Ubuntu 10.10 Filesystem access through windows 7

For a long time I was waiting for a good app to access my linux FS without booting into it.
Lo and behold, here it is

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/files/Ext2read%20Version%202.2%20(Latest)/ext2explore-2.2.71.zip/download

It works nicely for my windows. I havent tried writing to linux, but read works like a charm.

Discovering order in chaos and learning to control it

A course I have taken this semester has lent my imagination a new kick-start. When you learn about Karl Sims' creatures, Hod Lipson's data extraction, Turing's reaction diffusion models and Neumann's self replicator, you are dumb founded, inspired, amazed.

To this day I believe in my skills as an observer and experimenter, but when I read about Neumann and his penchant to visualize processes, trace phenomena correctly without any knowledge I am left speechless. Turing's quirkiness was particularly well known, but his thought about finding patterns through morphogenesis and obviously the Turing machine. The present day researchers are not too far behind, Lipson's work seems interesting and very promising.

Now that I have all that out of my system, let me talk about these few guys from the max planck institute who have aroused my curiosity and beckoned my imagination to sit and ponder of the what-ifs and could-bes. This  bunch of people who have been featured in nature - http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n3/full/nphys1508.html have observed unique neural behaviour in insects and captured it in a simple neuron model whose ground state is chaotic but is controlled by sensory inputs  to generate behaviours. These discoveries in the neural behaviour and contruction could shed light on the actual neural processes in humans leading to potentially simple and effective models of behaviour. In combination with techniques like subsumption architectures(doomed as a failure or atleast not so successful), we could look at simple and evolvable solutions to various problems in locomotion and path planning.

Going further,  if we could apply a chaotic organization mechanism to the reasoning process in AI, we would have made great advances. The reasoning scheme in AI has huge problems with representation and these problems will continue to haunt us, but some progress towards such self organizing behavior would definitely go a long way.

Player - stage Installation

Installing the player/stage I ran into a few problems and did not find good solutions, I am posting what worked for me-


1. Download the player project
2. Extract the player folder
3. sudo apt-get install python-gdal netcdfg-dev libpq-dev libhdf4g-dev libgeos-dev libatk1.0-0 lib3ds-dev freeglut3-dev
4. Run cmake (if you want create a directory for build like the install guide specfies)
5. Run make
6. Run sudo make install
7. add the following to your .bashrc file 

export PATH=$PATH:"/usr/local/lib64"
export PLAYERPATH="/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:"/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"


This should get you to set up.

This link http://www.control.aau.dk/~tb/wiki/index.php/Installing_Player_and_Stage_in_Ubuntu has a lot of information for installing and configuring your player information

The vienna philharmonic star wars

Any like minded geek would have heard of star wars, seen it, worshipped yoda and lucas. The movie acts at different levels, playing out human relationships and the ever prevalent fight between good and evil. There would definitely have been times when people have referenced the death star,  the "may the force be with you" in situations totally unrelated to the empire or the jedi knight.

I have really enjoyed the star wars music, humming "da dada da daaa, pom papapum".  This music evokes emotions in humans which can range from "oh no not that song" to "wow" to "what the hell is that?". Surmising these emotions in a word can never be done, so I shall let you see the magic that this music can create.

Recraeted by the vienna philharmonic - the star wars theme in all its glory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9xrmThlsOA

(p.s.:  look at the number of people sitting to watch and listen to this, cross cultural, cross planetary, and simply superb)

The amazing fractals

Fractals are a intricate design pattern generally self repetitive and aesthetically pleasing. They are things you see in everyday life, snowflakes, coast lines, fruits. Nature likes to deal with fractals and why not considering there is such symmetry.

Being introduced to fractals in my course and learning about the pioneering fractals has been pleasurable. Learning that Turing was really interested in reaction diffusions for morphogenesis and made some pioneering contributions has only increased my admiration of the queer genius.

Some of the images do look like the Rorschach test replications, they seem nice, generally colourful in a hue of blue, yellow or red. Turing was trying to set up a mathematical or state model explanation for the generation of patterns in nature. How does a cheetah get its dots, how does a zebra get its stripes and the general things common people never ponder over.

It is amazing how a small set of rules and parameters generate the most intricate patterns. You can have a look at them here : http://cgjennings.ca/toybox/turingmorph/. There is a nice applet which animates the whole process.

Back to the roots

Its been a long hiatus from writing, and writing again feels great. The last few months have been really a foot on the pedal with no brakes for me. I have ventured upon life in a graduate school, which is not the easiest because you have to be on the edge, multitasking, working hard and mostly keeping sane.

The last month has been a real adventure of sorts, getting to meet a lot of people, some with matching wavelengths and some from a different planet. Running around pillar to post getting myself organized, running up my google calendar to maximize my free time. Sometimes it turns out technology actually slows you down, but that a entire debate for another day. I have been a little lucky, coming in tired and landing without any jetlag. A week at my uncles place grounded in Indian tradition. A good friend who took out an unseen person to dinner.The really small things that helped me in a new environment.

Now that I am almost settled in and opened my cobwebbed blogger account, I realized its been more than 2 months since I had posted anything. So I decided to update my activities and start posting more about my studies here, general interests, debates and other myriad stuff which are generally of no interest to me. (pun intended). No goals set on the blogger time limit in my calendar for sure.

The new canon SD 780 IS - my second love

Its black, hardly bigger than a credit card and takes great photos. This is the new canon sd 780 IS. A wonderfully good camera, which trespasses the bounds on size and compactness. I would have wanted a few more features and a better ISO rendering, but with what I paid for it, this seems very good.

The portability is so good, it will fit into the back of any jeans or slide into any pouch. I would not say best picture quality I have seen, but it does have a nice macro. Shooting in auto in low light conditions is a definite no-no, the flash turns on and ruins the effects on any background. The High ISO ranges need a tripod and some real skill to get decent images.The zoom does not range long, and the digital zoom for once is not half bad, though I would never resort to it personally.

This would detract most of the users from this camera, but for a on the go snap shooter this is better than anything in the market.

Looking forward to unleash the amateur photographer in me.