Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

Douglas Deadlines: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."



PS: Is this the first use of the phrase "Douglas Deadlines" to refer to deadlines that whoosh by?


See also: http://www.academicproductivity.com/2007/parkinsons-law-and-productivity/

Presyn likhne ki tammanna abb humare dil main hai
Dekhna hai jor kitna apni research work main hain

-- PhD lene ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai by Sushant Sharma

appughar has always been a good wingman... but I never realized he would take it to such awesome heights!

Have fun chasing wings dude!

~vipul

PS: this gives a new connotation to winged migration

I have an OLD National PE-301 fully manual flash. I usually use it with my OLD Pentax K1000 film SLR. I recently tried it out with my Olympus E-510 DSLR and it worked perfectly!

This flash is so old that there is hardly any mention of it on the Internet. It was made in 1976, no wonder!! The flash is older than me :-)

Of course, I need to set my camera to manual exposure and calculate aperture manually by estimating the distance-to-object and following the guide on the back of the flash. But I am already used-to this with my manual film SLR.

It is a good strong flash that I can happily reuse 32 years after it was manufactured! Now that is what you call standardization and backward compatibility.

I wonder how much of equipment we buy today will be reusable three decades from now...

~Vipul

Originally posted at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/olympusesystem/discuss/72157605699353228/72157605732284325/

Quick updates from my side:

I'll be traveling to the US soon for a conference. First trip to the US and third trip outside India (and counting!).

I bought an Olympus Evolt E-510 10MP Digital SLR Camera! With two kit lenses: Zuiko Digital 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and Zuiko Digital 40-150mm f/4.0-5.6. Yippie! The package cost me $655 from Amazon.

Some reviews of this camera:

• http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse510/
• http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/olympus/e510-review/
• http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/OlympusE510/
• http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/E510/E510A.HTM
• http://www.popphoto.com/cameras/4380/camera-test-olympus-e-510.html

Check out the photos on Flickr's Camera Finder shot with the E-510.

Anybody in or around Raleigh-Durham, NC or Chicago, IL or NJ/NYC want to meet up? Reply here or drop me an email on vipul DOT mathur AT gmail.

Back to work for now!

 

Ever wondered why the asterisk is the wildcard character for zero or more characters?

Hint: It is the answer to everything. You just have to know how to asc the question.
More hints: http://vipul.livejournal.com/34734.html 101010 0x2A \052

This occurred to me after seeing hiddenharmony's status message (101010) on gtalk.

The following is quoted from a credit card payment alert email. The quoting is verbatim, except for masking out the numbers.

The pymt date for your card **************** is **-**-**.The TotalDue isRs????.?? and Minimum Rs???.??.Pls send the pymt early to avoid chrgs.

SMS speak has infested even the strictly professional interaction. What kind of a message is the credit card company sending to its customers by the use of such silly language? Just imagine that this is a template-generated mail sent out regularly to all customers!

Is this a lost cause? Does anyone even care?

PS: Don't even get me started on the punctuation blunders there!

Spend some time listening to the wind,
where the butterflies dance and the flowers sing...

~Vipul

I finally decided to take the plunge and get a Flickr pro account for myself. Clicked through their upgrade procedure till the point where it says "Ok! I am ready to pay". Clicking on that took me to the familiar Yahoo "password verification" page. Entered my password and submitted... only to be redirected back to the same page.

At first I thought that I might have mis-typed my password, so tried again---with the same result. So I was stuck in some sort of "verification loop". Tried with a different machine, and different browser, but no joy. Sounded like an issue to me, so headed over to the Flickr help forums. Found three threads there [1] [2] [3] that talk about the same problem (so others were facing it too!).

As it turns out, the issue seems to be limited to people behind network proxies. I do not have any non-proxy network access [4] (Home and work are both on campus at IIT Bombay). So I am completely stuck, unable to buy a Flickr pro account.

I am also disappointed by the fact that a fix, for an issue that apparently is faced by a large number of people trying to give their money to Yahoo, still remains to be "in the works" for about 8 months now [1]. The suggested solution is to "try another network".

I have read the explanation that the issue is related to the proxy (in my campus) caching the result/cookie, when it should not. But why is being behind a proxy a problem only with Yahoo Wallet payments? I regularly use my credit card over the same network for a myriad of services, though this is the first time I am trying to make a payment for a service (Flickr) that uses Yahoo Wallet to process payments (and does not give options to use other payment gateways).

So dear Yahoos and Flickreenos (who happen to read this): any suggestions, or do I have to take my money elsewhere? I really love Flickr, and would really, really like to get a Pro account---if only Yahoo would accept my money ;-)

[1]: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/44717/
[2]: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/50191/
[3]: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/53770/

[4]: Note that I prefer not to use (for safety/security/reliability reasons) a nukkad cyber-cafe or an open wireless network to do a credit-card transaction. Too often have I been bitten by "mysterious errors" in credit card payment due to unreliable networks. They usually get resolved, without any loss of money, but rarely without hours of haggling and battling with "customer care" and "help lines".

I recently (Dec 5, 2007) bought a Sony Ericsson K790i CyberShot phone.


This is the first non-Nokia phone that I have owned, and it is turning out to be a joy indeed! I have started a mobile photography blog at wanderingpixels.blogspot.com and comments are welcome :-)

The phone has an integrated blogging feature, that allows one to quickly compose a title + text post around any photograph and send it to a linked Blogger.com blog directly over GPRS. Since GPRS access charges are the same even on roaming (at least for a Vodafone Mumbai customer roaming to Goa) I have been using this feature quite often.

The phone behaves relatively well with Linux, showing up either as USB mass storage, or as a USB serial device which I can read with the likes of wammu/gammu/gnokii. I'm going to setup an opensync pipe to evolution, when I find the time.

The top things that I like about the phone are the 200dpi screen, the 3.2MP camera with auto focus, a rocking macro mode, best-pic shot selection (burst) mode, and of course the Xenon flash. As you can probably notice, it is a great combination of a camera, phone, music player, and FM radio in one cool gadget.


Anyway, Wandering Pixels is going to be more active than my LJ, at least in the near future.

PS: I call it Evita, after Sony's internal development codename for the phone. The folks at Sony seem to have the right idea in naming their phones ;-) What do you say code_martial?

this is an (almost) anonymous version of a recent reply I wrote to P's mail that was sent to K, R, U, M, and Me


@all: please read this in its entirety, and do look up the references as you read.

@P: do not miss the post script.

On Nov 10, 2007 10:33 AM, P wrote:
> Make darn sure... that you don't get a techie girl-friend.
> For the ladies, this is a GREAT idea! :) http://xkcd.com/340/

Hmm... imagine how much fun it would be after the patch up. An evening of digging through the backups, or restoring the boot sector from a printout... byte by bite. Or just a great opportunity to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release ;-)

And if it does not work out between you and your SO (Significant Other)... letting go would probably be a bit easier [1].

Of course there are many many advantages of your SO being a techie. For the purpose of illustration, here are a select few:

On a lazy Saturday afternoon [2], go out for an impulsive drive [3] and enjoy a /complete/ dinner date [4]. Spend the night twirling [5] and celebrate [6]... Happy Diwali!

Well this reply was just meant to add some perspective to the discussion. Of course, the problem with perspective is that it is bi-directional [7]!


Anyways, right now, I feel like I am flying a kite in a thunderstorm [8] the result might be electrifying and sparks may fly... if not, at least I wouldn't regret not having flown the kite O:-)


[0] http://xkcd.com/340/
[1] http://xkcd.com/215/
[2] http://xkcd.com/149/
[3] http://xkcd.com/283/
[4] http://xkcd.com/287/
[5] http://xkcd.com/162/
[6] http://xkcd.com/201/
[7] http://xkcd.com/230/
[8] http://xkcd.com/235/ don't miss the mouse-hover alt text on this one!


P.S.: P... I noticed how you conveniently left N out of the list of recipients ;-) I am tempted to include N on my reply. Before that, however, here is fair warning to you: backup your boot sector!

~ViM

It started off a bit slowly... The weather was pleasant, but it got humid as the day progressed and it rained (!) for some hours in the evening!

I had an early lunch (brunch) at noon. Headed off to my lab, checked out status of testbed machines, planned to move them to the new rack in the evening, send some mails to setup other work related meetings. Later planned the train journey for trip to HiPC 2007.

There was this issue with our email server that was bothering me for long, so spent some time figuring that out along with the friendly neighborhood sysad (yes, I am not the sysad everywhere!). It was fun and a great way to relax! Hope we can do this more often :-)

Then after making plans for the evening with friends, went to my office and worked on the upcoming paper submission. Later in the evening, had more work related meetings and carried out the planned testbed machine shifting.

Today, we had Surbahar---the IITB cultural event that has students singing hindi film songs with full orchestra in Convocation Hall. Went there and waited for friends who were expected to join in. appughar walked in soon and biswarup an hour after that with... wait for it... Pizzas! from the PPT. So had dinner, while listening to some foot-tapping numbers. The event was going really well with a great selection of songs and enthusiasm and rendering to match!

There were some more friends expected and they walked in a couple of songs before the tea-break in the event. Had reserved seats for the bunch of 7-8 and was expecting to enjoy the songs even more in their company. However, they sat in another part of the hall, and disappeared during the break without a word!! I was sad to see this! Why would you walk in a group and then walk out after two songs! Maybe they had a lot of work pending... maybe they didn't enjoy the songs (not likely)... maybe... bah! Felt a bit silly waiting for them and then getting ditched like this... After the break, the first song performed was "Intehaa ho gayee intezaar ki". How appropriate!

The tempo increased quickly after that with "Woh ladki hai kahaan" from DCH and they also performed "Tere bina" by Fuzon, which I liked a lot. The fun continued with increasing amount of junta coming forward to shake a leg. Towards the last few songs, appughar, biswarup and I realized that this is perhaps our last Surbahar in IITB. With that thought, we recalled the awesome time we had dancing in our first time at this event, and that was it! A few seconds later, all three of us were found near the stage, dancing our hearts out like nobody is watching!

Gosh! That half an hour of uninhibited energy was something! We left the place completely tired, sweating to the core, and with completely refreshed minds!

Great way to end a day that had its geeky, fun, ecstatic, busy, sad, angry, rocking and inexplicable moments. Fun was had... spent time with those I like being around... though some things were left unsaid... well I guess not everything turns out the way we want it to ;-)

Till another day!

It is amazing how much of a difference three hours of uninterrupted, concentrated thinking can make.

There is something about dining solo that makes me keep at it. Late night dinners at Subway, Mocha, Bread Talk, even KFC... Hash Brown / Spanish Omelette, Satay Chicken Crustini, Tuna Sub, Club Wraps... A hot cup of Kenya AA or Yemeni Mocha... Maybe a dessert in Vertigo or Devil's Own or Sizzling brownie... The best part is, you can indulge when you feel like.

At first I thought dining solo would be a bit boring---sometimes it is---but the joy of just sitting back, relishing the food, no yapping, observing the people around you and their antics is quite enjoyable indeed. Going out with friends is always a lot of fun, but the experience of a solo outing is something that many often miss out on.

I am enjoying the solitude while it lasts.

Update: I concede. The treat business belongs in whole another post. I was too lazy busy for that.

जाने मेरा यह बावरा मन मुझे कहाँ ले जाएगा...

http://chocolategeek.blogspot.com/2007/08/blog-post.html

Just a quick note to say that freed.in is happening in the last week of September this year. Read more about the event and stay tuned!

They never fail to get me in a jolly mood, specially when it is the first mega-thunder-shower signaling that the Monsoons have arrived. This happened in the evening, day before yesterday. To add to the fun, the electricity went off for the entire campus for about an hour and a half. So nothing to do but enjoy the rains!

The bolts of lightening made the evening seem like day, the thunder, the cool wet breeze, the overcast skies. Ah! Enjoyed these till my heart was contented, thanks to the open green campus and the panoramic view around Powai lake.

Paus aala re aala!

 

Route from H12 to VT
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vipul/files/gps/routes/

Marengo GPS Route Planner
http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/

Now I am on the lookout for a Linux-compatible GPS receiver available in Mumbai / Delhi. It may be a standalone device, as long as it can communicate over bluetooth or USB or serial link, I am fine with it.

Suggestions anyone?

Looks like lots of GPS-related software is available
http://tuxmobil.org/navigation_gps.html

I vaguely remember jace doing some GPS hackery... are you reading this Jace?

I have a strange relationship with books. There was a time when I used to read very quickly, devouring whatever I came across. Those were my early days of reading. Started off with the Children's Pocket Classics series, then went on to Enid Blyton (The Five Find-Outers and Buster The Dog, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven), The Hardy Boys... This was while I was in school.

Towards the later years of school, and after starting college, my rate of reading books took a nosedive. I guess I had other avenues to keep myself occupied. For long I have regretted not reading a more diverse range of literature, specially during the post-adolescence phase.

Nonetheless, books always surrounded me and I developed a strange sense of belonging with my books. The nature of the books I was reading had turned to more of the technical side though.

Now, for the past two years or so, I have been slowly catching up on my reading. I have this large list (and populated shelf) of books that I want to read. Time is always in short supply, but I am making efforts to always keep at it. There is much to read, though my pace of reading has now become more deliberate and relaxed.

There is something magnetic about the rough-smooth feel of paper; the printed letters in black ink; the strange smell of an old book---and how each book seems to have its own characteristic one; bookmarks, tags; the rustling sound of crisp paper sheets rubbing against each other; the gentle puffs of air that blow towards you as the pages flip by...

Here's to the love and joy of books!