Mr. Aggarwal

Pretty funny; amazing how much media attention this has gotten in the past few months:

Indeed, tragic is he who can never have enough. But worse is he who knows he has enough, yet he cannot bear helping. – Ashok Aggarwal

These people know their audience.

By the way, at the end, the translation for the Hindi voice-over is:

[the woman texts the husband]: “It’s been 25 years, but you still don’t understand anything about women.”

I don’t judge the nature of the problem or solution as much as I do the depth of their respective complexity and simplicity. – Ashok Aggarwal

This quote isn’t as much an epiphany as it is just trying to find a way of describing what I really like to do…every day. This notion of finding simple solutions to complex problems also describes the kind of people I enjoy working with. Are you with me on this?

I have summarized the 10 dimensions as described by the video and interpreted by me below:

1. Length – a line
2. Length + Width – an impossibly flat object
3. Length + Width + Height – every object we can perceive; our world — an example is a human
4. Introduction of Time – imagine a single perceivable object in the 4th dimension is of indeterminate size and shows your entire life span
5. Introduction of Possibility – we introduce all the possible life spans you could have led in the 5th dimensional object
6. Our universe’s Infinity – all possibilities from the beginning to end of our entire universe accessed at an instance without travel; as an example, even in the 4th or 5th dimension, you would have to “travel” an indeterminate “distance” (though there is no such notion distance as we know it in dimensions that encompass time) in order to access a place in one of your possible life spans — in the 6th dimension, they would all exist at once
7. Introduction of other universes – imagine other universes with different laws of physics and altogether different foundational beginnings
8+9. Ability to travel “instantly” between different possible universes (similar to 5+6)
10. As our universe’s infinity became a point in the 7th dimension that allowed us to branch to other universe’s infinities, so all the infinities of all universes became a point in the 10th dimension. However, it is unclear what that could possibly branch to. So, in my mind, the 10th dimension is not well defined.

You may want to watch, think about this for a few days, and then come back to watch it again. It is just one way of describing 10 dimensions in layman terms, but I believe it will help formulate a thought process you can engage your mind with. I think you will find that you have already postulated some of these concepts during your own personal contemplation.

Observation alters reality. – Ashok Aggarwal

This was a nice introduction of Indian culture onto the Ice Skating scene:

This happened to me recently. I needed to download my iPhone photos and videos like I normally do periodically, but I was not seeing the device in Windows Explorer like I used to.

The solution was simple. I just need to:

1. Unplug the phone from the USB charger
2. Enter my passcode
3. Plug it back in

Why? When the phone is locked, Windows cannot detect the device properly. I hope this helps someone.

These are all branded names of web browsers. I have been using FireFox and Chrome for a few years now. I only use IE7/8 for enterprise application development that requires compatibility with those browsers. After seeing such productivity gains myself by switching to the fastest browser available, I am starting to look into introducing FireFox into enterprises. It has certainly occurred to me that a quick description of a web browser is in order.

Notes:

1. A program on your computer, just like Microsoft Word
2. For Windows, Internet Explorer (also called its acronym, “IE”) is the default browser. If you don’t know which browser you are running, you are likely running IE.
3. At its basis, a Web Browser takes a web addresses (also called a “URL”) like http://www.mraggarwal.com as its input, and outputs the result on the screen, which is typically a web page.
4. There are four main Web Browsers on the market:
- IE (Closed Source by Microsoft)
- FireFox (Open Source)
- Google Chrome (Open Source by Google)
- Safari (Closed Source by Apple)

I found the following video to further help exemplify and provide another learning medium. I hope you enjoy it:

As you go higher, the wind gets stronger. – Ashok Aggarwal

I had a font package with afm, pfb, and inf files. When I tried to copy/paste them into c:\windows\fonts on Windows Vista, they would not install. Nor would they install using the “Install Fonts…” options.

These worked fine with XP — I realized that Vista requires a pfm file. And it is not difficult to convert these, though third party software is required. I download the free AfmToPfm software to complete my conversion:

http://www.proximasoftware.com/afmtopfm/

I hope this helps someone in the same situation.

Excerpt from Alon’s blog:

Download the patched version: termsrv_sp3_patch.rar

Installation instructions
0. Go to C:\Windows\system32\dllcache and rename the termsrv.dll to termsrv.dll.bak
1. Go to \Windows\System32 folder and rename termsrv.dll to termsrv.dll.bak
2. Copy the new SP3 patched termsrv.dll to \Windows\System32 folder
3. Run the included registry patch “ts_concurrent_session_patch.reg” (by double clicking it), it will update the relevant registry values which are relevant to the concurrent sessions support.
3. Restart windows.

NOTE:
if you are currently using Terminal Services, you will need to start windows in safe mode before you can overwrite the existing termsrv.dll files.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended her decision not to close the borders with Mexico, saying it “would be a very, very heavy cost for what epidemiologists tell us would be marginal benefit.”

Where was this logic with the handling of the economic crisis? That approach has really just been “spend as much as possible, as quickly as possible, without waiting to assess the benefit.” I always thought people working with numbers were supposed to be the most logical. And in a time when we are at the cusp of an epidemic with the “swine” or “Mexico” flu, I am more likely to accept questionable and conservatively irrational decisions.

I guess, something about reading that quote just got me thinking.

I really like this animation of the credit crisis. I hope it provides you some insight as well:

Constrain for the sake of constraint. – Ashok Aggarwal