lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

one relating to, belonging to, or resembling lunatech

reducing life suckage

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.
- Arthur Dent
Problem Statement Life sucks. More specifically, I am dissatisfied on the following parts of my life.
  • Health - To say that I have been neglecting my health would be an understatement. I have not been doing any physical exercise - except pushing my chair to get away from my desk. I have gained a lot of weight and have grown wider.
  • Volunteer work - This part is balance I guess. I contribute to the PHPCommuntiy and quite a few mailing lists. I have also joined as a developer for addons.mozilla.org website and I am still trying to get my head around the code. The part lacking here is that I do not write enough technical articles.
  • Book reading - Currently my reading list has been limited to technical books/webzines/blogs only. I should read at least 2 books each month (self development, literature, fantasy, non-fiction)
  • Hacking - Not enough hacking, have not written something which does something utterly cool. One idea floating in my head is to write a "knowledge digger" - a script which when give a word or a starting url, will find the list of key terms on it, will run through wikipedia and del.icio.us and look for urls that give more idea about the terms.
  • Fun - The less said about this, the better it will be. Bangalore sucks - there is absolutely nothing to do here. Most of my good friends are in Delhi and to make the matters worse, the LUG meeting (at least the one I attended) was as fun as a funeral :-( .
  • Quite a lot of this problem can be solved if I get up early, get to the office early, put in 8 hours of work and be back home early. Below is the ideal outcome in each part of my life

    • Health - Lose 20Kgs over next 3 months
    • Volunteer area - Put 3 hours weekly in writing articles (to produce 2 articles monthly) and put in 1.5 hours of work daily in the u.m.o website code
    • Book reading - Read for at least an hour daily. This will not include the time I spent in reading blogs
    • Hacking - Think of one cool hack every month and implement it. I think that hacking does require any flash of insight, but simply hard thought. Spend 4 hours every weekend on this.
    • Fun - Spend half hour each day in solving puzzles

    I also have to find a way to measure how effective I am at following these measures. Each month will have 3 tables - for my daily, weekly and monthly goals. Anytime I reach my goal, I will put a dot in the column. But I have still not worked out the format for recording them. I will have time to do it this evening.

Howto become a Linux sysadmin

Quite a few college students have queried me on how they can become a Linux sysadmin. This prompted me to put up a list that anyone in a college currently can follow to get the required skills to become a sysadmin. Hopefully this list should reduce the amount of words that I need to type.

Disclaimer: I am writing from my experience, and as always, your mileage may vary

BLUG - whatever happened to it

Back in Delhi, we had a very good Linux User Group (LUG). When I came to Bangalore, I had expected the LUG here to be even more active. However, I was very disappointed - the BLUG had been dissolved and replaced by totally listless BoF (beards of feathers) meets. Kingsly has posted a good summary about the state of affairs. Seems like too much politics was involved.

Defined tags for this entry:

Moving the MySQL's datadir directory.

By default, MySQL's datadir is placed in the /var/lib/mysql directory. However, if you are planning on using MySQL tables to store a lot of data and your /var partition is small, it might cause you problem at a later stage. In such a scenario, it is better to move the MySQL's datadir to another partition (like /home.

The steps are

  1. Stop your mysql server before starting this operation
  2. Create the directories that will be new datadir
  3. chown the directory to the mysql:mysql user
  4. copy the files from the old datadir to the new location. However, make sure that the files named ib_arch_log_0000000000, ib_logfile0 etc. are not copied to the newer location.
  5. Make sure that the files and directories are owned by mysql user
  6. Make changes in the my.cnf to point the new datadir.
  7. Restart the MySQL database
  8. You might need to do varying degree of troubleshooting to get the server working if there is some problem
  9. Create a new database and verify that the files for this database are getting created in the new datadir
  10. After the server is running for a few days properly, get rid of the old data.
  11. Sleep
I tested these steps on MySQL 4.0.24 and all my tables were MyISAM type.

Defined tags for this entry:

people whose opinions matter

I was watching the recorded episodes of Simpsons today. In one of the scenes, the children of Springfield decide that they are going to spill out all the secrets of the adults. So they start to plan how they can do it.

Lisa : Let us publish this information on the Internet
Bart : No, we have to get to the people whose opinion really matter

:-)

Defined tags for this entry:

why is prostitution considered 'wrong' ?

A question that has been on my mind for a long time was put in by my friend Mary (he is the sysadmin at Sarai). Let me give a bit of the background. When I was in Delhi, a bunch of us fellow-geeks used to meet almost twice a month to talk about our hacking projects, our current work (all of us were happily free of NDAs), have a good dinner and generally get into debates about topics that would be considered a taboo (or inappropriate by most people). Once when we were joking about how prostitution is legal in Thailand and what procedure would the government be using to collect the taxes (I mean, how will they cross check the receipts), that Mary popped the question "Why do you think prostitution is wrong ?" . My first reaction was "It is not the right thing to do" - however, I realized that pushing my judgement of what is right and what is wrong on someone else is not the correct thing to do. I have been thinking of why I consider prostitution to be wrong - it is a profession - a service is provided and a price is paid for it.

This question again came to the front of my mind when I read this blog post by Joshua Newton. He writes about the An autobiography of a sex worker by Nalini Jameela. He posts the following quote from the book

Some see brothels as a space for sexual perverts.
They are wrong. Why do people of all walks of life come to us? Parents prevent our sexual desires in the beginning. Then teachers in schools. Then moralists in churches, mosques, and temples slap rules. When you grow up, police and courts take up the role. They spread the rule one man for one woman. Yet people seek out prostitutes all over the world in all ages. What does it prove?

So are you against moral structures?
No. Men dictate the morality of this age. They use wives or sex workers to their ends. We dream of a new dawn of morality. Sexuality like food and shelter is a terrain of human tastes. It is still to be developed into a plateau of endless tastes and forms. Morality should not suppress. It should be liberating. When sex work turns into one among many human service sectors, you will stop suppressing yourself and others.

I have not read the book but this book is definitely on my to-read book

Defined tags for this entry: