Of News Plenty and a Missing Entry
Some days ago, Saip wrote a shout-out here asking for fundaes on file-sharing. I remember that day being unique ‘cos I had slept for a solid 10 hours the night before, a rare event in these parts of the world. My mind, for a change, was awake! I read that request moments later and in this clear-headed state, I immediately penned a 200 line article titled ‘File Sharing - A Mini HOWTO’. It was a good piece of technical writing IMHO and reaffirmed my faith in tech-journalism being a viable future career. I hit upload and went about the day’s work.
I came back in the evening and checked the site to see if Saip had posted any comment on the article. ‘Hmm.. deja vu.. this stuff looks like from some time ago.. of course it’s from some time ago! It’s last week’s entry! So where’s this morning’s post? It’s missing !! How’s that possible?!’ I looked at the SmallTalk and WTF! The request was missing too!! Weird.. totally weird. Only three explanations came to my mind (discounting the 17 Matrix related ones).
a) I was still sleeping that morning when I ‘wrote’ the post.
b) I was sleeping that evening when I was thinking if I was sleeping that morning.
c) The RIAA has an eye on me.
I scratched (b) of the list by the classical ‘pinch and tell’ test. Next, I estimated the probability of (c) being true to be nearly 1\%: considerable for scientists but disposable as ‘error’ for engineers. Down the chute goes (c).
I mailed my brother about this puzzling puzzle. Maybe he didn’t want anything with questionable legality discussed on his domain - hence the censoring. Living in Singapore, I see censorship everywhere. ;-) My brother, the liberal Indian, assured me that he was a true believer in free speech and wouldn’t think of editing anything. anything except [deleted]
I furrowed my forehead and slept the usual fitful sleep.
Next morning, there was another mail from him. The hosting server had been moved and the article was possibly lost in a backup-restore. A plausible explanation. Still doesn’t rule out (a). Oh well, I’ll live with it.
And Saip, sorry buddy. I doubt you’ll wait for another clear-headed day here for a treatise. So just use Emule, that’s what I use. Or visit Slyck for a rundown on all the p2p networks and clients out there.
The news bit.
Work is coming along just fine. But classes begin next week, let’s see how it goes then.
Got the wireless working under Linux on my laptop. The trouble was with Intel not releasing Linux drivers for the wireless card. But thanks to some ingenious work by the people at ndiswrapper, I can now surf wirelessly using the Windows drivers under Linux!
I also saw a couple of movies. Khakhee in theatre and Chameli on VCD. Khakhee is great stuff. Chameli is pretentious and falls flat.
There’s a refurbished stuff sale going on, apparently HP iPaqs are selling for < 200S$. I am going there tomorrow, let’s see if I can snag something.