A less taught aspect of engineering

"Many people think engineering is applied science. It works the same in Perth, Pune, Paris or Pocheon: you will get the same results from the same experiments.

However, engineering is much more than applied science. Engineering is a coordinated social performance of many people with the technical expertise distributed among them, like an orchestra. Social interactions constrain the results just as the strength of steel limits the height of our tallest buildings."

This is such a beautiful and articulate expression of a rarely taught fact about engineering. It's a fact that all engineers would have experienced but not all would have understood. Not until they saw it in plain words as quoted here from this article. I now realize that it was there at the back of my mind, as a funny feeling you get when you use a theorem that you don't fully understand, or when you read a proof that doesn't seem to add up. The article itself may or may not go well with you but this one excerpt, I thought, was worth preserving.

Amarok 1.4 on newer *ubuntu

If your newer (k)ubuntu comes with Amarok 2 by default, here's an easy way to install Amarok 1.4 even if you just have KDE4.

Research+ w/ Zotero & Jungledisk

Sometimes waiting a while is the best option. I didn't wait, I started to write my own pdf-manager but never really finished it. The goal was to keep track of all my research sources (read online papers in pdf form) with copies available offline whenever possible. Additionally, I wanted to keep notes on these resources as I read this. All bundled together, instead of notes and actual pdf's flying all over the place.

How I designed my to-be manager and what fate it met is a story for another day. Fast forward 3-4 months and find me falling back to Zotero. Why? Because now it's version 2.0. They have an excellent demo video on zotero.org, so I won't detail it here. The thing to note, though, is that I came back to it because they added a server-sync functionality in 2.0. All I needed, now, was a WebDAV server storage, which Jungledisk provides off the Amazon S3 storage for $2/month + 15c/GB-month - peanuts. WebDAV is just a protocol on top of http for generic storage access. Again, jungledisk.com is very intuitive and works right out-of-the-box. (No, I don't use Windows or Mac).

Conclusion: Firefox + Zotero plugin + Jungledisk a/c make it a breeze to keep track of your resources from anywhere, anytime. It's worth your time exploring these.

Caveat: It may not be possible to include your existing resources into the Zotero library. If you think of your research resources/projects as music albums, just switch to Zotero from your next album.

pulseaudio(amarok, firefox, xmms)

This article explains nicely the myriad of linux sound projects and where pulseaudio fits or why to use it. The pulseaudio wiki tells how to set up the alsa driver to route audio to pulseaudio server so that all applications using libalsa (alsa API) can work seamlessly.

I have youtube, xmms and amarok playing simulateneously right now. Did three tracks together sound sweet ever before?

P.S.: I'm not suggesting pulseaudio - it just happens to be the default sound server in most distributions today and it's easier to work with it than around. Things worked even before pulseaudio.

Universal playlist interface

I want an anytime-anywhere playlist interface, so that no matter which music player or which machine or which device I'm playing music from, if I "favorite" a track, it is magically recorded to my has-it-all, omnipresent, cloud-like personal music database, such as one on last.fm or iLike.com. It should also know which source file I was listening from and how I can get back to it. I should then be able to pull up all my favorites into my iPod or like with a single click, and keep it up-to-date as I listen to more new music.

That was from the user side. With current proliferation of server-side music databases like last.fm and musicbrainz.org, this shouldn't be too hard to do. I see two hurdles: 1 getting all client-side software to talk on a single interface, and 2 getting all server-side databases to share information. The latter should be easier to handle as long as the services are co-operative and willing to provide an API, which any reasonable service today does. The first problem also shouldn't be too hard to solve either as long as you're working with open-source and modern software, but legacy commercial players like Windows Media Player and Winamp may be harder to write plugins for and, unfortunately, form a large fraction of user-base.

The sleek part of this exercise would be the universal interface, which must be designed such that it can make it's way incrementally and unimposingly into a user's music experience. Do you know of any such existing solution? Or do you want to build one? Life is too short and music too big to forget and lose a track you liked in the first listen.

Recommended: virtualBox!

No more VMWare or other commercial, hefty virtual machines. Use Sun's FOSS VirtualBox. It's light, streamlined and it works! The configurations I have tested are XP-host, Ubuntu-8.04-guest Mandriva-2009.1-host, Ubuntu-8.04-guest. The latter because the cisco-vpnclient for linux always hangs my dual-core pentium machine (known issue), even on disabling one processor. It ran just fine on the virtual machine.

I haven't got around to testing an XP-guest, but my next configuration will be Mandriva-host, XP-guest. It might not be as clean because of a greater kernel-replace for a Windows-guest but it's too early to say. I'm simply loving VirtualBox so far. It's worth the... effort?

corkscrew

Excepts from man corkscrew:

CORKSCREW(1)

NAME
corkscrew - Tunnel TCP connections through HTTP proxies

SYNOPSIS
corkscrew proxy proxyport targethost targetport [ authfile ]

DESCRIPTION
...
corkscrew is a simple tool to tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy supporting the CONNECT method. It reads stdin and writes to stdout during the connection, just like netcat. It can be used for instance to connect to an SSH server running on a remote 443 port through a strict HTTPS proxy.
...

COMMON USAGE
The common usage of corkscrew is to put the following line in your ssh_config:

ProxyCommand corkscrew proxy proxyport %h %p

This will let your ssh connection go through the proxy with the help of corkscrew.