Srini's Point of View

macOS tricks 5 days ago
http://bit.ly/aY9lOs -x Srinivas Nyayapati Data Systems Development State Stre 5 days ago
30 Fantastic Geeky Tricks to Get The Most From Your Mac http://bit.ly/aeyhFi 1 week ago
Wouldn't it be nice to see google search results on Bing! I love Bings images, but I also love google search!! #fb 2010-04-23
Did You Know You Can Write Like This And Keep On Writing Every Word In It's Own Line Looks Like I Wrote A Very Long Message This Is Cool LOL 2010-04-02
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Windows registry repair

I found this wonderful free tool to repair registry problems.. It’s just simply called registry repair! Saw some good reviews and it is dead simple to use.. Just scan your registry and you will see a list of potential problems. You can then fix and repair the problem right there. Here is a link for it – http://www.glarysoft.com/rr.html

Best Gyro in Boston

My quest for the best gyro sandwich is over!! Mick from timony.com/mickzblog pointed me to Zo Boston after seeing my yelp postings on other gyro places I had been to.
I fell in love with the first bite. The sandwich is soo tasty!! Don’t know if it is the tzatiki sauce or the fresh warm pita bread or the tasty pork meat.. Maybe it’s the combination of all the ingredients… It doesn’t matter.. What matters is how tasty this sandwich is!!

Zo Boston is different from other gyro places.. The way they are different is because of how they cook and add the meat to the sandwich. Other places have strips of meat in their sandwich whereas Zo shreds it’s pork meat!!

The last time I was there, I found out that they also serve a chicken and pork combination Gyro sandwich… Man!! I love it when places have secret menu items.. It makes the experiance even more fun!! I can’t wait to go back and try the chicken and pork combination Gyro!!

Rotini with cheese and cream

Pasta is comfort food for me, specially white sauce pasta. I try to make the cooking exciting by changing the recipe at times. Some times I add tomato sauce to it or there are time when I have even tried to use cooking wine to my white sauce. I came across this recipe in one of the abundant cook books we have at home. I changed a few things on it and added few ingredients like garlic, chilly flakes etc to make it more flavorful.

The recipe goes like this -

Ingredients

Rotini                                                         1 pound
Egg yolks                                                  3
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese    7 tablespoon
Ricotta Cheese                                        1 cup
Light Cream                                             4 tablespoon
Butter                                                         3 tablespoon
Onion (sliced)                                          1
Green peppers                                         1
Salt, red chilly flakes and pepper per your taste

Method

Cook pasta as per instruction
Meanwhile mix the egg york, grated Parmesan and ricotta cheese in a bowl. Add the cream and mix it with a fork.
Melt butter in a pan. Saute garlic. Add onions and fry till golden brown
Add green pepper and salt. Cover and cook till the green peppers are tender.
Add the cream sauce and then add pasta.
You can add black pepper and red chilly flakes according to your taste.

This pasta has to be eaten hot as soon as it is cooked. The sauce tend to thicken if you wait.

Convert AVCHD video to MPEG-2

I have a Canon H100 video camera. This records high definition 1080p videos in a digital video format called AVCHD. It has been a pain to watch these videos. First of all, these videos don’t even play properly on my single core PC. My 3-4 year old PC is just not powerful enough. The video is choppy and jittery.. It is completely unwatachable. I have been watching these by copying the files to my camera and then connect it to my TV. If I had a PS3, I could take my memory card and plug it directly and watch these videos. But I don’t have a PS3. I normally use my legacy xbox which has XBMC installed, to watch and listen to my media. It sucks big time that I can’t watch my AVCHD videos through my xbox.

So the only way I can watch these AVCHD videos is to convert it to either an MPEG or AVI format. I know.. I know.. I am loosing video quality by down converting these videos… but till the time I can find a better way to watch these videos… thats what I am going to do. I did find a script at videohelp.com which was using some freeware tools.. But in my opinion the process was still painfull. My ideal tool would be to take these AVCHD files and either convert them to AVI/MPEG or to burn them to a DVD directly. Did I mention, I want this to be free too . You could also pay $50.00 for ConvertXtoDVD which does that for you.

Another option is to create an AVCHD DVD which will play directly on a blue ray player or a PS3. Scott Johnson, CEO of AtTask has a script on his blog which will create the DVD disc which will play on a blue ray player.

I got my camera in 2007 and in 2010 I have finally found a software which does the video conversion for me. It’s called Free HD Converter V1.6.
The software works on my old machine.. It’s not fast but I just batch all the videos and a couple of hours later, I have the converted MpEG files. I wish this tools would stitch the many generated mpeg files together too. Maybe it does and I haven’t found the setting! I can now burn a DVD from the Mpeg files and send the videos of my new born to my Mom or upload to YouTube directly!!

Next step is to convert all my AVCHD videos to MPEG. Now only if somebody could just do that for me too

Wake up your PC from your xbox using xbmc

I read an old lifehacker article on wake-on-lan the other day and decided I should try it on my home network. After using the free tool Magic Packet Sender mentioned in the article successfully, I thought how cool would it be to start my media server from my xbox. I use my xbox as my media center. I know… using the xbox is old news and it is not powerful enough for hi-definition videos… but still.. I like my xbox and am not willing to get rid of it yet. Till something better and cheap comes along, I am going to continue using it. My brother bought the Acer Aspire Revo (AR3610-U9022) which comes with the Intel Atom 330 processor. I like it a lot and boxee and xbmc both work really well. Streaming 1080p video works flawlessly. Hulu desktop works too, but you have to use the adobe flash 10.1 beta drivers for the video to work. let’s see what path I take.

Going back to my little project, I thought I will study what is involved in sending a wake-on-lan packet to a PC to wake it up. I read the lifehacker article in detail and then googled for other resourses. I came across a really nice resource which explained how the wake-on-lan packet is constructed along with a sample java program. I also found, I am not the only person who thought about using this technology to start their media server from their xbox. I found this script in the forums at xbmc.org. Here you go -

^?View Code PYTHON

# Wake-On-LAN
#
# Copyright (C) 2002 by Micro Systems Marc Balmer
# Written by Marc Balmer, marc@msys.ch, http://www.msys.ch/
# This code is free software under the GPL
 
import struct, socket
 
def WakeOnLan(ethernet_address):
 
  # Construct a six-byte hardware address
 
  addr_byte = ethernet_address.split(':')
  hw_addr = struct.pack('BBBBBB', int(addr_byte[0], 16),
    int(addr_byte[1], 16),
    int(addr_byte[2], 16),
    int(addr_byte[3], 16),
    int(addr_byte[4], 16),
    int(addr_byte[5], 16))
 
  # Build the Wake-On-LAN "Magic Packet"...
 
  msg = '\xff' * 6 + hw_addr * 16
 
  # ...and send it to the broadcast address using UDP
 
  s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
  s.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_BROADCAST, 1)
  s.sendto(msg, ('&lt;broadcast&gt;', 9))
  s.close()
 
# Example use
WakeOnLan('aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff')    # My PC

The last line in the script is calling the WakeOnLan method and passing the MAC address of the PC you are trying to wake up. You can get the MAC address of your PC from a DOS command prompt by the command -

^?View Code DOS

c:\> ipconfig /all

It will show up as Physical Address in the detailed listing. Read the lifehacker article given above for more details. You can wake more than 1 by duplicating the WakeOnLan(MAC) line in the script.

You have a couple of options of executing this script. You could create a sub-folder under the scripts folder in your XBMC install and place this script there. In which case you can call it anything you want. I have created a script for every PC I want to wake up in my network and have the machine name as the script name. You could also start up all your computers as soon as the xbox is switched on. Just name the file autoexec.py and put it in XBMC/scripts. It’s similar to how autoexec.bat works for windows

I also put these scripts on every PC in my network, so I can start any of them remotely. The pre-requisite is that you need python installed on your PC for the script to work. You can either install python or just use the python which comes with cygwin. I recommend that if you need a decent command line on windows, just get cygwin and give mintty a try. Andy Koppe the creator of mintty recommended it to me the other day and I love it so far!! I have also further recommended it to my friends at work. I just launch mintty to get a bash shell on my windows box and execute the script this way -

^?View Code BASH

$ python /path/to/WakeOnLan.py

Same music album showing up multiple times on iPhone

I created an album with different artists to listen on my iPhone. To my horror all the songs showed up as separate albums. Cover flow showed up the same album art for each of the songs. I hated this!! The fix is pretty quick. You have to make sure of the following to make your songs show up as one album -

The Album name has to be the same for all the songs
The Album Artist name has to be the same for all the songs
All the songs should be set as a part of a compilation.

Here is how you do it . Select all the songs in itunes you want to show up as an album, then right click on one of the chosen songs and click ‘get info’ -

Type in the Album Name and Album Artist
Under the options tab, make sure the ‘Part of A Compilation’ is checked and set to Yes.

That’s it… That will make sure the album shows up only once for the entire album

Mutton Curry revisited

I got about 5 pounds of goat leg from Waltham India Grocer. It is an Indian grocery store which also sells Halal meat. I normally get my meat from Cheema Supermarket but as I was in the neighborhood, I just picked it up from Waltham.

I was making my usual Mutton Curry and half way through making this dish I realized I did not have any crushed tomatoes.. so I had to improvise. According to some purists Goat curry should not have any tomatoes. I have always used tomatoes.. so this was a chance to try make this dish without tomatoes… Unfortunately I don’t have a picture to show on how this looks. It was a big hit at the party and that’s what counts

Here is how I did it…

Ingredients

Goat leg – cut into small pieces (1 inch)
Onions chopped – 4 large onions chopped
cinnamon – one 2 inches stick
cardamom – 5-10
cloves – 10-15
curry leaves – 10-12 leaves
green chillies – 4-5 cut into big pieces
garlic – 5-6 pods finely diced
ginger – finely diced – 2 inches
turmeric – 1-2 tsp
garam masala – 3 tsp
dhaniya powder – 4 tsp
lal mirch – 2 tsp
degi mirch – 2 tsp
jeera powder – 2 tsp
MDF Meat masala – 1 tsp
Coconut milk – 1 can

Method

Heat oil and some ghee in a big flat bottom vessel.
Add Cinnamon, cardamom and cloves
Once it sputters, add onions and start frying it. Add the salt to taste and turmeric immediately.
Once it is slightly brown, add the chopped ginger and garlic.
Continue sauteing and add the chopped green chillies and curry leaves.
Add the mixed powdered spices
Make sure you don’t burn the spices. Add a little ghee like maybe half a teaspoon.
Add the mutton and coat the onions and spices to all the meat.
Sear the meat so it cooks and changes color on all sides.
Add a can of coconut milk and mix everything together. After 5 minutes transfer all to a pressure cooker.
Wash the vessel you used and use the water for the pressure cooker. Put enough to cover the meat.
Add a cut potato in the cooker. This helps bring some texture to the gravy.
Add 2 tsp of MDF Meat masala.
Add chopped cilantro and then pressure cook for 30-40 minutes.
Once the pressure comes down, open and check if the meat is tender. If not tender, pressure cook for 10-15 more minutes.
Taste and adjust salt
Serve with Rice

First warm weekend of 2010

What a phenomenal weekend! It was nice and sunny and the best part was it was not too hot!

Food wise it was a great weekend too.. Friday night we went to Aegean in Framingham. Their bread basket had fresh baked bread and Pita bread. This came with olive oil and feta cheese. This combination was so tasty. The key here was their Pita Bread… Fresh!! For the main course I order their Lamb Youvetsi. This was a Braised Lamb with Orzo topped with grated cheese. My wife ordered the Mousaka. This was Layered eggplant, seasoned with ground meat, grated cheese and topped with bechamel sauce (My wife is a sucker for white sauce!!). Both dishes were very tasty and very very satisfying. My lamb was very succulent and tender.. This was cooked with tomato sauce, spices and orzo. Did I mention it was very satisfying! My wife’s dish was good too… It was like a lasagna but instead of pasta, made with eggplant.

Saturday morning was bright and started out a little cold but it got warmer and ultimately turned out to be a great day to spend outdoors. We met our cousins in Waltham and spent a couple of hours in Waltham Commons. Got coffee, coffee cake and cranberry scones from Cafe on the Common. A very cute place with some tasty baked goods. The place looked like an old school coffee shop.

For lunch we ended up in Taqueria Mexico. My Bro-in-law recommended it… looked like a whole in the wall.. the Food was very authentic and the prices were not too high. Check out their menu and you will find some traditional mexican dishes not available else where in and around Boston. I wanted to get the Guisado De Carne De Puerco. This was slices of pork cooked in green sauce with onions and peppers. Serverd with rice, beans, salad and tortillas. I got chicken instead of the pork. My Bro-in-law got the original dish and we both agreed the dish was better with the chicken. The corn tortilas were fresh and went good with both our dishes. My wife and my cousin got a chili reileno stuffed with cheese, one green chicken enchilada with melted cheese and sour chream on top. Served with rice, beans, saland. All dishes were yummy.

We then walked down Moody street to do some Indian Grocery Shopping at Patel Brothers. While I was there I got 5 pounds of goat leg from waltham india grocery planning to make mutton curry on sunday (will share the recipe). We then stopped by Lizzy’s Homemade Ice cream where I got their orange pineapple ice cream, my Wife got a chocolate frappe, my cousin got a cup of vanilla ice cream whereas my bro-in-law got some green tea.

Sunday was another fabulous day. The Sri Laxmi temple in Ashland was going to Host the Indian festival Holi. I guess the temple chose to celebrate it on Sunday as it was really cold the weekend of the actual day. I celebrated Holi after like 10 years. It was a lot of fun playing with colors with your friends and family. The organizers did a good job of arranging for food and Indian tea for everybody. I then invited my cousin’s family along with other family friends for an impromptu dinner.

Dinner was a big hit! I made mutton curry, Priya made okra fry. My Cousin Vandana made an awesome dish with Cholle and Spinach. The family friends made Channa Dal. It turned out to be a feast and a fitting end to this awesome weekend!!

A better cygwin terminal - rxvt

rxvt is so much more better than the default cygwin terminal. You will thank me once you switch to using rxvt. To get rxvt working without starting an X Server, just create a shortcut using the following -

^?View Code TXT

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fg green -bg black -fn "Lucida Console-14" -e bash --login -i

This is assuming that cygwin is installed at c:\cygwin. You will get a foreground of green on a black background. The font used is “Lucida Console-14″.

Grep for multiple stuff in one file

Update: See the comments to see how to do this correctly.

the UNIX grep command is very powerful, but the egrep command is even more powerful. You can grep for multiple strings in a file using the egrep command. All you have to do is use the | (or) symbol and add as many strings you want to look for. You have to make sure you escape the pipe symbol. This is especially helpful when you are wading through log files.

^?View Code UNIX

egrep "string 1"\|"string 2" file.log

The above command will only display the lines from file.log that have a reference of “string 1″ and “string 2″