ctrl.altered.mind

If the title of this post was not enough as a hint, I got the following text as an email forward from dear family. Some of these present wise advice, and therefore, I shall share them with everyone chancing upon this blog.

(Text has been cleared of all obnoxious font typography, size, and color for your reading pleasure)

If a dog was the teacher you would learn stuff like:

When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.

Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.

Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.

When it’s in your best interest, practice obedience.

Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory.

Take naps.

Stretch before rising.

Run, romp, and play daily.

Thrive on attention and let people touch you.

Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.

On warm days, stop to lie on your back in the grass.

On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.

When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.

No matter how often you’re scolded, don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout … run right back and make friends.

Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.

Eat with gusto and enthusiasm. Stop when you have had enough.

Be loyal. Never pretend to be something you’re not.

If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.

When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.

For those not in the know, a meme is a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. The rest of you would be aware that memes can either trigger bloggers block or induce feverish and passionate mashing of input keys on a digital computing appliance. Known factors affecting response to stimulus include time of day, caffeine content, length (and width?) of pending tasks list(s) for the subject. Side effects to remain undisclosed until FDA approval.

If all that sounded like gibberish, you must be new to the internet. Check this link for a quick tutorial on the neo-cultural phenomenon that is a meme.

Alright, if you haven’t guessed by now - yes, I have been tagged for reciprocating to a meme. It doesn’t happen often, but when one does get flung my way, it usually is followed by a few moments of pause, which are followed by thoughts revolving around the theme, “how should one go about responding to this meme”. Well, fortunately this particular one appears to be not too complicated, so here goes -

First things first - I was tagged by the Bluelicious blogger.

Next, to lay out the rules -
- Link the person who tagged you.
- Mention the rules in your blog.
- Tell us about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
- Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them.
- Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Unspectacular Quirk #1:
I’m slightly compulsive when it comes to text formatting (in addition to spelling, but that has been covered before). Before sitting down to peruse a digital document, I must go through a set of re-formatting tasks to make the text more pleasing to my eye (caveat: the document has to be editable, of course.. if it isn’t, I am sure I won’t be giving it 100% attention). I have to right-justify paragraphs, insert whitespace as appropriate (or remove redundant line breaks), and switch fonts if necessary to a personal favorite. If I’m dealing with computer code, I will go through additional routines like replacing tabs with spaces (depends on the computer language and currently active text editor).

Unspectacular Quirk #2:
This one is fairly new, and I hope it does not become an impulsive habit. If I am at the computer when I come across a new interesting word or phrase (or personality), I tend to google it for etymological references and usage. I am likely to also check the wikipedia link for additional trivial knowledge accumulation.

Unspectacular Quirk #3:
In restaurants, I tend to choose corner booths by the window (even if the weather is dreary).

Unspectacular Quirk #4:
Speaking of quirks, I am intrigued by (and often even go looking for) easter eggs and unusual usages in computer programs and hardware. As far as microcode programming is concerned, I regularly realize usage quirks for C that I picked up as a graduate student, which conflict with the way the ARM compiler likes its code. I’ll spare the details in the general interests of this weblog.

Unspectacular Quirk #5:
In large parking lots, quite often I park my car at farther distances from the entrance. Surprisingly, I don’t consciously do this at work. Perhaps I should start tomorrow.

Unspectacular Quirk #6:
I am officially addicted to getting my world and offbeat news from Reddit. I have even found myself guilty of opening Reddit in a new browser tab, only to realize that I already had it open in an older one. More proof that I’m getting old.

There (phew). I can’t believe how unspectacular those quirks of mine are! If you’re still reading this pointless passage, you might as well go on to read the hopefully more captivating lists the following people-who-are-about-to-be-tagged are going to make. You can even call it a sociological experiment, if you want to sound important.

Mike
Murali
raison d’etre
Sean
Rohit
// placeholder*

* That’s five. Note to self - befriend more bloggers for the sole purpose of dissemination of vital cultural exchanges such as this one.

Among the mostly crappy commercials on television, every once in a while there is an ad that comes along and makes you chuckle. Virgin Mobile’s (India) new advertisements such as these ones do manage to strike a chord with those amused by deviant teen humor
Their tag phrase, ‘Think zara hatke‘, however, seems to have been directly inspired by Apple’s long-standing Think Different slogan.

The New York Times has a graphic representing the average amount of food thrown out each month in grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias and homes, for a family of four people. This works out to an unbelievable 122 pounds of food - fruits, vegetables, and grains, amongst other types.

This image (courtesy of the NYT) depicts the monthly share of wasted food for each family of four, the sum of waste in eight different food groups as detailed in the study.

The scary part? This statistic is almost 13 years old. Collectively, about 96.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted by US retailers, food service businesses and consumers in 1995. Consumption of processed food has only increased over the past few years in the United States, thereby causing a shift in the predictability of consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables. With artificial enhancements going into most edible substances today (with cheap substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup replacing cane sugar), the shelf life of naturally grown products has been strongly affected (which, in turn, would cause greater wastage for products that remain on the store shelf at the end of the day). Milk is a prime example - organic milk with no growth-hormone treatment lasts much longer than that ‘extracted and processed’ from hormonally treated cows. Small examples such as these lead me to believe that the amount of food being wasted today scales much higher than was the case in 1995. If you have a hard time visualizing such numbers, just make a trip to a game venue at the end of a football or hockey game, and you will see gigantic containers full of unsold hot dogs, bratwurst and bread being unloaded into the trash. Since these stay cooked and non-refrigerated for a long time out in the open, it is unlikely that these foods can be handed out at the end of the day.

This has got to be the most uplifting video I have seen this week (or perhaps this year). The outro is especially outstanding.

Having switched from a desktop to a notebook as my primary computing device (not considering the PS3), being conscious about the added vulnerability of personal data is now imperative. It would be terrible if the laptop was lost or stolen, of course, but there is now the more probable risk of accidentally damaging the portable machine (not that I am sloppy, but it is reassuring to know that I am protected from hard drive damage due to dropping the laptop, or from accidentally yanking it off the coffee table).

Some habits are really worth adopting in order to minimize the pain of going through data loss and/or recovery - even more so in the case of theft (fact: about 97% of stolen computers are never recovered). There are scores of data recovery services available, but they generally seem to take advantage of the customers’ cornered situations and charge a heavy premium for fetching data from a damaged laptop (often more than the cost of a new computer). Of course, there are some pre-emptive solutions available such as PCPhoneHome or LaptopLocate.net, which can help track down machines by monitoring their location. With the iAlertU freeware application, you can even add “car alarm” or security camera protection for an iSight-equipped Apple notebook.

The first and most vital thing to do for any computer user, is to use a backup storage device. The simplest form of this would be to connect an external hard drive. Hard drives with encryption features allow locking down of personal information as all data stored on the drive is inaccessible without a master password. While it is possible to back up data on optical media like DVDs, this is a cumbersome repetitive chore and requires a lot of sorting and organization for the backed up information to be easily accessible.

External drives can play well with automated backup software, thus making what would otherwise be a daily chore an invisible background task for the computer. My external hard drive is network-attached, which eliminates the need to constantly plug it into a laptop, and additionally allows moving all media files to the external drive so they are accessible from all shared computers on the home network. On the flip side, this does have the disadvantage of not being able to access your media outside the home (unless you open up the drive for internet access).

I often find myself minimizing the kind of personal data that is stored on the notebook’s hard drive. I typically use my Gmail account as a network archive as this makes my files retrievable from any computer with an internet connection (more on how to make this process more convenient in a future tutorial). This benefits both security and accessibility, and prevents losing years of data and pictures along with the laptop. There are new web services cropping up now, that recognize this activity and endeavor to help organize data tucked away in your email attachments. Xoopit is one such service that ties in with a Gmail account.

What is your favorite strategy?

With no one to count on. Yet.

Image from the ProseBeforeHos weblog

When my wireless router started faltering with alarming regularity in the past month, I realized the little device had probably reached the end of its life cycle. The Netgear router has been pretty much running 24/7 over the past two years, and while routers typically last much longer than that, everyones mileage varies.

Therefore, instead of shopping around for an alternative el-cheapo router that would get the job of letting all of my wireless-capable devices talk over the internet done, I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade all the way up - to an Apple Time Capsule.

If you’re familiar with Apple hardware, you will realize that the Time Capsule breaks no new ground - it is simply an 802.11n Airport Extreme base station with a built-in hard drive, which is also its biggest plus point. Having switched from a desktop to using just a notebook computer, a new Macbook Pro, I quickly found the need to have a wireless network hard drive solution quite imperative. It is tedious having a backup drive that constantly needs to be plugged in, to be of any benefit. The Time Capsule steps in with network-attached storage (with choices of 500GB and 1TB), and also integrates seamlessly with the one-click Time Machine backup feature built into Mac OS X Leopard. Additionally, the Time Capsule can also connect (and extend wireless capabilities) to a USB printer or external hard drive. I picked up a 500GB Time Capsule, because the storage capacity should meet my needs for now. There are also web tutorials that prove it is quite simple to upgrade the internal hard drive yourself.

I was a little concerned about rushing out and buying a Time Capsule, simply because initial reviews of the hardware have not been excellent on the Apple website. People have voiced concerns about Time Machine backups taking exceptionally long durations to complete, impact on wireless browsing performance while backups are running (forcing them to turn this off while actively using their computers), and other issues such as unusually high heat generation and wireless device incompatibilities. Having read through all these reviews, I was prepared to purchase the Time Capsule in test-drive mode, ready to return it within the 14-day period if any such issues would raise their ugly heads. Thankfully, I am extremely happy with my Time Capsule.

I have not run into any speed or wireless bandwidth issues while running Time Machine backups or generally accessing the wireless drive (I did use an ethernet connection to perform the first backup, as most would recommend). The router functions excellently, plays well with all my devices, and efficiently utilizes my high-speed connection. I have not experienced overheating issues either, although a higher heat profile is not very unusual for a NAS/router appliance.

The Time Capsule also interfaces very well with my Playstation 3. This was a very important requirement for me, as the PS3 is used heavily as my media center and not just a gaming console. Speaking of games, the console has not seen any connection issues (that I had started experiencing on my earlier router) while playing online first-person shooter games. Additionally, media streaming from my computer to the TV via the PS3 has been excellent (I use MediaLink ($20/free demo) and Mediatomb (free, open-source) for wireless streaming from Mac OS X to the PS3). One thing to note, is that the PS3 does not recognize a NAS - it only supports the DLNA protocol, and would require a computer that is running a media server application in order to access media files. The Time Capsule does not support direct Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP), so if any of your devices require this protocol the Time Capsule is not an option for you.

The Time Capsule only requires a couple of screens of configuring the first time it is used - this is done via the Mac OS X Airport Utility. Once this is done, the router is ready to serve Mac, Linux and Windows machines. The Time Capsule hard drive is also directly accessible by Windows machines, which see it appear as an encrypted, password-protected drive on the network. There is an Airport Admin Utility available for Windows that should allow configuring the Time Capsule using a Windows machine, although I have not attempted this (yet).

As it supports the 802.11n standard, the Time Capsule also allows me to fully utilize the wireless-N capabilities of my notebook. While this does not mean much for casual browsing, it does allow better local networking and is future-proof as far as wireless standards are concerned (at least for a good while).

Feel like you could use a good joke? How about one custom-crafted to suit your exact taste of humor?

A team at the University of California at Berkeley has been running a collaborative filtering system for recommending jokes. It’s called Jester, and is currently at version 4.0 in its evolution. The idea behind Jester is to recommend jokes to the user based on their ratings of previous jokes. The system can begin recommending anecdotes once the user rates a training set of 8 jokes. Apparently my tastes make for textbook cases of classification, for I found the jokes served up by Jester to be spot on hilarious, right after the initial set. A significant portion of the content in the database has been in wide circulation, so chances are you have read them before - the system might eventually be expanded to allow user submission of content. Content-based filtering, which is a form of collaborative filtering, has become one of the central mechanisms behind pioneering current-generation applications on the Web today.

Jester uses an algorithm called Eigentaste 5.0, which dynamically adapts the order in which items are recommended. The basic filtering algorithm uses universal queries to apply real-value user ratings on a common set of items. Those familiar with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) will recognize the techniques applied to the dense subset of the ratings matrix. PCA helps reduce multidimensional data sets to lower dimensions for analysis.

The dataset used by Jester has been made freely available for research use, while the framework is also being used to develop new predictive applications.

Finally, here’s one of the anecdotes served by Jester that had me smiling:

A group of managers were given the assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they’re falling off the ladders, dropping the tape measures–the whole thing is just a mess. An engineer comes along and sees what they’re trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the managers and walks away.

After the engineer has gone, one manager turns to another and laughs. “Isn’t that just like an engineer? We’re looking for the height and he gives us the length.”

American Express is one of the major global financial service providers and is best known for its credit card and traveler’s cheque businesses. Naturally, I was shocked to learn that the 74th largest company (Fortune 500, 2007) has such poor focus on enhancing user security for its financial account portal.

The AMEX website permits users to only set passwords with a maximum of 8 characters, with no non-alphanumeric characters supported. This is very strange for a corporation the size of American Express, and especially so for a financial services company. I figure that with these constraints, any kind of password set up on the AMEX site will only qualify as having “weak” strength.

However, I’m sure most people would not even encounter these constraints while selecting their passwords. In a study on password security conducted with undergraduate and graduate students, it was found that over half of reporting users (52.70%) never change their passwords if not required by the system. These numbers drop with increasing frequency, with about 12% users changing their password every three months.

Furthermore, some common practices have been observed to be followed by users when choosing a password. Most users only use a combination of lower case letters and numbers, where the number is usually a personally meaningful one (such as birth dates or phone numbers). Over half of all users also reported using the same password for multiple accounts (around 33% use some variation of the password).

With most websites (AMEX, for example) not enforcing stricter rules for generating passwords, user tendencies are not going to see much change. Passwords are generally considered a pretty basic form of security themselves, and therefore one should be very careful in selecting a password that effectively appears as random as possible to a potential intruder.

Password strength is the amount of security that a password can provide against password-guessing attacks, and is measured in bits of entropy.

Common guidelines for choosing good passwords, as listed on Wikipedia are:

* Include numbers, punctuation, and upper and lower case letters
* Use passwords with at least 8 characters
* Avoid passwords based on repetition, dictionary words, letter or number sequences, usernames, or biographical information like names or dates.

Wikipedia also lists some examples of weak and strong passwords (which are probably already included in password-cracking databases, so please don’t choose one of them for your own).

General alertness is also of extreme importance while using online portals, as even the strongest passwords are of no use when it comes to protecting users against certain forms of attacks like phishing or keystroke logging.