Domain Maximus

Afficianados Aficionados (just like fans but with better teeth and gold credit cards) of this blog will be well aware of the many changes that have taken place to Domain Maximus over the last five years or so. It all began as an email newsletter which ran for a year or so before finding a very happy home at sidin.blogspot.com. The blogspot site saw the blog mature, find itself in a Zen sort of way, and settle down to the sporadic rhythm it has now.

And then in May of last year I moved everything to this whatay dedicated domain. With rising traffic and a more vigorous freelance writing career I figured I needed a better, more personalized showcase of my writings. The wordpress platform gives it flexibility and customization that was simply unimaginable on Blogger. But apparently more than that has changed on this blog. Sob.

Middle of last week I came across this link.

The Blog Readability Test ‘apparently’ goes through the content on your blog and determines the education level required to understand what’s going on. This is a fun thing to do for the avid blogger unless, of course, THIS is what the site had to say about the very blog you are on right now…

Hmm. Elementary school. Damn! And here I was, thinking Whatay was all about erudition and insightful humour and intellectually enriched conversation.

Apparently we are all little kids with leaky noses and tiffin boxes.

But the slap in the face was yet to come. (And I WILL tell teacher about it too!) Guess what happened when I typed in the trusty but forgotten blogspot url:

DAMMIT!

What has happened to Domain Maximus? Are any of you sensing a general lowering in intelligence levels? Am I using one word where I should use a paragraph with footnotes? Shorter sentences? Perhaps time for a post on Shakespearean Insights into Metaphysical Particle Dynamics?

I am at a loss of words here. I feel dumb. Waah! Waah!

Can I go to the bathroom now?

Geeeaaaaaaaaaweewaaaaaaa…

Ah! Nothing like getting up after a truck load of work and then stretching and screaming in relief no?

No seriously. I actually do that. The wife hates it. Apparently I never did it before marriage. “You have changed Sidin!” she says while I download photos of Matt Damon and take large printouts.

Anyways it’s been a really tight couple of weeks and I’ve finally managed to salvage the time to bring your attention to an evil which is slowly eating away at the very social and moral fiber of our society. Something that is beginning to rear its evil head more often than it ever has in the past. A vile presence that sits like a benign granuloma on the spinal cord of our society and restricts the blood flow of unity and communal harmony to the population centre that is our brain stem leading to the subacute sclerosing panencephalitis that is mass cultural myopia.

(Many many House MD DVDs. Sorry.)

But before that, I would like to say that henceforth each blog of mine will come with a little banner for GiveIndia embedded in it. GiveIndia is a website that makes it easy peasy to donate money to your charity of choice. They don’t pay me money to do this, of course, and I hope the High Networth Engineers and MBAs amongst you will rise to the occasion by clicking through and doing your bit wherever you see fit. Charity begins at home page no? (Ha!)

So where was I? Ah yes mass cultural myopia.

What’s with this sudden upsurge of national political correctness? Haven’t you noticed it? When suddenly people are afraid to say what is blatantly obvious? Just so that they avoid the possibility, however minor, of offending someone.

Of course political correctness can be convenient in certain harmless situations.

“Of course your baby is lovely! No the moustache is cute.”

“No no. That is a good IIM too!” (Guahaha.)

Yet nothing drives me insane like one of those media reports, especially on TV, where they try to pass off “People from two communities had a go at each other yesterday with sub-machine gun fire. Riot police later controlled the crowd from a distance using only mind power as made famous by the Bapna brothers in Competition Success Review.” instead of just coming clean and admitting that the Buddhists and Bahais are at it again.

First there was that Aaja Nachle thing. And then the Sikhs of Lucknow filed cases against poor Anilbhai. And now the recent discoveries about my cellphone.

What did you say? No idea what happened to my cellphone? None at all?

Sigh. Socially networked society it seems. Citizen journalism will change our world they say. Pshaw!

Texting messages is one of the great modes of communication of this day and age. After a hectic day in the office nothing warms the heart like sending a message of extreme naughtiness to the wife. But then “Darth Vader Woman in HR” is just next to “Darling” in the phone book and often hilarity ensues due to digit-al mishaps.

So imagine my chagrin when I discover that the Brick, as I affectionately call my P990i when I wear hip hugging jeans, has a predictive text input that is so prudish that it makes an Indian parish priest look like an American parish priest.

Let me explain.

My cellphone uses what is known as a T9 dictionary. This is the thing that gives your predictive text input thing work. So you don’t have to go punching forever on your teeny mobile keypad to get simple words out. (Try doing the phrase “I was flabbergasted when I perused the entry for appendicitis in an encyclopedia my dear Parthasaarathy!.”)

Yet I know the smartest people who don’t get the hang of predictive text input. High funda software engineer processes Laplace transforms and does Matrix multiplications in his head over a Hazelnut Cappuccino. But tell him to sms you what he’s sipping and watch the genius sweat over his keyboard.

But all the difficulties of T9 pale in comparison to the indignation I felt when I discovered that the Brick comes factory-installed with a dictionary that has all the good words pruned out of it already. Is this another sign of the moral decrepitude of our times?

I am afraid so.

For instance when I am thoroughly angry with someone I need to send out a message like “NO! YOU are a dial head!” This is because the word I am looking for (rhymes with drick) is not available on my phone. The closest available choice is ‘dial’. I could call it Richard. But that could become an annoying habit.

You’ve been late with a column submission and got beaten black and blue by the newspaper person? The best you can do is “I got batch-slapped by that Hindu person again today!” This is because my phone does not believe in the existence of the female of the canine species at all. “Where do puppies come from?” is not a question my phone ever asks itself.

No reference can be made to the posterior region of the human body with any suitable word except ‘booty’and ‘butt’. Words such as ass / arse / fanny / back-end / doublebubble are simply missing from the T9 dictionary. If this was before marriage I would have asked aloud in agony: “What is wrong with the posterior for god’s sake? I think it’s mighty fine and deserves wide appreciation!” Today I have no interest in such things at all. In fact you should ignore this last point completely.

I cannot call anyone a ‘moron’, ‘nincompoop’, ‘imbecile’, ‘slut’ or even ‘dufus’. All perfectly good words in the English language. But my phone will have none of it. Apparently such words are beneath it.

Instead it cheerfully throws up such conversational gems as ‘incontinence’, ‘Hilcote’, ‘tundra’ and my personal favourite: ‘hernia’d’.

‘hernia’d’

Definition: The situation of having a hernia thrown at oneself at great speed without warning.

Use in a sentence: “Sidin was writing a poem about the Asiad, could not find a rhyming word for some time, before he picked up his phone and observed ‘hernia’d’.”

Important Note: Be EXTREMELY careful when sending T9 composed message to any girl named Rashmi.

Yes my phone has ‘screwdriver’. But no mention at all of plain old simple ‘screw’.

As you can this has shaken my faith in the world at large gravely. Who knew such a vile conspiracy was afoot within the bowels of the mobile phone industry?

Is this happening to your phone as well? Is the phone trying to prevent you from speaking freely? Is it curbing your freedom of expression?

I think we should form an Orkut group and fight this immediately. When I pay for my phone I should get it complete with a full quota of words whether they seem unsavoury to the phone maker or not. Let us put an end to this menace.

Or as my phone would say “I’ve had enough of this asap. Time to kick some cps!”

I can now rest in peace. I have got my comeuppance.

Last night I finally managed to wrap up an installation of Ubuntu on my laptop. Minor hiccups aside, things like hardware drivers missing and wireless networking issues, I now actually have two operating system coexisting in peace on this laptop: Windows XP and Ubuntu.

This may seem insignificant to you. But in my little world that is worthy of a Nobel. Now I can use Ubuntu as a light and free operating system to take care of all day to day tasks while Windows can take care of the complicated stuff like downloading Backdoor Trojans and spontaneous hard disk formatting.

This finally puts to rest a long, long war of attrition between Unix and your truly that stretches back almost ten years.

One evening, during my third year of engineering, I suddenly got into a fit of placement pangs. All my usual confidence disappeared. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not exactly what you would call prime recruitment material.

This was the time when software had just reversed the poor trends of 2000-2001 and IT companies were beginning to flock to our campuses again. Everyone with serious job hopes were rushing to their rooms after class and locking themselves away with the usual IT job preparation materials: Shakuntala Devi, Edward De Bono, Yashwant Kanetkar, old Infosys question papers and the like.

(I have been told that things are easier nowadays. Last year someone from NITT told me that some of the top IT names don’t even interview anymore. All you needed to do was just clear the written test. Sigh.)

But back in my time a job with Infy was no forgone conclusion. Of course you could safely assume squeezing in somewhere between Infy, Wipro and TCS. But if you didn’t then the going was pretty tough.

Till then I had assured myself that software was not my cup of tea and I would save myself (one is cocky at that age and with that level of blood alcohol on a daily basis) for one of the tech or core companies. Bajaj, Telco, Volvo - the real engineering types.

And then one weekend morning I lay in bed and decided to quickly overview my career plans for a few minutes. But not for too long as the bread pakoda ran out after 9:30 or so.

Now I knew couldn’t program to save my life. The Meta syllabus included a moderately difficult course on C and C++. I’d passed through with flying colours scoring one mark more than pass point. (The highlight of the course was watching the professor, a high strung nervous sort, struggle with an early morning class on Objected Oriented Programming, break into a sweat and then finally faint into the arms of a vigilant fellow in the front row. I bunked that class unfortunately.)

I’ve often wondered over the years hence why someone would want a C program that printed out a pyramid of prime numbers. What essential human endeavour struggles for want of good pyramid prime programs?

“Houston we have a problem!”
“We know. Perhaps a particular problem pertaining to the pyramid prime processor?”
“We like the alliteration Houston!”
“Merely making the mundane mirthful mister!”
“Ok cut it…”

I sucked at most forms of programming. And particularly the fancy shmancy prime number, sorting, pyramid type programs.

But then what certainty was there that I could make it into one of those engineering firms? They seldom came every year and, even when they did, they picked up one, maybe two people at a go. Was I being foolhardy I wondered, as I lay in bed with an eye on the clock.

Then later that evening I decided that I must hedge my risk. I had to ensure that I knew the bare minimum to make it into a software firm just in case my core engineering dreams fell flat.

So I asked Tuhin Chatterjee what I could do on a war footing. The threat loomed large that I would have to give GRE and then do an MS and PhD because I couldn’t get a job.

“Unix man. Unix is the way to go man. That and Networking. Just focus on those too.”

He shared his thoughts during one of our many walks to the gate for chai and cancer sticks.

For one whole month I sat hunched over a UNIX manual and a huge textbook on Networking.

Who was that networking by? Ah yes. Tennenbaum. Andrew Tennenbaum I think.

After a month I thought I was ready to try out some of my newly learnt computing skills at our computer center, the Octagon. I briskly walked into the Unix lab.

Two hours later I was back in my room pulling out an old Barron’s guide to the GRE from under the bed and already mouthing words like apothecary and apothegm fighting back the tears.

It was the worst thulping by an open source operating system I have ever received in my life.

Why were there backslashes everywhere? Why was vi editor such a cold-hearted bitch? Why do I have to press seven keys simultaneously to scroll down one page? Why? Why? Why weren’t things like the way its said in the manual:

finger - display information about local and remote users

When in reality it was more like this:

finger - put in eye in one smooth motion to get in the mood for vi editor

It was a futile struggle. Around me Unix maestros were clearly enjoying themselves enormously:

“Hey there is a problem with my port. Can someone just finger me right now!” was the sort of thing one Unix maestro would say to the other excitedly.

I went on to pick up a job with an engineering firm where engineers worked as they were meant to: grinding and cutting and welding and sweating it out and coming back home with grease stains. Once there I was asked to design a project costing software.

For close to a decade I never crossed my path with Unix ever again.

Till last night. After much recommendation from a friend I decided to give this Ubuntu thing a shot. I followed the manual by the letter. I slipped in the DVD, booted from the disc, played around with my partitions a little bit, set up a root user and finally waited with bated breath while the installation happened.

As of now everything except the sound card and the PPPOE connection for the internet at home seems to be working fine.

I could try to get them to work too. I checked the user forums and there was a wealth of information such as this response from an Ubuntu expert:

This is bug 2825 (http://https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?i d=2825) . The work around is to ~# ln -f /etc/pppd/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

To which someone with a sense of humour replied:

I can confirm this bug. I am using a tap0 bridge to emulate PPPoE on a Globespan chipset-based USB aDSL bridge and the latests stable eciadsl-usermode drivers (which, btw are not in Universe). It would be nice to have an updated pppd perhaps backported from Dapper.
I know that Debian’s choice of using kernel-mode PPPoE makes rp-pppoe unnecessary, but I wonder if it would be possible to update rp-pppoe to 3.7 for those that still in using it.

I laughed heartily and decided I was ok without the sound.

So for now, between me and Unix, its even.

(p.s. A big hola! to all the regular readers of this blog out at NIT Surat. Especially Raghav and Sanjeev. Much love goes out to you guys! Now send me money.)