My favorite excerpt from APUE

In older versions of Linux (those before version 2.1.81), chown didn't follow symbolic links. From version 2.1.81 onward, chown follows symbolic links. With FreeBSD 5.2.1 and Mac OS X 10.3, chown follows symbolic links. (Prior to 4.4BSD, chown didn't follow symbolic links, but this was changed in 4.4BSD.) In Solaris 9, chown also follows symbolic links.

[I am not sure I follow, Sir :-]

Statutory warning: Too much JFGI is bad for your mental health

Today I stumbled upon this nice article, Is Google making us stupid? Talks about the effects today's search engines are having on our behavior. As we all know, we (at least most of us) don't read a dead tree book or do research in a 'real' library these days, we just JFGI, and at that too, we just skim till we land on the exact tidbit of our interest. And though it's efficient, the author warns that this habit of going for quick wins is already having measurable adverse effects on our mental abilities (like ability to concentrate).

I agree with the overall point of the article (not the least because I have observed myself doing the same kind of thing, I mean JFGI). But what I liked most was that the author is not just a nostalgic whiner, he points out how writing and printing both were criticized by scholars of the age when they were introduced, and although the things feared by critics have come true to an extent, the boons far outweigh their problems. We can hope that the boons of the Net will also outweigh it's problems.

But hey, we can at least minimize these effects (and avoid the 'reprogramming of our minds', as the author puts it). So here is my current status, "Out for some offline reading".

[The original article is a bit long and to be honest, I must admit that I had to make a conscious effort to read it in full (and not just skim it), the effect is there after all :-)].

3T update

AirTight 3T (Table Tennis Tournament) is going on full steam (btw the image above has nothing to do with TT, it's from Xkcd). Just for the record, we lost both matches in which I played, but thanks to other players in the team, we still have a respectable score. Btw, I got the name Single pointer in my first match (scored a single point). Second match, scored five points, so I am now five point someone I guess! Will keep you posted of the latest happenings, bye for now..

Another way to JFGI..

In the beginning there was the command line. You told the computer what to do by typing a command and it did it, it was that simple. But soon enough, people got lazy. They decided they did not want to remember the command names and they said the command switches are confusing. Then came the age of GUI. And people started ridiculing the command line. The command line managed to survive on Unix and its descendants. But even these systems are moving away from it these days.

OK, enough hoopla. But the point is, command line is not the primary UI to a computer these days (at least for most of the people). Surely enough though, there still exists a band of command line freaks who take a particular pleasure in writing long, complex commands with multiple redirections and pipes and what not. What I am about to talk about is for these hardcore CLI freaks (Disclaimer: I am a moderate command line freak). It is this site goosh.org. It's an interface to Google. OK, you will say, there are many others, like blackle. But this one is special, being a command line interface. Go to the site and you are presented with a command prompt. 'ls' will show you available commands. And you search on Google by typing commands at the prompt, e.g to search this blog on Google, type 'blogs jitr4me'. It returns the top 4 results. To jump to say, result 3, type 'go 3'. 'more' to see more results. The default search mode is 'web', there are others like 'news', 'feeds' and 'videos'. You can add goosh to your list of search engines with 'addengine'.

Pretty cool, isn't it?

A journey to the mountain peaks (and back)..

I spent the last weekend at Matheran. I had been there once before, in my second year of college, but this place is worth visiting a thousand times. The natural beauty has been preserved well, unlike overly commercialized Mahabaleshwar or Lonawala. Motorized vehicles are not allowed in Matheran proper, so the only transportation mechanism (excluding your legs) is horses. Matheran is full of beautiful, foggy valleys. Situated at a height of about 3000 feet above sea level, it's constantly raining there. Naturally the place is full of mud, but it only adds to the feel IMO.

Now something about our group. We were ten people in all (thanks to Musa and DJ for taking the initiative in organizing the trip, DJ however could not attend). Musa and Sunil returned on the first day and I was also thinking of it, but I now think I did better by staying (I would have missed the toy train (or troy ten as a friend put it)). Matheran is not a place to finish in hurry. You can spend hours at a single point, and the best part is when the fog thins out for a moment or two to reveal the landscape. I simply can't describe its beauty. I especially enjoyed Malang Point and Sunset Point. Another plus was that the place was not overcrowded, so it was like we had the whole thing for ourselves.

The biggest attraction of Matheran, for children and adults alike, is the toy train. We could not get the tickets on our way up so we hired a taxi, which was another kind of thrill. The road is not for the faint of the heart, the drivers make you miss a heartbeat or two. On our way down, we were determined to get the tickets. The number of tickets is very limited however and people come like 4-5 hours early to get them. But after more than two hours of toil, we somehow managed to get the tickets (it was sheer luck, but that's another story), and it was the high point of the trip, the joy on the guys faces when they heard the news was simply ineffable. And take my word for it, the toy train is well worth the toil. Hats off to the guys who envisioned and built this system. The whole journey is breathtaking. If you visit Matheran, don't miss it.

Overall the trip was a great refresher, I enjoyed every moment of it. I hope the next one will come soon.

Update: Photos of the trip by Jaggi