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 subscribe to the RSS feeds from Lifehack and I came across some good tips. One that was of value to me was their post on procrastinaton . The writer suggests that procrastinators should persistently ask themselves this one question. “What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?” l could not agree more. I am already practicing that piece of advice and it might shame me into doing "the best think I could be working on right now" and that is certainly not blogging. See ye!

It is no secret that people in the US drive a lot , and they rely on their personal vehicles for the majority of their transportation needs. Slight increases in the price of gas or concerns about the environment have done little to curb the country's fuel consumption significantly. The three Detroit automakers always seem behind the curve on every technology including fuel efficiency. No wonder they are all on the brink of bankruptcy. Citizens seem uncompromising when it comes to their right to drive cheaply. Is there any way to cut down on fuel consumption by US drivers? Freakonomicists STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT suggest introducing disincentives for driving could be effective. What disincentives do they entertain? Congestion pricing which 'penalizes' those who drive in congested areas has been effectively applied in Singapore and London, but has received a lot of resistance in Manhattan. Pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) Insurance - This way, those who driv...

I had previously written about blocking ads using my wireless router's web filter as a way of saving network bandwidth . Apparently Firefox users like myself can block ads much more conveniently using the Flashblock and Adblock addons. Flashblock literally blocks all Macromedia Flash content and indicates the blocked content with a placeholder which may be clicked to view the Flash content. It is a little excessive, but I like it. Adblock blocks ad sources as instructed. I apologize to those that rely on online advertising revenues to put food on the table, but they should find solace in knowing that I don't respond to ads. Trust me, it is for the best.

More Bikes More bike trails particularly in metro areas. Encourage people to ride bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles Government subsidies and/or tax credits for people using bikes as a primary mode of transportation. Add more safety features to motorcycles. Lighter and More Aerodynamic and Less Powerful Cars An average sedan weighs 3000+ lbs. An average person weighs ~160 lbs. An average horse weighs ~1000 lbs. Why do people need a 3000lbs machine to carry their 160lbs bod? It's time to reduce the car:person ratio. It is time for cars to lose some of that weight. Build cars out of lighter material w/o compromising safety. Encourage people to remove unnecessary weight. Build cars with smaller gas tanks. As cars' fuel mileage improves, the need for giant gas tanks should diminish. More two-seaters for the average Joe, not just sports car enthusiasts. More aerodynamic designs. Thinner tires with higher pressure to reduce impact of friction as well as air drag.

... Disaster has struck and the post I had spent a whole day on has vanished because of some incompatibility between Blogger and Microsoft SkyDrive embedding. I will try to recap the contents of that post briefly anyways. The original gcard style sheet is intended for making a small greeting card that gets folded twice, as shown in my previous post . I would like to modify the style sheet to produce a card that gets folded only once. It will have some content on the outside as well as inside. In addition, I want to add features like background image and other figures to make the cards more appealing. Going from a double fold to a single fold That requires that you make the following changes in the file gcard.sty. 1) Double the panel height. %\setlength{\panelheight}{(\paperheight-2\gctopmargin-2\gcbottommargin)/2} \setlength{\panelheight}{(\paperheight-2\gctopmargin-2\gcbottommargin)} 2) Push the inside pages to their respective location next page. %\begin{textblock*}{\panelwidth...

No, no, not that kind of latex. You are pretty sick for thinking that. I am talking about LaTeX, the typesetting program. Back to greeting cards. Anybody else hate greeting cards? The type that you buy at the store, sign and deliver even though the message is very impersonal and superficial? Yeah, those kind. I hate them very much. Not only do I hate spending time trying to find something that's mildly personal, but I hate paying for them too. $3-5 on that garbage is a travesty. Jerry Seinfeld captures my feelings towards Hallmark cards perfectly in this clip: or this one http://www.youtube.com/v/7tq-RE_6yVo This problem has become significant enough for me to start working on solutions. I am going to make my own cards using LaTeX. So, I googled "LaTeX greeting cards" and came across the the gcards package. It requires that you also install the textpos and graphicx packages, if you don't have them installed already. I am working with a Linux system ...

My previous post on saving paper and ink/toner using the Aardvark Add-on on Firefox has inspired me to seek other topics on efficiency. This post advocates the client-side blocking of ads on the web as a way of being less wasteful with internet bandwidth. I feel slightly guilty about this because a lot of the free content on the internet is supported by ad revenues, and users blocking those ads might deny access to those revenues for the providers of the free content. However, if you are like me and you almost never pay attention to or click on any ads, then you are probably doing no damage. How do I know what to block? I looked through my Firefox cookies and did a search for 'ad'. I would then selectively block those domains. You can block the ad servers locally on your computer, for example suing 'iptables' in Linux or Network Magic in Windows, or for your whole network through whatever interface you have. In my case, the easiest thing was to configure my...

I am sure you are tired of printing garbage like ads and someone else's colorful artwork while all you wanted was have a hard-copy of some clean text and graphics. If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, there is a solution that can save you lot of paper and ink/toner. It is a Firefox add-on called Aardvark , and it allows you to selectively remove sections of a web page before sending it to a printer. Here is a little synopsis : Powerful and user-friendly utility for selecting elements and doing various actions on them. It can be used for cleaning up a page prior to printing it (by removing and isolating elements), for making the page more readable, and (most appreciated by web developers), for analyzing the structure of a page. To use Aardvark , just right-click on the page and select from the popup menu. As you move the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle around the current block element, along with a label showing its type, and if they exist, its id, class, and styl...