Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

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Musical Instruments

So, first on the topic of musical instruments. I have a very old, valuable violin back home in India. It is something that has been passed down, and something that was given to me once I was deemed competent enough. Some of you from India who have been trained in classical Carnatic may know what this means — it has also been blessed by a particularly famous vidwan (master) back in Trivandrum, starting on Vijayadasami, almost 15 years ago (the said Vidwan was also my instructor).

As you can understand, this instrument is very precious to me, and very valuable to me. I was hoping that during my next visit to India, I might just pick it up and bring it back here, since no matter what other Violins I may play, it is never quite the same — after all, I did learn to play on that particular instrument for eight long years.

Now — get this straight — very straight — there is no way in nine hells that I’m checking that violin into checked baggage on a plane. My life may quite literally be on the line, but that violin is not going into checked-in baggage. Given the low temperatures that could crack the wood, the way baggage handlers treat luggage, my horrible luck with my baggage and just my absolute lack of trust with everything airport related, I’m almost certain that my Violin would be broken into several tiny pieces, the wood would be cracked and the bridge would be totally out of place.

If I’m lucky.

And if I feel so strongly about my violin, I can only imagine how the Bolshoi musicians must feel about theirs. So, what do I do to bring my musical instrument home here? Take a ship? (Yes, I could totally see me telling my boss that I wanted to take off for a month so that I could take a journey on a ship from India to the US, to bring my Violin).

Do the folks who come up with such restrictions at airports realise what they are doing? Or do they even care?

Data Security

Ah, now to even more interesting topics. Maybe I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon way too often than would be recommended for a normal human being to ever re-read any piece of literature.

But see, reading the Cryptonomicon has done some wonderful things to me — it has given me a healthy dose of paranoia. The Cydonian thinks I treat it like a Bible — maybe it is a Bible of sorts, to me.

So, with these new restrictions, I would have to check my laptop into checked-in luggage. Great. These retards not only break my latest, strongest suitcases made out of the coolest-sounding-material-costing-me-a-fortune, but they dismember these works of art into unrecognisable masses of matter. So, now I’m supposed to put my gadgets and laptops into these suitcases?

Now, ideally I’d say, “Go to hell, you $^@%$&%&!”

However, a beer and a margherita later, the truth hit me — if I’m going on a business trip, I really do not have a choice. If I have to fly from here to the west coast, there is no way that I can drive or even take a train. I would have to fly, and I would not have a choice. Of course, under these circumstances, it would definitely not be my personal laptop that gets checked in — but this would mean that I also install every piece of software that I would need into any laptop that I take with me. Great. Simply wonderful.

Now, I have a question. See, I’m quite aware that these people would not recognise responsibility if it hit them on their face. However, what about your data security? Oh, everything is quite wonderful and everyone is quite safe — but how do I know that my data is safe? What if I have the latest research on some magic drug to cure cancer that is worth a billion dollars in my laptop? Can you assure me that this data is absolutely safe? Or less seriously, what about confidential corporate data? Or even personal data?

Can they assure me of the safety of my data? Now, while there are many ways to get at your data, once they have _physical_ access to the equipment you use, all bets are off. If they (whoever they may be) can get hold of your laptop, forget it. Your security has already been compromised.

Of course, at this point, the classic, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” ugly beast of a quote usually rears up its head. The thing is, I may have nothing to hide from Big Brother (*snicker*), but I most certainly do have a lot to hide from my peers — the last thing I would want is having either my personal data or any other confidential information fall in the hands of Joe Random Scammer.

And what do the airports do if my luggage ends up in the hands of a Nigerian scammer? Can they assure me that no matter what, my laptop would never ever fall into such hands?

So, the question I ask the airports that would not let me take my laptop is this — can you absolutely assure me of the safety and security of my equipment containing confidential information?

Duty Free

I love Duty Free shops. Especially at airports, the kinds that sell you Glenn Fiddich, Chardonnay and Ferroro Rocher at rock-bottom prices. Amongst other things (such as perfumes for the lass, assorted sugar-rich stuff for munchkin cousins etc. etc.).

Now, the thing is, I usually shop at Duty Free stores while I’m waiting for a connecting flight at Frankfurt or Singapore. You see, the idea is that while I’m waiting for my flight, I spend the time shopping — and take these things with me on the flight as carry-on baggage.

But now, it turns out that I cannot take anything with me — they have separated a man from his Scotch, which is an unthinkable, unforgivable sin. Heck, I cannot even take that bar of Toblerone. Do you know how much that annoys me?

No, you probably don’t. But let me tell you — that annoys me a lot.

So, how are these fine folks at the airports going to let me shop? I mean, what the hell is the use of buying something if I cannot take it with me?

Of course, their only solution is to let shoppers check-in stuff purchased from these places. Now, go back up to what I said earlier about baggage handlers. No, not the, “they are retarded” part — the, “they break everything, including kryptonite” part. That’s right.

Do you really want to let these guys to handle bottles of expensive Scotch and Wine?

Now for some anecdotal real life experience (TM) — I was carrying some very nice and fairly expensive (at least to me) bottles of wine and cider from one of the wineries in Colorado, back to Cincinnati. Since I had more than a few bottles (five, to be exact), I had wrapped them up in clothes (such as t-shirts) and put them in my suitcase. Now, the TSA had been very excellent folks and had opened my suitcase to see what the heck it was all about. Understandable, because five wrapped bottles of stuff tend to stick out. Of course, they had forgotten to wrap my bottles up properly after seeing what the hell was in them.

So, guess what? I land in Cincinnati and find some wonderful Riesling, Chardonnay, Peach and Blackberry Cider all over my clothes. Fortunately, I’d had the brains to pack all my nice stuff (such as my jacket and formals) elsewhere, so my clothes were for the most part spared. And of course, I was glad that I had a liking for white wine and not red — can you imagine the kind of stain that red wine would cause?

Now — these guys — these very guys — do you really expect them to handle your bottles of Scotch and your clothes? Together? Can you imagine landing at a new place, with your clothes smelling like an aged bottle of Glenn Fiddich? Now, don’t get me wrong — I love Scotch, but I’d rather not walk around smelling like one, thank you very much. Would you?

I didn’t think so.

So, I have three questions to all these airport folks — how the hell do I get my Violin here, how the hell can I be assured of the safety of my data and how on Earth do I bring home some fine Scotch?

(The mile high club is still open, right? That involves fluids, you know?)

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• Comment Preview — I’ve added another button to the comment-posting section called Preview. But rather than post through Submit, this helps you preview your post through AJAX. The preview is shown below the text-area of the post, right below the Preview button. I downloaded and customised the AJAX Comment Preview WP plugin by Michael Adams for this.

• Read More / Hide — I was battling some problems with CSS, and I figured that using the more tag in WP would help solve it. However, I preferred something a little more dynamic, and so here it is — clicking on the Read more link dynamically expands the section and clicking on the Hide link dynamically hides the remaining text, showing only the excerpt. I downloaded and hacked up the content show/hide plugin for WP by Jennifer for this.

• Search Posts & Pages — My default install did not come with a good search feature, merely one that searched the posts. However, given the amount of content that I have, I decided to install the Search Pages plugin by David Nagle for this — now, you can search both the blog posts as well as the pages for content. It even works for such things as image names and the like. Yay!

• Sans-serif Fonts — A lot of folks had felt that the use of fonts with Serifs (such as Georgia) made the text unreadable. So, while the headers still contain Serifs, I’ve removed all Serif fonts from the content fonts. However, I’ve heard that for whatever reason, Safari sometimes has problems with this setup, for whatever reason. I promise to fix that in just a short while.

• All sections are back up — Finally! All the sections from the older iterations of Metlin.org that I’d wanted here are all up and running (yay!). And I finally decided to go ahead and add a Code & Downloads section, with some code from days gone by.

• Favicon for Metlin.org — Thanks to Alamandrax, I’ve added a favicon for Metlin.org. Originally, he’d made them as buttons for RSS feeds from Metlin.org, but I’ve not yet finished up the rest of the images, so that’d have to wait. Personally, I think they totally rock — my personal favourities are the green and black ones.

Now, I’m aware of some problems, too — the captchas being a pain, and the timeout and loss of content when it decides you’re a spammer and the like. And sometimes, Askimet also throws out some of your comments into the rubbish bin, which needs to be fixed, as well.

So, that’s about it folks. And do let me know if you have any comments, ideas, candies and flames.

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Processing is this fun programming language based on Java, primarily created for electronic artists and visual design & media folks. It lets you do some pretty cool and interesting things visually, and has actually gotten around being sophisticated enough to do some impressive things — a large chunk of the the visualization part of my graduate work was done in Processing.

Anyway, I also found out that someone had taken my Java source code for generating Julia & Mandelbrot sets and ported that to processing — here are Mad Merv’s versions of Julia fractal and Mandelbrot fractal.

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