“I went for a drive at 2:30 AM” !   ,

“Dosa tastes best with chutney only”.

I have only one advice for people with such tweets “Get a life ” and spare others as well because seriously nobody cares about it. I mean how can anyone express his feelings about anything within 140 letters and still leave an impact on the reader. Let me make it clear that I do not hate those who use twitter. Most people use Twitter casually since it is the next iteration of Facebook or Orkut . Terms like ‘scraps’ transformed to ‘tweets’ and ‘friends’ to ‘followers’. Log-in to either of these websites  and you see loads of “tweets” transformed to ==>  “Whats on your mind?”  … being updated every 15 minutes, where even household chores becomes your “Status message” !!

I don’t want to write on all the drawbacks of Twitter and sound like Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) here but one thing is clear, Twitter will neither be missed nor it would replace blogs .

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

Now here is a scenario, Navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch Terminal.app. Enter sudo su -  as shown in the picture. It would ask you for a password.

Now without entering the password, Quit the Terminal

and boom ! … Terminal.app goes kaput, doesn’t even show the prompt and becomes useless. The only option to rectify this  is to restart the machine. Now how is that for a bug

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

With a plan to give wings to some of my financial desires, I have been devoting some time these days in analyzing the Stock markets. Yeah …  I know that this is contradicting to my earlier post to which there were few comments from a small yet thoughtful reader base. Even though the goal is to make “money” ( would be lying if I hadn’t mentioned it !), this is a kind of an experiment in the world of Gambling. This word is not new since it has a profound association with one of the epics of Hindu history – The Mahabharata. (without gambling i guess Mahabharata would never be written at all !

Trading at the stock markets has been quite eventful till now with occasional profit bookings. But the most interesting and challenging part of it is to constantly overcome the state of indecisiveness about a particular stock, whether to hold back or to sell. Now the “analysis” part of stock kicks in which has some uniquely hilarious words that one should be familiar to understand, especially those spoken on some of the private channels -  “The level of 4500 acted as a hurdle for the market and kept it below the equilibrium level of 4475 on closing basis. One more reason for the contraction of the activity may be that the nifty is in between several supports and resistance which are placed within a shorter distance of each other.” 

At the moment my experiment is being limited to stock markets alone and i am looking for an opportunity to ‘diversify’ it. Very soon there will be updates which i hope would entice the readers on different forms of gambling !

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

The cat family moves on, from 10.0 Cheetah to the latest 10.6 Snow Leopard being its seventh major release. Wonder if the next OS X would be named as Lion as that is the only one left in the cat family. Well… got to wait and watch. I have been using  Snow Leopard  for few days now and must say that there has been lot of refinements especially the Exchange support with auto discovery feature of Microsoft Exchange Server. The hype surrounded the OS X with Apple giving developer seeds only to people or companies with developer accounts, stopping people from disclosing information to public under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Just days before its release the security world on the net went abuzz with rumors that Apple has quietly added a new  feature to scan software downloads for malware. Hmm… contradicting to what they actually advertise http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac_ads1/viruses_480x376.mov . Later it was found that Snow Leopard is protecting Mac users against certain file types. The plist file is located in the below path

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plist

Even though Snow Leopard is basically a glorified service pack of the current Leopard 10.5 it has lot more to offer.One can go through the technical specification in this link http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html. Finally coming to the most obvious question … Will Snow Leopard be a better OS than Windows 7? Only time would tell.

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

Traveling in the night was crazy as everyone were at their talkative best, apart from me as i dozed off mid-way . Its still fresh in my mind, the way we pulled each others legs, those never ending singing of songs, dumb charades, quizzing sessions on Ramayana and Mahabharata and the famous Argentina T-Shirts that 2 of my friends wore to the temple ! This requires a special mention – probably the most violent debate ever recorded till date which started at 5:45 AM saturday on Sri Sri RaviShankar’s Art of Living and in the end a wonderful darshan of Lord Krishna. All in all a perfect trip to “Gods Own Country” !

They say that “Pictures speak a thousand words” but i don’t know about “Perfect Pictures” !!

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

]]> http://arjunsm.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/escapetogodsowncountry/feed/ 0 arjun Ghat section Surprise CloudCover Picure Perfect http://arjunsm.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/mac-os-x-10-4bug-in-terminal-app/ http://arjunsm.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/mac-os-x-10-4bug-in-terminal-app/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:23:44 +0000 Arjun http://arjunsm.wordpress.com/?p=173 ]]> I had a long overdue for a post in this category as hectic work at the office kept me at bay. But there was an interesting find that had to be posted, for i strongly feel that solution for this trivial yet hard to identify bug would help all those users who are still on Tiger 10.4.X and here is the flash back …

Couple of months ago I was working on some shell scripts and was trying to get a PID of Console application running on Tiger 10.4.11 with the below command and to my amazement i didn’t get the process id at all even though console.app was running !! After some struggle it came to behavior that was illogical, it never worked for the very first time i opened the terminal and then type the below command. Try executing different commands and then the below command would work fine. I tried many other options thinking some of my commands were wrong but with little success and neither did Google search helped. The same command was working like a charm on Leopard 10.5
PID=`ps -ax -o "pid" -o "command" | grep -i "/Applications/Utilities/Console.app/Contents/MacOS/Console" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
echo $PID


Days went by and was still not able to figure out why the above problem was happening. But then i discovered a strange thing when i expanded the terminal . Check out the picture below,

If you open a new terminal, window resolution will be by default 80×24. That is it has 80 columns. so when you type the above ps -ax command, the output of this command will stretch to columns more than 80. So i probably think there is bug in Terminal.app on Tiger. If you expand the terminal for a bigger view after the ps -ax command, most of the output will be truncated and hence i wasn’t getting the PID. Phew … that’s a weird find but how about the fix?


PID=`ps -ax -w -w -o "pid" -o "command" | grep -i "/Applications/Utilities/Console.app/Contents/MacOS/Console" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
echo $PID


see those “-w ” twice .. well if you man ps command you will know it. After this small tweak in the script everything works fine !

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

It’s all about the amazing diversity of opportunities that people are finding to make money with minimum effort. Even blogging which once started as pass time for many has become a serious money minting business. I recently stumbled upon this post from Wall Street journal “America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026415808636575.html#articleTabs%3Darticle. As said in this article , there are 452,000 people using blogging as their primary source of income !!  That’s a staggering number, wonder if this is because of the buzz word these days called “RECESSION”  . Of course,  internet has always been a great source for people to make a living … and to earn without parting away from their home comforts is like an icing on the cake.I have to cite the overused cliche here “Necessity is the mother of all inventions”!

There are couple of websites that caught my attention, using which people from around the world are making money

1. SoftwareJudge.com :-  If your are a computer geek and an avid lover of trying out new software on your system, then why not get paid for all the reviews that you can give. This  is one website that pays you around 50$ per review.

2. Ether.com :- If you are an expert in anything and you have the ability to give advice then this is the website where you get paid it. The site also offers “Call me” buttons for your website or blog as well as some advice on how to market yourself to get more calls.

3. Cash crate : – This is small excerpt from the website itself ” Do you know that companies are paying top-dollar to have users like you try their products and services for free? At CashCrate, we pass that money on to you. Simply complete free offers and get paid without spending a dime!”

Though i haven’t personally tried these websites, i came across articles which had given good reviews against these websites. So if you are trying out any of these mentioned sites, all the very best.

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

Why do we get bored?

I FAIL to understand and would go any length to understand, probably would get many along with me as well to find out … why?  People around me say this a lot, including myself “I’m not working today because …  I’m bored.” But if you think hard on that exact feeling, would lead to perpetual darkness, unable to explain anything about it.  Wonder if its because of the kind of work we are involved in. There would be a day or two when inertia overpowers us.

Trying to unearth this mystery, i sought for a Medical explanation as to why we get this feeling? I am no Medical student so my easy access was a dictionary. It says “feeling weary because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in one’s current activity.” (was bored & hence this effort.) Even in Medical science there is not much that is known about it, except that boredom is very unpleasant and can only be experienced and cannot be expressed. This finding was completely orthogonal to my imagination as i had thought of some hormones getting drastically low and hence experience boredom. It is believed by some researchers that people experience boredom out of an inability to know what they are feeling and what it is that they really want. This feeling has a new medical term — “Alexithymia” which means inability to know what one’s feelings really are. Well my inference is … if you don’t have any work that keeps you occupied, you get bored. Is it possible that, one can have a situation when there is nothing to do? I tend to disagree. We get bored when we do not want to do, what we are supposed to do.

Now … look at my sorry self , got bored in what-ever work I was involved in, started writing this blog so as to make myself understand or rather  incoherently as to why I got bored, trying desperately to change my mental state  and probably you too got bored in what you were involved in, looking out for a change, began reading my blog and that state is called BOREDOM.

aah ..! truly a long one but what the heck..? I was bored

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

You might ask me … So What ?? Well i would be more than happy to answer that.  Did you know that when you take a photo with a digital camera, a truck load of background information is embedded into the file called Exchangeable image file format (EXIF   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format) metadata, including when the photo was taken, the make and model of the digital camera, the exposure, shutter speed, lens focal length, whether the flash fired, and some other interesting tidbits. Sure, if you have nothing to hide about ,then you should not be worried but still why give away more information ?

Digital cameras save JPEG (.jpg) files with EXIF  data and  Camera settings and scene information are recorded by the camera into the image file. Believe it or not, Preview application on Mac OS X can display all this EXIF metadata — you just have to know where to look.To see the EXIF data for the current image, just press Command-I, then click on the Details tab, and if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a header for EXIF Properties, along with the full scoop on your image.
check the below image that i had taken for its meta data.

This is on Leopard 10.5

This is on Tiger 10.4.10

OK, all said and done … but how can i remove or clean Up the image you want to upload ? No need to get paranoid, you got lots of applications on Windows but i am surprised to see that there not even one good application on Mac . The closest that i could been in getting a tool was SnapCleaner 1.3 and that too its not free !  This application didn’t work for me and hence i wouldn’t recommend it at all. For Windows you can use this small application called JPEG & PNG Stripper
You can also use this website  http://camerasummary.com which is an online EXIF data extractor that provides information.

Next time you have personal photos and want to upload it on to the web especially social networking sites … TAKE CARE !

— Go Green, Save a Tree —

“Beginning with the PowerBook G4 (12-inch, 1.5GHz), PowerBook G4 (15-inch, 1.67/1.5GHz), PowerBook G4 (17-inch, 1.67GHz), and iBook G4 (Mid 2005), Apple portable computers feature a Sudden Motion Sensor. Intel-based Apple portables such as the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air also make use of the Sudden Motion Sensor.” This is text written in Apple website.

Navigate to “About this Mac” by clicking on the Apple symbol on the top left corner of the screen in your Mac Book and click on “More Info…” and you see

Sudden Motion Sensor is designed to detect unusually strong vibrations, sudden changes in position or accelerated movement. If the computer is dropped, the Sudden Motion Sensor instantly parks the hard drive heads to help reduce the risk of damage to the hard drive on impact. If you want in depth understanding about Sudden Motion Sensor visit http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/sms/

There are many applications which make use of SMS ad protect your Mac Book.

1. LockDown – Anti theft system for mac is a Mac security application built from the popular iAlertU. Once your alarm has been set off, your computer will sound a loud alarm and prevent the system from being muted or put to sleep. http://www.foozoodesign.com/lockdown.html

2. iAlertU – AlertU is the first of its kind alarm system for your Apple MacBook computer.  Basically iAlertU is a car alarm for your Apple Mac. iAlertU uses the built in sudden motion sensor (SMS) device to detect movement of your Apple MacBook and triggers an audible and visual alarm.http://www.slappingturtle.com/home/

3. BumpAlarm 0.9 -BumpAlarm is a program that uses the motion sensors in Apple’s new Powerbooks to trigger various actions when motion is detected. It can be set it to automatically play a sound file, send an email alert, or run an applescript.http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/17684

SMS can also be a source of entertainment to some extent and here are few applications which you can check out.
1. SeisMac —> http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html
2. MacSaber —>http://blog.isnoop.net/2006/06/22/macsaber-11-attack-of-the-backlight/

I actually installed MacSaber and it was fun to play with.

3. Slapbook 0.65 —> http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/22148
4. Liquidmac —> http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/simulation_and_sports/liquidmac.html

Have Fun!!!

— Go Green, Save a Tree —