Reconfigure
Notoriously resistant to (for practical purposes, afraid of) change.Bad carb good carb
May 29, 2006 [12:06]
The best embarrassment that I had in quite some time. Swearing, I took my bike to an elite mechanic (from the initial impressions from Prithvi) cribbing (Oh yes, 'crib' is an evolution of 'crib-biting') about petrol leak from the carb. Felt silly when a junior mechanic scuttled to the 'left' side of the bike (which I had conveniently ignored) and pulled out the fuel line which was cracked. I knew that it was cracked but it never entered my mind. Felt really bad about having pulled that my bike specialist colleague to help me with this.
The evening ride was quite smooth though. Strange. How can it be the fuel line ?!
permanent link Comments ()Of German spam and Notepad
May 25, 2006 [11:53]
Marc Joye: Crpto expert.
Notepad as my !#!@#! 17:17
Its the third time somebody has sent me this:
Hi All, This is good for people who use notepad to write down any info on a day to day basis. 1. Open a blank Notepad file. 2. Write .LOG (in CAPS only) as the first line of the file, followed by an Enter. Save the File and close it. 3. Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the Current Date and Time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the Line after. 4. Type your notes and then save and close the file. 5. Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the Date and Time to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it.
I might sound arrogant like Eric Raymond in this.
Passwords 13:12
These bank passwords are a discomfort (a.k.a driving me crazy). I can't put the same password everywhere. End up mixing passwords, getting accounts locked, calling up them (which I don't like a.k.a hate), not reaching, feeling bad (a.k.a frustrated). Typing this down to vent the uneasy feeling (a.k.a anger). I am not comfortable with talking to the call centre people.
German spam 10:55
Quote:
Sehr geehrte Damen und herren,
wir laden Sie rechtherzilch zu unseren Aktion. Alles was daufuer zu
machen brauchen ist dieses Formular auszufuellen. Das eine Euro das
Sie uns schicken wird viele Kinder der dritten Welt erfreuen
Das Kennwort fuer den Formular lautet jkm0
Herzilchen Dank
My head did a couple of somersaults when I saw this from a customer particularly when an gnus indicated an attachment with mime type application/octet-stream. Only the stream caught my eyes, then I have this German thingy in an attached picture.
permanent link Comments ()Learning
May 24, 2006 [12:58]
Ariyillengil Padikkuka thanne venam (approximately 'learn it, thats the only way out'). I dont remember (
Tolkien again 22:17
I visited Tolkien estate (on the web) recently. Links to the artists gallery gave me nice high (the way I used to have it a couple of years ago when the thought of LOTR was fresh in my mind.) I got a link to John Howe's site from the 'estate' and to Ted Nasmith's from google. There aren't any dedicated pages to Alan Lee. Ted's site appears to be broken.
Bad boy on bike 09:10
From the time I learned to use lower gear to accelerate quickly, my mileage has dropped. I am now trying to stop using that technique. Its quite useless other than for pleasure. On second thoughts I could get out off tight situations using that. But then its also scary. Compromise, start training on avoiding it or more correctly controlling the use of it.
Dhanush
I envy him, for his enviable account of two people getting separated at a railway station.
Bike's mileage, Lucid dreams, Deja Vu, blackboard pattern, assignment in C++, .comm directive of the assembler, Online games, fitness permanent link Comments ()Carburettor
May 20, 2006 [09:25]
Finally with enough courage I pulled out the carburettor of my bike myself. Took it in, opened it, vacuumed it, blew into it and put it back. Although there were some anxious moments, I got going (yeah, no adjectives, I am happy 'to be' riding it again). Those moments are like, as you mighta guessed, bike did not start after it I put it in. Also found a brass colored pice of screw/nozzle thingy on the floor after I put the carb back (my friend explained, to my relief, that it was a part of a fancy pair of earphones). As for the starting problem I shut the air completely and kicked, it /sucked/ fuel and started rolling. Though the whole business was quite educative, I did not get what I had looked for, the throttle still sputters plus I have the clamps on both sides of the air intake (to the carb) in reverse (not a problem, though the service guy is going to get a laugh (or atleast a smirk) from this sight).
permanent link Comments ()Politics
May 19, 2006 [08:30]
I got a crash course in politics from my manager. He is not like the ones I have seen with my previous employer. He, to my awe, is interested designing things (all kind of things). One of those fast moving kind (too fast for me).
Communities 12:53
Its amazing how people act like their place is the only one in the world. When confronted with some thing from the other guy's domain/place/where-they-come-from they respond like that thing is not supposed to exist.
I had a guy who was surprised to hear about a sweet delicacy called 'peda' and another lady who was even surprised to hear that he did not hear about peda.
More Upgrade screw up 12:24
As the 'Corporate Objects' tutor said. The memory violation in your program would bring down the other guy (in legacy OS, that is). Now I have a corrupt Symantec Client Security (firewall) getting in the way of running (IBM) Rational Rose.
Super man 11:33
Hangs around on #emacs. Hej, but don't tell any body that I told you this, OK ?
AutoFocus by Micr0$0fT 10:40
It does not fail to f***strate me. Gives me a prompt to type in my user+domain+password. Then whisks the focus off it and the stuff I type is elsewhere. That is called M$ auto-focus (tm).
AutoFocus in dreams 9:16
Dreamt of some person trying to take a picture of a notice board sticking out on top of an oilrig (or ship) with a camera attached to his sniper rifle's sight. I try it and see that its out of focus. Then I do something and suddenly the board is crystal clear. Then I decide thats too clear and to blur it a bit.
Doing too much gimping too late into the night.
permanent link Comments ()Anxiety
May 18, 2006 [12:10]
Rains 16:13
The regularity of rains. They dont miss the mark. I've never seen such long bouts of pre-monsoon showers.
No non-Leaders 15:46
There are only people 'who would like to be leaders' and 'leaders' in the class of 'good team players'. There is not something that is a good team player and follower.
Anxiety 15:01
Fear of being left out of all action particularly the people have the tendency to leave you out of all action. But I made this choice either toil or remain anxious. I chose anxiety.
No A-JACK'S gmail 14:36
Infra-struct-ure-team has done something to the proxies that Gmail's AJAX version does not work. I guess they wanted to stop people chatting over 'Gmail-Chat'. But see who has been hit. In a way I feel thankful that I lost 'calendar' access before I could be corrupted by it. Now I have more than a reason to use planner. Thank God.
Mobile Phones 14:14
Lotsa mobile phones from Nokia. But what do I like ? I wish to have one which has some kinda SDK given, I can sync my planner stuff with it. Colleague JP+ bought an N70 - What is good about it ? The 2mega pixel camera ? For cameras I would like to own a D70 instead (difference is that its from Nikon and its just a Digital SLR camera (no phone).
Upgrading AntiVirus 12:47
Our local helpdesk /upgraded/ my Symantec antivirus installation to Trend Micro antivirus through a script. This script appeared to have worked well leaving almost no trace of Symantec, until I saw the 'Symantec Security' thingy hanging around in the installed programs' list. As you mighta guessed, I hit the un-install button and it fails. Why would not people understand that these big guys have thousands of pieces of programs scattered over the hard disks. I feel is too much to think you can write program that would remove these dirty 'big corp' programs. The best way (at least) a saner way would have been to un-install the programs and install it as they say they should then look for any droppings from the now-gone beasts (which is almost always there).
Wrong Button 11:47
I hit the wrong button this morning. Instead of 'snooze' I hit the alarm kill of my cell phone and woke up at 8:00. When I wanted to wake up before 7:30. Inference: I am sleep deprived ? Naah.
permanent link Comments ()Tough learning
May 17, 2006 [14:04]
Disazter 23:25
How bad can things get ? Eli's oringinal file (made using his spanking Xml spy 2005) had noNamespaceSchemalocation, used for schemas without targetNamespace. It should work as is. I found that its because, we have noNamespaceSchemaLocation along with elementFormDefault=unualified in epgDataTypes_11.xsd the, file was valid. The default namespace would have been necessary to avoid the qualification is mandated by. I was confused by the examples (which were using schemaLocation). We dont have to put the default namespace prefix.
Lonely bit 13:08
I have my hands over my head pressing it down. Thinking of the way return values are enumerated. I like the way C had decided that all non zero values are true and zero is false. What difference does it make if '1' is used. There would be one out of 32 bits (in 32bits sys) set. I magine the plight of that bit. I see him standing alone when all those 'if's 'while's and conditional '?'s check him. There are no other bits to support him. I think it would be better not to let '1' be the sole representative of truth.
Comments 12:38
I am tempted to comment on people. Then that crazy feeling of "are you good enough" to comment acts up. Wonder if its ok to comment on people when you are not the ultimate thing to happen to human kind.
permanent link Comments ()Quitting dark humour
May 13, 2006 [10:46]
I wish to quit dark humour. Yesterday I watched "A series of unfortunate events". Sick one, I think, for a children's movie. Ref. his (Count Olaf) expression of Sunny (the youngest of the three orphans in the story) coming down crashing was sick (that is a baby in there, he mimics the way the cage would crash, (yuck)). I am impressed by the way Jim Carrey created a 'hatable'(or in general, thing that causes headache and nausea) character. He did that a lot of times, one such being returning a blind kid's bird, dead, in 'Dumb and Dumber'. Some wholly sick movies of his are: 'The man on the moon', 'the cable guy' and 'Eternal sunshine a of spotless mind'. 'The Truman show' could fit in if you look at it as a big sick joke played on Truman. 'Wasting' a man's entire life in the name of entertainment (Even if it has cozy part of Truman's freedom and all). 'The cable guy' is more like a 'sophisticated' bully to me. Though Eternal Sunshine doesn't have any obviously sick scenes. It makes you think of how one could mess with your head, if allowed. I got a similar feeling as this movie when I played the game 'Sanitarium'. I wonder if it was OK to be a Jim Carrey fan. I like him and have come to dis-like him for the same things.
permanent link Comments ()SGI
May 09, 2006 [00:33]
.. was my dream company to work for for quite some time (till it almost
got replaced with id software, after which I don't have any 'dream' company).
What caught my eye this morning on digg is this. There are 'forward' looking
in the SGI announcement, but then it has disclaimers as well :( I remember
drawing the wire-cube logo in my school notebooks, drooling over pictures of
Indy. To top it they started of my alltime favourite API: OpenGL. I think
they would come-back.
Majic happens
May 06, 2006 [13:23]
I got the new nForce4 northbridge fan. Check this pic out.
The fan on the left 'was' and that on the right (well, one like the one on the right) 'is' on the chipset inside squarehead. This image is from Triad Networking (here).
In various discussion forums I see people in US and Europe speak about how they called the ASUS RMA and had the new fan mailed to their homes. I was wondering if ASUS had any office in India. Also feeling bad about the idea of not having my PC at home for a week (or weeks ?), considering the way 'service' is done in many shops around. Luckily, my PC shop allowed me to take the board to a service center (Digicomp) which appears to have blacklisted (perhaps 'gray'-listed) them. Finding this shop was a problem as they were the only 'electronics' people in an area crowded with timber merchants. If any of you have to go there, the number is 2678040/60. I was very happy to hear the technician say - 'On this fan, I'll fix it', happier to see the new fan on the board.
permanent link Comments ()Binary XML
May 05, 2006 [05:33]
Rather funny that binary XML is needed by people. A couple of standards I had come across (DVB-H and T-DMB service metadata) would like to have XML 'encoded' in some kinda binary format. The T-DMB people have a binary encoding (pdf) with single byte tags corresponding to a set of XML elements. I've always felt the same way as many who think Binary XML is an oxymoron. Let me see if the stuff at w3c can change my mind.
permanent link Comments ()Squarehead gets cold
May 02, 2006 [12:39]
It was a close call. My box (squarehead) has the screemer. It almost gave up yesterday. A whole day of watching movies, the sun sets, dread of weekday nibbles at my head. Thats when I notice the output of 'sensors' program which said.
fan3: 0 RPM (min = 664 RPM, div = 8)
That hurt me.
Today, I called up my shop and they wanted the whole box to be brought to them When I am trying to squeeze time for extra-activities, that was too much. Lot of googling about the already known problem with A8N-E chipset fan. Back home I (as planned) opened the box up and felt the fan with my finger it was tight (almost as tight as a typical volume control knob!!). I brought the vacuum cleaner and let her rip the fan open. After a few seconds I heard the whine of the fan. That was a bit encouraging. after blowing off all the lint around in the box. I plugged squarehead in and booted. The rpm is back to the scream (~8K).
More cleaning. I made a little air filter (hope it does not affect the air flow too much) out of sponge and put it up in what appeared to be a major air inlet on the cabinet. I hope it runs for long before it gets the cold again. WTF!! Just as I type this its dropping to 4-5K RPM!!!.. #!@!@###@
I think my box is alive. I am not saying anything anymore.
permanent link Comments ()