Just posting some random thoughts bouncing around my head. I think people who use the phrase “He/she works Banker hours have obviously never worked in a bank. Also the people who keep telling others that they slept like a baby have never spent time with a baby for an extended period of time.
I have finally placed my order for the Raspberry Pi 
No I don’t mean the actual pie, (I don’t think I would like it that much. Too sweet for me) I mean the mini computer the size of a deck of cards costing about $35. Can’t wait for it to arrive, have loads of projects in mind.
Tried eating honey roasted cashew nuts today dipped in spicy sauce and it tasted awesome, I think I need to go buy more honey roasted cashew nuts. I had tried the same earlier with just salted nuts but that didn’t taste quite as good and I ended up burning my tongue.
Did you know Taco Bell in Bangalore gets a weekly shipment of Taco Buns (?) Bread (?) Round thingies (?) from Delhi and if the shipment doesn’t arrive then they don’t have the ability to make it in Bangalore?
Well this is all for now. I will stop now before I sound like a complete lunatic.
- Suramya
Another publisher (Tor) sees the light and from July 2012 will start selling DRM free books. Yay! I have long advocated DRM free books for no other reason than the fact that I would like to read my books on all my platforms (Linux PC, Tablet + Android Phone) without restrictions or compatibility issues.
Tor is mainly a SciFi and Fantasy publisher with some great authors in its line up so I am glad that they are removing DRM from their books. Plus its not like the DRM was stopping anyone from making a copy of a book in any case.
Check out the Smash Words blog for a really good writeup on why DRM doesn’t work.
Five Reasons to Say No to DRM:
Readers (who know about DRM) don’t like DRM
DRM adds expense to books
DRM makes books complex
DRM limits accessibility to books, especially for those with vision disabilities who require Text-to-Speech (TTS)
DRM doesn’t prevent piracy
In all this is a great step forward in the fight against DRM. Now we just have to convince the publishers to price the ebooks reasonably and I will be all set. Ah well, one step at a time.
Source: Tor/Forge E-book Titles to Go DRM-Free | Tor.com.
Just about a week ago, my sister gave birth to a lovely boy named Vir. It feels great to have such a lovely nephew. This is the first kid for whose birth I was there at the hospital. Mom said “Sarb ka phal Meetha hota hai (Fruits of Paitience are sweet), Vir made us wait a lot for his arrival but is so sweet that the wait was worth it. I was asked not to post photos on the Blog/Facebook so have waited till now to let Vinit and Surabhi post the pics. but Now its my turn. I was also asked to make sure no fugly photos are posted but that’s not possible since Vir is too cute to have Fugly photos. Vinit and Surabhi on the other hand are a completely different story.
Without further ado, I present Vir:
Vir just about an hour old
Me and Vir at the hospital about an hour after he was born.
Vir and Me at home about a week later
Have more pics but need to get them past the censor board (Vinit & Surabhi) 
before I can share them.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
- Suramya
Seriously, can someone please explain this to me? This guy went and painted a bunch of tree’s blue and that is supposed to raise awareness about the importance of tree’s. I would be more concerned about the harm this paint might cause the trees. (Paint blocks the pores so could effect the ability of the tree’s to convert co2). I would understand if he went out and planted a lot of trees or did something that educated people about them. I really doubt that I will ever understand these so called ‘artists’, A lot of the ‘modern’ art looks to me like a mad monkey was dropped in paint and crawled across the canvas in its death throes. Or maybe its because someone supposed to be a big art critic said that the above is art and everyone else is just jumping on the bandwagon so that they don’t seem as if they don’t know art (kind of sounds like the emperor’s new clothes if you ask me).
Drawing a box bisected by a line with different colors on both sides or putting a rock on a fence does not make it art or you an artist. Making something that takes actual effort and skill (like this or this) is art.
Now a lot of folks say that it requires a lot of thought to create a painting and I agree with it, I just don’t classify my examples above as paintings. A while ago I visited a art exhibition with a friend and one of the paintings over there was a canvas painted yellow with a black line cutting across it diagonally about a third of the way from the corner. Another painting was a blank canvas with a red (or was it blue) dot in the middle of it (that’s it). Now please tell me what makes it so impressive that someone painted a dot on the canvas?
Source of the image prompted this rant (Although I have been meaning to post about this): Urber Humor: Daily Morning Awesomeness 32.
Any thoughts/Comments?
- Suramya
Normally I don’t post links to video’s on the blog but after watching this video I just had to share. Its a must watch for all Doctor Who fans but it has a lot of spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t seen the last season of Dr Who. The video shows the last season of Dr Who as an 8bit RPG and is awesome. Plus it has Fish and Custard I wish that this was a real RPG.
Click on the image below to watch the video:
BTW, Shipra: is 11:50pm better for this stuff than 6am?
Thanks to Nerdapproved.com for the link.
- Suramya
Today was fun. After a long time I spent an evening completely geeking out at Krishna’s place swapping mother-boards to get a server back up and running. Initially we were going to hot swap the Bios chip to re-flash it as the chip seemed to have gotten corrupted. But then we realized that the board we were swapping to (my old motherboard) had a different Bios chip so the pin layout was completely different so obviously the swap wouldn’t work. 
Then we decided to take the motherboard from another computer (Preeti’s desktop), put that in the server (who’s MB had died) and put my MB in the desktop as a temp solution. Spent over 5 hours trying to get this to work. Gah. Most of it was because of the trouble Windows gave when switching motherboards.
The desktop was originally running windows 7, and there is a new program called sysprep that you can use to prep a Windows 7 system to move it to another motherboard. At first I was impressed that Windows finally supports something that Linux has had for a while. Even though it was a bit clunky and required an extra step but this is an improvement from what it used to be. But then we found out that sysprep really messed up the system. It destroyed the Windows 7 partition and we had to recover it using the windows recovery CD (That Krishna had thankfully created the day before). We recovered the partition but nothing really worked even after that. Basically after answering all the setup questions we kept getting put in a temp profile that would be deleted when you log out. So even though the data was all there, the system was unusable.
Looking at the system log didn’t get us any answer and finally we decided to restore the original partition (that we had created before the sysprep using dd) to the drive and put it in the new system without running sysprep. Hopefully this will work (I Left while the dd restore was running), will find out tomorrow. Otherwise lets see what other options we have.
When I upgraded to this new motherboard, all I did was plug in my old drive and Linux detected all the new hardware and booted up without any major issues.
The funniest part was when we booted up the disk after cloning it but before running sysprep (we had swapped the USB keyboard and mouse around) I got a message that new device was detected and drivers were being installed for the keyboard (the same one that was being used earlier) and once the installed finished we were asked to reboot the system for the changes to take effect. I always thought that this was a joke (“Windows detected that you moved your mouse cursor, please reboot for the changes to take effect.) but this happened today.
Once I came back home I watched a couple of episodes of “The Guild” which is an web series about a group of online gamers, and how they interact online and offline. I had found the series after listening to their music video: I’m the One That’s Cool and searching for more stuff by them. Check it out if you have some time, each episode is only about 3-5 mins long so doesn’t take long to watch.
Well this is all for now. I was planning on doing some coding but its hot and almost 6am so I should probably get some sleep. Will write more later.
- Suramya
I am all for trying out the local cuisine when visiting various places as long as its vegetarian or has eggs but there is no way I am every going to try this Delicacy from Dongyang, China: Urine-Boiled Eggs. At first I thought that this was a joke but its on the food section of Gizmodo and a search on Google gave articles going back a few years so it looks like this is real. These are regular eggs that have been boiled in urine collected from boys under 10 years old. Yes, you read it correctly. The eggs are boiled in actual urine and then eaten.
The recipe for Virgin Boy Eggs is quite simple really. One first collects a bucket of piddle from the local primary school. Only the water of boys under the age of ten is suitable. Virgin Boy Eggs are first soaked in in a pot of urine, then brought to a boil. Once firm, the eggs’ shells are cracked to allow fuller penetration, and bathed regularly through out the day with fresh piss to prevent them from overheating.
This is all for now. I am going to go throw up now.
Source: China’s Urine-Boiled Eggs Are a Cultural Delicacy I Will Not Try
- Suramya
Seems like slowly everyone is finally figuring out that sharing information is good (except for RIAA/MPAA etc). First Royal Society journal archive was made permanently free to access then Sir Isaac Newton’s scanned notes got published online by Cambridge. Now the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has published some 2,000 digitized documents from their Albert Einstein’s archives ranging from personal correspondence to scientific papers online (on alberteinstein.info). These documents are fully searchable and can be examined right down to the finest detail. They will continue adding additional documents over the course of 2012, with the ultimate goal being to get all of the 80,000+ items in the university’s archives online.
This is an amazing collection that can maybe help more people understand how one of the most brilliant men in history thought. I would love to go through the archive, but unfortunately they are mostly gibberish to me. I am sure other folks would find them most interesting and who knows, this might spark some idea in someones mind that could end up changing the world.
Source: CBC News
Thanks to Engaget for the initial story.
- Suramya
Saw this in my news feed today and found this interesting enough to share. Facebook (FB) has become the defacto medium by which most young folks share information with their friends and keep in touch. I can’t even count the no of times I went out with friends met someone new there and once I got back home had a Friend request from the person I had just met. Now this study claims that the new generation is becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships. While its not true for all folks on FB, it is true for a large majority. How many of the 500+ ‘friends’ you have on FB have you had a conversation with in the past one year? Even I have people on my friend list that I haven’t talked to in over a year (although that could be because I don’t log on to FB that often ).
From the article:
Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.
People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.
The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.
The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site’s public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.
For me friends are people I interact with on a regular (semi-regular) basis as a friend in real life, hence I hesitate in adding folks I barely know as friends on FB. That just dilutes the meaning of ‘Friend’ for me, but I think that this is not the case with most people. BTW, I am not saying that we need to be best friends before I add you to FB, just that I need to become friends in real life before becoming friends on FB. (Another reason for not adding you could be that I just haven’t logged in on FB in a while)
Was reading another article a couple of days ago where they talked about how people tend to exaggerate their life on FB to appear to be more popular. This phenomenon is not unique to FB, when MySpace was popular you could actually pay ‘pretty’ people to add you as their friends and post messages on your wall (don’t remember what MySpace called it). You can even buy FB friends for fairly cheap.
Moral of the story, don’t just post about having a good time; go out and have fun in real life with real folks. This photo is very accurate and something I see on a fairly regular basis and I am sure you all do as well:
What do you think?
Source: Facebook’s ‘dark side’: study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism.
Thanks to LifeHacker for the initial story.
- Suramya
“Say what??” Was pretty much my initial reaction when I first read this article on Techdirt. Then I thought that this must be some sort of misunderstanding as no one can be dumb enough to want to charge libraries extra for each time volunteers read their books (Not books they have written mind you, but books that they manage copywrite for… basically they are making money off other people’s work.) to kids. But unfortunately that was not the case. These idiots actually want to charge libraries extra because unpaid volunteers read books to kids.
Twice a month, the library in [the Belgian town of] Dilbeek welcomes about 10 children to introduce them to the magical world of books. A representative of the library in question is quoted in the De Morgen report as saying there’s no budget to compensate people who read to the kids, relying instead on volunteers (bless them).
SABAM got in touch with the library to let them know that it thinks this is unacceptable, however, and that they should start coughing up cash for reading stories from copyrighted books out loud. The library rep calculates that it could cost them roughly 250 euros (which is about $328) per year to pay SABAM for the right to — again — READ BOOKS TO KIDS.
Is it a requirement for people getting hired into such firms to be brain dead and lacking all common sense? How dumb can you get? Actually don’t answer that… I am sure they can stoop lower. These are the same upstanding folks who were Charged With Copyright Fraud, Embezzlement, Money Laundering and are waiting for the court date to be set for this.
All these organizations need to be banned and/or charged a heavy fine for every false complaint they make for copyright violation. At present it costs them almost nothing to send out these notices and if someone objects they can just withdraw the complaint without any downside/fines. If they had to pay every time they did stupid stuff then the number of false/stupid copyright infringement claims would go down a lot.
Actually… Now that I think about it, we should all send them money immediately before they start charging parents who read night time stories to their kids.
- Suramya
