Rants of a nerd
Miscellaneous
Pee Pee Water Supplies?
02 months ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
No thanks!
This is the actual name of a water supply company in Bombay. Why in heaven’s name would you call your water supplies company pee pee?
Photo taken through the dirty windscreen of my car, so pardon the dirty look. Camera phones seem to have so much depth of field that even the glass and the dirt on it is in focus.
3 months ago
Congratulations to Queen Elizabeth II on the jubilee. Another three years and she will overtake Victoria as Britain’s longest reigning monarch.
When plugins fail
03 months ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Don’t you hate it when a wordpress plugin fails suddenly. So here I have the flickr-gallery plugin. It has been working well all along and then suddenly decides that it will only show thumbnail images in the lightbox effect. Not really sure if any of the other plugins are conflicting with it. I think this happened after I added a plugin to enable facebook connect. Anyhow, I am disabling the lightbox thing till all this can be sorted out.
Paper camera
04 months ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Test photo taken with the interesting paper camera app. The real time preview feature is actually nice!
Auld acquaintances
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Had dinner with some old friends / former colleagues (including my ex boss). Good to catch up after six months. The occasion: my treat for losing a bet on the stock market. The last time we got together was my farewell at the old shop and so it was a sort of five gainst one bet.
We have set up a new bet. A little more balanced this time as we went around the table to get a clearing price at which we had three bearish and three bullish views. Settlement is on June 30.
I am not revealing the clearing level or my position!
No Post Today
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
It has been a long day and I am tired. So no blogging today.
Just wanted to point out one bit of heartening news. The Supreme Court ordered the release of some prisoners who had completed their terms. Ordinarily this would not have been news. Except that they were Pakistani prisoners who were being held even after completing their sentences because Pakistan was refusing to release Indian prisoners in an exchange. I can’t believe that the Indian government which berates Pakistan for the way it treats its people can treat anyone in this manner. For once I can say to the court: bravo!
Mac Day 2
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Well, the first full day with Leopard. Mostly the experience has been decent. Getting some hardware working was difficult. As with Linux, not all hardware makers offer Mac drivers. But the struggle with some basic stuff like keyboard and mouse were unexpected. Even after getting some fixes in, it still freezes sometime with the keyboard and mouse not responsive (if I leave the machine for a while). The last thing not working is the microphone. Sound is playing through the speakers, so this is probably a configuration issue. Perhaps it thinks that the mic port is a multi channel audio out port?
Applications too are not as easy to find as in the alternate worlds. Windows apps are everywhere of course. And Linux distros have had “app stores” for a long time (Synaptic / rpmdrake / whatever). But I like the way of installing new apps: just copy the application install to wherever needed (e.g. the applications folder). Discovering what apps are installed already and how to manage them is still a problem for me. Given that Darwin is a BSD kernel and the underpinnings are Unix style, will a ports type of repository work for mac?
The presentation is very good. However it feels very restrained / claustrophobic in some ways. The fact that everyone adheres to the basic user interface guidelines means that Firefox looks like Safari, VLC like Quicktime and so on. I guess the reason it is so successful is that it is a controlled system. In the same way there is the tight-knit ecosystem of itunes, ipod, etc. where the choices of what is available has been made for you. This feels so wrong for someone coming from an open environment like Mandriva (which is what I’ve been using for the past few years).
The basic reason I went in for the change in operating systems has not been tested yet: that is Adobe Lightroom 2. Unfortunately this nice piece of software is only available for Windows or Mac, and after trying XP for a while, I am not going to stay with it. Being perennially worried about viruses and other harmful software is not something I want to do. Loading the system down with a firewall, anti-virus, etc. is the surest way to slow the machine down to a crawl. I even tried running XP in a virtual environment (VirtualBox), but Lightroom runs like it is moving through molasses in that configuration. Tomorrow I shall test Lightroom out. It will also give me an opportunity to test how the export / import of the catalog of photos works.
Mac OS X
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Tried out Mac OS X today. The install of Leopard went remarkably smooth and here I am typing this blog post from within Firefox for Mac. Thanks to cross platform applications like Firefox, the learning curve is small. However there are enough painful differences.
Firstly the Mac OS does not seem to have an effective application menu. The only options seem to be the search icon at the top right of the screen (works if you know the name of the app, I suppose) and the Applications folder within Finder (Finder is a sort of file manager cum various other things here).
There is no task bar. Open applications add themselves to the Dock. I think they get a sort of blue dot beneath if they are running. Surprisingly clicking the red “x” button on an application only seems to minimize it. Can’t really say.
Now that I’ve tried Windows, Mac and Linux, it is easy to see where a lot of “inspiration” for new features and look-and-feel items have come from. Apple is clearly the leader in many aspects. However, I think KDE with the Plasma desktop have managed to really out-innovate Apple in some areas. Notably on the widget / plasmoids space (and not to forget the Plasma Netbook).
Windows is really the poor cousin here, it seems. I haven’t used Windows 7 to comment on that, but KDE and Mac show up XP and Vista in a bad light. The fact that a default install of either a recent Linux distro also throws in several applications further demonstrates the head that open source / free software has made in making the operating system usable out of the box.
P.S. Firefox for mac seems to have problems in laying out the WordPress dashboard.
Weather Scares
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Funny Story.
The winter storms that have lashed Western Europe and the US in the recent past have gotten people on the edge. So when news reports of an amateur weather forecaster predicting 40 inches of snow for the coming weekend came in, it started a near hysteria. Normally a prediction of this sort would have been met with scepticism, but coming on the back of two particularly nasty storms (and confident statements from newsmen that the forecaster had predicted both of these earlier storms), people were only too ready to believe it.
Now the guy says that he was misquoted. That it was only a worst case scenario and not what he had forecast.
What does this say about the spread of rumours? The internet seems to be particularly good at spreading rumours and stoking mass hysteria. Over seventy years ago, Orson Welles caused panic in New York as his radio adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds was taken as a news programme (despite many announcements that it was a dramatization). Nothing seems to have changed since then in terms of our gullibility.
PS: This reminds me of an old Archie Comics joke. Mr Weatherbee tells Miss Beazley, “rumours are like butter.” To which she replies, “because they are easy to spread?” The Bee retorts, “no, because they are so hard to unspread.”
Furniture Shopping
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Is not fun!
We went to a store called Home Town. It is spread over 2 floors and is massive. It has the most amazing range of home products under one roof. From groceries to electronics, they have not left anything out. I can understand selling electrical equipment, paints and DIY stuff next to furniture and curtains, but I have not figured out why they should sell DVD players and general provisions at the same place.
Anyhow the object was to get some book shelves, a long pending purchase. Over time the book collection has expanded while the storage has actually contracted, leaving books scattered and disorganized. The project over the next few days (till the shelves come in) would be to make space and for once fix the organization of the stuff. I wonder if the Dewey Decimal system is appropriate?
We also picked up a few other items of bulk, which we have to fit in the house now. So there is much to do over this long weekend!