Sharma Family Journal

Trying to use voice recognition on my android phone might make my blog exceed 140 characters.

There you have it. The app actually works. Punctuation done manually.

Motorola H15 is a headset with not so bad reviews – so I decided to get a “New OEM in bulk” piece from buy.com. It looks like motorola is dumping a bunch of refurbished headsets as “OEM in bulk” and “new”.

These things arrive in a plastic pouch, with bare minimum stuff. But they don’t really work. I’m pretty certain that these are products returned by other customers as non-working.

Motorola customer support: 1-800-331-6456 takes you to a eastern european country and the customer service rep disconnects the phone line after taking down my name and phone number.

Buy.com: Won’t return money, but is willing to send more broken bluetooth headsets.

If you’re curious about the problems:

First one: the mic would work only with the headset near my mouth. Didn’t pick up sound when it’s on my ear.

Second one: continuous beeps every second when paired. Motorola doesn’t document what this means.

A Chinese official today said:

“effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information”

I think this quote has the potential to be remembered for a long time to come.

My 1080p capable LCD monitor was not playing nicely with a netbook (Acer 1410) HDMI output when running Ubuntu 9.10.

Turns out that I had to run

xrandr --prop

Apart from telling me what X thinks about the hardware, it also gets my monitor to start working properly. Thought I’d blog it, before I forget about these useful little things.

If only I can teach my macbook to do this via the monoprice mini display port to HDMI adapter.

You’ve probably heard the jokes about Indian police and how they always arrive late and make fools of themselves, just like in Bollywood movies. Same goes for the judicial system.

Take for example, the most recent case of Ruchika Girhotra. Google news counts more than 1000 articles on this topic. Obviously, every news outlet wants to show how concerned they are and how broken the politicians and the justice system is.

Quite curiously, no one turns this around and asks what was the media doing between 1990 and 2009, before it became a big story? It became a big story, only because the guy was let off with a 6 month sentence. But in this ad driven world, how do we tell between honest media outlets and the ones which are just chasing the clicks?

People have been writing all kinds of stuff about the big stories of 2009. Even though this article in nytimes doesn’t say so, I think this is probably the biggest story of 2009. Along with that, the ability of the US govt to prevent the flight of capital (or the illiusion of it) is quite remarkable.

“What the average citizen doesn’t explicitly understand is that a significant part of the government’s plan to repair the financial system and the economy is to pay savers nothing and allow damaged financial institutions to earn a nice, guaranteed spread,” said William H. Gross, co-chief investment officer of the Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco. “It’s capitalism, I guess, but it’s not to be applauded.”

Are you looking to study the life of the Indian community in San Francisco bay area? Look no further than this thread!

Due to a server side misconfiguration, outgoing mails were bouncing for sometime. I identified the culprit to be:

/etc/hosts:

::1			localhost localhost.my.domain

After I fixed it, there was more collateral damage. A large number of subscribers were marked as “nomail” (i.e. delivery disabled due to excessive bounces). I didn’t see an easy way of mass enabling the delivery. So I wrote this little script.

#! /usr/local/bin/python2.6
#
# Copyright (C) 2009 Arun Sharma 
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

""" Flip the nomail bit for all members of a list. """

import sys
import paths
from Mailman import MailList
from Mailman import Errors
from Mailman import MemberAdaptor

def main():
    listname = sys.argv[1].lower().strip()

    try:
        mlist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=True)
    except Errors.MMListError, e:
        print >> sys.stderr, _('No such list: %(listname)s')
        sys.exit(1)

    # Get the lowercased member addresses
    rmembers = mlist.getRegularMemberKeys()
    for addr in rmembers:
        status = mlist.getDeliveryStatus(addr)
        if status <> MemberAdaptor.ENABLED:
            mlist.setDeliveryStatus(addr, MemberAdaptor.ENABLED)
            print >> sys.stderr, 'Enabled delivery for: %s' % (addr)
    mlist.Save()
    mlist.Unlock()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Enjoy.

In spite of a large number of problem reports, Honda doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

My dealer hit me with the same problem on a 2004 odyssey with 70k miles.

Typical problem: disk storms after sleep/wakeup, slow startup and generally weird behavior from windows7 after the vista to w7 upgrade. Looks a lot better after upgrading the BIOS from 31xx to 3302.