Random Thoughts

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while

I came across an interesting article on BBC (Finger length 'key to aggression' ) today and The Economist has a similar article ( Neuroeconomics: Digitally enhanced ). They report a positive correlation between the length of mens' ring fingers and their success in high-stress securities trading. Actually, the more correct comparison s between the ratio of the ring to index finger and success/aggression. In women, the ring and index fingers are comparable, however the ring finger is significantly longer than the index finger in men. In this study, the researchers only looked at men's fingers. Apparently the level of testerone in a fetus is exposed to during pregnancy affects length of fingers as well as the level of aggression. More aggressive traders tend to have longer ring fingers and they happen to be more successful, after factoring out the effect of experience. They also reached a similar conclusion when looking at college students. Having a short ring finger

I have been a fan of Kobe Bryant's game ever since I saw him in the 1999 playoff loss to the San Antonio Spurs. While I have always enjoyed his creativity, skill and finesse, my perception of the man has never been glamourous. He is selfish and narcisstic beyond I can defend, even though I have for many many years. Almost everything he does on the court has a certain motive which is rarely wholesome. What ticks me off about Kobe now is his latest marketing ploy for his Nike shoes. His official website claims that he wore his Nike Hyperdunks (which came out in the middle of 2008) until December 16, 2008. At that point, he switched to the new (and not-yet-released) Nike ZKIVs. Here are his stats with the Hyperdunks and ZKIVs. 24 GAMES WITH HYPERDUNK: OCTOBER 28 – DECEMBER 16 PPG: 25.0 FG%: 46.1 3-PT%: 29.5 12 GAMES WITH ZKIV: DECEMBER 19 – JANUARY 11 PPG: 30.8 FG%: 52.0 3-PT%: 48.9 They go on to say: His game has been elevated to amazing new heights over the past month, and the

In my previous post, the mounting federal budget deficit had me worried about the possibility of the U.S. government not being able to pay back its debt, effectively wrecking the global economy as a result. The odds of the U.S. government defaulting on its bond payments are very small but not totally negligible, according to the Greg Ip's article on the subject . The chances of default remain pretty remote. But remote does not mean impossible. The best way to keep those chances remote is for policymakers to vow to get the deficit down once the recession is over -- and mean it. I am encouraged that the author approves of Obama's stimulus spending plan despite the country's mounting debt. The Obama administration should not focus on debt reduction now, which could actually undermine the prospects for a recovery in the real economy. With households and businesses trying to spend less and save more, the federal government must spend more and save less -- that is, borrow more -

It is remarkable tha the Congressional Budget Office is projecting a federal budget deficit of $1.2 trillion without including Obama's expensive stimulus plan. Assuming Obama's stimulus plan costs $800 billion over two years, you are looking at deficits in the order of $1.6 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year!! Obama tells us that trillion dollar deficits are here to stay , for the coming years. These numbers are scary!! I like to think of the gravity of a federal budget deficit as a percentage of federal revenue (as opposed to be the GDP as everyone else does). Considering the federal tax revenue is about $2.5 - 2.7 trillion, the deficit for 2009 is going to be anywhere between 44-64% of the federal tax revenue!! Imagine if you are a household spending 44-64% more than you make. How long would you survive? Not for long!! I don't think even the money-printing Uncle Sam can pull this off for too long. This country is on an unsustainable path to a devastating nationa

Obama has been talking about including digiization of health records as part of his stimulus plan. I was delighted this morning to see concrete numbers showing the cost and benefit of Obama's plan. So, the estimated cost of establishing the system is $75-100 billion over 5-10 years, which is about $10-20 billion per year. That number is minute (<1%) compared to the $2.3 trillion the U.S. spends on healthcare. Once the system is up and running, it will cut healthcare costs by $200-300 billion every year. That is an investment I can believe in. I wonder if anyone would have any serious opposition to this plan.

I am a big fan of The Economist magazine because it always has neat graphs that get the message across without the need to read through articles. The reading, I save for people who love nuance or those who can't decipher graphs.

According to the Christian Science Monitor , the embassy is supposed to be one of the largest in the world and it is meant to symbolize America's long term commitment to Iraq. Sure, $592 million is peanuts compared to the nearly $1 trillion the Iraq War has cost so far, but it is a bad investment and a waste of money for many reasons. For one, the U.S. remains largely hated in Iraq despite whatever progress has been made lately. Such a grandiose symbol of the much-maligned America will only exacerbate and fuel the anger and anti-American sentiment that exists there. It is quite inconceivable that the Iraqis will warm up to the U.S. anytime soon. Secondly, building such an expensive structure in a country where suicide bombings are a daily occurance and their scale/destruction is massive is a waste of money. I would not be surprised if the new embassy is a subject of a major terrorist attack. To prevent a terrorist attack, the U.S. would have to spend lots of military resources

I am a big fan of The Economist magazine because it always has neat graphs that get the message across without the need to read through articles. The reading, I save for people who love nuance or those who can't decipher graphs.

I checked out The Big Lebowski 's IMDB page and came across this amusing bit. You would think such a classic masterpiece would win many awards and nominations, but that was hardly the case. I suppose it has a cult following of its own, but its appeal in the mainstream may not be that great. May be it had tough competition that year. Fortunately, it did win the Best Foreign Film award from the Russian Guild of Film Critics . That got me thinking if the numerous mentions of The Dude's favorite drink, the white Russian had any bearing on the film winning the Russian award.

I am a big fan of The Economist magazine because it always has neat graphs that get the message across without the need to read through articles. The reading, I save for people who love nuance or those who can't decipher graphs.

It's nothing long or complicated, but it might save someone a few minutes. The stable version of Picasa for Linux is 2.7 as of today(01/02/2009). You can install version 2.7 following the instructions in the download page or add Google repositories to your sources as down outlined here . If you are like me and you want the latest [beta] version, here is how you would do it. First, download the RPM for Picasa 3.0 from the download page. If you try to install to install the RPM, your efforts will fail with errors indicating that you are missing some dependencies. Namely, you will probably need to install sane-backends, libgphoto, libgsane, libksane or some combination thereof. In my case, I was fortunate enough to have had all those programs installed. The one I was missing was lsb . I went ahead and installed lsb and Picasa 3 installed on my OpenSuse 11.0 perfectly.

Here are two bailout cartoons that I wanted to recycle from Greg Mankiw's blog.