iwant2donate – donate for good
My friend, fellow motorcyclist and former coworker Charles gave me a great news yesterday. He and his graduate school buddies had been doing a monthly charity project for the last couple of years. They just launched the website iwant2donate.com for the general public to be a part of it.
It is my pleasure to share their good effort in my blog, to spread the news and bringing in more like-minded volunteers. Their past contributions page is already looking great. I wish them all the growth and success.
One door closes, another opens
14th December 2010. A day I will remember as a very happy and meaningful one. A fateful day for 600 engineers, including 7 from my team. Only experienced engineers. I was ecstatic. I knew it was a blessing in disguise. My coworkers watched with disbelief as I said goodbye with ear-to-ear grin and bursts of euphoria.
It was a great beginning five years ago. A rocking engineering manager. Productive team. New ideas. Less process and quick execution. Years went by in a blur of cool new products. We had regular lunch outs. The internal hack days were awesome. It was a bliss.
Something happened over time. Something a bit different than I would have liked. While I absolutely enjoyed the company of talented coworkers, I felt I was not growing as fast as I would have liked.
Then the axe fell. Just when the job market was heating up. Another dream came true — I landed a startup within 2 weeks. Pre-IPO, cash positive. 80 employees, including 25 engineers. 6 interviews ending with co-CEO asking me to code a solution to a NP-complete CS problem. Wow.
Change is a very welcome thing. I don’t mind the car + train + bicycle commute of nearly 4 hours a day, if that means passion reclaims the center stage of my life. Looking forward to some seriously tired and good times.
As for my impacted coworkers, I have a single advice – take this situation as a rare opportunity. Do not look back, do not get depressed. Reboot yourself and grab the next big thing. Email me your resume in case you want to reach out to the recruiters I know.
I am for hire
After 5 years of continuous learning and a veritable roller coaster ride at my former job, it is time for a change. While proud to have extensively contributed to the #1 finance website during my time at Yahoo! Finance, there could not be a better time for new adventures than now.
I am ready to take the jump. Looking forward to solving difficult and interesting problems.
My resume: PDF
My linked-in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joydutta
Email is the best way to reach me: j d u t t a AT gmail DOT com
Context-Aware Bash Shell Autocomplete
My work in the IT field involves a lot of repetitive typing in the unix shell, and most of them are basically copy and paste of things like hostnames, directory paths, screen names and so on. Bash shell by default offers a file/directory name expansion, but it can be extended for command specific autocomplete of specific files or data.
For example, all the host names you have ssh’d to before are stored in a file ~/.ssh/known_hosts, so we can leverage that. Similarly available screen names can be seen using “screen -ls” but it is much nicer to have the list available for expansion while invoking a screen.
So here is a project on github to build an extension script which offers as many useful autocomplete features as possible without interfering with the default filename expansion.
Examples:
Context: screen
$ screen -r [TAB][TAB]
photo debug bashautoc
joyd@shield ~/configs $ screen -r ba[TAB]
joyd@shield ~/configs $ screen -r bashautoc
Epson 7600 maintenance req 40
Posted by therider in Technology on October 31, 2010
This morning I had the weirdest telepathic experience. While starting up my 7600 for a print I was thinking about the possible things to do when the cleaning unit hits the service limit counter (it was close to end of life), and just then I saw the dreaded “Maintenance Req 40″ status on the LCD.
No panic. The print came out fine. I did a little bit of search to find out an useful information. Someone in the same boat posted his experience in a forum. When he called Epson they asked for the total prints so far. His number was about 1200. The technician told him to not bother and just reset the cleaner counter. The unit needs replacement only when page count hits near 5000. I just checked mine, it has printed 990 pages so far. So I did the following steps to reset the counter:
1. Power off printer
2. press PAPER SOURCE + PAPER FEED + CUT/EJECT buttons at the same time and keep them pressed
3. turn on the printer
4. Release the buttons
5. A hidden menu appears
6. press DOWN, “CLEAR COUNTERS” option should appear
7. press RIGHT
8. press DOWN, till “CLEANER” should appear
9. press RIGHT
10. press ENTER (CUT/EJECT button)
11. Power off printer.
The printer status still shows 990 pages so I just have to watch it hit 5000 before I bother about the cleaner again.
Revenge of the Ph.D.
Thanks to Priti’s Ph.D. and our separate living across two continents for more than half a decade, we came up with a plan to make up the lost time in both principal and interest, so to say. In short, a vision to live a life trying to avoid the slippery paths leading to the hellish traps of mediocrity.
This is a mission statement of life that we would like to live.
1. Never let go of the passion to live life to the brim. Treat every day as a gift and eliminate every wasteful use of time. No stupid TV shows, no useless chatter. Do activities and seek out other energetic fun loving people. Energy is contagious.
2. Do good stuff that are part of the solution of something big. Think sustainability, low footprint living. Help other interested folks achieve the same goals. Our friend Rucha Chitnis working with WEA is a great inspiration. I am also lucky to have a local chapter of Habitat-for-Humanity.
3. Live a childfree life and be the proof of how chock full of awesome it is. Screw society and its expectations. Screw the bullshit ads with imagery of you-need-a-family-to-be-happy nonsense.
Raising a human in the child-obsessed world is nearly akin to committing an ecological crime. Barring true desire to raise a mini-me, it is nothing but an enormous carbon footprint, 20 prime years of lost time for the parents and a lifetime of worry, not to mention the staggering expenses. Everyone I know follows the same formula and ends up having kids. Yet everyone does not have the same type of career, car or house. Heck, everyone does not even ride bicycles. Kids are a matter of choice, yet most couples can’t seem to stand up to their own life plans against societal/family pressures. I personally know a friend who openly regrets their daughter on the way and is comforted knowing that his family setup will automatically take care of her once they go back to India.
Many would argue that life is not a gadget or a competition. I see it as something with an expiry date stamped on it. A good 25 years is what we spend on a decent education. It is too valuable an asset to just let rot in a miserable rat-race life. Even the smallest amount of education can be put to good use by willpower and motivation. We all need to seek out the best potential of fellow humans and enable everyone to work towards a better planet and quality of life for all. And what is better than to live a life with ample spare time, a chunk of savings, unfettered freedom and spontaneity ?
We will check back in 5 years to review and retrospect.
Solution for Epson 7600 printing in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 30, 2010
In the previous post I have outlined a trick to print correctly from Lightroom. While that works, LR has a weird crop issue when printing. So I continued my search to find a fix with PS.
Thanks to Doyle Yoder from a Luminous Landscape forum thread (reply #18), finally I can print right again from PS CS3. The steps are:
1. Convert to printer/paper profile.
2. Assign sRGB profile, ignore the color shift as it shows on the monitor.
3. In the print dialog, choose “Printer manages color”.
4. Because of above choice, “Color matching” in driver dialog will show “Epson color controls” automatically chosen and grayed out. Now choose NCA in the settings.
Voila. Perfect print.
Epson 7600 and Snow Leopard printing woes and solution
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 29, 2010
Brief update from my side is that I picked up a large format Epson Stylus Pro 7600 from a good friend of mine. As much as I was excited to own such a fine printer, I was bummed for two straight days not able to print a test image correctly from Photoshop CS3 on an intel macbook with Snow Leopard (10.6.4). I used the latest 8.19 printer driver.
I followed the standard process. Photoshop manages colors, with Bill Atkinson’s 9600 Premium Luster paper profile (9600PLU1), with Relative Colorimetric intent and Black point compensation turned on. Also NCA (no color adjustment) in the printer driver. Each and every print came out darker as if shadows quickly rushed to blackness. Also the black and white images seemed warm.
From numerous sources on the web I found out that the root cause is “double profiling” due to a bug in the print workflow. What happens exactly is that when we apply a profile in the print dialog in PS, and then go to printer driver dialog, the “Color Matching” section shows that “ColorSync” is automatically selected and is grayed out. This is not desired because ColorSync itself applies another profile depending on the paper, in my case, 7600-Premium-Luster-PK. the NCA option is also grayed out. This double profiling screws up the prints.
Many people have fixed it by pointing the default ColorSync profiles to “Generic RGB” as if it is a null profile. But it did not work for me.
Another source said to convert the image to the paper profile, then choose “Printer manages colors”, and NCA in printer driver. Very strangely, the printer just won’t print anything with this configuration.
Then I found out a very interesting fact that in Lightroom the application print dialog and the print driver dialog are on separate buttons. I had to choose the NCA on the driver dialog first (clicking “Print Settings…”), making sure that Color Matching is “Epson color controls”, the only alternative to “ColorSync”. Then I chose the paper profile on the right side pane before clicking “Print one”, and not “Print…”. If you click the latter, the color matching will be reset to “ColorSync” and you have to undo it by choosing “Printer manages color” instead of the paper profile and click “Print…” again.
The print finally showed shadow details as desired and perfectly neutral black and white.
It will still be a PITA to prepare images in PS and print via LR, but at least the prints will be right. CS4 or CS5 might have this particular bug fixed, but not sure.
—————–
Various Epson 7600 related links:
1. Lesson: Printing Images Using an EPSON Pro Stylus 7600 / 9600 Large Format Printer and Adobe Photoshop
2. Lessons from using an Epson 7600 printer
Test prints:
1. On-sight
2. Bill’s downloads
Update: After getting the 7600 working right, the 2200 driver started giving problems. It won’t print and the utility app will not launch. After lots of research the solution that worked was to install the 2200 driver in uninstall mode before re-installing it. Then I tricked the 2200 the same way as 7600 to get it to print using paper profile and “Epson color controls”. The result came out better than what I was doing all along with “Printer manages colors” workflow. The grays are more neutral than the distinct magenta I used to get. It is still a little warm so I might still be using QTR for b/w but the color prints are gonna be better from now on.
Grateful to be educated
It seems that Indian politicians are once again doing what they do best – stroke egos (and of course lining their pockets) with fake “India shining” concepts. The attempt to host commonwealth games in India is probably the joke of the century, the biggest loot of public money in recent times, in a country with more mobiles than toilets.
The article in TOI has hit the nail on the head about the crux of the subject matter, so I am not going to repeat it here. But I have to admit it bugs us Indians who has had a decent education and doing pretty well in life, that we can’t do anything to bring a visible change within a short time. I agree that changing a nation in terms of its politics and people is an unimaginably daunting task, and short of a revolution, fruit of one’s efforts will not be tangible in a lifetime. But does it mean we don’t bother and keep living our lives isolated from all the din and bustle ?
I don’t think that not being able to bring a big change can keep us from doing small good things on a daily basis. Our education is a tremendous asset. We have decent jobs and places to stay. We don’t have to worry about daily struggles. We have bandwidth to contribute. Here is what all we can do that can strengthen the “India” brand in the global scenario:
1. Keep doing a good job at work.
2. Ditch the petty gossip on politics, bollywood and cricket — the herculean melting pots of corruption and mediocrity.
3. Spend less time on stupid TV shows.
4. Think and discuss new ideas to solve myriads of today’s problems. Co-found or join a startup if possible.
5. Be an expert (or good enough) at something. Anything. Then teach, mentor and inspire others to be productive.
6. Volunteer for good causes. Donate labor whenever possible.
7. Buy less useless stuff. Create. Fix. Recycle.
I think the aim of great education is to produce creative, capable and productive global citizens. I like to consider ourselves more as earthlings than Indians. And please, lets discard the cliche tagline “Proud to be Indian”. It should rather be “Grateful to be educated”. We do not choose our birthplace. We make the best of where we are born and raised. And we can give back to anyone needing help, because humanity has no political boundary.
Think global and do good work. Life is too short to bother about bullshit.
Notational Velocity app really rocks!
I reluctantly tried what I thought to be yet-another-app-to-make-life-more-organized, after reading the post on notational velocity on the mnmlist blog.
Oh man, it really works for me! But ofcourse, part of the awesomeness goes to Dropbox as well, which I have been using since last month. Now I have few major winning factors with NV+Dropbox:
1. Esc and Cmd+L works very intuitively – almost no learning curve.
2. I chose to save the notes as plaintext files – no fuss editing possible from anywhere.
3. I keep the text files in a folder under Dropbox – everything is synced between computers and iPhone.
I only wish that the iPhone Dropbox app would let me edit the text files, but I think it is only a matter of time before that becomes a reality.
And yeah, no more stickies.
About
Hi, I'm Joy, a Javascript engineer at Zoosk. While code pays my bills, I enjoy hang gliding, photography, motorcycling, woodworking and home renovation. Welcome to my blog.
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