cheeni

I haven't been this thrilled by a technology demo in a long time.

I hacked my Targus DEFCON-CL PA410U with strips of a soda can today.





Sources of inspiration:

1. An email thread at work about locked out laptops
2. http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/08/the-lockdown-your-new-targus-defcon-cl-lock-hacked-by-beer/

In response to http://bullnotbull.com/archive/dow13k-1.html

This is a description that would fit the current state of the Indian economy rather well. In an inflation ridden India of first time frivolous consumers and debtors, it seems difficult to afford a decent urban home and a primary school education on an honest income.

The US maybe headed for a fall, but a similar fall in India will have rather more pronounced and dire consequences. The banking and financial system in India is weak, without being backed in any serious measure by economic or military might. A fall in property prices, the US economy or foreign investment is sure to bring doom both to the foolish debtors and the wise who stayed away from debt.

I don't have much confidence in our TV reporters, but one statistic I heard yesterday of 9 out of 10 car buyers taking out a loan to finance their purchase strikes me as about right.

I am currently shopping for a car, I have been so for the past several months. It has never been an urgent necessity for us, since my wife and I are rather content to make our way around on public transport after we sold our last car. Nevertheless, having made up my mind to put an end to procrastination, I visited the local Tata showroom for a looksie, intent on getting a cheap set of wheels.

I was amazed at the number of new cars being bought on a rather ordinary and not particularly auspicious and "god-friendly" Sunday. The sales personnel took a good 20 minutes to notice that I had entered the premises, which left me rather happy since I could wander around and inspect the vehicles without a nosy, ignorant salesman hindering my progress.

The salesman who finally accosted me was more interested in selling me a car loan, than in selling me the car. This to my mind strikes the most discordant note of all, the financial industry is so heavily leveraged on foolish property and consumable debts that it risks the economic stability of India.

The salesman was rather crest fallen when I announced that I had no need for a loan. The fall in his interest levels was rather dramatic as he abandoned me for yet another 15 or so minutes as he wrapped up some potentially cozy loan deal.

In the end my visit turned out to be in vain since I was rather definitely told that they had a policy against allowing test drives in the dangerous evening traffic.

By any measure the value that Indian cities seem to offer in lifestyle benefits, living space, property ownership and civilization seems rather scarce. On an idle Saturday afternoon I must have done some thinking for the idea that I pay more than half of my income in taxes has come to be rather firmly implanted in my mind. It's not hard to get at such a figure when you compute my basket of direct and indirect taxes - namely, income tax at 33.33%, sales tax on anything I consume at 12.5%, miscellaneous upstream taxes such as excise and customs, and property and road taxes.

For this I don't get medical insurance, nor do I get the right to live in a strife and peril free country. I have bad traffic, chaotic infrastructure, inadequate supplies of dirty water and a corrupt government that beggars contempt.

Were I to be rash enough to splurge on a house of my own at the present moment, it would cost me a rather large fortune, financed no doubt by usurious debt. Debt which I would possibly find hard to repay if the Indian economy were to hit murky waters. Debt that would be in vain were I to lose my land to some fancy record keeping at the land records office, no doubt inspired by the invisible and sometimes all too thoroughly visible hands of the land mafia. Debt that would make me look like a fool when the property price like water finds its true level.

Wise men have observed land is always a good investment for they don't make more of it any more! Under ordinary circumstances that would hold, but what we have in India is a spiraling inflation of urban land prices while rural land continues to lie untouched by the Indian economic miracle unless it has some potential of touching the margins of our ever expanding urban zones.

Cities unlike our planet with its arguably finite quota of land can be created by mere men in rather short time spans with a stroke of a pen. All that an Indian city seems to need is a good road or two, meager quantities of civic infrastructure and power and a legislation declaring some lands as urban and the rest as SEZs (special economic zones).

Which kind of brings me to the final note of doom that I think about during the summer power cuts since I don't own a car or I'd have those thoughts at the fuel pumps as well. Energy is central to our existence, and the smart economies have squirreled away these essential resources through a combination of forethought and action, whether it be through wars or industrial take overs backed by military might. India on the other hand has a rather tenuous grasp over a vaporware nuclear future that could go up in a puff of smoke in the next decade or so that it will take to deliver results, and a gas pipeline through the lands of a sworn enemy.

If all economic cycles are like the Titanic with rather fanciful notions of invincibility until the iceberg moment, the US economy travels in first class with access to life boats and priority off loading, and the Indian economy travels below deck, in the cargo hold, sure to sink with no access to so much as a sight of the stars on an icy night. Well, maybe that's a blessing too, we will never know what hit us.

I've been using Dreamhost.com and friends who are looking to switch hosting providers have asked me in the past about my experiences with them. When I got an email yet again today I decided that there might be a good reason to publish this information to the world.

First check out the latest plans and offers at http://dreamhost.com, this post doesn't deal with any of this.

Now the recommendation:

Hi srini,

My xxxx is up for renewal. Don't want to continue (too much downtime, and 
i end up telling them that the server is down!). How is dreamhost working out? 
SSH ok? MySQL ok? 

Dreamhost works fine for me. They provide a lot for the price, and since I am not running anything mission critical, it seems ok.

There is some downtime since there are a lot of users, and DH is good but not really looking to deliver 9s, everything is only best effort. I have reported mail / www / mailman outages, but I'm usually not the first person reporting it, and they are usually already working on it. Outages have rarely been greater than a few hours. You can report an outage on the webpanel and it will tell you when it was first reported, when it was confirmed and so on.

This is the most automated webhost I have ever been at, this is a lot of power, and you tend to get used to it. Creating a sub-domain, upgrading the version of PHP, creating a new mailing list, editing DNS records, everything works off the web panel and gets done in minutes. Much better than emailing a helpdesk every time you need to do something.

Whenever I've needed human support, they have always responded in 24-48 hours, even on weekends. System loads are fine, and the servers are not really slow. Of course I have never thrown anything that challenging at cheeni.net so I wouldn't really know, it works for me.

The current load average for the server that runs cheeni.net is

22:57:02 up 55 days, 20:44,  2 users,  load average: 2.35, 2.61, 2.86

$cat /proc/cpuinfo
[...]
model name      : Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 175
cache size      : 1024 KB

$cat /proc/meminfo
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  4172861440 4035751936 137109504        0  8925184 2341986304
Swap: 6465036288 1043316736 5421719552
MemTotal:      4075060 kB
MemFree:        133896 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:          8716 kB
Cached:        2263292 kB
SwapCached:      23804 kB
Active:         734012 kB
Inactive:      1562204 kB
HighTotal:     3211200 kB
HighFree:         5464 kB
LowTotal:       863860 kB
LowFree:        128432 kB
SwapTotal:     6313512 kB
SwapFree:      5294648 kB

The servers are definitely not under utilized, but it's good enough for most.

> Let me know. If you get referral credit,
> let me know what i have to do to get you credit.

Dreamhost will from time to time release promo codes of their own that are usually the best deal. For example, I used promo code 777 that got me a year's service for < $10. This code may not be active anymore but I am sure you can find something reasonably good from DH or on Google. Using this promo will eliminate any referrals, which is ok as long as you are getting a good deal.

If you don't find anything that gives you at least $97 off, then contact me and I can make you a promo code that gives you up to $97 off.

If you'd like to refer me, you can do so in one of these ways.

Click http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?191832 and then sign up, like so

1. Enter that cheeni AT (s/AT/@/) gmail.com referred you when you sign up.
OR,
2. Use a promo code that I created for you when signing up.

If you don't use any promo codes, and refer me by citing my email address then I get $97 after their 97 day cancellation window has expired.

Hope this helps!

< / END OF RECOMMENDATION >

UPDATED:
P.S. thaths,jace,brainz and ravi are Dreamhost customers too.

It's been a while since I put up a reading list, so here goes.

Books I am reading or have read in the last 30 days

I had a 'geek pride' moment in the office today - a co-worker came up to me with his cool-internet-discovery-of-the-day StumbleUpon.com

I immediately pointed him to Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. I also delivered an impromptu lecture on how these social bookmarks operated and why he'd want to choose one over the other based on the audience each catered to.

del.icio.us was launched IIRC in 2003, and has an early adopter geek crowd. If you are a geek, this is where you'd want to be.

StumbleUpon is more suitable to the here-is-the-latest-time-wasting-email-forward, aka MySpace crowd.

Here, let's try an experiment.

The tag 'internet' on del.icio.us throws up a couple of links on net neutrality, at least three on DNS, a few opinion pieces on the politics and social-psychology of the Internet.

As opposed to StumbleUpon that has in the first five links three links to Youtubesque videos on funny-man-eats-dog / LOL style stories , one link to a flash game and one news clip on the cracked Skype protocol.

I was amazed my co-worker listened through it all even though I knew he was going to stick with StumbleUpon.

karbak and I were early users of del.icio.us and we once actually discussed the horrible consequences of del.icio.us being over run by uncool people when the word got out. So we decided to 'friend' as many cool people as we could on del.icio.us before it became too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thankfully it hasn't happened as much - of course you have more generic geek interest items on the site today, but the here's-a-cool-flash-game crowd went to sites like Stumbleupon that are even designed differently¹.

Maybe that's something to keep in mind for all budding usability / UI designers. Know your audience. I wonder if someone will do cool research on designing interfaces for geeks.

¹ Even the url structure is different. In del.icio.us it is "del.icio.us/popular/internet" and on SU it is "buzz.stumbleupon.com/internet/"! Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! That's the sound that a bee makes.

This is deeply ironical on many levels...

For most people, being swamped with information is just annoying. But for soldiers, pilots and police officers it can be a matter of life and death. So a device that prevents urgent communications from getting lost in bureaucratic babble, patented by US defence firm Honeywell, could prove invaluable.

Honeywell has been investigating ways to reduce information overload under a grant from the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The company's idea is for soldiers' uniforms to conceal an electrocardiogram, galvanic skin response detector, and respiration and blood pressure sensors. These instruments should be able to tell when a person is breathing hard, sweating and has a racing pulse. If so, the time is probably not right for HQ to ask them any mundane questions.

The same system should be able to sense when a person is calm and breathing easy, so ready to receive a load of information.

If all the sensors suggest that the solider is dead, the patent suggests that important messages should be relayed to another whose sensors still show signs of life.

Read the soldier sensor patent here.

[Via New Scientist]

Countries with highly evolved and transparent bureaucracies have difficulty managing spectrum allocation in a manner that is fair and forward looking. It doesn't help that there are greater demands on the spectrum management function in nations with ubiquitous use of wireless technologies.

India's spectrum management is in my view not efficient (read "a holy mess"). This fact has far reaching implications for the nation, and especially in the near term for companies like my employer that seek to harness the latest in wireless technology to bridge the digital divide.

Stories on spectrum management often don't reach the front page because the idea is not easily expressed in simple "newspaper man" words. This time however, there is one story¹ that has bucked the trend. Sure, sure there's doubtlessly been frenetic PR lobbying, which is natural given the amount of money in play. However, I believe that this just might be an inflection point in the Indian government's sad track record of managing technology.

¹ GSM providers ask for a 5:1 handicap as compared to CDMA, not 2:1, as the government proposes. CDMA providers are naturally quite upset.

[and so it continues...]

A friend remarked thusly when I showed him this...

"academia constantly claims they've discovered some important advance (that can often be found on Page 1 of the gita or other ancient source). then debate it a few years in a byzantine ritual birddance to stake their claim in the literature. jump up & down about miniscule studies claiming something has brought us an exciting step forward to 'legitimize it with science' but many, many more studies are needed until we know for sure ;-)

meanwhile, i'm sticking to yoga. it's 1% theory and 99% practice."