1. Three is not too big Three reasons is a small enough number of reasons to come up with on the spot.
2. Three is not too small In general, providing three reasons for a proposition is the minimum amount of work you need to do to convince or brainwash the other party in context.
3. You (generally) need to make only one fake reason You will notice that, generally speaking, you will have to make only one fake or made up reason (like this one) to complete your set of three reasons. Easy enough to get away with.

1. If you have a girlfriend, try to get her to come. No kidding, there are plenty of things for couples to do in Goa (other than the obvious) and you are sure to have a good time.
2. Rent bikes on the first day. There are people in Goa who will rent you bikes (geared or non-geared vehicles at your choice) at affordable rates. We rented two Honda Dios from a guy named Steve for 300 INR a day. Don’t  underestimate the kind of fun you will have just riding around drunk on empty roads, especially if you are an all guys group (like us).
3. Ethanol. Booze is cheap in Goa but make sure you don’t end up drinking Kingfisher all day – try native stuff as much as you can. Almost every beach in Goa has a bar and there is really nothing like having a Goan sunset sitting on a beach in Goa during sunset. Here are two specific places you might want to check out.
   1. Tito’s – Due to certain circumstances we could not check this one out but everyone we know who’ve been to Goa swear by Tito’s. You might want to pay them a visit
   2. Micky’s – One of the smaller places where you can kick back and enjoy. These guys have wonderful live music and an awesome crowd. While I found the waiters a bit too busy, you’ll, in general, be enjoying yourself too much to notice.
4. Residence. We spent our first night in an awesome place called the Varca Beach Resort. Though we did not shell out a penny, rates generally range about 35k INR a night at around the time we stayed there. Needless to say the place was amazing, with swimming pools all over and a proper spa + gym. For the other six days we were put up in the Jasmine resort, which, too was great. I found it slightly dull but I guess I was spoilt by Varca.
5. Buying Stuff. Shopping may be a concern if you have your better half with you, which was not the case with us. I did, however, drop down to Newtons and pick up a bottle of El Charrow Tequila, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a can of Twinings coffee and a bag of Nilgiri Tea. As mentioned, booze is cheap in Goa and one must make the most of it.
6. Water Sports Frankly, this was a little disappointing; not as exciting as one would imagine.

After hours of reviewing and proofreading here is the first usable version of my CV. I know it is not perfect. It never will be. And I’ll probably change it.

For quite some time I have been working on a simulator which we (me with the other awesome folks from http://robotix.in) would use to evaluate the submissions for our XAnts problem statement. I initially implemented the entire thing in pure Java (I know … What was I thinking?) but in the past few days have re-implemented a lot of it in C. The code I’ve written so far is up on github on my fresh new account.

A lot of my coding style has been influenced by what I have seen of the Linux kernel. The project is currently in its infancy and has absolutely no documentation (yet). I intend to release the first few versions that solely run on *NIX and will slowly port the entire thing to Windows as well. That should only involve re-writing some socket code.

I was getting started with the Google Web Toolkit and the Google App Engine when I ran into a very strange problem – I got a ** Unable to load Mozilla for hosted mode ** error. Apparently the Google plugin for Eclipse is not linked to libstdc++6 but to libstdc++5 – something my ‘Squeeze’ Debian system does not have.

Some googling told me that a simple sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 should do the trick. Upon that, however, the sweet little package manager gently reminded me that Package libstdc++5 has no installation candidate. Other packages which looked like things that could possibly work gave errors like Package libstdc++5-3.3-dbg is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source rendering me a whole lot of help.

After some more hit and trial I figured out I should just download the deb package and install it using dpkg. But that did not work since the package depended on gcc-3.3-base and I had gcc-4.1-base installed. Ultimately, overcome by frustration, I extracted libstdc++5.0.7.so from the deb package to /usr/lib/libstdc++5.so. I never thought it would work. It did.

I have a particularly nosy friend (lets call him R) who happens to storm into my room every now and then trying to convince me to give up on my sweet little GNU/Linux system and to switch back to Windows (it’s true, I did use Windows once). His typical line of reasoning includes any or all of the following:

• Windows has a GUI and hence is better than a typical GNU/Linux system where all you have is a blinking cursor on a black screen where you type in stuff to make stuff happen.
• Windows has better hardware support (having to install drivers for everything other than the basic system devices apparently makes windows more flexible).
• Linux kicked my dog and stole my girlfriend (or was that Linus?).
• Photoshop, 3DS Max and Dreamweaver (he’s probably right on this one …)
• Any other arbitrary point on similar lines.

Jokes apart, R does raise an important point – Window is not as unstable as most GNU/Linux gurus tout it to be (for this discussion, ‘Windows’ == ‘Windows NT’ and not the Windows 9X shit). The latest version of Microsoft Windows, Windows 7, puts up a nice show and it is probably easier to get a root shell prompt on a typical personal GNU/Linux box (just add init=/bin/sh to the kernel command line in GRUB) than hack into an administrator account on a Windows NT based system. So why do I use GNU/Linux?

Do not get me wrong – I love GNU/Linux, to the extent of being a fan but I am try to not have the holier-than-thou image some people try to project, GNU/Linux is the most down-to-earth software I’ve ever seen – it should not give you wings (reminds me of this XKCD comic). Nevertheless there are essentially three reasons why I prefer GNU/Linux to Microsoft Windows

3. GNU/Linux is free (as in free speech … well mostly). This may be a big deal to most people but I am more of a pragmatist that an idealist, GNU/Linux being free is important but not the most important thing on my list.

2. Logical structure – anyone who has carefully examined a Windows system and a *NIX system will have noticed how arbitrary most of the conventions on Microsoft Windows are while the ones on a *NIX system are logically consistent and generally well-devised. Why do I have to access my first partition at C:\? Where do all the header files go? Where is pkg-config?

1. Transparency and loose coupling – keeping the closed-sourceness of Windows aside I find the entire system, the way the components come together pretty opaque. I mean what is the registry? Sure, Googling will give an answer but adding another level of redirection has definitely made the registry system quite opaque. The same logic applies to mounting and unmounting devices – I can’t do a dd if=crap.img of=/dev/sdb on Windows! Another thing I completely dislike about Windows is how everything is so tightly integrated. In the Arch Linux system I used to run (I recently switched to Debian but more on that later) I could compile and run my own kernel, install a bootloader of my choice (GRUB, LILO, GRUB2 … whatever) and use one of the dozens of Desktop Environments that exist. Can I do the same on Windows?

I do not consider Windows evil (dumb … maybe) but it still has its place. And why not? When we strip down all the technicalities (beyond which many ‘geeks’ fail to see) all that remains are opinions, opinions which are never absolute.

For the past thirty or so days Anirudh, Anurag and I have been working on an exciting top-secret-not-without-reasons idea which we plan to be our start-up.

Currently we have a working client implementation on the Android platform and we will soon start working on an iPhone based client as well (and then maybe even do something for the Symbian platform).

I have not blogged in a while – have remained busy with both my ADC project and various things particular to the third semester in the life of an IIT Kharagpur student.

I could, however, find time to shift my blog from the free web hosting at http://www.000space.com to a paid hosting service. The PHP executes much faster and the URLs work properly now.

I guess that’s it for now, will be back with slightly more interesting stuff soon.

1. The Digital Circle

   1. For various reasons I ended up writing up a lot of code in Java. Though no self respecting geek will consider writing code in Java a worthy pastime, I ended up learning a lot. The last time I coded in Java was a around three years back and now I discovered I could do things with Java I previously could not. Specifically I ended up knowing a lot about the Android platform – well, enough to judge how crappy it really is.

   2. I set up this very blog. For the record currently the blog is hosted on a free hosting provider (http://www.000space.com) and the domain name was bought from http://www.dynonames.com. I’ve also, very recently, set up Google Apps on my domain – now I have a really neat webmail interface at http://mail.playingwithpointers.com.

   3. I am having a go at hacking the Linux kernel. Though I am nowhere near to writing full-fledged kernel driver modules or debugging kernel panics, I have learnt quite a few things. Currently I am following ‘Linux Device Drivers’ by Colbert, Rubini and Greg and ‘Linux Kernel Development’ by Robert Love. I know I still have a long long way to go but I know I’m getting somewhere (I know basic stuff about how the kernel memory paging, process management – how the scheduler works, writing a basic driver) and will continue to put in my best efforts.

   4. Learned miscellaneous stuff about GNU/Linux – things ranging from some basic GNU utilities present in a typical distribution to licensing and patenting issues.

2. The Offliners

   1. After two months of debating with so called logical theists I am finally a firm atheist. After a lot of thinking I’ve finally figured out exactly why theism does not make sense. Will probably write more on this in a later post.

   2. Connected with a few of my old friends. Though I could not connect as much as I wished I could, but I did have fun.

   3. Worked out big time. I hit the gym everyday for the past ninety days and lifted weights like an ox.

   4. Tried to learn up new things as much as possible – looked up Wikipedia for every small thing that struck my curiosity.

   5. Rediscovered coffee – I’ve already dedicated a post to this topic I think.