Female Rappers
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Why aren’t there any female rappers?
Or is that there are, and that they just not too visible?
Is rap music a bastion of the males?
Filed by Carthik at 8:14 pm under General 
48 Comments
Why machines filter spam better than humans
Thursday, March 10, 2005
I couldn’t help laughing when I read Mako’s adventure with spam. What if a Nigerian email you, sincerely requesting collaboration on a project, or expressing a business interest in what you do? Well, this is what happens - your spam filter does not mark the mail as spam, while you do.
Mako’s blog makes me smile - almost always, and is now a daily read for me. How I wish he linked to individual entry pages from the title of posts. Each time I want to write about something he wrote about, I end up looking through the :
06:22 | reflections | # | Comments: 0
at the bottom of the post (for which I have to scroll down, first, or I don’t see them), and then i have to figure out which of those links is the right one for the post. WordPress has spoilt me, I tell you!
Mako’s blog is powered by Bloxsom, which is not GPLed, or as far as I can tell, distributed under a free-software license but is released under the MIT license, which enables folks to redistribute modified versions. It also does not put a “generator” tag in the source of the feeds it produces, and is the first tool I have noticed that doesn’t put that feed in there (there may be more). A discussion with Matt a long time ago had concluded with the reasoning that looking for the generator tag in the feeds was the best way to identify the tool used to publish a blog. Not any more, I guess.
Alright, so Mako, want to step into the wonderful world of WordPress? Moving is easy.
P.S. This post started heading towards one destination and ended up somewhere I never intended to end up when I started writing it. Sort of like how I spend my days - lots of things are accomplished but the plan usually goes out the window - have to fix this.
Filed by Carthik at 8:52 am under WordPress, Time Pass - Humour, Blogging 5 Comments
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links for 2005-03-10
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Discovering TeXmacs
Writing equations in Latex using Kile is easy enough, but for folks like me, it could get easier. TeXmacs is the latest wonder tool I’ve discovered to make writing equations for LaTeX so much easier.
Here’s a couple of screenshots - one of how texmacs looks, with an equation, and another of the LaTeX output I got from it. I know, the equations mean nothing, I was just trying it out. I was done creating this in under a minute!
Creating the equation:
The output in LaTeX, as seen in my text editor (Gedit):
Groovy!
Filed by Carthik at 12:21 pm under General 1 Comment
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Error - No Errors
Thursday, March 3, 2005
Now what sort of an error message is this?:
Error: Success! (like it was not supposed to succeed at what it was trying to do)
Notice the other error message, which is still sane. This used to happen occasionally, and I had saved a screenshot for later.
Filed by Carthik at 2:14 pm under Ubuntu, techknow 1 Comment
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Ubuntu Hoary, Tomboy and F-spot
I upgraded to Ubuntu Hoary, which is the next release, coming out sometime in May 2005. It is bleeding edge software under development for the most, but from my experience using it on the work desktop, I know it to be pretty stable. No problems so far, with anything critical. I guess I can take any problems it throws at me.
The reason for the upgrade was so that I can use Tomboy and F-spot, or at least try them out.
Tomboy is a desktop-note taking app, which I already find mighty useful, after 2 days of using it. An icon (Tintin) sits on my taskbar, and pops up an easy to use list of notes, and a link to Recent Changes. I can link to other notes from a note, so it really is a small note-taking wiki, which is el neato.
F-spot is for managing photos, you can tag snaps and export them to Flickr, or your own gallery. The gallery export feature did not work for me, and since it is a product currently being developed, there isn’t too much documentation or details at the website. It’s not complete by any means, but it interesting nevertheless. I need a way to organize all the photos I have on my computer. A lot of the more recent snaps never made it to my gallery, really, and I have been postponing the upload until after I have organized the pics locally. Why, oh why, is organizing such a chore?
Filed by Carthik at 11:56 am under Ubuntu, techknow 8 Comments
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Candidacy Exam Passed
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
I defended my candidacy proposal today, and I guess I did it in an agreeable fashion, since there were not too many questions at the end. I have passed the candidacy exam, its time to move on, and get the rest of the Ph.D. done.
Filed by Carthik at 5:10 pm under Yours Truly, Research 9 Comments