Sameer Ahuja

I keep telling him, John, dude, I love you like a son, but you’re letting this get to you, it’s getting under your skin, you need to let it go

via fakesteve.net

The dots are permutations of system settings, and the ghosts are possible resolutions. Finish the dots before meeting the ghosts, and you get to eat them again on Level 2. IT Support is the perfect antithesis of PacMan.

I just discovered that it takes one click in Windows 7 to pack all my wallpapers, sound scheme, and Aero color scheme into a single file, and another click to load it onto another Win7 PC. Given that information, I just had to create a pack of my own. Lo and behold, here’s a themepack with all my favorite wallpapers that I’ve acquired over months of idle time, along with my favorite Aero color scheme (Gray), and my favorite sound scheme (As few as possible). If it interests you, here’s the link:

SA.themepack

Be warned though, it’s huge (~89MB). It has several wallpapers, and they are as super-high-resolution as I could get. The wallpapers are all from publicly available sources, and I’ve been careful to not include any restricted content. However, remembering all the sources I’ve acquired them from is beyond my human capacity, so let’s just thank the Internets for them. If you own the rights to a wallpaper in the pack and would like me to remove it or to credit you in this post, please send me an email using the contact page, and I’ll do that in a jiffy.

Oh, and when you get to END wallpaper, please excuse me for it. You know I had to do it.

“I am going to just go back to India. I’m just not responsible enough to do anything worthwhile.”

As I stood sweating in the hot summer sun waiting for the 3PM Tom’s Creek A to arrive, I could not seem to find words degrading enough to describe myself. This was my second day in Blacksburg, Virginia. And I had concluded that I was going back to where I came from. You see, when I came here, I came with the understanding that out of everything that I possessed, there was just one thing that was critical to my presence. My passport. This understanding had been ingrained in my mind by my father’s persistence in repeating it to me, even at the cost of me mocking him every time he did so, once every couple of hours for each day of the week before I actually left India.

And so I stood there; now almost soaking wet from all the sweat in that hot, hot summer sun; trying to avoid the realization of the enormity of the fact that I had lost my passport on my second day at Virginia Tech. Earlier in the day I had found that the passport wasn’t in its natural habitat: The leather pouch in the inner pocket of the document holder I kept in my backpack. Since then, I had traced every step I took the day before. I mean that literally. I had searched the dorm room I stayed at, the laundry room of the dorms, the pavements that I had walked, all the paths on drillfield (I didn’t remember the one I had walked on), and of course, the empty apartment I was going to stay in before I lost the only document that I was not supposed to lose. I had given up on the search.

I went back to the apartment and lied down on the bare floor next to the two trolley bags, the backpack and the handbag that represented everything that I had brought with me to the States. Everything except the only thing that I wasn’t supposed to lose. I tried replaying the last day for one last time in my head. No luck. I was as doomed as Windows Me was the day it released. Well, maybe not that much.

But I digress. Having resigned to my fate, I tried to go to sleep. Now the part from here to what happened next is a gray area in my memory. But here’s what I do remember: I woke up shouting “The Bag!”. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the larger bag. It was empty. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the smaller trolley bag. There, at the bottom of the pocket, my fingers touched the leathery material that makes up the cover of all passports issued by the Indian Republic.

The next few moments are hard to describe. So I won’t. Suffice to say, I really was the happiest person on the planet for those moments.

This is what had happened: When I had arrived in Blacksburg, my baggage didn’t arrive with me – it had been lost in one of the 547 transfers you need to make when coming to Roanoke Regional Airport from anywhere else in the world. Fortunately, the airlines found my bags soon enough. On the evening the day before, the airlines had called me and told me that they were sending the bags at the apartment. When I received the bags, I had to show the personnel my ID. The only ID I had on me was my passport. So I took it out of its natural habitat to show it to the personnel. They gave me the bags and went away.

Now these were heavy bags, filled beyond their legal limits. One person couldn’t lift them both together. Ideally, I should have taken them in one by one. But having lived in big Indian cities for all 25 years of my life, my brain was conditioned to believe that you never leave anything unattended. Anywhere.

So I had to pull in the two trolley bags together, one in each hand. But I was holding the passport in one of my hands. I could keep it in one of the pockets of my Jeans, but that might bend it. This was the most important document in my possession, I couldn’t let it be bent. Umm, wait, I’ll keep it in the front pocket of one of these bags. It’ll be safe there. Later, I’ll take it out and put it in its natural habitat. And then, something happened. I went in, and completely forgot about taking the passport out of the bag. Hell, I even forgot I put it there.

Well, now that this trauma was over, that night I went out of the apartment to the nearby park to watch the stars in the sky. I come from Delhi – I’m blown away whenever I can see anything more than the moon in the night sky. As I was watching the stars, I thought to myself – lesson well learnt. In the future, I would not let magical moments dictate my life, and no matter what happens, I would always keep documents where they belong.

Now, you must be thinking – “I read through this whole post just to read that? I mean, that’s a pretty bland story.” To which let me respond by saying that its less bland than watching kittens sleep for three minutes in a YouTube video – an activity I’m sure you’ve indulged in before. But anyways, the story doesn’t end there. I wish, oh god I wish, that it did. But it doesn’t. In the course of the next two years, I managed to (really) lose my passport once, and my I-20 twice. Over the course of these mishaps, my sense of self-deprecation has mellowed, and I’ve come to accept things for what they really are. Today, as I get ready to finish up with my degree and get started with the next chapter of my life, I still remember vividly that second day in Blacksburg, and often think of the real moral of my story – “Shit happens.”

I’m a heavy user of TextMate, and use the blogging bundle to create and edit posts. I’m also a heavy user of WordPress Pages that enable wordpress to be used as a CMS. The one issue that always bugs me with any new WordPress installation is that you cannot edit pages from XML-RPC blogging tools like TextMate, Ecto, Windows Live Writer and such. The only working solution I’ve found to the same is a little ugly: You’ll need to edit one of the core wordpress files. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love TextMate so much.

This post from Maison Bisson described the process of editing the files for a previous version. The good news is, for the latest WordPress releases (I’ve checked 2.7.0 and 2.7.1), the data model has been changed to remove the “static” post status for pages (They now have the same status codes as posts), which means that no changes are required to the update fundtion; and a field called post_type now stores information about the kind of post (blog post, page, attachment).

So, essentially, here’s all you need to do to magically get the list of latest posts AND pages on your blogging client:

Modify this query in wp_includes/post.php:

 $sql = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = 'post' ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit";

to this:

 $sql = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = 'post' OR post_type = 'page' ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit";

This is a scotch-tape solution that’s worked well for me so far. Try it at your own risk. Also, remember that when you update your WordPress installation, these changes might get overwritten.

UPDATE: This works for 2.9.1 too, see comments below.

Since my body and mind are refusing to do any productive work today, I thought I’ll spend some time to post this thought that has been ringing in my head for quite a while. As is pretty clear these days to any social media specialist, there is a very strong personal identity management aspect to the web today. The first thing that any HR worth his/her salt will do on receiving your resume, for example, is google your name. Secondly, they might use tools like Pipl, 123People or Spokeo to get deeper insights into what you’ve been up to on the web. If you’re on friendfeed, you can make their task a little easier and aggregate your online activities at one place. And, all of us are generating tons of stuff on the web for these services to aggregate and search. Try searching for your name on Pipl. If you are in the core demographic of the people who read this blog, I bet that you’ll find something in the results that you didn’t expect to see. And you can’t delete it.

And that’s the thing about the web and social applications, which is not necessarily bad, but its something that not everyone understands. It’s hard to remove your footprints.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to share in this post. It’s an imaginary scenario that popped into my head the day I installed Twitkut on my Orkut profile. (Disclaimer: The author of the app is my younger brother. I am giving his app free publicity here in the hope that he’ll stop asking me for a MacBook for Christmas.) It’s an app that shows my tweets on my orkut profile and in my orkut update stream. As soon as I installed the app, I realized that it wasn’t the smartest idea in the world. You see, I post a lot of stuff on twitter that I expect only a small set of people to read. I know any one can read all of my posts by simply going to my twitter home, but I don’t expect them to care enough to go there, or to even know enough about me to go there. I certainly don’t expect my mom to go there. And I know she never will. She’s a normal person who uses a computer only for utilitarian purposes that include email, skype and browsing photos. That’s it. And Twitter, as a smart person I know once said, Twitter is still this underground movement in the whole scheme of things, and sometimes its surprising to the ‘tweeter’, as it may, when a more mainstream audience gets access to and comments on the tweet.

Now, Orkut is a social network that is becoming increasingly and scarily mainstream in India. I have school friends, ex-bosses, cousins, relatives and even past teachers as friends on Orkut. (I have my advisor as a friend on Twitter, but that’s another story) And my tweets aren’t meant to be read by all of these people. Especially the relatives. Because that brings them from the online social domain to the very active Ahuja family network domain. Here’s a potential scenario:

I’m willing to be my guinea pig and wait for this to happen some day. When it does, I promise to report in full detail. Till then, enjoy tweeting and friend-feeding, and remember to keep forgetting to keep those wild party pics private. It’s so much more fun to browse through photos when you know you are not meant to see them.

A few days back, I stumbled onto this TEDTalk by Lawrence Lessig. It’s by far the most convincing description that I’ve come across of the state that our culture and law finds itself in today. Watch it and decide if you’d like to vote for drafting him into the Congress.