Spoilers below...

My thoughts on the book — great beginning, great ending, weak middle. From about page 70 to about page 600 was one long camping trip, punctuated by the destruction of Horcruxes at regular intervals. None of the Horcrux chases had anywhere near the level of drama/difficulty of the quest for the Horcrux at the end of Half-Blood Prince. The end, though somewhat predictable and anticlimactic, did tie up most loose ends quite nicely. Some random people died in the book, which I suppose is realistic enough, though lacking a sense of destiny. Certain characters, notably Snape and Dumbledore, were revealed to be not quite as black and white as they had seemed in earlier books. The epilogue was trite and quite unnecessary. All in all, it was a fun read, though given my high expectations, a trifle disappointing.

The Departed showed up from Netflix last week. Still have not watched it; it has reached the stage where I wanted very much to watch it for so long, and now I am not that enthusiastic any more. Happened with Kill Bill Vol. 2 as well, and I still have not watched that movie.

Press: Shouldn't some one stand up and take responsibility?
Dravid: We definitely do take the responsibility. I am not sitting here and trying to shirk responsibility. I am the first one to stand up and say that we should have done better, and it starts with me. I am not trying to put the responsibility on anyone. People are asking me what's the way forward and what do we do. I haven't really thought about stuff like that. Till about 24 hours ago, I truly believed that we will still be in this tournament. I didn't have the time to think what's ahead of us. But I am not trying to say I don't take any responsibility. I take full responsibility for the fact that we haven't progressed to the next round.(from his CricInfo interview)

In this age of spin, it is refreshing to see someone acknowledge where the buck stops. Once again, Rahul Dravid, you make Josephites around the world proud.

In line with popular reason if not popular (and commercial) emotion, India lost to Sri Lanka today in a Group B match. The Sri Lankans were their usual competent selves, and shrugged off a couple of early wickets to post a respectable total. In stark contrast, the Indian batting order — except for Dravid — crumbled in yet another exhibition of mental weakness. It was a perfect example of what Americans call "choking".

It was clear in the match today that the Indian bowling can perform respectably and yet the supposedly strong batsmen let it down time and again. Granted our bowling attack is not what I would call top-class, but our batting is way over-hyped. The sign of a good batting team is consistency, not sporadic outstanding performances. India's batsmen are certainly talented, yet there is no sign of grit and determination which so many teams show in their lower middle order. I wonder if we can ever build that up; do other teams get it from training, from the way their first-class cricket works, or is it something cultural? Until we figure that out, all the talent we can cull from a population of over a billion may be doomed to fail.

This time around, all my classes are at the Homewood campus, which means fewer 7:30 a.m. shuttle trips to the medical school. My classes are covering material completely new to me and closely related to my research interests -- should be a fun semester! I am also working on a very interesting rotation looking at gene regulation for Dr. Beer.

Google Talk (from this Adium bug tracker entry):

• Change port to 443
• Enable "Allow plaintext authentication" and "Force old-style SSL"

MSN:

• Enable "Connect via HTTP"

My Dear Beloved,

I'm Mr. Desmond Tutu, it's my delight to email you this business deal. I'm the west african regional freight officer with a belgium shipping company having a new branch office in Accra Ghana.

On the 30th of November 2006,our office here in Accra Ghana despatched 14consignments into USA but only 11 was successfully delivered while others were kept in the U.S storage vault impending the rightful claims through my good office as the sole signatory to this very consignments.

My dear friend, one of the unclaimed consignments belonging to Mr.George Koshy contains cash of $14.7million USD, the cash is unknown to the U.S authority because the silver metallic trunk boxes where neatly package here in Ghana under my supervision before there despatch. This consignments has been lying there for five weeks now, please can you assist to receive the consignment if am able to change the ownership manifest record keeping from George Koshy to your detailed information?

I'm also willing to pathway with 50% of the total sum as my percentage once you're ready to corperate with me in order to inherit the african valuable treasures and liquid cash of $14.7m.if my situation interest you, please reply by email for processing the claims in your favour.

Yours truly,M
Mr. Desmond Tutu.

We have really reached a low point when Nigerian scammers are using a Nobel Peace Prize awardee's name as their alias. What does Bishop Tutu have to do, register a trademark?

Still, I gathered up my courage to visit the Eisenhower Library at JHU today, so I could have a quiet place to study. After figuring out how to connect to the wifi network, I found there were plenty of vacant study tables, probably due to most people being away for intersession. As I did not want to be on the main floor with all its distractions, I figured I would find a place on one of the higher floors, preferably by a window. Alas, Eisenhower has no higher floors! So I am now two floors underground, surrounded by unoccupied carrels and imposing bookshelves. Nothing like loneliness to complete the feeling of inadequacy. Guess I have no choice but to actually do some work. Weird — my mission in coming to the library was successful!

Milton S. Eisenhower Library, JHU

Why not Apple Mail?

When I first got my Macbook, I started using Apple Mail. There were a few things that I did not like:

• Mail does not perform well once there are a few hundred emails in a folder.
• I had some problems getting signatures to associate correctly with accounts.
• It stores email in a proprietary emlx format, which then requires a special converter to export your email.

Why not Thunderbird?

On my previous systems (either Windows or Linux), I always used Mozilla Thunderbird. It is open-source and very well supported, and one cannot really argue about its price. Furthermore, it is really easy to get data in and out of Thunderbird. Unfortunately, Thunderbird on the Mac behaves much like ... Thunderbird on Windows. In order to be truly cross-platform, it does not use basic OS X facilities like Spotlight and Address Book. This failure to use OS-native facilities also applies to Mozilla Firefox, but I still use Firefox for its excellent collection of extensions.

Why Entourage?

For a little over a month, I have been using Microsoft Entourage as my primary e-mail application. For those of you who have never used a Mac, Entourage is the Microsoft Office for Mac equivalent of Outlook. As far as I know, Entourage uses a completely separate codebase, and there are certainly feature disparities between it and Outlook.

The best part of Entourage is that it is a true Macintosh application. It inserts entries into the Spotlight database, making finding emails very easy. You can also use Applescript to automate frequently used tasks, and very easily bind them to a keyboard shortcut (more on that in a second). You can set it up to sync with iCal and/or Address Book, which is useful if you use iSync.

Entourage is not perfect by any means. It is a behemoth of an application and it stores data in a proprietary database format, much like Outlook. What is different is the ease with which you can import and export data. Want to export a folder of e-mails as an mbox file? Just drag and drop the folder to a Finder window. Want to do the reverse? Drag and drop works for that too!

Entourage is still not a Universal Binary, but that should be fixed later this year in the new version of Microsoft Office. For now, it runs fine through Rosetta, and is generally more responsive than its Office brethren Word and Excel. Perhaps that is what not being encumbered by a legacy codebase does for you.

A new filing system

Thanks to Spotlight's excellent search capabilities and Entourage's Applescript integration, I have done away with the complex hierarchy of folders I was using to save my e-mail. Inspired by Sharon Sarmiento's 7 Ways to Tame Your Inbox, I now have just three: Inbox, Sent and Archive. All new e-mail arrives in the Inbox and either gets deleted, move immediately to the Archive folder, or gets moved after I have performed some action on it. So, my Inbox generally has all new e-mail plus old messages that I need to act on. All other e-mail that I want to retain is in the Archive folder. I also have an Applescript set up to use Ctrl-A to move messages to the Archive folder (for you Windows folks, Apple-A is what does Select All on a Mac). This minimalist approach saves me time both while filing away e-mails and while searching for them, since I no longer have to decide where something goes and then remember what decisions I made in the past.

I spent today recovering from my exertions in the big city. :)

In any case, here is a highlight reel showcasing Iverson's amazing ability to use his speed to more than compensate for his lack of size. Hope he finds himself in a team which can actually win a few games.

My new Macbook is working great. The Microsoft Office suite runs like a bear, and there is no hope of improvement until Office 2007 is released in late 2007. Apart from that, OS X has been rock stable (knock on wood), though I had to do a quick Archive-and-Install when I screwed up Rosetta with Monolingual. I am glad I did not wait for the new Core 2 Duo Macbooks, which are still expected sometime before the holidays but not here yet.

Came across this Calvin and Hobbes strip in my sister's copy of "It's a Magical World". Thought it summed up nicely how the realities of the lives we make for ourselves constrict the breadth of our experience, even as adults.

(From this searchable archive of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips)

I am debating whether to buy Microsoft Office for Mac. I can get it for the educational price of $150; however, it is only available as a PowerPC binary, not a so-called Universal Binary compiled for the Intel Macs. I hope Microsoft gets their act together and releases a recompiled version soon.

Saw this beautiful place in San Francisco when I was there in 2002. The house overlooks the Palace of Fine Arts down the hill.

Advantages so far:

• Great Gmail interface
• 2 GB storage per account, more than what I had at Lunarpages
• Integration with other Google services like Google Talk

Things that are not so good:

• Gmail Notifier does not work with hosted accounts
• No way to import old email (GML and gExodus work fine, but do not preserve timestamps)

$h_X-Spam-Level contains "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"+++++++/dev/null$h_X-Spam-Level contains "XXXXXXXXXX"+++++++spam@genebrew.com

add_header all Level _STARS(X)_

Other potentials of interest: John McCain (palatable Republican), Jeb Bush (time to move to Canada), Rick Santorum (time to move to Antarctica) and Barak Obama (Democrats are desperate for any sign of personal charisma).

I am back in the US after a short 3-week trip home. Bangalore has changed quite a bit in the past four and a half years since I was there last. Plenty of development and plenty of traffic driven by the booming Indian economy. Anyway, now that I am back, I hope to do some more hacking with Cytoscape.

1. Create a new project using "Checkout Project from CVS", using the information at the bottom of the Cytoscape download page.Make sure you create a new Java project after checking out from CVS. Designate src as a source directory and use a name other than bin for the project output directory (there is already a bin directory in CVS).
2. Add all the JARs in the lib directory of your new project. You should then have no compile errors.
3. Create directories called fake_src, fake_src/cytoscape and fake_src/cytoscape/view.
4. Symlink or copy the resources directory to fake_src/cytoscape.
5. Symlink or copy the images directory to fake_src/cytoscape and to fake_src/cytoscape/view.
6. Symlink or copy the help directory to fake_src/cytoscape
7. Modify the build properties of your project and designate fake_src as a source directory.
8. Create a "Java Application" run configuration that uses the cytoscape.CyMain as the main class.
9. Run it!

The above steps essentially duplicate the actions in the run target of the ant build file, except for the compile and copying of resources/images/help files that Eclipse does for us automatically.

On the other hand, I do not see much difference from Fedora. Most of the desktop related improvements are flowing upstream into Gnome, and some improvements such as Fedora's NetworkManager are missing. Fedora is better supported for Java development by jpackage; I can find no such Java package repository for Ubuntu. Multimedia and "non-free" packages are not included in either distribution (Gentoo beats both in sheer package coverage).Finally, I am heartened by the fact that much the same people who work on the enterprise-class RHEL also work on Fedora, and bring at least some of the associated QA mentality to their Fedora work.

For instance, since the release of Hoary, there has not been a single kernel update on Ubuntu. My experience on Fedora was quite different; my low uptimes were invariably due to new kernels with security fixes. Perhaps the current hiatus is due to Linus' SCM issues; otherwise, despite shipping a very recent (relatively unstable and untested from a security standpoint) kernel, Ubuntu is not keeping it up to date.

• A lot of the applications I like from Linux are also available on Windows (Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org to name three).
• As the "tech support" guy for my family and friends, I felt lost in Windows XP, where things were just that slightly different from Windows 2000 (the last Microsoft OS I ran).
• I like to play games to burn off steam and I was tired of fighting with Cedega to get them to work.
• DVD burning is much easier in Windows, especially with applications like Nero.

There will definitely be tradeoffs though: Windows XP is nowhere as friendly to developers who do not use .NET or Java. I am not looking forward too much to wrestling with Perl and R on XP. Windows XP is not a hacker's OS, in the original sense of the word "hacker" anyway.

Let us see how long this episode lasts.

Well, KDE 3.3 is more of the same - very customizable, but somehow not as clean looking as Gnome. It may just take some time to get it looking and working the way I like. Also, though KDE/Qt applications were far ahead of Gnome/GTK, that is no longer true. Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim are killer apps for Gnome. Yes, I know that you can run apps based on any toolkit in both environments, but I like seeing all my apps look and feel alike.

• deathdruid is a nickname I often use online, not an indication of how I have morbid tendencies. Not that I don't.
• There will be no emotional outpourings or soulsearching here. Just some stuff about science, technology, and possibly even the real world.
• I will strive to sound like someone who actually went to college, rather than those teen blogs that sound like they were published by SMS.

That's all for now. Off to dinner.