If Harry Potter were a computer hacker ...

Rebellion, that makes him the Chosen One, is the quality that Harry Potter seems to share with a computer hacker. So I cannot resist the temptation to see HP's adventures through a computer geek's spectacles.

The idea came to me from Marauder's map and the difficulties Harry faced while finding Malfoy on that map. I wished so strong to suggest Harry to write a simple script (in some magical languages they might have) so that he could write a simple search engine for finding any desired person. After all it was another clever prankster before him who must have put together few magical things together to make that Marauder's map. (I am sure they must be having MagicSoft in their world - but that would cost many galleons to them). Also Harry must have learnt something from the muggle Map sites about the zooming facility they had added. I felt sorry for him when on that sizable map he had to see all the names in the school moving around.

Room of Requirement is a very interesting design pattern. Primarily it is a Factory design class. It creates variety of Room objects to suit the user's requirements. The implementation however is little fuzzy to me. One of the confusing things is its ability to maintain state and moreover its ability to restore that state to the user without any visible mapping using UIDs etc. To elaborate, Harry hides his Half Blood Price potions book in the Room that this RoR generated for him. The fact that one can hide things in these Room objects and can retrieve them later makes it necessary for the Room to maintain state. If RoR generates new Room objects every time then how would it know when to open an old Room object according to the wish of the user. So there should be a unique ID in RoR's database that maps the Room instance to a User and his/her Wish. But I doubt if this magical RoR factory pattern does so. I highly suspect that it's a factory that just picks up Rooms from persistent physical rooms and returns them to the user. That way it makes sense when the same room opened for Prof Trelawney and Malfoy in HBP. But then it remains unexplanied what is RoR's behavior when a user wishes some room with extra-ordinary requirements that physically might not exist at all. Will the RoR throw an exception in such case? NonPracticalWishException ? :)

Being the chosen one, Harry Potter has knowledge of some advanced languages that could help understand Dark viruses spreading in Magic cyber world - for instance Parselmouth (I wish they had named the script language as Parselmouth rather than Python :)

Excuse me if this was a complete torture for you. If you didn't think so, let me know how did you like it!

Cheers!!!

Gentoo, XGL, HGG

These are the things to talk about from last month. Gentoo is a hacker's distribution. It is for the bravest of hearts. Starting from a bare minimum installation (aka portage), it lets you build the system of your choice. The package management tool 'emerge' is more powerful than yum/apt. It allows you to build the source code of the application you want to install (with USE flags). I found the power of this feature when I installed Xgl with it. In fact Xgl being available on Gentoo was one of the reasons to try Gentoo. The building of Xgl, compiz window manager and other libraries with opengl support was very customizable because of the emerge's USE flags. Xgl being still an alpha software, this facility for tweaking proved very helpful.

Xgl is a new desktop rendering technique that uses graphics card's support for opengl. Most of the new graphics cards by Nvidia and ATI support OpenGL in hardware. Xgl (and Redhat's Aigl something) are linux window management tools that give very rich desktop effects. I was stunned to see a demo video of this and couldn't work with my old desktop till I got Xgl installed on them. The wobbly windows, opacity of windows, workspaces on the sides of a cube, all these things put the day-to-day computer access to a new level. Users of MAC will find this stuff familiar. But I am sure that having this thing in open source will show up very innovative results in not so distant future. After looking at this I really felt Microsoft sucks. They have very pathetic traditional window management. I hope vista at least tries to leverage some of OpenGL in hardware stuff. Delay of Vista is a whole new blog topic in itself.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy has been my latest read. I finished two Harry Potters before this. HGG is so "hatke" (or offbeat) ! I am totally amazed how can a person think so abstract and absurd things. I haven't yet decided if I liked this book or not. The shear distinctness of this book is appealing. Besides, it is a collection of many humorous quotes, that is something I am sure I like :)

Apart from this, Xen has been a main occupant of my mind for past couple months. But that's serious matter - 'll save it for some other time.