25 Feb 2012

Lying

I was going to an Indian restaurant for dinner.  I was very happy on the streets as I was walking.  I really liked the buildings of London... they were beautiful.  I was making plans that I would live in Europe for a few years.  I can travel around all of Europe.

I reached the place I was going to, and bought myself some biryani.  The food wasn’t great.  I kept complaining inside my head about the food, and at one point I posted a mean comment on Google+ about the food I was eating.  I remember very well, I was laughing when I posted it.

Then two employees of the restaurant asked me independently if the food was good.  To the first person, I said “it’s okay”.  I said the same to the second person, but this person wasn’t happy with my answer.  He then asked “are you liking the biryani, is it good?” looking for a more definitive answer.  I really didn’t want to talk about the food.  It was a done deal; I had eaten more than half of it already.  If I complained now, they would want to “fix” the problem, and that would only mean more delays.  I didn’t want to return the food either.  So I said “yes, yes” only to make him go away.

That was it.  I couldn’t face the restaurant staff any more.  I felt as if I had disrespected them for no reason.  I was feeling very bad on the way back.  I thought I was feeling bad because of that mean comment I posted about the food on Google+.  I took my phone and immediately deleted that post... that felt like the “right thing” because I had started believing that the food wasn’t all that bad, and only I was overreacting.

After coming home, when I think about it now, I think it’s the lie that has made me feel so bad.  In my view, lying is a deep form of disrespect.  I think I still haven’t forgiven myself for having disrespected the restaurant staff.

4 Feb 2012

Speed Matters

I bought a Samsung N150 netbook in early 2011.  That’s a tiny little laptop with an Atom processor, 2GB RAM, and a 10” screen.  It was tolerable, but slow nevertheless.  A few months later, I bought a Galaxy Tab 10.1v.  From then on, I started preferring the tablet for any task, and used the laptop only for things that the tablet is not very good at.  (Anything that involves typing text or multitasking.)

In December 2011, I bought a Toshiba ultrabook, which is way faster than the Samsung laptop.  Now I see that I prefer to use the Toshiba over the tablet.  I guess it’s not the form factor that makes me like or dislike a device, but the speed.  I just hate waiting for machines.

Moving Eclipse installation to a different location

I recently changed my username on my laptop from manki to m.  I just had to rename /home/manki directory to /home/m and everything worked just fine, except one program: Eclipse.  For whatever reason, Eclipse writes absolute pathnames like /home/manki/whatever in its configuration files and when /home/manki disappeared, Eclipse could’t figure out what to do about it.

One nice thing about Eclipse is that, like all Unix programs, it keeps all its data in plain text files.  I just had to look for files that contained the string /home/manki and replace those strings with /home/m instead.  The directories I had to scan were:
  • workspace-root/.metadata
  • ~/.eclipse
I used this command to get a list of files that matched:
find ~/.eclipse ~/prog/eclipse-workspace-android \
    -type f \
    -exec grep -l '/home/manki/' {} \;
Once I had the list of files, an easy search-and-replace across all those files did the job.  Eclipse opened with no issues, and it was able to find all the plugins and such.  I think doing the same would be sufficient to move an Eclipse installation from one location to another.

2 Feb 2012

Grand plans for life

For a while, all I wanted from life was to just travel and see places.  Live in places that look “fancy”.  Then at some point I thought I wanted to do something for people of my town.  I wanted to start something like a new company and be useful to my society in some way.  Just now I had a thought: what’s the point of “being useful” to people anyway?  Also, I think I shouldn’t be planning my life so far in advance.  I’ll take life as it comes, and go with the winds.  At least that’s what I think now.