Vivek live and kickin'

Hallucinations - Trick your mind with these illusions

2009-07-12T13:08:00.010+05:30

I saw this image on posted on reddit. Videos of some of the hallucinations given in that image.

Rubber hand experiment

The pinocchio illusion

According to the description the pinocchio illusion did not work for them.

The Ganzfeld Procedure

From the YouTube video description, "2 minute extract from a documentation of a ganzfeld experiment, conducted as part of a research for the performance project psi: mid space. The sender, receiver and experimenters are in 3 separate rooms, and the target image appears in the fourth section.". More information about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment.

Back to work inside the hot oven

2009-07-05T11:25:00.004+05:30

I had spent the last 2 months in Shimla and it was a quite pleasant there, now am back in Panchkula. The last months were relaxing to say the least. I've never really appreciated that place before, but this time I was able to stay home and relax.

Its been a week since I arrived and there is hardly anytime when I am not sweating. I've hardly been outside, trying to stay indoors to beat the heat. The monsoons were supposed to arrive a week back but there have only been occasional pre-monsoon showers.

A week before I came here I also released fefoo. Though the response has been really cold so far. Guess no one seems to get the concept of commands, plus the help documents are sketchy to say the least. The videos I wanted to make about fefoo have been scrapped. Lets hope I can get some time in the near future and am able to do something about fefoo and get people to use it. As for me I cannot work without it now. The webmasters, tools, movies, twitter, blogs, imdb and music category are the ones I tend to use every other day.

Just a few more days to go

2009-06-18T20:17:00.002+05:30

I have been resting and occasionally working on fefoo. I hope I can release it soon. Done with the help but am stuck on the videos. I have 10 more days left in my vacations and hope I can finish off and release fefoo before it.

Other than that I have been gaining weight and have been skipping my exercise schedule which is not very good. Hope to get back to my regular exercise schedule from tomorrow morning.

Also I wanted to make something in Python in these vacations but I guess that is not happening anytime soon. Maybe next time I am on vacations.

Google Wave makes fefoo look like a joke

2009-05-29T10:34:00.003+05:30

Though there is no link between the two, but I am amazed at the amount of work that has gone in making Google Wave. It is a whole new way of working. The first time you look at it it seems really complicated but once you see the demo you see the real power of collaboration. Its wiki + email + forums + blog + .. nearly all the tools one uses for collaboration today.

If nothing else it will enable Google Apps to make inroads into the business community. Coming back to fefoo, the amount of work I've done almost feels comical in front of Google Wave. I am almost done with all the features now. I was working on a new feature for the last two weeks but had to drop it as I was unable to get a usable UI. I've tried many ways to implement it but nothing seems to fit in. I will probably move it to the next version.

Finally finished off with vivekjishtu.com

2009-05-15T12:58:00.002+05:30

I have been planning to revamp the homepage for quite a while now. Finally I have been able to do something about it. I finished off the non-javascript part a week back. I was hoping to do a lot more with the JavaScript part but shelved any major plans for now. In the process I ended up with a leaner page, with less than 7KB of JavaScript. I was planning to use YUI but in the end got rid of it.

The JavaScript part is an add-on and even if you turn off javascript you should be able to see the complete content. I wanted to use JSON and get data from all possible places and show it on the homepage. The main problem with this approach is that the website becomes dependent on multiple sources. Incase flickr, blogger or twitter is down the page will take a long time to load. To get rid of the problem all the scripts are loaded after the page has loaded. Even if any of the scripts fail the page does not end up looking broken.

Spam from my domain name

2009-05-13T08:54:00.002+05:30

Some idiot's (lyncean@vivekjishtu.com) have been sending out mails with my domain in the reply-to: header of the email. If you got a mail from any email address from my domain its not me. I don't plan to sell you anything. There are only two email addresses on my domain and I won't be using then to send out spam. I want to clarify that the emails that you have got are not from me.

The week that was'nt

2009-05-08T15:49:00.003+05:30

Have finally finished work on http://vivekjishtu.com/, at least the non javascript version is up. Have been doing quite a bit of designing and trying to get the right template for the website. Since I am anything but a designer I stole my own design I had made 5 years back. Its almost like going back to basics. I had a similar design for my homepage http://vivekjishtu.tripod.com/ in 2005. It keeps a lot of design elements from that page and adds a few more things to it. Have planned to add quite a bit of JS elements to the page. But thats got to wait I guess.

Long awaited vacation

2009-05-04T11:36:00.003+05:30

After working for quite a few years I am taking time off for the next 2 months. I am hoping it will be time away from the computer and not thinking of any work. Lets see till when I can stay away from the computer and rest my overworked brain. For a change I plan to do a little more physical work and quite a bit of walking and giving a much deserved rest to my mind. I have finally finished most of the work on fefoo. Its finally become a part of my surfing habit and I can rarely search without it. Still has a few quirks that I have to remove over a period of time.

Airtel 16Mbps for Impatient Ones

2009-04-14T12:43:00.003+05:30

This advert can be the summed as the best in terms of making fun of the impatient ones. The new Airtel broadband is 16 Mbps but with a slight hitch. At Rs. 2999/- with a Data Transfer Limit of just 20 GB. Just listening to a few hours of music videos on Youtube should be enough to exhaust the limit in no time. Thinking of downloading torrents is something one should not even think about. Not sure who Airtel is targeting with this plan. If you bought this plan do leave a comment.

Making Portable Ubuntu feel at home on Windows

2009-04-08T13:10:00.004+05:30

If you like Linux applications but don't want to install Linux, Portable Ubuntu is the perfect application for you. Once you start using it you might feel that all the Linux applications feel out of place with the Theme and fonts. That is where this quick tutorial comes into play. Download the XPLuna theme if you are on XP or one of the Aero themes for GTK 2. You can look at all the available options and keep the one that looks identical to your windows theme.

The controls might look familiar but till you change the fonts it is almost like a waste. Copy the fonts from your windows installation. Open the terminal window in PUbuntu and then follow these steps. cd /mnt/C/WINDOWS/Fonts Here I am taking for granted that your Windows folder is in C:. Then make a new directory mkdir ~/.fonts. Copy Segoe fonts incase you are on Vista. cp Segoe*.* ~/.fonts. If you have Windows XP copy Tahoma fonts. cp Tahoma*.* ~/.fonts.

Open System/Preference/Appearance. Select the font tab and select the fonts and the sizes as in the screenshot. This should give you the fonts as of Windows XP. For Vista select Segoe instead of Tahoma and set the size to 10 instead of 8.

The fonts might look quite dark compared to windows. To reduce the anti-aliasing click the details button on the fonts dialog. And select the Smoothing to none. The fonts will look similar to windows fonts. Atleast for the dialogs but will not look good on other parts of the UI. I normally select Subpixel for Smoothing and Medium for Hinting. Though it still does not look like a real windows application but its close enough.

Linpus Lite is a big FAIL on the desktop

2009-04-05T18:19:00.005+05:30

I had bought an Acer AspireOne around 6 months back. I've used it for less than 3 months and the network drivers have been deleted like twice. And both the times the reason was a Live-Update. I went online and checked that the only way to bring back the thing to life was to reinstall everything. I want to believe that I know a thing or two about Linux, my first distro was Slackware in 1998. Its been a while and won't consider myself to be a linux noob. Given the fact that I know a thing of two about Linux and I was still frustrated. I could have spent 2-3 hours and somehow got the whole thing to life again, but I am just thinking about people who don't know thing about Linux.

For them its just an OS that runs and they don't even have to bother about it. But when you laptop stops working what do you do? This is a laptop without a CDROM drive and the only way to reinstall is to use the recovery DVD. I am just thinking about all the people who got the update around two days ago and who know the last thing about Linux. If I could get frustrated with it, I am so sure they will think twice before buying a laptop with Linux. Some people could argue that its not a more known brand of Linux. But given the fact that this is what this laptop came with for most people its not really a choice. And given a fact that how easy its to install an OS, almost as easy as getting a root canal done. Linux on the desktop is a big FAIL for me.

I use UBUNTU every now and then, I just installed portable UBUNTU but now all of a sudden all the files have gone missing. Its the second Linux FAIL for me.

UPDATE: I finally got Portable Ubuntu running and I have to say its amazing to say the least. Probably this is the only way I would ever use Ubuntu. Its like getting the best of both worlds.

Reorganising the blog

2009-04-01T13:30:00.004+05:30

Lately I've been busy with fefoo and hardly have anytime to blog. I've been on twitter lately and you can read the latest twits on the sidebar. I also started a new blog with all the [FW]'s and funny stuff that I seem to get in mail @ http://vivekjishtu.posterous.com/. Since I've completed the coding part on fefoo I will be working on the main site and try and integrate my digitial life in one place on http://vivekjishtu.com. Its been a long time coming and have been evading it since I've never had time to focus on it. It feels good that finally I have been able to finish work on fefoo and moving to comics.fefoo. It will be a place to read your favourite web comics. As of now it points to the page where I store a list of my favourite comics. But eventually it will point to http://comics.fefoo.com and allow you to add and remove comics. Lets see when that finally comes up.

Wacking my brain with localStorage and globalStorage in Javascript

2009-03-21T10:25:00.002+05:30

Most of the browsers these days allow you to store a lot of data instead of using cookies. I am still trying to make a library which will allow you to store data on the browser no matter if you have localStorage, globalStorage, flash or the good old cookies. The thing about using flash is that you need to wait for it to initilise and that is a little bit of a problem. I hope to release the library under the BSD license. Not sure if anyone would be interested, but I really need to get it done for fefoo.

Birthday blues and the year gone by....

2009-02-23T00:09:00.002+05:30

Its almost like a birthday tradition for me now. This is the 4th year I will be posting on my birthday. I was going through the earlier b'day posts and I realized I always want to launch a project or a site on my b'day but something or the other comes up and it ends up getting delayed. This year no such promises just work and release things as and when it happens. The project is already delayed by 3 years. It just shows that I should focus on one project and not try to put my hand into 10 different things at once.

This year I want to take a long vacation and probably figure out things that have been going on in my mind for a while now. Lets see if I am able to take it. In the year gone by I achieved one major goal and that was to shed excess weight. I lost 10 Kgs but have gained 3 Kgs over the last 2 weeks :P, that still makes it 7 Kgs in an year. I now need a good fitness regime if I want to stay healthy.

The last 2 months have been full of ups and downs. Mostly in terms of health and fitness. I really need to keep up with my daily routines of walks and exercise.

I've just had loads of chocolate before I got back home and that seems to be working in keeping my mood good and calm. Will try to add and delete a few stuff from this post if I get some time today.

If something can go wrong it will go wrong

2009-02-18T10:48:00.004+05:30

Somehow today Murphy's Law : If any thing can go wrong, it will! applies to me. I woke up at 5:00 AM and was in bed again at 5:30 A.M. Just kept twisting and tossing around in the bed but could not sleep. Since I could not do much I ended up writing the last blog post. Got up at 6:30 and planned to go out for a walk. Something that just could not happen. I had planned to get rid of a few bugs in fefoo but I never got time for it either. By 8:00 AM someone came over and my plan to work went down the drain. I ended up fixing a laptop and that took another 2 and half hours. I had planned to be in office by 9:30 but finally got in by 10:30.

Thats enough ranting for a day I guess :P. Here is hoping things would be a little better now.

That time of the year again.

2009-02-18T06:01:00.005+05:30

This comic strip captures my frame of mind as of now. Guess I am going through something like this as of now. I still have a week to go but am still not sure if I've achieved what I had wished for by the time I was this old. Guess its just another number but then thinking back I had planned to do quite a lot by now and I am still quite far away from the goal.

I finally plan to launch beta version of fefoo.com on my birthday. Its still an alpha release as of now and most things that should work are broken. I hope to clear up the pile of bugs over the weekend and get the site upto a beta quality. I am still hopeful that it would be possible to launch it on my Birthday.

Two amazing movies after two amazing duds

2009-02-07T23:15:00.007+05:30

I wish I could get back the time I spent in watching these movies. I could never expect a person like Aamir Khan to act in this good for nothing movie.
I generally don't watch too many movies but over the last 4 weeks have been out to watch a movie every weekend. I had a torturous time watching Ghajni and Chandni Chowk to China. CC2C would have to take the cake for the worst movie that any director could come up with. It was a torture to stay through the movie.

Last week I went out for Luck By Chance. Its an amazing movie with a really great concept. It really showed that there was a director who knew what she wanted and there was a script, which was lacking in CC2C. This weekend I went out for Dev D. I went out with the frame of mind that I would not like the movie but in the end I loved the movie. It was amazing to say the least.

What was Mr. Arindam Choudhury thinking??

2009-01-29T21:55:00.003+05:30

You need to read the review of Slumdog Millioner by Arindam Chaudhuri, i.e. incase you've not already read it in all the major possible English newspapers in India. It is a full page advert of IIPM where Mr. Chaudhuri is currently the Honorary Dean for Centre for Economic Research and Advanced Studies and it has this review in the end. This review seems so stupid in an advert for an Educational Institute. It seems like this person is really looking for some cheap publicity and you can see that from the comments on the blog post. I have a feeling that this guy really believes in "There is no such thing as bad publicity". I am still not sure why would someone actually pay for a full page advert for something like this.

Come to think of it Mr. Chaudhuri is also a film maker and it almost sounds like envy more than a honest review. I really love some of the comments on the blog post. Some of them follow now.

To leader2630 who said:
--------------------------
Very true we should all show the outrage to the international community by boycotting the film. & other forms of anger.
--------------------------

"..and other forms of anger?" :)) seriously dude!!! * dies laughing *

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Its food for thought for those who shamelessly celebrating their own undressing in public by a english man
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geez! how much of a perv are u, u sicko! u got ultra-hyper-maniacal-low-esteem-self-derogatory-inferiority-complex! see a doc at once!!!

To prerna who said:
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Slumdog:- As the name suggests its itself an abuse to the country for which it is made....
And we guys are enjoying it also...shame shame shame!!!

Arindam i must say that you really care about the feelings and honour of India which truely depicts in your article...

Thank you for taking the Initiative. Lets us hope we Indians get waken up by this..
-----------------------------

:)) * ROTFL* :))

To pradeep who said:
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Holy s**t! Can’t believe we Indians are so gullible, so gluttonous for fame and so desperate for the Oscar attention.
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dude, people who liked this movie dont care two shit for the oscars..they liked this movie because it was good. they liked this movie because they are not biased. period.

To sanjay who said:
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Indians who are praising this movie are nothing but coolies.
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and what are you, dude?

To Preeti who said:
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..share and tell the world that i am with them and we will not tolerate any nonsense like the SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE movie..Feel your country to be you home and fight for its pride...
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How do we fight for its pride my lady? but shouting at anyone who tries to venture near our slums and ensuring that it is hidden away from the world??

By getting mad every time a movie is made about India and in the movie India is not shown as this chocolatey place with all the girls looking models and all the guys driving around in imported Sedans?
Where only the poshness and upwardly life is shown? is that how u intend to fight for the pride of ur country?

..shame on you.

Sorrows of installing software on Linux

2009-01-11T19:24:00.003+05:30

I wanted to watch a divx movie on my aspire one laptop which runs a Linux based OS. I tried to play the file but I did not see the video in the preinstalled video player. My next logical step was to download VLC for Linux. But as it turns out there is no VLC for Linux, there is a VLC for Ubuntu, Fedora and Source Code for any other flavor of Linux.

It took me a good 30 minutes of searching on half a dozen forums to figure out a way to install VLC. It takes less than a minute on any windows based machine even if you download the zip version.

And I thought this was a problem just with windows. As it turns out if you are using Mac OSX there is a separate version of Safari for Leopard and Tiger while a single binary edition for Windows XP and Vista. Guess Microsoft is doing something right somewhere.

I was working on one of my friends computers which had OSX and Safari 2.x and figured it would be better if I installed Safari 3.x on it. I downloaded Safari and the moment I tried to install it it refused to install since I did not have all the updates.

That just goes to show that you can run Safari on a 9 year old Windows PC but there is no way to install Safari on a 2 year old mac without all the updates. And I am not even sure if it was only about the updates or it wanted to install a new updated OS.

Here is a video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in a 1983 Dating Game video.

Happy New Year 2009

2009-01-03T11:14:00.003+05:30

Happy new year and I hope you have a great year ahead. The last year has been different to say the least. Quite a bit of good, some bad, some boring and some exciting. The last few days have been good at least for my personal project. Its finally coming up and I am hoping to release a preview this month.

Working hard as ever

2008-12-27T17:18:00.002+05:30

I have finally got some time after a really long time and working hard to complete a few tasks before this year ends. I have been busy with work and trying to give some time to my own personal project and hopefully after hanging there for the last 3 years it will finally see the light. I am still not very hopeful given the changes and the amount of work required to finish it. Also the features seem to come into my head every now and then. I am trying to move most of them to version 2.0 lets see if 1.0 will ever come out for now :P

Windows 7 should be 64 bit if Microsoft wants it to work

2008-12-16T09:52:00.003+05:30

This is just one of those opinionated topics I hate to read. But then again its my personal opinion on my blog and I am trying to express an opinion. To make sure that Windows 7 really works they need to make sure that they don't have 5-6 different versions. They need to keep things as simple as possible. At max two versions one home and the other professional. Having half a dozen version just ends up confusing people.

The second suggestion might seem stupid at first but in the years to come can push not just Windows but the complete computer industry with it. They should only have a 64bit version of Windows 7. This might seem stupid at first but if you look at the legacy this can really pay off well in the end. Firstly to run Windows 7 you would require a 64 bit processor which will take care of the hardware compatibility issues that occurred with Windows Vista. All programs running on anything less than Windows 7 will work on it but not the other way around. Let me take an example which might make the whole scenario a little more clearer. When Windows '95 launched it was a 32 bit OS which could run any program which would run on Windows 3.1 but programs being developed for '95 would not run on 3.1, since people bought new hardware to run it they never faced the problem which users faced when moving from XP to Vista.

Since people tried to run Vista with less than 1 GB RAM and a whole lot of crap ware pre-installed, most machines that came loaded with Vista ended up being resource hogs. No one liked the new interface since it was slow, which to no real fault on Microsoft's part became the label that MS is still living with. To get rid of the image and have applications specially designed for Windows 7 a giant leap to 64 bit will really go a long way in in pushing people to use Windows 7. Windows Vista seems like a burden as of now since anything that runs on Vista will run on XP so no one see's the reason to go ahead. The same thing is with Windows 7 is every application that would run on Windows 7 runs on XP no one will bother upgrading.

The main thing here is perception and Vista now has the unfortunate perception of being slow. Given the right hardware Vista can really work well but since no one bothers looking at it's easy to blame Microsoft. Not that everything in Vista is perfect but they end up receiving a lot more criticism than they deserve.

Windows 7 can change the tide if they make sure that it is run on the right hardware. And a push towards 64 bit computing can really be giant leap for not just Microsoft but all the hardware and software makers around the world.

With the advent of faster internet connections Microsoft can store a complete repository of hardware drivers online and make it seamless for people to install new hardware. It is there in Vista and partly in XP but things can be made a lot more smoother without the need for disks to store drivers. So the moment you install a new hardware it checks for drivers on disk and then online in its repository and if it still fails then asks for the disks.

Not sure why I wanted to write it but this is something going on in my mind right now and thought of putting it into words. I am not a Microsoft fanboy or a Apple/Linux/BSD/... hater, but I think that if there has to be a major push for 64bit computing Windows 7 can do it. Again when I say 64 bit computing I am not talking about the advantages of going 64 bit. There never really is the advantage its really all very clever marketing and that's what I am talking about.

Let me come back to the classic example of Windows 3.1 and Windows '95. Windows 3.1 was 16 bit with 32 bit extensions. Windows '95 was 32 bit from ground up. Anything that would run on 3.1 would run on '95 but not the other way around. In the next 2-3 years after Windows '95 was launched there were hardly any software that was being developed for Win 3.1 and it died a natural death. With Windows XP and Vista there are numerous changes inside but they never came to the forefront since Windows XP has turned out to be the dominant OS and there are hardly any applications where I need Vista. That is where playing the 64 bit card can really drive sales for the complete industry as a whole.

Comics I read revisited

2008-12-14T11:00:00.004+05:30

I've been reading Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net for a while now. And its finally in my daily schedule. I have a list of comics that I read daily at http://comics.vivekjishtu.com and have finally added Cyanide & Happiness to it. Its risqué at best but has a few gems every other day. The other new comic to the list is Ask Dr. Eldritch. This one is also a bit risqué at times but one funny comic once you get a hang of it.

Google Clean search without searchwiki results

2008-11-23T12:47:00.023+05:30

If you want anonymous results from Google you can use this simple DNS hack to get the results from Google. Since you will never be logged in you will always get clean results and also no searchwiki results. Never realized how much cleaner the results are if you are not logged in.

To get the cleaner results add the engine to Opera, Firefox, IE and Google Chrome. Its just a DNS hack so you still get all the results from Google. But its all anonymous since you never log in. All the traffic is sent to Google but the cookies are not set as you can never log in so more or less you can be anonymous. Its still a hack so it can be turned off by Google anytime. But its good while it lasts. This is what you see once you use Google Clean. You are never logged in so the results are anonymous and you will never get any SearchWiki results. You can always go back with a single click incase you want the SearchWiki results.

Here is how you add it to Firefox.

The search box should be a little blue. You can click it.
Select Add "Google Clean" from the menu and you will be done. Next time you search it will be a little more anonymously.

Here is how you add it to IE

The search box should be orange.

Click the orange button and select "Google Clean" from the menu.

Here is how you add it to Opera

Right click this search box -->
and select "Create Search" from the menu.
Click details and select the following options.

Here is how you add it to Google Chrome

Right click on the address bar and select "Edit search engines.."
Click on the Add button.
Add the following in the textboxes.
Name : Google Clean
Keyword : gc
URL : http://g.vivekjishtu.com/search?q=%s
Select Google Clean and click Make Default

How is it being done?

There is no proxy or anything in between. The information is not being passed through my servers. My server cannot handle this much load. Its a simple DNS trick. http://g.vivekjishtu.com/ directly points to http://google.com. So all the traffic goes to Google. But since the domain name looks different you are never logged in. You could very well use the IP address like 209.85.153.104 and it would do the same thing. But since google servers will try and choose the servers nearest to you its best to use a domain name. The domain name g.vivekjishtu.com gets resolved to www.google.com and finally to the IP address.

So you can be rest assured that nothing ever passes through my servers. Even if I wanted to I don't think I would want to waste my bandwidth like this. The domain g.vivekjishtu.com is just a CNAME for www.google.com

Acer Aspire One finally working

2008-11-22T15:35:00.002+05:30

Before leaving for Oslo I had updated my laptop and the update screwed up the WiFi drivers and it was impossible to get online. I had to completely reinstall everything. I ended up spending the whole night trying to fix it. If you want to use anything besides the default settings you need to know a few shortcuts Alt + F2 is a life saver to start with. This will popup the run dialog and you can start bash in a terminal and move forward from there.

Everything on Linux seems to be super sized. The default font size is 12px nd that seems so weird. The next thing I do is do bring down the size to 8px and change the font to closely match Tahoma 8px. I am so used to it that anything other than this seems so ugly.

Also not to forget the command "xfce-setting-show" which will enable the menu when you right click on the desktop. It will give you a menu like the start menu. You can also add/remove programs in the setting menu.

For me the main application that I have to install is rdesktop which lets me remotely log into my main laptop and I can use the complete experience without carrying all the bulk with me.