State of affairs in September

It's been almost a month since my last blogpost. But no apologies. I spent time doing some really interesting things. Some of which I am going to write about now.

I started off by applying to the various universities in the United States. Yes, I have finally decided that it's time for me to look beyond what I have been working on and learn some-more, but I haven't yet made up my mind if I want to do a Ph.D yet. So thinking of MS for the time being.

My employer had a press release last Wednesday on 24th September, and the project on which I had been associated with for the past two years was chosen to be demoed. So I worked on recording the demo (I have grown apprehensive of the demo gods. They know only one set of laws formulated by this chap known as Murphy) and editing the video to add some animations (I was told that the press guys may not understand it otherwise). And I did all of this on Linux. You read that right. No Adobe Photoshop, no Windows Moviemaker, but plain good old Fedora9 with gimp and LiVES. I used gtk-recordmydesktop to record the demo. I also wrote a pyGTK tool to display the CPU-utilization when the machine was running some workload, which would also reflect the state of CPUs being offline/online and indicate the change when the state changes. I thought of using gnome-system-monitor, but sadly, it isn't aware of CPU-Hotplug.. at least not yet ;)

So yeah, I experimented with tools I had not used before and I wrote GUI code, which I never thought I would have to. And I did it not because I was really tired with CPU-Hotplug (as peterz put it :) ) but because it had to be done, and I wanted to give it a shot.

Other than that, the recent events happening in India, the blasts, the killings, the burnings, the one-sided media reports, all these made me question some of the ideas I had been holding on to for a long time now. And after spending quite a few late-nights trying to read various articles and opinions, looking beyond the conventional media, I found that there is another side of the story, which screams to be heard, but it's voice seems to have been muted more often than not in favour of the more-popular Indian-secular opinion.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat" , thus said Santayana. Most of these problems that are recurring do have an origin, a reason for their being. And to understand that, I have been doing my own little research, reading up articles and books. I am currently reading "India after Gandhi" by Ramachandra Guha. I found the book really interesting. Plain facts, neither too preachy, nor too dull. Also, it showered light upon quite a few things that I had not known about before like the Naga Revolution, the existence of a party known as Jana Sangh which was the predecessor to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the importance of Sardar Patel's role post-independence, a defence minister known as V K Krishna Menon and how the daughter rose.

Thus , September has been quite different that way.
Only time will tell what October has to say.