typings of a random clicker

Ever since I read about it couple of years back, I wished to make the Kangra Valley narrow gauge trip. Also with the aim to complete all Hill trains.. Trips done till now
Neral - Matheran
Shimla - Kalka
Pathankot - Baijnath Paprola

Next in target Ooty & Darjeeling hill trains.

KVR is the longest route of all, 164kms from Pathankot till Jogindernagar reaching peak altitude of 1210m. For the first 50kms it runs fast enough covering the distance in couple of hours, with halts extra, then gradually ascending, until Kangra and coming closer to Dhauladhar range, then a steeper ascent upto Palampur, Baijnath with highest point at Ajhu - 1210m (near Bir), then descending down to Jogindernagar at 1139m.

Photo set on flickr

More on this in a photo blog post

corollary from prev post… debian testing/unstable dont go well with dialup! time to get BB.

to my utter surprise found that Debian lenny DVD-1 didnt have wvdial on it!
one explaination by kart_ was that most debian folks use something better than dialup.. so wvdial probably went out of the priority!

havent posted nything for long while, but couldnt resist this

Now I have a desktop (AMD X2 5600+, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 17″ LG flatron, DVDRW, Kubuntu KDE4). Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 didnt look too great, or until I figure out how to get around the Suse style interface! Anyways stop gap arrangement, untill I manage to get Lenny amd64 dvd.
Main use is managing photos & doing builds.

Other two in picture - my 3.4yr old Dell Inspiron 510m (Centrino 1.6Ghz, 768MB, 120GB, Etch) and office T60 (C2D 1.83Ghz, 1GB, 60GB, Lenny).

More to get, proper computer table, a UPS and maybe a switch!

just posting sitting in a plane at nagpur enroute to delhi

If you have a nice idea/proposal in Indic computing domain , add here http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/GoogleSoc2008 as we plan to sign up IndLinux as a mentoring organization & then hope for the best!

I missed Freed.in this time (variety of reasons), but anyways had not planned to speak there.. didnt speak at gnunify 08 too.. & the mood seems to be that I might not speak at any FOSS event this year, until perhaps i figure out something other than Indic L10n to speak about!

Randomly happened to be at FossConf in Chennai, which was quite good for a first time event, esp. the stalls by students demostrating their foss projects, some of which looked quite good.. only hope they put it up somewhere. Might try to make it for FOSS NITC in April.. I would be again in Kerala then after an year!….
Photos of Gnunify’08 & FossConf still to come.., time to figure out a better workflow for managing photos!!

blog is now back again.. an upgrade was long pending, along with enabling few spam & comment control plugins (thanks to nirav’s tips)
hope fully it should be regularly updated.. for now have to figure out how to clear space on laptop & how to manage 45000+ photos!

छप्पनवी उडान भरनें के बाद कह सकता हूँ - अब तक छप्पन

I reached BLR few hrs ago.. for the annual FOSS pilgrimage… FOSS.IN/2007 personally though except for some KDE Hindi checkins I havent done much in last few months, since i shifted to a regular job (with symantec)…

IndLinux PD is on 5th. Getting few IndLinux T-shirts done (hope they reach in time!)… & some stickers..

more later…ZZzz….

night skies are getting better again after 3 months of clouds.. and we have an unexpected guest.. in comet holmes (to be correct comet 17p/holmes ), it suddenly turned bright enough to be visible by naked eye..from a very faint magnitude of 17.. at the moment it is located in constellation perseus (see path map ) or read more here.
A good time to see if would be after 8pm, looking towards north eastern side & slowly moving up, till an angle of 30-40 degrees. or towards midnight look up straight over head & then turn little north (abt looking at abt 70-80 deg).. refer to star chart ( or try in kstars - close to star named Mirfak going towards pole star ).
If you are in a place with least light pollution, then can easily make it out amont the fine stars, as it appears as a tiny hazy globe (with bright center when seen through binoculars).
gee.. time to clean up my 4″ reflector