Viraj's Weblog

Here's a great, albeit old, article on car salesmem.

It's amazing how 6 seconds of music can influence so much.

I've had an issue with using the OS X VPN. When I am VPN'ed in to work, I sometimes close my powerbook without closing the VPN client. This understandably gives me a VPN disconnected dialog when I open up my laptop. If I then open a terminal, I would get a beachball hang for 2-5 minutes before the window opened, and then a few more before the shell prompt.

I started running tcpdump to see if there was some network traffic locking things up, and I noticed that DNS requests were being sent out to my work DNS servers even though the VPN client disconnected. These were private class B addresses. I checked /etc/resolv.conf and indeed it had the work DNS IPs.

I don't think the OS X VPN client properly reverts resolv.conf when it disconnects this way. It is extremely annoying. So what's the solution? Well a co-worker recommended I setup a good old SSH VPN instead of the lame proprietary VPN. Yeh, I think that is a better route.

My lease is up in May. I'm planning on getting a hybrid. That is, if I can get one!

I currently drive a fairly nice car: Infiniti FX35. When I go to dealers, I like to park a bit down the street so they don't see my car. Salespeople are always looking out for nice cars for big-spending customers. I come in walking, and sometimes a salesman won't even approach me unless I ask, because they don't think I will spend any money. That's the way I like it.

Today I test drove a Toyota Prius. I liked it very much. It turns out there is a 5 month waiting list at the dealer I went to. WTF? Makes you wonder just how much big oil has their fingers in. I put a $500 deposit to get on the list, then went to the Honda dealershit.. umm dealership.

I received the worst service imaginable. They had no Civic Hybrid for me to test drive, and didn't even let me see the interior of a regular Civic. The salesperson was a rude ass. They definitely won't be seeing my money.

Anyway, I'm thinking if I decide on the Prius, I would be out of a car for a few months when my lease ends. That wouldn't be so bad since I can get by with a bike. We'll see...

Stop and get off your bike quick. If the beast looks like it wants to attack, try to keep the bike between you and it. Shout something commanding, like Go home!

Well I've been biking to work for over a month now. I love it, though roads can be quite dangerous at times. Here is a page with some good road biking tips.

I am still confused on one thing though: left turns at a left turn signal. Many times I'm the only one making a left turn, but does the traffic light 'sensor' detect my bike as if a car was there? It seems not to, because the light never changes, and I end up going to the crosswalk and using the button. Annoying as hell.

At some intersections, there is a bike drawing in the middle of the left lane right next to the crosswalk. I wonder if I need to put my bike here to get the light to change? Haven't tried that yet.

Update: A co-worker pointed me to a very interesting paper on detection of bicycles at traffic signals.

Today I decided to implement captchas on my blog. I dug around and found a neat PHP captcha class called hn_captcha. After a few hours of hacking on the b2evolution code I think I have it integrated pretty well.

It defaulted to using some Microsoft Word fonts which I didn't have (I don't remember when I last used a PC). As a replacement, I used Gentium, the free open source font recently released.

I've removed some restrictions on comments now, and now it's just wait and see how much spam I get. Judging from the previous spams, I cannot tell for sure if they are bot-based. Or at least they are trying to hide this. I have been logging the user agent for the spam posts and the last time 8 spams came in at about the same time, but their user agents looked like:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U) [en]
Opera/6.04 (Windows XP; U) [en]
Opera/7.02 Bork-edition (Windows NT 5.0; U) [en]
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98; QXW0332q)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 95; USA On-Site)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; MSN 2.6; Windows 95; Gateway2000)

The first 5 spams came in at the exact same time (to the second). The next 2 came within 2 minutes later. Are these botnets? If so, why the different user agents? The fact that they all came in within a small time frame says to me they are botnets. The spams that came in are pretty much useless since I was blocking URLs in comments. It's like they are testing botnets on my blog.

I've decided to switch to Firefox as my main browser on my Mac. I've been using Safari, and I've just been noticing it being rather slow on sites that I visit, especially SSL sites. Firefox seems alot speedier, and hit has lots of cool extensions.

One thing that immediately bothered me is that I got used to using Command-Shift-Left and Command-Shift-Right to move to different tabs in Safari and this didn't work in Firefox. I couldn't find any way to redefine keybindings without downloading the keyconfig extension.

After installing the extension, go to Tools->Keyconfig. Then add new key called 'Next Tab', check the global checkbox, and make the code:

gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(1,true);

Then add a new key called 'Previous Tab', check the global checkbox, and make the code:

gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(-1,true);

Assign Command-Shift-Left to 'Previous Tab' and Command-Shift-Right to 'Next Tab'. Restart Firefox, and voila, Safari tab navigation.

Here's an interesting article where an autistic person explains some of his methodology. I find this stuff very fascinating.

It's rather amazing that damage to the brain can sometimes cause a person to achieve superior mental abilities. What is this telling us?

Let's look at another process in the body: muscle building. When you work out, you are actually damaging muscles. Working out doesn't build muscles, but rather they are built during the recovery period. It is the healing, recuperation, and the body's response that makes you stronger. Your body is stressed and it expects more, so it compensates by building muscles.

Another even more dramatic body response is bone healing. When you break a bone, the bone heals in such a way as to prevent the likelihood of it breaking in the exact same place again. It is stronger than it was before. This is why you will see a fattening of the bone after the fracture heals, a lump of extra bone mass.

Is it crazy to correlate these features to 'brain-building'? I don't think this is too far-fetched. If there is damage to the brain, the body may attempt to rebuild it in such a way as to make it less likely for the damage to occur again, i.e. it becomes stronger than it once was. Stronger in a way that perhaps we don't fully understand, to handle some stress that we don't understand. Maybe the area of the brain that was damaged has to do with mathematical calculations, musical ability, emotions, etc. Of course there is probably a threshold as to how much damage can be 'good' damage, similar to working out too hard and actually getting weaker (e.g. not recuperating, eating bad, etc.).

This can even be extrapolated to drugs. Drugs can inflict a sort of brain damage. I don't condone using drugs, but could it be that some musicians who used drugs received their talents by the damage caused to their brains? It's rather amazing to think about.

I've always felt that open source ticketing systems were really lacking. The de facto standard is Request Tracker. I've always had issues with it. It's a nice interface filled with features, but the backend code to me is horrible. When you need to modify something, the code seems written to purposefully confuse you. I've had problems with binary attachments randomly getting corrupt, and it's next to impossible to debug. The documentation is also rather poorly written grammatically (which always pisses me off).

But the truth is, I never found anything better than RT. It worked most of the time, and usually did what I needed. Recently I came across Roundup, which is a Python issue tracking system. It took me just a few minutes to get it installed, and from first glance I like it. It's clean and simple.

Well I got back from the company ski trip and had a blast. The weather was horrible and rainy, but I did learn to ski. I didn't fall once. Well I did fall getting off of the ski lift, but that doesn't count (it's damn scary!).

In the evening there was a big party, and as you can probably tell from the pictures, it was a 80s high school reunion theme. There was a great band playing good 80s music and everyone was getting crazy. I got pretty wasted.

Really crazy video of various plane crashes.

Google has started putting up some of its techtalks on video.google.com. These are great lectures that happen throughout the week here on all sorts of interesting topics. Keep an eye out for them.