Firefox funnies

"Cookies are delicious delicacies".

;) Read the full story here.

And, if you use Firefox, check out the "Firesomething" extension / add-on, available here. (See here for the background story.)

Btw, other add-ons that I use myself, and recommend, are Tab Mix Plus, IE View, Forecastfox, DownThemAll, and the Winestripe theme (if, like me, you prefer the old v1.5 look of the toolbar icons.)
(Note to self: Check out IE View Lite and superT.)

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Try typing "about:mozilla" in the location bar of your Netscape / Mozilla / Firefox / SeaMonkey browser. You should get one of the following excerpts from the Book of Mozilla

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.

from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.

from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31(Red Letter Edition)

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

*chuckle* Reminds me of the story of the Dosfish (By Lincoln Spector. Originally published in Southern California Computer Currents, July 12--August 15, 1993.). (Read it here, or here, or here.)

WinAmp playlist / iPod playlist / I'm an idiot

I feel stupid.

I bought myself a 30-GB iPod a few months ago, because, although I already had a 512 MB flash mp3 player (an iRiver --- the iFP 895 --- and a lovely little thing it is), I wanted to have my *entire* music collection with me wherever I went. And out of the various hard-drive players out there, the iPod did seem like the best one. The only problem was: I didn't really like iTunes at all (and iTunes, as you're probably aware, is the only way to get music onto an iPod). I've been a devoted WinAmp fan ever since I discovered mp3, all the way back in 1997, and over the years I've developed my own method of organizing my mp3 collection on my hard drive --- filename conventions, folder arrangements, etc. And WinAmp doesn't interfere with any of that. iTunes, on the other hand, prefers to do things its own way. Thankfully, it gives you the option to not copy/move all of your mp3s into its library folder and to not re-arrange everything into its Artist\Album\Songname directory structure.

Anyway. There are other beefs that I have with iTunes, but those aren't the subject of this post. I feel like an idiot because I spent these past few months mostly *not* using my iPod because I couldn't figure out a way to import my WinAmp-generated playlists into iTunes. I like having all my music with me, and I like listening to my entire collection in random order, but in certain situations, like when I'm driving, I only want to hear the songs that I've set aside into my special for-driving playlist. (Obviously.) Hitting the "next" button on my iPod repeatedly is annoying, and depletes the battery unnecessarily. Hence the non-use of the iPod, until I figured out a solution, and the making-do with mp3-CDs and my flash player. Meanwhile, I grew increasingly frustrated at my inability to find a way to convert WinAmp's .m3u (or .pls) playlists into iTunes' .xml format. I scoured the Internet forums. Googled "export winamp playlist to itunes". Found a Winamp plugin that would export my entire library to an xml file, but not individual playlists. Found an iTunes plugin that would export an iTunes playlist to m3u (see a discussion about it here), but that was the opposite of what I wanted. Ranted and raved, and made much ballyhoo about how much iTunes sucked.

Today I found out that iTunes actually does recognize, and can directly read and import, m3u playlists. File > Import > foo.m3u . That's it, that's all. I have no idea why I didn't realize this four months ago. I could swear I must have tried it back then.... didn't I??

Hee-haw.

Tables: LaTeX vs. Word

Am starting to wonder if I made the right decision in choosing to write my dissertation in L^AT_EX instead of in MS Word. I need to create a table of information, and need it to:

• be in landscape format (because there are a *lot* of columns)
  
• break over multiple pages (because there are a lot of rows)
  
• have the entries in each cell wrap over multple lines (because there's often a lot of text in each entry)
  
• float, if possible (so that I don't have a half-empty page before the table starts).
  

Am pulling my hair out (what little is left of it) trying to grapple with the all the various tabular-derivative packages (longtable, supertabular, tabularx, tabulary, array... ), to figure out which one will work best for me, and how to massage it into doing what I want it to do.

And spending all my time doing this instead of actually *writing*.

GRARRRHHH!

Blogger num_profile_views coding silliness

Just discovered: You can jack up the count of the "profile views" on your Blogger profile just by refreshing/reloading the page. Even if you're logged in, as yourself. What a crock!

Arc of a Diver

Overcame my fear of diving (into water / a pool) this weekend. Well, not really "fear", per se, but more an extreme, subconcious, ingrained reluctance to launching myself head-first and un-braced for impact at anything. I actually used to dive really well, back when I first learned to swim, about a decade and a half ago, and was completely unafraid to smoothly arc off the diving board or the side of the pool. I couldn't actually *swim* very well, but I sure could dive!

Then, somewhere along the way, I learned the proper way to coordinate my anatomy when the object of impact was not water that would slide neatly out of the way (assuming, of course, that you assume an appropriately streamlined form, and don't try broad-siding the water, thinking that it's "soft". That, of course, is the mistaken assumption that belly-flop victims rapidly discard.), but unyielding, solid ground. "Tuck and roll" became my mantra, and it saved my bacon in numerous incidents involving bicyles, snowboards and the like.

Swimming somehow got abandoned along that particular way. There were a few sporadic attempts to re-aquaint myself with that marine mode of locomotion, but it never really got off the ground, so to speak. Forget about getting off a diving board. I became too aware of my lack of ability to swim well and/or stay afloat for any respectable period of time to trust myself in the deep end of any pool. Son of a sailor that I am, that became one of my most acute (`acutest'?) sources of shame. (... Lack of fluency in Hindi being a significant other.)

But my cousins have a pool in their backyard, and this summer I made use of it to the fullest, to develop my ability to manoeuvre capably in an aquatic environment... Basically, to expand my comfort zone to include that environment. And I was fairly successful... Except for the diving bit. I simply could not bring myself to, like I said before, launch myself at something head-first, arms and body locked into full extension, simply *asking* for skeletal-compression trauma. It was so... wrong! Every time I'd try diving, my body would instinctively brace for a colllison --- joints loose and ready to flex and absorb the energy of the impact, muscles relaxed, torso curved and twisted to transfer the blow over the shouder and back, head, elbows and knees tucked in to protect the face and internal organs... you know the drill. It wasn't *fear*, because I *knew* there was nothing to fear... there were no sharp rocks hiding just below the surface of the water, waiting to punish me for my stupidity. It was just a natural, instinctive reflex neural pathway that I needed to break. Mind over matter, and all that jazz.

And this weekend I did it. No more hesitation, no more needing to command myself sternly to disobey my instincts, because now it finally feels right. Hurrah!

Shut your mouth, fool!

I shoot off my mouth too goddamn much.

I used to be quiet, and introverted, and a real wallflower. Still am, at core, a very private, closed-off person, but I've over the years learned to be more sociable and "fun" when in the company of others. Just the other day, an old friend -- who knew me back in my wallflower days -- asked me when I'd come to [help her] rock a certain joint. Wow, I never thought I'd ever see the day when *I*'d be counted on for something like that! And, a couple of years ago, a date startled me into silence (for a little while) by mentioning to me that I was, indeed, a pretty, um, loquacious guy.

Maybe too loquacious. My overly-logical / scientific mind tends to second-guess and try and be extremely precise about just about every thing (which, for certain things, is a good thing, but probably not for every thing). And sometimes I open my mouth and voice that mind too soon. And get myself into trouble. The brain is in gear before I engage the mouth; only problem is, it's in over-overdrive, or crashing through the wrong set of gears.

Put a sock in it, J. Shut up and go with the flow.

Cars, electronics and computers

This is the third time, in the year and a half that I've owned it, that the check-engine light on my Mazda Protege has come on... and, a little over a week later, gone off by itself. The first two times I took it into my mechanic, shelled out about a hundred and fifty bucks each visit, and was diagnosed with (a) the first time, a faulty EGR boost sensor (whatever that is... something in the emissions-control system), and (b) the second time, a faulty catalytic converter. Each time, the broken item would cost nearly a thousand bucks to replace. Was it an essential fix? "No," said the mechanic. Would the car get damaged if I didn't fix it? "No." Do I have to do it? (I like to make sure there aren't any loopholes.) "No, not unless you are due for an emissions check-up any time soon." The only downside to not replacing them was that, if something else went bad, I wouldn't know about it, because the check-engine light would have already been on.

"Don't worry about it," they said, "unless you notice a sudden change/drop in performance of the car -- misfiring, bad starts, poor fuel economy, that sort of thing. Then bring your car in." (Strangely, I've noticed a slight increase in my miles-per-gallon / miles-per-tank the past couple of weeks... Odd.)

So I didn't replace them. And, like I said, each time, a week later, the light went off by itself.

This time, I didn't go to the mechanic. Just gritted my teeth and gripped the wheel and puckered up my sphincter and positioned my left hand on the wheel to try and block out that incessant, glaring yellow light, and waited... and waited... and waited.

And this morning, it went off by itself. :)

Es macht mir viel Spass!

Learning new languages is fun!

Yo soy apprendiendo Espanol. ... Problem is, German keeps sneaking in every now and then, when I'm at a loss for the correct word. (Just goes to show how deeply I got pulled into the Max-Mueller-Bhavan / Goethe-Institut matrix during that one year there. Nah, I jest. Frau Jyotsna Bhide was one of the best teachers I've ever had.) Just like that incredible moment, 12 years ago, when, while waiting for the bus home from school, I tried to translate/sing "A Whole New World" in Hindi, opened my mouth, and, without any conscious thought involved, out it came in German. To say I was stunned, myself, is putting it mildly.

And then I get all mixed up between the Spanish and French pronunciations of words like "bien". Partly due to having seen Jean Reno exclaim "Tres bien!" in Godzilla just a couple of days ago. ... And now I'm walking around, mimicking the French accent and saying "Tres bien!" to myself every few minutes and chuckling away at the novelty of bending my voice in new ways.

Learning new languages is fun!