Why do Indian people smell?  I’ve had lots of Indian classmates and a few Indian TAs in various labs, and they have all smelled incredibly strongly like sweat.  They don’t look sweaty, but they literally smell like someone who’s done a lot of exercise or manual labor without showering for a few days.  I’m not trying to be funny and I’m not exaggerating at all.  Tonight I was in the supermarket, coming up to the orange juice section, and got about 10 feet away from an Indian couple.  The smell was overpowering.  They took a while in front of the OJ, and when they walked away, I went to get mine.  The smell stayed there even after they walked away.

Every person has a smell that’s pretty unique, and you don’t/can’t really notice your own.  This is not that.  It’s something different that is common to ~all Indians I’ve encountered.  I’ve never noticed black people to have a certain smell, nor Filipinos (my best friend growing up was Filipino), nor any other race/culture I can think of.

Has anyone else experienced this with Indian people they know, or any other race/culture?  Do non-white people perceive a strong and identifying smell on white people?  This has bugged me for a long time, but I’ve never been able to bring it up in any conversations with Indian people.  I’m sure it would be rude, even though it’s completely genuine and serious and not ill-intentioned at all.

I didn’t know that Nick Berg was from my area until I read this article in the local paper.  (Hat tip to mom again for this one.)  It turns out his dad, Michael Berg, is a complete wackjob.

Michael Berg trivialized the horror of his son’s death by politicizing it. ... Berg’s latest excursion into "The Twilight Zone" is a column he’s written for liberal newspapers across the world.  Michael Berg quickly skips over why his son, a Jewish man, was traveling alone in a Muslim country at war.  He never mentions that his son was warned to get out of Iraq by U.S. authorities but refused to leave.
...
"People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son’s tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration.  They ask: ’Don’t you blame the five men who killed him?’  I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration."
...
Did anyone blame Bill Clinton when Marines were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Somalia?  Not even John "Say Anything" Kerry has stooped to Michael Berg’s level during the recent media hysteria surrounding Nick Berg’s grisly murder.
...
Michael Berg also blames the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison for his son’s death.  He calls the misguided actions of a few prison guards an atrocity.  To compare taking a snapshot of a naked Iraqi terrorist to "an atrocity" cheapens the very word.  The Holocaust was an atrocity.  The systematic murder, rape and torture of 600,000 Iraqi men, women and children by Saddam Hussein is an atrocity.  The death of 3,000 innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, is an atrocity.

I have to use Windows machines at work, and the PC speaker beep really annoys me.  I just found out about an easy way to disable it, though, on Windows 2000/XP: run the command "net stop beep".  (Of course, you could just unplug the speaker, but not everyone is able/allowed to just disassemble the machines that they use.)

If American newsmedia is to be believed...

Between the US and North Korea, the US is the unreasonable one.

What subjects actually say doesn’t matter; if you can find a third-hand source that reflects your ideology, use that instead (and if it directly contradicts what the subject actually said, more’s the better).

Coalition forces are targetting journalists in Iraq.

Relatively mild prisoner abuse is far worse than a prisoner being beheaded.

Before kernel 2.4.10, the prevailing wisdom was to make your swap partition twice the size of your RAM.  With newer kernels, equal-to-RAM will do.

So let’s say my system has 256 MB RAM and I’m running 2.6.x.  I should make my swap 256 MB.  The maximum "memory" available is then 512 MB.  If some applications want more, too bad, that’s all there is.  Some process is going to meet the OOM killer.

Now I buy another 256 MB of RAM.  Now I really do have 512 MB of actual memory.  And I hate swap -- it’s slow as crap, and it seems it’s always the stuff I really want to use that ends up there.  So why even use a swap partition at all?  I was doing fine with 512 MB yesterday, and today, now that it’s all RAM and no swap, my 512 is even better.

The most memory-intensive thing I do is my weekly backup; since it caches every file it reads, and it reads every file on my system, my RAM and swap are instantly full.  The kernel doesn’t start killing off procs at that point, so it shouldn’t be any different if my memory is pure RAM and no swap.

From now on, I’m disabling my swap completely and seeing how it goes.  It’s 2004.  It’s about time.

My mom’s been sending me links to Good Morning Silicon Valley, which is a sort of industry-insider tech-blog.  There’s always lots of interesting stuff to be read there, for example Linux nears the tipping point, in which the author seems to be thinking along the same lines that I am about the state of Linux.

I made some screenshots of my desktop a few weeks ago, and forgot to mention them here.  I’ve been using Fvwm instead of Gnome, and it’s been great -- small, fast, and ridiculously configurable.  You can make it look just like Windows, or really cool like in my screenshots : )  And you can switch between configurations anytime.

Then there’s The Ultimate War Sim, which would be funny if it weren’t representative of reality, which is that a troubling amount of people are outrageously fickle and just plain stupid when it comes to this war.

I wrote a script called searchtext (actually I adapted it from my blog search function) to do Google-style searching through text files on your Unix/Linux computer.  Google-style means you can use multiple words and/or phrases, and spaces mean "and," not "or" (naturally).  It recurses directories and shows some of the text surrounding each match.  Chances are there’s already a tool like this for *nix, but I already had this written for my site, so it was trivial to adapt it for local use.

And let’s not forget beautiful baby blue.

Ever since I first put the system into my car over a year ago, I’ve been looking for an LCD just like the one I had, except in blue, to match my car’s panel lights.  I searched and searched and searched for literally a year, and couldn’t find one anywhere that matched the specs I needed (4x40 characters, parallel data bus, blue backlight).  Which made no sense, because everybody was selling that in green, and everybody was selling 4x20s in blue.

Finally about 2 months ago, I sent out a mass email to about 8 LCD manufacturers asking why I couldn’t find one.  Some never replied, some said their equipment wasn’t tooled for that, one said it’d cost $15,000 to develop such an LCD.  Then, crystalfontz replied and said they could make one for me for about $50 (about the same as a green one, which is what I hoped and figured it should be).  They just needed 6 weeks of lead time.  Well after a year, 6 weeks was no problem : )

I’ll have a full photo set soon, with in-car shots, etc.  I’m having trouble getting the photos to come out right, though.  It looks pretty much like you see here, except the blue is deeper, and the white is brighter.  The problem is, if I close the lens further / snap the shutter faster to make the blue appear deeper, then the white gets darker.  If I adjust for brighter white, the blue gets washed out.  I’ve taken almost 100 shots at various combinations and can’t get it to come out quite right yet.  (This photo is about right, though.)

If you’re hiking alone in the woods, and you come upon a bear (or the bear comes upon you...), and the bear starts coming after you, what do you do?

- Stand still and hope he doesn’t hurt you
- Pick up the biggest rocks that you can throw accurately,
  and throw them at his head
- Shoot him in the face repeatedly with your BB gun
- Run away and hope you can outrun him
- Some combination of the above
- Something else entirely

I’m curious to hear what anyone thinks would maximize the chances of survival in this situation.  Note that the constraints are fixed as I’ve explained them above; you are alone, you have just a BB gun, and whatever else you might find in the woods (rocks, etc).