Finished "Interpreter of Maladies" today. Considering the fact that it has only 9 stories, it should have been a one day affair but I never managed to take out that one day. Instead I read it 1-2 stories a day after every 3-4 days. Now that I finally finished it with a marathon of 4 stories today, I think I enjoyed it much more by reading in parts, taking time to reflect on the stories as I read them.
So the next obvious thing: the best story on the collection. Well I'll rather not chose one best but I liked "Temporary Measure", "Interpreter of Maladies", "Sexy" and "Third and the Last Continent".
A very striking feature of the stories is that they are very rich in details. Unlike Arundhati Roy, whose plush language is a treat to read, or just behold for that matter, Jhumpa is all about details. Specially the details about food !! I could almost taste it in my mouth. And think about my plight when I had to go and eat mess foo...
[ With due apologies to Philip K. Dick ] For some days now, every morning I find a bunch of emails in my inbox from some friends who are graduating from IIT this year and the mails bring back so many memories, happy and sad !! It was around 2 years back when I was also busy writing such mails to all the people I knew. The world still seemed very small and every fellow IITian a close friend. It was beyond imagination that I wouldn't keep in touch with that guy living at the end of my wing whom I hardly had any interaction with. I wanted to get every address, every phone number, every email id. Yahoo groups were formed, mailing lists were created and with all the fan fare we marched out to the real world. And yes ! I also got all those "Friends' " episodes, all those songs, all those movies. How could I ever live without them? Today after 2 years, I have never talked to or mailed to R, my roommate for 3 years. I have little idea how M is doing,my next door neighbour for...
After about one year of having used the VPS based on Ubuntu Jaunty, recently I had the need to go look at my Apache logs. Now Apache log on my desktop machine are always nicely rotated by logrotate without me having to do anything. However on the server, I found a gigantic 1.2 GB other_vhosts_access.log staring at me with no rotation whatsoever in last 1 year. So I began to learn about logrotate. Running logrotate by hand produced the following which was obviously not true. abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log weekly (52 rotations) empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log log does not need rotating The contents of the status file (/var/lib/logrotate/status) which logrotate uses to determine which log files need ...
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Akshaya