Sharma Family Journal

Hope Ankur lets us get some sleep on the flight. May be I should be more worried about his brother

My WD passport drive boots from the USB port nearest to the SD card reader. Try booting from any of the other USB ports - things don’t work. Totally undocumented weirdness. HP folks: would you care documenting this next time please?

I heard this from at least two Indian senior families who flew this otherwise convenient, well advertized flight on an airline with high ratings. It’s a 16 hour flight and they feed you just after take off and just before landing. The other 14 hours, passengers are starving. If you’re a diabetic, may god help you.

While the other gizmos are good, the air hostesses are known to be less friendly (none of them look Arab or like being from Emirates) compared to Asian airlines such as Cathay or Singapore.

Seekingalpha is running a story today on Agriculture.

For example, in 1985 the average Chinese consumer ate 44 pounds of meat per year. Today, it’s more than doubled to 110 pounds. That in of itself is impressive, but when you consider that it takes 17 pounds of grain to generate one pound of beef, you begin to see how grain demand can rise exponentially to population growth with even modest changes to diet.

I wonder if there will be more vegetarians inhabiting the planet 100 years from now.

US news outlets - which seem to be an instrument of the government policy with almost total lack of independence do it again. Aren’t you sick of reading about Iranian opposition using facebook and twitter to organize themselves? Even if Mousavi had genuine complaints about vote rigging, only a foolish politician would be using tools of a foreign power with a history of blatant manipulation of country’s democracy. It’s almost like L.K.Advani (Indian opposition leader who recently lost) using Pakistani media to complain about vote rigging by congress. BBC and New York times are better off toning down the intensity of the coverage or risk losing serious readers looking for objective news to aljazeera or xinhua.

What was the last time you had the same kind of coverage about elections in Egypt?

Have you ever tried to lookup a train between two stations? Indian Railways website is the run away leader (not!) in terms of usability. You need to enter station codes (not city name) to use it and the interface to look it up is totally unusable.

You’re much better off searching for “indian railways station codes” in your favorite search engine.

These guys (and other Indian travel websites) seriously need some AJAX programmers.

It almost looked like my disk was going to die. My OS was giving me disk errors and the disk was making horrible clicking noises.

Turns out that I need to connect the disk to the USB ports on the left side of the HP dv5t laptop, rather than the ones on the right side. It seems to be related to some USB ports being able to provide more power to the disk than others. Whether the laptop was running on battery or AC also seems to make a difference.

All seems to be well now!

Just got it installed on my external USB disk. The installer totally rocks. Things I noticed (especially relative to Fedora 11):

• Timezone picker widget is 100 times more usable
• Does a much better job of detecting other OSes

Looks like the larger installed base of Ubuntu is clearly showing. The strength of Fedora is really that a lot of the Linux development still happens there. It’s just that Ubuntu looks a lot more polished at this point in time.

Downloaded a copy today. The install instructions ask you to dd the iso into a USB stick. That’s not so nice - for people with other data (eg: images, music) on the flash drive. I tried using unetbootin - but didn’t work out of the box. Here’s the trick:

1. Assumes you’ve already run unetbootin once on your USB key. Backup syslinux.cfg if necessary.
2. mount the image and then extract vmlinuz0, initrd0.img and splash.jpg onto the USB stick.
3. Copy isolinux.cfg as syslinux.cfg
4. Edit root=/dev/sdb1 rootfstype=vfat in syslinux.cfg. Replace sdb1 with the device name or label for your setup.

Reboot.

Overall impressions: Looks like a slick interface. As an end user I wish projects like maemo, moblin and android cooperated and produced one polished product.

Have you bought anything lately from Walmart (beyond soap, diaper and mouthwash) that actually works? I haven’t. I picked up $10 faded glory sun glasses recently that gave me a headache. Turns out that the glasses are not 20/20 (they seem to magnify slightly) and were not labelled as such. Memorex Mi3020? Looks cool, but the connector breaks in a few weeks and you can’t find the receipt to claim the warranty.

Target seems to be a much better place to shop - definitely so in densely populated areas where walmart is totally in the pits. Travel to a less densely populated place like Denver - it’s a different walmart there.