HARI MAHADEVAN (何瑞理)

A day working from home brought out another problem the new Thinkpad. I did not have a spare mouse lying around and had to fall back to the flawed Touchpad/Trackpoint mechanism on the new T440. My original idea was to disable Touchpad completely through the x.org conf files and rely on the Trackpoint. But it turns out that while Trackpoint navigation works fine, clicking only works for the left-click. For some strange reason I couldn't get right-click to work on the Touchpad upper button area.

Being a slightly dated OS release, mating Ubuntu 12.04 to Thinkpad T440 hardware throws up a few challenges. This post lists these and how those can be worked around.

One of Python's strengths is its exhaustive library. And date and time management is an integral part of this, provided by the datetime module. datetime provides the classes datetime, date, time, timedelta and tzoffset .

I'm still finding my way around the rather vast Python standard library. And today, I discovered a quick way to convert a pure time string (of format HH:MM[:SS]) into a standard datetime.time object.

Well, the context might look very obvious. But if you think a little deeper, you'll realize that there are many themes in life where this can be applied. Making is fun At least for most Rearing is less fun Except for most Yet we want to Yet we dare to Out of need Or wanton greed Out of fear Or is end near For we have little to leave When called to leave So we choose to So we don't have to not to.

Was out on labor day for a medical appointment and had a chance to wander around an underground mall by myself, for couple of hours. The key thing here is 'by myself' -- I haven't managed to do this for quite a while. At least not since the arrival of our daughter, which was 2 years ago! Anyway having lunch at the mall, relishing the what was to be a short-lived experience of my single days, I was inspired to write a small poem, based on my observations around the mall during that hour. I call it as a poem, not knowing what qualifies as one. You be the judge. It started with the first four lines, but slowly took the following form on the ride back home. Context is my decision to go for a KFC burger as lunch, giving in to the momentary temptation, that could be safely pursued in the absence of my better half. A fleeting bliss Derived from junk Makes me wanna hiss For what's inside is gunk. Lovers locked in kiss Hues of purple and pink Intent is not to diss ...

I sent another comment to The Hindu on MH370 disappearance and the recent developments around it which they published. Here's the screen-cap: The 'correction' here refers to the announcement by the authorities that the last words spoken by the pilots (or whoever was in control of the plane) to the air traffic control is not the original, and now famous, " All right, good night ", but " Good night Malaysian three seven zero ".

Here's a crazy idea on how to increase the chances of locating the missing plane. This is based on the assumption that the flight had indeed crashed in the ocean as many experts seem to believe. Create a compact sonar device specifically designed to locate plane's missing black box and/or other possible debris. I guess such a device is already available. And if not, we ought to be able to create one by customizing the firmware of an existing hardware. A few good programmers, within a couple of pizza and coke loaded nights, ought to be able to turn this around. Make this device send a periodic signal to a satellite. If that requires too much power and could drain the on-board battery too fast, let it send signals to a flying receiver such as a AWACS plane. Alternatively, float a few balloons such as the ones Google experimented with in New Zealand for cheap Internet access equipped the appropriate receiver. Identify a few migratory marine creatures (is that the correct way ...