A discussion of error on today’s APOD page that I noticed yesterday night. Interesting...

Your programmer personality type is: DLSC

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Source: Debian Planet: http://www.miriamruiz.es/weblog/?p=28

It is known far and widely that IRAF command line sucks! rlwrap is a program that cures this. It adds readline and command history functions to existing programs that don't support it themselves.
It is thus of great help. You can use it with almost anything such as basic ftp, telnet, netcat etc...
Imagine using it on Windows with cygwin on the cmd prompt. Good stuff! What more if you run debian, just apt-get it.

So in the last entry, I asked the question, can one make sand castles on Mars?.
The answer is a yes provided we have water and sand there behaves kind of like sand here on Earth.
Here is a link that explain it better: The Physics of Sandcastles
Considering that sand dunes exist on Mars, we can make sand castles too. If the grain sizes are on the average smaller than on Earth (I am not sure if that is the case), we will need less amount of water too to hold it together. And a lower vapour pressure for water on Mars will help.

An interesting commentary from Jaldhar Vyas. It comments on a recent article about India’s culture and its relationship with free software ideas. There are some very nice arguments about why the original article doesn’t give the real picture, though it is inspiring.

The Bubble Project and something more cool

Enjoy.

Just came back today evening from a trip to Xi'an, China. I was there for a conference on AGN. I didn't get to travel around China much due to work constraints, but the meeting was very nice and I enjoyed all the talks. I learned a great deal about different areas and met with experts in those fields. My poster was quoted in relevant talks a couple times, which was nice. During the conference dinner, we ate a lot of "Jao tze" (dumplings). Over all, food was good and cheap. The city is badly polluted like everywhere else. We saw the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty, the Bell and Drum towers in the center of Xi'an and the city wall. Once we ate at this Korean BBQ place; you cook your meat slices or vegetables over a small grill right on your table. For dipping, there was some type of peanut sauce. The mushrooms and pork we ordered was good. It seems chinese eat a lot of dishes that involves pork, just a impression I got. During the week did some small shopping for family. Got tempted to buy a chinese sword, but held back. Today came back home after a almost 22:00 hr flight and not sleepy now! Photos will follow on flickr. There is much backlog in that respect.

May the festival of light bring joy and happiness in your life. Happy Diwali to all who read this web log.

Recently I have been working a lot with text tables in Emacs and found myself a very useful key combination. It is M-<space>, in Emacs parlance it is Meta-<spacebar> or on PC keyboards it is ALT-<space>. In Emacs this truncates the whitespace between two words to a single space. Very useful if you have to get rid of those extra whitespaces between your words.

Since I mostly use GNOME I have stuck to Metacity, the greatly-lacking-in-features window manager. Metacity binds its M-<space> to window-menu. Of course you can disable or remap it in gconf-editor, but it is annoyance never the less. I love Emacs, one application that has been very faithful and very useful to me, though I do miss the ‘.’ command of vi once in a while. Still searching for a replacement for that, C-x z doesn’t quite do the same.

Its been 70 days since I logged in. So for some news consider this.

From The Jargon file, what would we do without it. :)


The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of
nonce particle names, including the “clutron” or “cluon”
(indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the
antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle
of {randomness}, or sometimes of lameness). These are not so
much live usages in themselves as examples of a live
meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or
linguistic maneuver to “explain” otherwise mysterious
circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these
imply nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack
thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalisation from “(bogus particle) theories” to “bogus
(particle theories)”!). Perhaps such particles are the
modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard
starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths.
Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the “futon”)
yields additional flavour.

An interesting article about Sensei Chojun Miyagi and his teachings.

I went for a radio astronomy workshop in Albuquerque, NM, from June 12th to 20th.
Apart from learning about Radio Interferometry, we also went and saw petroglyphs created by original native American people. I was reading about human migration on the Internet today and came across this fabulous website on rock art in India. Most of these are pictographs (or rock paintings). I though the link is worth sharing with the rest of you. Does anyone know if the ASI has monthly newsletters or magazines or other publications that are accessible from US?

Go listen to Ulrich Schnauss.

I discovered a /debian directory while parsing my filesystem tree, it is part of the firefox package... wtf!

If you are the glue that makes the processes run.

Few days ago I updated to GNOME 2.14 release and now had some time to check all the goodies. See here for a nice tour of what is available in the current release of GNOME. Apparently it makes gnome usable on a P400 Mhz machine, but I have doubts about that.

The things that got me excited and make this entry are as below:

• Gnome-terminal is now way faster at rendering its text, thrice as fast as xterm.
  and *blink* it can finally reorder its tabs by dragging.
  
  On a unrelated note, while reading Eterm configuration options I discovered that recent versions of
  have a new mode of operation called Escreen. Its a interface to GNU screen, and seems to behave in
  a similar fashion. This can be really handy.


• I liked the tags-based approach to bookmarks in Epiphany.


• The ability to save a search as virtual folders in Nautilus. I have loved this virtual folders concept
  since I first saw it in KMail/Kontact. I wish mutt could do the same.


• The Deskbar applet gets lots of points for nice integration.


I wish livejournal was more like a wiki, I hate writing HTML when all I want to concentrate on is content.
Does livejournal support wiki syntax ?

Check out this [1] ESO release of VLT photo of M100 taken to study “SN 2006X” a Type 1a Supernova so far. I was more enamoured by the spiral structures towards the center of course. :) Best M100 picture seen so far. This is on today’s APOD.

[1] http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/phot-08-06.html

Ran across a obscure firefox bug detailed here
This will probably affect you if run Debian/Unstable Linux and GNOME. A workaround is to change your GNOME icon theme. Weird.
Among other news I am still alive.

http://fb-s60.sourceforge.net/

Wish I had this on my cell. :)

So how long have you played Frozen Bubble in one go?? I have played it for at least six hours straight.