So, in the Android ‘platform-tools/’ directory, we know that we have our famous and helpful ‘adb’.

We will first connect our phone through USB cable and run the command ‘lsusb’. This will give us the listing, something like this:

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Using the information above, we create a file: ‘/etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules’ and paste the following in the file:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="618e", MODE="0666"

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="1004", MODE="0666"

Run the following commands:

adb kill-server

adb devices

You may have to reconnect the device once for the system to read and you are done.

This blog post is just a collection of small excerpts from the book that I deliberately did not mark in the book itself. There are a few reasons for this and I will put some prominent ones as briefly as possible. I believe that in itself will become a review, using the excerpt-ionism as the scapegoat.

All the text copyrights belong to Ms. Louisa Gilder.

The excerpts

Page 57. On the streetcar

Bohr, Einstein and Sommerfeld are discussing nature of light and two theories – particle nature vs wave. They miss their stop by 12 stops while discussing this.

“well….” says Bohr as he sits down, “I suppose during a stage in science when everything is in ferment, it cannot be expected that everybody has the same views about everything.”

Einstein smiles at this. “No, that is something that cannot even in the best of circumstances be expected.”

Page 81, Heisenberg in Helgoland

Then, out of the blue and practically crossing paths on the mail, came a paper conveying a totally different quantum mechanics. It seemed to completely contradict Heisenberg’s, yet it produced all of the same results, and – far from the thicket of matrices – did so using mathematics that any physicist could command.

The Schrodinger equation had arrived.

Page 86, What can you observe

Einstein sat down in one of his big armchairs before the unlit fire. “Heisenberg, he said, “every theory contains unobservable quantities.” Heisenberg looked up in surprise. “the principle of employing only observable quantities simply cannot be consistently carried out.”

“But isn’t that precisely what you’ve been doing with relativity?” asked Heisenberg.

Einstein smiled a little. “Perhaps I did use such philosophy earlier, perhaps I even wrote it, but it is nonsense all the same.”

Heisenberg looked as if he were being told by his priest that he did not actually believed in God.

Page 113, Solvay

“Like a game of chess, Einstein all the time with new examples,” Ehrenfest described to his students the subsequent Bohr-Einstein debate, which filled all the extracurricular conference time. Considering his own distaste for both unclear speaking and smelly pipe smoke, Ehrenfest found apt metaphors at hand: “Bohr from out of the philosophical smoke clouds constantly searching for the tools to crush one example after the other. Einstein like a jack-in-the-box; jumping out fresh every morning. Oh, that was priceless.”

One day, after Einstein had asked for the umpteenth time if Bohr really believed that God played dice to determine the future, a smile dawned on Bohr’s face. “Einstein,” he said, “stop telling God how to run the world.”

Page 134, Things fall apart

Von Neumann’s book was a tour de force of elegant and fearsome mathematics, the sort of things most physicists never read, but its existence and conclusions were deeply consoling. The phrase “von Neumann has shown…” entered the quantum physicist’s lexicon as a debate ender.

Page 136, Things fall apart

This occurs at the Cavendish lab experiment, the Rutherford’s place.

Rutherford stormed good-naturedly in and out, giving orders, encouragment, or distraction, occasionally shocking himself by hanging his wet coat on the live terminal or lighting overdry tobacco and sending it up “like a volcano with a great cloud of smoke, flames, and piles of ash,”as the experimentalist next door to Crockfort and Walton noticed with amusement. And on either April 13 or 14 – Crockfort and Walton in their notebooks wrote different dates – he observed the scintillations as the pieces of the atom hit the fluorescent screen. We’ve split the atom! This jubilant cry was soon heard at the newspapers – the atom, the unsplittable, has been split. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Page 160, The Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality

This is a small piece after the EPR paper from Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen.

“While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we have left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.”

Podolsky had to leave for California at about the time of paper’s submission, and it is not clear that Einstein saw it before he was suddenly confronted, on May 4, 1935 (eleven days before the paper appeared in Physical Review), with an article on page 11 of the Saturday New York Times entitled “EINSTEIN ATTACKS QUANTUM THEORY,” complete with a hundred-word exegesis that the newspaper attributed to Podolsky.

Page 168, The Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality

It all came down to the relationship of Schrödinger’s equation to reality. What is the connection between the mathematical description of events, and the events themselves? In what way does the Schrödinger wavefunction, Ψ, reflect the actual state that a particle fount itself in? Reality, or the particle’s real situation, is represented in these discussions by the word state or the phrase state of affairs. The wavefunction, Ψ, must represent this real state of affairs somehow. But it is hard to even articulate what was meant by such a connection to reality, or even what was meant by reality or state.

Page 176, The Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality

“…And even in when entering on topics apparently far removed from the problems under debate at our meetingsI have, so to speak, been arguing with Einstein all the time.”
Moved, Pais looked up at Bohr, whose voice was dropping as he circled. “I have been arguing with Einstein all the time…I have been arguing with Einstein…” He paced, slower and slower, hands behind his back, muttering, “Einstein…Einstein…” and finally stopped, gazing out the window, without seeing anything.

The assistant’s door soundlessly swung open behind him, and Einstein himself tiptoed into the room. There was “an urchin smile on his face,” and he signaled to Pais to be silent. “I was at a loss what to do,” remembered Pais, “especially because I had at that moment not the faintest idea of what Einstein was up to.” Very quietly Einstein lifted the lid of Bohr’s tobacco pot, and began to fill his pipe.

At that moment, Bohr got his thought and spun around. “Einstein is -” and he stopped in complete shock. “There they were, face to face, as if Bohr had summoned his forth.” wrote Pais. “It is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was speechless.”

“I am sorry, Bohr,” said Einstein, as Bohr burst out laughing. “But you know my doctor forbade me to buy tobacco.”

Page 177, The Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality

Neils Bohr died next year. On his blackboard were left two drawings, a record of what he had been thinking about the night before he died. The first looked like a spiral staircase – A Riemann surface – which was Bohr’s favorite metaphor for the ambiguity of language, the way you can arrive back at the same word in your thought and it can have a whole new layer of meaning than when you first thought it. But how, he used to ask, can you communicate this to another person?

The second drawing, almost vibrating on its chalky spring, was Einstein’s light-filled box.

Page 185, The Search And The Idictment

David Bohm is called before committee…
“He used to joke about it,” remembered his student Ken Ford, “real gallows humor. There was a faculty lecture on unresolvable paradoxes – If the barder is the man who shaves all men, who do not shave themselves, who shaves the barder? – “and Dave said that ‘Congress should appoint a committee to investigate all committees that do not investigate themselves.’”

Have these men forgotten that programming was primarily considered a women’s profession at one point? Have they forgotten that Ada Lovelace is usually cited as the first programmer? And above all, have they forgotten their decency? I think there wasn’t any decency in these pigs to begin with.

What if their mothers wanted to be in tech?

I think what women in tech need are more women and more support from the community. Let me rephrase that, what everyone in tech needs today is more women. Also, to boot off anyone who is found guilty of behaving like this.

Problem with current implementation is that it does not automatically call 911. It just pulls up the dial screen with 911 number pre-filled. I was trying to figure out a way to make calls but I guess I cannot do it. This is because the Android Intent called ACTION_CALL is restricted to non-emergency number and I have to use ACTION_DIAL for this.

So, the fun part is that I cannot create my app the way I want to because it just won’t dial 911. After releasing the huge button in my app, you have to press “Call” on the next screen. This just fails my app’s core purpose.

I think this app has a good usage. For example, someone moving through a dark alley might want to keep such a ‘setup’ ready in case something happens. You know, at least there will be a call to 911 (say, even if the phone drops etc.).

Older post about this app.

So, I did the following:

1. I created the Backup User using the CPanel and once created, logged in using SFTP into the backup user account (it gives you a different account/username).

2. I then created a directory named .ssh in the root of this new account (remember I am logged in sing SFTP)

3. Put my “id_rsa.pub” in this directory and renamed it to “authorized_key”.

By now, I thought things were fine and fired the command:

“rsync -e ssh -av @.dreamhost.com:~/”

Please make sure that you do not generate SSH key with a passphrase and also have right permissions.  It needs 700 for the private key.

I believe FB has made my account more open and public. I think the reason is that the race now is after the real time search and indexing. Since, Google et al. have started to put some real time search results from Twitter feed (I think FB also), FB esp. has aggressively started a campaign to make as much info on your wall, feeds, account public as possible.

This is what they have to say on FB Information about Your Recent Activity on your wall. (…and it sounds Satanic).

Also, when I tried to control my settings, to my surprise all of the options in sharing were checked. I, as a good user, chose the option they gave me: “Keep all the previous settings”, as I did not wish to change my privacy settings. So, you have to take a look at this screenshot to see what they did.

FB tells you to keep all the previous settings, but they do not keep their promise. Everything on the list is checked. Wow! Those were NOT my previous settings.

In other words, I am extremely angry and IMHO you should be too. Although, I was really disappointed by Facebook’s but then I logged on to Orkut.com and saw this:

Orkut is Google's never-ending joke.

Look at the pink circular-band. It looks like an AIDS or breast-cancer relief campaign more than a Social Network and it sucks.

The application is about Calling for help when you are walking through a dark or a possibly unsafe place. Hoping that you are getting phone signal, I have always wondered that instead of fidgeting with your phone to dial 911 and keeping your thumb on the “green call” button, why not have an application where there is a big fat button that when released calls 911. Thats what I have tried to do here in this application. A 200px button when pressed and held, does not do anything, but when released, dials 911. So, you can save yourself from a surprise event like someone attacking you from behind and leave the calling for the app to do.

Here is the .apk file of the application. I call it callHelp application. I think its a good idea to improve this application to include a setting where you can change the emergency number (I’d suggest keep 911). Right now this feature is not there because I am not even sure if this application works on a handset.

If you are interested in looking at the source code, you can do that here at Github. Source code at Github.

So, if someone out there tries it, please let me know how goes it! thanks.

Now, I do not know if there is a setting in these email clients that I am unaware of (I’d be glad if someone can point out). All I know is that its in the Gmail’s Web Interface, which is slick. It knows that you want to reply to the person you sent that last email to and not yourself.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness.html

You’ve got to think about this very eloquent presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zittrain).

We met for lunch again where he mentioned how my chat lingo was not proper. “I am trying to maintain my English standards”, I mentioned affirmatively. He replied, “Well! you anyhow should not write “I am laughing so hard here that I am going to die, on chat”. And he starts to laugh.

In this work plus social setup, I try to be extra nice and show that I can take jokes on myself.

“LAWL”, I laughed with (said to) him.

(In case you are still clueless —- LAWL = lol!)

I will give you the list with URL’s here:

1. Winwood != Winwood on Twitter. A gentleman with name Wojtek, from Poland is a TV mecahnic.

2. Whitehouse != Whitehouse of Twitter. 75 followers. No Bio available.

3. Tweetbar != Tweetbar on Twitter. According to their website:  Tweetbar is a wicked cool Twitter sidebar for Firefox and Flock. Not compatible with FF 3.0 at the time of this writing but will be, soon.

4. Young != Young on Twitter. Someone of Asian origin.

5. Lisa487 != Lisa487 on Twitter. How do I know that? Well, actual Lisa487 updated her (only) tweet on Jan 6th. She says “going to work”.

6. Twitair01. No twitair01 account on twitter yet. But there is a twitair. 

7. EMT != EMT on Twitter. Someone called Jason Machael owns it. Twit-Squatting???

8. JPMorgan != JPMorgan on Twitter. Apparently, this is a gentleman named Josh Morgan (cool!) who owns the blog http://www.respondingtoopportunity.com/ and finds The_Real_Shaq the funniest person on Twitter.

Personally, I am interested in knowing about Whitehouse, myself.

Also, trying some stuff on Amazon’s service, I realized (I was a great fan of Cloud before) that there are a lot drawbacks and the biggest one being Dependency on a specific Cloud technology/company, that too for eons. Seriously, I do think that this type of architecture is so specific to a company implementing it that it is almost against the norms of what Web stands for - Universality.

I remember working with Axis2 (the Web Services SOAP engine). It didn’t feel sinful while writing a Web Service wrapper for an existing C function for local company and deploy it, which would be consumed by a PHP client. Why? Because I was actually taking a C function and making it universally (Web) accessible (or at least for that company). I felt that I was pushing the existing architecture towards web standards. Working with Amazon’s Cloud wasn’t such a feeling. It was like working with another Microsoft kind of a product. 

On the other hand you might argue with the example of data loss at Ma.gnolia. It wasn’t running on a Cloud architecture from some big firm like Amazon or Google (and it was bound to fail?) It was running on 4 Mac Mini’s. (I have been reading this and have not been able to get any citation for this but it was definitely not Cloud). I believe that Cloud computing has to emerge or evolve in itself and produce a standard. I think there has to be a conformity to certain architecture that each of these companies adhere to. Just like the idea it is based on: Grids. Otherwise, if I have to use their architecture for my new application, I would be scared of depending upon it and of course would think twice of migrating my current app to this architecture.

Meanwhile, I am happy working with the limited features my web hosting provides (for cheap) and forget about Fault Tolerance for the time being.

Here are a few of the PHP Frameworks (MVC) that I found to be good at least when I read about them online. 

1. Symfony: http://www.symfony-project.org/
2. Mojavi: http://www.mojavi.org/
3. CakePHP: http://cakephp.org/
4. PHPOnTrax: http://www.phpontrax.com/
5. Prado: http://www.xisc.com/
6. Studs: http://www.mojavelinux.com/projects/studs/

Majority of these ‘good’ frameworks are inspired by RoR. What do you all think about these frameworks and which one is good and which ones are bad and in what respect. Or just tell me your favorite (reasons would be appreciated).

But just to mention that the form is a plug-in called “SECURE AND ACCESSIBLE PHP CONTACT FORM v.2.0WP for WORDPRESS WEB LOGS” By Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/). Nice job.

Warning: You might never end up with zero sins. Fractional sins are allowed. I know this.