Viraj's Weblog

We had our first exam in Chemistry and I got a 100%. Hell I never did this good when I went to school in the past heh. Honestly I seem to take school more seriously now than I did back then. Hopefully I can keep up the steam.

I had originally planned on putting class notes up on my wiki, but I realized that after I take notes I rarely ever look at them again heh. I've found the best way to remember or understand something is doing alot of problems at the back of the chapters over and over again.

Well this will work for the problem-solving classes at least, but not much for memorization. For that I try to look for patterns and such. Like for the chem exam we have this cation/anion table that we are supposed to memorize, and the teacher says "there's no way to figure them out." But actually all you need to do is memorize a few key items from the table, not the whole thing, and you can calculate the rest (ion charge, number of each atom) from the periodic table which is given to you during a test. Also doing alot of problems you learn to recognize them alot faster, and are able to know which ones don't look right.

It's all about familiarity and practice. I know some people who have photographic memories. Not me, I have to do ALOT of practice to remember something.

So a Windows PC my mom was using got hosed and it seemed nontrivial to fix it. I said what the hell and installed Ubuntu Linux. I just showed her how to login and start a browser (that's all she normally does). I think something like this is the best way to determine usability of a distribution.

The issues that came up so far is java, flash, and real audio not working. Of course no distro I've ever used actually includes this stuff. Is it really just licensing issues? Luckily Ubuntu has a wiki page describing how to install these. It was relatively simple, but could've been simpler.

The other problem is sound simply doesn't work. I found that out when Real Player wouldn't start and the process would just hang. I did an strace and saw it was trying to write to /dev/dsp and hanging. I didn't have a chance to look into this much, so whatever, no sound for now.

I think it's kinda lame that for someone to use Linux they still need Linux expertise to install plugins, setup apt repositories, and other crap that only a long-time Linux user can grasp. And forget about setting up a printer. It's almost like all distros are kept elite for the job security of Linux sysadmins. I would really like to see a day when a computer illiterate can use Linux without relying on a friend that knows Linux.

In general the system seems to be working and I haven't got too many complaints. We'll see how long that lasts, and when the Windows withdrawal symptoms set in.

So in case anyone is wondering, I've been going to school for about a week. At first I was very overwhelmed with the studies, and the summer classes are especially condensed. I'm starting to get the hang of it though. It's taking alot more of my time than work ever did!

I honestly enjoy the challenge. I know alot of the stuff I'm doing now is rather useless knowledge, but as an exercise, trying to memorize, solve problems, etc, is fun to me. It's like working out, but with your brain.

Probably the best thing I like is being able to wear shorts and rags every day. Man I am so sick of wearing office clothes! Students are here for a reason, and not to just jerk off. Everyone has a long-term goal, which I think is pretty cool. It's different at work in an office. Most people there feel they are at the end and have reached their goal.

This is not to say that I do not have doubts on my decision. In fact, I many times don't know whether I'm making the right choice. I think giving it at least 1 semester will help me decide if I want to continue this. Also, if I can't get good grades now, that will tell me it's time to go back to work.

I am not a big fan of Jet Li's blockbuster movies, however I do like his lesser known films. I felt like seeing a movie and saw that something called Unleashed was playing. After seeing the trailer it looked very interesting, and then I found out it was written by Luc Besson who wrote Leon The Professonal and La Femme Nikita. I knew it had to be good. His movies are usually about people ostracized from society but extremely talented in some brutal way.

It's basically about the Jet Li character being raised like a dog as a fighting machine. He soon becomes unleashed and gets to learn like a child what the world is about. It's a very dark movie at times, with Bob Hoskins playing an incredibly evil and convincing character. It's also a love story and has its sensitive sides. The fight scenes are exceptional, and it reminded me of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. There is a moving scene where after the Jet character experiences love and music, he is put in a pit to fight to death and tells his tormentor he no longer wishes to hurt people. Of course this only works for so long, with him only defending blows. But once the limits are pushed, the wild dog comes out again.

There is one very cool fight scene which I've never seen anything like before. It's a fight within a very claustrophobic bathroom. The walls are so close that just reaching back to throw a punch requires hitting a wall. The cinematography on this scene is pretty amazing.

The movie has alot of piano music in it, Mozart, etc. The character learns that he loves music. It was a great movie, but there were some teenagers in the theatre who pretty much were heckling the film and its music at the end. Throughtout the movie the music is by Massive Attack which are uptempo Matrix-like songs. It's still an extremely brutal film, so I'm wondering what sort of satisfaction these viewers were looking for.

I haven't been watching alot of TV so had no idea what this movie was about initially. What drew me to it was a previous movie also called Crash by David Cronenberg. Let's look at the plot outline of that movie on IMDB:

Since a road accident left him with serious facial and bodily scarring, a former 'TV scientist' has become obsessed by the marriage of motor car technology with what he sees as the `raw sexuality' of car-crash victims. The scientist, along with a crash victim he has recently befriended, sets about performing a series of sexual acts in a variety of motor vehicles, either with other crash victims or with prostitutes who they contort into the shape of trapped-corpses. Ultimately, the scientist craves a suicidal union of blood, semen and engine coolant, a union with which he becomes dangerously obsessed.

I loved that movie . In general, I loved all Cronenberg movies. They are so visceral and deal with extremely odd aspects of human behavior.

However, this new Crash is far from the old version. It's a story about racial tensions in Los Angeles, and I have to admit it's one of the most intelligent movies I've seen tackling this subject. It reminded me of Magnolia, where many different threads in the story are followed and they ultimately all interweave with each other as if through divine intervention. It shows how good people are capabable of evil, and how bad people are capable of good.

There is an interesting comment by the Don Cheadle character describing life in LA as being seperated from other beings between glass and steel and no one touches you. We desire so much to feel another person that we crash into them.

So I've been pretty bored lately and came across libgmail, a Python library to access Gmail. It's very much a hack in that emulates a web client.

But I was thinking, why don't I use this to write an IMAP interface to Gmail? So a few days ago I started working on such a hack. I'm sort of working backwards on this. Normally people would read the RFC. But instead, I configured mutt for IMAP, and started looking at some packet captures. I figure mutt's probably the cleanest IMAP client. I made my proxy behave how mutt expected from a normal IMAP client. Every now and then I'd refer to the RFC, but not much . In the backend, my proxy uses libgmail to get the needed info.

It's nowhere near completion, but I did get it to load up my inbox index in mutt. Here's a screenshot of my gmail account:

And here's a screenshot of mutt:

There are major problems in that when the message list is retrieved, all new messages are marked as seen. I don't see a way around this, since I need to get info on all messages to generate a proper index. I don't actually fetch the raw message to generate the message list, but instead 'fake' them by looking at the various info from the web interface (message date, from, to, subject, etc).

I'll probably post the code as soon as its in some usable state. But at that point, Google may have already released IMAP support . It's a fun project nonetheless.

Update: A few people have asked about this, and unfortunately I've had no time to work on it. It's in a pretty much unusable state. It only works with mutt and you can only view messages in the Inbox (cannot send, change folders, etc). I've posted the code here, but be warned it's unusable.