Archive

Archive for June, 2009

External USB hard drives and HP laptop weirdness

June 28th, 2009 arun No comments

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?

Categories: Gadgets, Open Source Tags:

Starving on EK225 Dubai/San Francisco? (DXB-SFO)

June 27th, 2009 arun 2 comments

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.

Categories: Travel Tags:

Vegetarians and Global Warming

June 26th, 2009 arun No comments

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.

Categories: General Tags:

Iran: American funded unrest?

June 20th, 2009 arun No comments

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?

Categories: Politics Tags:

Indian Railways website: who the heck designed it?

June 17th, 2009 arun 1 comment

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.

Categories: India, Technology Tags:

WD Passport: clicking noise of death

June 14th, 2009 arun No comments

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!

Categories: Gadgets Tags:

Ubuntu 9.04

June 12th, 2009 arun 3 comments

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.

Categories: Open Source Tags: