How do you take a 2D photograph and create a 3D scene out of it? When you take a 2D photograph the depth information is inherently loss. However when we see 2D photograph our brains can actually still perceive and estimate depth information, for example, a tree is in front and house is about 10 feet in the back and mountain is very far even though the photograph doesn't have any depth information in it at all. Using machine learning it is possible to partially recover and estimate depth information just like our brains does. For this, the team at Stanford has achieved very convincing results: first they divide the photograph in multiple segments and then applies several image processing filters for each segment to extract information such as blurriness, texture variation, shading etc. Then they create some training shots by sending out a robot toy car with laser light to get some sample scenes and actual depth information in the scene (they also use computer generated scenes to train the model). Then they feed this training data to algorithm based on Marcov Random Field to train the model. Each photograph is nothing but a connected graph of these segments as nodes and MRF fits quite well to operate on this graph using properties and connection of node as input and depth as output. Try out some photos you have taken at their website.

On unrelated note, there is an effect called Hitchcock Zoom where camera moves closer (or away) but in a way so that the subject size remains same by reducing (or increasing) zoom. As this is very counter intuitive for our visual system it provides for an interesting effect :).

The Observing Blog at S&T have posted this wonderful movie about celestial dance of some of the brightest objects in sky in August and September 2008, just after sunset. Unfortunately, for us in mid-northern latitudes (and especially Seattle weather), things won't be as bright and high but having these objects "collide" with each other and that too with crescent moon around looks beautiful!

I’d been attempting to post this entry right from inside Word 2007 Beta 2, but no luck so far interfacing with dasBlog. But the good thing is that most Office 2007 apps seems to be now blog and RSS aware. You can manage your blogging accounts right inside the Word or OneNote, although few things like pinging Technorati is missing.

The coolest thing in Office 12 is, though, new math related functionality. Now you can insert math equation in Word with rendering quality that matches LaTex (well, most of the time in Beta 2). The equation can be entered very interactively or in linear format which also allows TeX like symbol naming convention such as \alpha, \to, \infty and so on.  Full TeX syntax however is not yet supported and some features such as equation numbering is missing in this release. But the interactive UI to build equations is pretty funcky. You can align equations and form equation array by using shift+Enter key and right clicking on ‘=’ symbol.

Even cooler is the fact that this functionality is available from any Office app. So you can actually start writing equation in your emails and Excel sheet! The equations are converted in to png file when sent in an email so even the lousy email reader can handle it.  For example, here’s the Prime Number Theorem typed in Outlook 2007 is rendered as png image like this:

Andrei Burago working in with authoring team demoed this awesome power of Word12 and set out to rewrite my entire paper on twin primes just using Word 2007 (which I had written originally in TeX)!

The Ribbon bar is ultra cool and has replaced both menus and toolbar. This might drive you nuts however when you are trying to find some usual stuff such as list of recent files, print preview and so on. The trick is to click on Office symbol on upper left corner (hack, who would have known that!). The Lookout doesn’t seem to work any longer in Outlook 2007 but the instant searching is pretty satisfactory once you give it sometime to index stuff.

About a year and half ago, the new version of Groove had came out and it still didn't had an ability export IMs. It drove me nuts so I started to write my own Groove tool that would do it in excuse to explore its infamous internals. Ah! What a ride that was! Groove APIs have extremely huge surface area (which means there are thousands and thousands of them sprinkled all over in hard to find places). Tons of them have confusing names, misleading functionalities and put in the wrong place. The fun part? There is almost no documentation! And yeah, did I forgot to mention that they are heavy C++ oriented, frequently late bound and mostly proprietary stuff (they even have their own proprietary definition for rich text and APIs!)?

If your brain needs some challenge that's the place to dig in to. After sacrificing my 3 weekends I finally had a working tool that exports Groove IMs and put them to Outlook without loosing formatting or attachments! I consider this an equivalent feat of removing nag dialog of WinZip by changing a x86 jump instruction in its disassembled binary using only Visual Studio debugger and absolutely nothing else ;).

This tool had been sitting on my hard drive crying to get out for months and months. In between, I did some polishing up, adding wizards, support for Word and Excel, creating a help file and even created a website for it. So now I think it’s pretty much ready and have decided to give it away for free personal use (similar tools cost $50 something I guess). Check it out if you use Groove and want to save your invaluable messages! Call it laziness or ignorance or whatever but I really do feel guilty not to putting this out early when 3.0 came out and lot of people SO need it!

It's easier to run.

Okay... the (big) news time: We have moved out to all the way to the opposite coast and I've started my new work at Microsoft! More details will follow as I get some time from double pressure of moving and brand new job but suffice to say that Microsoft is possibly the ultimate geek destination on the planet and it shows up in all kind of little things. Lot of organizations out there fail to see the tremendous advantages of integration and try to mix and match in the hope they would get the best of both worlds. In reality they end up using only the lowest common denominator that exist between both worlds. Microsoft technologies are driven to its maximum at the MS campuses and its perhaps the best showcase for the power of these technologies. In other news, the fall colors in Seattle area is much vivid and really bright from what I used to see on east coast and something we thought we would be missing at this Evergreen State ;). This place rocks!

UPDATE: Check out my article on detailed HowTo for this topic.

A weekend worth of effort has paid off so I can finally write about this equation. For those who wants to write about mathematics in their blogs knows what I'm talking about. Quite ironically, there is no built-in support for writing math equations in HTML. Of all types of knowledges, mathematics is something that remains invariant over time, cultures, languages. But the fact that the Internet, the largest knowledge resource of our times, does not yet have the capability to easily represent theses crown jewels is ironic.

That got to be changed. Thanks to John Forkosh who authored MimeTeX, the C code that parses equations in TeX format and renders them in to images. The code could be compiled as CGI executable to run under Windows. But my goal is different. I want to enable all forums, blogs, wikis and even desktop apps like Yahoo/MSN messenger so users can quickly write math equations. Considering some of forums and wikis have thousands of simultaneous users, the CGI executable just won't cut it. Neither it's usable for integration with desktop apps. So my decision was to convert original MimeTex code in to Win32 DLL and that's were the trouble begins (and weekend plans ends). I realized the MimeTeX code had several memory leaks which don't matter that much when you run it as a CGI EXE but could bring down the server if I'd to run it in-proc. Fortunately I was able to fix those leaks in just a weekend worth of effort and finally have my C# test app talking to MimeTeX Win32 DLL and displaying equations as I type! However the coolest part of the whole process was the long long emails with John Forkosh over next few days discussing every change I made in his code, carefully scrutinizing it, sending back and forth our changes to each other. While John would be updating his distro soon, you can download the code with fixes along with VB.Net and C# samples, DLL for desktop apps and my HttpHandler HttpModule code. This will enable you to integrate this functionality in any website or desktop app and let your users write equations as simply as:

Fermat's Last Theorem is <img src="$x^n + y^n = z^n$">

And Now without further ado, here's the answer to life, the universe and everything (and no, it's not 42):

Known as Euler's Identity, this equation reflects the relationship between four most fundamental numbers in the universe. There are not many important mathematical and physical equations where , or hasn't invaded yet and that in essence implies that these fundamental constants very tightly controls the ways the universe works (did you noticed ). So in nutshell, this equation just might be the concise definition of the universe ;).

• If type's constructor (i.e. static constructor) throws an exception, entire type becomes unusable. Any attempt to call any member of that type would result in TypeInitializationException.
• Operator overloading should never be the only way to use the functionality if your code targets 1.x versions of frameworks because VB.Net can't access it without resorting to ugly calls such asop_Addition.
• There is universal symbol for money (a generic version of $, £, ¥ etc) and it's ¤ (U+00A4). If you format the number as currency in culture invariant way then .net attaches this symbol to your number. I just think it's cool to have some universal symbol for money :).
• Simplest way to convert hex number to int:Int32.Parse("1AFF", NumberStyles.HexNumber, null)
• Simplest way to display array of bytes as hex values:BitConverter.ToString(byteArray)
• If you updated something in your computer and suddenly your .Net app behaves bad, it is possible to do automatic rollback.. The .Net Framework keeps track of assemblies that was loaded by any managed app up. This info is stored in an INI file inLocalSettings\Application Data\ApplicationHistoryand is used by .Net Application Restore tool. I think this great debugging aid too.
• In .Net world, zombies are not purely an imagination:

  class Person
  {
  	static object HoldOnToMe;
  
  	~Person()
  	{
  		HoldOnToMe
           = this; GC.ReRegisterForFinalize(this); } } 

• Values types are allocated on stack but not when you have an array of value types. For example,new Int32[100]allocates 100 unboxed integers on heap, not on stack.
• The Finally block is not really always guaranteed to get executed. If any of these 3 special exceptions do happen, code in Finally won't be executed:OutOfMemoryException,StackOverFlowExceptionandExecutionEngineException(I'd be fortunate enough to experience all of these). That means you had created some global kernel objects, they will indeed hang around and may interfere when user restarts your app. BTW, if you see a code likecatch(Exception ex) {...}orcatch{...}, tell the developer that he has committed a sin.
• Apparently GC.Collect() is not always a line of code you should disgust at. You might want to do it especially when you own the process and had created loads of objects which won't be used any further (for example moving on to a new tab in WinForms app). I used this in one of my projects to improve on the memory pressure and was really feeling guilty about it, until recently.

  	GC.Collect();
  	//block my thread till objects needing finalization are done
  	GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
  	GC.Collect();
  

• You should always strong name your assemblies, especially if it is going to be used by assemblies in multiple AppDomains in the same process because only they are shared between domains; otherwise each AppDomain will have it's own copy. Why anyone would have multiple AppDomains, you ask. Well, if you are enabling your app to have 3^rd party plugins, I strongly recommend loading all these plugins in to a separate domain. This way not only you can control the security policy on these plugins but also unload the bad plugins without shutting down your app. This is often overlooked in various plugin architectures for .Net but if you don't do this, you app might go on the same route as IE6.
• If you have enabled your app or website for localization, don't forget to test it with Turkish language. If your thread is having CurrentCulture Turkish (tr-TR) and if you try to uppercase a letter i, you get İ instead of normal english I (i.e. Unicode character U+0130 instead of U+0049). Scott Hanselman has a first hand experience.
• Many of you know Application.ThreadException event which lets you capture the unhandled exceptions in WinForms app and do something like Windows Error Reporting. But the better way is probablyAppDomain.UnhandledExceptionevent because that also lets you get notified for non-CLS compliant exceptions and without needing a reference toApplicationobject.
• The values of public constants that you reference from other assemblies are embedded in your own assembly metadata. That means, if other assembly changes the value of the constant afterwards, you must recompile your own assembly or otherwise you still will be using that old value of the constant. I think this is as critical "bug" as lapsed event handlers.
• Jagged arrays are not CLS compliant. If you are building a library that can be used by VB or C# guys, you can't have jagged arrays as public member type.
• Visual Basic can do this:

  Try
  	...
  Catch e as Exception When
           x = 0 ... End try 

A famous quote from John Von Neumann goes like this,

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

This is something I've intuitively believed since I was 15 and even hadn't heard of Neumann. Pure random numbers is (or probably more) as fascinating concept as ∞ or i. It is impossible to generate sequence of purely random numbers without tapping in to nature. That means I could never write a computer code that generates a sequence of random numbers without showing up absolutely any patterns in a long run. There are only better random generators, never a perfect one, except thy nature itself.

So when I saw an article that digits of Pi are so far empirically proven to be randomly distributed, I was shocked. Infect huge progress has been made to prove that digits of Pi are indeed randomly distributed. Now the fact is, π can indeed be calculated algebraically (i.e. without tapping in to any natural phenomenon) and the idea that this can produce a pure random distribution just gives me a feeling as if sky is falling. I'd been hypothesizing since long time that the ability to generate infinite sequence of pure random numbers is the most significant (and probably the only) property to identify the existence of real universe, if it at all exist, that is ;). Consider this question: How do you know, at this precise moment, that you aren't part of some simulation running on some huge alien computer, or that you aren't some character in StarTrek holosuit or that you aren't dreaming with all these things around you (however "real" they may feel) aren't really "real"? Ok, it's hard to explain what I'm asking you but in nutshell, I'm trying to find out from pure mathematical perspective if there is anything in the nature that I can't masquerade, a property of the physical world around us that is impossible to simulate by any artificial means however sophisticated.

My hypothesis is that this property of the real world is an ability to generate infinite sequence of pure random numbers. That means, if you really want to find out whether you are some simulation running in a giant alien computer, all you have to do is to observe some natural phenomenon over a time with precision P and verify that your readings demonstrate pure randomness over the period of time T, where the P and T depends on sophistication of that alien simulation. The P and T can be very large but can never be infinity, except unless you are in the real world, of course. This is the mathematician's version of "I exist because I think".

So now you know why randomness of digits of pi made my stomach cringe. When I think about it, I'm starting to feel that any transcendental number obtained through convergence of infinite series (lets call them algebric transcendentals or ATs) must indeed have its digits distributed randomly. If you remember Cantor, there are more transcendental numbers than any other kind. But what this really means is I'm able to generate sequence of pure random numbers only using algebric means. It's as simple as finding new AT and emitting its digits. If you were someone who had given lot of thoughts to the nature of random numbers for years, this would sound both frightening and exciting to you. But hold on, could this really be true? After giving this some thought I believe it couldn't possibly be. I've finally constructed the following conjecture:

From a finite sequence of minimum length L of digits of any AT, there exist a Turing machine program G(L) to calculate the next digit in that sequence in finite steps. In other words, for any AT there always exist a number L which is finite and for which G(L) is a computable function.

In simple language, if you just give me sequence of AT's digits I should be able to predict the next digits provided you gave me enough of them to start with. This simply means if the alien computer was trieng to fool you by feeding you digits of some AT as a stream of random numbers, you can just sit back, collect these digits for a while and when you get handful of those, you can run through your algorithm to predict the next digits and find out you are not really in a real world (and also the fact that aliens didn't knew about Shital's AT Conjecture)! So random distribution is not the one and only property to identify a sequence of pure random numbers. The sequence of pure random numbers would not satiesfy this conjecture (i.e. L would be ∞). Infect this should be outright obvious: For sequence of natural numbers 0, 1, 2, ... we have all digits equally distributed but this sequence isn't by any means random.

This also gets us on to something else: the L now becomes a valuable property of an AT. A random number with infinite digits can be considered as a special class of AT with L= ∞. Let's call set of all such number Ρ (greek capital letter Rho) then the cardinality of Ρ should be Aleph-1.

If all of this went over your head, here is fun part: Here you can look it up if your phone number has showed up in digits of pi calculated so far or even your name expressed as hex codes! For example, I can be found in pi at 67357954^th digit ;).

These are interesting questions if you were pursuing an acadamy degree on management/leadership. I do have the answers but don't have enough room here to write it down (Fermat R.I.P.).

1. What a good leader should do when a majority vote is different then his/her strongly held belief?
2. If you must make a choice between hurting your team's goal or ethics, what a good leader should choose?
3. Say your boss wants you and your team to do something that isn't good for your team's goals. After lots of arguments, your boss does not change his/her mind. How would you handle this situation?
4. How a good leader should treat his/her equals in the team? What can you do to harness his/her abilities without producing conflicts in leadership or ego-clash?
5. How a good leader would pass the unpleasant news to the team without hurting the morals and motivation?
6. In certain phase of a project you need your team to heavily overwork for a some period. What are the good things to do to keep the team alive and motivated in such times?
7. Some members of a large team may end up doing boring, repetative and otherwise uninteresting work. How a good leader would recruite them? How to keep them motivated?
8. Statistically 90% of the projects goes over-budget and over-deadlines. Say if you did fell in to these 90%, how would you keep your boss and your team keep going?
9. Communication is of atmost important to the team. But is it good or bad to have lots of discussions?
10. What are the good rules of thumb for good signal-to-noise ratio for team brainstorming sessions?
11. A very capable and essential team member of yours asks you for a raise but you do not have funds. How would you keep him/her?
12. Say you lead a large team and you can't recruite every single team member personally any longer. What are the general good recruiting policies a leader can set up avoid the weak nodes in your team?
13. If you had to choose between following two candidates, what job attributes you would consider for the best match? enthusiatic but unexperienced college grads and less passionate but highly experienced professionals.
14. How a good leader should respond when he/she finds certain team members does not respect or have a belief in him/her?
15. Lets say you came to knew that you might soon become the target for certain mishapes, which weren't really your fault. What would be your exit strategy?

I'd to ditch the grand New York geek dinner to attend a talk on how the Brain makes memories at New York Academy of Sciences. This is my current absolute favorite subject to spend all my free time so I HAD to be there. The talk also turned out to be very energetic, fun and fast paced by Jennifer Mangels of Columbia University. The first part of the talk was about the role of the hippocampus in forming long term memories and her research. What they tried to do was to record EEG signals from different areas of the neocortex when a person tries to memorize something and recall it back later. Her research attempts to imperially prove that different areas of the brain must strongly participate together to have hippocampus realize the importance of the incoming information and form the contextual long term memories. While I really disgust at how everyone in neuroscience these days just do some EEGs and fMRIs and run around to write conclusions, above theory fits well with Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence.

However more interesting was the second part of the talk: The Self Theory of Intelligence. This is very interesting. In 1970s, Carol Dweck did some research on human motivation in school children and noted that some students intrinsically tend to persist in the face of failure while others quit as soon as the going gets rough. After more investigations, she discovered that student's beliefs about the nature of intelligence had a strong connection with the way they approach challenging intellectual tasks: Students who view their intelligence as an unchangeable internal characteristic tend to shy away from academic challenges, whereas students who believe that their intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence seek them out.

Students who hold an "entity" theory of intelligence agree with statements such as "Your intelligence is something about you that you can't change very much."   Since they believe their intelligence is fixed, these students place high value on success.   They worry that failure-or even having to work very hard at something-will be perceived as evidence of their low intelligence. Therefore, they make academic choices that maximize the possibility that they will perform well. For example, a student may opt to take a lower-level course because it will be easier to earn an A.   In contrast, students who have an "incremental" theory of intelligence are not threatened by failure.   Because they believe that their intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence, these students set mastery goals and seek academic challenges that they believe will help them to grow intellectually (Dweck, 1999b).

Dr. Dweck's research on the impact of praise suggests that many teachers and parents may be unwittingly leading students to accept an entity view of intelligence.   By praising students for their intelligence, rather than effort, many adults are sending the message that success and failure depend on something beyond the students' control.   Comments such as "You got a great score on your math test, Jimmy! You are such a smart boy!" are interpreted by students as "If success means that I am smart, then failure must mean that I am dumb."   When these students perform well they have high self-esteem, but this crashes as soon as they hit an academic stumbling block. Students who are praised for their effort are much more likely to view intelligence as being malleable, and their self-esteem remains stable regardless of how hard they may have to work to succeed at a task. (More at her page)

Dr.Mangels then showed some videos demonstrating how EEG patterns differ in these two types of people. This is very significant. It essentially implies that you can device a helmet for a person to wear and after few EEG recordings I would be able to tell if person is in one group or another! Think, interviews would be so different ;).

Recently I observed how unequally I use my right and left hands. It’s not because I don’t type with my both hands but it’s because I use only the right hand in maneuvering and clicking the mouse. Considering the number of clicks I make per day, this huge lack of load-balancing is terrible! So I switched the mouse on left hand and it’s been great (reminds me the first time I hold the mouse) except that my mouse is curved so it’s comfortable only on right hand. I guess I’m gonna get a new mouse which is left+right handed, wireless (easy to switch hands), optical and at least 5 buttons. Don’t forget to reverse the mouse buttons in control panel! This is really fun.

However, besides those sitting posture tips, I think the one factor that strongly affects your creativity at work is how far you can look from your desk.

I guess it's the time to write down bits about Mazda RX-8 for the benefit of future buyers. This is the car we bought in year 2004. I've heard that the 2005 model is exactly the same but I haven't checked it. Anyway lets start the engines!

• This car is a real head turner. I mean REAL. People see BMWs and Mercedes SLK350 and go ahh. This car is beyond that. Here, people not just go ahh but they literally stop you, tell you that they just went ahh and ask details about the car. And by "people" I mean complete strangers of all age and all types (even those truck and SUVs fans). It's not unusual for us to get one such stranger encounter every other week.
• RX-8 has got automatic plus semi manual shifting called "sport" mode.  In sport mode, you can shift gears right on the steering wheel! Also this mode is safe even if you tend to screw up when driving manual.
• This is a rear wheel drive and that means it really sucks on the snow. Actually it sucks more than average rear wheel drives. The semi-manual shifting doesn't help in snow because it looks like the automatic vehicle stability controls is turned off when you switch to manual so it's even more dangerous to manual on snow. When it was snowing heavily for couple of days, I preferred to park my car in parking lot and take the train.
• It's little more above then ground (with those big tires, of course) then most sports car. This helps a lot when you on dirty-rocky road. However you may not cross lanes by going over divider lines like those SUVs do. On the plus side, it doesn't flip over like those SUVs do.
• This car has rotary engines, not cylinders. So terms like V4, V6 doesn't apply to it. It simply doesn't have any pistons. It's fun to explain this to people when their first question for sports cars is "oh, is that V8?".
• The coolest feature that might get peoples jaw dropped for this car is suicide doors. They are extremely cool. We have seen car passing us by and then backing up to us asking "what is that?".
• It's even more fun when you try to get insurance for this car. "How many doors it has?" the agent might ask. It's technically neither 2 door or 4 door! This car defies the common mold.
•  Many reviews I'd read said the trunk space is small. So far we didn't had problems putting our stuff including telescope, guest luggage, caving gear and what not.
• If you frequently go outdoor places, GPS is not optional. In early 2004 model, the factory installed GPS had really bad software so we didn't took it and bought after market Garmin. However Mazda has upgraded this software in December, 2004 and it's as good as any after market GPS. I believe GPS is probably the most important thing in the car after steering wheel, gas and breaks.
• RX-8 has cool design for in-between seat space. You get two cup holders in front and back, 3 big storage compartments, and two cigarette lighters. Totally worth it.
• You want the red one.
• The seat design and covers has star trekee looks. The covers are made from washable and really wear resistant special material. This means you can put heavy stuff like big luggage bags with pointy corners on the seats without worry.
• This car is a huge gas guzzler. I guess it consumes at least 30% more gas then typical 4 door cars of similar size. We need to refill typically after every 5 hours of drive. And just so you know, this car only likes to have 93 octane premium gas.
• On another luxury preferences of this car, you can only tow it on a flat bed. Other towing may damage the car.
• RX-8 has powerful big breaks. Infect its breaks have same specs as Porsche Carrera GT. You might also notice that tires do not have wheel covers allowing faster cooling of those big breaks. The bad part is that lots of rust gets in to those parts and sometime it looks awful. However Mazda engineers have let us know that this is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.
• R8-8 dimensions are very similar to Porsche Carrera GT.
• There are no rear wipers.
• So far I've took it to 110 mph (higher speed isn't easy in tri-state area). High speed is pretty natural to this car.
• RX-8 has rotary engines and it makes unique pleasant sound then engine with cylinders. The main advantage seems to be their super compact size and disadvantage being they are gas guzzlers.
• Apparently only Mazda makes cars with rotary engines. They had released RX-7 about 8 years ago and the RX-8 is new incarnation with more compact and efficient engines. Check out RX-8 club which has tons of rotary engine fans.
• It has almost enough head rooms for 6 ft people.
• It has dumb headlights - totally manual, no photo sensors.
• It doesn't have dumb doors (the ones you need to slam hard couple of times to get them shut).
• This car requires mirrors to be perfectly set to avoid blind spots. It's more important than other cars. That means, if you are a couple, you both should be of nearly equal height people so if you switch seats, you don't have to reset the whole thing again.
• Unlike typical 2-door sports cars, this car is excellent for new couples planning to start family in near future because you get the extra seats behind with own their little doors :). This car perfectly fits the title of "family sports car".
• Other goodies included are digital speedometer and outside temperature. There is no compass.
• One of the biggest thing I dislike in this car is non-standard stereo. The factory installed one is pretty low end and you can't replace it with after market ones because it's non standard! That's huge deal. It's a shame for Mazda because cars with half the price now comes with MP3 CD player and FM with text. The 9-speaker BOSS system is less them impressive when it comes to sound quality and to me it looks like waste of money. Actually 9 speakers are pretty much useless anyway because Mazda system can't play audio disks with DVD-A encoding which are specifically designed for surround sound experience. Mazda does sell proprietary MP3 replacement player, however, for $350 only.
• Like most other cars, you would be required to heavily negotiate with dealers for pricing. In 2004, I kept hearing price tag of $29,000 (without tax) when I started looking and finally bought the car for $24,500 inclusive everything. The Wayne Mazda is an excellent dealer and service shop if you are in NJ.
• Because RX-8 is pretty new, it's hard to tell anything about engine life and resell values. But I believe both are pretty good if you look at RX-7.
• One of the problem with this car is that after you start the engine and then if you need to shut it down without driving, you have to step on gas while still in park mode and "rave up" the engines and then shut it down. Not doing this step causes something called flooding reported by many people.
• RX-8 doesn't have 5 star safety ratings.
• You get pretty powerful xenon headlights, sun-glass holder, automatic tire pressure indicator and no-traction indicator.

Anyone who have worked with .Net or Java would have certainly thought about this: Is there a way to extend these runtimes/VMs to build truly managed operating system? As it turns out Longhorn would be "mostly" managed OS but this is not the kind of "managed" OS stuff we are talking about. We are talking about truly managed OS, in theory and in imagination, that is.

If you look at .Net runtime, it indeed provides several services that should be coming from OS otherwise: threading, security, PE loading and so on. When I was watching the documentary Revolution, Richard Stallman was describing similar situation in his days: they wanted to build an OS, they had compilers, all kind of command line utilities, code for various services and so on but they were missing a kernel. So even if they had got lot of functionality working, they still needed some base OS to run off their stuff. I think the .Net runtime/JVM are in the same situation.
 
So what a managed OS would look like?  Who handles all the system calls down the line and how? Say I want to turn on a pixel on the screen, what my lowest level code running on a truly managed OS would look like? Let’s think about it: the lowest level managed code you can write in .Net is IL, which is essentially an assembly language for a virtualized CPU and memory system. The IL essentially has no idea about the world outside its virtualized CPU and memory system. For instance, I can’t write any direct IL instructions to read sector 510 from my hard drive or turn on a pixel on my screen. In its current form, I would have no choice but to extend IL somehow so I can make low level system BIOS calls or embed native instruction for my graphic card inside my IL. That’s not good. If I’m allowed to embed such low level calls in IL, the whole thing isn’t "managed" anymore and also not independent of the hardware I’m using.

As I thought about this more, I converged to the answer that we need a "runtime" for each of the subsystem in the computer. If you think about it, a hard-drive controller is a CPU in its own right with its own instruction set and so is your graphics card. Your main CPU and memory are just "over hyped" subsystems of your computer. Our traditional runtime and IL only virtualizes main CPU and memory, not these other subsystems. Once we have this "runtime" for video subsystem, hard drive controller and so on, it should be possible to write pure IL instructions to say, draw a bitmap on the screen. Notice that the IL code should work on any graphics card which has been similarly virtualized. Now you see, these "runtimes" for subsystems are essentially equivalent to drivers in current world but with a twist that they follow exactly the same structure and standards as the main runtime.

So now imagination can go wild: You have several "runtimes" running and managing each subsystem in your computer. Obviously each of these runtimes needs to discover and talk with other. The traditional runtime only manages main processor and memory but now it needs to send out IL instructions to say, VM controlling hard drive. So we now have a need for a standard protocol to discover virtual machines in the system and talk to them (much like Plug And Play). Also we need a system boot-strapper, which initializes all the runtimes in your system and provides common "channel" for them to discover and talk with each other. I also speculate a base runtime from which all other runtimes must "inherit" so as to enforce common infrastructure such as secured access to instructions and inter-VM communication. If you let your imagination wilder, you can think of a runtime/VM as something that consumes bytecode, changes its own memory state and outputs bytecode to another VM or a hardware. So essentially you can have cascading VMs too. You can even pass objects around VMs and even create your own VM (for example, to emulate non-existent hardware or to create a OS level service).

So what is the managed OS again? It’s collection of VMs for each subsystem and a bootstrapper. Good, we got somewhere. Anything you code against it would be (really) 100% pure managed code with potential to be executed on variety of hardware. Infect you could even have a VM which simply delegates call to parent OS instead of real hardware subsystem. That could make it possible to build versions of this managed OS that could run off the host OS that you already have, without forcing you to partition your hard drive or reboot your machine. This would still let all your "managed" code run as is it but may be without extra-strength security and such stuff.

This all sounds really cool. Now only if I can figure out how performance won't suck... ;)

Our custom made PC based "media center" just got its new replacement screen: Dell 2300MP Projector! Short review: It rocks and totally worth it (especially playing PS2 games wired with 5.1 sound system and WinAmp Visualizers on a big screen). And here are more tidbits for you geeks:

• Dell 2300MP is new line of DLP projector which (I guess) came out in Oct 2004. It has whooping 2300 lumens and 2100 contrast ratio and cost me $1165 including shipping. It's native resolution is 1024X768 which exceeds many plasmas. Projector of this class used to cost almost twice a year ago.
• PS2 even with S-Video connector gives pretty cool quality. Through 5.1 surround sound system with games like Grand Theft Auto and you can hear cars passing by around you as if you are on real road.
• This projector doesn't have DVI connector (for digital video from PCs) and component video/RGB connection (for high resolution DVD movies or 1080i HDTV format). That means you can only go as good as S-Vide. Also it has only one S-Video port. I don't think this is a huge disadvantage because more resolution offered by these connectors can't be displayed by projector anyway.
• It comes with lots of wires (though short in length) and a slick case. Remember projector wiring and screen is a significant portion of total projector cost. A 25ft VGA cable alone can cost easily over $50.
• One big limitation of most projection system is that you can project only a specific size picture from specific distance. So say if you have have 85" diagonal area available project on be able place projector at around 10-12 ft from the wall. No more no less. And yes, you must buy enough long wires to hook up all your PS2s, cable TVs and PCs.
• This projector is super bright and it looks terrific even on our direct white wall projection without using any screen at all. It’s so bright that we don’t even feel needed to turn off our lights. On the daytime, if you have really bright room (no curtains on big glass wall), picture would appear washed out – not good enough for DVD quality but still pretty good for talk shows like quality.
  
• Because of high lumens and contrast, the most suitable screens for this projector are matt white screens with the gain 1.0 or even lower. This eliminated need for high gain screens means you get wide viewing angle just like usual TV set and uncompromised colors.
  
• Many people complained about circular "rainbows" that appears when watching B&W movies. It doesn't seem to appear so far with us but I guess it might popup if you are watching high contrast black and white movie for a long time.
  
• Because of high contrast, darker scenes in the movie would feel darker. You will need to mess around with settings for this for a while (Dogma=3 works for us pretty well). BTW, we run at only 40% of its maximum brightness.
  
• When projector is not placed right at the center of screen but on lower or upper side. You get a distortion called keystone. This projector has built-in key-stone elimination feature which works great but it doesn't have any way to shrink picture horizontally or vertically or compensate for horizontal center-off alignment. If you are planning to project on for more than 100", you should consider exact center ceiling mount.
  
• If you still don’t think projector is a best bet for a screen, do a math on movie tickets. And even then if you don’t get convinced, go watch Step into liquid on 85" screen projected by this little toy! It's brillient!

Omar blogs about an age-old debate on whether class members should be virtual-by-default or final-by-default. Here's my take:

After my years of messing around with .Net class libraries, I would prefer virtual-by-default any day. Basically, when people designs their classes they really don't want to spend much time on analyzing how someone else would be overriding a particular method - unless they are really sure that lot of people really wants to do that. And so it makes a logical sense to be pessimistic for a language designer and assume that something bad indeed will happen and disable overriding by default. The bad part of this pessimistic assumption is that it doesn't go well with the real world statistics while its still logically pure and solid. In real world, you will find yourself in need so often to override a particular method, even if its "at your own risk", and hack your way through to satiesfy the requirements that original authors didn't spend time thinking about. Usually most people will test their such "hacks" and know that they might be shooting a bullet in their foot. But an ideal language should allow them to do so with warnings - just like unsafe keyword - rather then making it impossible. You had done that rather then relying on original authors (such Microsoft) to come out with new functionality after half a decade or wrapping entire interface in your custom classes. The problem is that people does wish that their methods be extensible but they don't have time to analyse all the side effects and make promises. My solution is that the compiler should just flag the warning that the method you are trying to override was not marked as virtual by default and may cause side effects (instead of current behavior of shadowing them). It should make all methods virtual unless specified otherwise and store additional metadata info that the method is virtual but wasn't marked explicitly so. Forcing virtual or final keywords explicitly does not solve the problem because most people will choose final anyway to be idealistic as they still haven't got time to analyze the side effects but those could have been statistically be mitigated by the authors who are willing to spend time in testing after they override.

As far as the performance goes, I believe, authors of base class would much rather willing to spend time in finding hot-spot public methods and mark them as final rather then running complete analysis to decide if each of their methods could be virtual. So vote again goes for virtual-by-default.

Did you knew that Vsiual Basic.Net Resource Kit has an utility to convert C# code to VB.Net? Ofcourse there are several online language converters but this one works great. And that's besides having cool Dudas Chart control and tons of other components from Component One absolutely free (though their charting component is pretty miserable and requires free registration for licensing). Charting is seriously missing component in 2.0's toolbox.and I'm just wondering why doesn't MS thinks of bundling these components with VS.Net 2005 installer rather than keeping it in an lesser known corner of web.

I don't know how no one is bothered by this. May be because it affects Longhorn. But anyway, everybody would agree that while .Net solved the DLL Hell issue, it created its own which I affectionally call Assembly Hell and had my rants loud from the start. I'd high hopes when I heard Jeff Richter is on the team. But be hold, they come up with the statement that the problem is "mathematically" unsolvable and some fuzzy argument to back up that statement and then they reveal possibly the worst versioning scheme I've heard in a decade for anything: divide the assemblies in "platform" and "library" groups! I can't even start to imagine someone could think of this kind of stupid idea for things that will hit the entire planet on massive scale. Must be an outcome of long meetings for days :).

I'd been burned a lot by missing gaps in .Net versioning and problem is pretty simple if you had been in this mess. The solution is even amazingly simple for what it appears like a monster.

The fundamental flow in the .Net versioning is that it doesn't allow to put a version number on assembly without breaking the compatibility. Once you understand this, lot many problems would be simplified. The 'assembly version' is what we usually use for checking whether the file is really the one what we want and for deployment modules to make an update. While 'compatible-to version' is for the run time to check if it should throw an error. So 'assembly version' is different then 'compatible-to version' and are not tied with each other. So all we need is one AssemblyXXX attribute that can let us specify what is the build number for this assembly and another AssemblyYYY to specify the version to which this assembly is still compatible from interface as well as behaviour point of view. You always auto-increment your assembly number on each build, but you do not change "compatible-to" number unless you really change the interface and behavior. And the problem is solved.

Infect, here is a final surprise: you can do this right now in 1.x and 2.x. Use AssemblyVersion attribute to specify "Last Compatible-To" version and AssemblyFileVersion attribute to specify the build version. Things have been worked out perfectly for me with this scheme. Now when I hear about dumbest idea since COM versioning and 'plateform' and 'library', I just think we are in for huge additional mess waiting that will take another release (another 10 years?) to clean up. Whether you agree or not, people, speak up!!

These are the some of the select broadway/off-broadway shows currently running in New York. Many of them ends soon. If you live in area, do check them out!

GoogleWhack - This small production comedy had been consistently sold out in UK and Australia. Even if it hadn't been, its pretty geeky enough for not to check it out :). We will be going to this show tonight! Ends December.

Forever Tango - Looks extremely cool. Seven couple who tango in their own styles from Argentine. Ends Nov 28.

Cookin' - A terrific show. Korean crew creates awesom beats and music from mere kitchen appliances besides other jaw dropping stuff in the show. Absolutely recommended.

Blue Man Show - If you want to see just one off-broadway show in New York, this would be it. We went to this one last December and its an awesomely creative show which you might enjoy every moment of it (and it doesn't have intermission). Its difficult to describe what this show is about but one can escape describing it by calling higher form of modern art, just like its music. The show that's being currently running has new "material" though.

Slava's Snow Show - While except for closing sequence it wasn't ultra cool, it sure was different. One might think its kids show but when we went to see it, we hardly observed more than couple of kids in audience (and show was sold out).

Trans-Sieberian Orchestra - This is the most impressive, most awesome and the coolest live concert I've ever been too. To miss them in live concert would be practically a sin. With hundreds of colorful spotlights, and another few hundreds of freaking lasers, and some cool fireworks right on the stage and a band of more than 20 musicians and singers and with very diversified styles, they simply doesn't have a match.

Steven Wright Comedy Show - For a long time I considered Steve Wright as the most gifted comedian I'd known. His ability to make up original random unrelated witty one-liners which he can keep throwing at you one after another for the entire length of show is amazing. He hasn't doing many shows since last few years but finally New York Comedy Festival provides a chance to hear him live!

Also as a side tip, many (but not all) broadway show tickets you can buy at heavily discounted prices by entering secret codes. Sources to check out for this are TheaterMania.com, BroadwayBox.com, entertainment-link.com and NY Times TicketWatch.

Any software that isn't open source AND also isn't evolving fast enough to keep up with their customers should be seen with the sign "Stay Away". These things gets in to your computer in the name of easing up your tasks and it indeed appears so for a while until you just run of out its capacity and start spending most of the time in just managing it or dealing with information overload. Sharpreader is the one. Windows is another. While my desktop will soon have Linux Mandrake distribution, I don't think it will still solve the problem because Linux is open source but it ain't fast enough to evolve, in my view. But finally I was able to take care of SharpReader. Check out the free and cool NewsGator Online Edition. I'm a convert since last two weeks and I like its not-large-but-effective featureset which includes:

1. It allows to rate posts.
2. It allows to clip posts.
3. It allows to share your clips using RSS (which you can eventually save on your hard drive for archival purpose).
4. It allows to share your OPML in real time.
5. No need of syncing news readers on different boxes.
6. Pretty cool non-interuptive Web UI

Features #1 and #2 are essential in dealing with information overload. I've also categorized my feeds in to just 3 categories: Peoples blogs, High interest services, Low interest services. Things have gotten pretty smooth after establishing these categories.

If you are like me and constantly run out of fresh new music to listen, here's something that might help. The best way to discover new music is to find new/fresh/weird genres. I'll try to put here a list of very interesting select genres that I came across recently. I would highly recommend services like Rhapsody if you want to explore these. What’s more important is the way they provide navigation and ability to discover more. For example, once you find an interesting album, you can immediately click on the music genre that album belongs to and then find out the top chart for that genre and discover even more artists and so on.

So here are some cool and weired music genres to explore :)

• Laptronica - This is basically music created by single person entirely by high-end software on his or her laptop. Some of popular laprtronica artists even have their concerts where they just sit on the stage with their laptop and stream out some beats for the audience! Example artist M83.
• Experimental - This is the awesome genre to explore and can keep you busy for hours. Try Blue Man Group's Audio album or a super-weird track by Tom Waits and you'll know what I'm talking about!
• Solo Instrumentalist - Example artist Itzhak Perlman.
• New Age/Solo Instrumental - Example artist David Lanz. These for some "non-intruding softer displays of creativity" times :).
• New Age Acoustics - Example artist George Winston. These are for some happy relaxing "find your soul" times.
• Space Age Bachelor Pad - Yes, that’s really a name of a music genre! Example artist Pizzicato Five.
• Cut & Paste - Too abstract to be classed as hip-hop, kind of beat-based experiments. Example artist Cold cut.
• Electroclash - Energetic synth, electro-techno-pop-punk hybrid. Example artist Fischerspooner.
• Bleep - Moody robotic sounds, too irregular for the dancefloor yet often too disruptive for passive listening. Pretty cool worktime music. Example artist Autechre.
• Dream Pop - So how about an album named "Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements" by Streolab?

Apart from these, there is a lot to explore in Foreign, Comedy and Theater genres too. But that some other time.

[Artists - Album]

1. Blue Man Group - Audio
My short review of this album would be "Insanely creative". This amazing Niagara of energy is probably very different than anything you have heard so far. Some of the tracks were composed with 15 different instruments including PVC pipes and homebrewed hybrid instruments! If you have seen their off-Broadway show, you will probably appreciate this music even more. This show is definitely one of the most creative, energetic, artistic and amusing I've ever been too. On other note, they have second album called Complex. In sharp contrast, this album, apparently containing many vocals, comes nowhere close to their first. This album is available in full-blown multi-track surround DVD-A format however it doesn't contain LPCM stereo tracks, which might force you to by normal CD for MP3 extraction.

2. The Polyphonic Spree - The Beginning Stages Of Polyphonic Spree
To give you a highlight, this group is composed of 20 members including 9 dedicated just for choir, humming and making noises. They are also the only one I know of using French horn. The combined effect of this huge mix and diverse instruments is just majestic while recording quality of vocal is not as good but you probably won't care for the kind of upbeat energy it pours in. While anyone would agree they sound amazing in live concert than on recorded media, I still believe Trans-Siberian Orchestra has still maintained its "absolute best" position with me as far as large bands are concerned. Unfortunately Beginning Stages isn't available in surround DVD-Audio format. However their second album Together We Are Heavy is indeed available in incredible crystal clear DVD-A surround format but it is probably half as good :(.

These albums are available on Rapsody, although not in surround sound.

If you are reading this and haven't been out there, well, you already missed the biggest blast of colors in Adirondacks (NY). On US east coast, Maine and an odd little dot in the heart of Adirondacks are two places where the amazing fall colors appears first. Last year, just by pure fortune, I was in Adirondacks and in one of the first mornings I saw a sudden blast of color everywhere in the region. So we took the flight over 46 tall mountains (and the countless small ones) that makes up this amazingly beautiful area. The aerial views we saw from the small plane flying low were definitely the best fall foliage view I’ve ever seen (and for the record, I’d been out quite a lot).
Anyway, last weekend was the day when colors had peaked again at Adirondacks and after a week of blazing show that nature had put there, the area is now past peak (along with Vermont and much of the New Hampshire – which is often compared with China for the best in fall foliage in entire world because of the diversity of trees). But if you plan well, you can still chase the fall foliage on the East coast for this entire month and enjoy the blazing colors in truly awesome settings! After some researching in to my collection of links and reviewing fall foliage reports from various states, I've prepared this Excel sheet for the approximate times for fall foliage peak colors. So go out and have fun!

The MP3 player that I was looking for to buy needed to be 1/2 of the size of iPod, built-in FM transmitter (yes, you read it right), built-in FM radio, capability to directly record FM radio in to MP3 files, voice recording, equalizer presets, digital bass and treble controls, HDSS or virtual 3D mode, line-in input and should instantly act as USB drive without requiring drivers. Of course, it should have 512 MB or more memory.

Does this thing really exist?

It turns out it does. There are manufacturers in UK, Korea and Japan who sell these in their countries - but for strange reason no one is making anything like this in USA. However, there are some obscure sellers who sell these foreign products on eBay. One that had everything above and more for $179 is Enox TMS-620 available at Sun-Tec.

Especially FM transmitter is pretty handy. It’s like carrying your own FM radio station in that 1/2 of iPod size thing. Of course, the best use is that you can play your MP3s in any car. If you wish you can hijack FM radio being played at restaurants too! My current usage is though listening to Dot Net Rocks, while looking at weird ads on New York subways :).

Some people had really rejoiced when DOJ started the antitrust lawsuit on Microsoft. I thought it was lame - for people who can't beat Microsoft in any other way. To me it was like suing Mc Donald’s because they are selling their burgers with their own buns instead of giving their customers an option to choose buns from different vendors. Monopolies are the inevitable children of capitalism but they have been declared illegal. In non-software world, people are less sensitive to this legality issues however. Take this: Loews theaters have put a new rule: If customers wants to see movies in their cinema halls, they must throw away the water bottles they are bringing and buy exactly the same bottle from their own stores inside. The employees are specifically instructed to keep an eye to observe this rule and literally force them to throw it away. As you might have guessed, the bottles available at their store are twice in price as everything else they sell. And as you might also know, entire movie theater business works on monopolies, i.e., if Loews is showing some movie, any other theater in the same region cannot show the same movie. None has yet cared about giving customers a choice for cinema halls. I saw people in line wanting to see movie willingly threw away their bottles without giving a thought. This is not the only example. Cable companies work the same way and so many others. I still think this a natural evoluation of free markets.

PS: Want DOJ and BBB to go after Loews? Do it here and here.

It should be a crime to buy a simple laptop instead of a tablet PC. But not just any tablet PC, mind you! Most tablet models are pretty miserable on specs tagged with high prices and geared more towards business people. But there is a gem out there for power users: check out Acer TravelMate C303 - it just looks like a usual laptop until you fold the LCD and make it a tablet! This is also by far the only one with built in DVD writer and 1GB RAM and 80GB HDD and Bluetooth and full 14.1" LCD (most other tablets have just 10").

For $2300, it makes a pretty good developer machine.

I use SharpReader to read my news. This is a small free app that has amazingly survived like an unevolving little insect in an environment where new species with more beef keeps coming. But this thing is still not extinct. I run around to look for an option with more features and end up at using SharpReader again and again. I'm though more interested that it dies away for one reason - the author isn't publishing source code and at the same time he doesn't have time to improve it by himself. It has pretty limited feature set but its designed so that its just barely enough to keep you alive. I tried to switch to RSS BandIt just to find that its fat feature list had missed some hearty points. Yesterday I looked at Omega Reader and was very excited that finally this will call for an end of SharpReader - just to find that its super-fat features comes with same numbers of bugs. So I'm still continue to live with SharpReader virus. Its an example how to design your programs so that your users wouldn't like it and at the same time can't give it up.

I never liked being forced to use DataView just to speed up my searches. Why not DataTable.Select() have an overload to generate internal indexes and do some smart things? But anyway, most people searching DataSet eventually would realizes that performance really sucks and they have no choice but to use DataViews, sometime whole bunch of it prepared for all sorts of queries you want to fire. Here are two things you should watch out (MSDN docs aren’t clear about this):

1. If you call myDataView(someIndex).Delete anywhere in your code, watch out that you do not access any other rows with index > someIndex. If you do, you might either get a run time error or even worse, you might be accessing row underneath that’s different then you actually wanted without any error. Another corollary: Never delete rows in DataView in forward loop.
2. If you are changing/adding row in DataTable or other DataViews, do not forget to call row.BeginEdit and row.EndEdit. If you don’t, your changes will not appear in other views you have.

Well, performance gains through DataView is still pretty sweet thing to have :)

If you need to store certain data in file, most of the time you will obviously think about storing it as XML file. Then soon you start drawing XML schemas and think about generating XSDs... Well, stop! You might be making same mistake as many other people. The better idea is to design XML schema which is loadable in DataSet rather then just XMLDocument. This has tremendous advantages then your custom schema:

• Instead of thinking in hierarchical terms, you can now think in relational terms. I've often found that this simplifies lots of things. This means you can think how you will be storing your data in tables rather then XML hierarchies.
• Schema generation gets simplified: You can draw actual database schemas using drag and drop in Access visually, set various properties for fields and generate XML schema using my utility.
• You can load your XML file right in to DataSet, create various relationships and access your data far more easily and with less code then directly using XMLDocument.
• Once you have stuff in DataSet, you can do data bindings directly for quick demos or even use typed datasets - which is far more safer then always late bound XMLDocument objects.
• In future, if you change your mind (and in most cases you will) to store your data in high performance databases rather then plain XML files, using DataSet in first place makes your job far more easier. Using DataSet compatible schemas allows you support plain XML files as well as real databases as your storage.
• If you don't want to use SQL Server, its still a good idea to include possible support for Access mdb file along with plain XML file as your storage. Unlike plain XML files, Access single file databases allows you to fire far more complex queries rather then just XPath, generate reports write VBA scripts, set constraints, use security features and use other tons of utilities out there. Using DataSet compatible schemas lets you do that.
• Use of dataset will let you migrate your application as becoming a Groove tool with far more ease. Once your app can sit in Groove transceiver, it would suddenly become a marvelous magic collaboration product! However note that Groove has not included their ADO.Net support in their 3.0 version but there are rumors that they eventually will. Currently the only way to have it is to use Groove 2.5 or upgrade from it to 3.0.
• If you manually enter data in your XML file (usually you might have to for unit tests, bug repro etc), you can do it in Access tables which is far more easier and save whole database as XML using my utility.

This might make you wonder is there is any negative points in using DataSet compatible schemas. There are some, indeed:

• Some data which is inherently hierarchical are better represented using custom schemas. Trying to fit in relational table structure will cause to create several many-to-many map tables and complicate the whole thing.
• If XML file becomes large, there ways to read it using SAX parser rather then loading whole file in memory. Using DataSet directly will always load the whole file in memory and in general uses more of it.
• Custom XML schemas are more "purer" to share across the platforms. However if you plan to use Mono, it already supports DataSets and that won’t be a problem.

This innocent little puzzle formed from some of the recent code I was writing. Lets see if it gets you! 

object p = 2;
object q = p;
p = 4;
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Answer is " + q.ToString());

Meanwhile I'm having fun asking it to my collegues ;)

Cloudscapes, scheduled to be released in Oct, 2004, is definitely some of the coolest stamp set.

[via Enchanted Ceiling]

Okay... found that! That song in the movie American Beauty with rain falling in one of the last scenes is Don't Let It Bring You Down By Neil Young. Though one by Annie Lennox is much better. It was buzzing in my head since quite some time now.

I just came across these Internet Explorer "power tools" which I'd wanted since soooo long. These little things called booklets are actually just shortcuts pointing to JavaScript which you can install by just drag and drop on your Links bar in IE (check View > Toolbars menu if you don't see Links bar). If you want to save time from having browse through each of these things, you can also download my selection and extract them in to your Documents and Settings\[Your_Login_name]\Favorites\Links folder and use them right away. You can do pretty neat things on a web page you are viewing once you have these little things. Some samples: View passwords, remove length limitations in a form, remove JavaScript, re-enable context menu, remove images and flashy stuff, show hidden fields in form, enable fields in form which are disabled, show borders of invisible tables, grayscale whole page (nice to have if page had weird colors), show HTTP headers, show HTML class when you roll over a block, force page wrap, lowercase everything, restore redirected links, view cookies, go to referer, sort table, number rows in table and more!

I thought I'd nothing new to listen to but then just brewed up this triplet which nicely works out on these winter days.

1. A Winter's Solstice VI: A Windham Hill Sampler - A nice classical album. Just by look at the track names like Northern Lights, January Stars, Snow Dance, This Clearness Of Light - you know it's gonna be good :).
2. The Very Best Of Yanni: Yet another good (if not as great) keyboard fiesta. Nice tracks: Flight Of Fantasy, In The Morning Light, The Mermaid.
3. Maroon: Surprisingly good for those "missing" times when there is too much to do and absolutely nothing do. This my Barenaked Ladies Firsts which probably one can never get tired of hearing one more time.

Listen As: Random The entire play list is available on Rhapsody.

While my wife would be celebrating Chinese New Year on more native land of Hong Kong, there would be quite a few events happening in NEw York city. The big parade is on Sunday 25th in Chinatown with dragons and lions, all red and gold, along with other events. Chinatown-Online gives nice little info on traditions of Chinese New Year and other festivities dates.

The major deal of New Year is, of course, lavish food festivities. There is a suprisingly large number of restaurants in NYC which will be offering special New Year meals, but here are some select few places to get the Year of the Monkey off to a good start (Chanoodle is the most recommended):

• Chanoodle - (212) 349-1495 - 79 Mulberry Street (Canal Street), Chinatown
• Congee - (212) 965-5028 - 98 Bowery (Near Hester Street)
• Dim Sum Go Go - (212) 732-0797 - 5 East Broadway (Chatham Square)
• Funky Broome - (212) 941-8628 - 176 Mott Street (Broome Street)
• Joe's Ginger - 212) 966-6613 - 113 Mott Street (Near Hester Street)
• Ping's Seafood - (212) 602-9988 - 22 Mott Street (Near Mosco Street)
• Sunrise 27 - 212) 219-8498 - 27 Division Street (Near Market Street)

(Courtesy: NYTimes) However my personal choice would be the Rainbow platter at Penang, the Malaysian restaurant on Rt. 10. Have a good new year! Sing Dan Fai Lok!

I finally bought my new keyboard synthesizer - something I wanted since last few months. It's Yamaha EZ250i from InstrumentPro (they seems to be the only one bundling the survival kit along with). This one is suitable for beginners as well as advanced users who needs a perfect piano experience. Infect it's the ultimate machine available for learner in the market. This one is an upgrade over EZ30 and has just arrived in last July. It can be connected to computer right away, has 400+ voices, accurate Grand Piano sounds, built-in Education Suit among several other things. Sweeeet!

It's cool to be in mountains when fall is just still arriving and you are among the first to feel it. This year my First Of Autumn hikes happened in Adirondacks. This area in upper state New York is probably among the most scenic part on East Coast. You got choice of 46 high peaks to climb (a High Peak is a mountain taller then 4000 ft) apart from countless small mountains and hills, several small and huge lakes to canoe and kayak or just relax on cruise, quite a few waterfalls and quint towns. The best part is you can even take small plane like Cessna 152 and fly over those mountains covered with fresh yellow, red, violet colors. It's probably someof the most scenic experience you can ever have in this part of the country. But behold! Fall is just beginning. The next best thing to do is probably long drives on colorful lonely snaky roads passing through mountains, valleys and lakes. But.. where would you go? Here's some of the best picks for autumn fall foliage road trips!

• Citysearch has their picks of top 10 fall foliage spots
• Visit GORP's Autumn kickoff. They have the great sets of scenic driving routes.
• This is commercial fall tours site but they have good adventure section and you can "steal" some of their iteneries :)
• America's Best also have small list
• If you are in New Jersey, pick your road trip from this great routes through out NJ.
• Last thing: How would you know when and where it's peak of fall colors? There are 3 sites which can tell you when it's time to go: Foliage Network, USDA Forest Services and this other site.

Every time I read and hear something in AI research, it freaks me out. These "research" people just keeps formulating laws out of thin air without having any strong logical grounds. Every researcher seems to have their own minuscule world of hard and fast rules that they think is capable to explain everything. What's even worse is that they keep day dreaming that if they keep going like this they are not too far from the finally glory. These people have essentially transformed the "science" of Artificial Intelligence in to a never ending empirical guess game. And this disease is spreading fast everywhere. Now most research studies simply means collecting data, do some statistics and throw some sketchy laws with lots of "might be" to hungry scientific generals. All you need is some post at Stanford or MIT and you can at least expect that your garbage will occupy shelves of library all over the world. A good example is this lecture by Doug Lenat of Stanford. You will see how lots of "principles" are drawn right away out of the thin air without any justification for their validity and completeness. I think these guys should step back for a while and read Newton's Principia or Euclid's Elements just to get feeling of how important it is to approach problem with strong logical grounds rather then "just thoughts out of my mind". We don't have HAL. But seeing current state of AI, that doesn't surprises me.

Star Trek Voyager is off-air since past few months. So I went to Netflix, my DVD subscription, just to find that Paramount hasn't produced DVDs yet. So I went to Amazon to buy VHS version, just to find that the video cassets are one episod per casset (consider having 150+ episodes). So all these have almost ruined my hopes to get back to Voyager, just when I needed the most. As my last resort, I looked up in Kazza and found some of the cool episodes floating around but it gonna take days to get them. Moral of the story: If it is still on-air in your area, watch it while you still can. Don't mess with your luck.

I recently went to Sierra Club's meeting/presentation on California's Route 1. This road trip certainly seems to be the queen of all. The presenter been touring this route every couple of years since last 3 decades and had some really awesome photographs - some taken in different seasons and time of the days and some even different decades! Here are some tips from the guru himself: The road trip to CA1 can be done any month, never let weather stop you. Still if you are too picky, in summer (through September) it's kind of hot. From December to March is good time except that El-Nino may strike the Pacific coast and parts of CA1 suddenly merges in to ocean, yet Feb-March is the best time. This is also the time when you can see lots of white whales in the ocean floating around while watching sunset in Pacific Ocean. The good place to stay overnight on this route is Ragged Point Inn. You might want to frequently take exists in between, specifically for San Simeon Castle. It's good idea to stay around this gorgeous huge architecture (they have even special tour for just bathrooms among others!). To stay around this building is San Simeon Pines is a good resort. The route is 90 miles long and totally worth an entire day trip. While in presentation, I also stumbled upon list of really gorgeous places to visit in United States. They are special because they have specific times when you should be there. Also they are very diverse (from flower covered moutains to canyons in Utah!). If you get a chance, don't even think about missing out on them. I certainly won't :). Here's my filtered list:

• Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah Canyon valleys partially gets covered in snow. Not for faint hearted.Best Time: Jan/Feb
• Cottonwood Lake, Alaska Clear waters and ice formations in lake like a huge starfish from end to endBest Time: Feb
• Glenn Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona Best Time: Feb
• Tehachapi Mountains, California Absolute gorgeous mountains completely covered with flowers. Yes, just like you had dreamed once :). Best Time: April
• Isla Espirita Santo, Sea of Cortes, Maxico urrr... this one is non-US.Best Time: May
• Painted Hills, Oregon yes, hills that actually looks like someone painted them outBest Time: May
• Elives Chasm, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Best Time: June
• Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta Best Time: Aug
• Cohutta Wilderness Area, Georgia Best Time: Sep
• Kennebec River, Main Best Time: Oct
• Snake River, Wyoming Best Time: Nov
• Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park, California Best Time: Nov
• Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska A special place where you can see Aurora Borealis! Best Time: Nov
• West Indian Manatees, Florida Best Time: Dec
• Owens Valley near Laws, California Best Time: Dec/Jan
• Weddell Sea, Antarctica urrrr... this is non-US, again
• Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Oregon Best Time: Dec/Jan

I recently upgraded my custom build 2.5 year old beast. When I started out that time, I wanted to make something really powerful, enviable and which kind of had everything. After burning $3500 in this endeavor I enjoyed owning something that exceeded what Microsoft and others just recently "innovated" as Media Center PC. But this time upgrade wasn't easy and I kept messing up things many times and calling up other gurus. So here's the list for the benefit of someone not-so-skilled: 1. Usually motherboards have 3 special screws that would touch the chassis and provide the grounding. Don't mix up (aha, screw up) those screws. 2. When you lay PC on its side (motherboard top facing you), remember all IDE cable's red-line side faces you but floppy's faces down. If you mess this up, drives won't be detected and you might keep thinking that you blew up power supply and run to buy another one. 3. Power cables to all IDE drives would have yellow side facing you and red side facing IDE cable's red-line. Usually you can't plug other way, unless, uhhh... you push really hard! 4. It's important to see which drive is master and which one is slave (ALWAYS look at the jumper settings before you put drives in bays wire everything up). I didn't bothered and just keep trying until they all were detected (real reason being I'd lost my flashlight). This won't blow up your drives but it's very unreliable. 5. Don't forget to connect CD digital and DVD SPDF connectors to sound card. Former allows digital ripping of audio CDs in MP3s and later allows Dolby Digital sound if you have the card that supports that and have hooked up to Home Theater system. Also if you want to listen modem noises on speakers (or home theater as in my case), don't forget to connect modem and sound card. Many cheap modems don't support this any longer however. 6. If power light blinks then probably you have power supply set on 230V (European style) rather then 115V (US style).

I'd to just help my neighbour to find her run-away cat. Now a last blogbit... before I really really go to bed! This Labor Day weekend I was thinking about spending 3 days in programming few stuff I'd planned but such things just can't happen. Suddenly a plan came around out of nowhere for 12+ hours of road trip to West Virginia and a visit to an ISKCON temple. Submitting to spontaneous weird idea seems to be my weakness. This one was weird because, well, who can think of visiting an ISKCON temple out of nowhere? While I'm not affiliated to ISKCON (or for that matter any religious organization whatsoever), I was curious about them anyway (watching Hare Krishna group dancing on Leicester Square in London is very cool) and so I joined my gang. This indeed turned out to be great road trip. We almost started at sun rise, passed through valleys and mountains covered with mist and made few stops. The temple located on the mountain top in hilly state of West Virginia has some good views. We also realized that day was little special being the last day of a festival called Paryushan from Jain religion and first day of another festival Ganesh Chaturthi and the last day when the temple remains open until 8 PM and a day when free feast is served and of course, it was the last day of summer. As if all these coincidences weren't enough, I ran in to one of my classmates in the temple who had left his job to be a full time ISKCON person serving as deputy director of a charity hospital (it's amazing how I keep meeting my classmates by coincidences. Last time I met one in a strip club, this time it was in a temple! And we always say this first to each other: "what the hack you doing here?"). We also took the tour of Palace Of Gold which is the memorial built for the founder of ISKCON. It's funny though to build a memorial buried under gold for a person who probably spent his entire life fighting against materialistic world and achieving nirvana. You can view some photos of this trip, some are really cool including one with beatles procreating right inside the rose!

Here's some from shopping list of past few months: [Artist - Album] Linkin Park - Meteora Evanescence - Fallen Audioslave - Audioslave Macy Gray - On How Life Is Barenaked Ladies - Rock Spectacle 4 Strings - Take me away (into the night) Evanescence's Fallen is probably the best thing came out this year. Audioslave is raw, hard and grungy. How Macy Gray came in to my list? I don't know... I'd written bad things about Meteora previously but when you are in real need for extreme screaming, lots of hatred and hard hard hard stuff these guys seems to fit the bill.

In this world of the Greater Being, I feel like I'm at play... like a little kid. With all my sense of wonder and curiosity... walking on my knees to get close, see and feel everything that has been put around me... and smile for all those good things that I find. And when I'm just moving around, there are moments when things are not the way I would have wanted... sometime when I would have really wanted. Some of the worst moments of my life constitutes of those when the people I'd admired I see falling apart and I can't do anything about it... when someone you cared is dieing and you can do nothing about it... Those moments... when I just want to look up in the sky and pretend that I don't exist... trying to convince myself that it's ok... I feel like I'm betrayed with anger bursting out every inch of my body... But then when I'm all low and down, there's always something that happens... like someone struck the new string on the guitar that I'd never heard before... wiping out all my doubts with just that one stroke of note. So I look around to find the one but I can't see. But I know she was there smiling at me... like I'm a little kid... someone is sure playing with me.

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