How to show unread mails on gmail?

I was wonder if there is any way out to show only unread mails in Gmail?
I have many unread mails(to do tasks actually :P) that I marked as unread.

In case there is no way out,
Perhaps, unread can be a default system label for all unread mails. ;)

How to drop caches in Linux ?

Symptoms:
If the system is eating up lot of RAM eventually making the system slow then try freeing up the cache memory.

Before freeing up the cache, running sync flushes all the file system buffers.
In root, run the following commands:

To free pagecache, inodes and dentries:
root@inferno: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free only the pagecache,
root@inferno: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free only the dentries
root@inferno: echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Sony Walkman : MP3

Sony Walkman : mp3

A basic mp3 player from Sony.
Why?
This B series audio player looks bulky when compared with other mp3 players available( esp: apple's ipod and transcend). Nevertheless, the number of features that come with this gives me the feeling to overlook the bulkiness.

1. The bass feature is impressive and delivers hig quality music even at high volume. Best for listening fusion music(Try listening to Ganesh Kumaresh's compositions)

2. Comes with an FM tuner option. Also has FM Recording option.

3. The voice recorder is also good. Handy for recording music concerts, classroom lectures. Stores the files in .wav format. Have tried recording few lectures and the clarity was pretty impressive.

4. The display is also a feature worth considering. Ipod (shuffle) doesn't have this feature.

5. Select the songs based on your mood. Songs can be searched using the tags available for songs.
This feature gives the freedom to select songs based on various parameters: year of release, singer, music director, genre etc. This feature works only if the tracks have the information encoded. This information is encoded in an MP3 song as ID3. Most of the current albums have this information.

6. Love the equalizer settings. :)

7. Forwarding the song is very handy.

8. Battery life is awesome.

But there are few things that could be improved:
1. Not suitable as a thumb drive for copying movies. I have tried copying files ranging about 1GB but failed.
This is because the firmware tries to index the content.
Note: When many files with lot of meta data(tags) are copied, the player would take some time to start. This delay is due to the indexing of tags. ;). But the delay is worth bearing as it gives the option to select songs based on the meta data.

2. The earphones jack is not convenient. Placing the player in pockets increases the chance of tearing/breaking the wire near the jack.

3. No clip to buckle to the belt. :(

4. Not too stylish when compared with ipod or transcend.

Despite all these drawbacks, this MP3 is a nice option if style doesn't matter much.

PS: This was presented to me on my birthday. Thanq friends :)

50 things students can't miss ;)

Was reading a post by Ben Jones(Director of communications at MIT 04-08).
Few points I liked from his post ( in no particular order)

1. Call someone you love back home a few times a week, even if just for a few minutes.
2. Carve out an hour every single day to be alone. (Sleeping doesn't count.)
3. In the first month of college, send a hand-written letter to someone who made college possible for you and describe your adventures thus far. It will mean a lot to him/her now, and it will mean a lot to you in ten years when he/she shows it to you.(I enjoy doing this even now :) but the frequency has dropped :( )
4. Embrace the differences between you and your classmates. Always be asking yourself, "what can I learn from this person?" More of your education will come from this than from any classroom.(This is most important)
5. Working things out between friends is best done in person, not over email. (IM does not count as "in person.") Often someone's facial expressions will tell you more than his/her words.(Indeed that's true)
6. Welcome failure into your lives. It's how we grow. What matters is not that you failed, but that you recovered. (Very true)
7. Every once in awhile, there will come an especially powerful moment when you can actually feel that an experience has changed who you are. Embrace these, even if they are painful. (This could sometimes be the turning point of your life too.... )
8. If you need to get a job, find something that you actually enjoy. Just because it's work doesn't mean it has to suck.
9. Don't always lead. It's good to follow sometimes.
10. Eat badly sometimes. It's the last time in your life when you can do this without feeling guilty about it. (Many such moments :))) )

Well, the post had 50 points(few not applicable in India but read for a laugh). Find the complete article here.

Public Data Explorer by GapMinder

A very useful tool from GapMinder

More about the tool here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html

What's next on GMail and Gtalk?

Guess it would be something like a stealth setting in chat
Though the block option is available, it doesn't let you chat until we unblock them.

With this kind of stealth setting, we can choose which friends can see us online or offline.

tips for not falling asleep in class . :O :D

This is interesting :D

Domain Names in Indian Languages

Transliterating a Telugu word or phrase in English is challenging. Of late, I faced this problem when I tried registering a blog by the name abaddhaalu.blogspot.com

One of my guidelines was to register a name that would be easy to remember and at the same time be unambiguous so that users can type it right in the first go.
Abaddhaalu can also be written as abadhaalu, abaddhalu etc.
And that was the time when the idea of having Domain Names in local languages came to my mind. A wild guess that some organization like the w3c might already be working in this direction.

It would be interesting to see the challenges faced in this process.
Would love to have a domain in Telugu :)

హెటిటిపి://వవవ.అబద్ధాలు.బ్లాగ్ స్పాట్.కాం ;)

Updates as status messages ;)

I was about to check how Indians(Tendulkar actually) were doing in the second ODI at Gwalior. When I was about to do this, I saw a contact on my chat list change his status message to
"score .. 143/1 - 22.2 overs. "

I was wondering how would it be if a plugin updates our status message with the current score. ;) cricket scores especially.

Events from a news feed/news alert can also go as a status message.

Will we see and live in THE MATRIX?

Nice read.
The article concludes with this paragraph.

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

Yeah, if this turns real, that would be amazing..... we would then be living in THE MATRIX.

Here is the link to the article, Have breakfast..... or be breakfast.

Google and the natural language queries

A recent article about google's new feature of answering the questions by highlighting the answer is interesting.
This feature comes from the Google Squared. In simple terms Google Squared is just extracting pairs with relations. i.e an attribute and a value pair.

Does it understand our NL queries?
According to my understanding, as the tech behind this is google squared, if the attribute in the query or NL question is identified, then the problem
merely boils down to extracting the value for the attribute.
My guess, there is no such complete NL question understanding module.
Few examples I tried to come to this understanding:
Querying with
1. who is the president of india?
2. president of india who?
3. president of india
4. indian president

All of these queries resulted in the answer as Pratibha Patil. :)
But, when tried querying: Chief minister andhra pradesh, the answer was "YS Rajashekara Reddy" ;)
Perhaps, the current CM is not active enough and therefore is not talked much in the media. ;)

Is it trivial?
With so many Presidents available, picking out the current President is challenging i.e
ordering the set of presidents to get the most recent at the top.
Huh! The problem is not complex either. If one has an access to the news feeds from many sites, a simple term frequency based approach should order the set well.

A small flaw:
It seems the query to google is sniffed by the google squared module and returns the results and the results are appended in the first page.
This shows 11 search results on the first page.

Would love to hear your comments/views.

Remove or clear the last login information in Linux

How to clear last login information in Linux?
Login information is stored in /var/log/lastlog
Deleting the contents of the file will remove the login information.
/var/log/lastlog is a binary file so opening it in an editor will show junk.
To read the contents of the file use lastlog

[praneeth@inferno ~]$ lastlog

Root permissions are needed to clear the login information.
Overwriting the /var/log/lastlog file is enough to clear the information.
[root@inferno ~]$ cat > /var/log/lastlog
CTRL+D