Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

I decided to download ubuntu and right at this moment, the servers don’t have the 7.10 release because they are being transferred to the mirrors. Am going to wait for another 15 minutes. The worst part is that I don’t even have the Release candidate downloads

So much for free, easily available free software.

Today afternoon I got something in the mail which I ordered nearly a month ago. It was an iPod classic which I ordered from eBay. I spent the entire evening organizing my behemoth music collection(which incidentally has four albums by the band behemoth). Here’s the breakdown and why I’ve sworn jihad against iTunes.

5:00 PM: I come back from lab and download and install itunes. I allow it to scan my music folder and it messes everything up completely. Turns out it only reads id3 tags, and some of my music wasn’t tagged properly. Winamp detected everything fine because of it’s excellent folder-tag detection service.

5:30 PM: I needed to tag around 49 gigabytes of mp3s and add album art soon. After searching around for nearly an hour, I found MediaMonkey. I discovered it had the amazing ability to search amazon for the album and download and tag everything and even add covers.

7:30 PM: I’m halfway through fixing my media collection. Now I have to go and play 5000 songs so the metadata is refreshed. I tried to clear the itunes library but I couldn’t. Finally I found the library xml file and deleted it and the library was emptied.

8:00 PM: I very carefully added only the folders which I’d freshly retagged and things worked a little better. All the artwork showed up in coverflow. I dragged all the music to the ipod and within a surprisingly small amount of time, everything seemed to work fine.

8:30 PM: I decided to see how the iPod works with winamp, because I’ve been using winamp as long as I’ve had a computer. It detected everything perfectly and even writing worked, and when I unplugged the ipod I realized that all the cover art was gone. The music was there but the cover art was gone. Now there’s no point with no cover art so I had to restore the ipod to factory settings before transfering everything again and I decided to wait before a more mature and stable version of the iPod management was coming to winamp.

9:00 PM: Tried loading in some video and TV Shows. Everything worked as it was supposed to except I seldom have the patience to watch a movie. I put Borat on the iPod hoping I’ll watch it on the flight back home. Also put a few family guy episodes for good measure.

Moral of the story: iPod rocks, iTunes sucks so bad, and winamp needs a bit more work.

I found this in a slashdot comment. An extremely insightful story. Kind of sums up the way I feel about certain things

Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.I read the examination question: “SHOW HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHT OF A TALL BUILDING WITH THE AID OF A BAROMETER.” The student had answered, “Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it,lower it to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.”

The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this. I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: “Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch.Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^^2, calculate the height of the building.”

At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded,and gave the student almost full credit. While leaving my colleague’s office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem,so I asked him what they were. “Well,” said the student, “there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building,and by the use of simple proportion, determine the height of the building.” “Fine,” I said, “and others?” “Yes,” said the student, “there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units.” “A very direct method.” “Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the height of the building,in principle, can be calculated.” “On this same tact, you could take the barometer to the top of the building,attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession”. “Finally,” he concluded, “there are many other ways of solving the problem.Probably the best,” he said, “is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent’s door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: ‘Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer.” At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think. The student was Neils Bohr.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr

Original Slashdot Comment

I’m not a big fan of stealth games. I prefer going out all guns blazing, not in an all-odds against me sneaking around trying to accomplish tasks. Stealth games are similar to most other videogames, except that there are two hundred bad guys in a level who shoot first, bury in the backyard, and then ask questions. You’re given a knife and a wimpy-ass handgun and some other tools which help you sneak around in the dark. Sneak into the light and you’re spotted like a crap clucking ape.

Now splinter cell chaos theory was one game I really enjoyed playing. True, it involved a lot of sneaking around, but I played it a few years back, and it was interesting and never got too easy or too hard. A lot of thinking was actually involved.

I heard of Splinter Cell Double Agent a few days after it released last year. Didn’t get the time to play it. I got the game recently, a mammoth 9GB dvd. I remember the old days when a game barely filled up one CD and today it needs twelve. Anyways, I found the game a lot different from the last. The stealth element is decreased, and the brilliant light and sound detectors are missing, (read about them here) but there’s an almost binary mode of being hidden, visible or in danger. Simple as pie.

I found the new game a bit more fun and flexible. I’m also playing on easy mode so there are a lot of tircks you can do to disable someone. New gadgets, weapons make the game more interesting.

What’s the most interesting thing about this game is that you’re a double agent and you’re working for a friend and an enemy. You have to do missions for both of them while not losing the trust of either. Often you’ll have to make a choice and that’ll affect the outcome of the game.

I noticed a few bugs in the game with the navigation and the loading of saved files which doesn’t work and has cost me many a good play minutes. but overall the game is really nicely done and the first one you actually get emotionally involved with because you have to make big choices.

Later.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy’s_Splinter_Cell:_Double_Agent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy%27s_Splinter_Cell:_Chaos_Theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_Cell

Now Playing: Metallica - Whiplash