The Prestidigitator

So, I’ve been using the Apple Magic Mouse for over a week now. And yes, like everything else that Apple comes out with, the design is pure genius. Very minimalist. At first glance, it looks like it’s carved out of a slab of marble.

I love the iPod Touch’s capacitive screen and I like that the trackpad for the MacBook Pro is very configurable. The touch interface for the Magic Mouse is as good if not better but the mouse tends to move when you do the two-finger side swipe. It’s slightly irritating but not something that can’t be gotten used to. Also, no pinch zoom. It tethers quite easily too and remained connected even when I took the mouse to the toilet. Yeah, don’t ask.

The one huge caveat is the price- I had to pay AUD 99 for it. Not cool.

Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up.  Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.

For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.

Where would we be without self-deprecation?

After an extraordinarily disappointing series finale, Ronald Moore, creator of Battlestar Galactica has set in motion another nefarious plan to let down legions of science fiction nerds. The events in the spin-off series, Caprica precede the destruction of the colonies by 58 years. Once again, we get to see Moore’s ideas on racism, religious fanaticism, relationships and technology.

If you haven’t already guessed, my respect for the man has gone down a couple of notches after finding out that the big reveal he had in store for fans of Battlestar Galactica was, “God did it”. Never mind the unresolved story threads, what about the asteroid sized holes in logic? How could a science fiction show be so scientifically and logically challenged?

Now that’s out of the way, the feature length pilot for Caprica was pretty solid. It answers a few questions that were never tackled in the original series; the most important being  how the Cylons, a breed of intelligent machines, developed a belief system rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions. BSG itself stretched the limits of portrayal of sex and violence on television. Caprica takes it further. To make up for the lack of cool explosions in space, there’s plenty of rather smart expositions on the nature of being and consciousness.

I’m fairly certain Ronald Moore will eventually let us down again but rest assured, he’ll disappoint us in style.

After months of staring wistfully from outside camera stores, I finally went ahead and bought the Canon Vixia HF10 (uhuh, High Def).  Shooting has been a somewhat humbling experience but I’ll get there. Sooner or later.

Moving files around has been a tad tricky so I thought I’d document (sort of) what I did.

Linux:

If the device doesn’t mount, try ‘dmesg‘

# mkdir /camera
#mount /dev/sdb1 /camera
#cd /camera

MPlayer supports AVCHD (.mts) files, but you’ll need to compile MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html) from source.

Windows:

Couldn’t  install the proprietary software that comes with the camera because my netbook doesn’t support the minimumm resolution. So I had to convert the .mts files to .avi.

First, install the AVISynth base and then this (mts_2_xvid.rar) . Unpack the .rar file and copy the .mts files from the camera into the folder and run the batch file _multi_demux_mts_Xvid.bat. That nifty little piece of code compresses the video to .avi and saves it in the same folder.

Trust me, it’s way simpler than it sounds.

Update: We live to die another day.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.

Configuring Hardy Heron has been a bitch; finally got around to fixing two nagging issues.

1. Sound: Ubuntu 8.04 has been infamous for having serious issues with sound. The fairly easy thing to do would be to build the ALSA modules all over again using the module-assistant package.

sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa

Reboot.

This seemed to have resolved most of my sound problems.

2. Login Screen resolution: I’ve had this problem with all distributions thus far; the text size on the login screen is so large that it’s, well, invisible. Go figure. The fix:

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

(Find)

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -br -audit 0

(Change to)

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -br -audit 0 -dpi 96

Reboot.

In related news, beating Nina Williams on the Sergie Dragunov story arc is turning out to be much harder than anticipated.

(It’s 3 am. Obvious?)

Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.

And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:

1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.

2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.

Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.

Links:

• Stellarium User Guide
• What Made Me Cry: Microsoft’s WWT [From Scoble's Blog]
• Stellarium screenshot from here

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” – William of Occam

Ever since the emergence of quantum mechanics thanks to the efforts of an obscure patent clerk nearly a century back, scientists have been trying hard to reconcile two seemingly correct but mutually disagreeing theories about the way our universe works- Gravity and Quantum Mechanics. MIT (quantum) mechanical engineer, Seth Lloyd attempts to give us an alternative to the countless theories that spring up every day, most notably the String Theory. Throughout the book, Seth Lloyd thinly disguises his disdain for the aforementioned theory which strives to explain the universe by stating the building blocks of everything to be 1 dimensional ‘strings‘.

Lloyd follows Occam’s (William of Occam’s) lead and puts forward a simpler theory (nothing in physics is that simple); he proposes that the universe is a giant quantum computer churning out complexity bit by bit. What’s better, the author takes us through the basics- the definition of information on a more macroscopic level. You see, the information the universe apparently creates is entropy, which Lloyd claims is an oft misunderstood word. What follows is a 211 page discourse on a variety of topics – consciousness, cosmology, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics (something I loathed from the bottom of my black soul in school) and chaos theory.

The book is an immense joy to go through; understanding something so complex has never been so rewarding and engrossing. I have always been fascinated by theoretical physics (never mind that I suck(ed) at math) and some of the questions attempted in this book are the ones that have plagued me for years- the initial moments after the big bang and the reasons for complexity in the universe. Seth Lloyd also gives valuable insights as to why the intelligent design debate may be moot because, if the universe is a quantum computer that creates complexity from simplicity bit by bit, serendipitous coincidences within cosmic chaos are inevitable.

This book is unlike most other popular science texts I’ve read. For one, it is understandable (for most part) and it does not rely heavily on the ignorance of the reader. Plus, my brother backs the book and that’s good enough for me.

Very highly recommended.

Links:

• NYT Review of Programming the Universe
• About the book: Random House
• Seth LLoyd @ MIT

It took me over 2 years to work up the courage to completely (no dual boot!) switch to a Linux distribution; and I’ve finally done it. Linux Mint 4.0 (Daryna). It took most of my day (and Swen’s) yesterday to complete the move and I have to say, I can’t help but me amazed by the possibilities.

Installation was a breeze, took all of fifteen minutes and configuring the system was easier. Most of the stuff worked straight out of the box, including the video, sound and graphics drivers. Installed Compiz Effects (a compositing window manager) which makes Vista look like a cheap knock off.

What I did have was a little trouble with getting the net set up but that was because my new ISP uses the PPPoE protocol. A bit of googling fixed that ($ sudo pppoeconf at the terminal window solves everything) and I was online to get live support that got me through the rest of the process.

I remember complaining about how Linux was a major pain to use back in college but boy has it come a long way in the last 2 years!

Natalie has a better personality now. Way better.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDJWi9yrTw]

If there’s one breed of vermin that deserves zero respect/sympathy/empathy, it’s the one that comments without abandon on sites like YouTube and Redditt. Going through some of the comments on YouTube (as entertaining as some of them are) is pretty much all the proof we need for dysgenics. For the average internet junkie, sitting in the confines of his/her room is all the empowerment he/she needs to air his/her retarded views onto an unsuspecting world. Most of the time they end up being just plain ridiculous and sometimes marginally offensive.

(Click to view)

There is a comment that shows up beneath an article on Wired,

I want to destroy young generation of India Delhi is the best place to do bomb blast in SouthDelhi mainly in Mohammad Pur, Nehru place buildings, Vasant vihar flats, RK Puram Lodhi Road, Sarojani Nagar are the best place to do the bomb blast and do lot of casualties. Lot of Colleges are are also the best place to do bomb blast if anyone will do bomb blast here then there are maximum casuilties done and ISI will become happy. I want to Tell that if anyone want to carry bomb laptop leather bag is very good for this.
Put the bomb in the leather bag.

Include punctuations where necessary to make sense of what you just read. How exactly do you react to something like this?

Additional Links:

• An interesting read by Andrew Chen
• What You Tube comments really mean