Photos

Just a couple of random photos.

The first one is titled "Working from Home." (And you will be justified in wondering what I was doing with a camera: welcome to the pleasures of working from home.)


The second one is called "Noh Photography." Why? Because I went for my first ever Noh performance (I went to watch, just to be clear), and started taking a few photos before I was told, "No sir, no photography." (So sure enough the photos have no Noh in them; it shows the setting for a little tea ceremony they had first.)

Onam Flowers

Except for vague memories of having collected chemparathi flowers as a little kid, I can't really recall making a pookkalam ever. Let me put this one up here so that I won't forget again.

(From Saturday's Onam get-together on campus. Yes, UIUC does have more Malayalis.)

Bhopal

It's not new, but New York Times has a good summary of the continuing tragedy in Bhopal. Some of us were part of commemorating the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, but I don't think at that time we really realized that not much would have changed in another four years.

The demise of the blog

The death of the blog be blamed on Facebook (because it lets me make quick one sentence status updates). I'm afraid that sounds like one of those fast-food culture things: unlike the good old days when we used to sit down and read/write a long blog post.


Anyway, to keep things alive around here, here's a photo, from today morning. (Yes, parents are visiting, and brother and I took them around Chicago.)

Unicode 5.1.0

Unicode 5.1.0 has improved support for Malayalam.

And having the new code-points for the chillus means that the chillus produced by this keyboard I made some time back (quite some time back, in fact) are now according to the standard.

After 333 days

So after 333 days, today I rebooted my computer!

(The remainder is mostly a note to myself, so that the next time around I'll know what to do when things break.)

Since there was a kernel update waiting to take effect, it was a good idea to have updated the kernel-dev packages as well, just in case. In fact, this time it was indeed the case: on rebooting (after 333 days, sigh!) the graphics card drivers wouldn't work with the new kernel.

Fixing the video: Figure out the graphics card model (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285), and download the relevant software from the NVIDIA website. Run it and, like it did this time, it might want to compile some modules against your spanking new kernel. Let it do as it pleases. Things may not look quite OK even after this (I tried running xscreensaver-demo using a GL* screensaver to confirm -- and got a bunch of "GLX" errors). Check/edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and ensure that in the Module section Load glx is there but Load dri is commented out. The instructions I was following also had me edit the Device section to read Driver "nvidia" instead of Driver "nv" (so that, I suppose, the driver installed by Nvidia's script is used; not sure why that script didn't edit that into the conf file). Quite unexpectedly, at this point, everything started working.

Fixing the wiki: This is why I rebooted the server in the first place. The wiki on the server was a little broken, thanks to mysterious SELinux issues. It was probably a consequence of software updates leaving the newly installed files in wrong domains. I thought rebooting will fix all that. It didn't. What did fix it was the fixfiles relabel command.

And today's was the last lecture for the semester.

Spring

NIU shooting

This was in a mail from the Chancellor, this morning:

The University has learned that U of I student has been identified as the
gunman in a fatal shooting at Northern Illinois University that left seven
people dead and more than a dozen more injured.

The entire University of Illinois family extends its deepest condolences
to the friends and family of the victims, and to everyone on the
Northern Illinois University campus affected by today's tragedy.

(U of I being where I teach...)

Update: And it seems the assailant bought a couple of his guns from around here. I wouldn't have guessed we have any gun shop in town...

The frozen bike

That's what happens when it's raining and warm in the morning/afternoon, but well below freezing in the evening. I should have thought about it, but like most of the time, I didn't. I just went down and found my bike all frozen. And I ended up breaking the cute bike-lock key -- could be something about things becoming brittle in the cold, or maybe I just applied too much force against a key stuck in ice. On the brighter side, that was only after unlocking the bike from the bike rack.

Anyway, at the moment, I'm waiting in my office for my bike (also in my office) to thaw so that I can ride it back home. (It's fun to listen to a micro rain, raining down from the bike onto sheets of paper spread on the carpet. Now you know what I do with all those announcements I get...)

I'll update when I get back home. I hope the road won't be too slippery... (Well, at least I'm not trying to ride a frozen bike on frozen roads, like the last time.)

PS: Yes, yes, I'm back from India, safe and -- despite everyone's curiosity -- single.

UPDATE: Yes, I'm back home, safe and -- thanks for asking -- in one piece. (OK, since my mom reads this blog, I can't keep pretending that it was such an adventure. Amma, trust me, my daily commute is too short to offer any sort of adventures, even on a frozen bike. And then it wasn't frozen either, at least for the first half of the ride...)

Still in India

This time around there was little opportunity for me to take any interesting photos. So I suppose I'll post some uninteresting ones, grainy and shaky (which, unfortunately, is probably the most interesting thing about them).

Ezhunallath: the Deity's procession (slideshow)

In India

So far, in this winter break: Chicago - Delhi - Chennai - Trivandrum - Bangalore - Trivandrum.

And here's from the morning skies of Trivandrum, about an hour back:

A conversation

With a friend, today evening.

Me: Yeah it's a nice house. It's pretty old, but it's alright. In fact it's kind of too large.
Friend: You know what you should do about that, right?
Me: Huh?
Friend: You know what you need to do if you're feeling the house is too large, don't you?
Me: I don't know. I think I'll just get used to it...

<later in the conversation>

Me: Oh wait, is that what you meant when you said I should do something about the house being large?
Friend: What did you think?
Me: Well, I thought you were saying I should get more furniture. You know there's room for more furniture here...

Green Revolution, Kerala Style

Or so goes the plan:

The policy will be ambitiously aimed at freeing Kerala of all chemical fertilizers and pesticides in five years.

Onam

Continuing the tradition of the last couple of years, Onam was celebrated with much enthusiasm and good food today. We were a dozen, plus two kids, for a potluck lunch. I made an avial, which literally translates to something like "cooked stuff."

(It's curious that whatever I make tastes fine in my kitchen, but at a potluck it always turns out to be a little low on salt. Notwithstanding my efforts to correct for this by adding extra salt before taking it for the potluck.)

In other news, now I have an orange coloured bike.

Updates

Several things happened since my last post, which I would have recorded here. (Not that they are all that important/interesting, but very few interesting things happen to me anyway.) This is probably a good time to update.

Firstly, I bought an apartment. It's an old building, with a toilet flush from the 1940's. Once I move in I may have more interesting things to say.

There was a work-related trip to New York. I stayed in the city for about a week, making sure that I can still stay (somewhat) cheap if I want to. I met up with many friends, old and new, on the way to NY, in and around NYC and Princeton, and on the way back from NYC. Several photos still need to be looked at.

On Sunday I happen to be flying out again, to Santa Barbara. Hopefully I'll be back by Thursday night, just in time to teach the first lecture of this semester's course.

The day before yesterday I took my new bike to the bike-shop for the 30-day tuning. Which was just as well, because whoever stole it today couldn't have taken it to the shop themselves. This time around the person who took it demonstrated a fair amount of ingenuity, expertise and guts (breaking the lock, twisting it using a metal cylinder -- taken from inside a cigarette stub receptacle near the bike-rack -- in broad daylight on a working day, in front of the department). I did call the police to let them have a look at the cylinder with the broken lock twisted around it. (Now you know how to steal a bike if it uses a cable lock. If I knew then, I would have bought the U-lock after all.)

And, Happy Onam!

Donation week!

Made two donations this week. First, the second one. It was a rather "involuntary donation." And being not present at the occasion I couldn't do it very well. So, if you were the one to get my bike, I'll be happy to give you the key to the lock too. I know, I was being too lazy to use it properly, but I'd like it to be useful for you (or, if you don't have any use for the lock, I could take it back and put it to good use on my new bike).

That's the donated bike in colder times (and a light snow). Or see it here.

The other donation was on July 4.

Hello! Need Malayalam interpreter.

Déjà vu! This time, this happened over phone. Someone called me up, at my office, in the middle of the day, and told me that they are looking for a Malayalam interpreter in Brooklyn, New York. It was strange enough that I thought I'll help out by blogging about it (again).

If you're interested in serving as a Malayalam interpreter, will be in Brooklyn on August 14th or 16th (and I suppose you may have to be eligible to earn in the US), please consider contacting Mathew Salinas of aLanguageBank, at 212-213-3336.

And in another similar (but probably less strange) incident, someone mailed me out of nowhere (OK, from Princeton, which is not exactly nowhere), and asked me if I could translate a couple of lines of Malayalam poetry for her. Apparently she is working on a Ph.D. thesis which looks at subnationalism in Kerala (among other things). She's also interested in knowing the publication years of the poems. I did the translation, but if anyone out there knows the publication years, please let me know. Here are the lines:

> paaTam paaTam uRachchu naam paaTippaaTi pOvuka
> paarilaikya kEraLaththin kaahaLam muzhakkuvaan.
> nam navaraNangngaLil, nammaL than thyaagangngaLil
> naam rachikkumaapputhiya kEraLam manOharam!
And,
> bhaaratham enna pEr kETTaalabhimaana
> poorithamaakaNam antharamgam.
> kEraLamennu kETTaalO thiLakkaNam
> chOra namukku njarampukaLil!

CCA

I don't know if "CCA" stands for anything for you, but to me it invariably sounds like one of those things I would write about in my other blog.

Well, I suppose the next time I use the term, I'll be reminded of something greener.

"... inspite of the difficulties involved in conservation of natural resources for a varied number of reasons, CCAs still remain in the hundreds of thousands countrywide," says Ashish Kothari, founder-member of environmental NGO Kalpavriksh... Kalpavriksh is now in the process of publishing a directory of such [community-conserved areas].

Gender-neutrality and L337speak in Malayalam!

A couple of Malayalam musings.

Call me Anglicized, but one thing that I often find jarring in Malayalam is the paucity of gender neutral terms in common usage. One of these days I'll sit down and collect some examples and come up with outrageous suggestions to "fix" them. Or, hopefully, someone will point out that a process of fixing is already underway.

[Update: if India gets a woman president, would she be called "rashtrapati"? (For the record, and for what it's worth, I won't say it translates to "the husband of the notion", but rather to "the Master/Lord of the nation.")]

Now for the Malayalam l33tspeak. I'm not too keen on it myself, but I'm afraid I've already seen this being used quite a bit in the Malayalam digitalscape (though mostly unintentionally). If you can read Malayalam, you'd agree that the digits one through nine (൧൨൩൪൫൬൭൮൯) bear an uncanny resemblance to certain characters (e.g. ഫ വ മ്പ ര്‌ ദ്ര ന്ന െ വൃ ന്‌). Of course there's a little more you could do using English characters and digits. (*shudder*)

Back to Yoga

I'm expecting some body ache in the next few days, having rejoined a yoga class after more than a year's break.