Background backups-way of Life

I was in Blacksburg last week and my laptop hard disk crashed after meeting my advisor. Karma :( Anyways, I was there stuck in Blacksburg with my Time Machine backup at home (in MD). My code was backed up regularly (not out of choice) only because my code needs to run on another machine for benchmarking. I lost a day installing everything on a spare laptop and then spent time figuring out everything I worked on before meeting my advisor. I had not obviously backed up before meeting him.

That made me look for a better solution. As usual, Manas had a better solution. His quote "Backup should be a background process. You shouldn't think of backing up. It has to be integrated in your work flow."I think I should I have an archive for his quotes that always seem to be apt for the situation. [:P]

I eventually got my Hard disk replaced at the local Apple store and restored everything from Time Machine. Manas suggested this solution, which IMHO is the best.

Step 1: Get yourself a Dropbox account (available for Mac, Linux and Windoze)

Step 2: Link your laptop to your account. You will see a Dropbox folder.

Step 3: On Linux and Macs: create a symbolic link to your folders you want to backup and place it in your Dropbox folder.

cd YourDropboxfolder

ln -s $HOME/Documents

ls -la

Documents -> $HOME/Documents

Sit back and relax. Everything gets backed up automatically.

Bonus point: refer your friend and get extra 250MB. Contact me if you want a referral.

Ye Dilli hai mere yaar !!!

I emailed our DC gang about watching Delhi 6 at a theatre nearby. Watching a movie on First day Last show is a thrill in itself. In any case, after a lengthy discussion involving 50 emails over a period of 2 days, 9 of us went to watch Delhi 6 on Friday.

It was an amazing day for me, as I managed to get my stuff to work after a long time. Drove back home in just 4 hours, took a different route to avoid the traffic. Reached home, booted my system (bole to mast nahaaya) and off we went for the movie.

Delhi 6 is a collection of vignettes revolving around Roshan (AB Jr.) the main protagonist of the movie. But it's not the romance between Roshan & Bittu (Sonam as the feisty Dilli ki kudi) that captures your attention. IMHO, it's the ensemble star cast, where everyone has a definite role in taking the movie forward. Waheeda Rehman, Om Puri, Pavan Malhotra, Deepak Dobriyal, Vijay Raaz, Atul Kulkarni, Divya Dutta, Rishi Kapoor, etc..Also not to forget the cute Rama Bua..!!! A R Rahman's music is extraordinary and plays in the background for most of the time letting you enjoy the visuals. Rahman's songs flourish amidst the background of Delhi 6, watch out for the most creative collage of Times Square and Delhi 6. This week Rahman's work will be judged at the Oscars..and Delhi 6 is another award winnning score by the maestro. The movie has a message and though it gets a bit filmy in the end is immensely watchable. Take a bow, Mr. Mehra, this is a worthy follow-up to RDB.

Techie Influence

I had a tough time configuring CUDA on my laptop, ahem CUDA is Compute Unified Device Access (NVIDIA's compiler for general purpose computation on GPU). So I decided to start a blog about my experiences with High Performance Computing. In general AcceleratedComputing will talk about hardware accelerators for HPC.

Also a quick note to myself or to anyone who wants to paste code from TextMate:
1. Open a blank document in TextMate and select "Create CSS from current Theme" from the Gears icon. This will generate a CSS template.
2. If you are using Blogger, go to Layout->Edit HTML and paste the CSS template in the Edit Template section. This ensures that you get the TextMate theme in your blog template.

Happy Valentine's Day !!!

Software necessary for a Grad student

I usually come across so many friends who have questions about what software they need for their laptop. My conversations always end up in a demo showing how to make their laptop use more productive. So I thought of writing a blog to address the question:

"What software do I need on my laptop to make my Grad life more productive?"

(a) Bibliography Manager: First of all as a Graduate student, we are exposed to scientific conference papers/journals. It's always good to come up with a filing system to access all the papers you have read or intend to read at some other time. Most of the times it's all about filing intelligently, so that the next time you don't waste time searching for the correct reference. For Mac OSX, I recommend installing BibDesk. This is a free application and is the best bibliography software on Macs. For Linux or Windows, use JabRef. I will not mention EndNote for Windows, as it relies on proprietary formats.

(b) Typesetting documents: Though MS Word is the most commonly used format to typeset documents, it is not the preferred work flow in most academic institutions. Use Latex to typeset all your documents.

For Mac OSX, keep track of the latest Latex software packages from MacTeX. The MacTeX package includes the Latex distribution, BibDesk, Equation editor, Excalibur (spell checker) and TeXShop (front end). As a side note, I recommend TextMate for advanced Latex users.

You can install Latex on Windows using MiKTeX. The front end TeXnicCenter is very useful and integrates well with Windows. This way you can avoid installing Cygwin on your Windows laptop for Latex.

Latex is inbuilt on all Linux distros. I have used Kile on a FC/Ubuntu box and have enjoyed the experience.

(c) Diagrams: I use OmniGraffle for making all diagrams on Mac OSX. I have used Dia on Linux machines and found it to be a very good application. Visio may count as a good alternative on Windows machines, though I don't use it.

I will keep updating this blog as and when I find interesting software that's a must for Grad students. Hope someone finds this blog useful. Thanks to MT for his guidance :)

Era of social networking

It has become a habit to glance through my emails the first thing in the morning. However, an in-depth reading of the emails and the daily news on my laptop flopped today because of the flaky internet connection. I restarted my desktop, power cycled the modem and the router a couple of times. Nothing worked. Finally I checked the important stuff using my iPhone. Thanks to Apple's wonderful device.
After all the email checking and reading the news updates, I decided to call Comcast and report the outage. The Comcast rep took my info and gave me a service ID saying that the next available technician would come between 8-11 am on Monday. In any case, I decided to twitter about my internet service down due to Comcast. I also mentioned if anyone knew about Comcast sending a technician on Saturday. Surprisingly, within minutes, I had a direct message from ComcastBill asking me to send my info. I sent my info and ComcastBill tweeted that the Comcast service was down at my zipcode and would be up in some time.
Thanks to twitter, the world is a smaller place. Everything is connected. I wonder if Twitter will replace the SMS feature on internet enabled phones?? I think it's time for me to upgrade to Tweetie on my iPhone.

Memory upgrade

My current work requires compiling programs in emulation mode and I started seeing my Macbook slowing. Promptly I decided to upgrade the RAM on my MB. Dealram has always provided good deals on RAMs for laptops and desktops. I bought a 1GB RAM module in 2007 Feb for 67$ from 18004memory.com I was surprised to see that the same RAM module cost me only $14 now in 2009. This suggests that laptop memory is getting cheaper by the day. 

Transposing the value of computer memory to human memory value it's exactly the opposite. Humans cherish the value of memory. Older the memory, priceless it is !!! Also the price of memory increases as we get older, as our memory retention decreases. So if our memory were to be traded in the stock market, we would see our investment doubling over time. The assumption is that we are involved in good deeds, etc. 

Happy Makar Sankranti !!!

2 different movies offering a glimpse of everyday life

I watched 2 movies over the weekend: Mumbai Meri Jaan and Thirakatha. MMJ is a movie depicting the effects of the Mumbai train blasts that happened in 2006. Excellent casting coup that features Paresh Rawal, Soha Ali Khan, Kay Kay Menon, Madhavan, Irfan Khan. This movie gives an insight into the workings of the Mumbai Police, unfair media coverage of the blast victims, Hindu-Muslim divide, trauma of traveling in trains after a bomb blast and finally the poor man's take on such blasts. I liked the actor who has played the constable's role, who is disgusted with the working of the Mumbai Police. Must watch movie !!!

Thirakatha is a malayalam movie by Ranjith that explores the life of a yesteryear film actress. Again a wonderful movie that includes a cameo by the director as well. The last monologue by Prithviraj lingers on: "Life is like a screenplay with lots of actors who do not know their roles and continue to act without the guidance of a proper director." Though this is not a word-to-word translation, I have tried capturing it's gist. Another must watch movie !!!