I lost my Violin

What is with violinists and their carelessness these days?

David Garrett smashed a $1 million violin when he fell over after a concert in London over Christmas.

[February 13, 2008]

A Wiltshire man leaves a 1698 Venice-made Goffriller valued at £180,000 on the train.

[April 14, 2008]

And then, in today’s news, I read this:

A violinist who left his 285-year-old instrument in the back of a New York cab has played a concert to thank the driver who returned it to him.

The violin was valued at $4 million. The violinist Philippe Quint rewarded the taxicab driver with $100 and a 30-minute performance, plus tickets to his future show. Philippe Quint also nominated to the Grammy’s.

For someone of Quint’s stature, $100 is way too small a reward and smacks of extreme miserliness!

Maybe the next violinist who loses his violin on the train or taxicab better not even bother looking for it.

Obama’s hand - Is it real?

I keep seeing gimped/photoshopped images of the US presidential candidates all the time. My favourite one is Obama answering a phone call.

Today’s photograph in BBC News made me wonder if its real or manipulated. Obama’s palm seems way too big. Maybe someone at BBC wanted to try out her hand at photo editing. Or maybe he just has very long fingers.

Okay, you’ve seen the photo. Now get back to work.

Bug fixing for simple C code, any C programmers?

Any C programmers out there who can fix a really annoying bug in a simple 10 line program?

» Here’s the C program that has the bug.

Ciao.

Take your Nerd Test

I just took my Nerd Test on nerdtest.com and scored 99.

Whats your score?

Baby with 2 faces born in north India

A baby with two faces was born in India yesterday. Her mother had a normal delivery and the baby is doing well. She’s being considered by the villagers as a reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga. The baby was named Lali. Her father is a 23-year old farm worker and mother a housewife.

Lali has a rare condition called Craniofacial Duplication, where a single head has two faces. She has duplicates of every facial organ except ears.

According to the Associated Press,

“She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time,” Ali said.

Rural India is deeply superstitious and the little girl is being hailed as a return of the Hindu goddess of valor, Durga, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.

Up to 100 people have been visiting Lali at her home every day to touch her feet out of respect, offer money and receive blessings, Singh told The Associated Press. “Lali is God’s gift to us,” said Jaipal Singh, a member of the local village council. “She has brought fame to our village.”

Read more here.

Earth Hour - a joke

On March 29, many people turned off the lights for an hour from 8pm to 9pm local time to signify that they were “saving” energy (whatever they mean by energy). Very nice, turn off your electrical gadgets for one hour, and then after 9pm, turn on the lights, air conditioners, office lights (maybe all night), flashing decorative lights (oh, these were probably never turned off!), various home gadgets, etc. And then get into the car and drive one block for a crate of coke, circle around the area for 10 whole minutes looking for a parking spot, <<INSERT THE REST HERE>>.

And then, there was Google which jumped on the bandwagon by changing its background to black instead of the usual white.

The funny thing is that black background web pages may use up MORE energy than white background web pages and Google had itself acknowledged the study.

Anyway, Michelle Malkin has more about this and the 1 million phone calls that “eco-friendly” activists intend to make to lawmakers on Earth Day - wonderful way of saving energy indeed!

Read more on her blog here.

Google plays April Fool’s Day joke with Gmail Custom Time

I was about to login to my Gmail when I noticed Google’s “latest addition” - an option that allows the user to alter the timestamp of the email sent, to make it look as if the user sent the email at a different time.

Since I don’t trust anything on April 1, I decided this was Google’s joke for us all. I anyway took a look at the “testimonials” of those who had “used” the beta version of this. Well, those testimonials are fake, but hilarious! Read them:

“The entire concept of ‘late’ no longer exists for me. That’s pretty cool. Thanks Gmail!”
Miriam S., Delivery girl

“I used to be an honest person; but now I don’t have to be. It’s just so much easier this way. I’ve gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the ‘right’ thing.”
Todd J., Investment Banker

Check it out here.

Rubik’s Cube solved in 25 moves

My wife and I are Rubik’s Cube enthusiasts. While I can solve it in about 5 minutes, my wife can solve it faster one layer at a time. There are many who can solve it in under a minute!

Rubik’s Cube is supposed to be the world’s best-selling toy and over 300 million Rubik’s Cubes and variants (2×2x2, 4×4x4, 5×5x5) have been sold worldwide.

The fastest is Edouard Chambon who has an average solve time of 11.48 seconds and a record of 9.18 seconds!

My personal favourite Rubik’s Cube solver is Jessica Fridrich, a speedcuber whose moves are the most commonly used for speedcubers.

Today, Slashdot linked to an article about how Rubik’s Cube can be solved in just 25 moves!

Stanford mathematician Tomas Rokicki has lowered last year’s record of 26 moves to 25.

According to the article,

Rokicki’s proof is a neat piece of computer science. He’s used the symmetry of the cube to study transformations of the cube in sets, rather than as individual moves. This allows him to separate the “cube space” into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored.

If you’re a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast interested in decreasing your solve times, go ahead and read the full article.

Philippine Weather Service moves to Debian Clusters

In what I consider a very smart and economical move, the Philippine government’s Weather Service PAGASA has moved to a clustered Debian Linux system from the existing SGI supercomputer.

For beginners, the Philippines is prone to floods, cyclones, landslides and other weather conditions. Every typhoon has left footprints of death. The Philippines needs to be on the lookout all the time in order to avoid major catastrophe.

PAGASA (Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration) is their official weather service and issues cyclone bulletins every 6 to 12 hours for all cyclones within the area.

They were apparently using an SGI supercomputer until now ,when they decided to move to a Debian cluster that is made up of 8 PCs, each having a dual 64-bit Intel Xeon processor. The nodes are connected via a gigabit switch.

PAGASA preferred Debian because it is the most stable! According to Alan Pineda who works there,

“We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,” said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA.

“Our ICT group came out with Debian as the most stable in servers, especially when things are being done pretty much in automatic mode. In our workstations the preference among programmers is Ubuntu, which is basically Debian-based,” he said.

This move also saves the cash strapped Philippine government a LOT of money. For the last decade, PAGASA’s SGI supercomputer cost over 200,000 Philippine pesos a month to run. After moving to Debian, the cost has dropped to 10,000 Philippine pesos a month - a huge saving of 190,000 pesos!!

They also saved a lot of money on the setup. The supercomputer cost them 25 million pesos, and the Debian cluster cost them just 2 million pesos which included migration cost and training.

The cluster calculates 3-day forecasts twice daily and uses a lot of free and open source meteoroloical software. PAGASA uses open source all the way, including the German High Resolution Model (HRM), MM5, ETA and Intel FORTRAN.

Everyone seems to be happy with the move.

“We are quite happy with the results so far, considering we haven’t applied assimilation of our radar and satellite products. We believe that as soon as these things are done, we can become even more confident in our long-term forecasts,” Pineda said.

Go Debian!!!

Read more here »

Starbucks replaces T-Mobile with AT&T (free Wi-Fi)

Starbucks Coffee has replaced its Wi-Fi provider T-Mobile with AT&T. Starbucks announced their partnership with AT&T this morning.

Their new partnership with AT&T allows Starbucks customers to use Wi-Fi freely for 2 hours if they pay using a prepaid Starbucks card. If they pay otherwise, they’ll be paying $3.99 per two-hour session, and monthly memberships will cost $19.99 per month.

In the article,

The chain has slowed its store expansion considerably and has been looking for other ways to appeal to customers. With free WiFi being used as a selling points for many smaller cafes, $9.99 per day at Starbucks just wasn’t cutting it for most WiFi addicts. Reshaping its offerings with AT&T to offer free or cheap service will allow Starbucks to compete with smaller coffee houses for those customers, while making its current customers even happier.

I think this is a right move for Starbucks from the business point of view. They’ll still have to work a little harder at the “free” clause if they want to attract more coffee drinkers/Wi-Fi users who hog free Wi-Fi areas like Panera and public libraries.

Read more here.