Harish's Blog

Gyros in New York City for dummies

harish2s — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:19:37 +0000

Basics

There are three main offerings – bread with meat, rice with meat and a combo of bread-rice-meat
Most of the meat is halal & mostly chicken & lamb. Stick to lamb if trying for the first time
Salad of lettuce, tomato is invariably present in whatever you order, ask for onions & bell peppers if you like
There are usually two sauces, red or white. Red is obvious tasting, White is yogurt based tartar-ish

Rules

As you approach the cart, make sure there is no meat on the griddle/pan/cooking surface & the meat is cut from the skewer in the cart
You’ll be offered variety of Rice, ask basmati for the first time
Overall average price for this dish should be $5.00 [at the time of writing, spring 2010]
If you have vegetarian companions, suggest the Falafel which made out of chick peas

why Apple’s closed design hurts customers

harish2s — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:28:42 +0000

What are the odds that my first generation iPhone fails A day before Apple announces its “latest creation”??

However far fetched it may seem, my phone’s connector failed this morning making it un-rechargeable. That’s like saying, your car’s fuel cap is busted and hence you cannot use your car.

It took less than 20 seconds for the apple customer rep to detect the issue, pitch a new phone or charge me $120 for the part’s replacement. And here comes my lament, what should a customer do when he paid $400 for the phone in the first place and a part failure sets him back by $129 or a new phone that costs $200?

Apple doesn’t make its components available to outside technicians or resellers, there are no alternatives [apart from dubious ones on the web]. Don’t get me wrong, the product has served well. But it nice to know that iPhone, in the end, turned out to be the princess that Android’s ads claim it to be.

Google bot’s adventures with Adobe flash

harish2s — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:12:59 +0000

Google’s fast flip started appearing on the Google news and the screen shots seem to have issues with Flash based content. Wonder what the content provider has to say about that.

Inexpensive NYC

harish2s — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:38:28 +0000

Frugal Traveler once again comes to the rescue to help the newbies of NYC.

Stuff that was left out was cheap hourly rentals, Zipcar or Hertz Connect . Certainly not advised for novices in the city, it can be fun if you have some time to kill.

Click here to visit the main article

Custom sorting using Mootools

harish2s — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:21:49 +0000

Mootools provides a great HtmlTable for display and sorting and everything else you want. Document is sparse for such a good utility.

And today, yours truly discovered that custom sorting is not a well documented feature. Maybe I was being stupid.

Anyway, let’s say you want to sort a table like the one below. Note, we use plain string, numbers and range.

Name	Region	Expected Returns	Number of sec. held
North American Fund	Americas	15%	15 – 20
European Growth	EMEA	16%	>50
Greater China Equities	Asia/Pacific	13%	<20
Australian Value	Asia/Pacific	14%	40 – 60
Global Reach	Global	18%	15 – 30
Money Market Value	Global	14%	80
Absolute Growth	Global	3%	35 – 55
Alternative Investments	Americas	21%	>60

Here’s the code for setting up the table as per official documentation.

var myTable = new HtmlTable({
  properties: {
    border: 1,
    cellspacing: 3
  },
  rows: [
    ['apple', 'red'],
    ['lemon', 'yellow']
  ]
});
myTable.inject($('someContainer'));

Now we add parsers to the official documentation


function parseNumberofSecurities(){
	//We will add parsing logic here later.
}

//make sure that the length is equal
//   to the number of columns.
//Leave null for columns
//   that you want Mootools to decipher.
var customParsers = [null, null, null
	, parseNumberofSecurities];

var myTable = new HtmlTable({
  properties: {
    border: 1,
    cellspacing: 3
  },
  rows: [
    ['apple', 'red'],
    ['lemon', 'yellow']
  ],
  parsers: customParsers,
  sortable: true
});
myTable.inject($('someContainer'));

Implementation of parser.

var securities;
var parsedSec;
function parseSecuritiesHeld(){
	securities = this.get('text');

	if(securities.charAt(0)=='<'){
		parsedSec = parseInt( securities.replace(''){
		parsedSec = parseInt( securities.replace('>','') );
		return parsedSec+0.01;
	}

	var index = securities.indexOf('-');
	if(index>0){
		//This is a range.
		//As we will only have whole numbers, replace hyphen with dot.
		parsedSec = parseFloat( securities.replace(' - ','.') );
		return parsedSec;
	}

	//This is just a number.
	return parseInt( securities);
}

…and Yankees attempt 3-1.

harish2s — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:46:43 +0000

Live from bottom of the first, world series ’09

CC is back and doesn’t seem to be as sharp as he has been all this series. Was it Chase Utley scoring in the first game?
Howard continues to strike out adding more woes to Phillies.

Who should win? Phillies.

Who will win? Yankees. Some consolation after Giants & Jets were mauled today.

Fall 2009 – monday night TV

harish2s — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:01:39 +0000

“Sheldon, you are impossible”

“no way. Look! I exist. You can say, you are improbable”

- The Big Bang Theory

House – continues to entertain.
Two And Half Men – getting a tad older? Charlie is getting old.
The Big Bang Theory – The goth episode. oy vay!
Is The Jay Leno Show getting predictable?

Coen brothers – A Serious Man

harish2s — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:25:13 +0000

Wouldn’t have noticed this until newspapers harped about it. Fortunately, the premiere preparations were being done next to workplace. As usual, they are craaaaaazy. Crazy nice. Crazy funny.

Windows 7

harish2s — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:23:27 +0000

……and then I installed the windows 7 last night.

People were going gaga over how quick the installation was. I thought it was exactly the same as installing Windows 2008 server.
I was one of those who actually found it rather nice to work with Vista and have been using the ultimate version since it was released. Considering my earlier bias, Windows 7 does look polished.
Installation was on a laptop, unplugged, with a DVD [obviously]. Unlike Ubuntu who’d not let me install until I plugged the power cord, Windows had nothing to complain and it actually worked fine with the wireless.
Oh, the audio drivers and my touch pad refused work. One had to dig through the DVD archives for the Dell drivers CD for Vista. Round 1 for moi.
And the installation, in its infinite wisdom, pointed out the lack of anti-virus. A little intertube search yielded Microsoft approved free, yeah, free anti-virus AVG . Take that people.
Will I completely shift to Windows 7 from Vista yet. Heck no! I like it, but not that much. Not yet.

The Jay Leno show!

harish2s — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:22:35 +0000

…and the wait is almost over, the new show starts tomorrow.

Conan O’ Brien might be good in his own right, David Letterman is spectacular, but seriously, these guys were supposed to can Leno? pfft.