Arjarapu

Back when I was a Junior, I came across term 'Fractal' from, 'The Object Oriented Programming in Turbo C++' book by Robert Lafore. Fractal is a shape that appears similar at all scales of magnification[1]. Recently, I happened to come across the same book and started reading Chapter 17, Just for Fun, containing Fractals sample code in it. So, 'just for fun', I thought of creating similar fractal with the OOPs & recursion skills I have scored over years.

Though my first fractal, plain vanilla of Tendrils example from the book, looked more like a Rangoli, I was not disappointed and thought of creating couple of other using Squares. Once the squares fractal turned out good, I thought of creating more and started looking over wikipedia. I came across various fractals including Sierpinski carpet, T-Square, and Sierpinski triangle. All of them fit into the same logic that I used for Tendrils and Squares. So, I went-on and created them as well.

I always beleive walking is good for health. However, walking outside in peek summer times (min. 40c) are too hard to bare for perdestraints in India. I almost died out of Heat stroke in the summer of 1994. There are quite a huge number of people who have to move around (work) during day time. With the Sun blazing from top, nothing is worse than dying parched. Any fluids especially a carbonated flavored drink are more refreshing and thirst quenching. May be one should consider Sugar-Cane juice, Coconut water or fruit juice rather than Pepsi / Coke cola. Here is why?

For the past couple of months, I have been hearing news about the Pepsi / Coke being fined in India for having pesticides in their soft drinks. Also, Kerala & Karnataka States has banned sale of Pepsi or Coke [1] while other States, like Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, have banned their sale in or around Hospitals, Schools & Colleges.

Any individual who freshly landed in America, agapes at cost of products that he is interested in. This is 100% true when he / she converts them into their countries currency. We defenitely cannot blame their feelings as various product's prices in America are touching the sky. Consider the following prices - a couch - $400, 450 W Powersupply - $70, Casual wear shirt - $40, Old Navy torn shorts - 20$. If I purchase the same in my home country, India, I get all of these products for 1/4 th price. Moreover, except for the weights in gym, most of the products sold here are made in China. All the businesses out here are multi million $ companies, may be because - the product manufacture is outsourced to cheap labor and are sold for 10 times the actual cost.

Anyways, while most of the product prices are outrageous, some of the computer accessories & peripherials you can get them for god damn cheap. Here is the story about, how I secured 160 GB HDD for FREE (tax included.) and it's only possible in America.

Couple of year’s back, when I graduated from school, daily I used to go Barnes and Noble store at 66th Manhattan, NY. This store is not only easier to commute, considering that NJTRASIT and PATH are only means of transportation, but also has huge collection of various books across multistoried building. Unlike my school library, I had access to multiple copies of various books. So it is guaranteed that I would find the book I am looking for. I used to go through PHP, MySQL and .NET books to keep myself up-to-date with these programming languages. This was 'back in the days' story. I never visited any Barnes & Nobles store until recently.

I have been using nForce chipset's built-in IDE RAID for my desktop. Unfortunatey, they do not provide / support drivers for Linux and Tiger OSx. So, I thought of purchasing PCI RAID which is supported by most of them.

I learnt that 3ware and Adaptec are supported by most Operating systems. However, I cannot spend $300 for a PCI RAID card, especially when I am using it over a desktop.

After lurking over web, I bought a used Promise Fasttrak Tx2000 PCI raid controller over eBay for $28 including shipping & insurance. I don't think it's a bad deal as the brand new one with Free shipping was around $100. When I received the product, I backed up all my data to dvd media as Proise RAID cannot understand already existing on board IDE RAID settings.