Premshree's (品速力) Personal Weblog

So, .. I was online looking for cheap airline tickets. i stumbled upon some cheap tickets tour/re-tour london. going out 22nd july. return 17th august. then i found a free 1 way ticket to Marseille all the way south in france....

1 way ticket. so i'm thinking hitchhiking myself back up to london in a 2 weeks time. i'm looking for people who might be able to help me along the way. maybe let me crash on they're sofa a night or two. let me hitch a ride further north. something something, you know what i mean.

anyone out there? any french? any londoners?
i need ride from and to airport (stansted 22nd and 23rd july) and a place to crash that night between the flighs. then i need help when i get to france start hitchin.

Lately, the mortgage and credit crisis that brought down several financial companies to their knees has been in the news. The negative impact of this crisis on the stock market and economy in general was enormous. With all the talk of mortgage-backed securities, CDOs and some other acronyms that were flying around, the whole issue was quite nebulous to me. Guess who came to rescue me from all this confusion... My favorite radio show: This American Life. The recent episode that was broadcast last week, "The Giant Pool of Money", explains the whole situation very clearly. It is a must listen if you were confused like me and want to know more. They basically took an individual on every rung of the chain from the mortgage borrower to banker to broker to wall street guys and used their personal stories to illustrate how things worked and how they went down. It is almost funny to hear how the requirements for mortgage approvals became more and more relaxed. It is very nicely done.

Some interesting points:


• Creators of CDOs, the very instruments that caused all this trouble, received an award for creating a novel financial vehicle for investment.


• There is US$70trillion (that is right with a 't') in fixed income savings worldwide. That is more than all the transactions that happen all around the world in an year. Fixed income savings means money for investing in very low-risk investments such as US treasury bonds. They don't want to lose even a penny of that principal. This crisis made a huge chunk of that money disappear.


• The financial companies and bond rating agencies calculated the risk for these investments using wrong data.

Hi everyone-

I have a question about the main Office 2004 user identity. It's currently taking up 8gb on my hard drive, which seems way too big. It's all sitting in the database file. I use Entourage 2004 to retrieve my mail from two Gmail accounts and an exchange account at my university. One of my Gmail accounts is pretty large (about 1.5gb) but the other is not and neither is the exchange account. Any way you look at it, it's not 8gb of email. Doing some Googleing, I read that deleting email will not make the size of the database go down necessarily, but I wasn't clear on what actually will reduce it and try to keep it from corrupting (which I'm surprised it hasn't already).

How did this get so large, how do I reduce it, and how do I keep it from happening again?

Computer info:
pbg4,1.33ghz, 768 ram, 60gb hard drive with about 2.7gb free. It's running pretty slowly around here.
OS 10.4.11. Most recent Office 2004 updates are all installed.

Thank you!

I sat down and tried to get comfortable. The seat had more joints than I knew what to do with, and it had a separate button, no two, for each of them. Then it had two macro buttons that scripted the others to do a bunch of high level maneuvers to get to two extremes, and discrete points in between.

I played with it a bit.

There was a bar. They served Dom Peringon among other things. They brought it to me with nuts. That confused me because half my brain suddenly thought that I was at Yacht. I wasn't.

There was a table that slid out from under the television. It was rather large. They came up to me and said, "Sir, may I dress your table?", which always cracks me up. The food was the same old fare, just decorated and served differently.

I watched I am Legend, and Italian Job, and I stretched out and slept. Full length, with a large pillow and comfortable blanket. The seat turned into a bed, with sufficient room for all six feet of me to stretch out. I enjoyed a good couple of hours of undisturbed rest.

The restroom was large. You could stretch out your arms without hitting the walls. Large half length mirrors that covered the side walls created the impression of a larger room.

This was my first time flying international business class. Thanks to my Jet Airways upgrade vouchers, I was able to upgrade from Brussels to Mumbai. I was two vouchers short of an upgrade all the way through.

I could really get used to it, but my company isn't going to pay for my travel, not business class, not economy. I've had to pay for all my trips so far. Which means I should either halve the number of flights I take, or double the amount of money I make.

I still don't know who's going to pay for me to go to Linux Symposium this year. The conference says they won't pay, and Yahoo! doesn't seem to keen on it either, and I'm not about to pay $1500 for the right to speak at a conference. Let the attendees read my blog instead.

Oh yeah, in other news, just had a four day vacation in New York (Manhattan and Cold Spring), and I'll be working from Mumbai for a week.

Quoted:

"It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs, the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores, the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta, the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds, the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too."

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And bluesmoon showed up in the middle of the night and gave me a huge surprise. My day is complete.

The Philosopher's Path - http://www.japannavigator.com/2007/04/08/sakura-in-kyoto-philosophers-path/

If you have used a Debian-based system to generate SSH keys in the past two years, your keys are likely no good. This document has instructions. In brief:

1) Delete your bad keys: .ssh/id_*. Fix all systems where you're trusting those keys (think .ssh/authorized_keys); someone has already published a table of all private keys, so it's just a matter of time before your system is brute-forced.

2) Update your systems. I see an "openssl-blacklist" package show up on both my Debian stable and my Ubuntu whateverletterthey'reon one. You'll get some debconf prompts about it clobbering stuff, including potentially your host keys, which means the next time you connect to the machine you'll get the "host keys have changed" message.

3) To make yourself feel less anxious, try running ssh-vulnkey to print an analysis of keys in standard paths on your system. (Run it as sudo ssh-vulnkey -a to check all users on your system.)

I support the relocation of polar bears to Antarctica and penguins to the Arctic.

I am here in Sunnyvale for three weeks. Lot of folks from Bangalore are here for a conference. Landed in this Sunday by Singapore Airlines. SG flights are much better than CX but the quantity of food they serve is very little. I had to get some bread to fill. Also, it is so lame that they don't carry extra pillows. I asked for one on both the legs and I was told since the flight was full, they don't have any left. :-( The paranoia of air travel has gone overboard. When you board at Bangalore, there is a security check and scan your baggages. At Singapore, you don't go out of the airport but still there is another scan. Does this mean, there might be items that can be bought in the airport which might have security concerns? Similar thing at Inchon airport. They spent a lot of time checking the boarding cards and issuing a transfer card / scan for a 50 minutes stopover.

When I reached SFO, Charan was there to pick me up. Checked into the hotel and the first thing I did was to go to Chipotle for lunch. Manoj was around and we went to a bunch of places. And then he lent me his wii. Since then, I have been having so much fun. I spend about 2-3 hours a day playing on it. Boxing and Tennis are my favourite games. If ever I make up my mind to buy a TV, I am going to get a wii the next day.

On Monday, visited my next favourite place, Murphy's Law in Sunnyvale downtown. Nula's is next. Sunnyvale feels home away from home.

PS: Krisworld, the entertainment system on SG, runs on RedHat. They had some issue with the system during the flight and they had to reset the system and it showed the familiar bootup screen. :-)

So I've been searching forums, and googling this but I can't seem to find an answer, so I wonder if anyone here has ever had this problem.

My work Mac (iMac G5 2 GHz, 2 GB Ram, running Mac OSX 10.4.11) has a weird problem with the speaker balance fluctuating on it's own. I use headphones mostly, so that's how I notice it. I'm not manually changing it in System Preferences, so I'm wondering if maybe there is a keyboard shortcut that I'm hitting by accident which causes it to do that. It only happens once in a while, and anyways soon enough I won't have this Mac anymore (moving into the PC world at my job...) but it was still an oddity that I wanted to figure out.

Thanks.

Some pix from a recent trip to Japan...

01.

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I have a MyBook 500gb that I use through the firewire connection to my macbook.

I have it formatted with osx extended case sensitive.

I went to do a resize on the volume (to make room for a small fat32 partition) and it said it needed to be verified. So I did a verify/repair on the volume through the Disk Utility and it's giving me (hundreds of) thousands of warnings about "HasFolderCount needs to be set".

It's been running repair for a good 10 minutes, should I just let it keep going? Or take all of the data off and wipe it clean? It's alot of warnings and the ETA has been less than a minute for far more than a minute.

Any suggestions?

Update I stopped the verification and performed these steps.

Guided loosely by http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214, I stopped the verification process.

1. Opened up a terminal
   
2. Listed my partitions in a terminal using df -hl
   
3. Did a quick test to see if I got the same errors using sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk1s3
   
4. Unmounted the volume
   
5. Performed a force repair on the volume (journalled, so had to force) using sudo fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk1s3
   
6. Voila!
   

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Loving it..



When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse.

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
But if you never try you'll never know
"Just what your worth"

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream, down on your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face and I...


Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you.

 

look what i woke up to today



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