Trying to forget someone you love is like trying to remember someone you never met
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Fix a broken Linux shell
When you accidentally cat a binary file, it can leave your shell in a broken state as it can interpret some of the binary sequences as control characters.
You will see gibberish instead of normal letters/digits and the only recourse may seem to close this terminal and start another. But wait! The next time it happens, use the command reset instead!
You can see where I typed reset (second last line) and restored sanity. Note that even the name of the terminal window is back to normal!
You will see gibberish instead of normal letters/digits and the only recourse may seem to close this terminal and start another. But wait! The next time it happens, use the command reset instead!
You can see where I typed reset (second last line) and restored sanity. Note that even the name of the terminal window is back to normal!
Thursday, March 05, 2009
DjVu - It's surprising that it has not had widespread acceptance yet.
"DjVu is a web-centric format and software platform for distributing documents and images. DjVu can advantageously replace PDF, PS, TIFF, JPEG, and GIF for distributing scanned documents, digital documents, or high-resolution pictures. DjVu content downloads faster, displays and renders faster, looks nicer on a screen, and consume less client resources than competing formats. DjVu images display instantly and can be smoothly zoomed and panned with no lengthy re-rendering. DjVu is used by hundreds of academic, commercial, governmental, and non-commercial web sites around the world.
DjVuLibre is an open source (GPL'ed) implementation of DjVu, including viewers, browser plugins, decoders, simple encoders, and utilities."
From my personal experience, PDF's are almost always too slow and cumbersome (I tried a few DjVu files and it was a much smoother experience). More importantly, they are huge - The free document I mentioend in my previous post has a 6MB DjVu file and an equivalent 30 MB PDF File! It's time to bury the PDF behemoth for good.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Quote - Laws of form
From George Spencer-Brown's controversial book Laws of Form (1969).
"The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet."
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