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.

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This Saturday/Sunday, I’ll be off to GNUnify’07 for a presentation on Fedora, titled – Internationalization on Fedora – What & How.

GNUify – Schedule | Wiki

Okay, just found out, I have the first presentation slot in the morning! phew! That means getting up again at around 6… whoa!

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On wednesday, I reopened the bug 206439 when Aman pointed the following to us…

Okay, this seemed a translation bug. Down to the debugging & I found that Comment 12 was where the bug coming from. Giving it a round of translation was the first thing on my mind… which was not very well received by the code. The code was parsing the translation & separating it for day names on the basis of length… not a good thing.

Ankit then suggested to keep the day names in separate strings, so they can be separately be translated. This would bring sanity to both the code & the translations. But however, this induced another problem… Since the day names were being used as “MTWTFSS” (initials!), marking Saturday’s S and Sunday’s S separately was another issue. Gettext has a rule to mark duplicate strings as a single translatable string. Carlos at #i18n (irc.gnome.org) suggested to use contexts in strings which are to be marked for translation… which led to this patch.

…now Evo rests in peace… atleast for two days of this weekend – during which I plan to hack m17n-db for bug 198325 to move my Mapper from a pre-pre-alpha+buggy version to a alpha version atleast!

It looks like this in its current state…

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The Official GNOME 2 Developer’s Guide

After reading a few pages from Ritesh’s book, I was simply mesmerized! If offers just the details you need to understand the what & how of GTK+ and GLib libraries.

The saying goes correct… Good books are worth all the investment.

Order your own copy for INR 495 (~= USD 10) with free shipping anywhere in India from FirstAndSecond

…waiting for the delivery… which is promised in 3 days!

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I’ve been long using FC on my system, not to mentioned installed it about a hundred times… but I never came across this option (actually I never knew it untill I saw Aman using it).

When at the boot promt (during the installation), use this

linux vnc

With *vnc* as an arg, the installation will drop you to a shell, asking you to do a vncviewer to the machine on which installation is going on.

Chk this out…

Taking screenshots of installation process is now as easy as “PrntScrn”

PS: I’m sure that other distro’s might also have this feature…

All in all… Tux Rox!

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Yesterday, the much awaited soccer tournament started with we playing with L&T. Though we lost 3-Nil but Pai (our goalkeeper) & our defenders did a fine job. While Amit & Salil lead nicely from the front. Lots of improvements will be required to take on the next team & i hope i’ll also step in the field the next time.

Red Hat Soccer Team – Image from Rangan’s Gallery

As of now, my contribution to this team was the RH poster & lots of hooting
…the contribution is set to increase the next time!

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