Of Memory and Mind

Things I remember >> THE WAVELET TUTORIAL PART I by ROBI POLIKAR

Things I forget >> Minds, Brains and Programs by John Searle

Am I evil? I am man

At least that what metallica said. Below is a link to an interview with the author of the book “The Lucifer Effect”. my 10 cents (I count in binary)… firstly, the environment never justifies doing something evil. secondly, نہی عن المنکر can prevent that lack of oversight incidents.

Unless of course you believe in uno deum and a day of judgement and that you do care about if your ass will burn or not.

Philip G. Zimbardo – Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil – New York Times

Of Vents and Wants

So what do you call a روشن دان in English? If your answer is a ‘ventilator’, you are as right as I was, which is 0%. I was wondering why there is a negative connotation to the word in English, more specifically of permitting something hazardous to escape from somewhere. Seems like I was wrong and the etymology at مریم وہاب ستار’s dictionary says it comes from ventus of Latin which means wind. So a روشن دان doesn’t let wind in only, it lets is light too, for which, the CRULP online Urdu dictionary gives the word skylight. Anywhoo, whether its wind or light, semantically it doesn’t mean ‘venting off’ always like شیخ سفیر says, “vent thy folly somewhere else…”.

You can’t bitch about a dog

I am probably in one of those modes today. Just noticed this text on yahoo news.  (emphasis mine)

A dog that ran off during a road-trip rest stop apparently made her way nearly 80 miles across Nevada’s high desert and two mountain ranges to return home a week later.

Dog crosses desert, mountains and somehow gets back home – Yahoo! News

Funny how the proper meaning of a word is a bit too lewd to be used. It IS the “B word” after all. (more here )

When headlines go wrong…

 

The BBC headline says
بچوں سے زیادتی:امریکی پادریوں کا طریقہ کار غلط تھا

which roughly translates to

“Child Molestation: The American bishops used wrong technique”

I hadn’t seen an ambiguous Urdu headline for a while so this is entertaining yet again. Thank you BBC.

BBCUrdu.com | علاقائی خبریں | امریکی پادریوں پر پوپ کی تنقید

BBCUrdu.com | علاقائی خبریں | ’گرینچ کی جگہ مکہ کا وقت‘

‘new’ =  ‘different’

BBC is entertaining today

BBCUrdu.com | علاقائی خبریں | ’گرینچ کی جگہ مکہ کا وقت‘

BBCUrdu.com | پاکستان | الیکشن کیلیےگریجویشن کی شرط ختم

Not that it mattered anyway, but still…. At least we wont be ruled by any پڑھا لکھا elite. 

BBCUrdu.com | پاکستان | الیکشن کیلیےگریجویشن کی شرط ختم

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Going through my mind while buying parsley.

 http://kon4812.com.ne.kr/pfvs/single02/pfvs142.htm

or

WebDav on WAMP

I ran into a stymie today when I needed to transfer a big zip file from my university account to my pc. I have a shell account which I use via Putty and hosting an ftp server on my machine (FileZilla in this case) didnt seem to work. There was some problem in the PASV mode and active mode transfers wern;t working either. Since I dont have access to the router here and have no idea what sort of networking is in place, the first solution that came to my mind was to mail it. This would have required installing lynx or some other text mode browser (i am not an emacs person) which I didnt want, so the solution that worked was making a WebDav server on my windows machine on which i needed the files.

Luckily, I have a WAMP installation and configuring webdav on it is a piece of cake

1. Start dav_module and dav_fs_module
2. uncomment #Include conf/extra/httpd-dav.conf
3. Change all paths in the config file above so that they point to the wamp installation. I changed C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2 to D:/wamp/Apache2/.
4. Comment the <LimitExcept> tags and thetext inbetween
5. restart apache
6. login to the shell account and use cadaver to transfer the files as shown in Teach Yourself Apache 2 in 24 Hours
7. Pat yourself on theback

Of Alternates and Exceptions

Continuing from the previous post, I remember we were taught RUP in out software engineering course and alternate flows and exceptions WERE mentioned. I never quite understood it all until I went on an implemented thing in the industry though. Reminds me why SE isn’t my piece of cake. I miss

10 TRAP 50
20 OPEN #1 FOR INPUT AS #1
30 ‘DO SOMETHING
40 GOTO 60
50 PRINT “Error!”: END
60 PRINT “Ok!” : END

( I wonder if i got the syntax right. how did you unset a trap? TRAP 0? )