24 April 2009

Profile views

Blogger apparently counts one's own profile views. Strange.

23 April 2009

Slackware funny

From some of my earlier posts, a reader can guess that I am a die hard Slackware fan. I especially love the fortune program. Also, Slackware is probably the only distribution which can generate extremely racist, sexist quotes. The "-o" option stands for offensive. A hugely funny incident happened a few months back. A visiting professor had come to our lab and I suppose he had some familiarity with GNU/Linux distributions. I do not think he has heard of the fortune program.

So, I created a login for him on the lab NIS and asked him to test it. After he had successfuly logged in, the fortune cookie popped out was this,

"This is not your computer. This is your ass."

I read it, asphyxiated with controlled laughter and typed startx as fast as I could and while the XFCE mouse started blinking, I managed to control my guffaw. The professor was however perplexed. He turned to me and said

"I saw some message on the screen. What was it?"

I said that the computer emits random login messages and pointed out that his screen was up and running, it took me an aching jaw and cheek muscles to keep it down to a smile. However, he was not convinced. Scratching his beard, he asked me to show the message again; he wanted to read it. I was pulverised, however I logged off. The professor bent down to have a better look, read the message again. I was shaking with with silent laughter; he turned to look at me. I think he suspected that it was a prank or something. However, he said nothing further. I still get crippled with laughter recalling this incident.

It may not seem very funny, my English is not that good but the spontaneity of the whole incident will remain in my mind till I pop off.

17 April 2009

test post

written using elinks, a text browser

09 April 2009

Emacs multiple buffers management with tabs

I use GNU Emacs fully for programming. When one has a number of files open, called buffers in emacs terminology, it is a major hassle while switching. So, I searched for tabbed windowing within emacs. Unfortunately, in Google if one types "emacs tab windows" or some simple term, the results thrown up deal with setting the size of the tab character. However, here is a link to a blog post which I found to be pretty useful. I am trying out the ido package.