No idea what to put here

these days i have a lotta things occupying my head and have always felt like writing something about them but my old nemesis (friend??), laziness seems to catch up with me very frequently. One sec theres this urge to put thoughts on screen and next i'm like 'This is so tedious' :p
I wanna try one last time if i can get myself to post again.


25th August 2007:
It was dreadful and to consider the fact that i was lazing and joking around at the very moment so many destinies were rewritten gives me the shudders. It was horrible. The true consequences are always felt later. When a friend passed the news, we dismissed it as a freak accident but once i got to watch TV, i realised the brutality and the horrific side of human nature. The very fact that someone thinks life is to be taken for granted is disgusting. I cant find words without stepping beyond the limits of decency to describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach(my vocalbulary fails me big time)
TV channels have decided that decency is the last thing to consider when u wanna outdo ur competition. Some of the pictures shown on TV made for such gruesome viewing and would have hardly qualified even as Adult only material. None even spelled out a warning about the pics being displayed. Horrific is too mild a word.
41 innocent citizens will never walk again. thats sending shivers through my spine
I've never felt so scared before. Never once did i feel so vulnerable. Those were places i had visited atleast once and even if i didnt have good memories of them, i atleast never despised them. Its blasphemous. I wish this would stop.
The fact that i was oblivious to the tragedy when it struck gives me the jeepers though i knw it aint my fault.That aint no consolation to me.

Its such a waste of human life that the utter disregard for it makes me wonder, if these people ever have hearts of their own. Would they kill their own brethren and let them die such torturous deaths ?
Maybe they would and thats the scary part. I suppose they never will have a conscience to answer to.

may all the souls rest in peace.
and to the injured, i fervently hope u have the strength to overcome this tragedy and resume life

Easier said than done but i pray life gets back to normal for all those hapless victims.


26th August 2007:
Just as i was reeling from the shock of previous night's tragedy comes the news that a friend's dad had expired due to a massive cardiac arrest. It took them nearly 2 hours to find a doctor qualified enough and he pronounces him dead on arrival. Most of the local hospitals were oblivious to the fact that he was being brought in and hardly cared.Their reason was its a sunday. The pathetic morons. Hope they rot in hell.
Its disgusting and when i realise that the guy doesnt have his dad to lean onto, i'm left helpless. His bro was remarkably composed and went through it all bravely.

May ur soul rest in peace sir.
My condolences to everyone there.

These two days did teach me never to take life for granted.

I have no idea what made me write this post. maybe i want to get rid of these feelings but i only hope everyone realises the importance of life for the harmony of all concerned.

Ads Galore

the first ad i understood while watching tv. was really an amazing experience especially with my dad explaining all the technicalities of the ad :)

This was prolly the first ad i ever saw on Doordarshan. The new Bajaj ad has this real good music on the electric guitar(???), which made me dig this one out. The ads really good. worth a watch :)

Its prolly one of the most comical and effective ads i've ever come across. Heres to the ad community b-)

Beryl continued

The Burn Effect-my fav :)

BERYL UNLEASHED !!!!

Beryl!! Hurray !!!!!!!!!!!!

Its taken me a week of relentless browsing, compiling, messaging and what not to get Beryl working in full flow(almost, only the cube's left out :) ).

My AMD rig was almost in tatters. I use an integrated graphics chipset, the ATI xpress 200G. With 2 giggers of RAM, and 128 MB of shared video memory, Beryl should work like a breeze.
But all good things come at the cost of painstaking effort and i found that out the hard way.

The problem is ATI is so screwed a company (i cant believe i'm saying this but yeah). They dont support AIGLX, the most commonly used rendering platform for Open GL on most linux machines.
Now since AIGLX doesnt work, i need to use the FGLRX driver with the XGL platform.
To accomplish this formidable task, i had to compile my own FGLRX module since my kernel hates supporting it. I use Ubuntu Feisty and kernel 2.6.20 something.
Then started all the trouble,
First the module refused to build due to lack of adequate compiler resources.
Second the ATI driver i was using didnt support my version of XORG i.e 7.2.

So whats the first thing i do ?? Try to downgrade my XORG to 7.1 which is supported by ATI.
Doing so, i realise the easiest way would be to perform a complete distro downgrade :D from the command line. Normally one would upgrade by editing the sources.list file, so i presumed the same editing would result in a downgrade. The catch here was that no one with a sane mind had ever attempted that :P
So finally when i do that, my system booted normally but all i was left with was a broken X server (the display protocol). The good thing with linux is that even though theres no GUI, the CUI provides a definite way out. The CUI is in fact much more powerful than the GUI and thus was a hope to recover my system.

Normally, when such a thing happens, my first instinct is to format the whole disk and reload the OS. This time i was close to doing that, the only factor that held me back was the presence of 34 movies and 50 GB worth of music, not to forget all my projects and custom files.
The very thought of losing all that devastated me. So i resolved for the first time, i was not gonna take the easy way out and would fix the OS.
Heres where i have stress on the importance of forums and the umpteen how-tos and the guides splattered all over the web and not to forget Shashank :) the best advice was to change the sources.list and upgrade back to Feisty.
That i did and then, realised that i messed up big time cos though i had upgraded, none of the desktop environments had been installed. So i start installing XFCE first. I like XFCE- i seem to like its cleanliness unlike KDE and GNOME which seem messy.

Then i realise that my original XFCE install was screwed so this was the same story. So finally i do something worthwhile and install ubuntu-desktop a.k.a.GNOME.
To do that this is what i had to do


Add the edgy main repos to the sources.list

sudo apt-get update

and then

sudo apt-get install -f libdrm2/edgy libdrm-dev/edgy libgl1-mesa-dev/edgy libgl1-mesa-dri/edgy libgl1-mesa-glx/edgy libgl1-mesa-swx11/edgy libgl1-mesa-swx11-dbg/edgy libgl1-mesa-swx11-dev/edgy libglu1-mesa/edgy libglu1-mesa-dev/edgy libosmesa6/edgy libosmesa6-dev/edgy mesa-common-dev/edgy mesa-swx11-source/edgy mesa-utils/edgy x11-common/edgy x11proto-damage-dev/edgy x11proto-gl-dev/edgy x11proto-input-dev/edgy x11proto-randr-dev/edgy xbase-clients/edgy xdmx/edgy xdmx-tools/edgy xkb-data/edgy xkeyboard-config/edgy xlibmesa-dri/edgy xlibmesa-gl/edgy xlibmesa-glu/edgy xlibs-dev/edgy xlibs-static-dev/edgy xnest/edgy xorg/edgy xserver-xephyr/edgy xserver-xorg/edgy xserver-xorg-core/edgy xserver-xorg-dev/edgy xserver-xorg-input-acecad/edgy xserver-xorg-input-aiptek/edgy xserver-xorg-input-all/edgy xserver-xorg-input-digitaledge/edgy xserver-xorg-input-elographics/edgy xserver-xorg-input-fpit/edgy xserver-xorg-input-hyperpen/edgy xserver-xorg-input-kbd/edgy xserver-xorg-input-magellan/edgy xserver-xorg-input-mouse/edgy xserver-xorg-input-mutouch/edgy xserver-xorg-input-palmax/edgy xserver-xorg-input-spaceorb/edgy xserver-xorg-input-summa/edgy xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/edgy xserver-xorg-input-tek4957/edgy xserver-xorg-input-void/edgy xserver-xorg-input-wacom/edgy xserver-xorg-video-all/edgy xserver-xorg-video-apm/edgy xserver-xorg-video-ark/edgy xserver-xorg-video-ati/edgy xserver-xorg-video-ati/edgy xserver-xorg-video-chips/edgy xserver-xorg-video-cirrus/edgy xserver-xorg-video-cyrix/edgy xserver-xorg-video-dummy/edgy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev/edgy xserver-xorg-video-glint/edgy xserver-xorg-video-i128/edgy xserver-xorg-video-i740/edgy xserver-xorg-video-i810/edgy xserver-xorg-video-imstt/edgy xserver-xorg-video-mga/edgy xserver-xorg-video-neomagic/edgy xserver-xorg-video-newport/edgy xserver-xorg-video-nv/edgy xserver-xorg-video-rendition/edgy xserver-xorg-video-s3/edgy xserver-xorg-video-s3virge/edgy xserver-xorg-video-savage/edgy xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion/edgy xserver-xorg-video-sis/edgy xserver-xorg-video-sisusb/edgy xserver-xorg-video-tdfx/edgy xserver-xorg-video-tga/edgy xserver-xorg-video-trident/edgy xserver-xorg-video-tseng/edgy xserver-xorg-video-v4l/edgy xserver-xorg-video-vesa/edgy xserver-xorg-video-vga/edgy xserver-xorg-video-vmware/edgy xserver-xorg-video-voodoo/edgy xutils/edgy xvfb/edgy x-window-system/edgy x-window-system-core/edgy

that should normally do the trick. In case of any problems, refer to the forums :)

Then came installing the driver. For that i had to struggle real hard.


i followed parts of various guides. One command from and another from another guide. It was painful to say the least.

First time i tried

glxgears

on the 7.1 Xorg, it gave me values in the region of 55k. Even an 8800GTX struggles to score 40k. What the heck ??? Mebbe my video card is better than the 8800 :p

Then i tried building the FGLRX module again to no avail. Kept trying real hard, was reading almost every available wiki on Beryl then i realised that Direct rendering was actually enabled.
Was pleasantly surprised for once.
All that was left now was to install Beryl and get it to work.
this time glxgears gave me sane numbers around 3k.

Good. So a simple

sudo aptitude install beryl emerald-themes

was all that was left and was accomplished in no time.

Now Beryl's installed and all thats left is to configure it and enjoy it in its full fledged glory.

Hopefully i can get the Cube to work and then it'll surely be worth all the effort.