Tanim Islam's Livejournal

testing

2006-11-23T16:04:58Z

This is a test of seeing if I can post on livejournal using my own jabber client. I am using Kopete by the way.

paris has cooled down!!!

2006-07-27T09:26:45Z

Thank god, Paris has cooled down. The heat wave is over, at least for today. Now this is the weather I remember from visiting France on vacation in August 1996 -- some cloudy weather and highs hovering ~ 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit. NOT completely cloudless, rainless weather with highs ~ 100 degrees (and lows around 80 degrees at night), that makes me want to kill myself because I can't even sleep at night. But hopefully the weather will stay like this the rest of the summer. I would pay lots of money to have Paris go back to the weather it was, before global warming.

too too too too too hot

2006-07-18T13:11:26Z

It is much too hot in downtown Paris. The weather here right now is 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Which wouldn't sound so bad EXCEPT THERE IS NO FUCKING AIR CONDITIONING IN PARIS!!! I have to stay away from people for a while, as I WILL start snapping at them. Oh my fucking god I wish there was air conditioning here, and I so wish that at least some of my friends were in Paris right now. And if the gravy train of good news wasn't perfect, I also find that my money funds are dangerously low because I decided to do the wildly extravagant act of taking...a...fucking...vacation from this feculent hell-hole of a city. If I don't strangle someone just to alleviate a tiny fraction of my unbearable frustration, no one will be more surprised than me!

Stupid me, I decided to give away my fan to someone whom I thought needed it more than I do. So not only is it 95 degrees outside, but it's something like 100+ degrees in my office. Plus there is zero ventilation, and I have no $$. For all the people who think Paris is a romantic and desirable place...I could not imagine what I would NOT do to leave this place, never look back, and forget I ever made the incredibly stupid decision to come here in the first place.

logjam broken! Linux VOIP fixed

2006-06-24T22:53:17Z

very happy. Got VoIP using the SIP protocol working with Linux. Was a real bear of a problem that is, of course, extremely poorly documented. Especially the part about sending phone calls from my PC to a land-line or mobile phone. Here's the basic idea of how it works. I use ekiga (formerly gnomemeeting) 2.0.2:

registrar: proxy01.sipphone.com
User: USER ACCOUNT
Password: USER PASSWORD
Authentication login: USER ACCOUNT
Realm/Domain: proxy01.sipphone.com

And then, say I want to dial a landline number, say 1-804-555-1234, I would then place a call on ekiga as 18045551234@proxy01.sipphone.com, and then I would be good to go!

I am growing a beard

2006-06-05T01:27:45Z

I figured that shaving is too much work, so I'm growing a beard. One whim that I have is to dye my hair salt-and-pepper gray, or perhaps completely gray. Maybe do the same to my beard as well, if I decide to keep it.

aaghh

2006-05-03T13:35:25Z

AAgh!

I wish I weren't so poor! Just got this deal in from tigerdirect.com, a DECENT (actually, VERY decent) Acer laptop for only $400!! Got the offer today, and the deal ends tomorrow. But alas, I am poor. Otherwise, I would purchase it with my debit card and have it delivered to my parents' house -- a nice gift for when I get back home.

Btw, here's the soon to be obsolete link here.

anti-immigrant fervor!

2006-04-15T23:36:37Z

What's with all the anti-immigrant fervor sweeping this country in the past few months? Ever since the Dubai ports deal was shut down because the company was Arabic (completely racist by the way, considering that a good fraction of the United States' ports are controlled by foreigners -- I suppose they're not the wrong skin color, ethnic group, or religion), there has been a new wave of anti-immigrant fervor. It's very sad, really, but what can you do?

long winded update

2006-04-15T22:50:01Z

Well, I got the ALSA sound capture to work properly on my ubuntu machine @ work. Now the trick is to get openwengo client to work properly on my linux machine. It doesn't seem to recognize my sound output for some reason. Who knows why?

In other news: 2nd paper finished, 3rd paper almost finished, 4th paper to be done "soon," and finishing writing up my thesis. Also, have to prepare talks and some other conference proceedings. Big one going to be the IAS meeting in Prague; then APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting sometime in October. Maybe I'll live @ home for the next few months. It sounds attractive :)

KDE 3.5 is PERFECT

2005-11-23T21:54:00Z

Everything is there. I really liked KDE, except the panel (in previous versions) would put all the minimized windows in one toolbar. Now, I can group minimized windows by workspace. KDE Works Perfectly.

good paris weather!!!

2005-09-10T18:08:00Z

Rather than the skin-melting hot weather that I've resigned myself to, Paris weather is actually nice -- cool and crisp, with beautiful sunrises (and sunsets). I'm gonna go see a movie tomorrow, and then certainly going Karaoke this coming Wednesday. Perhaps I should sing Sisqo's thong song?

cooling down...

2005-06-25T14:12:36Z

finally cooling down, god-damn it. One of the scientists @ the ENS (a very sweet lady) set up a system for ventilating the offices. Plus, I get a fan. Now I can think and work, rather than shutting down from the insanely humid heat!

i'm dying here!!!

2005-06-19T21:46:55Z

I'm fucking dying here!!! It is so fucking hot in Paris right now -- 32 Celsius, which comes out to 90 degrees. Too fucking hot in this city!!! I wish I had AC. Also, the lights in my office went out. Ha fucking ha.

it's a hot day in Paris!

2005-06-16T18:49:22Z

It's getting hot out here. Something like 25 C, which converts to almost 80 F. Of course, there's humidity here as well. And when it gets above 20 C, the mosquitos start coming out. Thank goodness my desk is black wood, otherwise I would be seeing the corpses of dead female mosquitos that got zapped by my monitor.

strresss!!

2005-06-15T21:52:21Z

all my recent results are WRONG! I have to redo them, but carefully this time.

love my office

2005-06-11T16:53:19Z

Love my office @ the ENS. It is wonderful. It's gigantic and I have it ALL to myself, thanks to the fact that I arrived asynchronously from the scheduled academic year. Also, work is going...so-so, as it sometimes does. Paris is LOVELY right now, as in barbecue-style weather without the insects and humidity. I wonder if I can cook a barbecue in the garden just adjacent to my office?

but i came to Paris to ESCAPE bureaucracy!

2005-05-11T22:49:15Z

Oh my god, the administrative bullshit I have to endure has even the native Parisiennes and Parisians complaining! I have to go tomorrow to the Office of Work (Bureau de Travail) on the other side of the city, which is conveniently open 2 hours each weekday to get my work permit, in the perfectly convenient hours of 9 AM - 11 AM. For that I need 4 pieces of documentation:

1. copies of my passport.
2. copies of my stay permit (titre de sejour).
3. copies of my letter of sponsorship from the ENS.
4. copies of my work card from the Paris Observatory.

All to get my carte de travail. Then I have to get a French social security card. This will involve the following 6 pieces of information:

1. copy of my carte travail and copy of my titre de sejour.
2. a copy of my most recent and next most recent salary statement (how convenient, as I haven't gotten paid yet b/c...i don't have this piece of documentation).
3. a RIB (Releve d'identite bancaire, like a bank statement, but much more informative)
4. An affidavit of birth, stating where and when I was born.
5. a "Justificatif de domicile," a letter from my landlord/landlady that I live in my apartment, since my signed lease is not actually sufficient proof that I live in the place I pay rent for.

And then, perhaps I will get paid!

It's been a while, I think, and here is the work so far

2005-05-05T21:11:12Z

It's been a while since I posted to Livejournal. Got new papers out at arxiv.org (astro-ph/0405666). Also, these Mathematica calculations are a beeotch to run. Either my calculations "reset" after 24 hours, or they don't halt. I hope I can get faster and faster computers to run them, but oh well...This is the nature of science, especially when looking at the kinetic version of the magnetoviscous instability. The nice thing about this, is that it is "exact." -- no need to take the moment-by-moment fluid calculations, just plug and chug your collisionless Boltzmann equation and see it go from there!

New papers characterizing the compressible limit of the MVI will be out soon, as well as instabilities with large electron thermal conductivities as well as large ion resistivities. Perhaps I can include the effects of finite compressibility as well with them. In a perfect world, I would be able to move onto numerical simulations something like...six months ago. But the world is not perfect, and I am very stupid.

i love paris

2005-04-11T22:53:26Z

I Love Paris. I also love American culture. I just watched "Robot Chicken," and it has to be one of the funniest things I have evre seen.

books by alastair reynolds

2004-12-04T07:16:58Z

I have ordered books by Alastair Reynolds from amazon.com: 1) Absolution Gap (book 4 in the Revelation Space series), and 2) Diamond Dogs/Turquoise Days (two novellas bound in a book). This is actually a bad idea, since I have pretty much read all the (good) parts of Absolution Gap during my treks to the local B&N and Turquoise (what a hard to type word!) Days is already in a collection of Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction (I forget which year or edition, suffice to say I have it). The only new book is the Diamond Dogs -- it should be very very interesting.

Reynolds writes for those with a deep science/mathematics background. Weird weapons from the extant remains of alien cultures -- hypometric devices (the inner parts look like Escher's famous ladder painting), bladder mines, inertial suppression devices, and then he delves into really exotic weapons (neutron star "computer," the gravity wave antenna built by the Scuttlers). Pattern Jugglers, Shrouders, Clown Jumpers, grubs, Scuttlers, Nestbuilders, and the ever-present Inhibitors -- a very powerful automated system of machines that suppresses the emergence of spacefaring cultures, such that any surviving race does so by becoming very...very...very...very quiet.

birthday

2004-08-17T12:19:58Z

I turned 26 today. Yippee. To celebrate, I am moving into my new place. A person named Vinnie asks if we can switch apartments. I told him I'll take a look this coming Monday and decide whether I want him to or not. He thinks it's all a formality, what with my checking of the apartments and what-not, but it may be too much trouble with my already having set up the driver's license and mail forwarding and voter registration and such to make the change from one apartment to another. Oh well, we'll see...

zum zum

2004-08-14T18:12:05Z

Had a fun night at a party. Offended some more white people (I think), but probably not. Very attractive women everywhere. Was heavily flirtatious, but tried to keep things a little cool. People say Sam has a problem hitting on women. I am much worse than Sam.

simple dreams

2004-08-13T14:22:22Z

Just swimming on the James River, at my parents' house. Working on physics and astronomy at a less frenetic pace than I am accustomed to at work. But somewhat bored. I spent Tuesday just vegging out in front of the TV or napping throughout the day -- I needed this sort of relaxation after the huge crunch of work that got to me right before I left. In any case, this vacation is "forced" b/c my lease ended the 9th and starts again at my new place on the 17th (my birthday), not that I am going to move in on that day.

In other news, I am also going to be having a party on the 20th of August (Friday). People I invite and their friends are invited to spend the night if they want to, but RSVP if they should decide to come. The party will be...what it is, whatever that may be.

In other news, getting better emotionally. I like to make the analogy of the molten Earth, after it's been hit by, say, the Mars-sized planet that vaporized and created the moon. Before I was a few thousand years after the event -- clouds of vaporized rock and metals mixed with water vapor. Now I am a few hundred thousand years later -- the rock has cooled enough to settle and solidify, but the air is still a few hundred degrees above the boiling point of water.

nostalgic for my Caltech "experience"

2004-08-05T19:36:46Z

I love Firefox and Mozilla-based web browsers. They allow me to look at email from the beginning of time (winter 1996-1997). Here's an oldie, but a goodie, from back when I applied to grad schools in physics. Here's some context: my handwriting is atrocious, so the return letter for my grad applications was thought to be mail code 543 instead of 593 (my 9's look like 4's, get it?). Everyone except for Princeton accepted me, but also everyone else sent my mail to the wrong code. Here's an email from the person who gets mail at 543:

Tanim

Apparently U. Virginia thinks your MSC is 543, which I'm pretty sure it's
not. A letter addressed to you from the physics department there was sent
to my mailing code. I'm sure it's important, like some kind of love
letter or bomb or something. I had this pen-pal once who wrote me a
wonderful letter about the delicate art of prison rape. Or was that just
a brochure?

Anyway, unless you want me to do something special to the letter you can
find it outside my room in Ricketts. Room ROTO (27) in Snatch.

-Ben Gudlewski

one of the coolest things

2004-07-22T05:08:36Z

One of the coolest things I have seen on the web: the UN Declaration of Human Rights translated into 331 languages. It's definitely something worth looking into. Unfortunately, made-up languages like Klingon and Pig-Latin are not included.

being poor

2004-07-15T04:13:51Z

Being poor sucks. I hate da bills, since they do suck most hardcore. I am cooking 6 days' worth of taco salad, my fav. salad. Bought bulk amts. of salsa, and dishwashing soap, and what-not.

I am thinking of living at the 'rent's place, sleeping at the office a few days out of the week (something like 3-4 days at a time), showering @ the AFC, and bringing my laundry in a suitcase. Perhaps replacing the cot with a mattress so that I can sleep better (or high-class, as we in the know like to call it). The house is ultra-sweetass, and it comes out to $7/trip (110 miles) each way these days. Or maybe even finding some sugar mommy to shack up with (purely for financial reasons, you see...decreased rental costs).

The parents might not cotton to that idea, but I'll say it's only until October 20. Of course, I very well might go completely insane by then. And the commute costs! Well, the more I think about it the more I like it. I'll save a buttload of money on rent, and they'll have me @ home. But the freeloading is probably not something they would like too much.