"So Be It"

So Be It - I saw this inscribed on the back of a bike today morning, while commuting to work. That is the meaning as it were, of the Sanskrit word "Tathaastu".

According to mythology, that was how the Gods granted boons to seekers. Including prayers that were mis-phrased or mis-pronounced (a famous one being Kumbhakarna's twist of tongue requesting "nidhra dehi" instead of "vidhya dehi" - after rigorous tapasya/penance, him thus sleeping for 6 months of each year).

The intention of this post though, is the chain of thoughts set off in me, after reading that inscription on the bike. Imagine that we are Gods, you and I. What we voice influences events and makes them occur. That extends to even our thoughts, not only words that come out of our mouth.

What happens then? What do I say and what does it result in?
"This is too difficult" - I actually find it difficult.
"Nopes, I can't reach office in time today" - I actually end up late.
"This race is just too long" - I drop out of the race.
"I don't like you" - I actually feel animosity towards you.
"$%^# YOU!!!" - I see only the wasted effort.
"I won't accept what you say" - I don't accept whatever is said.
"You can't help me in what I'm dealing with" - I get no help from you.

Gentle reader of this blog, the above is hypothetical. I'm sure you have thought even further through each sentence, so explaining is redundant.

Call it self-fulfilling prophecy, power of negative thought, or a thesis in the psyche of despondent people. But the end result is the same, and we have all found ourselves in the situations described above.

We have indulged in the opposite as well, regardless of someone calling it arrogance or over-confidence - and found our confidence well placed and working out alright in the end.

Replace the above negatively-phrased quotes in a manner that is consistent with your status as a God - the hows and whats are best known to you. Voice a sentence out loud, then imagine your own overwhelming divinity giving that sentence the power of fulfillment.

You might notice you then want to give a thought about how you phrase your sentences, and what you think. You are a God.

So Be It - Tathaastu!

Web Browser Thoughts: 64-bit Firefox, portable Chrome and Unfreezing Chrome Browser

Firefox 5 browser for desktop and mobile devices, has been released to the "stable" tree, as fruition of the first "Rapid Release" cycle. With this version's release , Firefox 6 would move up to Aurora from Channel, while Firefox 7 remains at "nightly" alpha builds for now.

With rapid releases, the changes between versions are not nearly as much, so you can be fairly sure that a Firefox 4 extension/addon will still work on Firefox 7. On a related note, beta1 of Thunderbird 5.0 has also been released.

It has been bothering me that other than Internet Explorer which has had a native 64-bit version since v6, no other (big name) browser actually seemed to care about 64-bit native versions. Understandably due to a chicken-and-egg situation (with "no Adobe Flash for 64-bit" being the oft-cited excuse). Mozilla itself had a proper Intel 64-bit (x86_64) variant of Firefox available for Linux and OSX, but not Windows. Pretty much the same applied to Google Chrome (to be precise, the Chromium project).

But now, those who want a native 64-bit version of Firefox on Windows can get it from the Nightly builds. You'll need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) installed too.

Google Chrome Browser and how to make Chromium portable:
The other recent stable release of an alternative browser was Google Chrome 12. If it annoyed you that the installer offered for it was always a 500-odd KB web installer, then here's a direct link to the official Stand-alone and 3rd-party Portable version installers. But as usual, I refuse to let a pre-packaged portable installer dictate even the best terms to me. Below is what I suggest instead:

1. Download a relatively stable Chromium build from BuildBot or Softpedia.
2. Install it to the directory you like, preferably outside of C: drive, to be able to retain it between OS re-formats.
3. Now you may want to pre-configure it before distribution, or make it portable to prevent user profile files from landing up at the %AppData% folder. You can use a batch file for this, or an LNK shortcut.
4. Test your batch file by creating a text-based batch file named "portable.cmd" in the same folder as Chromium's EXE itself. The command is:  start Chromium-folder/chrome.exe --user-data-dir="User Data"
5. Click it, verify that no files are created in the %AppData% folder, and that your user profile is created within the program's folder itself.
6. Adapt the same command for a Desktop/Start Menu shortcut by using full/absolute paths, using System Variables did not seem to work for me. For example, the shortcut target must be
D:\Programs\Chromium\chrome.exe --user-data-dir=D:\Programs\Chromium\UserData
with a Start In folder value of D:\Programs\Chromium\
7. That is all. Note that the quotes as mentioned in the example command above, are to be used in case your folder path name has spaces. Of all the additional switches that could be used, I thought these two were the most deserving of mention: -disable-java and -incognito (what the switches do is obvious).

Next up, if you want to customize the UI by default, the method on Chrome 0.2 used to be as follows:
Dress up Google Chrome to your liking by downloading a Chrome theme and saving its default.dll file into the application's Themes directory - C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\0.2.149.29\Themes\
That technique did not work for themes or WebStore apps, so going onwards to the next now.

Whereas Google Chrome has Adobe Flash included, Chromium does not. Pre-configuring the browser means NOT having to hope that your target PC will have the Flash plugin installed. Solution is as described below:

1. Download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash plugin (not ActiveX, which is only for IE).
2. Now from the folder C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash get the files NPSWF32.dll and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe - copy and paste these somewhere temporarily.
3. Go to the folder D:\Programs\Chromium\Plugins (create the "Plugins" folder if it's not already present) and paste the two files that you copied in Step 2.
4. That is it. You might need to install the latest Redist of DirectX 9.0c and copy two DLLs to the same folder as Chromium's EXE.

Recovering from a "Frozen" Chrome
If you open a lot of tabs, in Chromium's incognito mode, a browser freeze/crash leaves you unable to even recover tabs/URLs that were previously open, due to the nature and intent of incognito. Can get mighty frustrating indeed. When a number of tabs are open and you call upon the file "Save As" dialog box often, the browser inexplicably slows down in saving.

Eventually, when you right-click and "Save As", a situation arises where the expected dialog box does not show up, and the browser itself does not respond (this is normal behaviour, if the dialog box is in the foreground). In UX terms, it feels like a loop - the "Save As" has not popped up yet, and the browser is not responding to clicks either. This description is applicable to Windows 7 and Vista.

I tried a number of things, for the 3-4 times this occurred. Each time it got more irritating to lose everything that was ongoing in the browser tabs (face it, a lot of your PC usage nowadays is via browser). Here is the solution that managed to work for me, and has been working each time since the first time I tried it:

1. Make sure your Chrome/Chromium browser freeze is caused by a file "Save As" dialog box stuck in the background, being rendered invisible.
2. Finish up any work in other apps and close them. End processes and services that are non-MS and non-crucial for the moment.
3. Now the important part. End/TaskKill instances of explorer.exe one by one, before finally killing the task named dwm.exe (which renders the GUI).
4. You can now Alt+Tab your way through open apps/windows, but the Windows Taskbar has disappeared. Just as well, since the darned "Save As" dialog box will now be exposed and visible for you to either Cancel or Save the file.
5. Done. Chrome will now be resuscitated. You can bring back the Taskbar, normal Windows UI and other apps. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up Windows Task Manager, click "New Task" in Applications tab, and type explorer.exe to do so.

Lastly, I wonder if there is a way to import/export Tabbed Browsing Sessions between different browsers?

Assorted Thoughts of a Traffic-Clogged Morning

So I chose to blog about the traffic. Yeah right, so mundane. When more exciting times are upon us.

Such as Hazare's crusade for a super-empowered Lok Pal - and all I can think of in return to his kindly act is, "Those who forget History are doomed to repeat it", remember ancient Rome's "Dictator" post or its "Praetorian Guard"? Such as AMD's inability to capitalize on Intel's (relatively negligible) woes with the Cougar Point's SATA chip, and not try pulling ahead of at least the lower end Sandy Bridge processors, with its Fusion chips.

What has me exercised is the way barely a hundred people held up traffic for thousands of people on the Old Airport Road (Bangalore) this morning. The traffic police were present in considerable strength and re-routing vehicle flow. One side of the road was blocked out, and the other side was used for vehicles going in both directions. People on two-wheelers were delayed for a minimum of ten minutes, the larger vehicles for longer, and all this at peak-hour.

The village folk admittedly were only doing what they are entitled to. Conducting their "jaatre" or "thaeru", which is a form of "ooru habba". It comes once a year with a religious origin, in which the locality's "protector god" travels around the locality in a grand car. Lot of people volunteer their services in various capacities, lot of roadside hawkers get a chance to sell trinkets and candies, and residents watch the goings-on from within their houses or outside, some even dancing to the beat of the drums outside. The festivities start early, around 2 am in the morning, and wind up by 5 am in truly rural areas. Winds up by 6-7 am in villages that have been swallowed up by cities growing outward.

But not for these particular people, the concept of winding up. The sadistic concept of deliberately getting in your face to conduct these processions, officially blessed by the police, even as a number of traffic signals and roads get jammed, was seemingly so much more satisfying. Yes, we are a democracy where even a single person has the right to be heard. No, your right extends only so far as it does not trample upon mine.

Google Social Circle is a social mistake and violates privacy

So I noticed the "Google Social Circle" today.
And I do not like it. Not one bit.

It displays direct connections between me and my friends. That is, when I am logged into my Google account, it offers an "easy" central page to view profiles of all friends who are on my address book (or Chat) - and view content they have shared publicly or with me (Twitter, Flickr, etc).

Problem is, it also shows a list of "Secondary Connections" who are publicly associated with my direct connections. You could argue that i can already visit a friend's Google Profile page and then view a list of their publicly associated contacts on Buzz. Or that Twitter/Buzz/Flickr/FaceBook/WordPress/BlogSpot/their-own-domain are already on the public internet and you could track them down if you wanted to. But in practice, I doubt anyone other than contact harvestors and stalkers could have the conscience to do that.

As it stands, the Social Circle can strike out from just 64 contacts and show up 2510 secondary contacts. Short of email id itself, all the above and more are shown up. And shown up with a tracking line that shows which direct contact is a common friend. It is a lot like seeing a person's list of contacts right up front, with no effort at all.

That is scary, uncomfortable, and invasive of privacy. The least Google could have done (in the wake of the Google Buzz privacy fiasco) is to offer people a choice of whether they want to be shown up in such a list, and a choice of whether their "secondary connections" will be exposed on such lists. You can easily imagine sites/apps to pop up that make use of such a facility (or otherwise convert the HTML in some form into a usable API) and get users to sign in with their Google Account for access - Voila, instant personalized and demographic information!

Unlike FaceBook, where you add a friend knowing fully well that all your other friends can see the new addition, GMail contact lists are implicitly private. I explicitly signed on to FaceBook for social networking, and I explicitly knew that is not what I wanted my Gmail account to do - THAT is the CENTRAL DIFFERENCE. Chat/Buzz contacts may be visible to world but still some effort is required to scrape them, as against listing them ALL right up there. You could, at the least, opt out of Buzz, but with dependance on Google's services, how likely are you to shutdown your Google account in protest of this kind of a move by Google?

So yeah, bad BAD move, really evil, and leaving users feeling naked, is my opinion of Google Social Circle. Just leave me alone, give me back my privacy. In the future, take my permission before assuming it, even if you've been "graciously" offering me free services all along.

Hello ATI

A dis-jointed set of thoughts... where the bad follows the good in a law of averages.
Where the stingy Chennai vendor from whom I bought something was NOT the most bad thing to happen to me in the last one week. Maybe I need to eat more apples to keep the doctor away (but not the one that forms part of my family).

Maybe Nokia should also keep its service centres (or whoever has signed the contract to provide service on behalf of Nokia) open for longer. A mobile phone on the fritz is not pretty. A PSU (SMPS to some people) or processor fan or graphics cooler always smells nice when new. Oh, and hello ATI.

Farm - process, store and simplify data access

Alright, so making a computing farm that embraces in its fold, wired desktop PCs, wireless laptops, and even non-x86 architectures such as CUDA acceleration and RISC-based ARM processor smartphones...   does work. For the curious, here are some geeky specs (of the farm overall) to get excited about:

19 logical processing units (the majority clocked over 2GHz, this number does not take the phones/GPUs into consideration)

22 GigaBytes (GB) of RAM

9.5 TeraBytes (TB) of secondary storage

OS: Windows-only, except for the Symbian-based phones that were thrown in.

What were the challenges?

 - Connectivity! Why the heck don't we have multi-Gigabit wireless interfaces yet?

 - Syncing and bunching them into "similar" process groups, to ensure chunks are "checked in" in the right sequence.

 - Keeping the farm fed continuously with data to crunch, else it ends up being one heck of a mean parallel processing entity simply waiting at a faster speed and in more numbers to boot (since it isn't comprised of a single "PC" but is a collection) !

PC industry must use IEC standard for calculating storage

This joke stopped being funny a long time ago, so cleanup your act people!

I am talking about vendors of PC secondary storage who calculate drive capacity in magnitudes of a thousand each. Technically, they are correct, because the SI system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix) works that way. But computers do not use the decimal or SI system, they are binary and calculate data in orders of magnitude that had finally been defined and been given a new abbreviation about 10 years ago by IEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix).

To illustrate, let us see what a storage vendor claims and what the OS actually sees.

Vendor - 1,000 (1 kilo) bytes = 1KB.  OS - 1024 bytes = 1KB.

Vendor - 1,000,000 (1 million or mega) bytes = 1MB. OS - 1,048,576 bytes = 1MB.

Vendor - 1,000,000,000 (1 billion or giga) bytes = 1GB. OS - 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1GB

Now the storage vendor or company is scientifically correct, because the SI system is decimal and states that <10 to the power of 6> or one million, qualifies for the "Mega" prefix. Similarly, <10 to the power of 9> or one billion units, qualify for the "Giga" prefix. In contrast, the OS looks at storage in binary, and thus <2 to the power of 10> or 1024 bytes is reported as one KiloByte. Similarly, <2 to the power of 20> or 1048576 bytes are one MegaByte, 2^30 = 1GB, and 2^40 = 1TB.

But because of the vendor using the SI system and the OS using the binary system, people who buy a hard disk drive (HDD) of a certain capacity feel cheated when they see the OS reporting less space. For example, here are a few commonly seen HDD capacities:

2.5 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 2.33 GB

20 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 18.63 GB

40 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 37.25 GB

80 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 74.51 GB

160 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 149.01 GB

250 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 232.83 GB

500 GB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 465.66 GB

1 TB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 931.32 GB (instead of the 1024 GB you would expect)

2 TB HDD = Actual formatted capacity of only 1862.6 GB

As you go higher up the capacity ladder, the bigger the "perceived" loss of space or the feeling of being cheated. An immediate example I could bring up, is that of a person with HDDs that total up to a claimed 9.5 TeraBytes of data storage capacity. But as far as usable drive space is concerned, this person only has 8.64 TB of space actually. So does that mean he has effectively been cheated of almost 900 GB, since that is the difference in numbers?

Not at all, the issue at hand is simply the logical result of the SI-prefix versus IEC-prefix problem. In an ideal world, people would use the correct representations, just as you would convert weight in kg (kilograms) to lb (pounds) using a set formula. The example to remember is "KiBiByte" (presumably standing for kilo binary byte which would translate to 1024 Bytes) represented as KiB (to prevent confusion with the "KB" which stands for only 1000 Bytes). Similarly you have representations such as MiB (MeBiByte), GiB (GiBiByte), TiB (TeBiByte) and so on, which is what IEC proposes you should use. Under the IEC system, you won't have the confusing situation outlined above and you (presumably) won't feel cheated if the units were shown to be distinct from one another. For example:

2.5 GB HDD = 2.33 GiB

20 GB HDD = 18.63 GiB

40 GB HDD = 37.25 GiB

80 GB HDD = 74.51 GiB

160 GB HDD = 149.01 GiB

250 GB HDD = 232.83 GiB

500 GB HDD = 465.66 GiB

1 TB HDD = 931.32 GiB

2 TB HDD = 1862.6 GiB

I was hoping Windows 7 (the latest Operating System from Microsoft) would change the prevailing attitude, by providing an option to show file/drive sizes in compatibility format (for those who want the current way) and then options for strict SI format (in the 10^3 form for KB) and for strict IEC form (in the 2^10 format for KiB). Apple's Snow Leopard and Linux Ubuntu 10.04 are already moving in that direction. If you want to convert file/drive sizes yourself without the drudgery of multiple steps, you could use this online calculator instead - http://www.gordonengland.co.uk/conversion/binary.htm

The other option is for the storage industry (such as Seagate, Kingston, etc.) to provide larger drives (:P). When I ask for 2TB, give me the full 2048 GiB capacity instead of only 1863 GiB which feels as though almost 10% of the drive (the difference in number is 185 GiB) has been withheld from the customer.

Addendum:

After all, secondary storage is the only place this sleight-of-hand deception is taking place - a person buying 8GB of RAM is given 8 GiB (or 8192 MB) of memory, fair and square. But then, the Internet bandwidth and networking industry has been benefiting from the SI prefix as well for a while now. This is in addition to their added benefit of expressing speeds in bits (thus being able to roll off large numbers) instead of actual data-transfer speed in Bytes (made of 8 bits) and not taking data packet transmission overhead into account.  To the layman, saying "I have a 256 kbps Internet connection" sounds more appealing than saying "I get transfer speeds of 32 k Bytes/sec" -- 256 is a larger number than 32, right?

Fragile and precious

Life is fragile, it is precious, and you can never be too careful in trying to prevent snuffing it out.
A neighbour-incident made me say this, is all I will say. End of post.