Free Lunch

Read an interesting book lately called Free Lunch. It's basically a critique of government policies which enable the rich to get more breaks then the poor. Since I kind of fall in the middle there I can't complain too much I suppose :)

Still, some eye openers in there though … good read!

good movie: amu

saw a really good indian movie the other day. Not the typical bollywood crap. recommended!

http://www.amuthefilm.com/home.html

Book Review: Punjabi Century

I had been browsing around the online SPL catalog looking for books to read about Punjab or northern India. I found a really interesting book that I enjoyed reading immensely called 'Punjabi Century'. It was basically a sort of a social/cultural historical narrative on life in the Punjab before partition from the perspective of a person who was born and grew up there. A very interesting read!

Michael Jackson + Bhangra == wow!

This video is just friggin hilarious! enjoy =)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IG7ErbtZr4s

flash on pocketpc

I've ripped a couple of movies to watch on my PPC-6800 from sprint recently. The TCPMP player works great with a lot of different a/v codecs.

A couple of good linux tools are transcode and mencoder to encode a/v from and to various resolutions and codecs. There's a decent GUI called Acidrip ( among others) which appears to work rather well.

Did you know Tivo has a hiden web server built into it?

There is a plugin to TCPMP which lets it play flash files directly also. This saves re-encoding them from flash into other formats. Works great :)

Brother printers - awesome linux support!

I mostly work on linux/BSD boxes so I've been looking for a printer with decent support for linux. HP installed like 2 gigs worth of software .. 2 gigs?! I shudder to think what all it did install. Both Epson and Canon didn't have any support for linux from what I could tell. I could try and buy one and see if the built-in drivers that come with linux support them but then I came across the solution - Brother.

Decently priced all-in-one printers with awesome support for Linux:

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html

and they work as advertised. Scanner, fax, printer - all work under Linux .. installed without a hitch. amazing!

So if you're a linux user looking for a decent printer - I would highly recommend Brother!

Another good book - Fermat's Enigma

April appears to be a good month for book reading. I suppose with that rain and cold, it's a lot nicer to just chill with a good book :)

Fermat's Enigma is a very interesting book about a famous math proof which remained unsolved for 3 centuries! If you like history and math you will definitely like this book. Another good book by Simon Singh.

Curveball - good book!

I read a really good book recently - Curveball. That was the code name of the iraqi source whose info the government used to claim all those amazing WMDs they found in Iraq as the basis of the war. I guess they didn't really know what they were getting into when they started trusting the info from this dude. Didn't they know that part of the world is famous for graft, corruption and plain ol lies?!

Anyways, great read!

http://www.curveballbook.com/

Backup your phone data

I came across this really neat company called Dashwire which lets you backup all your phone data. It's a good solution for folks like me who are stuck with a windoze mobile phone and run linux at home. The really neat thing about it is that you can download a fat client to the phone and it will automagically run in the background and sync your info with the dashwire server. Neat!

Using older addons in Firefox 3.0 beta

So I've been playing around with Firefox 3.0b5 for the last few weeks now and it really rocks! It seems to have become quite the speed daemon. Unfortunately, there's quite a few extensions which haven't yet been ported to work on the new version. Luckily I came across the following tip which disables compatibility checking for firefox so you can install the old extensions. All the extensions I use appear to work fine in 3.0b5.

http://lifehacker.com/355973/make-your-extensions-work-with-the-firefox-3-beta

Code Quality

Don sent around a really funny comic about how to measure code quality at work today. It's hilarious =)

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

Playing with Firefox Beta4

I've been playing with Firefox beta4 which can be found at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

and it is fassssssssst! I also downloaded the punjabi version just to try it out and see how lame my punjabi reading skills had become. It turns out that I still remember some of it =)

PBS: Frontline

The show on Frontline last night was really good. It talks about the problems in Pakistan. Though the press here generally covers the big news headlines like Benazir Bhutto's assassination, etc. they generally miss the context in which these things happen. This show illustrated the destabilization that fundamentalism can cause to stable societies.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/pakistan703/

Wooden Sports Car

wow - here's some amazing concepts and engineering. A sports car made completely out of wood laminates. I bet the mrs would love it considering it's made from some of the same wood technology and products that she is involved with. Really neat!

http://www.joeharmondesign.com/

Linux backups

I've been working on writing some backup scripts in Python for the product at work and came across this really neat article which talks about how to do incremental backups on Linux. The central idea is the fact that filesystems on *nix are similar to garbage collection in Java in the sense that files are stored somewhere and filenames are just pointers to the actual data. When there are no more pointers ( filenames or symlinks) which point to a file, it is automatically removed from the filesystem. This leads to some really interesting side effects as evidenced by this article in terms of incremental backups - very cool!

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Uberdesi

I usually check out this blog every once in a while to read up on interesting things happening in the community in the des and pardes. I especially like the malarial videos - they're funny! =)

http://uberdesi.com/blog/2008/01/21/desi-ad-of-the-week-12/

PBS & Frontline

I keep forgetting how much television programs embrace new media such as the internet though some others keep trying to stifle it. Public broadcasting in the northwest is great and provides some excellent programs like Frontline. All accessible via the 'net. Awesome =)

http://www.pbs.org

Pulse for Eclipse

I've been using Genuitec's MyEclipse addon for web based development in Eclipse for a few years now. I noticed that they have a neat tool called Pulse which tries to organize the plugin hell which starts to permeate eclipse installs after a while. If you use Eclipse, you may want to check it out. Oh yeah, I highly recommend MyEclipse also.

Funny Software Dev comic

The success at most software firms ( or companies for that matter) can be probably be judged by their similarity or lack thereof to the following comic =)

http://www.jroller.com/keremkosaner/entry/comic_software_development_process

Funny post on languages

Hilarious post on various languages as characters at a panel. enjoy =)

http://davidrupp.blogspot.com/2007/10/last-language-war-language-trolling.html

Funny animation

Wilhelm at work sent this around. Really funny! enjoy =)

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf

HDTV

We bought a big ass 46" LG HDTV along with a nice LG Stereo a while back. I had been looking into a cable alternative for a while now. So I picked up a cheap $10 antenna from Best Buy and now we have a pretty sweet setup at home for local HD channels. It fits really well with my busy schedule and I can still pickup my weekly soccer games, highlights etc from the Tivo we have on our regular channels. HD is pretty cool! :)

Happy New Year!

A very Happy New Year to everyone. I hope 2007 has been as great for you as it was for me. Hopefully 2008 will be even better!

We were watching the fireworks at the Space Needle on television and there was a glitch this year around. Apparently the software is custom stuff along with some industry standard packages, all running on windoze from what I can tell. Some corrupted file apparently caused the problem. I wonder how good their QA testing was .. not to mention software design ;)

Interesting DVD: Cry of the Snow Lion

I saw a very interesting documentary the other day called 'Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion'. It provided an interesting glimpse into what is happening in Tibet these days. It's another commentary on how centrally powerful asian governments control and subjugate far flung provinces who might not necessarily obey the central diktat. It's a highly recommended DVD.

http://www.cryofthesnowlion.com/

Funny BBC Video

From a funny desi show on BBC called Goodness Gracious Me .. enjoy =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G1SK22-E8E&feature=related

Funny python cartoon

From Wilhelm at work .. funny! =)

http://xkcd.com/353/

Watching Tivo recordings remotely

I've been reading up on bits and pieces of info on the web about how to access the recordings stored on my Tivo from my Kubuntu based linux laptop. This is what I do to access the data:

1. Tivo boxes have a web server built in which can be used to access the recorded programs. Just use SSL ( https://tivo.box.ip/). The username is 'tivo' and the password is your media access key which can be found in the Tivo settings. You can then download the videos from the web interface. But they are stored in some sort of an encrypted format, So ...
2. Use tivodecode to decrypt the videos. You will need to supply the media access key.
3. I used mplayer to watch the decoded videos but vlc should work fine too. Once you have the decoded mpg you can also archive it, etc.

Virtualbox

I've been looking into encrypted filesystems here at work. Some of it involves doing things to a linux box which might leave it unbootable and might require fixing. To avoid that I looked into virtual machine alternatives to the uniquitous vmware. I did find one called Virtualbox which works rather well. It's free but certainly not as fast as vmware. Still, not bad and seems to be working fine for me under kubuntu. So far I've installed Fedora and Freebsd on it and it seems to work fine.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

New gig

I've started doing software consulting in the Seattle area now since I left Motorola around thanksgiving. It was fun there but quite obvious that the Seattle office ( what's left of 4th pass) is expanding in Asia and not here. I was looking into consulting anyways last year when I joined Motorola so that should be good.

My new gig involves working at a startup in Pioneer Square called Vantos which is working on software for the vertical investigations market. I'll be helping out with deployment stuff since their software is mostly Java based RIA ( gwt based) and runs on a linux appliance.

I finally get to work on a Linux box at work again .. woohoo! They deploy on Fedora but I run Kubuntu on a speed deamon of a laptop at work. The 4 gigs on the laptop sure comes in handy when running VMware or Virtualbox virtual machines while testing.

National Geographic Genographic project

The Genographic project is a very interesting collaboration between IBM and National Geographic to analyse human DNA and correlate it to mass movements of humans in history. It's pretty fascinating stuff! It costs a wee bit if you want to participate if you want to compare the history in your DNA with the DNA from similar people.

My ancestors from the Punjab are supposed to have descended from humans which travelled from East Africa through the Middle East to India via Iran. It's quite believable since there is quite an influence from both the west and the east in my homeland.

Check out the genographic project at: https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html