lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

I was reading an article, Do It Now, which talks about time management. One of the first points the article says about time management is - Clarity is key. The first step is to know exactly what you want. I thought to myself, "Why am I going to my job today ?". I tried to think of a good reason what my current job will let me accomplish in my life and I have not been able to come up with a concrete answer. I will think about this question some more for a few more days and see if this job is aligned with where I want to go.

Disney is taking the fight against recording of movies to ridiculous levels. Defamer has an account of what took place during the screening of the movie "The Life Aquatic".

The Disney thought police were out in full force, with their ridiculous mouse-eared 'cast' buttons no less. This is really getting out of hand.
[snip]
Once they take your cell phone and drivers license it's placed into a plastic bag and you are given a ticket to redeem them later (just like in prison!). After this you are then asked to open your bags and raise your arms while a metal detector is run all over your body.
[snip]
After you have run this gauntlet, during the film you are subjected to even more security as annoying red security dots with tracking id's flash on the screen every 15 minutes and scowling uniformed security personal scan the audience like the secret service.

I do not know when these measures will start getting implemented in India. It is quite easy to get "hall prints" of the new movies from any of the local CD shops in Delhi. From anecdotal conversations, I gather that these prints are not made by viewers. There is a collaboration between the CD shop and the guy who does the actual screening of the movie.

It feels good to be living in a free country. Thanks to boing-boing for the link

I had gone to visit my village for the ocassion of Chhat. Some of the conveniences that I had started taking for granted were missing. It made me appreciate how easy city life is and how hard a rural life is. However one thing that stood out was the ubiquity of the mobile phones.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of a few fellow-geeks. The points that make a geek gathering different from normal people's gatherings are

• The idea of the meeting was conceived on an IRC channel
• More time was spent on planning what to do, than the time spent on actually doing
• People kept referring to each other by their IRC nicks
• Pictures were taken using a mobile camera
• After the geeks had a shot of beer/vodka, they started debatng the OO capabilities in Python, history of python, squeak and other obscure topics.
• And of course, how can I forget the debate on which CMS rules - mambo/Drupal or Plone

An evening I enjoyed a lot

Firefox 1.0 got released yesterday. Yay !! If you have not downloaded it as yet, get it and reclaim the web. Google has put up a firefox on their search too. . Surprisingly BBC is covering the launch too. Officially, Firefox is not "just for geeks " anymore. Welcome abroad unwashed masses. Here is the list of newspapaers covering firefox launch.

While reading through the talkback pages at mozila, I saw that most people were having trouble getting Firefox from their local mirrors (which I guess had not gotten updated) or in accessing the Mozilla's website. Well, I took the easy route and just used the torrent to download my favourite browser. It was the first time I used torrent, and i must add I was amazed at how easy the whole process. Bittornado put a nice GUI and a easy to understand interface to the whole process.

There is a Bloglines Web Services (BWS) . Never knew about it . In another news, I discovered a nice skin for my wiki. \0/ One of my friends has launched a new blog devoted to books, music and movies. If you are a geek who enjoys reading and movies, have a look or volunteer to participate in the effort

I have been experimenting with a few wikis for my site. A great place to look for your wiki needs is the Wiki Engines page on the WikiWik (which incidentally was the first wiki). I have settled for Pmwiki, which you can see here. My reasons for choosing the Pmwiki are

• Written in PHP and released under GPL
• Does not need a database backend to run
• Easy to understand documentation
• Customizations are in a separate configuration file
• InterMap capabilities to provide links to other WikiWikiWeb systems
• Ability to organize pages into WikiGroups, with headers and access controls shared among all pages in the group

Link to my wiki