Cashews are South American in origin

Did you know that the Cashew tree is native to South America, and flourishes mainly Brazil and Peru? This now adds to the list of foods and spices that I already know to have originated in the New World (mainly the Americas - North and South). This list includes, tobacco, potato, chile pepper (yes mirapakayalu - if you don't believe me, check out this exhaustive article), corn, tomato, guava, peanut, pumpkin, sunflower, etc. For those of you who can read Telugu, I think this list carries its most visceral impact if I use their Telugu names - పొగాకు, బంగాళాదుంప, మిరపకాయలు, మొక్కజొన్న, టమాటాలు, జామకాయలు, వేరు శనగకాయలు, మంచి గుమ్మడి కాయ, పొద్దుతిరుగుడు పువ్వు, etc! And here's a pretty exhaustive list of New World foods.

BTW, the "raw" cashews that we buy in stores are already steam cooked - according to this wonderful article on Cashew nuts and trees.

I always find it interesting to revisit my wandering trains of thought that ultimately lead to me places totally unexpected. Now, I know that you probably aren't interested in knowing what *my* trains of thought are - but just wanted to share it anyhow.. right here..

I was just mid-night surfing a bit while listening to Talat Mahmood's great song - Meri yaad mein tuna aansoon bahaana.. And to check upon the meaning of a word I went to an Urdu dictionary site. (BTW, if you are constantly wondering what some of those tough Urdu words mean when to listening to some classic Hindi movie songs - then you can check this dictionary out. I really do enjoy the songs more if I knew their meanings.) There, under letter K, I found "Acajou" as the meaning for the word kaaju. Now, don't start thinking that I didn't know the meaning of the word kaaju. But, I didn't know what "Acajou" meant - and went to that google of dictionaries - www.onelook.com to check out its meaning. While reading the definition provided by Wiktionary, I came across simple side note that Acajou (Cashew) is native to South America. This piqued my easily aroused curiosity, and I ended up googling for "cashew origins" which led me directly to this interesting article. I thought I stumbled on an interesting topic for my blog - for which I had been looking for a while now. A little more research resulted in the links I listed above to support my claims :)

Now you know why this blog's title includes the word "ramblings" ;)

Gabbilam - Vignapthi (Audiobook)

Ever since I read parts of it in my 10th grade Telugu textbook, I always wondered about what prompted Gurram Joshua to name his khanda kavyam, Gabbilam, that way. Many years later, I finally had the opportunity to learn why. It was put so nicely by Joshua himself in the book's preface that I would like to share it with you all in audio format. I am not very good at reading these books, and would appreciate it if any of you can provide a better rendition of it..

Gabbilam - Vignapthi

BTW, Gabbilam was subtitled thusly:

"gasari busakoTTunAtani gAli sOka
nAlgu paDagala haindava nAgarAju"

And the cover work depicts a four-headed snake (nAgarAju) angrily hissing at a skinny half-naked man dressed only in loin-cloth.

I am guessing that Joshua was referring to the Hindu caste system with its four casts as the "nAlgu paDagala haindava nAgarAju" while the skinny man probably represented the untouchables. What do you think?

Amrutam Kurisina Raatri (Audiobook)

Hi folks,

I have made audio recordings a few of my favorite poems from Tilak's Amrutam Kurisina Raatri. Listen to them if you are interested, and let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Raahy.

Amrutham Kurisina Raatri
Ee Raatri
Naa Kavitvam
Prardhana

Brief book reviews

OK. The second coming of Raahy turned out to start with a whimper than a bang. Any how, things had been a little hectic lately what with the arrival of a new member into our family. Anvitha is already 6 weeks old and doing well. So, I no longer have the excuse of the hardship of parenthood.

In the meantime, I have had the opportunity to catch up on a bit of reading. I read the two sequels to The Old MaAn's War by John Scalzi. I liked Old Man's War and looked forward to reading the sequels. Scalzi was a simpler/clearer and less sardonic version of Heinlein.

But, the sequels got progressively worse. Ghost Brigades was at least entertaining, and Scalzi appeared to have put in a lot of effort to predict what the future of technology might be like. The Last Colony, however, became a bit of a drag, and I just skipped through many pages in the end to just finish it off. I am not one to write to detailed reviews, and these books already feel like a distant memory, so I am not going to provide any specific examples to support my comments.

Also, I recently decided to start reading biographies of great/successful people to learn about what made them great. Consequently, I read The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross; and The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy by Sandy Weill and Judah S. Kraushaar.

Of the two, the Edison biography was more interesting. It's surprising to know that by the time Edison was 32, he was already a world-famous inventor. He was an extremely hard-worker, and had enough respect and recognition from others to attract venture capital from a very young age (as a 19 year old). His inventions were not accomplished in isolation, but often in a race with other inventors. Some times he was able to beat others at the finish line, but at other times he would lose. His inventions were some times bettered by competitors, but he got a major share of the recognition by being the first one to come up with a working solution. For example, his preferred way of distributing current, DC would eventually lose to AC; and cylindrical phonograph would lose to the disc. His proximity to New York city, and the public's need to find a larger-than-life inventor made him the first super-star inventor. Apart from his ability to raise capital from investors, his business acumen was quite limited. I would have liked a more technical description of Edison's inventions and his method of invention, but otherwise the book definitely was an interesting read. I would give this book a 4/5 stars.

Sandy Weil's biography was a bit of a disappointment. It began interesting enough, with a quick walk through of Sandy Weil's childhood and college years, but once it started with Sandy's corporate phase, the entire book read like a looong list of events that involve people stabbing Sandy's back, and Sandy trying his best to continue working with them until the last minute. This is all from Sandy's point of view, of course. I would have liked more details on how he planned take-overs and how he turned them around, and less details describing the political machinations common across the corporate world. 3/5 stars.


My ratings?

The Old Man's War - 4/5 (Pretty good)
Ghost Brigades - 3/5 (OK)
The Last Colony - 2/5 (The low rating is mostly because it couldn't keep me interested)
The Wizard of Menlo Park - 4/5
The Real Deal - 2/5

Finally affordable RAID based NAS

In this rambling I will review the Buffalo Terastation Pro II Nas 1TB (4x250GB-SATA)

I have been looking for a product like for this for nearly an year. The concept of a low-end RAID based Network Attached Storage (NAS) is into its second generation and quite matured now, and it became quite affordable as well.

This product was very simple to install. It took me less than 10 minutes to get it out of the package, install the software, change the RAID setting from 5 to 10, and to start copying the files. It came pre-configured to use the subnet address 192.168.1.150, but since I didn't use that address, I was fine. Performance looked ok on my standard 10/100 Ethernet connection - I have yet to install Gigabit routers in my network.

Anyhow, I did quite a bit of reading on the various levels of RAID while researching the product. Below is a quick summary of what I'd learned. This summary assumes that all the disks in the array are of the same size.

RAID 0 - Only striping, no mirroring
READ PERFORMANCE Very good as reads are distributed across multiple disks
WRITE PERFORMANCE Very good as writes are distributed across multiple disks.
RECOVERY None
CAPACITY 100% of the total space is available.
SUMMARY Good for high-performance systems with no need for recovery.

RAID 1 - Only mirroring, no striping
READ PERFORMANCE Standard - same as a single non-RAID disk. Could be better some times if special hardware based controllers take advantage of multiple disks in the mirror (more than two).
WRITE PERFORMANCE - Some performance hit is there as everything you write has to be written to two or more disks. So, Hardware level controller is a must.
RECOVERY If one of the two disks fails, then the new disks gets built from its mirrored counterpart.
CAPACITY 50% of the total space, as the other 50% is used for mirroring.
SUMMARY Good for non-performance-critical systems with strong need for recovery.

RAID 5 - Distributed parity. Typical configurations involve 4 or more disks.
READ PERFORMANCE Pretty good, almost as good as RAID 0.
WRITE PERFORMANCE - OK to poor as parity information needs to be calculated and updated on each write.
RECOVERY Allows at most one disk failure at a time. Recovery could be painfully slow, as when one of the disks fails, the new disk's data is calculated using the parity info stored across all the other disks.
CAPACITY You lose 1 disk's worth of storage to store the parity info. In other words, a 4x250GB configuration will get you 750GB worth of storage space.
SUMMARY Not really good for anything - unless you are the NAS vendor trying to sell to customers who don't know any better - they can be easily misled by the higher RAID number, and the higher usable capacity (n-1 * disk capacity).

RAID 10 - Striping over mirrored disks. A 4 disk configuration involves two striped sets with each set containining two mirrored disks.
READ PERFORMANCE Very good. As good as RAID 0.
WRITE PERFORMANCE - Very good. Almost as good as RAID 0.
RECOVERY All but one disk can fail in each RAID 1 (mirrored) set.
CAPACITY 50% of the total storage space - the other 50% is lost for mirroring.
SUMMARY Good for high-performance systems with solid need for recovery. Unless you are have super-mission-critical system, in which case you should be looking for more advanced RAID configurations, this solution offers the most affordable yet high-quality solution for small businesses/home offices, IMO.

My ideal setup? I would use a two fast hard disks in RAID 0 configuration on my workstation for performance reasons, and a RAID 10 based NAS storage for backup/network storage purposes. If I want more peace of mind, I can do daily/weekly back-ups from the NAS storage to a USB based external hard disk.

You can read more about RAID levels in detail at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

Here's an excellent article that settled the RAID 5 vs RAID 10 debate for me:
http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

The second coming of Raahy

Alright. It's been 1 year, 5 months, and 12 days (including today) since since my last rambling. That's 75 weeks; or 528 days; or 12,672 hours; or 760,320 minutes; or 45,619,200 seconds. How time flies! I don't about you, but for me it seems to defy physics. Some times it drags slower than a bullock cart through mud, and some other times it moves faster than light.

Anyhow, I have decided to be more prolific in my second act as Raahy, and more consistent as well. I sincerely hope that it's not going to be 528 more days before my next rambling :)

By the way, I got the above date duration numbers from Date Duration Calculator utility. Apparently, there are a lot of uses you can derive from the calculator :)

Why don't I reminisce much?

Whenever I see my friends and relatives reminiscing their good old days, I always wonder why I reminisce so little myself. It's not that I haven't had a happy childhood or college days - I did. But, somehow, I tend to think very little of the past. And, I do wonder whether it is to my own detriment! Any how, the rest of the this post shares some of my thoughts on this topic.

I am a person who lives in the present - not in the future; not in the past; but, always in the spur of the moment. Sure, I do think of the cherished past occasionally. Whenever bright sunlight warms my skin on a mild wintry day, I am immediately reminded of the walks I used to have during lunchtime in winter in the green paddy fields behind Town Highschool in Gudivada. I do frequently bring up my childhood experiences in conversations, but those recountings rarely have a touch of nostalgia. By and large, my trips down the memory lane tend to be brief sojourns rather than soul searching voyages.

What are your thoughts?

I intended the next paragraph to be the introductory one. But, I don't believe it makes much sense any more. I have decided not to drop it because it did flow fluently from my keyboard, and it does sort of make me look smart in a post-modernist obscurantist way ;)

I know that I am a sentient being in one sense - consciously perceiving the stream of reality around me. But, if a sentinent being is expected to perceive reality spread on a temporal scale, reminiscing fond memories then I am afraid I barely pass that test.

Results of OK Cupid Politics Test

You are a Social Liberal (88% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (56% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Truth is stranger than fiction - color printers with tracking code

Continuing on my recent post about news stories that sound suspiciously like conspiracy theories, here's something interesting I came across in today's early morning surfing.

Would you believe that many color printers (including those of HP and XEROX makes) sold in US in the past few years printed pages with tracking code in the form of millimeter sized yellow dots that can only be seen in blue light? And that these yellow dots, seemingly sprinkled randomly across the page form a pattern which can tell government authorites (and any one else who can crack the pattern!) the serial number of the printer, and the date and time the document was printed?

Well, it's true! It comes from authoritative sources, and today's not April 1st. Read on more about it at this Washington Post article.

I am not exactly sure whether to think of this breach of privacy as some thing totally sinister, or as a necessary evil needed to combat bigger problems such as counterfeiting. It also makes it a little easier to track down careless forgeries :)

What do you think?

One more way to fight splogging

Google made it very easy to blog, and the spammers have joined the party - uninvited. I think one feature that Google can implement very easily is to include word verification (through picture) when posting comments. The administrator of a blog should be able to enable or disable this option - or better yet, Google should make it mandatory. Obviously, this won't solve *all* the splogging problems, but it will at least get rid of most of those annoying fake comments.

Lack of progress on Vennela Veta audiobook

I have been suffering with mild cold and cough for more than 3 weeks now, and that's making it impossible for me to record the next part of this audiobook.

Speaking of cold though, I would like to post my obligatory rationalist/skeptic rant of the week :) Did you know that Linus Pauling, one of the most respected scientists of the Twentieth century, and the only person ever to receive two unshared Nobel prizes, is mostly responsible for the widespread myth that Vitamin C can cure cold effectively? I repeat - it's a myth folks! What's worse, some people keep taking Vitamin C in large doses *after* they catch cold thinking that the vitamin would somehow ease their symptoms. If you don't believe me, check this out: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html

Pandemic vs. Endemic

One word that we keep hearing a lot lately thanks to the Avian Flu scare is pandemic. As I told my friend Giri the other day, it sounds very similar to endemic, but has a nearly opposite meaning. But, I made a mental note right then to verify my knowledge, and to learn more about it. So, here we go..

Here are a few definitions of endemic:

• noun: a plant that is native to a certain limited area (Example: "It is an endemic found only this island")
• noun: a disease that is constantly present to a greater or lesser degree in people of a certain class or in people living in a particular location
• adjective: of or relating to a disease (or anything resembling a disease) constantly present to greater or lesser extent in a particular locality (Example: "Diseases endemic to the tropics")
• adjective: native to or confined to a certain region (Example: "The islands have a number of interesting endemic species")
• adjective: originating where it is found (Example: "Endemic folkways")
  

Here are a few definitions of pandemic:

• noun: an epidemic that is geographically widespread; occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world
• adjective: epidemic over a wide geographical area (Example: "A pandemic outbreak of malaria")
• adjective: existing everywhere (Example: "Pandemic fear of nuclear war")
  

BTW, I just verified/improved my knowledge of these two words (and got the definitions above) by researching at the "Google of Dictionaries" - onelook.com. It's one of my most favorite sites - I have been using it since 1998. Instead of praising its many virtues, I just simply recommend you to pay it a visit the next time you are stumped about any word/name/acronym/etc.

vPod

I don't think I need to explain why I call it a vPod :) Any how, I can't understand why people would want to spend $250 for a nano when they can get a vPod for $300 that has 7 times more capacity, larger screen, plays video, and has a better/same battery life.

I think that the nano is too small to operate easily while running or driving. Even if you are not interested in its video capabilities, vPod is still the way to go!

On the other hand, Apple's keeping price low by taking out all the accessories that used to be standard, the charge-from-the-electric-outlet power cord, for example.