After editing a file, you discover that its mode won't allow you to save.
Then you do:

:w !sudo tee % > /dev/null

I was looking for some information on Srinivasa Ramanujan, that I stumbled upon this post at y! answers.

Mathematician Ramanujan. The greatest ever.

Born 22 December 1887(1887-12-22)
Erode, Tamil Nadu, India
Died 26 April 1920 (aged 32)
Chetput, (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India

Residence
British India,
United Kingdom

Fields Mathematician

Alma mater
Trinity College, Cambridge
Academic advisors G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood
Known for Landau-Ramanujan constant

Mock theta functions
Ramanujan prime
Ramanujan-Soldner constant
Ramanujan theta function
Ramanujan's sum
Rogers-Ramanujan identities

Ramanujan and his theorems are referred to in Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, a biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash.
He is the subject of David Leavitt's new novel The Indian Clerk, released September 2007. The novel is set during Ramanujan's sojourn in England, where he went at the invitation of Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlewood.
He was referred to in the film Good Will Hunting as an example of mathematical genius.
His biography was highlighted in the Vernor Vinge book The Peace War as well as Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.
The character Amita Ramanujan in the CBS TV series Numb3rs (2005–) was named after him.[90]
The short story "Gomez", by Cyril Kornbluth, mentions Ramanujan by name as a comparison to its title character, another self-taught mathematical genius.
In the novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis, Ramanujan is one of the characters.
In the novel Earth by David Brin, the character Jen Wolling uses a representation of Sri Ramanujan as her computer interface.
In the novel The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, a young mathematical genius is referred to as "my little Ramanujan" accidentally. Then it is hoped the young man doesn't get the connection because, like Ramanujan, the boy is doomed to die prematurely.
The character "Yugo Amaryl" in Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation is based on Ramanujan.[citation needed]
The theatre company Complicite has created a production based around the life of Ramanjuan called A Disappearing Number - conceived and directed by Simon McBurney
The PBS television show Nova episode "The Man Who Loved Numbers", about Ramanujan, was first broadcast on March 22, 1988.
The Helix comic book series Time Breakers features Ramanujan as a character. In the story, his meeting with Hardy was made possible by the time travelling main characters, who know that Ramanujan's discoveries are vitally important to their own work and ensure that his work at Cambridge will unfold as history demands.
The eponymous character in J.M.Coetzee's novel 'Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons' uses Ramanujan to discuss God, reason and being human.

Step#1 in programming: understand people.      - Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel

At last my desktop computer running FC2 was able to play movies from VCD. VLC did the trick and I had to spend considerable time with it to make it play.

1) vlc vcd:///dev/hdc
2) next to scroll bar there was chapter button. Click on that so that it does not finish with the advertisements only.

Good Will Hunting was an 'okay' movie.  It was trying to be a sentimental, emotional one. But there were lots of loop holes. Well movies as such have lots, but this was a little extra special in terms of mathematical genius janitor who is an autodidactic and considers himself correct all the times. Robin Williams plays the psychologist part and tries to help him find his way. Which you can expect in a movie, would be to get back to his heroine with whom he had a break-up. Thats following his heart.

I liked the slangs used, the boston country side and bars potrayed and the joke the heroine shares in bar with friends.  :-)

A very good speech given by J.K. Rowling to the students of Havard. This reminds of the famous Steve Jobs speech too. But there is something observable in J.K.Rowling's concluding part. It is same that Harry says to Hermoine in the "Order of the Phoenix" as the answer to the question, "What do we have that the dark lord voldemort does not and envies?"

I was very eager to watch the clash between Roger Federer and Rafeal Nadal in the French Open Finals 2008. Was expecting if Roger will pull it and shrug off his bad patch for a quite a sometime now.
But, everyone seemed dismayed at Roger making so many mistakes. Something was not quite going well with him. Lack of practice on clay court? Could be, because he mis-judged the length of shot so many times.

Many news over the web is focusing on Roger's worst defeat.

Few snippets caught my eyes.

Asked by one of his more obtuse inquisitors to imagine that a "little fairy" would come up to him next season offering only a single grand slam and asking which, of Roland Garros and Wimbledon, he would like to win, Federer snapped: "I don't want to answer these stupid questions any more. I want to win everything, I have no preference."

Well, if he were his normal self, I feel, he would have answered it , "I would prefer to win everything, its not that I want to win everything."

Another interesting note was this one:

Federer's third successive defeat in the Roland Garros final to Nadal was the worst of his career.

Tellingly, the 22-year-old Spaniard avoided his traditional roll of celebration on the red clay of Court Philippe Chatrier at the moment of victory.

"It was tough for Roger and I have to be respectful with one very good guy," said Nadal of a man who, with his 27th birthday just around the corner, is running out of time to claim an elusive French Open to add to his 12 Grand Slam titles.

The match and watching these two guys sometimes gives the hint to me that qualities like hard-work comes foremost for anything and it is difficult to maintain ones composure (without hardwork ) when he/she is on a testing ride.

What can be said of RF on hard work? I have heard that he practices 1500 balls on a single shot to get it right.

It is well explained in this article.

It is the lexical analyzer that takes care of the indentation and not the python parser. Lexical analyzer maintains a stack for the indentation.
1) First for no indentation, it would stored 0 in the stack [0]
2) Next when any Indentation occurs, it denotes it by token INDENT and pushes the indent value to the stack[0]. Think of it as a beinging { brace in the C program. And if we visualized, the can be only one INDENT statement per line.
4) When de-indent occurs in a line, as many values are popped out of the stack as the new reduced indentation till the value on the top of the stack is equal to new indentation (if not equal, error) and for each value popped out a DEDENT token in written. (Like multiple end }} in C)

A simple code like this

if x:
   if true:
      print 'yes'
print 'end'

Would be written as:

<if><x><:>                           # Stack[0]
<INDENT><if><true><:>  # Stack [0,4]
<INDENT><print><'><yes><'> # Stack [0,4,8]
<DEDENT><DEDENT><print><'><end><'> #Stack[0]

The parser would just consider the as <INDENT> as { of the block and  <DEDENT>  as } of the block would be able to parse it as logical blocks.

That was a well written article again.

I have voted for Python.

I seriously say to you that business or job as an engineer is not the thing for me. It is totally foreign to my nature and radically opposed to my temperament and opinions. Physics is my line. I know I shall do great things here. For, each man can do best and excel in only that thing of which he is passionately fond, in which he believes, as I do, that he has the ability to do it, that he is in fact born and destined to do it. My success will not depend on what A or B thinks of me. My success will be what I make of my work. Besides, India is not a land where science cannot be carried on.[1]

I am burning with a desire to do physics. I will and must do it sometime. It is my only ambition. I have no desire to be a 'successful' man or the head of a big firm. There are intelligent people who like that and let them do it. I hear you saying 'But you are not Socrates or Einstein'. No — and that is what Berlioz's father said to Berlioz. He called him a useless musician when he was young — Hector Berlioz who now accepted as one of the world's greatest geniuses and France's greatest musician. How can anybody else know at what time what one will do, if there is nothing to show. ... It is no use saying to Beethoven 'You must be a scientist for it is great thing' when he did not care two hoots for science; or to Socrates 'Be an engineer; it is work of intelligent man'. It is not in the nature of things. I therefore earnestly implore you to let me do physics.[5]
~Homi Bhabha
in a letter to his father.

Folks who love Unix have a habit of attaching a fortune cookie along with their signatures. I was missing it when using MS Outlook. So, I figured out a way to get the fortune cookie attached to MS Outlook signature.



1) Install QLiner Quotes Software.
2) Download QLiner_fortune.

This is a modified version of fortune database for use along with QLiner software.
* Removed all Offensive Cookies. Most often we use MS-Outlook at Office. I don't wish anyone to get fired, but again, if you get fired due to some fortune cookie, I am not responsible.
* Only quotes less than 100 characters are included. Long quotes are bad.
*There is lame program oneliners.py which I wrote to convert to fortune database files to suit the QLiner. Modify it and use it, if you wish.

3) Go to C:\Program File\QLiner\Quotes\files
4) Remove the existing files (or keep them if you would wish to) and copy the files from the QLiner_fortune to this directory.
5) Use the Configuration Wizard to choose your interest.

There you go!

"I don't know, " said the voice on the PA, "apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all. "

Got my BSNL UT300R2U USB Drivers working on Windows XP. My previous attempts were futile. This time, one of these files did it right.
usbdriver when installed was asking me to plug in the USB device. I plugged out/in a couple of times, did not see any recognition of USB device.
Then installed model dlls, using the Windows Add/Remove wizard that turned up.
In a couple of minutes, I found USB Modem connection working and later the installshield of the usbdriver also finished the installation.

Now, I have two connections from the single modem. Ethernet going to Linux box (Goofy) and USB connection to Laptop (Dogbert).

Thank you retupmoc, for the USB cable.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ~ Arthur C. Clarke.

Tank Pit Stop in operation. The video is very good and shows how a Robotic arm neatly opens the fuel tank, fills in petrol and closes it. This is already implemented in Netherlands.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was the guru of Transcendental Meditation technique. There are many different meditation techniques in the world. Meditation is a concept for your thoughts, which is similar physical exercise is for body.

Transcendental Meditation is one of them and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi pioneered it. I learned it when I was in 10th standard,16 years old and practiced it till my first year at job when I was in tech-support department at Dell, 23 years old. I feel, I had started meditation, because I wanted to improve my marks and achieve big things :-) and pursued it for 7 years intermittently, constantly getting confused with many things, without achieving the purpose of marks and big things. During this time, the Meditation activity also took me into religion and other spiritual activities in the related sphere and I got easily influenced by them also. My interests included, Sri Ramakrishna Mutt, Swami Vivekananda, Osho, temples and various different philosophical reading.

It was when doing night-shifts at work that I did not get time for these and because during the day time with whatever time I got, I wanted to study and prepare for a move to software department that my interests in these started to fade away. I think, being in Bangalore than in Madurai (where you have lot of temples and average interest in spiritual things is very high) and away from some friends who had shared my previous interests also led to this change. I was also disgusted with wrong paths which people might follow, if they just pray to god and not do the required work in trying to achieve what they wanted. So many nearby examples and sometimes myself included were in my mind. So, I simply kind of gave it up.

Our interests change at different points in time. Right now, I do physical exercises everyday, enjoy it without any aim for marks or achieving big things.

When thinking about the subject of meditation sometimes, I feel that it can be equated to exercises for your thoughts and it should not be a heavy subject however and should definitely not be linked with many things.

There are lots of article on Mahesh Yogi, Beatles involvement and Mahesh Yogi's achievements in field of meditation under the entertainment section of the news today.

Newspaper around the world are reporting the Scotland Yard's finding that Benazir Bhutto's death was caused by head injury while was trying to duck down on hearing the bomb blast. This while supports Pakistan Government ( Musharaf's) claims, but contradicts the initial reports which came from hospital that she was shot dead.
Well, Scotland yard can be considered to add value to investigation and might be considered a neutral party.
But how much can one trust Scotland Yard?

We have to remember recent incidents like Bob Woolmer's death mystery and where Scotland Yard could not help much. Are systems so primitive that it cannot find the exact reason for the death? Or is the media and political pressure playing a part that makes the investigators so vulnerable to say incomplete reports? On Woolmer incident, which world has forgotten now, I appreciate his wife's stance wherein she got over and started focusing on whats next.

The same, I think, should be done by supports of Benazir Bhutto. Instead of arguing over the reasons for death, hold your claim, sufficiently trust someone and move ahead to achieve what she wanted for Pakistan, ideals like liberty and justice.

Whether we follow or not, Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy is as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.
I went to a hotel called Rasam at Chennai along with my cousin. It was a Kongunadu style,the karaikudi area in Tamil Nadu and it had a display of historic newspaper clippings. One newspaper clipping was on Indian Independence and titles ran large with details and the photos of the ministers sworn in.

There was a small column however there that Mahatma Gandhi was in a village where in he was helping the riot affected people and he observed Independence Day by fasting, spinning, prayer. This is truly inspirational of a great leader.Dr. Kalaam also mentions about this incident in his books.

Quote of the day:

"Whatever we do might be insignificant, but it is very important that we do it" - Gandhi

Richard Branson along with Bert Rutan unveil Virgin Galactic. The report says it is 60 percent complete and flights are scheduled from Mexico. Good going, Virgin empire.

Some notes we take save us a lot of time at an later date. This post at my older blog,
cdrecord in Fedora Core 2 saved me a couple of hours of research today.

This video shows "Robbie, the eBot" doing the grab and the drop action.