Ever since the PDC ended, I've been reading tons of articles on the web about Longhorn, and all the different elements involved in the project. There are just so many amazing resources out there that you can keep exploring for hours - reviews, screenshots, technical articles...even small code snippets.
When the initial leaks came out, everything was so speculative. Now Microsoft itself has come out and shown the world what it's working on...or at least parts and pieces of it. The Longhorn section on MSDN is a great place to find out more about the technical side of things, and I'm glad a large part of the information and resources are available to the general public, rather than just professional developers and MSDN subscribers.
Of everything I've read and seen so far, there are two particular sites that I've found most useful. Check out the links section of the site, if you're interested as well.

On another note, I'm going home, as usual. Looks like my desktop might be getting a nice upgrade this weekend - a new 80GB hard drive. Mmm! More file storage over the VPN...
And finally - Happy Halloween to all the Americans.

Representatives from Microsoft came over to UCLA yesterday for the career fair during the day, and a presentation later in the evening. The career fair included other big-name companies like Google as well, but I thought it's too early for me to be looking at that side of things. I decided to attend the evening presentation nonetheless...just to see what it was all about.

The evening included talks by the Microsoft campus recruiter, and three other ex-students who are now working full-time at Redmond. The recruiter basically gave us all the info we needed to know about internships and getting a full-time job after graduation. The three employees shared their experiences with us, and told us a little about what they do at Microsoft, and how they got there.

There were some free raffle giveaways like an XBox, a wireless router, optical mice, copies of VS.NET, and other cool stuff. As usual, I came back empty handed, but at least I left with a head full of great information. :)

Since there's less than a week left for the big event, I decided to go ahead and add the new MatrixCode theme. Thanks to Vijay for the nice idea.

Honestly, I'm not sure it matches the rest of the site very well like the other themes do, but I guess it depends on the viewer's preference. Some people like dark themes and backgrounds. I usually don't, although I love anything even remotely Matrix-related.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, it's that creepy time of the year again, and it's making it big here in the residence halls. I've never witnessed any big Halloween celebrations in my last two years in the U.S, so this was the first.

To celebrate, we had "All Hill Hall-o-ween" last night. Every floor of every hall on the hill is decorated in it's own unique way based on a certain Halloween theme. Our floor's (Rieber 2N) theme is Alice's Nightmare (refering to Alice in Wonderland, of course). There are posters all over the walls of the characters like the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire cat, the rabbit etc. And of course, the more eerie, gruesome stuff like blood, cobwebs, glow-in-the-dark spiders, bats etc. It looked really cool last night with all the ultraviolet lighting.

I tried to get some pictures, but they didn't turn out too well in the dark. But I've got some pics of what our floor looks like during the day. Check it out in the pictures section.


Kids from nearby neighborhoods in Los Angeles made supervised trips to all the halls for their share of trick-o'-treating. People on the floors were handing out candy to all the little kids. It turned out to be quite fun, and it sure was a unique experience for me.

There's also a big Halloween day sale at the UCLA Store today, with some big discounts on everything. I went and got myself a UCLA cap with a nice 20% off the price tag. Picture's on the webcam.
Look...it even matches my T-shirt.

Physics midterm this afternoon was good. The professor decided to pick the most difficult problems the chapters could offer, but it was alright. I think I managed to pull it off well.

Got back home in the mood for some *nix-ing. I was having little problems here and there with my Slackware installation, and it was generally getting quite cluttered. So I decided to nuke the partition and start over with fresh Slackware 9.1 CDs (downloaded at some unearthly speed, I should add...hehe). Installation was just as smooth as last time. This time, however, I used ReiserFS instead of ext3. I was surprised and happy to see built-in support for my Broadcom 4400 ethernet controller in the 2.4.22 stock kernel. Saved me the trouble of having to compile a separate kernel module. Still had to get the touchpad module installed to enable the more advanced features like virtual scrolling and tap zones, but that wasn't much of a hassle either.

So then I get into X to download some software, and I make the WORST TYPO EVER. I untar the archive into my home folder, switch to 'su' and type 'rm -r /etc' instead of 'rm -r etc'
That one preceding extra slash just flushed out my entire /etc directory in less than 2 seconds.


Well, what could I do, but reinstall the whole darn thing all over again? So in went the CD again, and another fresh install followed during the next 15 minutes. Got all those earlier things done, and decided it was time to "de-uglify" that nasty red and black LILO screen that pops up everytime I boot my laptop. Found out there's a way to use animated images in the bootloader itself, with a little bit of tweaking and hacking, of course. More fun!

The result - nothing speaks better than some pictures:

Click the thumbnail to check out the full set. The blue and green colors are two variations of the same image. And the image, by the way, is an X-Ray of a 15" Apple TiBook. The hard disk motor and another fan actually spin, and an internal LED blinks on and off.
Every time I turn my computer on now, I'm greeted by this uber cool bootloader screen...and behind the scenes, it's still LILO, just the way I've been used to it, so that makes configuration painless.
It's stuff like this that makes Linux a surprisingly fun operating system to play with.

As an added bonus, I also got my USB printer working using CUPS. Works flawlessly, so I can mount my NTFS drives, open up my documents in OpenOffice.org, edit them, and print them too.
Slackware is slowly becoming almost as usable as Windows to me now.
Who'da thunk it?
Even then, I doubt it'll ever completely replace XP on my box...

This is great! When I first got this site up, the Google bots came and indexed it within a few weeks, and it was added to the search engine results. Then as I continued to make changes to the code, e-piphany suddenly disappeared from the search results one day.
I think it had to do with putting the head section of the page within another PHP file and including it into all the separate pages. Or maybe not. All I know is the site stopped getting indexed after I did that. I changed that part of it back to the old style a few weeks ago.
Now I never wanted this site to be on Google for random people to find it, but it was nice when it was there, because I sometimes had old friends whom I haven't been in contact with for a while, searching up on my name, and coming across the site. They could then find out what I was upto.

In any case, the point is, e-piphany seems to be back in the search results now...and I'm happy.

Apple has finally released iTunes 4.1 for Windows...and what can I say? They sure don't know how to disappoint people.
I'm really impressed with the sound quality, and the features it has, not to mention the slick, gliding interface, so I've finally switched over from WMP9 with DFX 6 to iTunes 4.1
More about the coming up later, but until someone comes up with some sort of "Now Playing" add-on or plugin, I'm taking that part off the site. There's already an AppleScript for the Mac version of iTunes that does this, but it obviously doesn't work with the Windows port.

But yeah, it's great, and everyone should definitely give it a try. Also, if you do, make sure you go into Preferences and enable Sound Enhancer (set the slider all the way to the right), and Sound Check (which is automatic volume leveling).

With two midterms rolling in next week, and a research paper due on Monday, I have quite a bit of work to do; not to mention club meetings, homework, and lectures thrown in between all that.
Looks like my time on the computer is going to dip during the next couple of weeks...

It's little things like this that make every bit of the time I spend on the NTFS forums worth it:

Private message from a member

Just a bunch of thanks goes out to you for helping out almost every night I got a question or two. Just wish you were living a little closer to Alberta, Canada so you could swing by and show me how all this stuff works!!!

Thanks again!!
Heeter

Now if only some of the people I know in person could be even half as appreciative...

Okay, I know that lots of people don't know the difference between Mb/Kb and MB/KB when refering to bandwidth/download speeds, but I assumed at least ISPs would.
Here's part of an email I received from Adelphia, regarding the recent network upgrade increasing downstream bandwidth to 3.0 Mbit/s:

Adelphia Free Service-Upgrade

Dear Adelphia Power Link Customer,

We value your business and understand that many of you have an increasing appetite for online content, email and all the benefits of our high-speed internet service. We were pleased to announce last week that we will be increasing the speeds available to our Power Link high-speed internet customers to up to 3 megabytes-per-second downloads and up to 256 kilobytes-per-second uploads. Your Power Link pricing will not change as a result of this service enhancement! [...]

Shocking!

Tonight's the second episode of Smallville (season 3). Can't wait to see what happens, especially after watching last week's crazy (and totally unexpected) ending.

Well, apart from that, a group of us are planning to go out to Westwood tonight. Most of us haven't seen much of the place around campus yet, and from the little that I've already seen, it looks like a great place for just about anything - food, movies, stores, what-not.
That also means I might get some more pictures to post up here, so keep an eye out during the next few days.

And here's a shout-out to my new visitors - all the NTFS  people! Thanks for the nice comments, everyone.


On another note...for those that didn't already realize - I didn't get rid of all the links on the left panel. Instead, all of you now get a special "Friends" page. That's mainly due to the fact that I wanted to use all the cool link buttons that *cough* some *cough* of you have created.

Okay, I knew there were jokes on this, but who would have thought computer users could actually be so incredibly stupid?

Take a look at this page from the official Compaq FAQ.

Here's a paragraph taken from my anthropology textbook. I just thought it sounded really cool.


"Walking barefoot on the soft sand of a beach, however, reminds us with each step, of the natural process. No longer is walking a matter of two flat slabs of leather or rubber alternately clomping down on the pavement. Instead, we can sense our feet actually interacting with the earth, gripping into the soil beneath them, pushing us forward in our desire to get from here to there. In the instant of each step, our heel strikes first, leaving deep impressions as the sand compresses beneath our weight, all of it focused on that small point at the heel. Then the foot rolls forward, the arch lightly curving over the sand, and leaving a thin, sharp indentation with the side of the sole. Next, all in a fraction of a second, we rock up onto the balls of our feet, thrusting our center of gravity forward, as we push our alternate leg in front of us. Finally, our toes push down, gripping into the earth, with sand squishing up between and around them, as we propel our bodies forward, ready to catch ourselves in the next step with the other foot." (Feder 2003)

This year, COMDEX is scheduled to be held at Las Vegas between November 16th and 20th. For those of you who don't know what it is, COMDEX is (in a sentence) basically a techie's heaven!
Some of the biggest names in computers and consumer electronics come to the show, and there are a whole lot of conferences; keynote speeches by people like Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, and others; exhibits of the latest-and-greatest tech stuff; and other events. (Damn...this is starting to sound like an ad)

Anyway, the point is that you can get a free Exhibits Pass (normally worth $100) via this page on Microsoft's site.

What an amazing opportunity; yet, I have to miss it because classes will still be on during that time. I am so disappointed!
Wouldn't it be great if UCLA Engineering organized an official field trip to the event for all C.S. students? Ah, wishful thinking...

Yup...I got a little bored of the existing themes, and I actually began to dislike the old Apocalypse theme (simply because it was just too dark!). So here's my new favorite theme, which I named "OceanBlu" (there are multiple reasons for this name, and why I left off the final "e"). It's based on the wallpaper "collapse" by coestar.
I should also mention that the theme switcher does not work if you use the e-piphany.tk address to visit the site. You must have the full URL (http://www.e-mpyrean.net/~kunal/) in the address bar for it to work. It's just due to the way the DotTK domain uses frames, and there's nothing I can do about it.

There's also a new section for my monthly desktop screenshot. If you like what you see, I've provided the necessary details about the visual style, wallpaper, icons etc. I'll try to update this at least once a month, if not more.

Let me know what you think of the new additions.

Remember I said I had a lot to write about earlier? Yeah, so let's get an update of what's been going on here lately...

Well, first off - Welcome Week was really great. Whole bunch of stuff going on during Week 0. Also had a chance to walk all over campus etc.
Now that the quarter has commenced, classes have been going on as usual...everything's great on that side of things. I don't have any classes too early in the morning, which is nice. I'm usually up around 7:30 in the morning. There are breaks between classes on most days of the week, and I just use that time to get my homework done in the library (which, by the way, is the greatest place to get any work done! There is no other place on campus where I can concentrate as well, and finish my stuff as fast)

On to other things...I joined a bunch of clubs during Welcome Week, some of which I might actually pursue, and others of which I won't. There isn't time to do everything, right? I'm officially a paid member of the ESUC (Engg. Society of the Univ. of California), and the UCLA ISU (Indian Student Union). Apart from those, I decided to join the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) chapter here, and the UCLA College Bowl, which is sort of like Science Bowl from last year, but covering a lot more topics and fields (attended one practice meeting last week). I'm sure I'm on the mailing lists of a few more organizations, but I don't remember, so I suppose those fall into the latter category?

Had a chance to meet new people on several occasions (one of which was last night - a free pizza party for our floor . I think the people on my floor are great...it's never noisy or disturbing; most people are in their own worlds, yet friendly when we meet. Our RA and PA have planned some cool events over the course of the quarter and the year. Should be fun.

Then of course, last night was the season 3 premiere of Smallville...one of the very few TV shows that I watch (never missed a single episode ). So a bunch of people (including me) gathered in Eugene's room to watch it. The episode most definitely lived up to my expectations...I knew it was going to be great, and it was, sure enough.

Hmmm...yeah, so I think that's about it. I don't think I missed anything worth mentioning...

Ah, been waiting for this for a long time. What could be a better way to start the new month?
The previews make tonight's episode look totally awesome!

WB Official Description

Oct. 1 - Under the influence of red kryptonite and living in Metropolis, Clark (Tom Welling) gets involved with a crime lord named Morgan Edge (guest star Rutger Hauer) who hires him to break into LuthorCorp. Meanwhile, desperate to put his family back together, Jonathan takes drastic measures to bring Clark home. At the mansion, Lionel (John Glover) accuses Helen (Emmanuelle Vaugier) of killing Lex (Michael Rosenbaum).

No TV in my room, but I'm definitely going to find a way to watch it...somewhere...somehow