The moment he crossed the finish line, he didn't celebrate as much as he always does. The moment the race was over, Jean Todt was almost in tears. The moment he got out of the car, he was subdued, but made it a point to go over to almost every cluster of Ferrari team members and hug/shake hands with them. He didn't jump on the podium until he received his trophy. And just when the anthems started, he probably told Kimi (he spoke a few words in his ear) "The next year, I'd like to see you on the top step at Monza."

And then Micheal Schumacher just when into the press conference and in his new "drift off the question" style, announced that he was leaving Formula 1 for good at the end of the season.

God damn it. He could have been there for one more year. First Agassi and now Schumi. I've always wanted to see Agassi play a grand slam match and Schumi in an F1 race. Neither of that is going to happen now.

Bye Schumi, F1 will never be the same without you. And when you leave, take the championship since no one deserves it as much as you do.

Lots of life updates in the pipeline, will let you all know in a day or two.

Awesome race. The Ferrari was the faster car through the weekend and well, although Alonso managed to steal P1 from Schumi, I guess he's been shown who the boss is. It was nice to see the old Ferrari pit-stop trick work to perfection after quite sometime. And they've now done it twice in a row...which is good. Massa drove a decent race and did well to keep Kimi off his back towards the end.

The joy on Schumi's face after the race explains why he's still in F1. I'm sure he'll continue to be here as long as he feels he can win, or as long as he's fit. I think it'll be the former more than the latter and as it is right now, I don't see him getting "tired" of winning at all. In fact, I guess 2005 was just the kind of break he needed...a year with one win to get his zest back for this season. Excellent.

This season is really starting to get all exciting now. Go Ferrari!!

A quick follow-up to the last post...

So you're stuck somewhere and badly need to help your dad with something on the computer at home. I've been in this situation quite a bit and well, I've usually ended up trying to troubleshoot over the phone with minimal success. Enter x11vnc. Here's a quick guide on getting it working on Gentoo.

remote denotes the box I'm using to reach my desktop on the machine home.

1. emerge x11vnc tightvnc. Substituting tightvnc with vnc will do as well, but I like some security, which is made slightly easier using tightvnc.


2. Run vncpasswd in your home directory. This creates a /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd and you will have to enter a password not longer than 8 characters in length, which I found a little surprising. Oh well.
   
3. On home, run x11vnc -rfbauth /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd -display :0. Adjust display as required (0 or 1..)


4. From remote run vncviewer home and enter the password you setup when prompted. Voila, you're in and seeing the desktop now.

A couple of points:

• For VNC to work correctly, home has to have the X Display active. From what I've seen, when I vnc into home with X running but I'm on the console, the vnc display is all distorted.


• By default, VNC traffic is not secure. It is advisable to tunnel it over ssh if you're using it from an insecure network/across the internet. With tightvnc it becomes very simple. All you need to do is vncviewer -via remote home and tightvnc sets up the ssh tunnel automatically.

Missed Barcamp, but had a relaxing weekend for the most part. Schumi showed Alonso who the boss is and I'm extremely happy for him :)