akrish

And so it begins; I think the most hyped olympics in awhile (at least in my short lifetime) starts today. Well technically it started earlier today. Since it’s almost 1am on Saturday in Beijing right now, I’m assuming that the opening ceremonies are over.

I’m really excited for the games because there hasn’t been much to watch on tv in the way of sports. This summer started of amazingly with the NBA Playoffs, the Euro Cup (probably the most excited soccer tournament I’ve ever seen), along with the French and Wimbledon Opens (also two of the more exciting tennis championships I’ve seen), and finally the Golf U.S. Open (which was absolutely amazing).

Usually I don’t watch sports that much, but this summer I’ve been watching more tv that usual, and have gotten sick of the same old garbage that’s ordinarily on. It also helps that I have people to watch sports with: Basketball with my housemates, soccer with people at work, and tennis with my dad.

So I always find the Olympics pretty exciting because it’s so competitive and it’s amazing to watch people who are that good at what they do (I guess you could say the same for anything though). But some of the events are more exciting than others. I’m looking forward to watching soccer, water polo, diving, some of the track and field events, and some of the gymnastics. I’m a big fan of watching the sports that don’t get much air time, so I also look forward to watching some of those as well.

In terms of nations that I’m cheering for, India seems to have a decent chance in both shooting and men’s doubles tennis, so it would be pretty cool if we could pull in a couple of medals. There’s also been some talk about China trying to oust the US as the “overall winner” of the games, so it’ll be pretty interesting to see how that plays out.

Rather than embed a video or something, there’s already a bunch of content on youtube and nbcolympics.com so just check those out instead.

I’ll be writing a bit about the olympics depending on how much I’m watching and wether I have other things to write about or not.

Check this out. After 11 weeks of work or so I think I’ve think reached the height of frustration with linux but at the same time I’ve learned a lot about dealing with those frustrations. I’ve always known that things are a little more complicated when dealing with linux, but I didn’t expect to get so annoyed with it. Anyway this xckd comic reminded me of some of the pains of messing with linux.

I spent most of today trying to install 1 (yes 1) perl module (DBD::Pg for those that care) and this was one of the most painful processes I’ve had to deal with. So I first had to configure CPAN which wasn’t that difficult but still required my attention for a bit. And when I tried install DBD::Pg the compilation failed with some C related error message. I spent some time trying to debug the module code, which I was pretty sure wasn’t the right thing to do (other people have installed it right?) Eventually after several hours, I found out that my machine had an old version of perl, an old version of a pre-requisite module, among other configuration issues so I fixed all of that and eventually got things to install.

And the other day, I got another monitor and was trying to set up TwinView on my machine and that opened another can of worms. I messed with my xorg.conf (the same as in the comic), and eventually I realized I had to install a new driver. This involved booting in a different run level and running through an installer which failed the first time for some strange reason. Eventually I got this to work, but this also took me a couple of hours.

And I guess what’s good is that I’ve come to accept that linux is more frustrating. At the same time, it’s good that I’m given a lot of flexibility to configure things and mess around with my system settings, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. A lot of stuff is oriented towards programmers; when I found compiler errors installed the perl module, I looked at the source code and made changes (although that’s probably not such a good idea in general).

Along similar lines, Vivek came over one day and he was all excited about partitioning his mac and installing linux on one partition. I warned him that linux isn’t all fun and games, especially if you’re not that computer savvy. When I stumbled on this comic, I promptly showed it to him as further proof that the warning is not to be taken lightly. But I’d still use linux over windows any day.