I was invited by the Office of International programs to be on the panel for ‘Politics Around the World’ forum. It was fun addressing a diverse group of people, and being involved in a discussion across borders.
The University did a press release of the event, which is already on youtube.
The university also posted the audio podcast of the whole event here.
It has been a while that I did a post.
Last month I travelled to San Jose, California to see my younger brother. California is beautiful. Went around the Silicon Valley campuses, enjoyed the California beaches,
drove around San Francisco,
saw the famous Golden Gate Bridge,
went for a game of beach-ball at Half Moon bay,
and went on 17 Mile Drive.
And yes! I forgot to tell you, I was there for just a day and a half:).
I’m watching Sikhnet Film Festival. A great attempt by Sikhnet.com to share the video submissions for the annual festival at the same time. Sikhnet is using a web service mogulus.com which provides free broadcast.
At this point of time, there are 146 viewers watching the “35″- A documentary on the importance of learning Punjabi script by Sikhs. A very professionally made video by 19 years old Raj Singh. I’m impressed.
I invite more people to join Satluj, where we – a group of Punjabi Techies are constantly working on enabling softwares in Punjabi and Localization of Linux.
Just few minutes ago, I shared another part of my Life with “The One”!
Kevin Kelly discusses how web will be in next 5000 days. A little scary, though!
Here is shell a trick that I used lately.
Before moving to new system (where I enforce quotas on all home folders), I had portable home directories for all the users on my shared server storage. The old setup did not strictly apply the quota limits on all users. Some of the users had large home folders and a couple of them logging on different systems, would fill up the whole hard disk on that system.
To find out how much space each user was using on the server, I ran the following command in their home directory.
$ du -chd -1 > $HOME/user_space_report.txt
Simple.
Last week was pretty eventful. On Sunday, I invited my friend Stephen Goforth and his son John to visit the Memphis gurudwara. John is majoring in Music at the University of South Alabama. He is already composing and writing music, although he still is a freshman at the University. Check his song Tunnel no light here. We talked a lot about western and Indian music and that how fusion music has revived a lot of lost music of past ages.
On the way back we visited Sun Studio in Memphis. It was here, where Elvis Presley recorded his first record at the age of 18. Artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johny Cash and B B King have been linked to this studio over the years.
During rest of the week I worked with engineers from Apple to setup a new XSAN in our Lab.
On thursday, we invited John and Roberto, the guys from Apple, for a get-together at a local pub, Blind Pig. The night turned into a nice little office social and our guests seemed to be pretty impressed with the hospitality and the “awesomeness” that Oxford had to offer.:)
Friday was a long day. The Apple folks left and I worked on rebuilding the workflow, imaging the systems and getting the lab back into business.
I recieved Rakhris in the mail from my sister in Texas and Canada. I remembered the days past by, the days in India and felt nostalgic.
Friday evening, department of student life had arranged an ice-cream social, where a 15 minute documentary – Celebrate What’s Right With The World was shown. A beautiful vision and very nicesly shot documentary.
Next week is going to be busy. But for now, I’m enjoying the weekend and reading a book on typography – Thinking in Type. It has been pretty interesting read so far.
I have started using Git over Subversion. Following is the list of my git configurations.
I spent some time today watching a couple of videos.
The first one was Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy who died on July 25, 2008 was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University and creator of Alice.
It was a heart-touching and inspiring talk. I have seen there is one commonality in all great men – mastery of effective communication skills.
Coming from Linux background, while working on OS X shell, I still cannot abandon my old Linux habits. A common one is trying to use wget instead of curl for downloading stuff.
Just out just curiosity, I was wondering why OS X supports curl, but no wget in the OS.
I came across this interesting page doing comparison of the two.
I work with Ruby on Leopard and and I need RMagick.
If you are a programmer and don’t know what RMagick is, you should know how code can melt your picture into art in Ruby:).