OS X applications are hidden from the user. Entering ‘ps’ on a terminal doesn’t produce the output you’d expect from a Linux/Unix machine. Thus, they’re a bit trickier to kill. Here, I’ve used ‘kill -STOP [pid]‘ to freeze up Mail.app for demonstration.

ooooh noessss

Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t capture the cursor, thus you can’t really tell it’s frozen. But trust me, it’s completely unresponsive.

So, how to fix it? First, you pull up a terminal.

See? Term!

Then you enter some stuff into the terminal.

ps -A | grep 'Mail'

The -A argument to ps will prompt ps to output information on processes that you don’t control (root, system) and processes without terminals. The | will push the results to grep, which receives the argument ‘Mail’, prompting grep to search through the list of processes produced by ps for processes with the word ‘Mail’ associated with them. The command will produce this output:

Yay results!

The number farthest left is what you’re looking for. In this case it’s “51845″. A second terminal command, kill, will be able to stop this resource hog!

kill it with kill -9!

‘kill -9′ is a sort of force kill. Give it a process id (pid) and it’ll zap it from the face of the earth. Remember the number from the previous picture? Well, we’ll be needing it here. Enter ‘kill -9 (number without parentheses)’. Tada! No more unreasonable process. Enter ‘ps -A | grep ‘Mail’ again, to find just the single entry! Yayyyy.

Terminal commands are neat little insights into how Unix based operating systems behave the way they do. Replacing any instance of ‘Mail’ with ‘Name of not behaving application’ will also work. Good luck!

My Bed:

My end table:

Desk + Laptops + Stationay:

Cubes:

Dresser:

Closet. It’s a walk in closet that’s large enough to house a homeless guy rather comfortably. Dave thinks we should sublet it to homeless people:

Desk with binders:

Old Laptop:

Hallo Laptop :] :

Calendar:

The week previous to moving in, I experimented a bit with cooking (again). This time, however, I tried cooking garlic bread. Extremely simple but extremely good. Photos:

Ingredients – bread:

(Toasted) Bread:

After toasting, I cut a clove in half and rubbed it against the toasted bread. It wears away the garlic and leaves the bread with a flavor:

Buttering the toast adds flavor (and keeps the garlic flavor down):

Adding grated parmesan introduces a nutty flavor to be complemented with the garlic:

Finished product (which may or may not look like garlic bread, but is fantastic, nonetheless!)

I’ve cooked a few things since moving into the apartment. Updates to follow!

bhargav

Here’s a small script detailing how I interacted it with it to display tweets with morse code. It’s a little hacked script from an honors project, so it will be ugly, of course:

import mechanize
from urllib2 import HTTPError
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import string
import serial

def get_user_tweets(userid):
	tweets = []
	try:
		page = 1
		while True:
			request_user = mechanize.Request("http://twitter.com/" + userid + "?page=" + str(page))
			response_user = mechanize.urlopen(request_user)
			body_user = response_user.read()
			soup_user = BeautifulSoup(''.join(body_user))
			attrs = {}
			attrs['class'] = "entry-content"
			tagName = 'span'
			extract_tweets = soup_user.findAll(tagName,attrs)

			for e in extract_tweets:
				tweet = e.findAll(text = True)
				tweet = "".join(tweet)
				tweets.append(tweet)

			attrs = {}
			attrs['id'] = "pagination"
			tagName = 'div'
			more_tweets = soup_user.findAll(tagName,attrs)
			if len(more_tweets) == 1:
				break
			page+=1
		return tweets

	except HTTPError:
		print "Error fetching user data"

def get_latest_tweet(userid):
	tweets = []
	try:
		page = 1
		request_user = mechanize.Request("http://twitter.com/" + userid +"?page=" + str(page))
		response_user = mechanize.urlopen(request_user)
		body_user = response_user.read()
		soup_user = BeautifulSoup(''.join(body_user))
		attrs = {}
		attrs['class'] = "entry-content"
		tagName = 'span'
		extract_tweets = soup_user.findAll(tagName,attrs)
		for e in extract_tweets:
			tweet = e.findAll(text = True)
			tweet = "".join(tweet)
			tweets.append(tweet)
		print tweets[0]
		return tweets[0]
	except HTTPError:
		print "Error fetching user data"

if __name__ == "__main__":
	ser = ''
	try:
		ser = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial-A6008bXp',9600)
	except:
		ser = serial.Serial('/dev/cu.usbserial-A6008bXp',9600)
	userid = raw_input("userid: ")
	tweet = get_latest_tweet(userid)
	#tweets = get_user_tweets(userid)
	ser.write(str(tweet))

And of course, here’s a little example for how the library works in Arduino C:

#include "yaymorse.h"

yaymorse omg(13);
int incomingByte = 0;

void setup(){
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
  if(Serial.available() > 0){
    incomingByte = Serial.read();
    omg.morse_char((char)incomingByte);
    Serial.print(incomingByte, BYTE);
  }
}

Download YayMorse v.01 here

The first thing I did was go directly to Asana, to get some Thai iced tea. I’d just spent two hours riding buses and had actually taken the wrong bus heading in the right direction. By the time I’d found out, I was in Scott’s Valley and needed to cough up another $4 for the correct bus. I at least deserved a tea:

I went up to the campus and got there around 6, and waited for Mo to come back from work. She showed up and we went straight to Yoga because we didn’t have any time for dinner, and were met with a the equivalent of a yoga drill instructor; our normal drill instructor, Joy, was gone . Although it was a bit faster paced, I still felt refreshed. We hit up downtown Santa Cruz, got ourselves dinner (some vegetable wraps from Trader Joe’s), and went to Cafe Pergolesi:

Following a late night spent working on conference stuff until around 3:30 or 4AM, we hit the sack. I woke up at around 10 the next day, took a shower, and met with Mo for lunch. We went to a mexican restaurant on the UCSC campus where we ordered vegetarian tacos and vegetarian nachos. As sad as it sounds, this was probably some of the more delicious mexican food that I’ve had.:

foo

Mo went back to work, and I decided to go downtown where I could get tea and hopefully get work done. I went to Asana and bought Almond Chai Latte and sent out lots of conference emails:

I met with Mo again at the bus stop at college 9 and 10. And found some deer before grabbing dinner. Don’t worry though, the deer didn’t become dinner:

Following dinner, I grabbed a few blankets and we took them to the shakespeare theater. I couldn’t get tickets to the same section the SURF IT group was sitting in, so I arranged to maybe grab a blanket space close to the front. Unfortunately, we got there too late and a lot of the front rows were taken. We scrounged around for a spot and found one rather obstructed by other people in front of us. Patrick borrowed a chair and found it to offer a moderately better view. We decided to try and get chairs; after having spent $29 on tickets, I wasn’t about to settle for a terrible view of the theater. While walking to the chair stand, we found the prime location on the opposite side of the theater. Good enough that we could sit down and  view the stage without people’s heads poking through. We stole a blanket and sat down and watched the first half of the show. Patrick joined us for the second half, finally convinced that our view was a lot better.

After the show, we had another conference party, where more emails were sent and even a phone call from Indian software company, Infosys, was intercepted at around 11pm. I fell asleep a bit earlier than normal; around 3.

The next day, I woke up early. I had to go home at some point during the day and I was told I could maybe get a ride to Almaden, somewhat close to San Jose. The people in the SURF-IT program were getting ready to spend the day in IBM’s Almaden research center. By pure luck, one of the SURF-IT students decided he had a back problem and wasn’t going to show. Thus, I was able to be snuck into IBM as Aaron Ganick, a Boston University student from Oklahoma, who’s working on an RC plane.

We met outside of IBM Almaden, after having driven through about a mile of undeveloped land in the middle of San Jose – weird. The SURF-IT program director was present – something I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with. I grabbed a nametag and had Peter sign me in. The director didn’t even flinch, as if he hadn’t noticed I was there. We started our tour of the facility, beginning with an introduction to the program and introductions to ourselves.

Crap.

I asked Mo and Pate what exactly what Aaron was doing for his internship, they both only had a general idea. The tour guide had asked our side of the room to start, and I was 5th in line. Eventually, he got to me, and I gave out only what I knew: “My name is Aaron…I’m from uh Oklahoma and I’m uh …working on an RC plane”. Somehow I managed to say this all with a straight face. Every other person was having trouble keeping themselves from giggling. Somehow I managed to pull off a convincing Aaron impression. And once again, the program director didn’t say anything. It was as if I was an actual SURF-IT student. However, even with that added advantage on my side, I still felt like I needed to keep my distance, in case he decided I needed questioning. When the tour had to split off into groups, I was lucky enough to go with the group that did not include the director.

The other students couldn’t get enough of it; was the director really that oblivious? Had he noticed but wanted to keep quite about it? Would he lay the smackdown later? Would I be escorted out by security? All important questions when considering that I was pretty much stuck in a research lab in the middle of a couple of miles of undeveloped land along with enough security to prevent most trespassers. I kept the guise up through lunch and was still faced with no questions or skepticism. Following the afternoon sessions, I became pretty convinced that the director wasn’t quite sure if he knew me. And if he admitted it by asking who I was (since he should technically already know who’s in the SURF-IT program), then it would only show his own weakness.

IBM was interesting… we learned about a lot of neat things, like how Electron Microscopy works. A tour was also given of the rapid prototyping labs, where I picked up a plastic wrench which had been designed and printed from a 3D printer. Interesting talks were presented, especially one about a project called “Battery 500″. The project is a bid to develop new and more powerful batteries, holding more than 100 times the charge of existing batteries, and giving them an energy output almost equivalent to gasoline, allowing cars and even household appliances to really make use of them. Imagine laptops that could last up to 100 times longer on battery power… D:

Following IBM, David, Sara, Pete, Pate, Mo, and I made our way to Cupertino, to go raid the Apple campus. We went to the company store and I bought clothing. Brace yourself for a terribly conceited camera held up to the mirror photo:

Aside from watching the Hangover yesterday and attempting to install OS X retail on a Thinkpad and a Dell Mini 9, that pretty much sums up this week! I’ll be flying out tomorrow morning, heading back to Illinois, and land of the slow internets :’(

See you all in a bit!

There, I went to the Renegade Crafts fair, where I bought soap, pins, and Greg, the stress cat.

I also discovered the friendly animal population is as unfazed by humans as those from Chambana.

And that even tourists can get lost from time to time :c

The following day, fellow Bay Area ACMers met with ACMers in Seattle! We went out to lunch and had delicious (but not very spicy :[ ) thai food

The following Wednesday, I went to Santa Cruz to hang out with Mo and had Gelato and Hot Chocolate for the first time ever. It was absolutely delicious and also from a place called Chocolate, so you know it’s gotta be good.

Following that week, was yet another exciting weekend getting lost in San Francisco and attempting to attend an of Montreal concert.

Wit arrived on Sunday and we found this guy dancing on a street corner in Mountain View.

Happy Wit is Happy

On Wednesday, we went to Santa Cruz again. This time, we brought Wit along with us. We did Yoga and met the Russians + Pete downtown.

We also collectively cut Patrick’s hair.

And in the morning, I took pretty pictures of Wit + trees + sunlight.

This weekend, I decided to check out San Francisco again. This time I’d go to the Exploratorium and Japantown. On the way to the Exploratorium, I discovered a rare species of giant lettuce.

I eventually found the palace of Fine Arts. It looks like a magnificent ruin in the middle of a lake

From there, I could take pretty pictures of the city.

The exploratorium was definitely neat. But being a student in the sciences, I felt like I was a little too old for most of the experiments and exhibits.

I went to Japantown to meet up with Mo, where we karaoked and Purikuraed!

Outside of Japantown, I took a few pictures of the peace pagoda + peace plaza

We dropped by Mel’s Drive Thru Diner for dinner (even though the drive thru was nonexistent).

On Sunday, the ACM had it’s ACM meetup. There, Dave decided that the Saleem and Sparks were playing charades and wanted to be a teapot, so he could join right in.

That’s all for now. Until more adventures!

The story is simple enough: a Yakuza lord wants his child, Makio, to become his succesor. Unfortunately for him, Makio is an idiot and often destroys his gang’s business deals by his stupidity. The prime example of this being in the first episode, where Makio is told to accept a deal at 27 billion yen. When he doesn’t, the deal goes up to 36 billion yen. Makio, not knowing which number is greater, still refuses to accept, and the deal is cut off and ends in a gang on gang brawl. The Yakuza lord tells him that his stupidity is unacceptable, and in order to prove his worth to the gang and become the successor, he must graduate from high school within a year’s time. What follows is Makio’s adventures through high school with pudding and attempting to act like a normal 17 year old (he’s actually 27). The following is mostly about the pudding.

It’s his first week of school. And Makio’s discovered it sucks. But apparently the pudding is pretty darn good. What does he do when it’s lunch time? Why run to the cafeteria, of course! Unfortunately there’s a catch. There are only 12 puddings. D:

So Makio, being the innovator that he is, decides to take the shortest route from his classroom to the cafeteria. This involves flying part of the distance.

Unfortunately, all is not right in the world. And the guy who makes the pudding disappears D: The school is struck with a PUDDING DROUGHT.

But! He reappears! Turns out he just went to Hokkaido to research better pudding recipes. This time however, there are 24 puddings! Enough for an entire class! The principal decides that each class will select 5 runners to run for the pudding for the class.

I guess all Japanese people really really like pudding? Mo, I need you to confirm this.

Prior to all this fuss about pudding, I probably ate the freshest naan I’ve ever had. Cooked directly in the tandoor with the tandoor operator’s completely hairless, the true sign of experience.

Naan!

I had it with some paneer makhani, which is cheese cubes cooked in a creamy, buttery, and curry like sauce of sorts.

Naan with paneer makhani

Last week we went on what was to be the first of a series of epic tea outings, henceforth known as “teacrawls”. Mo blogged about the first. So far, we’ve had two, with the second being more of a coffeecrawl. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures from the second, but I kept this picture from the first:

Mo with her chai!

On the first teacrawl, we went to get Bubble tea from Pacific Thai followed by the spiciest/best chai ever at Caffe Pergolesi. On the second, we ended up at a place called Lulu Carpenter’s, where I had a pretty epic drink called a Cool Cat, which is blended coffee, with ice, and some sort of flavoring. Following this, we thought we could get some work done and chose to go to a place called Saturn cafe, which we were told would be open to 3AM. Unfortunately, no work was done, because there were no outlets available for our laptops (which were about dead). However, we were met with the friendliest service ever. A pretty epic meal, including Mo’s Turkish Coffee Ice cream. And of course, a guy who we thought was completely stoned, who came over to our table and talked to us about Indian cooking, playing the Sitar, and his Go skills. Just when we thought the night would never end, he dissapeared, and we were free to go back home. In short: <3 Santa Cruz.

And so that’s what I’ve been up to these past few weeks. Pudding, naan, and teacrawls.

It’s gonna be awesome.

This is what I’ll be taking with me:

Both laptops

Two tubs full of electronics/stuff + helps me to get organized

The Scala book (which I borrow from the ACM office )

Kill Bill Vol. 1. Just because I won’t have internet tomorrow night, so I’ll need to be able to kill time _somehow_

My iconic red bag! Which will become even less iconic after it goes back to the town where it was made

The rice steamer/ramen maker thing I used a lot in freshman year! A pillow. Shampoo + other stuff which I’ll add tomorrow morning. Some sheets and a hand towel yay!

Just about all my entire closet.

My big red chair!

A space heater. For when it gets cold.

My reliable old Dell

Somehow it all fits into my bag \o/ Totally ready to take on California.

Of course, you weren’t expecting that, were you? You thought maybe food was on the agenda. You’ll be pleased to hear that it still is! Beginning from Monday of last week, we have my culinary adventures in Sushi, Banh Mi, and Crepes:

Om nom nom sushi! Rainbow California Roll, Baked Unagi roll (which was probably the best on there) and a King Salmon roll.

Since it was $1 sushi night at Ko Fusion, we had no choice but to try whatever they had there. To the left is the beer battered (fried) salmon with tartar sauce, towards the middle, I have absolutely no idea, and to the right was something spicy. They weren’t particularly good and we could definitely tell why they were on the $1 menu.

On Wednesday, we went to Xinh Xinh Cafe, a Vietnamese restaurant which had just opened up in Urbana. They didn’t serve many options I wanted apart from the Tofu Banh Mi, a crusty loaf of bread filled with spicy marinated and pan seared tofu and sliced cucumbers. It was definitely very fulfilling.

They also had bubble tea! Which was also rather good. However, hard to describe because it bore no relation to anything served at Evo’s, the other restaurant which serves bubble tea. I had a spiced chai flavor, which was pretty good. Mo had the green tea, which she said was too sweet and disappointing. However, she made up for that with her second bubble tea, the almond.

Finally, just last Sunday, we went to the Dossin family’s house for a dinner. There, I ate very good cheese which I intend to purchase in droves; sheep’s milk cheese. Quite possibly the best cheese I’ve had. Ever. We had ratatouille for our main course, which was very good – but unfortunately I forgot to take pictures. For desert, we were served a Vanilla Crepe Cake:

I counted roughly 20 crepes to make the entire cake. Between each crepe, a thin layer of chocolate. A heart attack for dessert.

The best part was that the cream was made with real vanilla beans! Ahhhh. So fulfilling, the French are.

I should probably sleep now, to wake up in time for that bus tomorrow at 9.

Or I wish it had happened that way. Unfortunately effort is typically involved in cooking or something, and I managed to scrape together a bit of that to throw together a not too bad sandwich.

We start with the ingredients, of course and lots of cheese. Cheese is very important in a grilled cheese sammich.

And onions. Onions are needed on any sammich of bhargav’s and are most delicious, yesm:

Mushrooms are necessary too!

Oil needs to be heated, yes indeed!

Mushrooms and onions: the classic combo of awesome.

Of course, we have to cook the combo for it to have any effect on our palate.

Buttered bread – soon to be toasted! Om nom nom.

And tomatoes. I threw those on at the last moment.

The toast goes on the frying pan, sort of like this:

And then it’s kind of flipped like this to get a nice little brown color:

And then on top of the toast, yay. Along with cheese.

I can has parmesan?

I can has sriracha?

Moar toasting please!

And a zipcar, for good measure and also because I sent the wrong photo from my phone.:

Not too bad. The cheese didn’t melt completely though- unfortunate. The bread was also kind of thin, after pressing it into the cheese and onions/mushrooms but that wasn’t so bad either. Was crusty and good though! Just what I need in a sammich. Happy hat wearing smileys! <:D

I started my journey by collecting everything I would need. Eggs, Ramen, Mushrooms, Green Onions, Onions, Capsicum and a few other ingredients which I’ll discuss later:

Unfortunately, not all the ingredients necessary were clean. Green onions, when they grow up from the ground, tend to collect dirt and grit within the stalk:

Sometimes I wish I had a use for the roots, but I don’t – so I cut it off and toss it.

And then I cut it up with the power of ramen fu:

Next up was the capsicum or “green pepper” as they call them on this side of the ocean. I began the necessary sacrifice:

The resulting massacre. I’d claim that “no vegetables were hurt in the making of this dish”, but that would be a blatant lie:

I wasn’t done:

Continuing the massacre and moving on to mushrooms. They barely cried for help:

Alas, it was done. So I moved on to the others:

And seasoned them so with a splash of milk, chilli powder, some food coloring that my mother uses and salt:

I beat them to a pulp:

So, I may have made a mistake here. Mushrooms most generally cook the slowest, but I added them last – and didn’t cook them long enough. Regardless, I think it’s necessary to cook the onions and green onions first:

Adding the capsicum – I generally add it before the mushrooms because it needs to be cooked for a time somewhere in between onions and mushroooms.

The mushrooms come in at last:

Finally, the eggs come in. I scramble them as soon as they hit the pan because it’s hot enough to turn them into omelettes in 2 minutes flat. Keep a fork in one hand, the bowl with the egg in the other, and the camera in your mouth. Works out fine-trust me.

As the eggs scramble, moisture is released and they begin the shrink. It’s really up to you when to pull them off the heat though. What do you consider “done”? I keep them cooking until I can see brown with the yellow:

Bad image, apologies. But I think this gives a good idea as to how I enjoy my eggs:

Well, it can’t be ramen without ramen. So I begin to cook the ramen:

2 minutes should get you around here:

The done and finished product. I needed a relatively large bowl to hold the noodles and the eggs combined:

And WOW. It was incredible! The eggs were incredible and perfectly cooked/seasoned. Even though I’m positive I made the mistake with the mushrooms, I could barely notice it.

As far as the title of the blog post goes, the holy trinity of vegetables is a Cajun combination including onions, capsicum, and celery – 3 ingredients that form the basis of most every dish in Cajun cooking. And here, I only had two of the three. Although, I’m positive the holy trinity of Bhargav’s cooking includes Green Onions, Onions, and Mushrooms, all 3 are fantastic.

That aside, blog post done. Maybe next month? Or even over break? We’ll see.

bhargav

Working backwards from last night we have the following:

World’s First Flying Machine:

The violinist and the guitarist in the back are my friends. Her name is Laura and his is Chris. I met Chris because he used to live on my floor and actually helped me into picking up the guitar, although I don’t play at all now and wouldn’t be surprised if I couldn’t remember a thing >_<

Happy thumbs:

You’ll probably only get the above if you’re a Room of King fan, like Mo and and I. We watched Episode 6 and started Stand Up! (It has that girl who played Asa chan!) right before the show.

We went to a Thai restaurant directly before Room of King and encountered recursive curry like we’ve never seen before:

Friday was spent reassembling the dead macbook I bought on ebay. I bought a motherboard for it for about $300 (trust me- at that price, it was a steal!):

The new motherboard in place and inserting the wifi card

Trying to plug things in without breaking other things. Macbooks are really really cramped!

It’s ALIVE!! It even made the ringing bell noise!

I was SO scared it wouldn’t work. What if the motherboard was broken too? What if the lcd were broken? But thankfully all my restless thoughts were calmed by the above.

We turned it off to finish the assembly process. We still needed to put the top plate in.

Great success, right? Obligatory happy face- :>

The much needed comparison shot, of course. I’m actually rather surprised as to how NOT large it is. My current laptop is like a giant compared to the macbook.

Of course we also went out to celebrate, but you won’t be seeing any of that

And thus ends my weekend- with an episode of Gundam!