a mARTIAN dIARY

I came across this blog taking about ‘thetu’, Since it was a new word for a malayalee for me, i went up and asked my colleauge about it. He was a bit surprised and asked me where i got this tamil word. finally after a lot of shying and smiling he started explaning the concept….with the first few words of "girls…men.." i got the idea…..

original post at http://sandhyakrish.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html

a reply

Nice points to think about….my humble take on religion that it’s something to be understood in your way. You could say that there are two types of people. I warn you this is a huge generalization but still it can help us take the larger problem and constrain, if only for the current discussion. One, the people who are religious or don’t-care about religion without thinking at all, that is either they are not too interested in thinking or are too engaged in their daily life to think, they are happy following what other kind interpret or with minor variations to that. They religious among them believe in a afterlife, maybe because they are not happy with their current life fully and expect something better or they are happy now and want to remain happy forever. They may at some level think of following the religion blindly as bribe for a smooth afterlife. A large part of the population is like that, it’s neither bad nor good

The second type of people includes people who are willing to think about religion and life. They either are able to do so or they think that they do so. What they interpret depend largely on the individual and their environment and chances are they can revert back to the first group. Even atheists come under this category.

Now there is a third type I cant talk about cuz I don’t know if they exist. They are people who can see through everything. See the truth. Here there is a substantial problem. U can see through, say N, layers of hypocrisy or lies, but you never know if there is a n+1th layer. Its for them to know or feel and us to ponder about until we reach that stage.

Now coming to your problem of allowing “theetu” people in temple… Mostly the people in the second category would agree with you but they do not form a majority. Eventually if this were to be forced upon them, they would just feel violated. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Like I said the first category depends upon second category for the interpretation of religion. The older generation depended on a second category that believed/interpreted that the rule in the old way. Like an majority of the old generation Brahmins would have revolted at the idea of a shudras entering a temple, but now you don’t find that much people revolting, at least not openly. slowly as time progress the “general opinion” will turn in favor of the other side of the rule and it may be allowed….but till then give it time…

Linux is built on many principles but one thing that can be generalized, is KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). But the KISS is a KISS applied on the generalization itself as you can not surprisingly find various violations to this rule. One of the collieries of the same is "Rule of Composition: - Design programs to be connected to other programs". For a person who lost his virginity to windows, and who the twisted casting director called fate has conferred the role of an electronics engineer, this is one of the most lovable things about Linux after maybe command auto complete. Now after all this blah blah…I come to the point….

For those less informed or plainly bored Pipelining is what I was talking about in the first paragraph. Pipelining is the process of directing the output of one program directly to the input of another file seamlessly in the shell itself. Now enough has been said about it bu here my two pence worth.

See a command like grep "mars" solarsystem_txt will search for the text "mars" in the txt file solarsystem_txt.

Now consider unrelated command ls. It lists the files in a current directory.

Now the feature of pipelining lets you take the input of ls and give it as the input of grep.

ls | grep "mars" would output all the files with mars in their file name.

would output all the files with mars in their file name. would output all the files with mars in their file name.

Cool huh?

But what if you wanted to search not only the current directory but all subdirectories for a file with mars in the file name?

Let’s introduce another command find which outputs all the filenames recursively from the root folder you say. So a find . would list out all the filenames from the start of the current directory( signified by .) and downwards.

Now you would do a find . | grep "mars"

Ok I want to go one step further I want to search not file names, but inside files within all the subdirectories for "mars". The solution would be

find . | xargs grep "mars"

What xargs does is that it takes each line output by find and executes a grep "mars" on that. Presto output taiyaar

One thing I would like to say rather emphasize is the Rule of Diversity, there is not "one true way" to do a thing is linux, you can do the same thing is umpteen number of ways some ways better than the other. What was done in the above post can be surely done in at least 10 other ways of the top of my mind. But it’s the concept that’s important.

So finally ……Use your freedom and KISS

Too many xterm windows driving you nuts????

Start xterm with -T "Space Craft Control" to give name to windows…

Start with -n to give name to the icon….

or both to give name to both

Voila….your desktop is now managable (?)

OR…

just add this to the init script of your shell

function xt {

xterm -T $1 -n $1 &

}

and invoke new terms as

xt "Mars Mail"