Visiting Vaisno Devi

Vaishno Devi Bhawan
Image via Wikipedia

Just back from a pilgrimage or a hike of 25 kilometers —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaishno_Devi

Vaishno Devi Mandir (Hindi: वैष्णोदेवी मन्दिर) is one of the holiest Hindu temples dedicated to Shakti, located in the hills of Vaishno Devi, Jammu and Kashmir, India. In Hinduism, Vaishno Devi, also known as Mata Rani and Vaishnavi, is a manifestation of the Mother Goddess.

The temple is near the town of Katra, in the Reasi district in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is one of the most revered places of worship in Northern India. The shrine is at an altitude of 5200 feet and a distance of approximately 14 kilometres (8.4 miles) from Katra.[1] Approximately 8 million pilgrims (yatris) visit the temple every year[2]

 

 

Top Cartoonists:Updated

Here is a list of cartoonists I follow- I sometimes think they make more sense than all the news media combined.

1) Mike Luckovich He is a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for AJC at http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/

I love his political satire-sometimes not his politics- though he is a liberal (surprisingly most people from creative arts tend to be liberal- guess because they support and need welfare more, 🙂 ) Since I am in India- I call myself a conservative (when filing taxes) or liberal (when drinking er tea)

2) Hugh Mcleod- of Gaping Void is very different from Mike above, in the way an abstract painter would be from a classical

artist. I like his satire on internet, technology and personal favorite – social media consultants. Hugh casts a critical eye on the world of tech and is an immensely successful artist- probably the Andy Warhol of this genre in a generation.

3) Doug Savage of Savage Chickens http://www.savagechickens.com/ has a great series of funny cartoons based on chickens drawn on Post it notes. While his drawing is less abstract than Hugh’s above, he sometimes touches an irreverent note more like Hugh than anyone else.

4) Professor Jorge Cham of Phd Comics http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php is probably the most read comic in grad school  – and probably the only cartoonist with a Phd I know of.

5) Scott Adams of Dilbert http://www.dilbert.com/ is probably the first “non kid stuff” cartoonist I started reading-in fact I once wrote to him asking for advice on my poetry to his credit- he replied with a single ” Best of Luck email”

They named our email server in Lucknow, UP, India for him (in my business school at http://iiml.ac.in ) Probably the best of corporate toon humor. Maybe they should make the Dilbert movie yet.

6) Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

XKCD is geek cartooning at its best.

For catching up with the best toons in a week, the best is Time.com ‘s weekly list at http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek

It is the best collection of political cartoons.

Merry Christmas and Season's Greetings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas

Light Cycle of Tron review

comiccon2010-6814.jpg
Image by YGX via Flickr

I really enjoyed the Light Cycle race in Tron- so instead of naming this the Tron Legacy Review- I call this Light cycle review.

The movie is a geek must check it out- and the mix of music, models,cars, and lights can be heady at first. The younger Jeff Bridges looks like a BeoWolf, and his son is ok. But Olivia Wilde is nice- and the cars and bikes are superb. If you like playing video games then check out the free game at http://armagetronad.net/downloads.php Its called Armagedtron.

And boy the 80s was a great time for pop music and video games.

Troubleshooting Rattle Installation- Data Mining R GUI

Screenshot of Synaptic Package Manager running...
Image via Wikipedia

I really find the Rattle GUI very very nice and easy to do any data mining task. The software is available from http://rattle.togaware.com/

The only issue is Rattle can be quite difficult to install due to dependencies on GTK+

After fiddling for a couple of years- this is what I did

1) Created dual boot OS- Basically downloaded the netbook remix from http://ubuntu.com I created a dual boot OS so you can choose at the beginning whether to use Windows or Ubuntu Linux in that session.  Alternatively you can download VM Player www.vmware.com/products/player/ if you want to do both

2) Download R packages using Ubuntu packages and Install GTK+ dependencies before that.

GTK + Requires

  1. Libglade
  2. Glib
  3. Cairo
  4. Pango
  5. ATK

If  you are a Linux newbie like me who doesnt get the sudo apt get, tar, cd, make , install rigmarole – scoot over to synaptic software packages or just the main ubuntu software centre and download these packages one by one.

For R Dependencies, you need

  • PMML
  • XML
  • RGTK2

Again use r-cran as the prefix to these package names and simply install (almost the same way Windows does it easily -double click)

see http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=lucid&searchon=names&keywords=r-cran

4) Install Rattle from source

http://rattle.togaware.com/rattle-download.html

Advanced users can download the Rattle source packages directly:

Save theses to your hard disk (e.g., to your Desktop) but don’t extract them. Then, on GNU/Linux run the install command shown below. This command is entered into a terminal window:

  • R CMD INSTALL rattle_2.6.0.tar.gz

After installation-

5) Type library(rattle) and rattle.info to get messages on what R packages to update for a proper functioning

</code>

> library(rattle)
Rattle: Graphical interface for data mining using R.
Version 2.6.0 Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Togaware Pty Ltd.
Type 'rattle()' to shake, rattle, and roll your data.
> rattle.info()
Rattle: version 2.6.0
R: version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31) (Revision 52157)

Sysname: Linux
Release: 2.6.35-23-generic
Version: #41-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 24 10:18:49 UTC 2010
Nodename: k1-M725R
Machine: i686
Login: k1ng
User: k1ng

Installed Dependencies
RGtk2: version 2.20.3
pmml: version 1.2.26
colorspace: version 1.0-1
cairoDevice: version 2.14
doBy: version 4.1.2
e1071: version 1.5-24
ellipse: version 0.3-5
foreign: version 0.8-41
gdata: version 2.8.1
gtools: version 2.6.2
gplots: version 2.8.0
gWidgetsRGtk2: version 0.0-69
Hmisc: version 3.8-3
kernlab: version 0.9-12
latticist: version 0.9-43
Matrix: version 0.999375-46
mice: version 2.4
network: version 1.5-1
nnet: version 7.3-1
party: version 0.9-99991
playwith: version 0.9-53
randomForest: version 4.5-36 upgrade available 4.6-2
rggobi: version 2.1.16
survival: version 2.36-2
XML: version 3.2-0
bitops: version 1.0-4.1

Upgrade the packages with:

 > install.packages(c("randomForest"))

<code>

Now upgrade whatever package rattle.info tells to upgrade.

This is much simpler and less frustrating than some of the other ways to install Rattle.

If all goes well, you will see this familiar screen popup when you type

>rattle()

 

Test Drive a Google Chrome Notebook: Last Two Days left

Main logo and icon for the open source interne...
Image via Wikipedia

Chrome

Test drive a Chrome notebook.

We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. It should take about 15 minutes. We’ll review the requests that come in and contact you if you’ve been selected.

This application will be open until 11:59:59 PM PST on December 21, 2010.

What type of user are you?

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/

Business
Education
Non-Profit
Developer
Individual