Why are we so afraid of doing things we love doing? Specially those which make you feel happy.

Be it work, personal life, friends, or just anything.

3 years ago when I was at the brink of taking an important decision (personal and professional) – I read this article by Paul Grahams who went at great length to explain about two categories of people – One – those who make a living by doing things they love to do – and Two – those who make time and money for things they love by doing things they don’t love so much.

Quoting yet again from Paul Grahams article – How to do what you love.

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

Leaving HCL Tech and joining Red Hat in Pune was almost a direct consequence of reading that article. For the year that I worked with Red Hat, I had joined the elite group who actually liked what they did, to make a living. Whatever I did during the day, used to give me an immense sense of belonging and contribution.

Today, almost 3 years hence, I’m now part of the second category which Paul Grahams described in his article – desperately trying to be back in first category. Things are complicated now – even though I want to get back to the first category (and I can) – I still NEED to be part of the second category. I need this “piggybacking” right now.

With Fireflies from Owl City playing in the background and Planet Ubuntu open in front of me, I’m simply missing my days at Red Hat – the time when I was actually happy.

Missing the feeling of doing things I love doing.

“I like to make myself believe, that planet earth turns slowwwly… Its hard to say that I rather stay awake when I’m asleep…”
“Leave my door open just a crack… Cause I feel like such an insomniac…”
(lyrics)

This day shall pass too. Brighter days await
Hope shall never die.

yummm…

Yep! I’m running Karmic Koala

So if you are in a same situation as mine, you probably…

• Are on an MNC’s intranet which is being simultaneously used by a ton of other souls
• Get pathetic internet speeds, at times – measurable sometimes in BYTES!
• Even “git pull” takes like ages to complete…
• Any connection to Twitter is severed before it even sees light of the day!

The solution to all these worries is simpler than you think.

We can create an SSH tunnel to a *much* faster server and push our internet traffic over it. If the server is local, this will work even better – as your SSH on local LAN connections would be definitely faster than that on real WWW.

Follow http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/weblogs/azul/firefox-ssh-tunnel and create a tunnel on any port. Lets call it $PORT
Basically, you need to run…

ssh -fND localhost:$PORT username@some-fast-server.com

Install tsocks – its a Transparent SOCKS Proxying Library which uses the magic of LD_PRELOAD and patches the connect() call to appropriately use a pre-configured proxy (via /etc/tsocks.conf). Hence any call like…

git pull

becomes

tsocks git pull

Your /etc/tsocks.conf looks something like this (after removing all the comments)

#Define a local network for which tsocks won’t patch the connect() call
local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

path {
reaches = 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = $PORT
}
server = 127.0.0.1
server_type = 5
server_port = $PORT

Replace the $PORT by the port you selected when creating the SSH tunnel. Server remains 127.0.0.1 as your tunnel exists on your own machine.

To configure your Firefox to use this new tunnel, goto Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network Tab > Settings and make it look like

Add URL’s and IP ranges to “No Proxy for” field to exempt them from using the SSH tunnel.

That’s it. Click OK and you are ready to rock!

Link: www.vimeo.com

Rails 3 Update by Yehuda Katz from Wind City Rails 2009

You just can’t ignore his style of explaining things!

Problem Scenario
I migrated my blog from makuchaku.info to makuchaku.in – and wanted everyone who was linking to my “.info” domain, automagically gets linked to my “.in” domain. Ofcourse, I cannot change all the possible places from where my .info blog is linked.

Challenges

1. I want “.in/” to be served when “.info/” is cliked
2. I want “.in/blog/this-is-a-post” to be served when “.info/blog/this-is-a-post” is clicked.

Ofcourse, Challenge 1 is very east and straight forward. Just put up a redirection at .info domain and you’r done. Challenge 2 is interesting.

Solution
Goto your theme editor (old wordpress blog) and edit the template for which you want to setup redirection. For me, it was all posts and all pages. Next, insert this javascript code at the top of template code…

Thats it. Now whenever you’ll hit http://makuchaku.info/blog/why-makuchaku – you will be redirected to http://makuchaku.in/blog/why-makuchaku – sweet!

Assumptions
This solution assumes that your new blog is a mirror replica of your old blog.

Please Digg this post if it helped. Thanks.

Simple!
Put it up against a 23″ LCD screen – ha ha ha

I just bought a new 23″ Samsung LCD for my new desktop. The screen is so huge & so bright that the 14″ screen of my T61 actually looks timid when compared side-by-side!!

Accompanying the awesome VDU, is an equally well built CPU – It sports a dual core AMD Phenom 3.10 GHz processor, 3 Gigs of RAM & a 512 Megs ATI Radeon onboard GPU

Next up in my shopping list is a good audio system which compliments the 7.1 channel audio output my CPU supports! Looking forward to an amazing movie viewing experience!

I’m happy…
A ton of thanks to Sam and Sandy for helping me get the 23″ LCD!

Okay, to start off – I really wanted Firefox to come on the top… I’ve been a dedicated firefox user ever since and simply love the product. The fact that it has addons for any conceivable functionality – makes it r0ck even more!

However, to my surprise Google’s Chrome beats it hands down when it comes to speed of the javascript engine each of the browser deploys. Google has V8 tucked under Chrome’s (v4.0.213.1) belt, while my shiny new (nightly updated) Mozilla Firefox Minefield 3.7a1pre has TraceMonkey.

So why am I this sad today? Well… check this out…

Peacekeeper JS test – Chrome was nearly 59% faster here!

SunSpider test – Chrome was almost 76% faster

Chrome vs Firefox – SunSpider test, merged view.

I purposely ran the tests in side-by-side browser windows, launching Firefox tests just about a second before the Chrome’s tests – and to my surprise, I could actually (visually) see Chrome finishing faster – it was that fast!
Afterall… 59% or 76% actually does seems a pretty huge boost, whatever functionality it might be in.

Here are by browser versions… (both are stock builds as provided by repositories/online).

and  

Well… to me, this is healthy competition. Talk about the times when Chrome wasn’t there, Firefox used to make IE look timid. Come Chrome and now Firefox is doing the catch-up. Whoever wins, we – the end users – get the best of all the worlds.

That is like – have your cake & eat it too

However, I seriously hope that by the time Firefox 4.0 launches, its javascript engine is at par with Google Chrome’s.
And by the time Google Chrome matures, I wish it should start sporting the same plethora of addons as does Firefox.

From UI’s perspective, Chrome also packs an extra bit of punch, which I really like and would like to blog about. But thats for a later post.

The much awaited Karmic Koala beta is due today from Ubuntu team…

With a ton of new features – and as always, the bleeding edge of the Linux world, I just can’t wait to test it out.

These features include

• Gnome 2.28
• Software Center (replacing the old Add/Remove)
• Ubuntu One file sharing service
• Kernel 2.6.31
• Seemingly new video drivers for Intel based cards
• Movement to ext4 and Grub2 as defaults
• Uncomplicated Firewall
• Newer KDE packages
• And much more @ Technical Overview page

The Beta release is yet to happen – as the daily builds page is still reflecting the builds from 29th September.

GDM screen in Karmic Koala.
Sneak peak into more artwork at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Backgrounds

Can’t wait!!