Wrapping up 2011

2011 comes to a close in 1 week. How has this year been? Hard to say. Its had its ups and downs. Overall better than 2010? Yes, I think so.

The good: I met some amazing people some of whom have become extremely good friends. They made me do some new stuff that I've never done before. Graduate school is going on, I learnt a bunch of new stuff (Across the spectrum ranging from arcane knowledge [1] to bleeding edge
research [2]). Being a teaching assistant has been a combination of being extremely frustrating and intensely rewarding.

The bad: I had my share of setbacks, failures, missed chances and lost friendships.

Did I learn stuff from this year? Yes. Experiences are good and as the saying goes, what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger.

Also, note to future-self: Don't talk to people about an emotionally charged topic when you are hungry/angry/sleepy/tired or don't have enough caffeine in you. The conversation WILL go better when you've had a night's sleep and have some caffeine and some food in you. Trust the wisdom you gained in 2011 about this.

Resolutions? Sure! my standard resolution is to not make any resolutions. Actually, that's not completely true, I may make some resolutions internally but (a) they aren't tied to the date of January-1 with a 1-year validity period and/or (b) they are unlikely to be posted on a blog such as this.

To wrap up: Here's RFC 1882: the 12-days of technology before Christmas:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1882.txt

[1] Van Halen's standard performance contract contained a provision calling for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown candies removed. This was to check how carefully the crew went through the clauses to ensure that the setup was done to specifications.
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

[2]
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces-first-22nm-3d-trigate-transistors-shipping-in-2h-2011

Cold Weather in India

"In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come
into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between
weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only
make it mushy."

- Mark Twain (attributed to)

Remove turmeric stain

To remove the stain of Turmeric from a vessel, soak for a few minutes in
a mixture of Coke and Baking Soda. (alternatively (dilute) Vinegar and
Baking Soda)

Temperature Plot: Living Room

This is the plot of temperature in my living room. Recorded between 11pm
(10/6) and 10pm (10/7).

Plotted using a iButton from Maxim. 5 minute intervals.

The Open letter collection

It seems to be all the rage to be writing "Open Letters" these days in India. Social networks (and email systems) across the planet seem to be buzzing with all the letters flying left and right. (or is it North-South/East-West ?)

I got to hear about so many of these that I initially pondered writing one of my own. Alas, I cannot write as eloquently as some of the writers, so I decided against it. Here instead, is a collection of the various open letters that are (to my knowledge) buzzing around everywhere.

The oldest and perhaps the most well read until  recently was the 2004 open letter quoted below

"The Travails of Single South Indian men of conservative upbringing" or "Why we don't get any..."

http://www.whatay.com/2004/05/17/the-travails-of-single-south-indian-men-of-conser/(Edit: Updated April 2012 for new URL)

More recently, we got the rant against men from the city of Delhi:

OPEN LETTER TO A DELHI BOY
http://raagshahana.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-to-delhi-boy.html

This one set of a firestorm! Twitter, Facebook, Google+ ... take the pick of your favorite social network and I'm pretty sure you've seen it being quoted and forwarded and posted and #hastagged all over the place.

A Delhi boy wrote back in protest

Bhaiyya... Palika Bazaar ka kitna? 
(translates to "How much (does it cost) to get to Palika Bazaar" - a shopping center in Delhi)
http://disgruntledmob.blogspot.com/2011/09/bhaiyya-palika-bazaar-ka-kitna.html

There was another lady who didn't particulary care for the "Open letter to a Delhi boy" either.

'Tis the season for open letters
http://www.lavanyad.com/madmomma/?p=6298

Somewhere along the line, another open letter came up, this one ranting against the language skills of people from the Indian state of West Bengal.

Dear Bengali boy, what's with the accent?
http://theblackrosegal.blogspot.com/2011/09/dear-bengali-boy-whats-with-accent.html

(I haven't seen a response to this one yet, if you do, please let me know in the comments and I'll link it up)

The latest one I've seen is the one below, where she tries to analyze this North-South divide.

THE NAARTH-SAUTH WAR - a Madrasi take
http://www.sify.com/news/the-naarth-sauth-war-a-madrasi-s-take-news-columns-ljwkWphgcfd.html

There are so many open letters flying around, that it prompted one person to write an "Open Rant"

An Open Rant
http://unpredictableblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/an-open-rant/

Have I missed some? please let me know!

Cherry cobbler

How to make Cherry Cobbler:

This is amongst the fastest desserts I've ever seen made. Recipe by the Awesome Kym.

You will need:

a) A can of cherries (the type you use for making pie filling, NOT maraschino cherries) (ask me how I know)
b) A box of Yellow cake mix.
d) A stick of butter.
c) A baking pan/dish - (9x11 or 8x8 are the ideal sizes, but for this dish, size of the dish doesn't matter. It all depends on how much of the dish you want and how thick you want it).

Make it:
a.1) Wash the pan/dish. (duh!)
a.2) Start preheating the oven to 375F 350F. (Updated based on feedback from the Awesome Kym)

b) Dump in the entire can of cherries.
c) Cover the cherries with the cake mix - (we made it about an inch thick)
d) Now cut up the butter into small strips (about an inch long by 1/8th of an inch wide) and place it all over the cake mix - Basically cover the cake mix with strips of butter.

e.1) Place this into the oven and let it sit for 30 minutes.
e.2) " the cherries are precooked, so you just want it hot and the butter to melt nicely into the powder"[1]

f) When done, take it out, let it cool, then eat!

g) There is no step (g).

[1] Unti(tl)ed

Ninite: For automatic multiple program installation

I had to re-install the operating system on my laptop recently. Leading to me wanting my entire list of frequently used programs reinstalled. This was going to be a pain. Amongst other things, I knew I needed the following programs.

Firefox

Thunderbird (Mozilla email client)

Keepass

Pidgin (Multi-protocol IM client)

Notepad++

WinSCP

PuTTy

Paint.Net

Inkscape

VLC

TrueCrypt

CutePDF (Standalone PDF printer)

Foxit PDF Reader

and more...

Installing each separately is a pain. (I've done it in the past) I remembered this post [1] on Lifehacker. Hence, I decided to give Ninite a chance.

Ninite is a bulk-installer. It automates the chore of downloading programs from their websites and then installing them. So, I went to their website and downloaded a custom installer for me. (The site gives you a list of programs available, you choose the programs you want, then the site gives you a smaller installer utility that downloads and installs the programs for you.)

Here's what I saw as it was installing:

Security paranoid folks might wonder what the implications are. There are risks - since you don't know what else this tool is installing for you. I had my anti-virus and firewall watch the application carefully and I didn't see it complain, so I guess I am good.

I will be suggesting this to people who want to make the re-install of applications painless on Windows machines. Ubuntu and other Linux distributions already do this with their package mangers and "software centers". Until this tool came along, either rolling your own OS installation disc with the other software slipstreamed into the disc or having a cloned image of a drive was the only way to have this sort of automated installation on a home machine. (Windows machines on a domain with a domain controller can have all sort of fancy features including a start up script that installs stuff from the server.)

[1] http://lifehacker.com/5388408/ninite-bulk+installs-great-free-windows-apps

Adding time servers to Windows XP

Windows XP by default allows you to configure it to automatically keep your system clock synchronized to two servers (time.windows.com and time.nist.gov). How about if you want to add another server to the list?

There are two ways to do this.

a) If you are logged in as an Administrator, you can directly type in the name of the server into the Internet Time tab (see image below, just type in the name of the server into the Server: box.) (ntppub.tamu.edu is the public facing NTP server from Texas A&M University)

b) Alternatively, you can add a couple of registry entries. [BEWARE! MODIFYING THE REGISTRY IS A RISKY BUSINESS, DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK]

To make this happen: [1]

Open the Registry Editor (Start > Run> regedit.exe)

Navigate to to the following entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current
Version\DateTime\Servers. Click on the "Servers" entry to activate it on the right side.

You should see a list of servers (time.windows.com and time.nist.gov) listed in the window to the right.

Right-click in the window the right and select New > String value.

Name the value 3 (one more than the last # present) , and press [Enter] twice to open the "Edit StringValue" dialog.

Type the address of the NTP server into the textbox named Value Data, and click OK.

Close the Registry editor.

Now if you look at the Internet Time Tab, you should see your new time servers listed there.

[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-tip-add-internet-time-servers/5109818

MikTex and TeXniC center

When using TeXniC center 1.0 on Windows-7 with MikTeX, look for the do
the following to solve most issues especially related to BibTex acting
up or PDF LateX complaining about GUI framework.

a) Set packages to be updated automatically (Miktex>Settings)
b) Install package 'translator' if you graphics in your PDF.
c) Remove all languages you don't use Miktex>Settings>Languages.
d) Leave MikTex to be in A4 size and use the Ghostscript/dvips settings
to scale to Letter sized paper.
e) Update MikTeX as soon as you install it.

Firefox-4: Prevent Tab scrolling / tabMinWidth not working / Tab width setting

Firefox-4 does not support the configuration option >> browser.tabs.tabMinWidth [1] In Firefox 3.6 and older, you could set this value to 0 in about:config to prevent the scrolling of tabs if you opened up a large number of tabs. To get this to work in Firefox-4, you need to make some changes to your userChrome.css file [2]. Or you can install the Custom Tab Width Extension [3] In my XP installation the userChrome.css file was in C:\Documents and Settings\<userName>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomString>.default\chrome\userChrome.css Open this file, add the below lines /*--start below this line--*/ /*Added to re-enable min tab width=0 in Firefox-4 */ .tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned]) {     min-width: 1px !important; } /*--stop above this line--*/ Restart Firefox and your tab behaviour should be back to the way it was. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574654 [2] http://blog.miranda.or.at/mozilla/firefox-4-and-minimum-maximum-tab-width [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-width/

Embed all fonts in PDF

The command line arguments to embed ALL fonts in a PDF document.
(Especially required to pass IEEE Explore PDF Check)

Place the following in the arguments to ps2pdf:

-sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true
-dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile="%bm.pdf" -c save pop -f "%bm.ps"

where "-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true
-dEmbedAllFonts=true" is the specification to tell ps2pdf to embed
everything.

See: http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/txie/publications/writingtools.html for
more information

Also, see my previous post here :
http://suneilmohan.blogspot.com/2010/01/miktex-texniccenter-us-letter-sized.html

CM19a X10 Transceiver on Ubuntu 10.04

The CM19a is a USB based X10 Transceiver. This is a modified version of
the more popular CM11/CM11A/CM15/CM17 versions all of which have serial
interfaces

** All of this information is from :
http://www.cuddon.net/search/label/CM19a ** I'm only posting it here so
that I can find it again easily

1. The Python driver written by Andrew (www.cuddon.net), requires
sudo/root permissions. To make the USB driver work for any user, do the
below:

Add this to /etcudev/rules.d/cm19a.rules
#Allow all users to read and write to the CM19a X10 Transceiver (USB)
SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bc7", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0002", MODE="666"

2. Blacklist two modules (in 10.04) so that the CM19a is seen by the system:

Edit using vim or nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add the following two lines at the bottom of the file:

blacklist lirc_atiusb
blacklist ati_remote

Reboot the machine so that the modules are unloaded and the udev rules
are updated at the same time.

Visit Andrew's site for Python drivers for the CM19a
http://www.cuddon.net/search/label/CM19a