An excellent resource for starting off with spectral analysis using MATLAB

An excellent resource for starting off with spectral analysis using MATLAB:

http://www.etsu.edu/math/seier/tperiodogram.doc

Google Fast Flip !

Here's some fresh google technology to answer the needs of sloggy networks (like that of my college) that remove the charm of online reading. Today Google rolled out 'Google Fast Flip' (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) and here's what they have to say about it:

"Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized."

The speed is indeed way better than the conventional feed readers (and that includes Google Reader) but its probably at the cost of diminished features (well, something has to be optimized after all). Seems there is also a mobile version for Fast Flip .. haven't yet checked it out. Nice experiment google labs!

GSOC: BITS Pilani goa Campus in Top 10 Schools in 2009 by # of Accepted Students

Ah! here's some awesome news for my college! In Google Summer of Code, it ranks in the top 10 Schools in 2009 by number of Accepted Students! Here's the link:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/tasty-new-google-summer-of-code-stats.html

Pidgin 2.6.1 is here !

A major upgrade of the favorite universal chat client 'Pidgin' has been released.
Detailed instructions of installations or upgrading can be found here. Some of the major upgrades are the new Voice and Video support for XMPP !! Hurray ! Apart form that, the general icons have also been changed and they now look much more decent. Check it out for yourselves !

Apt-get: Cannot initiate the connection to 8080:80 (0.0.31.144).

I've seen this problem sometimes cropping up! One of the reasons this problem can occur is when your http_proxy variable is not set properly!
The $http_proxy variable in your terminal overrides the http::proxy variable in /etc/apt/conf file and the connection is not established if the http_proxy variable in the terminal is set to [proxy]:[port] instead of http://[proxy]:[port]. To check this out do the following:

1. Type: echo $http_proxy in the terminal
2. If it is something like this: 10.1.1.30:8080, then type: http_proxy="http://10.1.1.30:8080" . (we're just adding the 'http://' before the content of the variable)

If the problem was because of the overriding variables, it'd be solved by now .. try typing sudo apt-get update and see if it works.