Rahul gives unsolicited advice

Compared to the rest of the saturdays I've spent so far, I'd have to say that today was the most eventful. From 2 till ~4:30, I was at a panel discussion on research in basic science in India, with panellists mostly from the physics community, with the exception of one professor from the EE dept. Some really interesting points were raised on why Indian research isn't on par with the research output of western universities, how this can be tackled and overcome, how research in basic sciences can help the society and the country as a whole and the measures one needs to take to increase the research output of Indian institutes. With veterans and young researchers on the panel, it was a lively talk with a good amount of cross talk, a lot of anecdotes and lots of humour. I wanted to ask the panellists what role science popularization plays in increasing public and government interest in science as a whole and in drawing more students towards basic research in the sciences. I al...

I have quite a few git repositories, 2-3 of which I actively work in everyday. And for many reasons, I might not push commits everyday. Eventually, when I gain access to the internet, it's taxing to cd into each directory and run git status to check the additions in the repository and the commits that need to be pushed. Being me, I looked for an easy solution which would loop over all git repositories and tell me their status. And this is what I have found in due course - This article talks about the use of third party tools such as Repo , gitslave, git submodules and git fusion. This describes one of the brilliant bash one-liners that can be used for the same with a much lengthy and less readable version here . Here is a solution in python, in contrast to the earlier ones which are all in bash. Uncommitted is another such solution in python, although it only supports hg and svn. Another simple bash one liner can be found here . Another third party tool, on part with the ear...

I've always wanted to know how to change the password of a user's account on ubuntu, from the terminal. Apparently, I didn't look hard enough because one google search came up with the man page for passwd . It was this easy? Why did I never bother earlier!

I've been using linux for over 5 years now and I've had to reinstall one or the other version of it every year, and sometimes more. And every time I reinstalled it, I had to install the programs that I use on a daily basis, beginning from audio/video players to browsers to linux utilities. And I've always wanted to write a shell script that would automate this task for me. It would add the relevant repositories itself, download and install them instead of me having to do everything one after another. I finally did that today. It didn't take more than a couple of hours but I figured out how to write a small, 20-40 line, shell script that would check the system for desired programs and if not present, would download and install them. I had to search a bit to figure out how to take user input in a shell script, to give the user more freedom with which package or program to install but it was pretty straightforward. It's still missing the 'add repository' pa...

a link dump, that's what this is, one of my earlier drafts that I didn't publish. Thank god there's a meaningful draft that I can now publish as my brain is on hibernate, unable to write. http://www.linuxquestions.org/ questions/linux-general-1/ creating-more-than-4-primary- partitions-376698/ http://www.overclock.net/t/ 986632/more-than-4-primary- partitions http://ubuntuforums.org/ showthread.php?t=1634855 http://tldp.org/HOWTO/ Partition/ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/ Partition/partition-types. html#logical http://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/ html/partitions.html https://help.ubuntu.com/ community/DualBoot/Partitions   - windows bashing! :D... on a completely unrelated note, an oracle help site popped up,  apparently there are partitions over there as well -  http://docs.oracle.com/cd/ A58617_01/server.804/a58227/ ch_pti.htm#436972   the mother lode, the one ring to rule them all, the hidden treasure or whatever the funk you wanna call it -...

Almost an year ago, i broke the audio jack on my dell inspiron laptop. I was too lazy to get it repaired, which actually worked out for the better. I wasn't able to watch movies or tv shows on my laptop for almost an year so i ended up either reading up (articles on) the internet or working. And ubuntu was the sole OS on my system (as this problem has an apparently easy fix on windows). Until i found this solution on askubuntu   to the problem early feb. Granted, i wasn't looking for a solution before and i should've just continued using my phone for songs. I shouldn't have. It's a software hack to use the mic port as an audio out jack. As simple as that. The HDA-Analyzer   tool is a GUI for audio control and the script one downloads (after running the wget command) is a dummy to download the full set of codes. Mind you, having a proxy wall will prevent the program from downloading the rest of the necessary codes.   Actually, it'll even prevent you from downl...

As another one of my friends who was trying to install a linux OS asked me how to go about doing it, i decided to write this article.  One of the major hurdles in a installing linux OS is to decide which type of linux OS to install -  The more commonly known Ubuntu ,  the more serious  Fedora   or the bare bones   Debian . I don't guess many of you know about   Arch Linux   and if you are a noob to linux, i suggest you stay away from it. You can only start dreaming about it after using a linux OS for atleast ~2 months! There are quite a few lesser known versions of linux OS like gentoo linux and then there are enterprise linux OS like CentOS, Red hat linux and so on and so forth.  As far as i know, if you just want to try out a linux OS, if you do not intend to do any serious work on linux, Ubuntu is one of the best versions of linux OS to install. Almost everyone starts out as an ubuntu user or atleast that's what i think.  Well...

Well, im not a windows hypocrite. Or atleast im not still one. And i've been procrastinating from doing many things on windows. I've been putting off learning python though i have v2.7 installed on windows, i've been putting off learning latek though i have texlive installed and well the list goes on for quite a while, though this has been one of the most productive summers of all time. But everything changed today. I woke up at 6 in the morning, even before the alarm rang. And having read this  article  on minimalism, i had started cleaning my hard drive of all the crap i had downloaded* and i eventually had enough space and the right number of partitions to install ubuntu. I already had a bootable pendrive**, using which i can run ubuntu and then install it on my comp. so, the installation is done, and not even a day has passed, i have configured all the settings like proxy, my dual monitor settings, downloaded all of the updates in 1 hour (which literally took m...