Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Baba Gyani Triviani said: " If it is not intuitive, it doesn't mean it is not powerful - it means that we should put an effort to learn it. And no, I am not talking about software " Let me begin this essay by talking very briefly (so as to not make it seem like my hobby-horse and bore non-technologists) about an editor called VIM. If you have any friends who are developers (and not hard-core geeks), ask them about it. Most of them would have barely heard of it, leave alone used it. Even those who have used it, will say that it is the least intuitive editor, that there are far more sophisticated and intuitive editors around. To be honest, it is a fact. Let's take an average person and ask him to use the editors - vim and Sublime Text. You will find that he will find Sublime a pleasure to use. He will not like vim at all. Then you ask him to do a bunch of tasks to be done with the editor, and watch him struggle with vim as he breezes past while using sublime. Why?...

Baba Gyani Triviani said: " I always remember what Buddha said - Desire is the root of all evil " My friend Deepthi shared this nice story which I felt is worth sharing with the rest of you. I believe she got the story from the "ISKCON Bangalore" group. The 99 Club Once upon a time, there lived a King who, despite his luxurious lifestyle, was neither happy nor content. One day, the King came upon a servant who was singing happily while he worked. This fascinated the King; why was he, the Supreme Ruler of the Land, unhappy and gloomy, while a lowly servant had so much joy. Later in the day, he sought the advice of his most trusted advisor. After hearing the King’s woes and the servant’s story, the advisor said, “Your Majesty, I believe that the servant has not been made part of The 99 Club.” “The 99 Club? And what exactly is that?” the King inquired. The advisor replied, “Your Majesty, to truly know what The 99 Club is, place 99 Gold coins in a bag and ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " Honour, it seems to be a forgotten word " "Honour, it seems to be a forgotten word" (or something to that effect) was the opening line of The Last Samurai . If you have watched the anime Kenshin  or watched The Last Samurai , you get a good idea about life in Japan during the mid 1800s. People gave a lot of value to honour - Of course, some were extreme in that, Seppuku being an example. Many of my friends have gone to the US for higher studies. I still remember them telling me that the US was not very different from India, except that there were lesser people, and the streets were a little cleaner (less dusty). They were vehement, and even said that the US was greatly hyped. But as time passed by, they seem to have changed their opinion, because with time, they have seen several differences. If you are reading this post, you are most likely educated (I won't merely call you literate) and if you look around, you will notice ...

Swami Nikhilaananda said: "Chat is cool, chaat is cooler" If you have used Pidgin, you would have seen the word XMPP. It will be really great if you have a look at this beautifully written article by Adarsh Ramamurthy on XMPP . In this post, we attempt to communicate between two computers via chat - And no, not using Google or Yahoo :-) I am using Linux on both machines. You can do the same thing with Windows. Step 1 , is to download the XMPP server. Let's call the machines as A and B. I stumbled upon ejabberd long back, and so used that. There are alternatives as well. On machine A, download and install ejabberd . I simply ran: sudo apt-get install ejabberd If everything went well, you will have it up and running, no sweat. Now, in step 2 , we will create two accounts. To do that, we will register them using the following commands. Oh, I am going to use Romeo and Juliet just for continuity from Adarsh's article. sudo ejabberdctl register romeo loca...

Swami Nikhilaananda said: " Are you a fool, for following the rule? Or are you cool? " I would like to state at the outset that I try to follow as many rules as I can while writing or speaking English (I don't know if I can be called as a purist because I don't think of myself to be that good.... yet ) but as and when possible, I correct myself, unlearn things that are to needed to be, and learn the correct usage. For instance, I used to say " Stop cribbing about it " but now I have switched to " Stop complaining about it " because I found out that crib doesn't mean complain in reality (Don't check Wiktionary, check a standard dictionary) and similarly, I say " The classes have been advanced " rather than saying " The classes have been preponed " I also pronounce tortillas as tor-ti-yas and tortoise as tor-tis and clerks as clarks . The reason I do all of this is because I know that's how it is to be done. B...