Jeetu's shared memory

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of a QR Code? A confusing maze of black rectangular patterns arranged on a white background?

True, most QR Codes are available in black and white but they don’t have to be that way.

There’s an excellent online QR generator at qrhacker.com that lets you create colorful QR codes and what makes this tool different is that it provides you can option to embed photographs and logo images to your QR codes. You can even edit the colors of individual pixels that form the code.

To give you an example, here’s a QR code made using a picture of Zuckerberg and if you scan the code with an app on your phone, say Google Goggles, it should take you to Facebook.

Every QR code has a unique URL for easy sharing or you can download the image locally in PNG or PDF. Here are more examples.

QR Code made with a colored picture of Zuckerberg.

via How to Embed Images and Logos in QR Codes.

“At the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Nashville, NASA engineers unveiled the newly open sourced OpenVSP, software that allows users to construct full aircraft models from simple parameters such as wing span and fuselage length, under the NASA Open Source Agreement. Says the website, ‘OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.’”

via NASA Open Sources Aircraft Design Software – Slashdot.

OpenVSP
OpenVSP is a parametric aircraft geometry tool. OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.

The predecessors to OpenVSP have been developed by J.R. Gloudemans and others for NASA since the early 1990′s. On January 10 2012, OpenVSP was released as an open source project under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA) version 1.3.

We are still in the process of setting up all of the things which allow an open source project to work. In the meantime, get OpenVSP for yourself from the links below.

Few months back, Google reader abandoned all its users to show its love for Google+. I used google reader extensively, with all shared articles flowing to jeetu.co.in.

But with its shared items feed shut down, I started to look for other options. My first worry was to import the existing shared items feed back to jeetu.co.in, and loose my 2-3 years of posts.

That’s when I found Seth Battis’ script to convert the dump of all shared items that Google Reader gave me into a wordpress format RSS feed, which could then be imported into my wordpress blog. With a little tweaking, I was successfully able to import all my posts to this blog!

After importing, the oldest post is from December 31 2007 on 3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late, and the latest one was a Little Johnny joke.

Let me know what you think!

Thanks  Seth Battis!

I find myself in a situation where I am logged in remotely to a server and have started a long running process, only to realize that I didnt kick off a screen session before, neither did I use nohup

In such a situation, the disown command comes in handy

disown -h %1

After I background the process, I disown it from the current terminal. The disown prevents a SIGHUP to the process if my terminal dies!

from the man page –

disown [-ar] [-h] [jobspec ...]
Without  options,  each  jobspec is removed from the table of active jobs.  If the -h option is given, each jobspec is not removed from the table, but is marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a SIGHUP.  If no jobspec is present, and  neither  the  -a nor  the -r option is supplied, the current job is used.  If no jobspec is supplied, the -a option means to remove or mark all jobs; the -r option without a jobspec argument restricts operation to running jobs.  The return value is 0 unless a jobspec does  not  specify  a  valid job.

Thats it for a sunday morning! To own something can be a lot of responsibility, disown it and rest in peace

If you have access to an admin user on the same machine, you can change the network settings without logging out using the following command –

runas /user:<admin user> “C:\windows\ie7\iexplore.exe ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\::{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}\::{7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}”

replace <admin user> with the admin account you have access to

TV Ads are broken

Today I was watching some sitcom on TV, with lots of boring ads every 10 mins. While watching the ads I noticed that almost all ads tell you their website and ask you to visit it to buy their product.

That had me thinking — how in this world will people remember some vendors website. I spend atleast 12 hours a day on my computer, still dont end up remembering the websites these ads suggest, even if I like their product. Well, it could be because I didn’t like their product so much, or may be because I could just google it (or bing it). But how do you expect a average internet user to remember these sites?

There’s something missing here. Whenever you expect a lot from the user of a system, it almost always fails. Of course unless you are offering a big incentive, like, in this case, giving something free on your website.

Can a TV be more intelligent, and remember these links for me? Probably not all, but some that I ask it to remember with the press of a button on my remote. It could later email them to me. Or it could publish it to some repository which I can lookup by going to http://my.tv… or something. This would help both the users and the advertisers. The system could publish metrics of how many links/ads I ask my TV to remember, which at an aggregate level, would be a very good metric for a TV ad.

Some food for thought…

As per the mail from netflix –

As of the submission by team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” on June 26, 2009 18:42:37 UTC, the Netflix Prize competition entered the “last call” period for the Grand Prize. In accord with the Rules, teams have thirty (30) days, until July 26, 2009 18:42:37 UTC, to make submissions that will be considered for this Prize. Good luck and thank you for participating!

The team called BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos has reached a 10.05% improvement over Netflix base measurement – which means they will win the 1 million $ prize, unless some other team beats them in the next month.

Wohoo! lets get some random number generator to make one attempt a day (Thats the max they allow)