Sachin Vs Ponting (Side by Side Chart)

I think picture speaks for itself.
Here is a comparison of Sachin Tendulkar Vs Ricky Ponting year over year.

The chart is done by me ;) and the stats data source attribution goes to www.cricinfo.com.

turn iPhone into Wireless HeadPhones :)

So I was at home watching some movie on Netflix on my Mac. But I wanted to relax on my bed and watch the movie without disturbing my room-mates. Hmmm.. "I wish I had a wireless headphones" , I Said to myself.
So I started looking around what can I use ... and there it was .. my iPhone. I said, how about transmitting the sound over wireless from my Mac over to my iPhone ..

A quick search on iPhone's App Store made me happy. So here is how you can turn your iPhone in a wireless headphones:

1) on your iPhone , open the app store and search for 'AirPhones'
2) Install that airphones app on the iPhone. (they have lite as well as a paid version)
3) Then go to http://airphonesapp.com/download.html and download the server component for your OS (Mac or Windows)
4) Install the server component on your OS and start the server
4.1) Start some music (we will use it to test this setup)
5) Start wireless on your iPhone and connect to your network
6) Start the airphones app on your iPhone. It will automatically connect to your server and start receiving the music.
7) connect your ear plugs to iPhone and you are done !!!

There you go as simple as it gets. Your iPhone can now be used as wireless HeadPhones.

Solr wildcards and omitnorms

I have been using solr for some time now. And I like the tool. With its schema definition it does allow a level of flexibility.
So the other day I was working on a task where I wanted to match a "text" field with wildcard queries e.g. "doc*" or "C*". But even after trying to hours I could not get it working... Until ofcourse I experimented with the omitnorms attribute on the field definition. I was able to confirm that by using omitnorms="true" on the field I was able to perform wildcard searches.

<field name="categoryCode" type="text" multivalued="true" indexed="true" stored="true" omitnorms="true">

I could not find any document on solr wiki that explaned about wildcards and omitnorms. I hope this saves someone time.

Do post your comments/findings.

Ubuntu 9.04 High CPU Utilization

I upgraded recently to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10. Even though 9.04 has a better boot up time, for some reason my CPU Utilization always stayed at 50-60%. This was slowing me down and was annoying since my laptop fan would just not stop making that irritating sound. I tried most of the things that were posted on some forums but none seemed to fix it. Finally one think that I noticed in the "top" command was vino-server taking up some CPU cycles.
So to try it out, I disabled the remote desktop sharing using the 'vino-preferences'. This fixed my CPU utilization.



To give this a try, just type 'vino-preferences' on your shell:

1) then just uncheck the 'Allow Other users to view your desktop' checkbox under 'Sharing'
2) Press 'Close'.

Hopefully this will be helpfull to someone.



If this does not help, you may also try
1) Make sure you have FireFox latest updates
2) Try disabling(i.e Selecting 'None') Visual Effects from System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects.
3) Disabling CPU Frequency Manager from System->Administration->Services