Kumara Sastry

Archive for 'Interesting Finds' Category

Life at Intel

26 January 2009

In short I am featured at life@intel website as one of recent college hires. Click here to see my profile, where I describe about my job and typical day at Intel. Click here is an associated video. . Here is the official description about the video from the life@intel website:

Coffee talk with Jenn and Kumara. Grab a cup and sit with Jenn and Kumara, two college hires from different business groups, as they share how they impact each other and Intel’s end product.

Purchased a Macbook

19 October 2008

Since my 4.5 year old Fujitsu notebook is slowly starting to fadeaway like a good soldier, I was looking to buy a new notebook. I was seriously considering between ASUS eeePC s101 (not yet out) and Lenovo X300 and was leaning towards Lenovo. However, I read lot of quality and build complaints about the x300 and decided to wait for the s101. However, apple’s new macbooks seemed like a better value for money, now that the “apple tax” on new macbooks has reduced to about $150, and I bought one today. This comes as a shock to people who know me as I am a diehard PC supporter and according to one, “I have joined the yuppies” . Well since I don’t have an ipod, iphone (and I’ll be getting tmobile g1 on Monday) and still have 2 windows notebook, and a desktop, I guess that makes me 1/4th or 1/5th a “yuppie”.

Here’s my experience with purchasing and using the macbook so far.

First, I really don’t like going to the apple store, the sales people there usually act as though they are too good/hip for you. Hopefully, I won’t have reasons to see one of their “geniuses” anytime soon, but given Nvidia’s recent problems and chipset history, and apple’s battery woes, it might be wishful thinking. 

Second, I got a HP printer with the notebook for free after rebate and I must admit filing for the rebate was one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had. All I had to do was login into apple site and fill in the receipt details. No mailing the rebate form, cutting UPC barcode, making copies, and mailing. 

Setup and update were very smooth and the only thing that bothered me was the multiple times I had to click for opting out of apple’s marketing emails (once when I purchased, 2nd when filing for the rebate and couple of times during setup). Once setup was completed, I got an email from Apple thanking me for registering iPod touch

I’ve been playing around with the notebook for about an hour or so, and so far I like it.

Ninja = No Income, No Job, and no Assets

1 January 2008

Just learnt this is actually a type of loan. Read this Washington Post article to learn more.

Collapse of intelligent design

31 December 2007

Here is a very interesting talk by Prof. Ken Miller given at Case Western Reserve University titled “Collapse of Intelligent Design: Will the next monkey trial be in Ohio?“. He makes very compelling arguments and clearly shows that Intelligent Design is nothing but Creationism 2.0.

Here is the ruling on the Dover case. Here is prof. Miller’s appearance on The Colbert Report.

Guide books on buying a home

27 December 2007

Instead of wasting my money on rent, I’m thinking of buying a house as an investment. I’ve been spending some time over the web going through introductory articles on home buying and so far I’ve been disappointed. I found that most of the stuff over the web is not very helpful. While they give a good overview of possible options, they are very short on giving practical guidelines to aid decision making.

For example, here are some of the typical questions that I have:

• What are the key variables (or rules) to decide between buying a single family home, townhouse, or a condo?
• How to go about ranking different lenders and choosing the *best* offer from among different lenders?
• What part of mortgage and other related fees are negotiable and how much can you negotiate?
• How to chose a real-estate agent?
• How to evaluate the quality and selling price for a property
  • I know some sidings are good and some are bad, I am not sure about other things such as furnace, carpets, etc.

I am hoping that one of the following books will be helpful in answering my questions.

• 10 Steps to Home Ownership: A Workbook for First-Time Buyers by Ilyce R. Glink
• The 106 Common Mistakes Homebuyers Make (and How to Avoid Them) by Gary W. Eldred
• How To Buy Your First Home, Second Edition by Diana Summers
• Home Buying For Dummies, 3rd edition by Eric Tyson and Ray Brown
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Home, 5th Edition (Complete Idiot’s Guide to) by Shelley O’Hara and Nancy D. Lewis
• Nolo’s Essential Guide to Buying Your First Home (book with CD-Rom & Audio) by Ilona Bray, Alayna Schroeder, and Marcia Stewart

Cube Dreamin’

7 December 2007

Xavier sent me a note pointing to an article that large tech companies are getting rid of cubicles and saying I should cherish the cubicle. Actually, I found the comments more interesting than the article itself. Anyways, here is a cool song about cubicles.

Here comes another bubble

5 December 2007

A hilarious song, check it out!

Configuring Canon EOS XTI/400D digital SLR camera starter kit

29 July 2007

I have been wanting to buy a digital SLR for a while now, but wasn’t comfortable. Now that I purchased a festival pass to the wall to wall guitar festival and hope to take many photos, especially with 70-300mm telephoto zoom lens I already own. So I’m thinking of finally biting the bullet and purchasing the following canon XTI kit. All I have to do now, is to find the money to buy it

• Canon EOS Rebel XTi Black SLR Digital Camera Body Only
• Canon 28-135mm F/3.5-5.6 IS USM EF Lens
• Hoya 72mm Ultraviolet UV(0) (S-HMC) Super Multi-Coated Glass Haze Filter
• SanDisk 4GB Extreme IV CompactFlash Card (See my earlier related post here)
• DKE 72mm 4-piece Close-up lens set

OPTIONAL:

• Canon Normal EF 50mm f/1.8 II Autofocus Lens
• Hoya 52mm Ultraviolet UV(0) (S-HMC) Super Multi-Coated Glass Haze Filter
• Canon Zoom Super Wide Angle EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 Lens
• Hoya 77mm Ultraviolet UV(0) (S-HMC) Super Multi-Coated Glass Haze Filter

I found this guide particularly helpful.

Write speed comparisons of compact flashes

28 July 2007

A very good write speed comparison of various compact flashes can be found here.

Flickr pictobrowser plugin for wordpress

23 July 2007

I heard about pictobrowser from Julie and like this much better than the flickr slideshow. However, since “object” and “iframe” are stripped out of wordpress for security reasons, I could no longer embed pictobrowser object directly. Therefore, I modified the flickr slideshow plugin to embed pictobrowser.

1. Download the plugin (.zip) here.
2. Unzip/install the plugin in your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate the plugin within wordpress.
4. Usage:Once activated you can embed slideshows in your blog post as follows:
   [pictobrowser user_id set_id]

Please feel free to modify the plugin to include tags, and other parameters of pictobrowser. If you do modify the plugin, I would really appreciate if you would inform me of the updates (so that I can use the updated plugin).

Here is the plugin in action (these are photos of Myvatn, Iceland):