thŕattle

He1: Hey! Tell me, how many times you guys hav gotten physical?
He2: Hu! ok -1 times.
He1: Minus one?
He2: Yep! Figure it out.

He1 scratches his head, to find what -1 can be. The number of times that anything is done, can’t be any negative. Can it mean the number of times, a certain thing is un-done? What can be un-done in such a scenario? He1 could not comprehend.

Simply ignoring the sign, would make it 1. He2 could hav said it to be just once. Ho! come on, it can’t be just once. He1 knows the intimacy between He2 & his GF.

What could be minus one? He1 goes back to his PC & writes a program having the following line:

printf(”Minus one means: %u”, -1);

The terminal blurts:

Minus one means: 4294967295

Shocked to see such a big number. He1 decides to spoil the rest of his day.

Minus One actually means Countless in English.

Do It Yourself (DIY), is an attitude kinda thing. Gives you independence & empowerment.

3 things, I DIYed recently:

Fixed my headphone. Being a Sennheiser, I didn’t want to throw it way. Learnt that the internal metal strands are very thin & comes with a resin coating. Just pulling out the vinyl sheath isn’t enough to establish a broken contact. You gotto meticulously scrape the resin to expose the bare wire.

My mobile fell down from the shelf & the display showed up like a mirror image. So all that that you enter would go from right to left with all glyphs having a horizontal flip. I tried several things, like restarting the phone, pulling out the battery etc. Nothing worked. Then I dropped the phone exactly the same way it had fallen, the prev time. Viola! The display is back to normal.

The ironbox is the most essential thing, specially for Bachelors who would do a quick press before running to office. It had gone berserk & would heat only for the 1st time, you power up. The next time it would heat-up is after 30 long minutes. I opened up the outer-cover & pulled out all screws; except one. It got jammed & my screw driver would slip everytime I tried hard. Not knowing what to do after, I placed all the screws back & closed the cover. Now the iron works perfectly fine until today. :)

Something had gone wrong? Don’t giveaway. Try your hands. You can make a difference.

Great resource for DIYers: Makezine.com

ps: Agreed! This post isn’t composed well.

Update #0: My iron stopped to work after I blogged about it! :( Looks like, taking it to a repair shop is also a part of DIY.

When I heard the terms, “Dark energy & Dark matter” first, I thought it to be related to Witchcraft & Black Magic. Nope! It is not. It is from Particle Physics & Space Science.

Here is a video from TED, telling all that you want to know:

I remember, reading in School that some scientists believed that space is filled with ether. I thought that was crap, when it was actually vacuum. Now I realize, ether is nothing but Dark Matter.

This also brings back memories of the days, I hooked to the “மானுடம் வென்றது (Mankind had Won)” program on Radio.

There is lot of space in space & man will find his way into it.

Names hav always been my fascination. Here are the names of PCs, I used:

Sawtooth: While in college, 3 guys pooled in & bought this PC. Inspired with the characteristics of a sawtooth waveform, I named it so. Did lots of work in C, Matlab, Photoshop & Flash with it. It also served as an epicenter of Hostel movie club & gaming centre.

Mr.Fertile: This is a desktop, I bought after starting to work. I donno why, I addressed it to be masculine. Since, the host names cannot hav dots, I settled with Fertile. It is with my bro now. Hope he is making, good use of it.

Strawbee: Its a Dell Inspiron 1520. It has a red front body, so took the Straw part of Strawberry. I wanted it to work & be active like a Bee. So is the name. It gets hot pretty fast, bulky & is ugly looking. The best part of it, is its 1660×1050 screen. I adore it all the time.

The SSID of our home router is Serene. My roomie named it. I guess its cool.

Idea: Planet FLOSS India

IMHO, Chrome isn’t any better apart from UI tweaks & V8 JS engine. Separate process per tab is a part of IE8 too. But the total memory used is real BIG. V8 is opensource, if Mozilla wants it, they can pick it. Infact, Firefox 3.1 has a better JS engine than the V8.

Google has opensourced their vector graphics library called Skia. Wondering who would use, when everyone is going with Cairo?

GOOG has entered a mature market like they did with Android. It amuses you becos it is brand_new. Firefox has a big sense of community. Their extensions such as AdBlock Plus is a real plus, which Google in principle, shudn’t support. I guess, Chrome’ll eat up IE’s market share in the long run. Loyal Firefox users wud fallback.

Chrome is opensource & still not available on Linux? What a pity? It is a little nuisance. Better, ignore it.

I believe, Google uses “Opensource” strategy while entering mature markets & when its products are not all that great. It makes all techies “feel” good & embarks ease of acceptance & adoption. GReader is not opensource. Picassa is not. That’s because they are pretty “featuristic” among the comparable ones. Google’s contributions to opensource with GSoC is commendable thou’.

11th hr inclusions:

• Labnol has an interesting post about the evolution of Chrome’s Logo.
• Impressed with Chrome, but wanna to stay with Firefox? Here is how to make Firefox close enough to Chrome.

Update #0: Contrary to what I said about Google, I found this.