i was trying to avoid writing this post and had succeeded at that goal for almost 2 years. after some recent exchanges, i see the wisest move is the opposite. so, here goes.
via blog.layer8.net
The story of how Amazon EC2 was born…
05
Feb 09
A Clockwork Black: i was trying to avoid this
13
Jan 09
Jeff Atwood at CUSEC 2008 – Is Writing More Important Than Programming?
Jeff Atwood hit the nail on the head when he indicated that
Programmers should really learn how to write well while they learn how
to program. Being good at writing is really an indispensable skill for
all programmers.
05
Jan 09
Zed Shaw at CUSEC 2008 – The ACL is dead
Amazing keynote by Zed Shaw
Zed Shaw – The ACL is Dead from CUSEC on Vimeo.
17
Oct 08
Follow your twitter followers
Now you can follow back your followers on Twitter, thanks to
https://followtwits.appspot.com/
09
Oct 08
The oTeam Lunch Outing
29
Apr 08
DO NOT WANT!
Well the reason why I had to resurrect my old and unmaintained blog is that apparently, I have been nominated for the “Great Indian Developer Awards” in the “Top Committer” category.
I had no idea about this until now as I have received no communication from the organisers regarding the awards and I have no idea how I got nominated.
And I think this is completely Bullshit.
I don’t see any reason how I can get nominated even though I haven’t been active in the Free Software community since the last year or so.
I think there are many other people who deserve this much more than I do. Hell I don’t think I would even feature in the list of top 100 Indian Free Software developers.
To name a few, I would rather nominate the following (in no particular order):
- Gopal Vijayraghavan (PHP APC, DotGNU)
- Sayamindu Dasgupta (GNOME, OLPC)
- Kartik Mistry (Debian, OOo)
- Kumar Appaiah (Debian)
- Ananth Narayanan (Gentoo, PHP, Plan9)
- … and many others
So, the organisers, please don’t humiliate me like this and kindly take down my name from your God damned website.
I am just a Free Software enthusiast … I don’t need no award.
And in any case, I think this whole event is bullshit, just look at the other nominations and you will know. But that’s another story …
17
May 07
A reward from Sir Donald
Dear Mr Ghose, Many thanks for your extremely helpful note. [...] I owe you the customary "reward check", because these corrections affect pages of The Art of Computer Programming. To what snail-mail address should the check be sent? Cordially, Don Knuth
w00t!
Update: I received the cheque today! Check my flickr page for a scan of the cheque.
06
Nov 06
GNU Emacs with XFT goodness
Personally I have been using the emacs-unicode-2 CVS branch of GNU Emacs for a long time now. This branch will become Emacs 23 in the future and it contains better Unicode handling code in addition to some cool features like antialiased fonts (courtesy XFT and FreeType), copy to clipboard, etc.
I usually build a custom version of the emacs-snapshot package with source from the emacs-unicode-2 branch and some simple customisation to enable the antialiased fonts. Some of my friends are using those packages and I thought it’d be good if share those packages with a larger audience.
So I have set up an APT repository with those packages which you can install on your Ubuntu Dapper machine. To do that, first add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list –
deb http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt/ dapper main
deb-src http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt/ dapper main # for source
Then do sudo apt-get update to fetch the package list and then sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk to install the customised GNU Emacs package.
If you already have the vanilla emacs-snapshot installed then only sudo apt-get upgrade will upgrade your current installation to the new one. And yes, this package can co-exist peacefully with your emacs21 package.
Now to enable antialiased fonts, add the following line to your ~/.emacs –
(set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-8")
Now launch GNU Emacs as emacs-snapshot-gtk --enable-font-backend and enjoy the awesomeness 
Leave a comment if any of you need Ubuntu Edgy packages, I will build them and add to the repository.
Update: I have added Edgy packages too ! Just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list and the rest is identical to the instructions for Dapper.
deb http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt-edgy/ edgy main
deb-src http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt-edgy/ edgy main # for source
