HTML5

Just a quick update – I recently read this informative article about HTML5 – and it looks kind of interesting. I personally like the cleaner structure and the newer structural elements. Let us see how the Web-designing community reacts to it.

The absolute mantra to fitness and nutrition

This is not something that people don’t already know… but since after several years of trial and error, reading and discussing, I finally figured out the perfect plan (for myself, of course), I thought I’d post it up here for people to see and judge. The thing that makes physical fitness even more complicated than several other things is that nothing works for everybody – you really have to test it out for yourself, if it suits your particular body type (what type are you – mesomorphic, endomorphic and ectomorphic?), time, daily routine and disposition. But my hope is that this little article still serves as a general guideline, which might be easily tailored to everybody’s needs…

First, workouts – work out 4 to 5 times a day. Try to use such a split system that every body part gets trained. Learn about different muscle groups and subgroups, and which exercises work which of these muscle groups. Try a balanced approach such that no part is left out. While working out, the basic idea is to use as much weight that gives your muscles enough exercise – so you can do 10-12 reps with some difficulty. If it gets too easy, move on to heavier weight. If you cannot do 10-12 “clean” reps with correct form, go a little lighter. Use full range of motion and controlled movements, and feel the muscle working out. Make sure that, as much as possible, your bones, joints and other muscle groups only act as links to the actual body part you are training. Quality over quantity, always. Try to get a pump in the muscles by the time you’re done.

Next, the more important part: nutrition. Eat 5-6 times a day – 2-3 good meals and the rest snacks; all meals should be separated by 2-3 hours. This makes sure that your metabolism always keeps going and you keep burning fat. In every meal, try to incorporate good quality carbs (whole wheat breads, brown rice), lots of green and leafy vegetables, fruit, sufficient lean protein from lean meat and lean dairy products, vitamins and minerals. Whey protein supplements are excellent. Make sure that you don’t eat any carbs after 7 o’clock or so.

Finally, get enough rest. I cannot overemphasize this point. Lack of sleep is extremely detrimental to your overall health and even mental functions.

Now for the interesting part. As a college student, you are bound to be invited to parties, and of course you want to go. But indulging yourself in moderation is a good idea in itself from several points of view. As a student (well – this is true for everybody), you often have a lot of workload and your brain needs to be high on sugar for it to work! But instead of allowing yourself empty calories coming from refined carbs, use fruit. Fructose breaks down slowly and gives you evergy over prolonged periods of time. Also, often you don’t have enough time to prepare your balanced diet – we all need comfort foods. But even in this scenario, you can always go for leaner and cheaper alternatives…

Convert image formats among themselves and to PDFs

Has anybody heard of this cool command line program for Linux, that you can use to convert the formats of images with a single command, and even convert images to PDFs? Great for taking screenshots and converting the PNGs to PDFs so you can quickly include them in your research papers?

The program is called imagemagick, and it can be installed on Ubuntu with a simple

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then, to convert a file, just do

$ convert file.png file.pdf

And voilá! It works. Neat, eh?

Using Xmodmap to map one key to another

So, everybody having a good holiday?? As for me, I got unlucky with my super sleek and shiny laptop and its motherboard got fried. So, for quite some time I was relegated to using a laptop which

(i) had a Spanish keyboard, on top of which I was using German and English layouts (oh yes, even for programming ), and

(ii) had the period/colon key missing (it had been ripped off), so I was using another keyboard connected via a USB port to type my periods and colons whenever they came up. And no, I could not only use the USB keyboard because that one in turn had some keys not in the best working order (!!! wait, it gets better soon !!!)

After bearing with all this for quite some time, I thought there has to be some way I can map the period/colon key to one of the keys I am not using, for example Pause, F12 etc., and do away with the additional USB keyboard, and thus make things a little better. So I finally stumbled upon Xmodmap, which my Ubuntu was pre-equipped with, of course, and figured out a simple way to accomplish the task at hand.

Use the following at the command line:

xmodmap -e "keysym Pause = period"
xmodmap -e "keysym F12 = colon"

And you’re done! Now Pause prints the period and F12 prints the colon, no matter whether you are using the German, English or Spanish layout. I guess if you put “period colon” together then the later character will be printed with shift, but I didn’t experiment with that.

I tried putting these lines in my .xinitrc file and then in my .profile, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be running automatically when the computer boots. For the time being I am having to do it manually every ime the computer starts afresh.

Here is a list of all the “keysym” codes you can use with Xmodmap!

There you are – happy Xmodmapping

Heat your homes using waste from data centers

This is the neatest proposition I’ve seen/ read about in quite some time. IBM’s Zürich Research Lab demonstrated at Supercomputing 2008 how, within 5 years, they’re going to have data centers that use water pumped through microchannels within computers for cooling rather than traditional air conditioning or fans. Here alone we are talking about saving annual energy costs by billions of dollars! Then, additionally, this water that would absorb the heat from the huge data centers will be used to heat nearby homes, which would save more energy dollars. If this comes true, we are talking about a very efficient and effective step towards a greener earth, in my opinion. Even as I am holding my breath, you can read this interesting article here.

Shazam!!

Shazam is a new iPhone/ Android phone application that is capable of capturing from the surroundings any music playing and identifying which song exactly it heard. It has a database of 6 million tracks and it’s actually pretty neat. Talking from a first-hand experience.

Now if only someone will develop this for my RAZR… or my notebook…

Installing Infomap on Ubuntu

Infomap is an NLP software from Stanford which simulates a variant of a Latent Semantic Analysis, with term-term matrices (instead of term-document matrices) and singular value decomposition. In a nutshell it is a C program which is readymade for you to build semantic vector spaces and compute similarities between words or concepts.

To install it on Ubuntu, make sure you follow these steps:

1. Install g++ (sudo apt-get install g++)
2. Install gdmb (with dbm-compatible modules – refer to the README/ INSTALL file)
3. Install Infomap

Hope that works!

Laptops getting hotter… time to cool them down

As this article clearly suggests, the laptops these days have so much processing power that they are no longer “lap-tops” anymore. The heat has to go somewhere, and it tends to move towards the cooler area, according to a certain law of Thermodynamics, to the user’s lap. Wow. I used to think the problem was only with my laptop. But it looks like the problem is more widespread than I initially suspected. So now these two researchers from the University of Virginia take an aim at this problem and toward laying the scientific groundwork that will facilitate more and more research in this area.

Folks, don’t forget the problem of dwindling battery lives, especially if the laptop happens to have a nice graphics card and Windows Vista. It’s not that the research has “still a long way to go” when it comes to keeping laptops cool and extending batteries lives, it’s just that the research in these areas has to keep up with the corresponding research in the chip speeds… come on, folks. You got work to do!

Free online courses from Stanford

After MIT, Stanford has done it too – they are providing 10 free online courses for free, accessible via YouTube, iTunes, MP4 and the like. These courses included a Programming Methodology course, a Programming Abstractions course, and a Programming Paradigms course – which cover basic programming techniques in Java and C++. Oh, and that’s not all. There are two more courses of special interest to Natural Language Processing researchers – an NLP course by Christopher Manning and a Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng. All the courses are quite interesting, energetic, and easy to follow…

As an aside, take a look at some of the Linux themes on this website – I find these to be especially aesthetic and appealing…

Too much work at your tech job? Here’s a new credo for you…

So, yet another list of how we computer folks can improve our lives… let’s tackle the points one by one. Telecommuting… as much as I like the idea of showing your boss your face as often as possible, this point actually makes sense. Save gas, save time, save money on eating out (you can cook while your big program is running at home), and just report to your boss your progress and meet with her once/twice a weak. Not a bad deal, now that I think about it. Ok. So far so good. Making regular local and remote updates. Good idea. Using keyboard shortcuts as much as you can instead of always reaching for the mouse. Good idea. Ergonomic, and stylish as if you were Tony Stark working with Jarvis on your Ironman suit (Ok, maybe you’re not moving 3D images with your hands, but it does look like you’re a computer genius from a Hollywood movie rather than an average user if you use the keyboard rather than the mouse.) Keeping track of your calories for free? Who doesn’t want that? About managing email – I personally like to manage mine in a slightly different way, but I think that’s subjective.

Hmm, I think this much analysis is enough and proves that the article is readable. Now to actually follow through with it, that’s a completely different story…