Tag: computers

photos


Photo0075
Originally uploaded by _prasun.

As two of my roomates and I are leaving the town in summer, my other roomate has to look for other people to share the apartment. So he needed to post some pictures to interested people

We took a few photos with my new Samsung a707 cameraphone. You can see them here :- http://www.flickr.com/photos/prasun/archives/date-taken/2007/04/24/

While I was uploading pictures on flickr, I thought of creating a tool to generate flickr like logos :- http://www.prasun.info/hacks/flickr-name

All this, while I should be working on a project which is due Thursday.

Big blog!

Today
I had an exam today. I didn’t know what to study for the exam as the material covered was quite simple. Naturally, the exam was simple too and it wouldn’t be surprising if every one gets full credit. But then, I have a tendency to goof-up (hopefully this semester would amend last semester’s bad grades!).

Due to the exam, I was able to catch an earlier bus back home – exams days are better than classes!

There’s this guy in my lab called Chao – he happened to be on the same bus today. When I reached home, I was about to say Ciao when I stopped myself. It would have sounded weird if I said Ciao Chao!

Yesterday
My roomates and I have almost developed a habit of eating out and having coffee every weekend evening. Last night we had dinner at Subway and then some coffee (Grande Chai, actually) at Cup-a-Joe’s. While returning, we had some time to kill before the bus came, so we went to the library and my roomies borrowed a few books. One of the books was this :-
The book is about a guy who left his job to work amongst the poor people in Nepal and India. It almost inspired me to the point that I am thinking of contributing to some ngo-type organisation. I googled and found a few organisation which help children and women in and around Ranchi, but the problem is that I don’t know which one deserves help and which one doesn’t. And then, just donating money isn’t as satisfactory as real work – I mean, every penny helps, but other people are already donating (and probably donating enough). I want to contribute with something that I’m good at, but I doubt if they require any software related help!

prasun.info
In other news, I found this amazingly cheap webhosting deal at dreamhost.com ($22 for a year’s hosting : 175GB storage).
So I have a shiny new website : http://www.prasun.info/. And I plan to blog more regularly.
movies, spring break, summer plans, politics

Cracking safes “encrypted to 512 thingies”

Go read the latest BOFH story from El Reg:-

“It is! I had to take my laptop to the dealer to get it setup for this safe, and it would apparently take ALL the computers in the world over TEN YEARS to break into this safe.”

“Well, no time to lose then!” I say, making to leave.

“Are you suggesting you could break into this safe?” the Boss asks. “They use these to store Government secrets!”

“You mean secrets like how the Weapons of Mass Destruction disappeared?”

Computers and me; Or, How I lost 3 months of email.

When I hear people complaining of losing data, I smile to myself and say – What a moron! Why didn’t he have a backup!. However, yesterday I was the one worthy of similar adjectives.

Since I moved from one location to the other, I needed to change the domain of my computer and so, I had to copy the emails from the earlier domain account to the new one. However, bright me, copies the *new* folder and files onto the *old* ones! I had just overwritten all my 3+ years of mails with nothingness! Gone. Without the wind. I just sat there refusing to believe all was lost. But then the realisation sank in (much like kanishka_sinha‘s Clarence.

Turns out, I do have backup. Only it is 3 months old. So the last 3 month’s email is gone.

Time for Thunderbird for a fresh start!

Adventures with Windows Command Prompt

I was playing around with cmd today.

Actually I was wondering whether cmd prompt could have a newline just like my cygwin command prompt. Google is my friend, and it promptly took me here. The newline character is $_ . Then I thought, what about something like user@machine just like bash prompt. Again google came to my help. It is as simple as using the environment variables %username% and %computername%. So the final prompt is :-

$_$P$_[$T]$_$_%USERNAME%@%COMPUTERNAME%

and the prompt looks like this :-

F:\
[19:23:55.83]

prasunr@PRASUNR-LAP >

Just like my bash prompt.

Next interesting thing to be discovered was ANSI.SYS. It seems that this is useful in displaying colors using the $E. It needs a machine reboot — so that will have to wait till tomorrow (I do not want to disturb my cygnome download!)

I like my ls to display colors (ls --colors). But I hate typing all that each time. There is something called doskey, but it sets the alias just for that instance of cmd.exe. Is there something like .bashrc for windows? It seems there is. Create a bat file and add the path to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun (Note that AutoRun does not exist by default).
Details :- Unix in Windows (2K/XP)

Reboot the Universe

Stumbled across this piece:~

Jack Chalker wrote a series about the Well of Souls, a planet-sized computer which runs the math that creates reality.

One interesting character is the only authorized root user. No matter what he does, the computer will not let him die. Every outrageous coincidence of adventure fiction can and will happen to keep him alive. He’s pretty sick of it.

The climax of the series is when someone independently discovers enough of the relevant technology to corrupt the data structures of reality. The only cure is to reboot the universe, which caused a lot of dramatic conflict because there was no way to save the universe’s state


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66105&cid=6091835
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/31/2224253&mode=nested