Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

Hello, there. As with all conversations in the future, it's hard to know exactly what to say, and what you'll want to know - what's important to keep, really. But this being my blog and all, I feel a little entitled to say what I like. So here goes.

I first heard about you around April 7, 2008. You were born, I hear, on September 29, 2008, at 7:05pm CDT (Central Daylight Time), which corresponds to Sep 30, 12:05 midnight at UTC, and 8:05am SGT in Singapore, where I was at the time. I didn't find out about it until I got an e-mail at 10:29am SGT.

September 2008 will probably be a nice time to be born - things are bad, but will get better, I hope. Global warming is all the BBC talks about - will all the horrific predictions come true by the time you grow up? The credit crunch is worstening, as America's economy slowly slides backwards. A global recession might start up soon. Voting has begun for the next American presidential election: will it be Obama or McCain? We'll know in a month and a week, or something like that. J. B. Jeyaretnam, a Singaporean opposition stalwart, died yesterday. I hope to be able to fly to America and meet you sometime next year.

There have been bomb blasts in India all through 2008. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, with Iraq getting slightly better and Afghanistan getting worse - but Pakistan is getting worse and worse. Russia invaded Georgia last month, and now everybody's worried about them nibbling at NATO's eastern edge.

I'm bored, so I'll stop; if there were any decent newspapers in Singapore, I'd've kept copies, but this - and, maybe, the rest of this blog - is all I've got. So there.

Labels: ramblings, the unnamed gupte

This post was posted by Unknown at 11:34 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment

Am trying to slowly slide my wake-up time earlier and earlier. The plot is to get up earlier, get moving earlier, so I can get home earlier, giving me a larger block of time to do whatever I want in, and more flexibility at the end of the day to meet that deadline. This week so far has been crazy: I've been barely squeezing in everything I have to do (except for the little bits which ooze out through the cracks) while also trying to do this Grand Transform (and what's the point, really, may I ask? One weekend day getting home late and it'll be blown to bits, I can promise you that).

As asides: Facebook comic one, Facebook comic two (NSFW!), and a TV show I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid. Those were the days! School sucked, though. And the independence at present in very nice. And no internet! I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those "Ah school I loved school!" type people, and this is my way of making up for it.

Labels: crystal maze, ramblings, time, today

This post was posted by Unknown at 12:12 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment

This iteration of the rms vs. lbt flamewar feels ... different, somehow. Maybe the moderation's still ongoing or something? Normally, us rms-siders are in the vocal majority, with a few anti-rms posts (as well as the inevitable showering jokes) thrown in for good measure. This time, not only is the discussion more fifty-fifty, but there's a lot more "doesn't GPLv3 restrict your freedoms? Isn't this all about the freedoms?" and "Without Linus open-source would be nowhere"-type comments. While the latter point atleast makes a reasonable argument (read it again: GPLv3 does not impose usage restrictions, only distributional ones), I'd still give the vote to rms. I value a free-as-in-freedom software stack a whole lot more than a kernel. The GNU toolchain is behind Mozilla Firefox, probably the most talked about open source software at the moment. I love being able to get wget or curl for my machine no matter what bizarre combination of systems I might be using (okay, one of those isn't GPL, I know this ... okay, wget->GPL(exception), cURL->MIT). And holy cow, GCC compiles MySQL and PHP, which together run the modern day library of Alexandria.

<

I was going to argue that Firefox is the most used OSS around, but - come to think of it - Firefox has what, a 10-20% share of the browser market? Optimistically? Google has 70+% of the web search market, and every time anybody hits Google for a search, all those Linux machines in the great Googlebrain are activated. But I suppose nobody really knows about that.

Ho, hum. I was going to write about work, but now I'm all written out. Maybe tomorrow or something. Man, this weekend could potentially get unbelievably busy. And House is back on Monday! Hallelujah!

Labels: free software, linus, open source, opinion, ramblings, rms

This post was posted by Unknown at 1:06 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment