I went to grab water in the break area and saw the TV spouting news of Sanjay Dutt’s impending verdict today. And there was this anchorman telling the news of Sanjay Dutt leaving his house. Should I even honor the word “news” for what the anchorman told? Do we have so much happening that it has to be told as it happens? How is it going to affect me today – will I lose electricity today, will there be a traffic jam in Bangalore? It wont be even a blip in my radar – nor so for the billion people in the country – perhaps for the one or two souls called producers who have invested on Mr.Dutt. Things are rapidly falling the Fox,CNN way – I remember once seeing some thing like this : breaking news : 10.01 PM somecriminal has been escorted by somePD to the airport, 10.08PM : he has been seated in the plane, 10.23 PM : he has been served prawn rice, 10.40 PM : he has been escorted to the loo. What idiocy is this? How do I save myself from the idiot box and the idiots pushing stupidity in the guise of “news”. Will someone pull the plug please?

Today I removed my blog ka link from Thoughtworks profiles site. I had always wanted to do it – because it was kind of inhibiting my writing. I should watch what I say, be politically right – even though TW does not say anything of that sort – I felt I have to be a responsible citizen and not land TW in trouble. Now I can write what I feel about Karnataka Govt, the Indian Govt, Indian cricketers, Airport Road, people who park their cars on the road jamming traffic, the smokers who smoke their and my lungs out, the ridiculous property prices in Bangalore, the sad state of working children, our friendly neighbors P & C and so much more !! I thought I will start another blog – when I am this lazy to write in one blog itself – I will end up not writing on any of them.

Later !!

ahh…my 7th grade English teacher would have written a “V.G” for the alliteration in the title. Anyway – last week the nice folks at AirTel set up a DSL modem in our home – and life is at supposedly 256Kbps now. Had hathway cable internet till now – but it was hopeless – net was good for checking emails – sudo apt-get updates will never complete. The list of woes is endless and it all got sorted out after the bandwidth expanded.

Anyway here is what I have accomplished at home. A full fledged ubuntu “headless” server.

Subversion :

This was the first app I installed. You might be wondering why subversion. It keeps some of the files – like an excel sheet of expenses I have – versioned. I am trying to organize lot of stuff – and its time to get disciplined and versioned !!

Torrentflux :

This is one sweet app. Throws a web interface to the torrent downloads.

Wiki :

I have installed phpWiki. Why wiki?? I have been using it at work for the past couple of years and I have always wanted one at home. Nothing can beat the wiki when it comes to organizing stuff. The wife loves it too – the simple interface and the japanese zen like philosophy it has running through it.

mt-dappd :

Rendezvous for streaming music out of the linux box. So now my linux server shows up on itunes and can enjoy music from anywhere in the home.

It took some time googling trying to figure installing all of the above. And since its a headless server – I installed all the apps using command line. My advice will be to download the ubuntu server version – I had to spend some time configuring LAMP stuff – so it will be a great headstart.

Perhaps, if I have the enthu bug biting me will expand on each of the installation – but who knows when the next post will be…..!!