Cynic's Blog

I n this blog, I will try to illustrate beautiful natural wonders, which are the way because nature wanted us to see them that way...no other reason long or short.... Let's call our roll list, Solar Eclipse We all know that solar eclipse are occur because moon obstructs sun's light or in a more layman's term, moon casts it's shadow on earth when it transits between earth and sun. But few might have pondered upon the fact that the mystic diamond ring and total solar eclipse (when it virtually becomes dark, in a small part of earth) have a more subtle origin. These happen because from earth surface, lunar and solar discs looks of same size, and that's the reason why moon exactly covers the solar disc during eclipse. The exactness is more crucial in the formation of diamond ring during eclipse. In case, somebody is wondering, this is Diamond Ring. But isn't sun and moon incomparable in sizes? Then how come they have similar sized discs? Yes,...

I f you have a HP printer at your office or at your home and if you are a vivid user of Ubuntu, then you definitely might have tried to install the printer driver for the same. I have been trying to do that for a couple of years! Alas but things didn't worked for me, mainly because of the fact that hp doesn't provide drivers for the printer in the cds, but rather asks to use a utility called hplip (an abbreviation for HP Linux Imaging and Printing). For one thing in Ubuntu one can install hplip using the package manager apt . You can install hplip using this command in an Ubuntu Box. sudo apt-get install hplip-gui After successful installation of hplip, one can run the program hplip form command line by the command hp-setup . The first window looks like this, where-in one have to select the type of connection with the printer. I have a network printer attached, hence I optionally selected to input the IP address of the printer. After hplip has obtained the i...

I n part II of my blog Human Mind and Computers (An Uncanny Resemblance) , we will be looking into the war and post war era (1940 - till date) . This was the era which changed the days after, forever. The change so enormous that it changed the way we human think, and quite appropriately gave a name to the "age" that came, The Information Age . We the Homo Sapiens Sapiens has walked a long way from being hunter-gathers , in Stone Age   to farmers , in Bronze and Iron Age , to producer-consumers , in Industrial Age , and now to Information Seekers , in Information Age . We no longer needed God for explaining things that we couldn't understand a few hundreds of year ago. The changes were sudden and shocking for many. But the few who could grasp the change dared to think beyond the horizon. They questioned their own existence, which is considered as the the epitome of self consciousness. Even though this question was asked millennia ago by philosophers in Greece, our...

H uman Mind, the single organ in Human body which consumes as much as 20% of the total energy consumed by the whole body combined together. Now, that's a feat for a small organ which constitutes only 2% of the net body mass. Every thought one have in their brain, every neuron which fires in your nervous system consumes energy. Our Brain; the wonder machine Since ages philosophers have pondered upon the mysterious capabilities of human brain and its abilities. We all might have heard the rumor in our childhood days that a grown adult uses only 20% of the total human brain; which I can tell you is a total bullshit, since a neurosurgeon would tell you that people with a small injury in brain cripples the functioning of specific parts of body partly or completely. It we were using just 20%, then there wouldn't have been much functional difference in our behavior even if a small part of our brain was damaged. Human brain is unique from other animal brain in function...

I am sort of a perfectionist and when it comes to keeping things cleaned up, I can bet no one can beat me!! My Android phone, Motorola Quench XT3(never heard of it! Yeah, it's an Asia specific product from Motorola) has a nice feature of showing album art for songs, as is there in VLC , the epic product from VideoLAN , WMP , the shitty product from Microsoft Corp (which MS has made less shitty in Windows 7 and more) and the lesser known (among mainstream PC and MAC users Rhythmbox , the default music player featured in Ubuntu , the blue eyed kid of Canonical Inc .). But for me the turning point was when I can view album arts in my phone while listening to music and it became an absolute necessity that every song I play on my Android must have an apt album art, not the stupid, moronic default album art which Android features, The default album art of Android Anyways, I search on the internet for a suitable program which would do this thing for me on my computer that i...

My first job was at an IT company where they used to have a company policy wherein they lock your PC after every 3 minute. The usual excuse was Information Security. Just imagine, every-time you have to take a leak, the PC would just lock itself up. The situation was exasperated because of another thing, the password policy, which demanded every password to be  At least 8 character long. At least one number. At least one lower-case alphabet and one upper-case alphabet. and at least one special character. Now, all thing rules made the remembering of password a bit of a hell and on top of it was the 3 minute locking rule. That was the time when I decided to do a bit of mischief and code a software which will do the task of moving the mouse, which would effectively prevent the desktop from locking itself. I started to look for things which would enable me to do this. That's when I encountered Robot , a class Java provides since J2SE 1.3. This class acts like a simul...

In the recent past, my interest for python grew to insurmountable proportion; mainly because of the ease and pseudo-code style syntax. I was actively using python for my Project Euler codes. I am an avid downloader mainly from torrents. Then one day i thought, wouldn't it be nicer if my PC could shutdown automatically when-ever my internet connection breaks up!!! My first choice was a DOS bat script. But then, who uses bat now a days.. :P So, I hooked on to python. It was a matter of a few hours before I could fix it! Here's my script - The same thing in DOS batch file - Feel free to post any improvements in this code of mine...