Disenchanted

Edited to replace the embedded videos with links. (Jan-1,09)

The 2008 HMS Genetics Department Christmas Skit

PART-1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No8_2ID8ch4&hl=en

PART-2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNOKDniNrw&hl=en

PART-3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LntERliGozk&hl=en

Christmas Eve Adventure

I had an adventure of sorts on Christmas Eve.

Just as I was pulling out of my apartment (I hadn't gone 50 feet), I saw what looked like white steam come out of the right side front corner of the hood of my car. With memories of having seen this in the past (in other cars), I stopped and opened the hood and peeped around.

Two things caught my attention (a) My coolant tank was bone dry (b) The air filter and some other parts had green fluid sprayed on them. Meant I had a massive cooling system leak somewhere. The next question was where. We poked around the engine and found that the upper radiator hose had developed a large rip in it and hence the source of the leak.

Finding a replacement for this on Christmas eve was tricky, but luckily it wasn't 5pm as yet. (It was 4:15). So we went looking for a replacement. Two stores said they would have to order it in, while the third one had one in stock. Armed with the replacement hose, new clamps, new coolant, we returned to the car, replaced the hose and refilled the coolant. At 5:30 we were done and the car was returned to regular operation. Oh, and it took 1.2 gallons of coolant to refill the radiator.

Whoop! Yay! for being able to notice the leak in the day time, Yay! for it happening close to my apt and not in the middle of a highway, Yay! for it happening in town and where I have people whom I could call upon for help.

Merry Christmas!

Bacon and Cheese Roll - I made it !

So I did it.
I made the bacon and cheese roll.

See detailed pictures here :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68701052@N00/sets/72157611501230447/detail/

[If you are not signed into flickr, you will only see one picture, you need to be signed in and on my family/friend list to be able to see all the pictures]

Solstice and Equinox

The Solstice is the day of the year (happens twice a year) when the Earth is at the farthest point from the celestial equator. It also marks symbolically the start/end of specific seasons (specifically the start of winter/summer)

Equinox is the day of the year (happens twice a year) when the Earth has the same amount of night and day time hours.

2008:
Equinox Mar - 20th
Solstice June - 20th
Equinox Sept - 22nd
Solstice Dec - 21st

2009:
Equinox Mar - 20th
Solstice June - 21st
Equinox Sept - 22nd
Solstice Dec - 21st

2010:
Equinox Mar - 20th
Solstice June - 21st
Equinox Sept - 23rd
Solstice Dec - 21st

More here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice
and
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/EarthSeasons.php

Singing cat

A cat that likes to sing along to the words of "Happy Birthday"

Owning the Empire State Building in 90 minutes

From the New York Daily News:

"In one of the biggest heists in American history, the Daily News "stole" the $2 billion Empire State Building.

And it wasn't that hard.

The News swiped the 102-story Art Deco skyscraper by drawing up a batch of bogus documents, making a fake notary stamp and filing paperwork with the city to transfer the deed to the property."

Read all about it here : http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/02/2008-12-02_it_took_90_minutes_for_daily_news_to_ste.html

Bacon Cheese Roll

This is probably extremely unhealthy, but it looks good. Posted here to remind me to make it sometime. I'll put pictures up if I ever get around to making it.

http://foodproof.com/photos/full/bacon-cheese-roll-1290

[One person who randomly reads this blog, likes bacon a lot :) -> if you see this, call or text me and I'll tell you when I plan to make it.]

and then there was snow...

It snowed 1 inch in College Station last night after more than a decade.
Here's a snowman (or is it a snow lady?) a friend and I found on campus

(If you are familiar with the campus, this was located next to Sully's statue)

[This is also an attempt at an emailed picture posting]

Quasars in Lightbulbs

This evening, a conversation amongst friends turned to the topic[1] of "How much power does a Quasar emit, in terms of light bulbs".

We looked up some statistics on the web[2] and came up with some interesting figures.

A quasar is said to produce the same amount of power as 10^12 suns.
Our sun produces 4 x 10^26 Watts of power.

Taking the average light bulb to be 60Watts, that means the sun produces the equivalent power of 6.67 x 10^24, 60W light bulbs.

Plugging that into the data above, we find that a quasar outputs the same amount of energy as 6.67x10^36, 60W light bulbs !

So there you have it -> A quasar outputs the same energy as 6.67x10^36, 60W light bulbs

--
While most of us in this conversation were not astronomers or in related fields, two of the participants in this conversation were
astrophysicists. One of them did some number crunching with actual formulae and numbers of luminosity and frequency from the field and came up with a value of 2.7 x 10^34, 60W light bulbs. Close enough for back of the envelope calculations!
--

[1] One person was going to be giving a talk on quasars to people from another discipline.
[2] Some of the data was sourced from Wikipedia or links from Wikipedia, use these numbers at your own risk. If you use these numbers to do anything important, you are insane.

More SPAM Winnings

It seems to be my week of winnings again!
According to the SPAM making its way into my email, over the past two
days, I have apparently won over 1,500,000,000 British pounds.

hmmm...

Paranoia?

This post has been redacted for privacy.

Email me for the text if you are interested.

Pans and Heat

No point in blaming the kitchen range for not heating a pan, when I forgot to turn it on in the first place eh?

SPAM winnings ?

If I believe the spam I've received this week, this has been the most lucky week of my life. Twice in the same week, I've won enormous sums of money from online lottery sweepstakes.

On Monday, I was congratulated on winning 500,000 UK Pounds and today, I was congratulated on winning 1,000,000 UK Pounds. All I need to do to get the money is to send them my contact information. :P

If only things were that simple ;) :P

Words, Parsing and Ads

I sent an email using GMail to someone today. After I sent the email, the next ad that was displayed by Google, was exactly on the topic that I had written the email about.
While I knew that the system does parse emails to display the appropriate ads - it was a tad surreal to see the ad so accurately reflect the content. (This wasn't a simple word matching, it was more complex than that.)

Risks

Thank you to a certain someone.

[If you don't know what I'm talking about - Don't ask me. I will not tell you.]

Another bike in the pool

We found another bike in the pool. Looks like this is becoming a Friday night ritual for someone or some group of people.

Speech Recognition update

Update:
The speech recognition thing works quite well. More training has helped it improve accuracy.

However, there is one issue that needs to be fixed before I can have it replace typing for large text entry. The fact that it is slow.
I can type (and hence input data) faster than it takes to listen to my voice (which has to be at a controlled pitch and speed) and then transcribe it totext.

Also, I find that I'm not used to dictating stuff to my computer and hence end up with lots of junk input in addition to the main text. Typing is more focused and controlled input of data in my case.

Speech Recognition!

So last night, I was talking to a friend and I began to wonder why my computer could not convert speech to text. So today after school, I came home and looked up online to see if the Linux operating system had any utilities that would allow me to do this. While looking around online, I saw (to my surprise) multiple entries pointing to the fact that Windows XP and Office 2003 seem to have some sort of dictation software.

Since I had Office 2003 professional on my machine, I went to take a look to see if the I had the software utility installed. After about 10 minutes of poking around the innards of my computer, I realized that I could indeed get this thing to work.

Once I got the software installed, I spent a couple of minutes (about 20 minutes in all) training the package to understand my voice. Because of the fact that I am not a native English speaker the package takes longer than usual to understand my pronunciation of some of the words. For some reason it seems to think of the word 'package' as packet, and packet as 'kicked'. I obviously need to train this package some more so that it can understand me better.

Oh, and a thank you to Amy, for introducing me to a project ;) that convinced me to go look up speech recognition from my computer to prevent me from having to type out pages and pages and pages of text.

It may be that further posts on this web site will be powered by speech recognition. Let’s see what happens.

The above post was composed using the dictation feature, then formatted and edited before I posted it here. To demonstrate how accurate (or not) the software package was with about 20 minutes of training, I have enclosed the raw text generated by the software below. Take a look, I'm rather impressed with the quality.

---

So last night I was talking to a friend and I began to wonder why my computer could not convert speech to text Saturday after school I came home and looked up to see if the linux operating system had any utilities that would allow me to do this while looking around on the day of useful runs as a multiple entries pointing to the fact that the news expert and office 2003 seem to have some sort of dictation software

Since I had office 2003 perfection of on my machine I went to take a look at if I had the senior treaty install . after about ten minutes of poking around that he notes off my computer and realized that I could indeed get this thing to work


Once I got the package installed I have spent a couple of minutes training the packets to understand my voice
because of the fact that I am not a native English speaker the packets take longer than usual to understand my pronunciation of some of the words. . For some reason it seems to think of the word package has been kicked

I obviously need to train this packet some more so that it can understand what is better or for the first 30 minutes I think this is doing pretty well
The law PCI and each time a friend using major project which required me to go look up speech recognition from my computer to prevent me from having to type out pages and pages and pages of text will obviously using me introducing me, it may be free to post on this web site will be powered by speech recognition. Let’s see what happens.

Bikes, chairs and swimming pools

We found a bike and two chairs in the pool of our apartment complex over the weekend.
While we didn't hear/see the folks responsible for this, one of our neighbors reported hearing people making a lot of noise the night before. Perhaps the drunken revelry lead to an idea about a new place to store your bike.

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali folks!

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali if you want to read a bit about
Diwali)

From "Tips and Tweaks" to Techbite

Steve Bass - the author of the technology column (Hassle-Free PC) and blog (Tips and Tweaks) has left the organization that he used to work for.

Steve wrote the Tips and Tweaks News letter - a source that has given me quite a few pointers to nifty tips and utilities. Before this he used to write the Home & Home Office column. He was also the founder of PIBMUG (www.pibmug.com). Search this blog itself for a couple of entries/posts which are courtesy of Steve's blog/column. If I've ever shown you the little program on my pc that simulates a martian surface flyby- that program is courtesy Steve from one of his newsletters.

As one of the first writers that I encountered when venturing into the WWW some ~7 years ago, I've been following his column and blog for a while now. I enjoy his writing style and personal touch to the column, a trait missing in many other technical writers.
Steve will now be starting his own column at Techbite (www.techbite.com).

If you were a follower of the Tips and Tweaks blog or the newsletter, hop on over to Techbite, where Steve will be continuing to run his weekly newsletter.

Original Tips and Tweaks : http://www.pcworld.com/blogs/id,43/steve_basss_tips_and_tweaks.html

Techbite: http://www.techbite.com/

Chocolate Chip muffins

I made some chocolate chip muffins today. They came out pretty good.

VNC, firewalls and iptables

VNC requires port 5900+display_number to be open through the firewall.
For eg: for vnc display on :1, you need port 5901 open.

vnc displays are found to be at server.example.com:PortNumber

Or look in your .vnc folder for an entry that states example.com:X.pid
(where X denotes the display number)

[The following requires root (or sudo) privileges]
---
1. Add rule to firewall by adding the following rule into your iptables
script:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport
5900:5906 -j ACCEPT

[This opens ports 5900-5906 through the firewall for the tcp protocol]

2 .Then restart the iptables daemon using the command :

service iptables restart

Now you should be good to go. Connect into vnc using vncviewer or a
program such as RealVNC or TightVNC
---
For fedora 9,
iptables is a textfile at /etc/sysconfig/iptables
service is an shell script at /sbin/service

Ubuntu 7 (Gutsy Gibbon)
- implements iptables as an executable. ( located at /sbin/iptables )
Run the command, by prefixing 'sudo iptables' in front of the -A
command, and remove the string RF-Firewall-1-INPUT and replace it with
the string INPUT
eg: sudo iptables -A -INPUT blah blah blah

The Ubuntu community has a set of nice guides which should be helpful.

The main HOWTO: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo
Ubuntu Forum guides :
BASIC :http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=159661
ADVANCED_USERS : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=668148

Future Spam

Spam creators have apparently found out how to send messages across time. On

Thu October 02, 2008 07:07 PM CST, I have emails with Saturday, Oct-4 as the timestamp.

:P

Boilerplate responses

I'm a fan of having a boilerplate (otherwise called template) response available when multiple people ask you the same question again and again and again. I am however against form letters that don't give you any useful information. I believe a template letter can do the job, IF it provides some useful information.

I found one such template recently and enjoyed it. This template is to be used for responding to people who come up with their latest idea of "How to solve the Spam problem". Fill in the appropriate sections with a X and you are ready to go.

----
Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) $BigCorporation will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) $PopularEmailClient

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, $expletive ! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Medium Sea Green

you are mediumseagreen #3CB371

Your dominant hues are cyan and green. Although you definately strive to be logical you care about people and know there's a time and place for thinking emotionally. Your head rules most things but your heart rules others, and getting them to meet in the middle takes a lot of your energy some days. Your saturation level is medium - You're not the most decisive go-getter, but you can get a job done when it's required of you. You probably don't think the world can change for you and don't want to spend too much effort trying to force it. Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Reciprocative Communication

Its a new communication strategy. Its simple in concept - Person A keeps in touch with Person B to the amount that Person B keeps in touch with Person A.

It works because it requires that both people put in the same amount (or lack of) effort to stay in touch. If the one person doesn't put in an equivalent effort in keeping in touch, why should the other person have to carry the load ?

Perhaps I should try this out. There are some people I know who never seem to be interested in keeping in touch from an 'initiate a conversation' angle.

So lets see how this goes shall we?

Computers cannot score essays (yet!)

Computers cannot and should not be used to score/grade an essay. At least for the current state of art, this is a fact. 10 years from now this post of mine might be ridiculous.

With the current state of art, if you depend on a computer algorithm to grade people's writing skills, you are making a big mistake.

Here's [yarnsoftheheart.com] one person's account of her experiences with an 'online essay scoring system'.

Read the 'essay' that was scored and the score that the system assigned to it. If you were the teacher grading that essay, would you give it the same score ? If you have a child going to a school that uses something like this to grade essays, you may want to have a talk with the teacher.

[via Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing]

Busy tuesdays

With the new semester is fully underway, my Tuesday schedule seems to be the most solid booked of the lot.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:
Group Meeting : T 1200p-0200p
TA.Lab : T 0200p-0350p
Advisor Meeting : T 0400p-0500p

Without anything else, I'm booked solid every Tuesday from 12-5.

Add in the fact that I'm the department representative to the Graduate Student Council this year, and every 1st and3rd Tuesday of the month, my Tuesday stretches to 6:15pm. [The GSC meets 5:15p-6:15p ]

Should be interesting to see how this works out.

Random Win

Last night, I randomly decided to go to a graduate student mix-and-mingle event organized by the nice people at AGOSS (Adult, Graduate & Off Campus Student Services - part of the Offices of the Dean of Student Life)

There was a game of bingo in it, and believe it or not, but I won!
This is probably the first time I won something at one of these 'for-fun' events! :)

So what did I win? well, if you are reading this blog - you should have already heard about it from me. :)

If you haven't heard about it, then that should be an indication that you don't keep in touch enough.

Bugs

I stumbled across some interesting definitions of bugs on catb.org
--
schroedinbug: /shrohdinbuhg/, n.

[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years.

mandelbug: /man�del�buhg/, n.

[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug.

Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/, n.

[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug;

heisenbug: /hi:�zen�buhg/, n.

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug;
--
See more at The Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/jargon/

Clock Radio

I bought a clock/radio gadget. Not a simple one, a rather fancy one ;) Its got 21 different (independent) alarm settings, a nap timer, USB power out (for an external gadget that might need USB power) and more.

Now let's see if it can manage to get me up on time everyday.

You can see the site I bought it from and all the specs on this device from here [thinkgeek.com]

Cows point North ?

Apparently, cows have built in compasses. They can sense the magnetic North.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2623809/Cows-point-north-thanks-to-in-built-compasses.html

A 100 things to try to eat

Lilian posted this 100 things to try to eat at some point in your life.

Some of them I have tasted, a lot I haven't.
This sounds like an interesting list to try to complete!

FoxClocks

I found a most useful extension to Firefox today.

Called FoxClocks, it adds a number of clocks to Firefox! Allowing you to keep track of the time across the world, with a variety of formatting and customization options.

Those of you who have seen my Windows desktop, would have seen a Yahoo Widget that I use called Timezonabulator that serves the same purpose. This is a Firefox add-in that serves the same purpose.

Get a copy of FoxClocks from Mozilla addons here : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1117?id=1117

I found this when wandering around Wikipedia, from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony quote

I liked a comment on radio today -- "The only people who probably won't
be happy about today's grand opening of the 2008 games, are probably the
folks in charge of organizing the 2012 opening ceremony"

$500 Audio cables ?

Read the reviews here Cat-5 AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cables.

In case you do get inspired to buy one of these, stop for a moment and pay a visit to the experiment listed on the Consumerist website on whether coat hanger wire makes for good sound quality http://consumerist.com/362926/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables

From Steve Bass's Tips and Tweaks Blog and the EndUser Blog

My MP3 player works again.

Whoop!
My MP3 player (A Sansa c240 that I got from Woot) is back in operation.

A couple of weeks back, I went in and deleted some stuff off the player and accidentally ended up deleting something that I probably shouldn't have. It turned my player into almost a brick. Out of the ~80 tracks that I had on it, it could only see 30 seconds of one track. Over the course of the last weeks, I tried poking it and restarting it and reformatting it, to no avail.

So this morning, I decided to go for the heavy action. A couple of hours of looking around the web, led to re-flashing the device (install new firmware on top of the old one) thrice (yup, not once, but thrice), multiple formatting sessions in the middle of all this, and countless reboots later it works!

Back to regular operation as usual. I can once again drag and drop music onto it from my desktop and not have to use custom software to get into the device! :)

Being a geek can be useful.

------

Thank you! to the folks from the following places:

The people on the forums at "Anything But iPod" : http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/

The people on the forums of Rockbox : http://forums.rockbox.org/

People on the forums of SanDisk : http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board?board.id=c200

Southpark Avatar

I credit (perhaps that should be blame) Lilian and Mags for this creation of mine. :P This be my Southpark avatar !
If you want to make your own SouthPark Avatar. Go here : http://images.southparkstudios.com/games/create/

I'm running for election.

When, and only when you are done watching the video, if you are still interested in following through to the source from where I got this idea from, go here

The Jedi Gym

Former swordplay trainer to the stars and Star Wars fanatic Jeremy Flynn recently opened "Jedi Gym", a fitness center in Torrance, CA where members channel characters from the Star Wars film series to work out, meditate, and improve their lives."Star Wars is all about the Hero's Journey, and so is working out," says Flynn, " you leave home, battle your demons, and hopefully return home stronger."
Flynn is frustrated with his students' lack of commitment and focus, but when a 7-foot man in an incredibly authentic Darth Vader suit arrives at the gym, Flynn thinks he's found his dream student.
Instead, Flynn and his students learn, first hand, about how powerful the Dark Side can be...

Watch it to the end... Its worth it.
Note: If you are not a Star Wars fan (or don't know the base characters of Star Wars, you probably won't find this interesting.)

What's going on ?

A week or so back, I got notified by the university that there was an armed bank robbery in my university town. This was followed by a message some hours later that the culprits were apprehended by state rangers. All's well I figured.

Until today, when a friend informed me that the bank robbery was actually at tje bank that is less than 5 minutes walk from where I stay! Which means, this is the bank in which I have my bank account!.

So, in the last few months- the area has had robberies, aggravated assaults, a stabbing incident, an aggravated robbery (mugging) and now an armed bank robbery.

So much for the safety of a small town.

Part of a world record attempt

Part of a world record attempt, originally uploaded by Suneil.

Its official, the firefox team did set a world record for the most number of downloads inside a 24 hour period.

I contributed to it by getting my copy of Firefox 3 during this period (see previous post that has the certificate)

Carpets and Doorways

Yet another random post - this time to store a thought on carpets.

"Do not spend $$$ and install white wall to wall carpets which start at the front door of the house, if you don't want to spend the rest of your life worrying that your white carpet is going to get a stain of some sort"

In fact either don't get carpets at all, or get a color other than white, and you'll find your life at home that much less stressful!

Countertops

A random post to store a thought of mine on Kitchen Counter tops.

"It makes absolutely no sense to spend $$$ remodeling a kitchen, including a very expensive new counter top, to get a counter on which you can't put anything hot."

What's the point of installing a counter top on which you shouldn't put a vessel that is at a temperature of more than 80F ?

Ducks! Smile for the camera.

Even More ducks!, originally uploaded by Suneil.

Close up of part of the 10,000 ducks that were in the race.

10,000 Ducks

10,000 Ducks, originally uploaded by Suneil.

I went to see the Silicon Valley Rubber Duck race over the weekend.
10,000 Rubber ducks. Adopt one for the duration of the race and the proceeds goto charity.
It was a neat event.

Mad Roger Flint

That be me!

According to the Pirate name quiz from here : http://www.piratequiz.com/
My Pirate Name is "Mad Roger Flint"

"Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!"

If you don't get the joke, don't worry about it. You just need to be aware of the Pirates vs Ninja debate. If you don't get this also, again, don't fret. It just means you aren't part of the geek crowd.

Baseball game- San Jose Giants vs. Visalia Oaks

I went for a baseball game yesterday with two other colleagues and one of our managers. This was a minor league game with the San Jose Giants playing the Visalia Oaks.

This was also my first baseball game in the US. So it was fun!.
If you have access to my flickr page there are pictures there of the game and the people with whom I went for the game.

We were there to support the San Jose Giants! and yes, our team won!

SanJose Giants: http://www.sjgiants.com/ or http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/clubs/ip_index.jsp?sid=milb&cid=t476

Visalia Oaks : http://visalia.oaks.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t516

Pictures on Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/68701052@N00/sets/72157605733229114/

(The Flickr set requires authorization - i.e you need to be family or friend to see the pictures.)

Firefox Download Certificate

Firefox Download Certificate, originally uploaded by Suneil.

Firefox 3 was launched June-17,2008 at 10am PDT
[Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 17:00:00 UTC]

The Mozilla folks were trying to set a Guinness World record by getting the largest number of people to download it in a given day. I participated in this and got the certificate!

(Participation in this case, was to download the latest version of Firefox inside the deadline)

See also:
www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/
and
blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/16/download-day-kickoff/

University Birthday card - Warns against the dangers of alcohol

"At Texas A&M, where student Michael Wagener died of alcohol poisoning on his 21st birthday in 1999, students who turn 21 receive a card about safe drinking that is signed by Wagener's parents, the university president, and vice president for student affairs. "

I have seen this card - (that a friend of mine received). Its a real birthday card to wish you for your birthday, along with an insert that contains a message from the parents cautioning people about the dangers of alcohol poisoning and why they are including this message.

Here are some more stories on this:
http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2004/colleges-look-for-balance.html

The Story of Stuff

Take a look, its an interesting presentation.
--
"The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever."

http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html

[Note: its a 20 min video/presentation]

Davis, CA

Random tidbit of information.
I'm visiting Davis, CA this weekend to see some friends of mine.

One week in San Jose

You might know that I'm currently in San Jose for an internship. If you
didn't, well, I am in San Jose,California on a summer internship. I'll
be here till August.

Today marks one week of being here. The work is going on fine. I got my
deliverables and plan of work for the period all squared off with my
manager and I even made some small but useful progress on the work on
Friday.

San Jose is cold! Coming in from Texas where it was 85-90 'F (29-32 'C)
to here where the mid day temperature doesn't seem to cross 55 'F (12
'C) this place is cold. One of the first things I did on coming here was
to go buy a blanket. With the new weight and piece restrictions on
flights, I had to leave my perfectly good blanket at home and come here
with a very light collection of stuff for the next 2.5 months.

Phoenix lander on Mars has a twitter page

The mars lander Phoenix which touched down a few days ago on Mars, has
its own Twitter page with updates written in a slightly spooky
first-person voice.

See the page here:
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

World's Scariest Model Train Wreck

A reality show about the scourge of wrecked model trains. Watch it if
you dare...

Roof Leak fixed

I forgot to post this before, but the roof leak was fixed last week finally on Thursday (22nd). They came in and sealed the area of the pipe that had the leak with some sort of clamp rather than replacing it. I now have my roof ceiling all back to normal :)
I'll put a picture here sometime.

My name on Mars.

My name is on a DVD that was part of the Phoenix Mission that landed in the Martian Artic regions yesterday (May 25th, 2008) at 23:38 UTC (16:38 PDT).

So how did this happen? Sometime in mid 2006, (June I think it was) the Planetary Society had a web page where you could ask for your name to be added to the list - which I filled up and submitted.

After that, I completely forgot about it, until I got an confirmation email this morning that the disc was on board the Phoenix Lander which touched down yesterday.

The message that I got reads:

As part of The Planetary Society's Messages from Earth program, your name — along with a quarter million others from around the world — is now on the surface of Mars. Landing with you on the disk is Visions of Mars, a treasure trove of literature and art — from classic works by Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury to Orson Welles' radio retelling of "The War of the Worlds" to a special audio recording of Carl Sagan delivering a message to the future."

I searched my archives and found my original certificate too. :) Ask me if you want to see it, or perhaps sometime in the future I'll post an image of it here.

You can find out more about sending your name on future missions by visiting this page: http://planetary.org/special/messages

Roof Leak-2

The roof leak saga continues.
Maintenance came in over the week (on the 14th) to patch the insulation,
they installed new insulation on the pipes, only for it to start leaking
again the next morning.

Because of this, the next morning (on the 15th), Maintenance sent in
someone else to look at the problem. This person found that the problem
was not a failure of insulation on the cooling lines, rather a hot water
line next to it had developed a leak and was dripping out water at
>140F. He cut away some of the insulation, so that the water no longer
flows along the insulation and drips into the room, rather the leak now
flows onto the wall.

He said that at some point over the next few weeks, another crew would
come in and replace the 20ft long hot water pipe.

Net result: My room still looks like the previous picture, with the roof
tiles off. Added change being that we've moved out the computers that
were under the leak, since changing the pipe is going to involve water
splashing around the room.

I'm not sure when they are going to be getting around to fixing it. The
maintenance guy did say that since the semester has just ended, they
were very busy fixing things across campus that had been postponed due
to classes in session.

Banks and Facebook

I received an offer in the mail from a rather well known bank that
offered me a credit card with an added bonus.

If I joined their facebook group, they would credit me bonus 500 points
to their member-reward-program.
/rolleyes

I decided to decline their generous offer.

Why ?

Answers to questions I have received about the recent activity on my blog.

Q. Why the sudden flood of posts?

A. Multiple reasons --
(a) A very good friend of mine (Hi A!) reminded me that blogging is/could be fun.
(b) I remembered and reactivated the ability to post by email.
(c) I got something interesting things that could be posted without
problems.
(d) I have some extra time on my hands to send/make posts.
(e) For fun!

Q. Why all the Linux based posts?

A. I'm playing around with my Linux install, and figured (based on what
I've seen on other sites on the net) that using my blog to keep track of
methods/procedures to fix problems and make things work could be a
viable and potentially useful method. Plus the ability to email posts to
the blog has made it much more accessible.

Q. Does this mean that the blog will now be active/be updated regularly?

A. Unfortunately, No. If point (d) in Q1 (available time) drops, this
blog will be one of the first things to lose attention. I will (and
believe it or not, I do) update this blog when I get the time and
inclination to do so.

Roof Leak in HRBB

Roof Leak, originally uploaded by Suneil.

My office in the department developed a leak in the roof!
Maintenance said that it was a lack of insulation from the AC cooling pipes.

See bucket placed below to catch the drips.

Two days later, the bucket has 2 inches of water in it and no techs to fix said drip.

Bluetooth on Ubuntu Gutsy

If you get the message
"obex://[xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx]" is not a valid location."
when you try to connect to your BlueTooth enabled device using Gutsy,

Run the command:
sudo apt-get install gnome-vfs-obexftp

This should fix it.

(On Ubuntu Gutsy on Dell E1405 with built-in Bluetooth)

Primary Source : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothSetup
Secondary Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=580347

Car needs a wash

Car needs a wash, originally uploaded by Suneil.

Found this car parked outside my apartment this weekend.

Ubuntu - Dual Monitor support

How to get dual monitor support to work on my laptop on Ubuntu to get
multiple resolutions to work.

To make the second monitor goto the right of the LCD run:

xrandr --output VGA --right-of LVDS --auto

Hardware Setup:
Video Card: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express
Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
Laptop LCD: 1440x900
External Monitor: 1280x1024

Make sure xorg.conf has this:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS,
943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1440x900" "1280x1024"
Virtual 2720 1924
EndSubSection
EndSection

xorg.conf is in /etc/X11/

"Thank you" to Nikhil for making this work on my laptop

(This is for Ubuntu 7.10 - the Gutsy Gibbon.)

Lolcode

With all the lolcat pictures around (see http://icanhascheezburger.com/ or search for the Caturday thread on Fark) its only natural that the computer people come up with a programming language that takes into account all this awesome lolcat language. I was shown this website by one of my students www.lolcode.com

From the website:

[quote]
Programming the LOL way.

All LOLCats, LOL, ALL CAPS.

HAI! This site provides community documentation of the emergent LOLCODE language. It was the creator's original hope that the examples could grow in a way that is both internally consistent and suggest a real, feasible computing language.

[/quote]

To get you started off; here's the customary Hello World Program:

[code]
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE
[/code]

Have fun with lolcode. www.lolcode.com