I was messing around in the GNU humour section when I came across the Unix Error Messages page, which is an inventive collection of funny error messages you can get in a Unix shell. A lot of them don’t work any more, but some do, and some do it in unexpected ways.
% ar m God
ar: God does not exist
That is what the page says I should get in a C shell. Here is what I got -
$ csh
% ar m God
ar: creating God
Now That was funny.
My frantic and tedious journey ended about two weeks back, but I had been either too tired or too busy with coding and gaming to take up blogging.
I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).
Sau Crore (1991) is directed by Dev Anand, and I don’t think any fan of Bollywood will need a longer introduction to the movie. I wouldn’t really have watched the movie, except that Naseeruddin Shah was in the lead, and Sunil Gavaskar was to make a special appearance along with his team.
Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.
Much goes in the name of science in this country, and if I were to believe what I read, the rest of the world is not much different.
My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion - the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).
The Unix Millennium Bug started getting noticed (in 2006), exactly a billion seconds before its sceduled execution, after there were some mysterious crashes which were finally traced to the definition of time_t in unix-like operating systems (and more generally, in the ubiquitous C (the programming language)). From a thread in PIClist, I also found this webpage which claims to have been written in 2003 (in case the opening paragraph looks familiar to you, yes, the whole page is a mostly plagarised version of the programming challenge in the introduction to the excellent book Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden, a book I would recommend to anyone).
If somebody had told me five years ago that I would one day come back to this old place, I wouldn’t have believed him.
That is a bit of irony considering that ten years ago I wouldn’t have believed that I was going to be away for so long.
For a very long time I had made no effort to understand Shakespeare, owing principally to my belief that he was overrated. Then I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (even though I couldn’t stand Leonardo those days), which used the original text of the play without modifications (except for omissions and rearrangements).
The Baboon is finally back.
A week or two more while we tidy up the site, and then we’ll open up for another season starting from the 1st of this March.
Do remember to come back.
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