about vinod kurup

I missed the Milwaukee Malayalee Christmas Party this past weekend, but Lisa sent me pics. Can’t wait to go home for the holidays…

MarkD informed me that unregistered users couldn’t add comments. Turns out it was due to some extra quoting of query variables that has been fixed in more recent versions of OpenACS, but I’ve been too lazy to update. The good news is that all of you who’ve been dying to tell me off can finally do so!

Hey, my colleague Steve Vaughan is quoted in this NY Times article on music file sharing and he even got mentioned by name on scripting.com.

The Worst Jobs in Science [via badgertronics]

The next time an intern complains to me about their job, I’m gonna say, “Yeah, you’re right, but read this!”

Open Letter to SCO.

*Loud Applause*

Read this journal of a guy who had his sight restored after 43 years of blindness. [via Badgertronics]

I’ve been getting weird emails over the past day or so. The From: address is always different, there is no body text and there is an attachment called your_document.pif. The From: address is sometimes recognizable, but seems to be spoofed.

Google only gave me 1 document for “your_document.pif” and that document states that this is a new virus called W32/Sobig.F-mm (link changed due to 404). Not much info about it yet, but it seems pretty widespread.

Update: Wow, google only had 1 document for the above search when I wrote this a few hours ago and now it has 391! Looks like this virus is just taking off. Fastest. Virus. Ever.

Mars is closer than it will ever be (in our lifetime, at least).

Today is the 56th anniversary of India’s Independence from Britain. Interestingly, Google’s top results for “indian independence day” are not very informative - mostly just greeting card sites.

The power finally came back on at around 7:20 PM tonight. I was sitting on my futon trying as hard as I could not to sweat, when I heard a loud cheer from the courtyard and saw that the lights had gone on in the apartments outside my window.

It’s been a weird couple days. The power went out around 4:15 PM yesterday while I was looking up some labs in the preceptor’s room. The A/C had been on full-blast, so we all thought that it was just an overloaded circuit, but soon we got word that nearby buildings were affected and everyone went smoothly into disaster-mode. Take care of any urgent patient needs and encourage everyone else to go home. No staff leaves until we know what’s going on. Around 6:30, we got the word that whoever was within walking distance could go home, provided that they be back first thing in the morning. I figured 4 miles is walking-distance, so I left. From the 80’s to around 63rd St, 2nd Avenue was packed with cars trying in vain to get to the Queensboro bridge. Traffic lights were off, but it didn’t seem to matter since the cars weren’t moving anyway. Civilians were trying to direct traffic with varying success. The cars obeyed, but pedestrians were on their own schedule. From the Queensboro down to the 40’s, pedestrians replaced the cars and swarmed over the street.

I got to my neighborhood around 8ish. Most of the local shops were out of flashlights and running low on water. I swear the people at the counter were just making up prices as they went along, but no one really seemed to care. After getting settled at home, I went for a short walk outside around 10PM. I was shocked at how dark New York was without any lights. You could clearly see the stars in the sky. It was dangerous to walk around without a flashlight because there would be people just sitting on the sidewalk waiting to be tripped over.

But everything is back to normal now and the only casualty is my uptime

Update:

• Satellite pics [via Badgertronics]
• Lots of more interesting stories [via BoingBoing]