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

Meh !

I've been seeing the word "Meh" being used on the web --in emails and online communities lately. While the context of the word made it obvious that it was a form of a non-commital indifferent response, I wanted to figure out what its actual meaning was.
So I went a-exploring and found this definition on the urban-dictionary www.urbandictionary.com

Meh:

Meh is used to describe any and every word possible, including:
Yes
No
maybe
kind of
never
always
ok
alright
no thankyou
yes please
look b**** i really dont care so just shut the f*** up
if you want
whatever
If you wnat
i dont want to really
well
shut up
i dont really care
no honestly, i dont care...

...and is never explained on which is actually used...

"you wanna come round mine?"
"meh"
"whats that mean"
(told all of the definitions above)
"so which one? yes or no?"
"meh"
"that a yes?"
"meh"
"a no??"
"meh"
"a maybe???"
"meh?"
"maybe???"
"meh"
"look please tell me"
"meh"......

Small Earthquake

Wouldn't you know it ? I come to this new city, and it has an earthquake to welcome me !!

A tiny tremor happend around 4pm local time. The building shook, some pans rattled, the other person in the apartment felt it too. We both thought initially that the other person had moved something big or stomped around a bit, we then realised that it was probably a small earthquake.

Anyway, no damage was done, hence everything's fine.

The earthquake was recorded by the USGS on their website:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/cap/nc51182114

Pale Blue Dot

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken at Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990.
As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun),Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.


Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.


The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.


It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.



-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

---

---

The content on this page originally came to me as a forwarded email. I decided to turn it into a webpage.

You can find out more about Carl Sagan on the web. Here are some starting points:


Entry on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan)

NASA's StarChild Program page (http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/sagan.html)

The Carl Sagan Portal (http://www.carlsagan.com/) (More of a commercial site)

Malicious Program Mimics Windows Activation Scheme

Symantec has detected a new Trojan Horse on the loose that asks for your credit card information by pretending to be part of the Microsoft Activation package.

Read the story and see some screenshots here:
http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2007/05/ms_needs_your_credit_card_deta.html

Symantec has published technical details and removal instructions at:
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2007-042705-0108-99&tabid=2

Doctor Who - Theme - Video

A behind the scenes look at the making of the theme song to the television series Doctor Who. (BBC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxFqw36KQ0

From the description of the show:

Footage of the early 80s remake of the doctor who theme song for the show of the same name by Peter Howell. Get a great behind-the-scenes view of how it was made and close glimpse at the equipment used (this is a portion of the Music Arcade - Radiophonic Workshop special)

(more)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxFqw36KQ0

Instant Messenger Worm

I almost got infected by a Instant Messenger Worm today.

This evening I signed into Yahoo Messenger.
A few moments later, a good friend of mine logged in and sent me this seemingly harmless link, but before I could respond/click, this person logged out !

In and out in less than 30 seconds ? That's not like them...

I felt odd... so, I looked at the message/link carefully.

The accompanying message told me that it would lead to screenshots of a popular operating system. This message seemed ok to me as this friend of mine knows that I like computers :)

Looking at the link.. something did not feel right. Remembering the set of IM worms that have been around, I decided to try to search the web for some information. But what do I search for ?
The message text was too generic.. so, I decided to Google the name of the site that apparently the link pointed to...

and was I lucky...

This was an attempted infection by WORM_SOHANAD.AL.

A Win32 "Memory Resident Worm" , this worm attacks and propagates through Instant Messenging applications - specifically Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger/ Windows Messenger.

The said message contains a link to a remote copy of itself. When the recipient clicks the link, the copy is executed on the recipient's system.

The message it sends out has the following details:

-------Message: (any of the following)------------from trendmicro.com----

• :D who is beside you in this pic http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/friendpic1.jpg so good-looking hot pics this week http://quicknews.info/hot.jpg :x
• ;) 1 of my vacation pictures http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/vacation1.jpg <:-P
• ;) 1 of my vacation pictures http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/vacation2.jpg <:-P
• Screenshot of new windows version _ Windows Vista http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/vista.jpg so cool :D
• Images shot in Iraq _ The war will never end http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/Iraqwar.jpg << :( • oh my god , i've won a 20000 usd lottery :O http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/mylottery.jpg <<
• never click into the links like something in this image http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/dontclick.jpg #:-S !!!
• :( the page cannot be displayed http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/error.jpg Something was wrong !!!
• :( the page cannot be displayed http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/error.jpg Something was wrong !!! Check it again and tell me later. THanks
• Do you realize who is in this image: http://{BLOCKED}icknews.info/who.jpg . Just think for a moment and tell me soon ;))

---------end messages-------------

This worm also replaces the status of the affected user with any of the abovementioned messages. For more indepth look at this worm, visit http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM%5FSOHANAD%2EAL&VSect=T

So that explained it. Looks my friend's got this worm on their machine :(
I've sent them an email informing them of this.

Hope they fix it.
Luckily I escaped.
Moral of all this : "read before you click".

What can the wind do ?

What can the wind do ?
Ans: It can break window panes !

So here we are (me and my roommates) all doing our own work, when we hear this really loud smash followed by the sound of breaking flass. We investigate to find the area next to our front door splattered with broken glass...

What does this have to do with wind ?

We had a small thunderstorm tonight. All the sound and light effects and some really strong wind. So, a really strong gust of wind picked up a plastic chair from the corridor in front of the front door and hurled it at the window pane next to the door. Net result = a smashed pane of glass and our living room gets a shower of glass. Luckily no one was sitting on the couch right next to the window.

(See the picture of the smashed pane)