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Sushi, Seattle and Seahawks

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:21:00 GMT

Random view of Redmond countryside So I'm hanging at the XenSource Redmond office for a few days, and munching on delicious sushi at Flo, and it turns out that the dude behind us was none other than Matt Hasselbeck! It seems like only two years ago that I was cheering on the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Bus as they owned the Seahawks.

Unfortunately, I only realised my brief brush with celebrity on our way out of the restaurant, which also probably saved me from saying something stupid to him. As if! But anyway, the, err, moral of this post is that you must check out Flo Sushi if you're in Seattle and eat the spider roll, it's awesome.

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Core stability exercising

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:57:00 GMT

It's been a wierd exercise year; I went from hard-core powerlifting (go 220lb bench!), to playing a lot of badminton and tennis, and then ending off the PhD era with breaking my knee (details not suitable for blog publication).
Ajay having a nice stretch

As anyone it's happened to knows, a knee injury is really annoying to recover from as it feels really "wobbly" for ages and can't quite be trusted. I've been doing physio on it myself for about half a year now, and can finally run around for 5km or so without too much discomfort, although yoga and Capoeria are perhaps a few more months away.

But then, the Forrest Gump-class runner and ex-officemate Alex Ho pointed out these amazing exercises by the captain of the CUH&H running team in Cambridge. They all emphasise smooth movement and core strength without the need for heavy weights, so can be done while travelling as well. So highly recommended, that even little Ajay (right) is trying them out!

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Karnatik Jazz, Live Painting, and such things...

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:28:00 GMT

Had a great evening out in San Francisco on Friday, when we visited the Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street to check out a really unique Jazz experience.

The boys from VidyA recently took up an artist-in-residence position there, and performed their fusion of traditional Indian Karnatik music with modern Jazz pieces. They've been making some waves in the SF Jazz scene already it seems, and to top it all of, the owner of the art house did a live painting session during the performance. The audience passed out random bits of stuff, and he incorporated it into a piece done over the course of an evening. Talk about artistic overload!

Love the area as well; there's a nice friendly coffee-house down the road (which is pretty much my only criteria, apart from not getting shot and such).

My school was never this cool.
My school was never this cool.
The area was a mix of Latino and African, it seemed
The area was a mix of Latino and African, it seemed
And in the Red Poppy Art House, eclectic art abounds
And in the Red Poppy Art House, eclectic art abounds

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Trac spamming is taking down Melange

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:15:00 GMT

After loads of reports that the Melange site keeps going 505 and crashing, I took at look at why. Turns out several spam crawlers were going mental and repeatedly adding tickets with spam links. Around 600 tickets and thousands of comments later, the process decided it had enough and terminated.

I've deleted all tickets (even the valid ones were spammed into oblivion) and turned off comment creation and modification for anonymous users. A look on the Trac Wiki shows that there are some SpamFilter extensions being developed which I'll investigate at some point.

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Hans Rosling at TED last year on global development

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:36:00 GMT

Having coffee with AliB and discussing lecturing reminded me of one of the best presentations I've ever seen: Hans Rosling at TED and debunking myths about the developing world.

Even if you're not interested in the subject, it's worth checking out just to see how cool his presentation of otherwise rather boring statistics is. His company, Gapminder also got bought by Google a few weeks ago, so chances are Analytics will get more interesting soon.

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Melange hits the euro-spotlight

Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:12:00 GMT

It's been a busy old March (release management of the new XenEnterprise sucked up most of it). I did take a break and go over to EuroSys 2007 in Portugal to present the language and compiler I implemented as part of my PhD work (read it here).

Although the talk I gave was was a bit underwhelming (more preparation and time-practise next time!), I met a whole bunch of really interesting people. My argument about rewriting whole applications also didn't get laughed out the room as I thought it might, as people recognise that retro-fitting safety enhancements on existing languages is a bit of a dead-end road to go down. It has definitely inspired me to make more time to spend on polishing up the Melange applications for a proper release in 2007.

In a pleasant surprise, it also won the Best Student Paper award of the conference as well!

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