Congratulations: Successful M.Sc. I (CS) Candidates @ RDNC

Heartiest congratulations to all successful M.Sc. Part I (Computer Science) students at R.D.National College, Bandra, Mumbai!

Best wishes for Part II!

Recipe: Sago Porridge

Ingredients

• Sago: 1 small cup
• Sugar: 2 small cups (or as per taste)
• Butter: 4 tbsp
• Milk: 1/2 litre
• Cashew nuts: 1 small cup

Method

1. Roast the cashew nuts in the butter until they are golden brown.
2. Set the cashew aside. Boil milk in a pan.
3. Roast the sago in the butter.
4. Add half a glass of water and cook.
5. Stir well.  Add the boiled milk and let simmer on low heat
6. Add the cashews and sugar to the mix, with constant stirring.
7. Cover and cook over low heat for 3 – 5 minutes.

It’s Not Ready if it’s Broke

24+ hours into using SUSE, and you realize there's something fundamentally wrong with the Gold Master (persisting all the way since the RC)!

• Hardware detection: check
• System performance and responsivity: check
• Package installation: … uh, what's the opposite of check?

The default package manager in SUSE linux 10.1 is broken and eminently unusable, and that's putting it in a genteel person's vocabulary. Of course, there exists a workable alternate, detailed here, but it's incredible that such a major defect was left unattended in a final release.

The moral: if you're going to introduce a spanking new program which has had perfunctory testing at the most, do not get rid of the old tool which works.

If nothing else, chalk it up to bad software management policies.

Experience: Open SUSE 10.1

4 hours into the install of Open SUSE 10.1, it's a Work In Progress. Nothing much to say about the install. It couldn't get any simpler or robust than this (except for maybe the Live CD approach, but that's a different paradigm altogether).

Trying to use Yast to manage packages, one becomes painfully aware that it's slow! Definitely faster than Yum though (shudder), but absolutely no contest to the zippiness of using Synaptic.

First order of business is to set up additional repositories following the excellent documentation presented here

Talk about priorities! Amarok's the first application to be updated!

There's more to try out yet, but I've been pampered a bit too much by PCLinuxOS !