- December, 2007
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woohoo! audiobook ready now!
I have been waiting for a long time for this audiobook to be available for download. Please put your hands together and welcome The Count of Monte Cristo audiobook, available as a free download from LibriVox.
A big thanks to the volunteers at LibriVox for the hard work.
Links
- November, 2007
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slow nfs mount in ubuntu
On my home server, I have a nfs server running and I use nfs to mount my music to my laptop. Ever since the first day the nfs mount process used to be dead slow. Today I got irritated enough to check out if this is a common problem.
It seems that this is a common enough problem. The reason is that nfs requires portmap to be running on both the client and the server side.
Links:
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youtube search - sort by video playtime
The youtube search does a good job of searching videos. In its search page, it allows you to search by popularity/ratings/date. I have found that videos with longer playing time are usually the ones I am interested in, however, there is no option to sort the results by playing time.
I did a bit of digging in the Youtube Developer's guide and saw that they give the length of the video in seconds. The next piece was Yahoo! Pipes. I created a pipe which would fetch videos from youtube and then passes the results through the sort operator to sort the results based on the yt:duration field. Tada! That gives me videos matching my search criteria near the top.
Links:
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analysis of x-headers in spam
RFC 822 allows people to define and use additional header fields in their emails. These fields start with
X-
in their names. For example,X-Quarantine-ID
orX-Spam-Score
. Usually these headers are not too interesting. I wanted to see if the spammers use any custom fields in the spam messages that they send out.The complete analysis is posted here. The headers that I found interesting (i.e. the ones that occur very infrequently)
- X-DSNContext
- This seems to be header set by MS Exchange
- X-AntiVirus: Checked,
- This seems to be header set be spammers to confuse the mail filter
- X-ME-UUID
- Looks like header set by some mail server
- X-Source, X-Source-Args, X-Source-Dir, X-Spam
- These are headers set by phplist
- X-Failed-Recipients
- This is a header generated by exim when it handles mailing lists. Looks like some spammer has a mailing list with all his targeted email ids in it.
- October, 2007
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finding and moving to a new home for cheap in Bangalore
On the 29th of September, I relocated to a new house. I wanted to relocate as cheaply as possible and I think I was sucessful in doing that. Here are some tips that you might find be useful.
Finding a home
The conventional way to do this is to use a real estate agent (or as we commonly call him "property dealer", "PD", broker) to find a suitable home. The downside to this is that you have to pay the agent one month of rent as commission. I was under the impression that in Bangalore this was the only way to find a home.
However, there is another way that I used this time. I went walking in the locality that I wanted to live in and wherever I saw an apartment block, I asked the security guards of that apartment if there were any flats available for rent. Frankly, I was a bit worried that the guards might treat me as a nut-case, or that I might have trouble communicating with them (since I don't know Kannada). However, even though I got a lot of "No apartments available for rent here" or "the rent here is HIGH_SUM_OF_MONEY", I got to see quite a few good apartments that were within my budget.
I finally found a good apartment using the above method.
Moving to the new home
Again, the conventional method to do this is to hire a Movers and packers and pay them a hefty sum to do the work. I called up quite a few movers and packers and even though they were asking for a big amount (Rupees 3500 to Rupees 5000), I had almost finalized on one of them.
However, one of my colleagues suggested that I can do the whole thing myself. In Bangalore (and Delhi), there are lots of Tempo stands (usually located near major bus stops). These people provide you with the vehicle to move your stuff as well as the laborers to load and unload your household items. However, these people do not do the packing part. I went out and after a bit of roaming around, I was able to locate a fellow who was willing to do the move for Rupees 2000.
The next part was doing the packing. This part actually seems more daunting than it really is. The trick is to get four essential components, viz: lots of big cartons (in Bangalore, this can easily be procured from your local kabaddiwala), at least 2 rolls of big, brown cello-tape (it is used for sealing the cartons), fast paced music that you can listen to while packing and finally a partner who can make sure you are not slacking off. Thats it.
A few tips from my experience
- pack all you small and expensive stuff in one bag and keep it with yourself when the laborers come in.
- pack your expensive and big stuff (like your desktop, microwave, television) and put some mark on those boxes. This will help in making sure the laborers are moving the big, expensive stuff carefully.
- Supervise the loading and unloading of the stuff yourself.
Hope you find these tips useful!
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what is your formula? your equation? your algorithm?
I recently paid a visit to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London to see Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend with whom I have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented "The World Question Center" as a work of conceptual art.
The walls of Obrist's office were covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: "What Is Your Formula?" Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
Some interesting formulas
- DANNY KAHNEMAN Psychologist, Princeton; Recipient, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/Kahneman.html>
- MARVIN MINSKY Computer Scientist; 1st Generation Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, MIT; Author, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/Minsky.html>
- PAUL BLOOM Psychologist, Yale University; Author, Descartes' Baby <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/Bloom.html>
- RICHARD DAWKINS Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The God Delusion <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/Dawkins.html>
A lot of formulas use symbols that I did not understand :-/
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reddit on y! pipes
Most of the times programming.reddit gives quite relevant articles. However, somedays the fanboys make reading it a bit dull. Somedays back I had stumbled across reddit cleaner, which combines programming.reddit and joel.reddit, eliminates anything with an exclamation in the title, and a few other fanboy-ish keywords. Even after that, I was not satisfied with the quality of the articles coming in. Hence, I modified the reddit cleaner pipe to further eliminate articles with the following words in their title
- ruby
- python
- fsf
- microsoft
- apple
- Ask Reddit
- released
- google This is the resulting pipe Lunatech Reddit cleaner
Note: The above blacklist does indicate any of my deep rooted prejudices.
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