What the heck is this?

What is this thing I am going through? Life that is. Are the rest of you real? Or is it like the eminently watchable Spanish movie I keep watching whenever I get time? Are you all virtual images created by my mind?

I am a doubting Thomas as far as mysticism is concerned. I keep swinging between hard core atheist and reasonable, secular, private religious guy who always loathes intolerant religion aficionados. Mind you, this can even include atheism depending on how the proponents portrays it for the rest of us. I know that all modern common religions are plain stupid and wrong.

Had it not been for the indoctrination and conditioning during childhood, nobody would even care a flying fart about this stuff. Only dumb and opportunistic people who take advantage of them would have been practicing most of the religions. plus they might die a natural death minus all the extreme respect for the religious sentiments, much like other ideologies for eg. the real Marxism. And with this, at worst the religions would be as harmless a belief in astrology. No one will kill another for not believing in a tarot reader, right? Well, mostly. Wow. what a world it would have been. Kids will choose what to listen to at whatever time they feel an urge to listen to whatever stuff they have to listen.

Some part of eastern religions hinduism, budhism, etc might be correct. I am not saying this because of my possible conditioning. I came out of those effects at the right times thanks to less severe brain damage caused by conditioning in most of the Hindu families in Kerala (where Hindus are almost apologetic or ashamed in extreme cases about being religious). Probably the only bad, horrible thing in Hinduism is the casteism spread over every aspect of it. A dumb, illogical dimwit is considered a learned man if he has a sacred thread around his body.

Atheism sounds like a great idea if I was conditioned and/or indoctrinated with one of the Abrahamic religions and then started reading scores of books and listening to other points of view. The arguments in those religions are very weak or downright stupid thanks to the advancement of science. Lack of tolerance only makes it a thousand times worse.

On the other hand, I refuse to give in to the likes Richard Dawkins, as it is very difficult to believe it all starts when an egg meets a sperm and it goes to null and void with lack of electricity to brain. There has to be something more going on here than what Mr. Richard Dawkins is preaching. By the way, he is as much a priest as Pope would be, from where I look. He is an elitist and thinks he is superior because of this atheistic views about the world. If you have any doubt about this, try listening carefully to "The God Delusion" audio book from him.

Right now, I am a bit bored of typing. So please tune in for the rest of this. And please do comment. I would like to know honest opinions from other humans around. That is if you are not manifestations of my mind. If it is indeed, my mind is an awesome thing. It has imagined quite a lot about the whole setup.


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Learn Python in a few minutes

http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python

Use CVS in less than 5 minutes

Using CVS for your personal projects/little utilities.

Applies to Cygwin, *nix environments. For windows, use the extremely cute tool called TortoiseCVS or better TortoiseSVN.
If you want to use the power of CVS for your simple project, solely for the purpose of keeping track of the changes you make within a span of a few days within the development cycle, you can use a local repository of CVS. (Remember, you probably don't get file backup facilities etc with this).

Set your CVSROOT environment variable to the directory which you want to use as repository. For example "work/cvsroot in your home directory.
$ mkdir ~/work/cvsroot
$ export CVSROOT=~/work/cvsroot

Then you ininitalize the cvs repository by saying
$ cvs init

Now you import the first version of the code into the repository, by "adding module" technique. Suppose your root module directory is rootModule.
$ cd rootModule
$ cvs import -m "yor comment in quotes" rootModule ROOTMODULE_DIST ROOTMODULE_0_0_1

Now you have a repository with a module added to it. To work on it you need to "checkout" the content into a work area, say ~/devp.

$ cs ~/devp
$ cvs co rootModule
Now you have the entire module checked out into your ~/devp.
Make the necessary modifications to all the files. Once you are satisfied, review the references, cvs diff command.
$ cvs diff
It lists all the changes made on the console in diff format. You can view this in [g]vim which is the galaxy's best text editor. Once you are sure everything is alright, it's time to "checkin" the files back into the repository, (while retaining the ability to go back to your earlier versions, which is what CVS is all about).
$ cvs commit
It will let you know the files which have changed and ask for conformation. Once you are done, you may tag the new version with an appropriate name so you can use that version later if you need to. I found the following command helpful, but use your imagination here.
$ cvs tag -R -b <APPROPRIATE_TAGNAME>

And continue the above steps peacefully, knowing that you can make mistakes and correct them later or track them to where they happened. History is important, and not just for politicians!!!! Heck, it doesn't teach them anything anyway, but it does a lot of good for us software labourers.

The awesome 'team' of GNU autotools

When was the last time you ran "configure && make && make install"!!! Did you know it's best to run it from a directory other than the source directory? Yes. That way you get to keep the source tree intact and delete the build directory where you ran the configure and make without any trouble and start over.

Also, alternatively you could have a source anywhere in your network, and run the "configure && make && make install" from many machines of different flavors, like say, 'cygwin, linux, solaris' etc all from a common source tree on your friends gmail account (if you have a gmailFs drive that is), even if the source tree is read only.

Well, while it is easy to use, it's not that easy for a beginner to provide all these in a perfect fashion. You can spend a day or two to figure out which of the millions of resources in the 'wild wild' web, is relevant for you. I found the presentation pasted below to be great with its simplicity, well updated content and just enough to get you started.

http://www-src.lip6.fr/homepages/Alexandre.Duret-Lutz/dl/autotools.pdf

I did not know about 'autoreconf' till I went through this one. You can get additional information about a particular tool, specificity of usage etc, via any of the various ways like 'info', man, or the "plain old" internet.

Once you are through with the above document, which is excellent, just in case if I didn't mentioned it before :), you might want a refresher and more with http://inti.sourceforge.net/tutorial/libinti/autotoolsproject.html.

Have fun auto-tooling.... and tune in for more updates...

Technology Acronyms list

Common terms the protocol spaces are explained below with their full forms.

3GP.................3GPP file format
AAC.................Advanced Audio Coding
ADSL................Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop
AMR-WB+............ Extended Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband Codec
ASF................ Advanced Streaming Format
ATM................ Asynchronous Transfer Mode
AVC................ Advanced Video Coding
AVI................ Audio-Video Interleave
BIFS................BInary Scene description
BIFS................Binary Format for Scenes
CD-ROM..............Compact Disk-Read-Only Memory
CIF................ Common Intermediate Format
CLEI................Common Language Equipment Identification number.......... |..which will help in uniquely identifying a particular equipment with great precision for inventory purposes.
CODEC.............. enCODer/DECoder
CTMS................Cable Modem Termination System
DMIF
DVD-ROM............ Digital Video Disk-Read-Only Memory
Enhanced aacPlus....MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC plus MPEG-4 Parametric Stereo
FDDI................Fiber Distributed Data Loop
GIF................ Graphics Interchange Format
GOP................ Group of Pictures (in MPEG standard)
HBR................ High Bit Rate
HDB3................High-density bipolar-3 Zeroes
HDTV................High-Definition Television
HTML................HyperText Markup Language
HTTP................HyperText Transfer Protocol
ICMP................I/P Control Message Protocol
IETF................Internet Engineering Task Force
IPMP................Intellectual Property Management and Protection........ | Part 13 (ISO/IEC 14496-13):..IPMP Extensions.
IPv6................Internet Protocol Version 6
ISDN................Integrated Services Digital Network
ISO................ International Standards Organization
ITU................ International Telecommunications Union
ITU-T.............. International Telecommunications Union – Telecommunications
JBIG................Joint Bilevel Image experts Group
JPEG................Joint Photographic Experts Group
KLT................ Karhenen Loeve Transform
LBR................ Low Bit Rate
LZW................ Lempel Ziv Welch
MBONE.............. Multicasting BackBONE
MIME................Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.................... | an Internet Standard for the format of e-mail. Virtually all Internet e-mail is transmitted via SMTP in MIME format. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.
MIME................Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
MJPEG.............. Motion JPEG
MMS................ Multimedia Messaging Service
MP4................ MPEG-4 file format
MPEG................Motion Picture Experts Group
Mbps................Megabits per second
NIC................ Network Interface Card
NTP................ Network Time Protocol......................................| keeps time in sync with all participating servers.
NTSC................National Television Standards Committee (U.S. TV standard)
NVOD................Near Video-on-Demand
PAL................ Phase Alternation Line (European TV standard)
PCI................ Peripheral Component Interconnect
PSS................ Packet-switched Streaming Service
PSTN................Public Switched Telephone Network
QoS................ Quality of Service
RAS................ Registration, Admissions and Status.
RGB................ Red-Green-Blue
RSVP................Resource Reservation Protocol
RTP................ Real-time Transport Protocol
RTP................ Real Time Protocol
RTSP................Real-Time Streaming Protocol
RTSP................Real Time Streaming Protocol
SCSI................Small Computer System Interface
SDP................ Session Description Protocol
SECAM.............. Sequentiel Couleur Avec Memoire (French TV standard)
SIF................ Standard Interchange Format
SMIL................Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language............... | It is a W3C Recommendation for describing multimedia presentations using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). It defines timing markup, layout markup, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things.
SPIFF.............. Still Picture Interchange File Format
SRTP................Secure Real-time Transport Protocol
SVHS................Super VHS
TCP/IP..............Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
TIFF................Tagged Image File Format
UDP................ Universal Datagam Protocol
UDP................ User Datagram Protocol
VCR................ Video Cassette Recorder
VOD................ Video-on-Demand
XDSL................Digital Subscriber Loop
YCrCb.............. Luminance (Y), Color Differences Red Y (Cr), Blue Y (Cb)
YUV................ Luminance (Y), Hue (U), Saturation (V)
OLC................ Open Logical Channel

explanation for the name

"Alphazet"??? What the heck is that? Well, we know what alphabet is. Alphabet originated from A,b etc in Greek terms. So what if a dumbwit thinks the last letter in Greek alhapbet is zeta (following the anology from Zee in english)??? The results are blogs like alphazet. Ignorance is bliss indeed. Coupled with partial knowledge it could be devastating...

Anyways, happy reading....