Carthik Sharma

The rocket will be inspired by SpaceShipOne - something created in part with the money from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The launch pad will be in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, 25 miles south of the town “Truth or Consequence”. The ships of Virgin Galactic, which has for it’s logo the eye of Richard Branson, with an eclipse for the iris, will have a seat for you, if you can spare $200,000.

Doesn’t it sound like something out of a work of fiction? It is all true.

Filed by Carthik at 12:42 am under Science 2 Comments

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It is a rainy day, but I don’t need an umbrella. The water is falling in gentle flakes, slowly. I can’t make up my mind whether this sort of weather depresses me, or makes me happy, since it does both. It depresses me, and yet puts me in a reflective mood, and brings back memories, and thoughts of the future, still unborn. I came back to the lab after a short walk and the songs that were playing in random mode were just perfect. “Anticipation” by Ali Akbar Khan from the album “Journey”, followed by Hélène Ségara singing L’amour est un soleil from the album “Humaine”. It’s in French, but sounds great, nevertheless. My music player is hooked up to last.fm, so you can follow the music I play at my profile page at last.fm if you like. A million thanks to Satya for all the music.

The university is full of students cramming for the finals. Mine are over. I stopped working on a paper and sent it to my professor. I can’t say I finished work on the paper - they never quite get “done”, if you know what I mean. So at the moment, I find myself wanting to drive a really long distance, listening to some good music, which, I think, is just what I will do.

Filed by Carthik at 1:05 pm under General 3 Comments

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Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here’s how we do it at google.

Me read that as “The company with the most employees without an inkling of what’s going on (out-of-knowledge) will be successful.

(From this newsweek article…)

Also, I started debating whether it should be “key to business success FOR the next quarter century” or “key to business success IN the next quarter century”. Also note that the “g” in google is not capitalized.

Time to sleep, I suppose.

I am the black kettle calling the pot black, I know, being not so careful with my grammar and spelling up here, but yet, I miss the days when finding a spelling mistake, or incorrect grammatical constructions in the daily newspaper (The Hindu) used to make my day.

And no, The Hindu is not in “Hindu”. I have had no less that 3 people ask me, “So you’re from India, eh, do you speak Hindu?”

Quick Quiz - which is the fourth most-spoken language in the world? No searching in Wikipedia, or elsewhere - only top-of-the-mind answers allowed.

Filed by Carthik at 1:39 am under Yours Truly 4 Comments

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One of the main problems I had (about a year ago) with working, or using the computer, when at home, was that I did not have a proper seating arrangement, and so used to end up slouching in the couch, or torturing my spine in bed, or some such. So I got myself this desk from Target.

Now the problem with working from home was that when I work on the laptop, the laptop keyboard on top of the desk made for an uncomfortable typing position. The keyboard tray in the desk is already occupied by the desktop’s keyboard and mouse — so I can’t place an external usb keyboard and mouse on the tray for use with my laptop.

So as things were, I used to work, and use the computer at school.

Until tomorrow. Today I installed Synergy on my desktop as well as laptop. This was very easy to do - $sudo apt-get install synergy was all it took, thanks to Ubuntu’s magical software management. Then I edited a synergy.conf file onthe desktop following the instructions at the wiki.

The following is the entire content of the file /etc/synergy.conf :

section: screens
        # two hosts named:  umberto(desktop), milan(laptop)
        umberto:
        milan:
end

section: links
        # umberto's screen is to the right of milan's
        umberto:
                left = milan
        milan:
                right = umberto
end

Then the desktop was ready to act as a “server”, that is the machine that has the keyboard and mouse physically connected to it. $synergys --config /etc/synergy.conf got synergy running.

Now, on the laptop, I installed synergy, and I fire it up using $synergyc umberto (where umberto is the host-name of the desktop). That’s it, now I can use the same mouse and keyboard for both the desktop and the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme left on the desktop’s monitor, and then a little more to the left, the mouse pointer pops into the laptop’s screen, and now the mouse and keyboard can be used for the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme right of the laptop screen, it pops into the desktop, and now the kyboard and mouse can be used with the desktop. This is so magical, almost, when you try it - especially since setting it up was so effortless.

I wonder why I took so long to set this up, really. Now I can’t wait to do this at the lab too, where I have another desktop, keyboard and mouse waiting

Come tomorrow, I might just feel better about working from home, and save myself at least the late-evening trip back to the lab.

Oh, Synergy works for windows and macs too, and for any and all combination of OSes, and for multiple computers. So you can have 5 computers and monitors all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse. Isn’t that great!

Filed by Carthik at 10:55 pm under Linux, Ubuntu, techknow 6 Comments

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