XM, pre-installed with Angstrom.

Before getting started, a few words regarding how the MicroSD card is structured. It has two partitions on it. A FAT partition and an ext partition. The FAT partition contains 4 files namely MLO, u-boot.bin, uEnv.txt and UIMAGE. The ext partition contains the root directory of the distribution. That means it contains ‘/‘.

The BeagleBoard boots from the Linux kernel within the /boot/ directory of the ext partition. That directory will contain a symbolic link called uImage which we will point to the kernel image we want the BB-XM to boot to.

It might be well to point out here that I tried 5 versions of the kernel from kernel.org and all of them failed to work and I was unable to debug the reason for that. However, it seems that there was a certain group of people working on patching up the kernel to make it compatible exactly for the BB-XM. We will be using their source in this post.

So let us get the tools ready. First you need to get the toolchain for doing the cross compilation. You can get it from here. Download the ones for ARM and GNU/Linux. You’ll need to register yourself to download it. Once downloaded, extract it to some convenient location and set your PATH environmental variable to point to there. Refer to the following figure:

Now we need to get the kernel source. As I said earlier, we are not going to use the source from kernel.org but instead, we are going to use the source from the following repository.

https://github.com/beagleboard/kernel

Clone that repository. At the time I was trying to compile the source, the stable branch was the 3.0 one. So I’ll be using the same for demonstrating in this post. Clone that repository and checkout the 3.0 branch. To checkout, run:

git checkout origin/beagleboard-3.0 -b beagleboard-3.0

Once you have checked out that branch, run the patch.sh file there.

./patch.sh

It will fetch a few patches and apply them in the source. Once you are through with that, you need to setup the configuration of the kernel. Normally, we do this by using the default omap2plus_defconfig configurationgiven in the kernel source but, try as I might, it did not work for me. Hence we will use the config file created by running the patch.sh file as our kernel configuration. But first, after running the patch file, your directory will look like below:

You can see the configurations that the kernel provides. You can see omap2plus_defconfig there. Now I will explain the 4 steps of kernel compilation.

Step 1

We need to give the kernel configuration. As stated before, we are going to use the configuration created by the patch.sh file. In order to do this, copy the configuration from the /patches/ directory to the .config file under the kernel source. Assuming you are in the kernel source directory (as given in the above figure) you would do:

cp ../patches/beagleboard/defconfig .config

However, keep in mind that this is not the standard way of doing things. Usually, we do the following:

make -j2 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- <defconfig>

Where <defconfig> should be replaced by whichever configuration you want from the /arch/arm/configs/ directory.

Step 2

We can access the configuration file of the kernel as a menu and manipulate several options such as which all modules we want enabled as well as whether certain modules should be compiled as ‘built-in’ to the kernel or compiled as a separate module. In order to get the menu, we do:

make -j2 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- menuconfig

After making the necessary changes, save and quit.

Step 3

Now we actually compile and make the Linux kernel image.

make -j2 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- uImage

This will take a while. Once it is finished, you can get the kernel image called uImage under the /arch/arm/boot/ directory. Copy this image into the /boot/ directory of the ext partition of the MicroSD card. After copying, get the symbolic there called uImage to point to our new image. You can do this by:

sudo ln -sf <destination> <source>

Once that is done, we proceed to the next step.

Step 4

Here we compile the corresponding modules of the kernel separately. In oder to do this, you run:

make -j2 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- modules

This will also take a while depending on how many modules you selected to be compiled in the menuconfig interface. Once this is finished, you have to install these modules. For that, you do:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- INSTALL_MOD_PATH=<path to where you mounted the mmc root diectory> modules_install

This will install the compiled modules under /lib in the path given. The path that I would give in my system would be /media/Narcissus-rootfs. Refer to the following figure. You can see the different directories corresponding to the different versions of the kernel I tried compiling.

Now everything is set. There are a few more points to note however. You can find the following line in the uEnv.txt file within the FAT partition.

console=”tty0 console=ttyS2,115200n8″

Change it into

console=”tty0 console=ttyO2,115200n8″

One more thing. Within the /etc/inittab file of  your MicroSD card’s root directory, you can find the following line:

S:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 ttyS2

Chang it into:

S:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 ttyO2

Basically, what you did in the above two steps is to replace the places where ttyS2 is present with ttyO2. I think this is because kernel versions from 2.6 onwards use ttyO2 as their console. If you do not do the above change, you might get the following error in the middle of booting the kernel:

INIT: Id “S” respawnin too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

——————————————

You are good to go. You can now boot from the new kernel.

Happy hacking!

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Family issues.

“Isn’t it beautiful dear?”, asked Anna affectionately, looking through her bedroom window, out onto the wide open fields. It was a beautiful summer evening. The fields were bathed in the golden rays of the evening sun. The birds were chirping and scurrying about for their final morsel of the day.

“Hmmm…”, said Derek, looking up from the book he was reading. He was not someone who enjoyed being interrupted while his mind was wandering over places unchartered. However, he loved his wife. “It sure is Ann, it sure is…”, he replied.

Anna knew that Derek did not like to be bothered, but some calm and irresistibly gentle feeling made her blurt out with the question. She had actually meant that as more of a statement rather than a question, and did not carry on with the conversation. The feeling was so comforting that she sat mesmerized with the sight.

Her brooding was cut short by her daughter’s voice calling from downstairs. “Mommy, little Jean is back from watering the garden and I’m hungry too!”, called out the 14 year old Rebecca, Anna’s elder daughter.

Even though a little bit irritated for having her chain of thoughts interrupted, Anna got up from the bed, brushed her hair and went down stairs. “You too come honey, I’ll fix us all a snack”, she said as she was about to leave the room.

“In a minute.”, said Derek, without looking up from his book.

Meanwhile, John and his team were standing across the field, about a mile from Derek’s home. He looked into his icara-10, 7-pod screen and frowned. “Status sir?”, asked one of his subordinates. John did not answer.

By the time Anna had finished fixing a snack, Derek was already downstairs. She brought it all and put them on the table where her daughters and Derek were already seated.

“Yay, Burgers!” cried little Jean, hungry and somewhat excited. Rebecca looked and smiled at her handing over a piece for her. While Rebecca was helping her little sister Jean with the snack, Anna looked at the clock, nodded at Derek and stood up from her seat. “I’ll just see that the fence gate is closed and come back”, she said with a smile and went out.

Derek finished his piece and followed her out. Just when he got out, suddenly, Rebecca started feeling uneasy. She felt like something was swelling up inside her and filling her inside out. She started finding it hard to breathe and a burning sensation originated inside her head. The piece of burger fell from her hands and she held her throat, starting to choke and gasp for breath. Little Jean got frightened seeing what was happening to her sister. “Reb!”, she cried out. Just then, Rebecca started bleeding from her nose and mouth, gave a muffled cough and fell onto the table. Little Jean screamed and ran out yelling.

She got out the front door and saw her Mom and Dad standing near the big oak in front of their home. “Mommy!”, she cried and started running towards Anna. However, Anna and Derek did not seem alarmed at all and looked with a pair of cold eyes, at their daughter running towards them. When little Jean was half way, suddenly she gasped and felt something blowing inside her head. Just like Reb, she started bleeding and fell down. Clutching the grass and coughing, she wriggled for a while, and then lay still.

“Sigh… What a mess”, said Anna.

“Yeah… “, concurred Derek.

“Not bad for the new DNA”, said John, still looking at his pod screen. “Let’s relay the report to the main research HQ and go pick up the carcass”, he told his team. He then took his transponder and said, “Experiment 3k-007 completed. Results are being relayed. Material being gathered. Shut down Droids O72-Derek and Q144-Anna. Over.”

“Copy that. Over and out”, cackled a voice over the transponder.

“No more STD they say… No more risks they say and no more sex, they say…”, mumbled John and walked away.

Years later, on a lovely summer evening, Anna said affectionately, “Isn’t it beautiful dear?”, looking through her bedroom window, out onto the wide open fields.

John, sitting at a mile away, looked into his pod and said, “Rebecca’s and Jane’s DNAs’ are stable. They will live longer this time. Relay the status. Let’s come back later.”. He took his team and went on to the next site.

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This story was actually a dream that my sister had. Dream as in the dreams that you have in your sleep. She saw it like a movie and surprisingly, remembered enough of it to come and tell me. I’ve made it into a story as best I can. Do leave your comments.