I am thinking of taking up either saxaphone or trumpet and one day play in such a band.

Trying to Improv

Time flies extremely fast. These are the last two weeks of the Spring semester. Finals are coming up. Worse, projects are wrapping up. Presentations. Reports. I've been having very little sleep since the carnival, up till 5 a.m. almost every night working on this huge distributed systems lab. Yet, on Thursday, I took time off to drive up to Cleveland for Dim Sum. Zane and I rented a Nissan Altima with a 2.5 L engine. The ride was smooth. I was driving on the way back and 100 mph felt like 60 on a Dodge Neon. Anyway, we arrived in this dying city just in time for a heavy Dim Sun lunch. $11 including tips for dim sum that I barely can finish. Pretty cheap, eh? We met up with Brian after he finished work for some beer at this local brewery cum restaurant in the hippest part of town, West 25th St. The joke of the day came when the waitress brought us our finger food, "pub bites", which was a fried fish. $9 for 6 ounces of fish. King, Zane and I had 2 bites each. $3 for 2 bites. $1.50/bite. We might have gotten a bargain for the dim sum during lunch but we couldn't run away from being ripped off. Zane said I should do my Jesus thing - multiply the fish.

Friends have associated me with religion because I do talk a lot about Christianity but not to preach but simply as topics of laid back conversations. I do find interest a little bit of Theology but I don't find myself as that Christian hot shot wearing a Christian T-shirt 24/7 or having crucifixes around my neck. I don't listen only to Hillsong and I definitely don't have Christians as my closest circles of friends. I disagree when Christians (or with any religion as a matter of fact) get too close with each other, starting to form a tight clique or community. Eat, sleep and work with Christians when you should be a silent witness of Christ out there with your Muslim, Buddhist and Atheist brothers. This applies only to the lay people like us as I do agree and even am very well supportive of religious orders like monks and nuns because their sacrifices in giving up their lives to God.

Btw, I was getting a tour of the Penn State campus with Rafiq during Spring break. One building, called the Willard building, has a preacher from the Orthodox church preaching every afternoon. I happened to listen to him preaching about rock music in Christianity that Protestant churches are being said to be "cool" because they have Gospel pop during the service. But Christianity isn't about being a "cool" religion or being modern in accordance of current trends. All these hype and preaching about the Christian faith is able to restore your lives from your troubles is extremely misleading. Being a Christian is not about being protected by Jesus from personal, school, financial problems. It's a religion that promotes selflessness and ascetism.

Also, I have my own not-so-supportive view on the charistmatic movement within the Catholic church but I'll talk about it another day. Interesting to note that the charistmatic movement within the Catholic church originated from Dusquene University, Pittsburgh which is located 2-3 miles from where I am currently sitting right now.

Alright. Party time for carnival is over. Time to focus on the finals. BofA starts exactly in a month. Waiting for the good times.

American college kids really know how to party. The SALSA/ASA party last night was huge!! Abundance of hot chicks.

And I was really drunk.

Spring BBQ for Budaya (Msian Students Association)

Through the lenses of my Canon 350D. Nice day with fun people around. Photos are at

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~cbasah/S06_BBQ_Orig/

About Being Sensitive

I hate being sensitive as in being overwhelmed by the fear of offending others. I think I am a sensitive person that tries to please everyone that I encounter. You guys might agree. For example, this evening, I was apologizing to my lab partner for not being able to work tonight because I can't concentrate in the clusters until he said "hey, no. don't take it personally. there are times that we just can't work and should take a break" that's what i love about americans. they are frank people and don't take things personally. awkwardly, i observe this from The West Wing, where friends and colleagues argue at the top of the voices in defending their opinions and their actions without jeopardizing their relationships. That's why at times I wish I can spend some time in a military college where I'll be drilled by the roughest of all men without taking their words at a personal level. That's why I should take up rugby as well.

I think a recipe to success is shrug off what others think of you and bulldoze your way through. Shrugging off criticisms, scoldings or comments doesn't mean keeping quiet and backstab those people who told you off in your blog but simply just let them off your mind.

This is one thing I want to be prepared for during the summer internship.

How I Tried Installing OpenAFS on Linux for the Past 2 Years and Succeeded Last Night

This post serves as a post in case I forget the steps in the future and for those who are interested in installing the client for this distributed file system engineered originally at CMU.

I am using Gentoo Linux is an awesome O.S. as it is highly configurable. I took the pain of installing the system manually by command line. Even compiled the kernel manually so it will generate a sleek and thin kernel, removing unneccessary modules or built-in features that would slow booting and takes up memory. I love portage, the package management system, since every app you want to installed is compiled locally first which means you won't have conflicting binaries. It also calculates dependencies using the revolutionary USE flags.

1. Make sure in the kernel, module unloading is supported. Get this done by doing make menuconfig from /usr/src/linux. Recompile the module by make && make module_install. Copy arch/i386/boot/bzImage to the kernel image at /boot. Make sure the boot partition is mounted directly from its root at /dev/hda1. Reboot machine.

2. #emerge openafs-kernel
This will install a kernel module called openafs located /lib/modules//kernel/fs/openafs. Do not autoload this module. /etc/init.d/openafs-client loads the openafs module at boot time.

3. #emerge openafs
This will install openafs itself.

4. #emerge mit-krb5
Carnegie Mellon's AFS authenticate users by granting them Kerberos tickets. This will install a bunch of programs like klog.

5. Modify /etc/openafs/ThisCell to andrew.cmu.edu. Default client cache size is 200 MB. Kesden says, in AFS, any file that goes beyond the cache size will be dropped. Coda does it differently.

6. Reboot your machine.

7. To log on, do klog cbasah@ANDREW.CMU.EDU and enter password. Files are at /afs/.....

How I Tried Installing OpenAFS on Linux for the Past 2 Years and Succeeded Last Night

This post serves as a post in case I forget the steps in the future and for those who are interested in installing the client for this distributed file system engineered originally at CMU.

I am using Gentoo Linux is an awesome O.S. as it is highly configurable. I took the pain of installing the system manually by command line. Even compiled the kernel manually so it will generate a sleek and thin kernel, removing unneccessary modules or built-in features that would slow booting and takes up memory. I love portage, the package management system, since every app you want to installed is compiled locally first which means you won't have conflicting binaries. It also calculates dependencies using the revolutionary USE flags.

1. Make sure in the kernel, module unloading is supported. Get this done by doing make menuconfig from /usr/src/linux. Recompile the module by make && make module_install. Copy arch/i386/boot/bzImage to the kernel image at /boot. Make sure the boot partition is mounted directly from its root at /dev/hda1. Reboot machine.

2. #emerge openafs-kernel
This will install a kernel module called openafs located /lib/modules//kernel/fs/openafs. Do not autoload this module. /etc/init.d/openafs-client loads the openafs module at boot time.

3. #emerge openafs
This will install openafs itself.

4. #emerge mit-krb5
Carnegie Mellon's AFS authenticate users by granting them Kerberos tickets. This will install a bunch of programs like klog.

5. Modify /etc/openafs/ThisCell to andrew.cmu.edu. Default client cache size is 200 MB. Kesden says, in AFS, any file that goes beyond the cache size will be dropped. Coda does it differently.

6. #rc-update add openafs-client default
Add openafs-client to be list of started daemons during bootime at the default run-level.

7. Reboot your machine.

8. To log on, do klog cbasah@ANDREW.CMU.EDU and enter password. Files are at /afs/.....

Enjoy.

TV Chefs

Do you think TV Chefs Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Emille Lagasse or the Iron Chefs are the best chefs in the world? I doubt they are. The genuine master chef does not need the media to promote himself. Perhaps iron chef competitors are but not the Iron Chefs themselves.

I just realized that some of friends here taught their moms at home my pasta recipe and they are using it at home now. Kenneth used not to like pasta cooked by his mom. After have fed with mine several times, he started eating pasta.

Signals & Systems

An ECE course. So math-oriented that it's more hard core than most applied math courses from the Math department.

Looking back at this post in 2009:
Not actually a hard-core math course as compared to classes on Analysis.