Happy new year! Will this be my year and my decade. Let's see what I can do this year.

Budgets are $exy has a guest article from an anonymous online poker professional titled "Confessions of an online poker player." There has been times when I have thought that I can also be a poker pro. But reading this article, I can be certain that I cannot do it in the near future. It takes a lot of commitment and will to stay the course when you are not doing that well being an online poker pro. This makes me realize why the pros were upset, during the last years WSOP main event, about not having a pro win the event for almost five straight year. Good luck to Phil Ivey, who is the only pro player in final table of this years main event.

Ever since I started playing golf almost two years ago I have never purchased a pre-assembled club either name brand or no-name brand. I have always build my own clubs with club components such as the club head, shaft, grip etc. I learned to build clubs from a golf class that I took at OSU called "Golf for Business and Life." The business part was not the business of making golf clubs but rather how to use golf as a business tool. The main advantage of custom golf club fitting is that the clubs can be considerably inexpensive compare to pre-assembled clubs. Also custom built clubs may help improve the game.

A few months back I released some MATLAB code I contributed to MATLAB central under GPL. But the Mathworks sent me the e-mail early May

Dear Aravind Seshadri,

Starting later this month, the MATLAB Central File Exchange will adopt the well-known and widely used open-source BSD License as the standard license for posted content. As a File Exchange contributor, you are receiving notice of this new policy in advance of its implementation. No action is required now. We'll contact you again when a FAQ list is available and you are able to update your existing files.

Adopting a standard license for the File Exchange will help eliminate confusion around things such as modification rights, redistribution rights, author liability, and support responsibility. The community's needs in these areas are well served by the BSD license. We need your help to make this happen.

Starting in mid-May, new File Exchange submissions will be licensed under the BSD license as a condition of upload. You may then assign a BSD license to your existing submissions. A simple form-based tool for you to convert your existing files will be available at the File Exchange.

Great interview of Jim Cramer by Jon Stewart. Check them out.

BitPim is an application that lets you manipulate data on certain LG phones such as LG-Vu (which I upgraded to recently). LG-Vu is a great touch screen phone which can do a lot more things than my previous Nokia phone. Best of all mobile Java applications can be installed on the phone.

In order to install applications we need to either download the applications from AT&T app store directly to the phone (using a data plan) or some how access the data in the phone using a data cable. With the right data cable one can access the phone data using BitPim application.

Tiltviewer is a great flash gallery by AirTight Interactive, the people who made the famous simpleviewer. The interface is great and the installation is very simple especially if you have a Flickr or a Picasa account.

It is not hard to install manually using a xml file that defines the images and their functionality, but I wish there was a Drupal module that would have automated the process for me. Fortunately I was able to find a script (from howtoforge.com) that generated the xml file for me. Attached file is a version of the script that I modified to suit my need.

Yesterday I setup a test tiltviewer galley manually. The gallery looks great and I love it. Check it out! The cons for using a flash gallery are: they are not searchable, non-taggable and have poor accessibility. Nevertheless it was fun setting up the gallery. Do check it out!

The recommended way to view this gallery is in fullscreen mode. Right click on the flash content and select fullscreen.

I recently changed my web host from 1&1 to lunarpages. I took advantage of a recent offer which was $4.95/month for 24 months but I was actually able to get $2.87/month. The hosting package included a lot of good features including unlimited disk space, one free domain name, PHP support, Perl support, Python Support and loads of other feature. More information is available below

System beeps, or system bells as it is officially called, got activated automatically when I upgraded to Fedora 10. It is a nice feature especially when I receive new e-mails in my Evolution Inbox the system speaker makes a beep sound. But it becomes really annoying if you are using the terminal or if you get a lot of e-mails. For example I use the auto complete feature in the terminal quite often. When there are more than one option to auto complete the system beeps. This really annoys me. I also hear a lot of beeps when I use MATLAB command window. In the past (previous Fedora releases) I was able to disable this beep by changing the sound preferences.

Today it really got on my nerve and I decided to do some search to disable it. Apparently it is a bug. Fortunately there is an immediate solution. By typing the following as root the beep can be disabled.

# rmmod pcspkr
# echo "blacklist pcspkr" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist


A great article on MSN Money from Kiplinger.com teaches some nice and easy ways to save money on almost anything.