Just few minutes ago, I shared another part of my Life with “The One”!

Kevin Kelly discusses how web will be in next 5000 days. A little scary, though!

I found this TED talk a narration of my own life story.

When i was 7 years old, because of militancy in Punjab, my father sent me and my three siblings to a boarding school in Himachal. In was fascinated by music education, and used to hang around the music facility where elder kids were taught music. The second month of arrival to the school, I was picked up by the music teacher for teaching music. I remember being the youngest kid learning classical Indian music and sikh religious music.

In next three years that followed, I travelled all across India on music scholarships - places where my parents or my friends had not been to, performed at many stages, competed in various vocal music competitions with our music group. By the time I was in 5th, I had two “dhaadi” albums recorded. And I used to excel in my studies.

And then destiny took a turn. For some circumstances, I had to leave the school in my 5th grade and come back to my village in Punjab. My parents admitted me to the best catholic school in my district. For them excelling in a creative environment was the same everywhere.

And then I got another chance in my 6th grade. Along with four other kids from the old boarding school, we were offered scholarship from Guru Nanak Sikh School in London. It was a newly opened school, on the patterns very similar to my old boarding school. However, we were denied Visa by UK embassy for some unknown reasons.

I was miserable. The environment in the catholic school was dead compared to where I came from. There were no more music lessons. For three years in my school, I was an invisible kid. I flunked few classes. I started finding solace in reading. In those three years I read everything I could get my hand on - fiction, classics, poetry, Greek mythology, religions, philosophy. I read Punjabi culture a lot, in search of who I was, to find what my identity was. I would sometimes write poetry, but seldom would show it to anyone.

Things started changing by the time I started my 9th grade. With support of my parents, I struggled back. My hungry artistic soul always found solace in creating things - And then I found computers and rest is another story.

I have no complains how my life turned out to be! Well it has not yet as I want it to be and I’m on my way. But I assume its pretty good. Things could had been much worse and I thank Almighty for leading me to who I’m. However some days I wonder, had I continued the path I was passionate about, how would things had been. Never know.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both …. …And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back…..

Here is shell a trick that I used lately.

Before moving to new system (where I enforce quotas on all home folders), I had portable home directories for all the users on my shared server storage. The old setup did not strictly apply the quota limits on all users. Some of the users had large home folders and a couple of them logging on different systems, would fill up the whole hard disk on that system.

Two find how much space each user was using on the server, I ran the following command in their home directory.

$ du -chd -1 > $HOME/user_space_report.txt

Simple.

Last week was pretty eventful. On Sunday, I invited my friend Stephen Goforth and his son John to visit the Memphis gurudwara. John is majoring in Music at the University of South Alabama. He is already composing and writing music, although he still is a freshman at the University. Check his song Tunnel no light here. We talked a lot about western and Indian music and that how fusion music has revived a lot of lost music of past ages.

On the way back we visited Sun Studio in Memphis. It was here, where Elvis Presley recorded his first record at the age of 18. Artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johny Cash and B B King have been linked to this studio over the years.

During rest of the week I worked with engineers from Apple to setup a new XSAN in our Lab.

On thursday, we invited John and Roberto, the guys from Apple, for a get-together at a local pub, Blind Pig. The night turned into a nice little office social and our guests seemed to be pretty impressed with the hospitality and the “awesomeness” that Oxford had to offer.:)

Friday was a long day. The engineers left and I worked on rebuilding the workflow, imaging the systems and getting the lab back into business. I missed most of the exercise schedule during this week, except some basketball on Tuesday and some Tennis today.

I recieved Rakhris in the mail from my sister in Texas and Canada. I remembered the days past by, the days in India and felt nostalgic for a little while.

Friday evening, department of student life had arranged an ice-cream social, where a 15 minute documentary - Celebrate What’s Right With The World was shown. A beautiful vision and very nicesly shot documentary.

Next week is going to be busy. But for now, I’m enjoying the weekend and reading a book on typography - Thinking in Type. It has been pretty interesting read so far.

I have started using Git over Subversion. Following is the list of my git configurations.

[Read more →]

I spent some time today watching a couple of videos.

The first one was Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy who died on July 25, 2008 was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University and creator of Alice.

It was a heart-touching and inspiring talk. I have seen there is one commonality in all great men - mastery of effective communication skills.

[Read more →]

Coming from Linux background, while working on OS X shell, I still cannot abandon my old Linux habits. A common one is trying to use wget instead of curl for downloading stuff.

Just out just curiosity, I was wondering why OS X supports curl, but no wget in the OS.

I came across this interesting page doing comparison of the two.

I work with Ruby on Leopard and and I need RMagick.

If you are a programmer and don’t know what RMagick is, you should know how code can melt your picture into art in Ruby:).

[Read more →]

For the last half an hour I have been playing with Git. Project I’m working on my laptop is version tracked by git. However what is the fun of using version control without a remote server.

As soon as I pushed my project directory to my remote OS X Tiger server, I got the following error.

    bash: line 1: git-receive-pack: command not found
    fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Google comes to rescue.

    Many installations of sshd do not invoke your shell as the login shell when you directly run programs; what this means is that if your login shell is bash, only .bashrc is read and not .bash_profile. As a workaround, make sure .bashrc sets up $PATH so that you can run git-receive-pack program.

Running following two lines solved the problem.

echo export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Although it is one of the first chapters one read when starting with Linux/Unix, it is always confusing where should we put what when it comes to installing stuff on Linux/OS X computers.

I found a detailed reference Filesystem Hierarchy standard website.

It is also worth knowing, why is it important to store any new customized apps in /usr/local.