You think you’ve lost everything. Nothing works the way you expect them to work. It’s as if the end of the world is before you.
Then you see a faint ray of hope.
And you go on.
New year photo tagging
I’m usually not easily annoyed at stuff, but others tagging me in new year wishes photos can really take me to the limit. And I know I’m not alone.
But how can you make another understand how annoying it is? If you’re not very careful explaining this can even lead to loss of friendship. Why? Because those who tag the stupid photos really think it’s some kind of ritual or pleasantry that has to be performed and they don’t want to think about it beyond that. When somebody explains how annoying the whole tagging thing is, all what the tagger hears is ‘blah blah’.
Not everyone can think in the same way. You can’t just make others think the way you like them to think. It’s simple as that.
So unless you want to risk the friendship, never try to explain one how annoying what he does is.
Wiping out your race?
There are blogs. Then there are racist blogs. I happened to see one of the latter today.
The blog warns us that there’s a master plan by the international community to wipe out our race and goes on to explain how the plan is being carried out presently. Apparently that’s supposed to be a long term plan and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the authenticity of its claims. Pretty convincing, I would say. The message the writer is trying to give is clear. Open your eyes. Your race is doomed. Join and fight for survival.
What the fuck! Why would one be worried about his race being swept out? What good would it do if your race survives? Will the others feel alone without you? (They of course won’t coz it’s the others that are planning your demise.)
When a race is wiped away from the face of the earth, its culture and traditions would be gone as well. But what good would it do if they continued to exist?
None. Zilt. Nothing. Even the humanity would die away one day. The earth as we know wouldn’t be there forever. Some things may die quickly and others may stay a while.
I know that by now the reader may have taken me as a weirdo or a lunatic trying to make crazy remarks to get heard or something, but I don’t care. This is what I feel.
I love my race. But that’s only one side of the story.
Playing MIDI files in Ubuntu
I was taken by surprise when I found out that I could not play MIDI audio in my Ubuntu box. Apparently it has to do with your sound card. But still..!
One of the simplest methods to play a midi file in Ubuntu is to install timidity. Yeah, lovely name that. 😀
sudo apt-get install timidity timidity-interfaces-extra
You can play a midi file directly from the command timidity followed by the file name. For example,
timidity awesometune.mid
Or, if you want a GUI, you can simply type
timidity -ig
and an old-fashioned window will pop up.
Happy listening! 😀
World's end
Just finished reading Daya Dissanayake’s article on today’s Daily News titled Lessons from the Drowned World, where he goes to explain how the natural and man-made disasters mentioned in the literature could actually come true and put an end to this world.
The ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis has paved way to rethink the safety of the modern technology man is using to conquer the world. But should we really be scared? What if some sudden accident happens and the humanity along with other species is wiped out from the face of the earth?
There is no reason to shudder at such a thought. If everything is wiped away, so will the sorrows and regrets we struggle to suppress. Why should we continue to live if all we care for and live for get swept out?
We know nothing about life beyond earth, but that should not scare anybody. We will be going into oblivion, but so will our families and loved ones. Nothing left to worry. All problems closed.
Well, I’m not wishing for such an extermination to happen, all I do is underlining that we shouldn’t be so frightened of a possible end to the world. Let the technology go on its way without hesitation.
Stupid blog gadgets
There seem to be many bloggers out there who think that the more gadgets they have in their blog sidebars the better. There are those blogs filled with dozens of bright and colorful banners and gadgets that it’s quite hard to focus on the actual blog content.
MP3 players are one of the lamest of these. They suck your bandwidth and can become a reason not to visit that blog again. To make the matters worse, the pause buttons of some of these players can’t be found no matter how hard you try. :/
And why would anyone put up a Clock gadget on their blog? Seriously!
And then there are those long FB fan page gadgets filled with lots of faces.
Even a big visitors count banner isn’t necessary. Okay, I have a small one in mine as well, but come to think of it, what would anyone gain from that except for some ego boost to the blogger himself?
A dictionary bookmarklet (or a search bookmarklet for that matter)
So I was bored and wanted to test some of my javascript knowledge, I wrote a simple bookmarklet for searching dictionary definitions and felt like sharing. I’m a javascript noob, so it’s dead simple and is one of the most basic bookmarklets you can imagine. 🙂
I had trouble putting it as a link in wordpress, so go to this link and copy-paste the code as a bookmark.
The script first checks if you have highlighted a word in the current page and, if there is, searches for that word. Otherwise, it shows a pop up where you can enter a word to search.
This searches the Urban Dictionary, but you can change it to search any site you want by simply replacing the URL. Some examples are:
Google: http://www.google.lk/search?q=
Twitter: http://twitter.com/search?q=
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=
Have fun!
I love you Serj Tankian!!!
Serj has released a trailer of his upcoming Goodbye – Gate 21video. By today morning, 877 people have liked the vid and 12 have disliked it. Here’s a comment found in the youtube video page:
-Mom, can i kill 12 people?
-Why, son?
-They don’t like the new music of Serj Tankian
-TAKE MY FUCKI’N SHOTGUN!
Why the fuck would somebody dislike Serj’s music? Fuck you everyone who disliked the vid! Go and Like a Justin Bieber song, you freaking morons! Don’t even watch serj’s music! I WILL KILL YOU ALL!
Installing SCID in Ubuntu
SCID is a free, cross-platform chess database application. Can be used to edit PGN files and do loads of other stuff.
Unfortunately there is no PPA or deb files available to install the app in Ubuntu, so you have to get the tarball available at the site and install manually. If you try to configure the tarball you’ll get an error saying that it cannot find Tcl and Tk in the system, even though you have Tcl/Tk installed. The reason is you need to have the developer channels of Tcl/Tk installed for SCID.
Here’s how to install SCID in Ubuntu:
1. Install Tcl/Tk developer channels using the command:
sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev
(8.5 is the latest release)
2. Download the SCID tarball and extract in a temporary location
3. Go to the extracted location in a terminal and enter the following commands:
./configure BINDIR=/usr/local/bin
sudo make install
To run SCID, press Alt+F2, type scid and press enter.
Tip: Missing "Custom" option in Ubuntu Visual Effects?
In the Visual Effects tab in Ubuntu (System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects), there’s a neat little option called ‘Custom’ which can be used to tweak most compiz-related settings. It can be used to change the animations (eg: window closing animation), configure the desktop wall/cube, assign commands to windows edges, and such.
This option doesn’t come pre-installed with Ubuntu, so if you’re missing it all you have to do is installing the Simple CompizConfig Settings Manager or simple-ccsm.
sudo apt-get install simple-ccsm
Now go to the Appearance settings dialog and you’ll find the new Custom option in the Visual Effects tab.