http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Read, laugh, enjoy, and don't miss the comments.

I would recommend everyone to stop browsing and using the internats for a few months, you come back its all like it was in 1999!

You know you have abstained from the internets way way too long when you go to a site that you used all the time, and thought had a decent future and find nothing there.

Feedster is dead. A google serach for feedster.com yields nada.

Why the heck did I not get a memo that my fave feed search engine is retiring???

Oh man, God knows how many other websites died when I wasn't looking. /panic.

Desktopography

Dress up your desktop.

Here's a chance to help me.

Get the word out on this iBook for sale.

Please.

http://www.listsofbests.com/ is my idea.

Someone else implemented it before I had a chance.

My implementation would not be only about movies, music and books, though - it would be a general create and share your lists kind of thing - lists like "things to take with you to Agra" would be welcome.

Anyways, at the site I mentioned, you can check off of other people's lists. That's neat. so, say psasidhar, or beatzo, or nimatee wanted to share a list of movies, then I could check off the things I have already done/seen etc.

When changing a tyre/tire, make sure you have the handbrake on. Especially if you are doing it all by yourself.
This keeps the wheel's "hub" from rotating, and you finally can put the tyre on with all four screws in the holes.

Also make sure you are not dressed to go to work when you are changing said tyre.

I tried out TrustFlow II for LiveJournal. The following people not on the friends list for 2fargon are close by:

• suku (200 - 250)
• teemus, kalyan, veenven, khorgath, minn, al_lude, jessyleen (250 - 300)
• sampada, kceleste, shrijani, dhempe, aivalli, kanishka_sinha, nash_da_basher, freegeek, sidcarter, fatmuttony (300 - 350)

( More results below the cut... )

Created by ciphergoth; hosted by LShift.

TrustFlow II: Who is closest to your friends list?

Narayan Days is Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's review of Malgudi Days, that R.K.Narayan work that we Indian's have come to love. The review introduces you (if you are unfamiliar) to Malgudi, and if you have read the book, reading the review will bring back fond memories.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of R.K. Narayan’s birth, here is one way I propose that you read his Malgudi Days: one story per day for 32 consecutive days, by the end of which you will have experienced Malgudi Days as a Malgudi month, more or less. Each day’s reading, with only a few exceptions, will take about ten minutes. The vast majority of the stories are less than ten pages long; several are under five; and only one is more than 20. “What a fine idea,” you are perhaps thinking. “Ten minutes a day: I can manage that.” And if you are the type of virtuous person who is satisfied after just one piece of chocolate from a chocolate box, never tempted, until the following day, by a second, then perhaps you will be able to savor Malgudi Days in this restrained fashion.

I have had to revoke my PGP key since I forgot the passphrase - mea culpa. Not that I have had too much use for it in the near past, but really, my Social Security Card, and passport haven't seen the light of the day in more than a year now. My passphrase had 5 phrases/words in it, and though I can remember the last four, no amount of thinking in the shower, going to sleep while telling my mind to recall it from the subconscious and reveal it in a dream, and trying to recreate the instant when I thought up the passphrase is helping me. When I created the passphrase I had taken special care to make sure that I can recall it if I remembered at least one of three things, and yet, though I have the last four phrases/words I can't for the life of me remember the first. I am sure it will come to me one day when I am lounging in my beach chair in a remote beach with a book on my chest.

So, friends, my keys have been revoked, using the instructions I wrote myself when I created the revocation certificate. The Key ID is 1878779A. Previously, the key with the Key ID 702814C0 had also been revoked. Searching the MIT PGP KeyServer confirms the revocation. Strangely though, the Veridis Keyserver doesn't seem to know about the first revocation.

Anyway, the following is the revoke certificate:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

iI4EIBECAE4FAkKUqn1HHQBSZXZvY2F0aW9uIGNlcnRpZmljYXRlIGNyZWF0ZWQg
YXQgdGhlIHRpbWUgb2YgY3JlYXRpb24uIE1heSAyNSwgMjAwNS4ACgkQPEhXdhh4
d5rUDQCeMdyDBHIh4rGGnFrsw6yWi99Db5EAni81qyTuNVBZu5OwE7bOcvuO0psb
=3bl3
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

The only reason it took me so long to revoke this key-pair is that I had encrypted the revocation certificate with a symmetric key cipher, and thought I had forgotten the password for that too. I know, how smart. I had encrypted the revocation certificate using Gringotts - a very neat little encryption/decryption application. Then when I tried to decrypt it a while ago, the dang file wouldn't get decrypted. So I feared the worst, and thought maybe I had forgotten the password for that too. Being unable to revoke keys is a lifelong sign of stupidity - much worse than a tattoo, I hear. Fortunately I just found out that Gringotts was broken and it was not my fault. So I tried with an up-to-date Gringotts, and voila! - I could decrypt my revoke certificate.

I will create a new key pair shortly - I have to get it all perfect from the get-go this time.

When I was a little boy, I used to get frequent stomach aches. Almost everytime, my grand mother used to heat a dosa kallu (a flat, heavy non-non-stick frying pan). Then she'd roll up a long piece of cotton cloth, make a puff out of it and heat it on the kallu and transfer the heat to my tummy - it was a very good feeling. The pain would gradually subside, and after 15-20 minutes, get reduced to a minor irritation.

Turns out, scientists at the University College at London just verified the fact that heat helps combat stomach pain. They didn't need to have done the research to have known that, really - all they had to do was be a little boy, and go to my grandmother complaining of a stomach ache.

And to think that I used to think that it was the magic in her hands that took the pain away...

Roger Barrett, aka Syd Barrett died at an unknown time in the past week. From a founding member of Pink Floyd, he went to a recluse living in Cambridge - riding his bike, and living a quiet life. Too much LSD, and what followed was a life, the details of which are unknown. I am amazed by people who give everything up, and retreat to a life of silent existence. His songs used to leave me in wonder, and I could never wrap my head around how such a dangerously deviant musical experiment as the Piper at the Gates of Dawn became a commercial and critical success. I owe him a word of gratitude for having made my teenage years more colourful, and for teaching me to appreciate art. I wonder what his thoughts were in the later years of his life - maybe nothing remarkable, and maybe his silence was his biggest message - that there is no "message" - that life is just meant to be survived - a day at a time.

Stylus Magazineâ™s Top 50 Singles of 2005 - Article - Stylus Magazine
Stylus year-end singles list - 50 top songs. I am still stuck on Dylan, Cohen, CSNY and co. perhaps I should "check these out".

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions. I met Dr. Black, the maintainer of this resource, at a conference once - good to see a name on a webpage that belongs to a person I know, albeit fleetingly.

BBC NEWS - Pakistan deletes 'pro-Bush' poem
Pakistan's government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out "President George W Bush". They have "no clue" how it got into the school textbooks!!

TylerHall.ws - Defining CSS Constants using PHP: Using the magic of PHP we can define constants in our CSS files. Much needed method to use stylesheet-wide constants.

It is a rainy day, but I don't need an umbrella. The water is falling in gentle flakes, slowly. I can't make up my mind whether this sort of weather depresses me, or makes me happy, since it does both. It depresses me, and yet puts me in a reflective mood, and brings back memories, and thoughts of the future, still unborn. I came back to the lab after a short walk and the songs that were playing in random mode were just perfect. "Anticipation" by Ali Akbar Khan from the album "Journey", followed by Hélène Ségara singing L'amour est un soleil from the album "Humaine". It's in French, but sounds great, nevertheless. My music player is hooked up to last.fm, so you can follow the music I play at my profile page at last.fm if you like. A million thanks to Satya for all the music.

The university is full of students cramming for the finals. Mine are over. I stopped working on a paper and sent it to my professor. I can't say I finished work on the paper - they never quite get "done", if you know what I mean. So at the moment, I find myself wanting to drive a really long distance, listening to some good music, which, I think, is just what I will do.

Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it at google.

Me read that as "The company with the most employees without an inkling of what's going on (out-of-knowledge) will be successful.

(From this newsweek article...)

Also, I started debating whether it should be "key to business success FOR the next quarter century" or "key to business success IN the next quarter century". Also not that the "g" in google is not capitalized.

Time to sleep, I suppose.

I am the black kettle calling the pot black, I know, being not so careful with my grammar and spelling up here, but yet, I miss the days when finding a spelling mistake, or incorrect grammatical constructions in the daily newspaper (The Hindu) used to make my day.

And no, The Hindu is not in "Hindu". I have had no less that 3 people ask me, "So you're from India, eh, do you speak Hindu?"

Quick Quiz - which is the fourth most-spoken language in the world? No searching in Wikipedia, or elsewhere - only top-of-the-mind answers allowed.

One of the main problems I had (about a year ago) with working, or using the computer, when at home, was that I did not have a proper seating arrangement, and so used to end up slouching in the couch, or torturing my spine in bed, or some such. So I got myself this desk from Target.


Now the problem with working from home was that when I work on the laptop, the laptop keyboard on top of the desk made for an uncomfortable typing position. The keyboard tray in the desk is already occupied by the desktop's keyboard and mouse -- so I can't place an external usb keyboard and mouse on the tray for use with my laptop.

So as things were, I used to work, and use the computer at school.

Until tomorrow. Today I installed Synergy on my desktop as well as laptop. This was very easy to do - $sudo apt-get install synergy was all it took, thanks to Ubuntu's magical software management. Then I edited a synergy.conf file onthe desktop following the instructions at the wiki.

The following is the entire content of the file /etc/synergy.conf :

section: screens
        # two hosts named:  umberto(desktop), milan(laptop)
        umberto:
        milan:
end

section: links
        # umberto's screen is to the right of milan's
        umberto:
                left = milan
        milan:
                right = umberto
end

Then the desktop was ready to act as a "server", that is the machine that has the keyboard and mouse physically connected to it. $synergys --config /etc/synergy.conf got synergy running.

Now, on the laptop, I installed synergy, and I fire it up using $synergyc umberto (where umberto is the host-name of the desktop). That's it, now I can use the same mouse and keyboard for both the desktop and the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme left on the desktop's monitor, and then a little more to the left, the mouse pointer pops into the laptop's screen, and now the mouse and keyboard can be used for the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme right of the laptop screen, it pops into the desktop, and now the kyboard and mouse can be used with the desktop. This is so magical, almost, when you try it - especially since setting it up was so effortless.

I wonder why I took so long to set this up, really. Now I can't wait to do this at the lab too, where I have another desktop, keyboard and mouse waiting :)

Come tomorrow, I might just feel better about working from home, and save myself at least the late-evening trip back to the lab.

Oh, Synergy works for windows and macs too, and for any and all combination of OSes, and for multiple computers. So you can have 5 computers and monitors all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse. Isn't that great!

Alright the bug got me, so here is a list of commenters, and comments. I seem to be doing a lot of self-observation on here, don't I?

( Where are you at? )

Thanks to the awesome FAlbum (for Flickr Album, I suppose) plugin, I now have all my flickr photos on display here, at this site. Look at the top nav bar, or if you are reading this elsewhere, visit my photos page to see some pics.

I used to have a self-run Gallery at 2fargon.com, but I let the domain expire, and exported all the pics from Gallery to Flickr using this exporter. It took a longish time, but now I have the 2K+ pics at Flickr. They're all private now, so you can't see them. I will work on the albums, one by one, add descriptions, trim the collection where it needs trimming and then enable the albums for the public.

Thanks for the FAlbum plugin, the gallery-to-flickr exporter, and thanks again Matt, for the Flickr "pro" membership.