Friday, April 16, 2010

Behold the beauty!

Aren't the so called 'insignificant' events often the ones that give you the moment that you cherish from a puritan perspective? Aren't these the times when your lips involuntarily smile ever so slightly? Aren't these the times when your throat lets out a brief chuckle and your heart feels a milligram lighter? Aren't these the moments that your mind archives in the briefcase of joy?

At least I think so, for the past couple of week has been a real bundle for me, a perfect cocktail of joy, indecisiveness, peace, disappointment, beauty and euphoria - all in impeccable doses. But then, it's neither me nor my story that would interest the reader. My intention was to bring to fore how grossly we remain aloof to the things around us.

Beauty is all around. And paradise is where you are. And when people say beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, they lie. It is not very often that nature is so benevolent and you get corrected of your mis-perceptions so soon after you err. One of my previous post spoke about the search for the beauty that was ephemeral and today the quest is proven preposterous and void. And why is that? Because beauty doesn't lie in the eyes of the beholder. It lies beyond, all so expansive and emphatic - everywhere. And beyond your perception. The cards are dealt in binary, you either see it or it just doesn't exist.

I was in for a surprise, for amidst my exam schedules and perhaps because of it, my sky-gazing sessions have increased dramatically and I happened to see it. Just another day, like the ones that had gone by in the past few days, but, it was seen today - quite emphatically, showing its disdain for my lack of vision so far! I rushed for my camera, for it is the only way to capture in celluloid (binary in my case) what your mind might fail to archive. I spent a frenzy hour clicking away with my camera only to realize the vanity of the act: you could keep clicking endlessly. Of course, I did come up with a few nature clicks which I am posting for my reader's benefits, but I hope to have conveyed the point beyond it.

And no, it wasn't just the sky or the spring blooms that are messengers of joy. I received an email one morning from a friend of mine, and as I read through it - I smiled. There was joy and beauty in it. And incidentally, the email too spoke in length about both joy and beauty. I spent an evening walking with friends and talking incoherently about a legion of things. I spent another entire evening with a friend of mine at the university talking about how routers should be scoped to be seen as an issue with the internet until they process data at transmission rates. On the new year day, it was a session of 'Vishnu sahasranamam' and 'Sri Suktam' followed up by a payasam with my friends that made the day. Aren't these beauty personified? Aren't these as beautiful as anything that you have felt and would cherish?

I see the point in people readily accepting things of nature as embodiments of beauty, but aren't man made entities beautiful too? Is it not radiated perpetually by things all around? In fact, if you were to look at it, even thoughts (I'd even venture to categorize them as physical entities, but then thats a different thought altogether) can radiate joy and beauty. And so Mr.X(Y) now asks - what should I be doing now?, and the answer would be - "See".

Friday, April 02, 2010

You too eclipse!

'Not even eclipse is so benign' was what I discovered when I was battling deadlines to patch up a project submission due later that day. Eclipse is one of the few OpenSource tools that I've respected for its utility and its awesome support community. Name a distribution of OS, and you are almost certain to find a suitable build of eclipse ready as ever to be downloaded and used by the click of a button. Well, so I thought, until now..

I wasn't trying anything out of the oridnary: just download one of the numerous pre-built archives that eclipse provides you with. I extracted the archive and wait.., let me back off for a moment. This is a technical post and hence I am at the liberty of adding in more details ;-). Ahem, So, I recently decided to run into "karmic koala' and had to undergo the process of builing my dev-tools from the scratch - hence the eclipse installation and hence the post. So, as you would expect, I extracted the archive into one of the folders and did a

pnsn@ubuntu: ~/dev/eclipse$ ./eclipse 

And bang came the surprise:

bash: ./eclipse No such file or directory

I went - what the hell?  Just to make sure I was in my sense I did an ls, chmod, and all the tricks that I could think of - even an exec!

pnsn@ubuntu: ~/dev/eclipse$ exec ./eclipse
bash: ../../../eclipse: No such file or directory
bash: ../../../eclipse: Success 
And as I was 2mm close to nirvana, I thought I should perhaps try out what my version of java said it was., and

pnsn@ubuntu:~/dev/eclipse$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02, mixed mode)


And so I figured out the culprit - the java was a 64bit and I was trying a 32bit version of eclipse. And the realization dawned - not even Eclipse can be benign! There's no way that you can identify the problem without an error message and there's nothing that can drive you mad than a queer error message that is not obviously related with the actual issue. Perhaps, there's an obvious difficulty that prevents the eclipse folks from figuring out these incompatibilities or  redirect to a more helpful message. Not my cup of tea- in either case. There's something that I can do, for the sake of my brothers-in-arm of the programming community who might face this very problem, inching closer to insanity and stumbling on to this page - without any further attempt at modesty, I'll be benign.