iPod Engraving in UTF-8?

When outside, I'm always afraid of my big iPod Classic (80GB) of falling on the pavement and breaking. Even though it is quite nicely protected by a fantastic wide-corduroy case by the foof-lady, there is always a chance that it will sustain serious damage if it falls. So I was thinking of getting an iPod shuffle and the iPod Classic I have is way too big to go jogging around on the streets.

When I went to the famous online fruit store, it said that I could request an engraving to be put on the back of the iPod. I liked the idea and quickly tested something in my mother tongue. All I got was ???? on the back of the iPod instead of ਮੇਰਾ ਸੰਗੀਤ. Has anyone tried using non-English characters? e.g. Arabic? Chinese? Japanese? etc.

It seems to be quite a trivial thing to do when all software Apple has supports UTF-8 characterset and the engraving is also done by a machine rather than a human hand (would be wonderful if it was done manually though).

MS Excel - Shared file bug

This is a note to self, plus for those who might encounter the issue. It took me about an hour to find the solution to this problem.

Problem: A large Excel spreadsheet (about 3MB) which has the "Share Workbook" enabled is used by different authors and over time the file size increases enormously. In this case, the file had grown to about 90MB with only small additions of data over a period of a couple of months.

Possibility: User might have added several empty or almost empty cells to the sheet so that the whole sheet/workbook is filled up.

Interesting observation: Deleting 233 columns (and 64k rows) increased the size of the file by 2MB!

Solution: This happens when the workbook is keep a track of what is being done with it and by whom. If you don't want that information (I wonder how it is viewed), you can remove the extra tracking information by removing the Share feature by going to Tools > Share Workbook and then uncheck the option to make it shared and save it. You can check the size of the workbook after saving and it will be reduced to size needed by the data and formatting.

You can re-enable the share feature after saving if needed.

F1 Barcelona and BBC Bug

A fantastic F1 Spanish Grand Prix is going on and the Brawns up for a 1,2 again. F1 in 2009 has change a lot with Ferrari and McLaren both struggling to get into points finish let alone podiums. This is going to be a very interesting season.

Keeping a watch on the F1 Live Spanish Grand Prix page on BBC Sport. They keep an AJAX powered leader board on the right side and it updates very nice except sometimes when it puts a retired car (MaLaren-Kovalainen) for a podium finish!

On Demand CPU Frequency Scaling

Results of setting up cpufreqd on my machine using the ondemand governor: idle temperatures dropped approximately by 10℃. Details to follow, enjoy the graphic results for now.

GMail Down

So GMail went down at 0130AM Pacific Time. The announcement has been posted on their support page only. No reference of the down time has been posted on the GMail Blog as of yet.

Even though the statement on the support page says that it went down at 0130AM PT, I noticed that the mail interface stopped loading around 10:00ET last night. I hope that they get it back up fast.

PS: As of 0730 ET, GMail seems to be working again.

Spotting Debian

This post is for Debian logo spotted in daily life. This photo was take by a friend of mine in France. The place was a pottery artists gallery in St. Pere, Vezelay, France (excuse absence of accents, because of keyboard issues). You can see the swirl in the mortar bowl in white.