A weekend in Chikmagalur

We had our department's annual picnic last weekend. Last year we had been to Monarch Safari Lodge. This time it was Eagle Eye Holiday Home in Chikmagalur. We left Bangalore on Saturday morning in a private bus with no TV or radio in it. To keep everybody entertained, we resorted to singing Bollywood numbers, old and new, with great gusto. Not one to be left behind, the bus driver took a shorter route which only served to prolong the journey with rutted roads thrown in for good measure. Adding insult to injury, he also kept asking for directions when there was only one way to go up. As we neared our destination, we found out that the bus could only go up to a certain point beyond which we had to use jeeps to reach the resort. Finally we reached the place at around 4 P.M. by which time it had started drizzling.

Verdant fields on the way

After a late lunch, we were given cottages (with thin walls and thatched roofs). As plans were being made for boating the drizzle turned into a heavy downpour. Some remained undaunted by this natural obstacle and went ahead with their boating plan. Some people began playing an improvised form of football, albeit in a badminton court! There were no TVs in the cottages, presumably to keep us closer to nature which meant that we couldn't catch up with the India-Australia cricket match. So a few of us got down to playing carrom on a damp board in the recreation room. That was when we noticed a wooden box in a corner which turned out to be an ancient Optonica TV. We managed to switch it on somehow. The resort had DishTV but it hadn't been configured properly. Hence we could watch only one channel at a time! It didn't matter in the end anyway as the match turned out to be a damp squib (somewhat similar to our situation at that time). The rain continued unabated as we made ourselves comfortable in the gazebo. The incessant rain also poured cold water on the campfire & the activites planned around the same, except for a brief respite during which some kids sang nursery rhymes of which "Twinkle twinkle" was the only familiar one. The kindergarten syllabus has changed a lot since our days ;-).

For the night, six of us repaired to the tree house. We were given an electric lantern to find our way in the darkness as the tree house was some distance away from the centre of the resort. The tree house wasn't as cold as we expected it to be. And surprisingly there were no mosquitoes. Hurricane lamps and a lampshade-moderated bulb were the only sources of light. A different experience altogether.

A tree house

The next morning some people went on a short trek (which I ditched). The rains had relented & we finally put the slippery badminton court to some good use. A group then left for seeing the Bhadra river. We went out to the pond where there were coracles and facilities for fishing. Then the rains decided to make an appearance & eventually ensured that we were delayed for lunch which meant that we couldn't leave the place till 3 P.M. The return journey was much faster and smoother as the driver took a different route this time.

A panoramic view of the pond

Chikmagalur is a great place to visit, but the resort could do with some improvement. The food wasn't that great and the facilities didn't match up to the amount that was charged for them. Nevertheless, a well-deserved break for us.

Tags : Travel

Posted by Rajat @ 9:49 PM   |  Comments

Doodle

I bought an HP PSC 1410 All-in-One a few months back. Having not made much use of the scanner I decided to put into action something which I had been planning to try out for a long time. The end product of my actions is below (*straight face*).

Here's how it was done :- the basics were sketched by hand and scanned. The scanned image was enhanced and coloured, the text was added and the bounding boxes were put in place. All digital editing was done using GIMP. A convoluted method I admit, but I did try using the mouse to draw. Of course, a Wacom tablet would have been handy here.

P.S. : If you weren't able to figure out what the doodle is all about, please accept my humble apologies - those were meant to be ostriches. The Wikipedia entry for the same should be helpful here.

P.P.S. : I just might post more of these here. (*runs away*)

Tags : Cartoons, Humour

Posted by Rajat @ 8:38 PM   |  Comments

Breathless Red, breathtaking Red

Sample these abridged lines from Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, which I am currently reading.

Indifference, time and disaster will destroy our art. [...] Greedy, shameless mice will nibble these pages away; [...] Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They'll blacken people's eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink. [...] While mothers destroy the illustrations they consider obscene, fathers and older brothers will jack off onto the pictures of women and the pages will stick together, not only because of this, but also due to being smeared with mud, water, bad glue, spit and all manner of filth and food. Stains of mold and dirt will blossom like flowers where the pages have stuck together. [...] Not only our own art, but every single work made in this world over the years will vanish in fires, be destroyed by worms or be lost out of neglect: [...], your red-tinted pictures of love and death, yours and all the rest, all of it will vanish ...

Ethereal, isn't it? Pamuk manages to vividly illustrate the ephemeral nature of man's artistic creations in the passage. But at the same time he makes you appreciate the timelessness of art. You can detect a hint of defiance in the artist's passionate outburst when he is speaking of art doomed to face extinction. An almost breathless (and breathtaking) outpouring of devotion and resignation from the artist. The missing parts probably take away some of the beauty of the passage, but that should in turn be an incentive for you to buy & read the book (You don't seriously expect me to type out two pages of the fiery stuff, do you? :-) ).

Tags : A Bookworm's Diet

Posted by Rajat @ 11:36 PM   |  Comments

Xgl on SUSE 10.1

What do you think of the image below? How do you think I generated it? Photoshop? GIMP? Some 3D image manipulation software?

Rotating Desktop

Nope, none of those. That is just a screenshot of my Linux desktop being rotated (taken using KSnapshot).

Yeah, you read that right. Desktop being rotated, courtesy Xgl.

I have SUSE Linux 10.1 on my home PC which is powered by an Intel Pentium IV 1.8 GHz processor on an Intel 845GL Chipset with onboard graphics card. I had tried to enable Xgl manually before by editing some configuration files using the instructions given here. That hadn't worked. But today I followed the method given on the openSUSE website and it worked like a charm (In retrospect, I realise that I had forgotten to enable 3D aceleration on my card :-)). I had also tried this on my test machine in office - a Dell machine with an ATI card. But no such luck there :-(.

The Xgl page says that my graphics card is totally unsupported (it is not even there in the hardware list). Yet it works. Of course, the display is a wee bit slower & Compiz doesn't support the theme I use on KDE. Also scrolling is slow and if I am playing music at the same time then the music gets jittery.

There are other cool things that you can do with Xgl enabled - check out the Xgl page for more details. The screenshot below shows one of them where pressing the Pause key gives you a thumbnail view of all open windows. Click on any window & that window becomes the active window while the other windows get back to their original state. This is similar to Exposé on Mac OS X.

Exposé-like effect

Now if you are thinking that all this is just eye candy and has no practical use, you are wrong. Some of these effects are useful in making the desktop more accessible to visually impaired users. The cube view is useful in explaining the multiple desktop metaphor to users. The best part is the chance it gives you to show off to others (As you can see your opportunistic host has already grabbed this chance ;-)).

Red Hat has something similar to Xgl in Fedora Core 5 called AIGLX. I do have FC 5 installed but I haven't checked this out yet. I am not even sure whether the necessary packages are installed. I found the installation process for FC 5 very unfriendly. I had been a Red Hat loyalist in my college days. But after comparing FC 5 and SUSE 10.1, I am hooked to openSUSE.

Tags : Linux, The Binary Files, Usability

Posted by Rajat @ 11:05 PM   |  Comments

A Bookworm's Diet

Since my last update I have managed to devour the following :-

• The Search by John Battelle
• The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (the first novel in the 5-in-1 The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Currently reading :-

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
• The Great Indian Novel^† by Shashi Tharoor

Lined up along the shelf for subsequent consumption are :-

• One flew over the cuckoo's nest^† by Ken Kesey
• 1984^† by George Orwell
• Maximum City^† by Suketu Mehta
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

† I bought these books from Landmark, using the coupons I had won for being first in the weekly intra-company quiz for 2 successive quarters.

Tags : A Bookworm's Diet, Quizzing

Posted by Rajat @ 9:47 PM   |  Comments