LinuxLala’s Temple of Wisdom

So everybody over at Planet Fedora is running the brain test. Not that I blame them. It’s only 20 questions and so I too took the plunge. But while everybody else seems to have got a fairly decent response, here’s what answering the 20 questions yielded for me:

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 56%
Visual : 43%
Left : 61%
Right : 38%

No matter which side of your brain is dominant, M i n d W a r e can strengthen your emotional brain power by helping you understand how you feel about yourself.

Now what test do I take to determine whether I’m capable of deciphering this bull.

This post is not going to discuss my harrowing experience of staying up late one night. Rather, it’s about how staying up late frequently over a long period of time has affected my sleeping pattern.

The story starts some four years ago. I had just passed out from high school and started grad school. Staying up late so I could study and do things that I love (read: investing time in Linux) soon became a habit. Around that time, I would usually hit the bed at 01:00 or 01:30 and wake up around 09:00. This continued for about a year or so. I used to however, occasionally stay up till 03:00 and 04:00 wasn’t such a big surprise either.

I then changed my sleeping pattern to a far more flexible state: staying up for as long as was necessary and then catching up on my sleep during the day. This meant that I went to bed early in the morning and slept till about 11:00 or 13:00, or even later at times. This was however not a deliberate decision. I had for many months now been trying to bring my sleeping schedule back on track, but I failed at it miserably. You see, even if I went to bed at 23:00 or 01:00, I still couldn’t sleep till after 04:00 or 05:00. And that meant I would wake up around one or two in the afternoon.

Let me now tell you about more recent happenings. This is from about eight months ago. I was on a very acceptable schedule — getting up around 10:00 and hitting the bed a little after 00:00. I was still sleeping on average about nine hours a day, but as long as I wasn’t up all night I was at peace.

But out of the blue, for no reason at all, I just couldn’t sleep one night. So I went to bed at 7 A.M. Naturally, I woke up after lunch. This then became the routine. I would go to bed around mid-night (sometime sooner) and after struggling to find sleep, get up in the middle of the night and stay up all night, struggling to kill time. You see, at this point, I couldn’t do anything. I was tired, my mind wouldn’t work and so I couldn’t write anything. This continued for some weeks when I decided I just won’t go to sleep one day. So, on Sunday night I didn’t go to sleep, I couldn’t in any case. The whole of Monday was naturally quite a drag, but I somehow managed. I went to bed on Monday around eleven and peacefully got out of bed at 5 A.M. on a beautiful Tuesday morning. I felt fresh and I managed to get some work done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t sleep Tuesday night at all, so the whole of Wednesday was a drag, since I had decided against going to bed at seven in the morning. This pattern of sleeping every alternate day continued for about ten days after which my schedule had returned to normal.

I was going to bed before mid-night and getting up at five or five-thirty in the morning. Life was great.

Then, the work load increased and I was forced to stay up till midnight and even 01:00 at times to meet dead lines. I still however was getting up at no later than five-thirty, which meant on occasion I only got four hours of sleep at night. As is the case everywhere, change is the only constant. I was forced to work till two or three at night and that again meant my sleeping pattern was in turmoil. I don’t exactly recall what I was going through at that time, but I assure you life was hell.

A couple of months ago, I again did the sleeping on alternate nights to bring some order to my sleeping pattern. Magically, it worked again. I was back to getting up at five or five-thirty in the morning and I was getting about six-seven hours of sleep everyday.

But, it was not to be. Out of the blue, for no reason I can think of, I just couldn’t sleep one night. I stayed in bed however and finally found sleep around 5 A.M. Crap! I woke up around 2 P.M, having spent nearly 14 hours in the bed. This then became routine. I would go to bed early because I felt tired and couldn’t think straight, but was unable to get any sleep. I also tried the sleeping every alternate day routine, but that didn’t work: I was just so tired to keep it up and would always hit the bed by 8 or 9 A.M. As a result, I got up at 3 or 4 or even 5 P.M. at times. Life as I knew it was over.

Fortunately, I managed to turn things around once again, and I was again able to get up at 5:30 in the morning. Usually I would sleep till about 07:00 but on average I got up before 06:00. But for the past few weeks now, I’m back on the “can’t sleep after I hit the bed routine”. This despite my going to bed around mid-night.

Now, from these past four years, I’ve learned some important lessons, the most important of which is to not to mess up with your sleeping pattern. Now I know many people who stay up all night partying and what not, but I seriously can’t imagine how they manage it.

I should probably also mention at this point that I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. In a few more words, I’ve never smoked a cigarette and I’ve never even had a beer.

My current schedule, as of today is: I went to bed around 2 A.M. but couldn’t sleep till about 4 A.M. I then was vaguely aware of every sound around me till about 07:30. But from then till about 13:00 I was totally out, as if I was drugged.

So I woke up today at one-thirty P.M. and I’ve no clue when I’ll hit the bed again.

Just to make this narrative complete, let me also mention the time when I was on medication for cough/cold/fever etc. Most of the drugs to combat cough/cold as you know are sleep inducing. Any anti-allergy pill will typically knock you out for several hours. Even when I was taking these pills, I couldn’t sleep at night. That meant that even if I tried sleeping every other day, I didn’t get any peaceful sleep.

So, the purpose of this entire post is to urge everyone who reads this to not mess up their sleeping patterns. Try to get in bed and find sleep before mid-night and try to get up early in the morning. And do some exercise.

I’ve invested quite a bit into building my own gym, but with a sleeping pattern like this, I don’t know what a good time to eat and workout is!

My latest article on Linux.com is now online. It talks of two Nautilus extensions that I really find useful. The article discusses 1) Opening terminal from within Nautilus and 2) Changing image resolution.

The second is very special, since you can do away with opening any special program to change the resolution of the images. just right-click an image and select the resize image option. Amazing!

FTA:

Nautilus, the official file manager for the GNOME desktop, can help you perform tasks from browsing the filesystem to accessing Samba shares on your local network or FTP sites on the Internet — and more. Here are a couple of tips and tools that will allow you to open a terminal window from Nautilus and resize and rotate images without opening any other program.

So go ahead and read the article.

My latest article on Linux.com discusses implementing disk quotas to restrict a users’ disk space usage.

From the article:

If you manage a system that’s accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It’s fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group.

The article made it to LXer and someone raised a very interesting point. He says

the more they stay the same. Disk space quotas were a standard operating procedure for sys. admins. in the ’80’s when disk storage was mega-expensive. I see the point in putting *some* limits on users, but let’s hope that sys. admins. aren’t so tight-fisted these days now that disk storage is cheap.

I agree with him entirely. But, and I’m not trying to defend myself or the article, I would like to clarify that implementing quotas should still be standard practice. And, since it’s so easy to limit errant users on a multi-user system, I’d suggest people to set it up on their home systems too. The reason being that despite storage being so cheap nowadays, how can you ever justify buying a new hard drive every so often. For instance, let’s suppose you are running out of disk space because of someone who downloads songs from the various file sharing networks. Now, you can either restrict the disk space he can fill up with these downloaded songs, or you can buy a new hard drive and let the user fill it up as well. It’s my opinion that sooner rather than later he would get tired of his songs and may never want to listen to them again. So, how do you justify buying a new disk when the old one is free again since he’s either deleted all the songs, or made a DVD backup?

It’s best to limit him to just X amount of space so he can only download Y number of songs, that he’d have to either backup or delete if he wants to download more songs.

Anyway, read the article and decide for yourself if you wish to curb an errant user by implementing quotas.

My latest article on Linux.com reveals two very useful albeit less known secrets of the man command. That’s right! The most used command on any Linux box, man, has two secrets that can save lives. Well almost. They do however save a lot of time, mouse clicks, head scratching and more.

So head on over to Linux.com and find out what are these secrets.

Once again, I inform you all of my article after it has done it’s round on all major news websites (read: lxer, linuxtoday, etc.). This article is about LVM. It covers how to setup LVM and some of the popular use cases, like extending you logical volume or the size of the volume group.

If you’ve never used LVM before, and have been troubled in the past when faced with the heart crunching situation of “running out of disk space”, I’m sure you will find the article helpful.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

Before jumping into the details of setting up LVM, you need to familiarize yourself with LVM terminology. LVM refers to a typical partition as a Physical Volume (PV). A Volume Group (VG) comprises one or more physical volumes. Each volume group must be divided into Logical Volumes (LV).

A logical volume functions like a normal partition — they have a filesystem such as Ext3, and a mount point. You can think of the volume group as a virtual hard disk. A logical volume is thus a virtual partition on your virtual hard disk.

That’s the title of the latest Fedora title from Apress. It’s what kept me busy these past several months. To browse through the TOC of my book, visit the book’s page on Apress.com. You will find exciting deals on the book on Amazon.

It’s time now to thank the people who’ve contributed towards making this book possible.

Jason Gilmore, the editor of the book. His insightful comments resulted in some interesting changes in the chapters.

Paul W. Frields, the technical reviewer. It was a pleasure incorporating his suggestions into the chapters. His insights into Fedora, certainly make this book interesting.

Tracy Brown Collins, the project manager. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever exchanged emails with. We had some excellent discussion regarding the book, Star Trek, Rocky series, etc. Thank you Tracy, for everything.

Damon Larson, the copy editor. His suggestions and requests for “changing the text for clarity” make the book an enjoyable read.

Katie Stence, production manager. She too is on the list of the nicest people I’ve exchanged emails with I bothered her plenty with untimely requests to update the chapters after they were well into the production stage, and all I got in return was “it’ll be done”. Thanks Katie.

Tom Debolski, manufacturing director. We once had a terrible scare when the Fedora 7 DVD I shipped to him was rejected since it had some bad sectors. It was all sorted out later, but I must thank him for speeding up the manufacturing process, so that the book didn’t get delayed.

Keir Thomas, my co-author. He’s the author of Beginning Ubuntu, the book that won the coveted Linux Journal award. It was an absolute pleasure working with Keir. He’s the one who offered the book to me. Thanks Keir!

These are the people I interacted with directly, but there’s also Lori Bring, the proofreader who took over Katie Stence when she was out-of-office. There are still several others who worked behind the scenes so a big Thank You to all of them.

Head on over to the Apress.com to look over the TOC and a sample chapter from the book. I’ve also compiled a brief video that discusses the book’s composition, which I’m sure prospective readers would find informative. A big thanks to my big bro for the excellent camera work and for uploading the video to YouTube.

Did y’all here this? I am set to receive $420,000.00! I never knew this, but apparently Yahoo mail gives random cash prizes to their members. I just got notified, and in all the excitement, the people at Yahoo! dropped the exclamation mark. Not once in the mail I just got is there and exclamation mark anywhere. That saddens me some.

If you are not “excited” about giving me the money, then I don’t want it. I’m not saying that there should be multiple exclamation marks and stupid punctuation marks in the mail, but at least one exclamation mark after “Congratulations” is expected.

I also discovered today that the lottery is conducted by messenger.yahoo.com and that I am just one of the 12 guys chosen to be awarded. I am also expected to use part of the award money in the 1.3 Billion dollar international draw. Wait a minute. Isn’t this already international? I mean, I’m here in India, with a .co.in mail id and I got the email from [email protected]. That’s as international as international is ever going to be for me.

To be eligible for the money, I am expected to perform such crimes as these:

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE
These are your identification numbers…………………..

Batch number…………………Lwh 09445
Lotto number…………………..Lwh09446
Winning number……………….Lwh09447

To begin your claims, kindly contact your claims Agent;
Dr Jose Garcia of DUMEX SEGUROS MADRID SPAIN
Em ail:[email protected]
Tele:+34-687-193-286

You are required to forward him with the following details:

1.FULL NAME
2.COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
3.PRESENT ADDRESS
4.SEX
5.DATE OF BIRTH
6.AGE
7.OCCUPATION
8.TELEPHONE NUMBER
9.FAX NUMBER(IF ANY)
10.MARITAL STATUS
11.WINNING NUMBER, BATCH NUMBER AND LOTTO NUMBER.
12 THE MONTH YOU WON……
13 AMOUNT WON……………….

Notice 11, 12, 13 above. The email I received had this information. Lord knows why I’m being asked to send them this back again. Perhaps they want to keep track of the people they managed to fool

Also, having been a user of yahoo mail for years, I really don’t understand why they don’t already have my Name, Sex, Age, etc. Thankfully, there’s a gif animation in the message from yahoo that shows data transfer between two computers. A postcard (like thing) leaves one computer and enters the other. Symbolic don’t you think? Evidently the guy running the lottery has a nice heart and so he informs me (via the animation) that this is just his means to steal data from me.

I tell you, these guys are increasingly getting smarter. Or maybe, they are imagining that the world is growing stupider.

In other news, my brother just got an email from a troubled orphan who said “she kisses him extremely and waits for his positive reply”. Said she was keen to come to his country and continue her studies, if he’d help her get her hands on the $4.2 million her father left for her. She didn’t say this, but I guess her relatives must be troubling her. Happens all the time in Bollywood movies.

First there was DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Then there was the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive).

Now there’s a possibility of a similar act for Canada. What are they going to call it — DSWU (Don’t Screw With Us).

Preposterous!

Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily,
until there’s no confusion left.

Doesn’t seem to make any sense, and without some instruments making melodious sounds, even more so. This post is going to make two things clear: the importance of repetition and the need for repetition.

Let me begin talking about repetitions by referencing the commercials we see everywhere: billboards, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and online. There are so many ads, and you never seem to see an ad just one. It always repeats, and it’s everywhere: on every radio channel, on every TV channel, on every busy road, on every popular website. Repetition results in recall value. The purpose of repetition is to ensure that people can remember things and to ensure it stays in your mind.

With commercials however, there’s not a lengthy-enough timeline. Once the purpose is served, commercials fade out to make way for new commercials.

Michael Tiemann recently expressed outrage over the misuse of the term Open Source, and called for action. He asked that people who misuse the term be corrected on the spot. I’m glad he referenced how Richard Stallman corrects people every time they confuse Free Software with Open Source software, or how they call it Linux instead of GNU/Linux.

The purpose of this blog entry is not to focus on the naming convention but rather on correcting people. It’s imperative that you correct them, and every single one of them. It’s important to raise your voice over all the confusion and chaos and clarify things and correct people and sometimes to blow your own trumpet.

If the community doesn’t correct the mistakes, who will?