Rant

Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.

The scene would be something along the lines of:

rrs         6467  0.0  0.0  23088 15852 pts/1    Ss   12:53   0:00  |   |   \_ /bin/bash
rrs        11512  0.0  0.0  14876  4608 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |   \_ systemctl restart snapper-timeline.timer
rrs        11513  0.0  0.0  14984  3076 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /bin/systemd-tty-ask-password-agent --watch
rrs        11514  0.0  0.0 234756  6752 pts/1    Sl+  13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /usr/bin/pkttyagent --notify-fd 5 --fallback

The snapper-timeline service is important to me and it not running for months is a complete failure. Disappointingly, commands like systemctl --failed do not report of this oddity. The overall system status is reported to be fine, which is completely incorrect.

In my past, I’ve had experiences that have had me thinking. My experiences have been mostly in the South Asian Indian Sub-Continent, so may not be fair to generalize it.

• Help with finding a job: I’ve learnt many times, that when people reach out asking for help, say, for helping them with finding a job; it isn’t about you making a recommendation/referral for them. It, instead, implies that you are indirectly being asked to find and arrange them a job.

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Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.

At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.

This has gotten me finally ask the question

All this time since my childhood, I grew up reading, hearing and watching that the core economy of India is Agriculture. And that it needs the highest bracket in the budgets of the country. It still applies today. Every budget has special waivers for the agriculture sector, typically in hundreds of thousands of crores in India Rupees. The most recent to mention is INR 27420 Crores waived off for just a single state (Uttar Pradesh), as was promised by the winning party during their campaign.

Bugs can be annoying. Especially the ones that crash or hang and do not have a root cause. A good example of such annoyance can be kernel bugs, where a faulty hardware/device driver hinders the kernel’s suspend/resume process. Because, as a user, while in the middle of your work, you suspend your machine hoping to resume your work, back when at your destination. But, during suspend, or during resume, randomly the bug triggers leaving you with no choice but a hardware reset. Ultimately, resulting in you losing the entire work state you were in.

So I got an email yesterday from Google’s Jess Hemerly, talking about how they care about encryption

To quote a small snippet of the email:

We use locks to keep our homes and our possessions safe offline. But how can we protect our digital things, like photos on a smartphone or email traveling across the web?  **[The answer is encryption.](https://takeaction.withgoogle.com/page/m/1439db80/19cdc98/22666ed/3ed584ff/875135400/VEsE/ "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efacebook%2Ecom%2FGoogleTakeAction%2Fvideos%2Fvb%2E924932914232399%2F939211039471253%2F&utm_medium=email&utm_source=google&utm_content=2+-+The+answer+is+encryption&utm_campaign=20150910encryption1pm&source=20150910encryption1pm")**

To change, it has to start from home. That means, add encryption support to Gmail. Add encryption to Google Photos. To every service you provide. So that, if tomorrow, your service is compromised, you don’t public our data.

What is a Good Citizen?

These are my observations in an urban city of a developing country. One unanimous comment that I often hear is Traffic. That that how bad it is, no rules, pathetic roads and so on…… The government is to blame for this unplanned growth that has been causing chaos. And then there ’s no effective system to raise, track and execute Tickets.

All these might be very facts based arguments if thrown out in the wild. What I haven’t found is what people think of good citizenship. This is a regular nightmare. The citizens have vehicles but have no etiquette on how to make use of it.

My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.

With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE’s efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one’s personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.

First you go unethical by forcing users (stating security concerns) to upgrade to a newer firmware. And then, you don’t even do a good QA on the firmware you release. It clearly looks you were in a hurry to strip off the “Other OS” feature.

I lost all my gameplay in the firmware upgrade.

The blog entry is about the F word.

What the fuck? You don’t know what the F word is. Sigh!!!

Mea Culpa! Not your fault. It is quite offensive, no? More offensive than BC, MC, BsdK, LkB ?These are some of the usual terms used in our local derived languages in all its locally derived richness.

The word Fuck, many times, either from people with authority (HR) or the receiver, is termed and reacted to as a very offensive term. Usage of the word fuck is kind of blasphemy. In organizations, its usage can lead to harassments (to all those ultra fuckin’ dumbs) and terminations. Sigh!!