Some Sci-fi love

Sci-fi and fantasy as a genre have few patrons, the rest however are non-appreciative, or just downright insulting.

I not only love the out worldly experience that can only be communicated by these genres, but also the profound depth and messages these deliver. Yes, it's not real and yes it can never happen, but when has that stopped it from being communicative of human values.

I'm making a case for sci-fi movies like The Matrix trilogy, The Watchmen and television shows like Battlestar Galactica. Let me tell you by saying that I'm a big.. I mean really big fan of these shows, so it really grind my gears when people just go and watch these for special effects or just dismiss them as "kids category". The beauty of these genres is that they are the only ones successful in mixing socially relevant messages with entertainment. Others don't even come close..

Today BattleStar Galactica aired its final episode and I was in tears (yes geeks do cry, you just need to know how to make them cry). On the cover it deals with a race of humans (preceding our own, but somewhat still futuristic) in conflict with cylons (androids, which are almost humans), but at it's crux it spotlights human nature, both its dark and bright side, and tries to stretch the morally grey area in the middle to include everyone of its audience. The show was carefully engineered to instill hate against the cylons into the audience, the show then had the "good guys" commit justifiable crimes against the cylons, like torturing/suicide bombing (socially relevant ones at present), which although as I said, were justifiable but unethical, thus making its audience a part of the show. Its shows like these that make you introspect and helps you discover yourself.

BSG presented me with same moral dilema as The Fountainhead, and hands down, has been the best thing I ever saw on the tube. If you can look past the FTL drives, the dilithium crystal, the mental projection of cylons, i.e. all the jargons that alienate some people (mostly non-geeks), the message conveyed is pretty strong, you just need an eye to spot it out. This message is ofcourse hidden, if it wasn't, it would be a documentary. At some level, sci-fi/fantasy movies are documentaries after you peel the onion. Plot in these movies/tv shows is so thick, that it almost pains me to find people talking about it at a totally superficial level.

Take Matrix: The Revolution, the last fight sequence, when Neo is walking amidst darkness, rain and hundreds of Smith copies, and fights one of them at the end. The fight ends with Neo fighting Agent Smith and ending the war between the man and the machines, but how many of you noticed what the director wanted you to see? The song in the background was ancient Vedic hymn "Asatoma Sadgamaya", which signifies the victory of good over evil, the multiple copies and the darkness signified multiple faces of evil in dark times and the song itself points to the fact that Neo had already won the war by making his choice and knew the outcome. The choice, that architect was advocating in most of second sequel. The movie worked on so many levels, and each time I see it, I discover a previously uncoverd hidden meaning in the movie.

Coming back to BSG, well, that is the only sci-fi piece I know of that married belief, faith and science. It talked about angels & daemons, about gods, about prophecy, while still being mostly a sci-fi show.This show made some startling plot twists by projecting one of its main protagonist as a real angel, while couple of others as some sort of agents of "God", who play major role in turn of events. It tried to perpetrate the existence of destiny, of hope, of human values.. kudos to the BSG team, when they could have just got about same TRP ratings, had they shown a nonsensical, visual effects loaded series.

Watchmen, is another such movie. I read the book about two years ago, and I must say that although I don't really like the casting (except Silk Spectre ofcourse), it conveys the real essence of the book (not what Harry Potter movies did to the books). The book is more detailed, of course, but movie comes quite close. It makes you see the world from the eyes of the demented comedian, the omniscient Dr Manhattan, the genius..yet human Veidt, the idealist Rorschach, the observer Night Owl. I really love how the actions of each superhero is justified by their portrayed viewpoints, and forces the reader/viewer to agree with writer.

Sci-fi has come a long way from "Attack of Mars" to BSG/Matrix, it deserves prime time... definitely more than the mind numbing reality shows and soaps. Isn't it time the kirks, spocks, jon shephards, adamas, starbucks,trips, gaetas,McCays etc got more attention than "gossip girl" or Simon Cowell?

Car hack..

As all of you know (if you read the earlier post), that my car has a Bose audio system. It sounds really awesome with 7 speaker surround sound and 9 subwoofers and/or pods (the term am not sure of but my car geek friends refers to.. sort of the refers to the speaker design that moves back and forth alot, so if you are standing close to it, you get a different feedback for the beats.. these pods are fixed next to my legrest, so the whole experience is pretty rad when you are driving).. ofcourse, I'm no audiophile.. the only speakers I ever purchased were the cheap Rs300 speakers in India, so my perception of the sound quality might be skewed.

Ok.. back on track. The only thing that this audio system lacked was an auxillary input to which I could plug in my mp3 player to (which is NOT an iPod). I went to the dealer and  was told that it would cost me $700 to replace the sound system, of course he had to bear with my loud WTF sigh.. there was no way on earth I was gonna do that. Next I went to some random car-audio store and asked him for a relatively inexpensive solution, and he showed me some gizmo for about $140 that interfaced directly with iPod, but did expose an auxillary-in.. but I didn't wanna pay for an iPod interface that I would never use, so I searched around for a simpler/similar solution.

Now fm transmitters were totally out of question, I had tried them and the sound quality sucked. Using that on the bose system was like tying a gold chain to a monkey. I noticed that there were tape/MD drive buttons and slots on the dash, but no tape drive, which led me to believe that there would be way to directly hook up a mod chip to that interface and get clean unadulterated music directly from my mp3 player (which is creative zen sleek iPhoto.. i know, it's relatively unknown, but it was the only mp3 player in my budget with a fm reciever in it). I googled "tape/md drive auxillary input mazda6", and voila! found Mazda6 forums where people were discussing exactly the same issues, and I discovered AuxMod in one of the archives, which was exactly what I needed.

Needless to say, I ordered it (but was definitely vary about the shady site), got it in a week by UPS, wrapped in torn magazine pages! Well, at $60, I wasn't exactly expecting a well wrapped manual with funky CDs that I would just toss into the trash. Next roadblock was installing it, the car-audio mechanics were charging about $200 for installation (I checked at two differnt places and they both gave me similar quotes.. another classic WTF moments), so I decided to install it myself (against the advice from all my friends/roommate and the ridicule by the car-audio mechanic who gave me a "yeah right" look ). My housemate let me borrow his tool set for my little adventure.

Had to rip open the cup holder, the gear interface, the glove compartment and the whole dash to reach the damn radio. Took me 4 friggin hours to install it and route the auxillary cable inside the armrest. After battling through some unmodular interfaces, weird sockets, mind numbingly complex plugs and being almost starved, dehydrated and exhausted to the point of unconsiousness, I pulled it off. This was one hack, not for the faint hearted.

It worked like a charm and was a totally rewarding experience. Finally.. took a long cold shower, took her out for a spin and treated myself with some bhel-puri and jal-jeera at Lucky Dhaba :)

Lens Fetish

I think its time I introduced you to my new love.. Canon Rebel XT. I had iffy affairs with couple of point and shoots and one really prehistoric film camera but there was something always missing in our relationship. I purchased this camera at a black friday sale last year and have never looked back since. I know I know.. she is not as good looking as Nikon D200 or as smart as Canon 5D.. but she gets me and I know that we are meant for each other. We had couple of lenses, filters, a tripod and a remote control together.. we are really settled now for some time.

Jokes aside.. I am still an amateur photographer.. infact I can safely say that I know most of the theory that goes into photography (after reading few books, manuals, articles and watching some videos)... but still suck at executing them. Exceptional photographs take a lot of patience, skill and time. If I take a 100 pictures in a day.. only 5 to 10 of them are worth keeping (which eventually make it to my flickr page). I have the most inexpensive gear that one can get and all individual items are less than $200 (thats dirt cheap if you ask any photographer)... This does mean that I have compromised alot on the build and optical quality of the lenses, but come on.. you don't learn drifting on a BMW with traction control :P .. and hey thats just my way of looking at things. Am showcasing two of my favorite pics to add credibility to my self proclaimed "amateur" photographer status.. the mistakes in these will be obvious to a seasoned professional.

A lot of my friends are into photography at some level and often ask me about it. Since SLRs are not cheap and the hobby isn't really meant for casual photographers who just buy cams and toss them aside for "occasions", they are wary about getting into it. Here are my two cents to those who are just planning on purchasing an SLR (from a point of view of a hobbyist.. not a professional):

• If you never owned a camera before, DONT buy an SLR. Get a point and shoot.. experiment for atleast an year before getting into it.
• Decide on the brand: Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus, Sony etc etc.. its really important that you do your research before choosing a brand. Lenses are more expensive than the camera itself, so even if you go for a low end camera, you will eventually buy some decent lenses and quite obviously lenses meant for one brand are not compatible with others. (There are convertors, but you dont want to go down that road).
• Dont buy a high end professional camera.. go for the inexpensive one first. I say this for two reason: Firstly, higher end SLRs are heavy and huge.. you dont want one strapped around your neck all the time.. unless you are making money off your pics. Lower end SLRs like Canon Rebel XT are lighter.. though it still takes some time to get used to the fact that you cant shove it in your jeans pocket; Secondly you might not wanna go all the way.. believe me, photography gets to the point where you have to get into science and physics involved to get a good effect. It takes more effort than you think. Be kinder to your pocket and start with a cheaper camera.. if you are not able to take good pictures with a cheaper SLR, an expensive one wont do you any good.
• Buy a good tripod, but don't go overboard. Bogen Manfrotto 728B is perfect for beginners.
• Be a flickr group regular.. atleast be a passive listener there. The information and help you can get from people in these groups is phenomenal.. Find out a group that gels with your needs. You can find many experienced professional to help you with your problems.
• Read, read, read.. Read manuals, articles, tutorials on anything related to photography.
• Learn to use a photo manipulation software like Gimp or Photoshop.. and no, picassa wont do.
• Keep clicking.. I cant belabor the point enough.. probably the first few hundred, even thousand photos you click from your SLR will be worse than those clicked using a point and shoot.. don't give up hope.
• Explore pictures on Flickr, look around for photographs.. see their EXIF information. Set those values on your camera and try reproducing the shot. I find this the best way to learn.

Also accept the fact that a decent picture of you will never be taken once you get good behind the camera :)

Wrestling

Note :Do not try this at home without adult supervision

I have been using linux for the past 5 years and use it as my primary OS.. but once a while I have the "OOPS" moment. (No.. this does not mean that there is a problem with linux, just means that if it was any other OS I would have just done a boring clean install because there was nothing else I would be able to do).

I have got so used to larger disk space that when I installed Debian Etch on my "new" 900Mhz machine with 10 GB hard disk, I never put any forethought while partitioning the harddisk. I just went for the default 2G root partition and ~8 G /home partition. As expected, with my rampant abuse of the apt-get command, I pretty much filled the root partition. Now my 500G external disk was mounted on home folder and I did not need any space in there, so it made real sense to redistribute the space. Complication 1: The /root was on a primary hard disk partition and /home was an extended one so I could not use gparted and do any easy cut paste operation.

The right thing a sane person would have done was to cpio the whole disks, repartition and then cpio the stuff back and fix the tiny inconsistencies along the way..but no. I was crazed beyond imagination. I created two disk images with dd and tried to restore them after repartitioning. This wouldn't be a problem for the root partition as the size of the formatted drive was bigger than the disk image..not so with the /home partition. /home didn't have anything anyway, so I thought that even if the image got partially copied, I would be able to fix the number of blocks in the superblock. (Now you know the meaning of the phrase: Little knowledge is a dangerous thing). I had never used dd earlier and had no idea whether this would work.. but what the heck, its all about keeping the spirit of adventure alive.

So after copying the larger disk image onto the smaller /home partition. I ran mkefs2 -S to fix the superblocks and ran e2fsck -y to check the filesystem and fix the errors automatically. It cleaned out my /home directory.. by that I mean it deleted everything.(btw I also tried dls and foremost before performing the step.. these are industrial strength forensic tools.. courtesy of Debian repositories).

Finally I did a clean install but fell asleep half way while configuring it. After waking up I discovered that I had deleted the font files, X, gdm, and few other gnome packages while asleep. I couldn't figure out the packages I had deleted while asleep (may be I wanted to get rid of them at a sub-conscious level :) and no amount of apt-get seemed to startup gdm.. I gave up and did another clean install. Hopefully this should be the last install.. today. All the software mishaps predicted by Murphy's law have already happened.

This exercise made me realize how rusty my sysadmin skills have become since linux became all "user-friendly".. ah the good old rh6 days.

Harry is comming..

July 21, The day I was waiting for the past two years. For all the sane people out there who have no clue what I am talking about, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the supposedly last Harry Potter book is hitting the book stores on July 21.

The world looks very different now if you see it from the eyes of a Harry Potter fan. All I can see everywhere is the mention of this book and discussion of possible endings. Just yesterday while having lunch at a deli(not a regular one, this one is in the middle of IT campus and the customers are generally just IT guys), a group of 50+ year old people were discussing Horcruxes and Harry's quest in the last book... shattered my colleague's belief that Harry Potter books are for kids :P. Today Cecelia(of PhD comics fame) wrote about it too.

I will be quarantining myself for the weekend. That means no blogs, no mails, no IMs and no calls. Basically am just trying to avoid all the channels that can ruin the ending for me, especially I'll block out all the people who are Harry Potter fans.. I know they'll do the same.

I have never gone ballistic over a book before.. not for a movie, not even for the iPhone :P. J.K.Rowling.. you rock.