Tuesday, January 31, 2006

M. Jayachandran "the new find"

I recently had a chance to listen to some of the hits of Malayalam songs at Raaga.com. Some songs composed by M.Jayachandran seems to awesomely soothing. Do try to listen to the following albums like Boyy Friend, Nottam, Paranju Theeratha Visheshangal etc.

I felt I need to know more about the music director M.Jayachandran. Hindu has always been consistently putting good interviews given by talented personalities. Checkout the interview at:

Interview1
Interview2

I liked one of his remark about relation between music and competion. And also unwanted importance given to them. His point seems to be very valid, and can be applied to any field.

"The undue stress on competing and winning, rather than music was the reason why he stopped participating in such events "

Meanwhile, checkout the album "HAPPY" in telugu by Yuvan Shankar Raja. Sounds quite cool,
and youthful album.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Interesting non-technical books

Interesting book useful to introduce scientific experiments :

1. Where puddles go - Michael Strauss
2. Mr. Tompkins - Gamow
3. Asimov on Physics - by Issac Asimov

Interesting non-technical books
Books in touch:

(0) Engineering : our digital future

(1) Geeks by Jon Katz
Comments:

(2) Bad astronomy : misconceptions and misuses revealed, from astrology to the moon landing 'hoax' / Philip C. Plait
Comments:

(3) Einstein's heroes : imagining the world through the language of mathematics / Robyn Arianrhod

(4) First things first : to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy / Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca R. Merrill

(5) The Evolution of Physics: By Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld

(6) Mathematics for Millions: by Lancelot Hogben

(7) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond,

(8) Thinking physics is Gedanken physics / Lewis Carroll Epstein

(9) An introduction to mathematics by A. N. Whitehead

(10) Quest : an autobiography / Leopold Infeld

(11) Journey through genius : the great theorems of mathematics / William Dunham

(12)
Men of mathematics, by E. T. Bell

(13)
What is Mathematics? An elementary approach to ideas and methods, by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins

(14)
The six core theories of modern physics / Charles F. Stevens

(15)
Brave new world / Aldous Huxley

(16) Mr. Tompkins in paperback, by G. Gamow; illustrated by the author and John Hookman

(17)
One Two Three . . . Infinity : Facts and Speculations of Science (Paperback)
by George Gamow

(18) Thirty Years that Shook Physics : The Story of Quantum Theory (Paperback)
by George Gamow

(19) The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein (Biography of Physics) (Paperback) by George Gamow

(20) Models of my life / Herbert A. Simon

(21)
What mad pursuit : a personal view of scientific discovery / Francis Crick

(22)
The joy of insight : passions of a physicist / Victor Weisskopf

(23)
Science careers : personal accounts from the experts
by Flowers Lawrence O

(24) Building a successful career in scientific research : a guide for Ph.D. students and post-docs / Phil Dee ; with cartoons by Chris McLeod

(25) UCI Library links

General books:

(1) The innovator's dilemma : when new technologies cause great firms to fail / Clayton M. Christensen

(2) Demon-haunted world: Science as a Candle in the dark / Carl Sagan

(3) The Innovation Algorithm: TRIZ, Systematic Innovation and Technical Creativity / Genrich Altshuller

(4) And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving / Genrich Altshuller

Books by E.Schumacher

Interesting links

Resume tips:
web.mit.edu/career/www
Science:

http://www.sigmaxi.org/
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/ScientistNightstandTypeDetail/assetid/45261

Computer Architecture tools for study and analysis:

http://netcare.purdue.edu/ => Tools for research and education in computer architecture
http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/architecture/ => Tools for various architecture evaluation
http://yara.ecn.purdue.edu/~teamaaa/dlxview/ => DLX processor simulator

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Devishri Prasad's best in recent times

Friday, January 06, 2006

Social works involved or contributed

(1) Asha Eindhoven
(2) Udavum Karangal , Chennai
(3) UNICEF
(4) WWF - Worldwide Fund for Nature
(5) Stichting ICCF Holland

Monday, January 02, 2006

GNU Linux notes

Found the following website to be very useful for Fedora Core 4 installation guidelines:

Very good installation guide
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html

Very good installation guide
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc4.html?PHPSESSID=768296656d32bd985e74949a9ca31b42

Guide to setup wireless using fedora
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=373096

Things which did not work out-of-the-box in fedora on Dell Inspiron 8600:

(1) Wireless settings:
Wireless installation on Fedora had not been quite as easy as I expected.
Still have'n t figured out the exact sequence needed for wifi to work smoothly with my PC.

(2) Sound card problem:
After the first installation, the sound card did not work properly. I found from some news group that we need to use a tool called kmix, and disable external amplification option, so that the sound is played using internal speaker itself.

(3) Nvidia driver support

(4) ACPI and APM support: Did not have option to put the pc in standby mode or suspend or hibernate mode.

(5) Hardware did not detect the correct settings for the the monitor especially resolution.



Ubuntu notes:
Tried using the Live CD from Ubuntu and found to be quite a idea replacement for desktop.
The interface and tools resembled Windows XP a lot. I was wondering any other front-end would come into the world (probably from MS).
The experience was pleasant. I detected my monitor correctly. I did not know how to enable the wireless network from liveCD. I still considering of switching from Fedora to Ubuntu.

Is it good to switch now ?

How to be hacker by Eric Raymond
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Other linux related links:

User-Mode Linux:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/l-dw-linuxuml-i.html

Cell project from IBM/Sony/Toschiba:

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/cell/

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellstartsim/

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/cellsystemsim

http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/cbexdev.html

Linux tools:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/library.jsp


Concept of GRUB installation not in MBR:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dual_Boot_from_Windows_Bootloader_(NTLDR)_and_why


http://www.sysresccd.org/Howto_install-usb-stick

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html