DHAR DHAR

Before you can enjoy all those movies you have or listen to the collection of songs in your PC, you need to install some essential software. Ubuntu, due to many copyright restrictions, doesn’t support multimedia playback out of the box. However, installing the support for the system is really really easy and it hardly takes a minute to do so.

But before going deeper into that, one thing that you absolutely must know about is the “Ubuntu Software Centre“. It is the repository for all the software you will ever need. The software centre can be found under the System menu in the left hand side of Netbook Remix.

Ubuntu Software Centre

Clicking on that takes you to the main page of the Software Centre. On the upper right hand corner, there is a search box. Type ‘restricted’ and the list of available software with that name will show up. Choose the “Ubuntu restricted extras” and click on the install button. This will install all the required multimedia tools you will need for that Scarlet Johansson movie or that Coldplay song.

Another major thing that should be installed before everything else is the pdf support. In the search box, type ‘adobe’ and Adobe Reader will pop up in the results. Install the software and there you go… ready to rock.

The out of the box Multimedia system of Ubuntu comes with Rhythmbox Music Player, Totem Movie Player, Cheese Webcam Booth and the Sound Recorder. The combination of these usually satisfies the bulk of the multimedia needs of the average Joe, but if you need more than this, even then Ubuntu has plenty to offer you. Just go to the software centre and look under the “Sound and Video” section. There are lots of available software to indulge you forever. For the start, try Audacity. You will not regret it.

Totem Movie Player

RhythmBox Music Player

Installing these initial things will take you to the level where you will probably stop missing Windows. The Software Centre has loads of stuff available and once you get the hang of it, trying your hands here and there is not a bad idea at all. Linux is all about experimentation, try it… you will never regret it.

Windows is used in more than 90% of the PCs in this World. As this stat below shows, the various flavours together command a substantial share of the golbal market.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Operating System Market Share

I have used Windows operating system for most of my time with occasional experimentation on linux and unix. However, due to the major problems in both of these on the entertainment front, I never quite got hooked on to them.

I purchased my 10.1″ Gateway LT Series Netbook with Windows XP pre-installed just before coming to the UK. It was a huge adjustment from my previous 17″ laptop, a HP Pavillion dv6226tx. Though Windows XP ran quite well on the machine, a couple of months back, after hearing a lot about how it speeds up laptops and all the other things, I decided to purchase Windows 7. What a big waste of money? Even with all the glitz and glamour disabled, it was a huge drag for the machine to run 7 comfortably. There was no other alternative but just to treat the costs as sunk and move on. That is what I did recently.

I have moved on to Linux. Ubuntu has this great Linux flavour called UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix), which is specially optimised for Netbooks like mine. To my amazement, Linux has improved by leaps and bounds since the last time I used it. Here is a screen-capture of the UNR Desktop. As you can see, for this version, Ubuntu has completely changed the Desktop. It is now more similar to a touch phone with everything nicely arranged into categorised menus. This makes navigation much faster than the conventional Start Menu system, which was itself quite heavy on the memory.

Desktop for UNR 10.4

Over the next couple of posts, I plan to show you the underbelly of UNR and reveal how complete a system it has turned out to be. Check this space out…

I have so far applied to many jobs and have been rejected from many more… but sometimes, once in a while, something comes up with which you get so emotionally attached that when you get to hear that big SORRY and NO from the other side of the phone, it just simply breaks your heart.

Something similar happened to me yesterday. I attended this assessment centre of one of the Big 4 professional firm’s last Friday and was pretty sure about a positive outcome. But as fate would have it, I got rejected. What hurt me more than the rejection is the feedback which they gave me afterwards. They pointed out that I am not a team player – a fact that is quite opposite to what I have heard over the years. Moreover, all the other feedbacks from the other assessment centres also mentioned ‘team player’ as one of my strengths. I am hurt because either apparently, I did something which I have no clue of or they failed to recognise this strength in me.

Anyway, why was I so emotionally attached to it? coz it was one of my dream companies. I have dreamt of working at that place for ages now and to see that dream shatter in front of my eyes made me doubly sad. But, as they say, everything happens for a reason and always for the greater good. After a very bad assessment centre for another job, I applied to the current job that I am having and made it. So, that failure was a way for a better future. In a similar manner, I believe the higher powers have some other plans for me… something bigger perhaps…

I share my LSE Sidney Webb abode with five other girls and a guy. The guy is from Vietnam, one girl is from Germany, one from Russia, one from Hong Kong and the other two girls are from mainland China.  The tragedy of my flat is that apart from the fleeting ”hello” and the half hearted attempts at small talk in the kitchen, nobody knows each other at all. Aside from the German and the Russian girl, I even have no idea what the names of the other girls are.

The Vietnamese boy calls himself Sky (not his original name though) but speaks horrible English, so any attempt at initiating any thing resembling what we call meaningful conversation is always thawed by the requirement on my part to repeat everything twice. Initially when I first met him, I got totally confused about my accent. He is the person who made me, one of the most active chatterboxes alive, doubt my ability to speak properly. Sky…

The German girl is Christiane. I’ll remember her as the coffee addict and the one having the craziest and the loudest laugh. When she laughs, I can hear it from my bathroom – that is a good three sound proof doors away. As it is the only sound from another flat that is audible from my bathroom, comparing it to something is very difficult but if I try,  it will be something similar to the fire alarm at Sidney Webb. However, having said that, I have to tell you that beneath it all, she has a heart made of gold. A very good person to know, albeit slightly crazy…

The Russian girl, Svetlana, is doing her Phd at the LSE in Economics and Mathematics. She is the the second prettiest nerd I have seen in my life but, that is just it. Her dress sense is almost non-existent. The other day I saw her wearing a fluorescent orange jacket with matching fluorescent orange running shoes and a beige pant. To top it all she was also wearing fluorescent orange ear muffs. That might look hot in some other planet but in Earth, the combination looks horrible. However, she cooks really nice and good looking food and in the eternal hope that someday she will offer some of that to me, I will stop here.

This brings us to the three Chinese girls. One of them is like a ghost whom I have only seen twice during my 7 months stay here. If that assertion is true then I don’t want her to come and haunt me anytime in the future. So, it is better not to talk about her. One of the remaining two (I am not sure which one) is called Wei Wei. I know this because the first time I saw this name in a letter in the mailbox, I was totally awestruck. It’s like naming me Dhar Dhar or Sid Sid.

These two Chinese girls are the youngest and the sweetest in the flat. As a matter of fact, they are the life blood of the flat. They are the ones who play loud music, shout like crazy and cook exotic dishes. Without them, the place would turn into a God forsaken cemetery. God bless them. So, what will I remember them by? Noodles… From the daily analysis of the kitchen garbage bin, I have come to realise that both of them are total noodle freaks. One of them once showed me four different kinds of noodles based just on the diameter of the strands.There is also something called the glass noodle and it is transparent. How amazing is that? Noodles…

We are all from different part of the World, with different pasts and backgrounds. Destiny brought us together at Flat no 704 of Sidney Webb house. Even now, our only meeting place on a day-to-day basis is the kitchen. Now a days, just by the scent in the kitchen, I am able to tell who has cooked food and who hasn’t. That is the connection… and I am pretty sure it is the case with all of us. All this will come to an end soon and we all will go our separate ways, but these smells and personality quirks will always stay with us… suspended in the ether of memories…

The Right to Education becomes a fundamental right today. This is a momentous step for the whole nation as it has the potential to unleash the tremendous talent holed-up behind the vale of poverty in Indian cities, towns and villages. It took us more than 60 years of freedom and a couple of decades of mind numbing growth to come to this juncture, but as they say, “der aaye par durust aaye” (Though you are late but you have reached safely). We have finally reached the destination. However, this is not the end but only the beginning.

Now starts the long process of ironing out all the loop holes and implementing the law with an iron fist. The use of education as a highly profitable business, but without the corresponding returns has fixed its roots very deep into the psyche of the population. That has to change.  It really matters a lot as to who is at the helm of affairs in the education ministry. A minister like Mr. Sibal can do wonders for the entire country, where as someone like Mr. Arjun Singh can very easily drag it to the bottom of the pits.

A lot of us (as a matter of fact, an entire generation or two) can very easily relate to what Mr. Manmohan Singh said last night in his address, “I am what I am today because of education“. Now that I am in London studying at the London School of Economics, I sometimes reflect back and wonder about the progression my family has made from humble umbrella traders in a small town of undivided India, through the perils of partition, the initial uncertain years in independent India, to the place where I am now. Over a course of two generation, the entire family has been catapulted out of the clutches of poverty and into relative affluence. As a member of the third generation, we are nothing but consolidating the position. All this has been possible because of the investment my family has made in education. It might not be possible for the poor families to make such an investment at the outset. This law will come to the rescue of such improvised people.

Education has the power to transform, to change a person from within. Knowledge bring with it rewards far greater than any other product of human ingenuity can bring. I am proud to say that this is a right step in the right direction by the Government.

Image courtesy: University of Minnesota

What do I fear most in life? The answer would be the consequences of my actions. I live in constant fear of hurting others. From my previous experiences I have learned that I have a monstrous capability to hurt people. Though I never intend to, but there are always things I say, stuff that I do that invariably hurt somebody or the other. So, like a dog who gets conditioned by repeated promises of bones, my brain has learned from repeated mistakes not to say things or mention stuff that might hurt others. But this, I am finding out now is slowly killing me from the inside. I want to say so many things, but due to the psychological conditioning, it is almost impossible for me to utter a single word. The funny thing is that the fear of hurting  which initially lead me to behave this way has now been replaced by a new fear – the fear of bursting out. I have been controlling it for so long now that it might just come out any moment. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to keep it all in any more. I am dreading the day when the dyke will collapse and everything will just come pouring out. I dread the day…

If you are a user of Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site, you know what Top News is. For the uninitiated, Facebook has something called News Feeds, where you can view what your friends are up to and keep up with the World. There are two kinds of News Feeds, “Top News” and “Most Recent”. Most recent as the name suggests shows the most recent events, news, activities of your friends in time. This is a constantly updated, relentless barrage of all kinds of updates. Quite useless if you ask me.

The interesting part is the Top News section. Facebook help says,”Top News aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting”. The operating word here is interesting. You have no control over what is interesting and what is not to you. This is entirely determined by Facebook. The problem is that this information is not public. You can take an educated guess but there are probably so many variables involved here that making a reasonably accurate judment will be difficult for an outsider.

In my opinion, at least one of the criteria the Top News section depends upon is the number of feedbacks (comments and likes) a particular item receives. The more the number of feedbacks, the more popular the item is and more people will consider it news. Another criteria has to be the individual’s Facebook surfing behaviour. To check my assertion about the surfing behaviour, I embarked on a mini experiment. I started visiting the profile of a couple of friends regularly, checking out  their every item- photos, videos and things like that. I did this for a week and then I stopped.

The main difference during this time was, as expected, in my News Feed. Earlier, without large feedbacks the status messages of these friends never used to find any mention in my News Feed, but after this experiment they are very well represented even if they have zero feedbacks. The funny thing is, now the moment they post something in their profile, it instantly becomes visible in my News Feed. So, Facebook assumes that whatever they do (taking the privacy filter into account) will be news for me and presents that accordingly.

There are many other factors which play a role in determining what constitutes your Top News feed. If you often click on a particular user’s links when they post something, Facebook starts showing their links in your News Feed more often. Similar is the case with Photos, videos and all other things that you can do in Facebook. The same principle is applied to most of the FB groups and fan pages but I am sure with additional features or restrictions. Being an outsider it is virtually impossible to guess the complexity of the algorithm that determines the News Feed section. After all, it is the most visible part of Facebook that users see and thus perhaps the most scrutinised and hence the most most well designed. But I think, based on my experiment, Facebook uses the information regarding the user that it collects to present custom News feeds catered to the individual. That is the power of information. As they say, “INFORMATION RULES”!!

As a part of my curriculum at the London School Economics, I am doing a case study on BMW AG Germany. I need some data to answer a few questions regarding the case and for this I need your help.

I have set up a small survey HERE

The survey will take around 2 minutes and doesn’t require any registration. I would be very grateful, if you guys could take some time out of your schedule and help me with this.

UPDATE: Thank You everybody for participating. It was great having your opinion.

Too many tweets, it seems!