Hypo-Allergenic Cats

I was reading about "Hypo-Allergenic Cats" at slashdot, which led me to the website http://www.allerca.com/. I found the cat facts really interesting until I hit this fact under the heading "Cats and People". It said, "It has been proven that stroking a cat can lower one's blood pressure" ....disgusting! I don't know who tried it and proved such a disgusting thing. Really pitty the cat :-)

Big Day !

Certainly was a big day, I was slogging the weekend for an interview that caught me by surprise on friday. Yeah monday evening I interviewed with Amazon, quite amazing, last year when I was here I interviewed with Mircrosoft but didn't get to any serious level.

This time Amazon which, was as good as microsoft when it came to screwing candidates. 1 hour of royal screwing; managed to answer a few question but no doubt was way below their expectation, did ask my interviewer in the end if I will make it to the next round :-) and this was his the answer "we will let you know soon" in recruiter's esoteric that translates to "ass hole, you are a looser". This is my humble contribution, hope it helps those innumerable folks that want to get into Amazon.

Sunday evening was big too; got myself a big toy, more on my next post, with pics......yeah u guessed it right :-)

Wires Wires Everywhere... not any more !

Got my wireless router DLink DL-524 yesterday, setup was as usual a piece of cake. Configured it with WEP inititally and found that there was significant load on the router also experienced some latency. In the end turned off WEP and disabled DHCP, assigned few static IPs and couple of rules to stop the rather inquisitive folks around with a wireless equipment to mess with my network(Vayu). In the process found couple of un-protected wireless network to which I could connect and simply use their resources including their internet bandwidth. One of them had a read/write MS share :-)

Now, I can move around with my notebook anywhere within my place and still be hooked on to the internet, isn't that great ? But, there is one problem I don't have an endless source of battery power. I need to plug my notebook on to a power supply every 3 hours. That sucks, I hate wires :-) That also makes me wonder why we need to have a wire(copper) as a medium for power. Why not use a Plasma Magnet for power? I am not a physics freak but, to me it sounds feasible, of course with my obscenely limited knowledge of physics and it's application one wouldn't attach much weightage to my proposal.

One thing that puts me off is tangled phone wires, particularly the wire that connects the receiver to a phone. Whenever I see such tangled phone wire I feel like grabbing them and fixing them immediately. I need to put a bridle on my irksome attitude now.

Uppuma Disaster !

Came home late and really was in no mood to cook. Reluctantly browsed through my cooking storage area and found uppuma ravai. A thought flashed through my mind, I was reminded of the kichaddi that I had in Karpagambal Mess just before leaving for this place. I knew the recipe, pretty simple and straight forward but, never had a chance to make some before.

So, there it all started with heating some ghee and preparing the onions, red chilli, vegetables and the garnishing stuff. The ghee was warm enough for me to add the stuff that I had got ready. After frying the stuff for sometime added some water and salt and let it boil. After the vegetable was cooked properly added some more water and let it boil. This was the most important and delicate phase of making uppuma, a slightest mistake here and you are doomed. So, collecting myself and with all the might, holding the ravai packet on one hand and the karandi on the other, slowly started pouring and stiring simultaneously, I was so impressed with myself that I lost track of the amount of ravai that fell inside pan. That was the first sign of trouble. The thing almost instantaneously turned into a slimy paste. Within minutes the mixture became a thick paste, though that's how the uppuma is supposed to look and feel; there was a major deviation. The ravai was still not cooked properly, it was half cooked and tasted like our regular oats kanji (Porridge). That was when I realized that I had screwed up big time.

Quite obviously the next course of action was to fix the problem. Only way to fix the problem was to boil the uppuma which looked more like a rava-vegetable paste, so pured more water and boiled for 10 minutes. With no avail poured more water and boiled for some more time. The only difference that I could sense was that the level of the uppuma paste was constantly rising. The third time I added more water the uppuma paste reached the brim, that when I realised the amount of ravai I had poured and that I had a "situation" in hand. Things were getting nasty and out of hand. Time was ticking(11:30PM), I had cooked the stuff for close to 45 minutes and the lousy ravai just refused get cooked. My last option was to pressure cook the thing(was nothingth close to uppuma) so, transfered a part of the ravai-paste into my cooker, a part of the paste for I only had cute little 2 litre pressure cooker. It was like half ravai and half water and pressure cooked it. This time was quite confident that the ravai would get cooked. After about 20 minutes, I opened the cooker only to find that there was still some water left and ravai exactly in the same state as what it was when it went in. In the end we didn't have much of a choice but to eat the left over rice from today's morning.

Yeah.. project uppuma was a total disaster. Now, I have a pan full of un-cooked uppuma, I am just wondering what to do with it :-). We had dinner at 12:30 AM and now the time is 1:30 AM, I better get some sleep now :-)

Race to the Space

There is suddenly an increased activity and effort to escape the grasp of gravity. Few months back the chinese despite their tight-lipped media and government, publically announced their manned mission to the moon. India too in a fit of competition announced it's manned mission to the moon and later down graded to an unmanned mission (Chandrayan) to the moon. Later, a private company in the US managed a manned flight into space. Now, there is a Race X Prize to the space offering a prize money of 10 million.

Talking about the Indian mission to the moon, I wonder if this is really necessary given the economic state of affairs of the country. We sure should prove to the rest of the world that we are by no means behind them when it comes to space exploration and technology, but at what cost ? The manned mission I heard would cost 2.2 billion dollors, that's like 1/4th of our annual education budget. It's quite apparent that 2.2 billion dollors for the mission would be questioned from every corner. The decision to go ahead with the current un-manned mission is understandable, but, it would be better if such decisions are made with a bigger and better concensus. The unmanned mission is going to cost 500 million, while the american version costed 12 billion :-), no wonder India is the destination for outsourcing Oops ! should I say labour distribution. If India proves a much cheaper and efficient model for such missions, I am sure India can capture the next "Space Exploration/Travel" out-sourcing market. And we should all be proud that India happens to be the first in Asia to launch a exclusive sattelite for educational purposes. Let's keep our fingures crossed untill 2007 to see how Chandrayan-I fares and how we benifit from it. The fact that they are calling it Chandrayan-I indicates that there will be more such missions. It's a bold step but, we have to wait and watch if the objective are acheived.

Coming to the Chinese aspirations, china has big time plans to reach the moon. China has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in its space program, which has close connections with the country's military. The communist leadership in Beijing regards the space effort as a key indicator of China's rapid development and a focus for national pride. However critics say the program is a waste of money in a country where hundreds of millions of people live below the poverty line, without access to modern health care and education.

But there is something that is driving these folks, there are probably doing this to strike gold first. Sometime back a Russian righlty predicted that there would be a race to claim a source of fuel that is found abundant in the moon, Helium 3. Yes, United States the most fuel hungry country on the face of this earth should also be planning a covert moon mission, but guess they are keeping it under wraps. Now that we have private players into Space exploration and travel it has become a race against time. Who is going to get there first, is the question. I am not sure as how Helium 3 can be transported and effectively used, but if it is done then it is close to having found an un-conventional, non-depleting form of energy.

The Xprize race is on and today the news was out that "Space Ship One" won the prize. SpaceShip one an interesting project funded by non other than our Redmonder "Paul Allen". I get a feeling that Redmond is using Paul Allen here, I really am sceptical about Paul Allen's personal interest in Space Exploration and Travel. MS controlling all those spaceships and space stations would be a nightmare. I am just wondering where we will be 20-30 years from now. Space travel would be like travelling to the Hawai for vacation. Douglas Adams' fantasy would become a reality, hyperspace bypass, Galactic Restaurant etc.. :-)

Some more of nothing !

After a lot of pondering and researching ultimately found the right kind of linux distribution for my needs.Gentoo was becoming a little too complicated for me to handle. Debian certainly had the potential to make it to my list but failed because of the slow development cycle. Debian did not have most of the latest and the greatest of the open world. Even if it did, it was labeled unstable. I can understand that they are a little paranoidl about new softwares and very serious about the stability of the distribution, but, I wouldn't want to use Gnome 2.8 after I get my grand children, either.

So, there it was just waiting for me "ubuntu", a cute little linux distribution with almost all the things that I wanted. Some folks in south Africa actually put this distribution together, the current release is codenamed "Warty Warthog" Ubuntu is actually a word from the African Nguni language family, meaning "humanity, caring, and harmony" yeah..singing the same open world song. Things that I liked the most, also being the reasons for my choice:
1. Distribution based on Deb. which meant I could apt-get :-)
2. Linux kernel 2.6 (Wireless Support, Laptop power saving)
3. Breaking the tradition, it had HAL, means more H/W friendly
4. Gnome 2.8
5. Evolution 2.0
and more than all these it's a single CD base edition, more ingenious ones can always apt-get.
Installation is so straight forward that anyone as dumb as a Dodo can install it blindfolded and with arms tied behind his back. Installation screens are ANSI graphics, which is in fact good and pleasantly reminded me of the good old days of bulletin board systems.

I have to admit GNOME 2.8 is awesome, I remember few years back installing RH6 on one of my friend's comp., that was the time when GNOME had introduced Nautilus and the world of spatial design was catching up. Till this time I was totally against Nautilus after having witnessed it's performance issues during the early years. But GNOME 2.8 rocks ! nautilus is nocibely quick. Infact GNOME has taken the best of all the worlds. Context Menu Options and drag-drop(Windows), Dockable Menu/Bars( NextStep/Mac) and some GNOME specific stuff like Application and Systems as two seperate menus. I am no usability expert but I find GNOME 2.8 really convincing.

Most of the hardware on my notebook was detected without any problem, the only thing that failed was the IR port, I don't use it often anyway. Did some apt-get for xmms and vlc, those are by the way two good audio and video players, got bittornado for torrent downloads. I found this interesting fact about Ubuntu while trying to mount my windows ntfs partitions. The root account is disabled by default and all operations are carried out using a user account. When there is some operation that requires root privilege it "sudo"s. That again is cool for the chances of you messing up things are less. One annoying thing was that the terminal did not refresh properly, like when you have lot text on the terminal window and you scroll up and down the text gets garbled, have to look out for an alternative. That was friday till 2AM, that's when I decided to hit the bed.

Otherwise there are lot of crazy activities happening around this place. Particularly, mother nature has been really hostile in this part of the world, 4 hurricanes in the south east, a really strong earthquake measuring 6.0 on the richter rocked the west(California) and now St.Mt. Helens is being overwhelmed by the hot activity in her belly. Helens belched a roiling plume of white steam and ash today, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes first warned an eruption was on the way. This is the first noticeable activity after 18 years it seems. Now the interesting part, I live exactly 180 miles away from mt.st.helens and last time when she erupted she consumed everything in 200 miles radius :-)