What do I want to do?

This post is meant to be a (hopefully) living article with statements about things I want to do. That is, I expect to add to this as I think of things. I also might check off items that I do.

Something that I want to do can be anything, but in order to make it onto this page, it will probably be somewhat significant. It could be an aspiration or goal, though I won't limit myself to that. In general, this post should help me remember things and also let me see how my desires change over time.

• Postdoc. I would like to continue working in academia, but I want to get experience with research in a related but different area. I want to work with different people. Basically, I want more and broader experience. [2009-11-10]
• Live in another country. I'm currently fulfilling one of my dreams: living in a place outside the US for at least a year. I would still like to experience life in yet another country for at least a year. At some point, I may decide I want to live somewhere permanently, but I'm not quite there. [2009-11-10]
• Get married. Yes, it's basic, but why not list it? In case I forget... [2009-11-10]
• Have kids. Probably two, but I will see how it goes. [2009-11-10]
• Teach. I would like to plan and organize my own courses. I would like to have students doing research with me. [2009-11-10]
• Travel to Russia. I learned the language for so long: wouldn't it be nice to see the place where they speak it? [2009-11-10]
• Travel to India. Such a crazy place with crazy people so different from other crazy places and other crazy people. I'd like to see different parts—north, south, east, west—not just one area. [2009-11-10]
• Visit friends in South America. Go see Juan in Colombia, Americo in Bolivia, and Marcos in Uruguay. [2009-11-10]

The NRC needs a new editor

Carefully read the first sentence of this article summary:

The Dutch government is going to store the fingerprints citizens as of next week are required to submit when applying for a new passport in a single database.

The NRC International says it needs a new editor. Yes, they most certainly do!

Madiba's Chicken Curry

This is a dish I made today. It came from a cookbook that Darshana gave me last year. The authors of the cookbook are the South African Jeremy Mansfield, radio host and TV presenter, and his wife Jacqui. He fixed this dish for Nelson Mandela (whose nickname is Madiba). It was the first time I'd made anything like it. (Lately, I've taken to doing stir fries because they're so easy.) This was not difficult, but it did take a while: 45 minutes to stew the chicken. In the end, it turned out quite well.

Picture Pages

Does anybody else remember Picture Pages? Am I one of the few who has fond memories of the song, the musical marker, and Bill Cosby?

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Time to get your Picture Pages
Time to get your crayons and your pencils

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Open up your Picture Pages
Time to watch Bill Cosby do a Picture Page with you

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Lots of fun with Picture Pages
Lots of fun with crayons and with pencils

You can play with Picture Pages
Fill your day with Picture Pages
'Till Bill Cosby does another Picture Page with you

Feel free to sing along. It's a catchy tune.

Slumdog Millionaire is a rich film and worthy of Oscar

I'm glad to see that Slumdog Millionaire won so many Academy Awards last night. It was an awesome film.

From direction to story to editing to music, this was most definitely not Bollywood fare. British director Danny Boyle told the Times of India:

I’m truly happy that every Indian I meet is beaming, and it is the ultimate compliment for me that people in India see Slumdog Millionaire as an Indian film. However, in reality it is a British film. It is a very gritty in the beginning and very realistic because our film culture is based on that kind of realism which in Hollywood and Bollywood isn’t quite there.

From my (notably limited) experience with Indian films, I can't help but agree that Slumdog lacks the songs, dancing, and melodrama typical of Bollywood. But it's good to see that Indians are excited about the success of this film, because it is still an amazing portrayal of an amazing country. It's completely filmed in India (Agra and Mumbai) and filled with significant amounts of subtitled Hindi. (Side note: I loved the styling of the English subtitles.) Slumdog also has an almost entirely Indian cast. The lead actor, Dev Patel, is a British Indian. And the score comes from the extremely popular composer A. R. Rahman.

Speaking of music, I thought this was some of Rahman's best work. Unlike his usual repertoire, we are treated to more Western-style songs: there are a lot of hip hop beats and English (rather than Hindi, Tamil, or mixed) lyrics. But I thoroughly enjoyed the tunes whenever they came to the forefront.

The story was at times dramatic and coincidental, but present and past were interleaved well to provide full character development and a climactic build-up. I was wrapped inside the story of Jamal Malik, a child of the slums who grew into a young man with definitive character and persistence despite all the horrible things he saw and survived.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, you should see Slumdog Millionaire. And congratulations to all those involved who won awards!

In other news, I want to see Smile Pinki, winner of the best documentary short. It's another film about Indians, particularly about a girl born with a cleft lip who gets it fixed up.

Last but not least: Happy Shivratri!

Pasteboard commands for the Mac

Perhaps I'm a little behind on this, but I just discovered two useful command-line applications for the Mac:

• pbcopy
• pbpaste

The summary is that these allow you to send standard input to the "pasteboard" (a.k.a. the clipboard where copies using Cmd-C are stored) and received text from the pasteboard. For example, you can copy the text of a file to the pasteboard and paste it (Cmd-V) into a graphical editor.

$ cat file.txt | pbcopy

In my opinion, anything that makes it easier to transfer information between command-line programs and GUI programs can only be a good thing.

PGP in Gmail?

Note: See the update below!

Do you have any idea what to make out of this? No, they're not fake.

And after clicking...

I only saw this in one conversation that I had open in a "New Window" (actually a tab). Every message had it at the bottom. I tried to reproduce it with other conversations, both new window and not. I even looked at messages that have a PGP signature and tried to see if it mattered whether a person was in my contacts or not. Alas, it was all to no avail.

Update 1: A few hours later and a lot more investigation have resulted in the discovery that Google is testing PGP verification in Gmail.

Here's what one finds when one greps the source (... Luke):

$ grep -i PGP a.html

function zOb(a){var b=a[dd](/(-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----(.|\r?\n)*?-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----)/);return b?b[0]:null}function AOb(a,b,c){if(!a.ff())return 1;var e=zOb(a.Ug());if(e==null)return 2;try{if(c==null||!c.Fp())return 4;var f=b();if(!f)return 3;return c.Omd(e,f)?5:6}catch(g){return 1}}function BOb(a,b){sp[j](this,a);this.XN=b}function COb(a){pZ[j](this,a)}var XNb='<applet code="',YNb='" width="0" height="0"><param name="archive" value="',ZNb='"/></applet>';OZ[k].Omd=function $8Qa(a,b){return this.YBa.verifySignature(a,b)};OZ[k].Fp=function $9Qa(){return this.YBa!=null&&this.YBa.verifySignature!=null};OZ[k].Lgc=function $$Qa(){var a=this.wbc();document[ye][H](a);return a[Fe]};var DOb="PGPApplet",EOb="exp/799/pgpapplet_0.jar";OZ[k].wbc=function $aRa(){var a=document[Qi](M);d(a,WNb({code:"com/google/caribou/pgp/PGPApplet.class",name:DOb,archive:EOb}));return a};Dq[k].sua=null;var FOb="pgpEngine";Dq[k].JBc=function $bRa(){if(this.sua==null)this.D.sua=new OZ;Sn(FOb,this.sua)};Dq[k].orc=function $cRa(){this.JBc();return this.D.sua};var bOb="snHRaf",jOb="kCeyR",kOb="Click to verify PGP signature in this message.",lOb="Verify signature",RZ="vPzQab",mOb="Info",nOb="No valid PGP signature found.",oOb="Warning!",pOb="Invalid key entered.",qOb="Applet not loaded. Is Java enabled?",rOb="wrClmc",sOb="Success!",tOb="Your message was verified successfully!",uOb="Verify again",vOb="The signature was incorrect! This message may not be authentic!",wOb="Internal error occurred.",xOb="nKAWHb",yOb="dlMhw";o(BOb,sp);var GOb={C1b:tqa};P=BOb[k];P.ub=function $dRa(){this.IOb(0)};P.Lx=function $eRa(a,b){if(!ee(b,xOb))return false;var c=this.ycc(),e=this;fca(c[w](),function(){e.rTc(this)});return true};P.ycc=function $fRa(){var a=new ed(Xj);a.V(fj,uU);a.V(JG,this.XN.Hc().Yc);return a};P.IOb=function $gRa(a){d(this.b(),aOb({id:this.Jj(GOb),w1:a}))};var HOb="Enter sender's PGP public key:";P.rTc=function $hRa(a){function b(){return hT(HOb)}var c=this.XN.w().orc();this.IOb(AOb(a,b,c))};_B_prog(97)}catch(e){_B_err(e)}

<form method="get" action="?tf=1&amp;ui=2&amp;ik=20658725fc&amp;view=cv&amp;th=11f6233736b8d787&amp;msgs=11f622c66e59b189&amp;rt=h&amp;search=sent" style="overflow: hidden; position: absolute; visibility: hidden; left: -10px; top: -10px; height: 10px; width: 10px;" accept-charset="utf-8"></form><div><applet code="a_data/PGPApplet.html" name="PGPApplet" height="0" width="0"><param name="archive" value="exp/799/pgpapplet_0.jar"></applet></div>

Unfortunately, a_data/PGPApplet.html doesn't give much information. It's appears pretty much the same as the loading page.

Update 2: I'm grateful to Ionut Alex Chitu for the discussion about this. He has posted an article about Gmail's PGP testing on his blog.