Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • py2app, MacPorts, Snow Leopard, and PIL: a match made in Hell

    For a while, I’ve been needing to create a little app out of some python scripts I’d been hacking on so I could have others use them easily. For those of you not familiar with it, py2app generates the equivalent of a statically-linked binary using python files and the transitive closure of all the libraries […]

  • Vancouver Olympics (part 1 of … many)

    I spent 10 days in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics; my time there was certainly one of the most enjoyable experiences I can remember. I had intended to keep updating my blog regularly, but alas, the best I was able to do is to keep a few notes and resolve to post retroactive updates later. […]

  • En route to the olympics!

    I wrote this post last week, more on my Vancouver experiences soon! — I’m currently on the plane to Seattle, the first stop on my February/March adventure! After spending about a day in Seattle with friends, I will be heading up to Vancouver to partake in Olympic madness for about ten days. A friend of […]

  • Helping Haiti

    In an interesting piece (the title is more controversial than the content), Don’t Give Money to Haiti, Felix Salmon makes the point that large sums of money thrown at a corrupt government in short order will probably not be beneficial. As an example, he points to Red Cross money collected from the tsunami a few […]

  • Adobe CS4 Updater and Mac with Snow Leopard. (also, instruments.app)

    I just reinstalled my computer, and was having issues: After installing Adobe Creative Suite 4, the Updater (which generally updates software _too_ frequently) checked for updates and then kept proclaiming that none were available. Since my install DVDs were very old, I didn’t believe this, and more recent updates were in fact available on the […]

  • What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?

    I recently published an article in Venturebeat about Google’s Chrome OS. Here is a copy of that article: What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS? Posted: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:59:09 +0000 Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized […]

  • Migratory tales (blogger to wordpress)

    (Before I get too involved with the story, those of you who followed my old blog in an RSS reader might have noticed that my old posts looked new again. That’s a one-time artefact of this transition and won’t happen again!) Alas, this blog entry does not detail an inspirational 30-week long migration of some […]

  • Good random password generation

    I’m in the process of moving this blog, and in doing so, needed to generate a good random password for a MySQL account. This is the command I used on my Mac (using the terminal). Replace the ’10’ with the length you want! dd if=/dev/random count=1 bs=2k 2>/dev/null | uuencode -m – | sed -ne […]

  • New website, etc.

    I’ve finally made a website for myself: Vijay Pandurangan This is the first step in a list of things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, including moving this blog to a better platform, so stay tuned for changes!. Incidentally, I’ve posted two of the papers I wrote about Bangalore and electronic governance in […]

  • Skype + iPhone = saving $20/mo.

    If you have an iPhone with AT&T and you’re not on the lowest rate plan, you could be throwing money away!  Skype has a new app for the iPhone, that works pretty well, and (as you’d expect) lets you make calls using Skype!  Skype also offers an unlimited calling plan to Canada and the USA […]

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