Ultimate Collaboration

There are some folks on this earth that constantly keep thinking about how to improve things. This is one very good example; some ingenious guy has managed to project craigslist data onto google maps, isn't it wonderful ?

Ubiquitous Scratchpad !

Hmm... I wanted to do this, long time back but, once Gmail surfaced I started using it as my ubiquitous scratchpad, lets me search the data too, what more can I ask. With Google's customized home page thing hitting the scene, I just can't imagine how many more ways we can customize/maintain/effectively use our personal data. With all due credit, the "web accelerator" thing from Google sounds a little "evil" to me. It's like the big bypass to the "Internet", how can u be sure if u are getting what you asked for ? Anyways, that a different topic all together.

Electronic Scratchpad ! I've been using them for years. One problem that always lingered was the inability to access it from any place. My pre stone-age scratchpad technique was to quickly jot down stuff on an ascii file stored under my home directory. This however, was becoming difficult to handle, I ended up with different versions at office/home and at other temporary computer facilities that I used and synchronising them was another big pain in the right place(pain in the right place is much more painful). I even tried to find if someone on the internet would give me a gratis cvs account so that I can checkin my scratchpad and control it from anywhere. The problem with cvs was the inability to checkin/checkout from behind a firewall that's out my control. This motivated me to come up with an ubiquitious storage scheme which would simply accept whatever I type and store them without having to do much over http. I initially tried email-to-blogger but, blogger's implementation was so crappy that it would take nearly a week for my emails to appear on the blog and sometime even fail, otherwise, was obscenely inconsistent.

So it was my original idea. They stole it from us ! my precious :-)

Well actually, in all fairness I should say wise people think alike.
Thus, I declare Glen Murphy a wise man ! and all who think like me as wise people.

Yeah you guessed it right, people otherwise refer to me as generosity personified.

Cyclic Redundancy !

I was toying with my new iRiver H320 mp3 player. Well, not really toying but was trying to upload all my mp3 music from CDs to the player. I would have completed couple of CDs and soon hit a problem. I could not copy few songs and kept getting the CRC error. However, I could play them using winamp, abosolutely no issues. I tried to figure out if there was a copy utility that just verbatim copies a file from a source to a destination, surprisingly couldn't find one.

All the copy utilities simply refused, cp on cygwin had the same effect. I wasn't sure if cp was only a wrapper over the regular windows copy utility. Though cp did not explitcitly say CRC error it bombed calling it an I/O error. I was quickly running out of options. I couldn't ignore these songs for there were many and were fairly good ones to be carried around. So, wrote this very simple perl script to get it done :-)

#!c:/perl/bin/perl -s
#file : cp_ignore_crc.pl
#If you are stuck with copying some file from you old cd, particularly you old mp3 files
#due to a CRC error. This script will verbatim copy source file to the destination

my $numArgs = $#ARGV + 1;

if($numArgs < 3)
{
print "Show me the money !\n";
print "USAGE : cp_ignore_crc.pl < source file > < destination file >";
exit 1;
}

my $horrible_cd_file=$ARGV[0];
my $dest=$ARGV[1];

open(FR,$horrible_cd_file) or die "an error occured: $!";
open(FW,'>:unix',$dest);
binmode FR,raw;

while(< FR >)
{
print FW $_;
}

close(FW);
close(FR);

That makes me wonder why these basic file copy utilities don't have a method to turn off CRC. I think it makes sense to make CRC optional for non-executable files, because even if a few blocks are corrupt we can still make sense out of the data.

Kayaking !

Yes ! kayaking. one of many things that I thought was kind of out reach for me came true last weekend. Couple of friends and me headed to Lake Union to get a taste of kayaking. This lake is right at the heart of U.W university district, quite an Urban setup for a lake. Summer is the time of the year that people on this part of the earth long for very badly. The moment they see the Sun out, the place is overwhelmed with activity. People get hold of their skate board, boats and other paraphernalias to pursue different outdoor activity. One of the many things that is done pretty regularly by folks out here is Kayaking.

So we reached this kayak rental place near Portage Bay, we got there early to avoid the holiday rush. The place I heard gets particular crowded after 10:00 am and attracts a lot of desi. So, there we were at Agua Verde Paddle Club and Cafe at about 9:30. as we entered the place saw couple of people already getting their acts to-gether. I was a little apprehensive because one, I had not tried kayaking before and the Kayak itself looked like a spiteful contrapment requiring some skill to handle. Another thing I was worried was the temperature of the water it was pretty low, 10 minutes in that water and there was very good chance to suffer hypothermia. There were also many options like a two, three or single seater. We were three and I didn't want to take the 2/3 seater option for that last thing I want to do is put others in danger and of course put mine in danger by letting some one screw. I also felt the 2/3 people rowing together required more co-ordination and it was definitely not the time for such experiments.

Quickly the owner I suppose, came to us and asked about the boat option and we all opted for 3 single seaters, that is one kayak each :-) . He also made us fill out few forms which basically said that they will not be responsible if we try to do something stupid and of course a lot things in fine print for which we had no time. After completing all the formatlities, the instructor led us to our kayaks and explained few things before getting into the kayak, he wanted us to empty our bladders before starting which made complete sense for once you are out there at the middle of the lake there is no way you can get out of the boat or get back to shore quickly. All of us obliged to his suggestion and came back, put on our life jacket and pinofore kind of thing that had a funny looking skirt fastened to a oval shaped ring. We all looked like the "Kathakali" dancers with the a life jacket on less the facial do and expressions.

The instructor patiently explained how to get into the kayak and get the steering controls right. Quickly he calibrated the steering, sealed the kayak with the oval ring from waist and below and we were off in no time. I was a little uncomfortable with the paddle and my rowing action was notoriously clumsy to begin with. Slowly I got the hang of it and could proceed at good speed. Speed was important because we had to get back in 1 hour. We started out from Portage bay and headed for Gas Works park. The distance is roughly 2 miles. The rowing part was extremely tiresome, I had to take breaks for every 5 minutes of paddling. The steering was also very sensitive so, for minor adjustments in direction we used our paddle and rowed on one side. The passage of big boats made it more thrilling for we got to ride those small ripples the boats left. We went under a big bridge and as we got near Gas Works park we were treated with a spectacular view of seattle down town dominated by the towering Space Needle. Earlier, I had decided not to take my digital camera with me fearing the event of dropping it into the lake but, thoroughly regereted the decision for I could not capture what I saw, a picture would have explained it better than my obscure descriptions.

On the shores of Gas Works park stood a huge liner, was blue in color and looked a little old, the height was equivalent to a two storey building, we set that ship as our target before we started back. All of us assembled near the front end of the ship, it was amazing to see such a thing made of solid iron floating on water. We started our journey back and like the US road rule we had to proceed on the right side, which meant crossing the lake twice, which by itself was a daunting task considering the boat traffic at time. We were compelety drained and managed to get back to Aqua Verde club on time, it was then time for some photographs as usuall we also managed to click a few snaps of the good looking female staff at Aqua verde :-)

The exercise was thoroughly refereshing after a horrible stint at work earlier in the week.