Hey!

This blog was about to die a natural death due to negligence… when I realized that it would be a really bad thing to do! Hence, reviving it with a new vigor, a new enthusiasm and a new domain name too.

I have a lot of things to talk about, but procrastination was getting the better of me… NO MOAR!

http://www.thoughtsonrails.com/

This blog will remain as it is for a while since many search results point here – I need to find out a way to seamlessly redirect every link to the new place… shouldn’t be too difficult, but any ideas are most welcome!

Cheers!

Yours Truly,

The Thinker on the Runaway Train

Ahmednagar – Pathardi – Paithan – Ahmednagar

Originally uploaded by Harshad Sharma

Out shooting in Pathardi and Paithan on 26 and 27 Aug

Working on the stills for a documentary… with a great team, which translates to only one thing – FUN!

Cya!

Animals have their instinctive rules for survival. I experience a lot of this fury on the highways. Every driver thinks that the only vehicle on the road is his/her own. Only they want to reach home. Only they have the right of way. It’s only about them. All the time.

If you have not driven in India – more so in Maharashtra State, you probably have no idea of what I’m talking about.

People honk horns even if they can see there is another vehicle in front of you and you have nowhere to go. They don’t honk once, its a continuous riot till you get irritated and slam on the brakes to tell the guy behind you to shut up.

Many drivers won’t give you way – in a 4 lane highway, each direction of the traffic gets 2 lanes… among them one is for overtaking and fast vehicles and other is for slower traffic. They will drive their beat-down trashcans on the fast lane at half the usual speed and won’t budge. If you try to inform them with a short horn, they wave their hand at you to tell you to ‘go overtake from the slow lane if you want. I’m not moving’. Insulting others is normal here.

On the 2 lane highway, where oncoming traffic shares the road with you, people overtake larger/slower vehicles even if there is oncoming traffic. You have to get down on to the shoulders even if you were driving in your own lane because some SOB decided that he wanted to go immediately and he didn’t care if he swerved into your lane to do so.

These experiences are not once in a while… not once in a day… every minute that my tires are on the road, people piss me off.

I love driving, I totally enjoy driving. I’d love to drive all my life. I like to travel to different places. The journey means a lot more to me than the destination. The road is one of my best friends! I dream about traveling all the time. I save up money not for fancy clothes, but for fuel.

Yet, every time I drive, there are many people who are having a bad day and who make sure that they pass on their bad mood to every driver they meet.

I like the company of trucks when I’m on my bike – because they don’t try to kill me every time they see me.  The smaller vehicles though have no sense at all. When I drive a car, I give enough space to motorcyclists. I keep dipper/low beam light when there is oncoming traffic. I consider other driver’s situation before I take a quick turn or overtake. I don’t honk unnecessarily. I let faster vehicles pass even before they ask for side. I wait when pedestrians are crossing the road. I don’t get irritated if someone is learning how to drive and makes mistakes. I smile and wave at other drivers when the traffic is slow.

What do I get in return? Constant insult in the way of being snubbed by other drivers with bigger vehicles… I’ve recently started using same tactics on the other drivers. As soon as I see that they are going to overtake even when they can see me – I move my vehicle right in the middle of the road, flash lights and wave my fist at them, works every time. Guess, I should see if the Government allows me to keep rubber-bullet loaded guns too! Those will certainly be handy!

Heh, I can almost see myself becoming a lawless roadie some day. Its a tough job keeping my sanity and not giving in to scaring others shitless. Its not difficult to attack others… it is easy actually. I’ve found this out with experience. Most people will get on their knees if you raise your fist. Many will bow, if you make them.

That is not power. That is not respect. It is sheer intimidation. But it works like a charm on the highways – to keep yourself safe. But I don’t like it. I like to make friends… not enemies! What do I do?

I tried this for a full 100 kilometers – give the overtaking driver some space and move a bit towards the edge of the road. Each of the 30+ times in the nearly two hours of drive, the oncoming vehicle made me get down from the road, into the rubble and stop – because the bike would go out of control in  rubble. While coming back on the same stretch, I tried my flash-the-lights and wave-your-fist technique… none… yes NONE of the vehicles caused me any trouble.

Well, only one jeep-driver had the guts to still drive on, but since I stayed in my place, he had to swerve even more and go past the edge of my lane. I sure hope his passengers gave him some points to ponder. Three more cars had followed him and were already in my lane when this happened, they saw what happened and almost instantly got back in their lane.

I’m having a difficult time being good. It seems that the only way to stay alive on the highway is to scare the living daylight out of others. Can’t we Indians be sensible? Are we freaking animals that we have to attack others for the right of way? I’m not going to stop driving just because others have no sense nor responsibility of driving. I will not be scared into sitting at home or traveling in bus like many other people. Most importantly, I will not die on the highway.

I like to follow the rules. Please don’t make me lawless! Somebody help me!

I am almost finished uploading the photos from Allahabad trip…  you can find them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/harshadsharma/sets/72157600034308139/

Good news!

There has been a long long wait for Google’s Picasa on FreeBSD / PCBSD. And the wait is now over… if you are running PCBSD, just go get the latest Wine 0.9.32

Step 1: Install Wine – double click on the .pbi file and follow on-screen instructions.

Step 1.1: Install arial.ttf in c:\Windows\Fonts ( /home/username/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts )

Step 2: Install Picasa – start up konsole, navigate to the directory where your Picasa installer is located ( cd /home/username/Desktop/ ) and run the installer by typing ( wine picasa2-current.exe )

Step 3: Thank the Wine Team and enjoy!

I am leaving for Allahabad in a few hours. Shall be back in town by 26th March 2007.

Going for some work related stuff, but photography will not be left behind!

There’s a good chance that I’ll be able to get online before I come back, so do watch this place for posts and the photos section for well, photos.

Cheers!
Harshad

For the FreeBSD users, there’s a bit of a problem when using laptops -
the special volume buttons are usually not automatically recognized.
The following page helps in configuring that:

http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/

For configuring the keypress/command association, we use the following port:

x11/xbindkeys

You might want to install the following port for making configuring
xbindkeys easier:

x11/xbindkeys_config

Now, there’s only one issue – the volume cannot be muted and unmuted
to its original setting automatically, here’s a small shell
script that resets volume to 60
[http://blackk.union.edu/~black/freebsd/xbindkeysrc]

I wrote a python script that uses commands from above file and
adds persistence of volume setting while automatically muting or
unmuting each time the script is called, also it relies heavily on
UNIX commands – since this script is necessary only on UNIX/FreeBSD.
It will not work under windows.

It also has a nice feature – soft fade-in / fade-out (configurable via script). Especially useful when you mute at high volume and forget it… then play some loud music and unmute – if done using this script, it might not shock with you with sudden loudness.

All configuration is kept inside the script to keep usage of the script as easy as possible – just a call:

./mutetoggle.py

Hope it is useful to anyone looking to solve this or similar issue…

Here’s the file: mutetoggle.py.txt

It is 3:43 am, when most other users are offline, I am trying to download KDE 3.5.5 source packages for my newly installed FreeBSD 6.2 on AMD64 machine – I am using a 256 Kbps BSNL DataOne Broadband connection. On January 2007, BSNL announced that it has upgraded all users for speeds upto 2 Mbps. Yes, I enjoy the speed – and I am thankful to BSNL. However, as I watch the progress of my downloads, there’s nothing else than “SHOCK” that awaits me.

Here’s a sampler from my Python download session:

Python-2.4.3.tgz                                5% of 9129 kB 3775  Bps 39m04s

3775Bps, around 3 KBps which comes around to 3*8 = 24 Kbps. Am I being served 10 times slower internet or what?

This is not just for one or two downloads. I tried reconnecting, hoping vainly that things might magically sort themselves out. I tried to check my DNS settings (Regular and OpenDNS both) both resolve fine. This is not the first time this has happened. It’s becoming a regular P.I.T.A., and I’m very much frustrated with it. If BSNL decides to make the 2 AM to 8 AM block free for all users (no charges for downloads) then they should at least give the minimum promised 256 Kbps speed!!! 24 kbps is just #$%@#$% #%$@@.

That’s jungle code for “my machine is going to be upgraded now.”

Hopefully, I have all the backups in a good shape. I’ve just made sure – but with machines, you never can be really sure. Have the AMD64 version of FreeBSD ready to leave its mark on my system. I’m loving PCBSD, but it is 32bit only, my machine sports a AMD Turion 64 processor – better use the power!

Will try to set things up as they are (or at least very close to as) in  PCBSD 3.3. If I’m able to do that in the next few hours/days/weeks/months/who knows when, I’ll be a happier man! No, I’m not planning on PBI support, I like ports tree more – and I just realized, The FreeBSD Foundation has Java binaries available for most of our systems… great! Because I hate compiling java by hand (those who have tried it, know what I mean

Here’s the link.

I’ll be gone, not for long – cause I do have 3 other machines (actually, with friend’s machines lying here… those can be 5 spare machines) to come online if I mess this up! So no worries mates! I’ll just be busy, living on pure caffeine and rock music for the next few hours/days/… whatever

Digikam has issues with albums on a network share. It uses sqlite database, and it seems that the database file cannot be stored on a share.

Click here for the bug report…

Now, I was stumped when Digikam refused to work the first time, I thought it was because of the overwhelming number of photographs that I threw at it – 30GB, over network. So I reduced it to 12MB… nothing happened. That’s when I sensed that something is wrong.

The above bug report almost washed away all hopes of having my files on a central fileserver and accessing them from the various machines around me. I went to sleep at 6 am, thinking about this… woke up for lunch, and woke up with an idea – I mounted the share on a directory which is outside the path of Digikam’s library, then I symlinked the directory into the library. So now basically, the sqlite database sits on my local harddisk, but the files are accessed from the server – problem solved!

Library: /home/harshad/images/

Share mounted on: /home/harshad/shared/

Actual photos on: /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007/

Command:

ln -s /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007 /home/harshad/images/shared

I should mention that it works fine when I have the sample images amounting upto 12MB… when I gave it the whole library, it loaded the information into the database, but after showing no further progress for more than 30 minutes, I terminated it.

I think I’ll have to have various symlinks for smaller sections of my library and have shell scripts to create / delete these symlinks before loading digikam to make it lighter on the software and network!

Hope this issue is solved and we don’t need this workaround.

Note: Edited on 5 March 2007 for some typos.