Kumara Sastry

Archive for 'Interesting Finds' Category

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):

1000 films to watch before you die

15 July 2007

Found this guardian article via meish.org. Here is my breakdown (yes working on your thesis makes you spend time on such silly things), and I was surprised to see that I’ve only watched 301 out of the 1000 movies, but frankly most of them don’t seem to be any good. For example, Ace ventura is one of the 1000 movies!

A: 13 out of 54	B: 24 out of 95	C: 15 out of 61	D: 20 out of 64
E: 8 out of 25	F: 11 out of 36	G: 18 out of 47	H: 5 out of 45
I: 8 out of 30	J: 6 out of 14	K: 7 out of 22	L: 16 out of 50
M: 27 out of 71	N: 4 out of 24	O: 11 out of 28	P: 19 out of 46
Q: 1 out of 2	R: 16 out of 42	S: 32 out of 101	T: 24 out of 67
U: 3 out of 9	V: 1 out of 12	W: 7 out of 35	X: 1 out of 2
Y: 2 out of 8	Z: 2 out of 6

Update: The sum doesn’t add up to 1000, I am missing 4 movies somewhere.

Flickr slideshow plugin for wordpress (μ)

1 July 2007

Since “object” and “iframe” are stripped out of wordpress-? for security reasons, I could no longer embed flickr slideshows using either iframe or object. Therefore, I was looking for someway to embed my photo collection at flickr, but the plugins I found didn’t exactly do what I needed. Therefore, I modified the slideshare plugin to embed flickr slideshows.

1. Download the plugin (.zip) here (uses object tag). Note that object tag has some problems with ie7. Since iframe seems to work better on both firefox and ie, download the plugin (.zip) here (uses iframe tag; recommended, see below).
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:
   [flickr user_id set_id]

Please feel free to modify the plugin to include tags, and other parameters of flickr slideshow. 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).

In case you are curious, I tried the following two plugins:

• Flickr photo album plugin by Joe Tan: Needs libcurl with php, which we haven’t installed in our server. I tried to use the curl emulator, but some curl functions used in the plugin are not supported in the emulator.
• Flickr slideshow plugin from Xe-Media: Allows the use of user id, but cannot pass any other parameter

Update: It seems that the object tag gives problem with internet explorer (ie7). Here is a work around plugin that uses iframe instead of object. Thanks gifted typist!

See the plugin in action here: