I came back this morning from San Francisco after presenting a paper Extending Gurmukhi Script to Twenty First century and beyond at Sikholars – First Graduate Sikh Conference held on February 20, 2010 at Stanford University Campus. I had coauthored the paper with Amanpreet Singh Brar.

The manuscript pdf of the paper can be downloaded here. Schedule pamphlet can be downloaded from here and here

Wishing everyone a very happy new year 2010.

To download and print the following Punjabi Calendar for 2010, click here.

Calendar 2010

#!/usr/bin/env bash # Arvinder Singh Kang # askang@olemiss.edu # Version 0.1 - 2009-06-02 # ipaddress: This snippet returns the ipaddress of the current computer. Store in a directory which is in the PATH, and make it executable by running "chmod +x ipaddress". # Running command ipaddress should return ipaddresses of this machine.

ifconfig  | grep -E 'inet.[0-9]' | grep -v '127.0.0.1' | awk '{ print $2}'

However on booting a client from the NetBoot server, i got the following sign on ppc client machine

After reading some notes on NetBoot here, I found this reason:

The mach.macos.mkext file is a kernel extensions cache — a file containing all the important kernel extensions for basic network booting. Its fairly uncommon to run into problems in this stage of the Netboot process, however, there are a couple specific issues that can cause kernel panics at this point. Possible problems would be:

Not having a mach.macosx and mach.macosx.mkext file in your Netboot set

And when checked mach.macosx.mkext was actually missing from the nbi’s dmg file. So I generated one using following code

kextcache -a ppc -m /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DeployStudioRuntime-091207-145110.nbi/ppc/mach.macosx.mkext -N -L /Volumes/DeployStudioRuntime/System/Library/Extensions/

And my netboot imaging operation was back in business. Ahhh…. Freshly minted macs by the time I walk in tomorrow morning.

Update March 6, 2010 : As the unrooted phone does not allow change in the phone ROM, this would only run on rooted phone. Here are five reasons why you should root your phone. One way to do it, is listed on CyanogenMod wiki.

I use Google G1 running Android OS for my email. To enable Punjabi on android I used the following steps

1. Download a Unicode Punjabi font.
2. Copy this font to your sdcard and rename it exactly DroidSansFallback.ttf.

Now start Terminal Emulator and type exactly (watch the Case) the following commands, followed by enter.

su (then wait for the superuser screen and press yes)
mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
chmod 4755 /system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf
dd if=/sdcard/DroidSansFallback.ttf of=/system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf
reboot

Voila you should be able to read Hukamnama and emails written in Punjabi.

Thanks to Droidbot for the idea

I recently returned from Web 2.0 expo in New York.

What fascinated me the most is the fast pace and energy in the entrepreneurs compared to some of my friends doing startups on the West Coast.

I have compiled notes for reference. Feel free to help yourself and if you use an idea to create next web 3.0 products, 5% of your company belongs to me

Web 2.0 Expo Notes – NY November 16-19, 2009 | Learn.ArvinderKang.com

Creative Commons image by Magify.net

Net::SCP is a pure-Ruby implementation of the SCP protocol. This operates over SSH (and requires the Net::SSH library), and allows files and directory trees to copied to and from a remote server.

This solution lies somewhere between manually uploading and fully automation using Capistrano or Vlad.

Drupal rocks for some things, its deployment sucks! As I automate my drupal workflows better, I should post them one by one.

Following is the my bash script recipe, for installing drupal, checking it into a git repository and replicating it remotely.

The second piece of puzzle should be automating MySQL backup and deployment using either Capistrano or Vlad.

Wrote an article yesterday in The Daily Mississippian on the current health care debate.

* Creative Commons image by lab2112

By Arvinder Singh Kang Special to The DM

For those who don’t know what a chupacabra is, let me tell you my friend, it is a “goat sucker”. And yes, you can call him that.

Whether it considers that nickname derogatory has not been determined yet, because it belongs to a group of animals called Cryptid, a creature whose existence has been suggested but lacks scientific support.

However, searching for “Fox News chupacabra” in Google, gave me proof that my friend chupacabra is no more a silly Cryptid than Big-foot and Yeti (http://bit.ly/27ufOl).

If I was to consider myself an American and not an alien, as U.S. Immigration Services refers to international students, I would be a 4-year-old toddler. That is the amount of American experience I have, so I’m still in the process of making sense of things, which most of you would find easy to understand.

I’m still trying to make sense of why my doctor’s billing office charged me once for an emergency visit to Baptist Memorial Hospital in 2007 and then sent a collections agency who threatened to “screw my credit” and made me pay twice.

Even after proving it was a mistake in their billing, they haven’t sent my $259 back to me. Baptist Memorial says it has nothing to do with the doctor’s billing office, the doctor herself seems to have moved and the billing company CEO seems to have spent my $259 on Friday night booze.

And that’s why my toddler mind wonders when it watches people yelling to the government, “Keep your hands off my health care!”

Do they seriously think U.S. health care is not broken?

I wonder if these people ever got a chance to watch the House subcommittee hearings where witnesses testified about the practice of “post-claims underwriting,” which occurs when insurance companies cancel individual health insurance policies after providers submit claims for medical services (http://bit.l/1tH0gJ).

I’m still a smart 4-year-old American. I have a 2-year-old American friend, who got mad when he had to shell out more than $100 to get a tetanus shot after getting hurt with a rusted iron nail on the road, while he can get the same shot in his home country for free.

Back in my home country if I’m sick, I have two options.

If I go to a government hospital, I pay 10 cents (yes, you heard it right), and wait anywhere between 10 – 30 minutes to see the doctor.

No appointment, no insurance, it is as simple as that.

The second option is to visit a private clinic, the cost of which is still quite less then visiting one in the U.S.

The chronic care options might be limited and expensive.

However, for primary care, I do not have to wait days for an appointment with a physician in a country with three times the population of U.S. and at least twice the corruption.

Until recently, the term medical insurance was unheard of in my home country of India.

The U.S. spends the most on health care, more than Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. Ironically the Commonwealth Fund found U.S. health care consistently under-performed compared to the health care systems of these other countries.

The study found two major differences: The U.S. being the only country without universal health insurance coverage and the U.S. has the highest cost of malpractice insurance of any nation in the study (http://bit.ly/k1PsE).

A lot of time we associate universal health care with socialism. If caring for “the least of these My brethren” is socialism, then so are all-loved Medicare, disabled and veteran health care programs.

Caring for others who have the least are the signs of a healthy and sane nation.

Caring for “the least of these My brethren” has made America “a beacon of hope” for the suppressed and underdeveloped parts of the world.

Steps in that direction would not diminish, but bring back the glory of the old days to what we so proudly call the U.S.A.

I installed Scala in /usr/local , the reason for which can be found here.

Prerequisite

Before starting installation, you will need **:

1. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
2. The latest Xcode Tools (from the Snow Leopard DVD or downloaded from Apple — the 10.5 version won’t work)
3. Confidence running UNIX commands using the Terminal

Step 1: The PATH

Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities folder.

First lets set the PATH variable using a text editor. I use Textmate (hence the mate command). You can use Textmate, Smultron or vim.

mate ~/.bash_profile

At the end of this file add(even if it is blank)

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/scala/scala-2.7.5.final/bin:$PATH"

Save and close the file. Close the Terminal. On restarting the terminal, enter following command:

echo $PATH

We should be able to see /usr/local/scala/scala-2.7.5.final/bin as one of the paths. Note: If we were compiling scala, we would prefer its binaries to be at /usr/local/bin/scala. However we are taking the easier route.

Step 2: Download Scala

I keep all my software installers that I install away from Application folder, in a folder in home directory.

Make a new folder:

mkdir ~/SourceFolder
cd ~/SourceFolder

Download scala IzPack Installer:

curl -O http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads/distrib/files/scala-2.7.5.final-installer.jar

Step 3: Install

The installer needs administrator permission. Hence install by double click would not complete due to permissions issue.

On the Terminal:

sudo java -jar scala-2.7.5.final-installer.jar

Type in the password when prompted. Installer GUI would start

Choose language.

Goto next.

Read and accept the license.

By default, the installer will install in /usr/local/. However choose /usr/local/scala/, otherwise the installer tends to overwrite /usr/local.

Scala is installer.

To verify, we’ll run Scala interpreter:

scala

On my machine, it shows:

Welcome to Scala version 2.7.5.final (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.6.0_15).
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.

scala>

Type :quit to exit from the interpreter.

Scala is installed on Snow Leopard.

* The writing style of tutorial is shamelessly inspired by Hivelogic.