Formulaic literature

I was looking at Patrick Rothfuss's blog, whose first novel "The wise man's fear" was an award winning novel in the fantasy section. I read the book on a train journey between Bangalore-Jaipur twice, and seriously enjoyed it.

The second book has been repeatedly delayed. However, he has written a long blog post defending himself. One of the really funny thing is this guide to writing Mill's & boon romances.

http://www.eharlequin.com/articlepage.html?articleId=1102&chapter=0

the ABCD of indian mobile market

I attended the Mobile Application Conference at Nimhans convention center today. Interesting talks. Some of the key points made were

1. India vs Bharat dichotomy - N5800 vs 1100
2. 3G will affect the high end segment
3. small town segments - different needs (vernacular, etc.)

An interesting observation by people in the business was as follows: Indians are in general penny pinching, however, they are willing to pay for the following over mobile segment
A - astrology
B - bollywood
C - cricket
D - devotion

The surprising thing is that business such as SMS for businesses/market alerts were not mentioned.

R.I.P. geocities and some thoughts on the future

I'm trying to update my resume. As part of it, I ran across a link (http://www.geocities.com/v_jethava/TEX.zip) for a telephone simulator which I wrote during my 3rd year at IITM as part of a simulation championship. It was probably the only time I used .NET, since Matka, my partner believed it was great and the only thing to go with.

Well, since then matka has moved onto bigger apples and his advice unfortunately has not withstood the test of time :) Anyways, I could not get the geocities link. (Basically I lost my website).

Now, I realize that just as old college photos bring up old memories and have emotional value, same can be said about a website which one spent a lot of the summer creating. People put considerable effort into blogs/webpages etc. And just as diaries provided insight into the minds of great people before they were considered "great" in the past, we might be provided a look into the lives of the celebrities in their pre-celebrity days through the emails/.blogs/tweets etc. that they sent.

Only one problem. The usual deal with the net is that nothing ever gets erased. So, you might find a forum post on favourite movies or an embarrasing tweet abt a co-worker which you did in 2000 also appearing in search results for your name in 2010. Especially painful if you might be standing for elections.

So, solutions:
1. No skeletons in the digital closet.
2. Use of separate identities for professional/non-professional activities :)

Delicious TagCloud

Found this java script which can add your delicious bookmarks tag cloud to the blog/website.

< script src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/js/tags/vjethava?title=Interests&count=150&sort=alpha&flow=cloud&color=73adff-3274d0&size=10-20" type="text/javascript">
< /script >



The spacing is messed up to avoid registering as a java script.

Pidgin for Y!

Found this while trying to make y! messenger behind proxy for ubuntu using pidgin (previously gaim). Any ways the only way to make Y! work behind proxy uses outside proxy support (www.your-freedom.net)

This snippet is useful for finding what sites the web address maps to.

dig +short scs.msg.yahoo.com

BibTeX headings

Found out how to change the bibtex headings...

\tiny{

\renewcommand\bibname{Bibliography}

\bibliographystyle{ieee}

\bibliography{8_12_08}

}

This is especially useful when one wants to have selected references for one page abstract documents.

Graphs in LaTeX

For conversion of graphs in matlab to dot (AT & T) mode,

graph_to_dot(G, 'filename', '/tmp/my.dot')

The code is available at http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4518

Converting dot files to tex:

dot2tex --autosize -tmath ex1.dot > ex1.tex

Found this handy script for converting all .dot files in a directory to .ps; Very handy renaming in bash.

for f in *.dot do ; dot -Tps -o ${f%dot}ps $f ; done

Split files.

Had to split a .tar.gz (a 5GB file) as scp quits at the 5GB limit for some reason. Anyways, here's the one liner splitting I found.

split the file into 500MB chunks with:


nohup nice split --line-bytes=500m foo.tar.gz foo_ &

rejoined the file with:


nohup nice cat foo_a* > foo_FULL.tar.gz &


Actually found the reason, it seems you can't write a 5GB file to a vfat.

First Cut

I last worked on a personal home page in 2004, At that time, it was on geocities,
which is since being closed. So, in a sense, this is the second innings. Anyway, this is tied to my github account.

Uploaded a reduced .emacs file to github:
http://github.com/vjethava/Customization

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