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Places to visit : Cruise on Michigan Lake

Some pseudocode first 🙂

  • If you live in Chicago
  • If you are looking for a place to have a small get together

{OR}

  • Take your significant other on a special date
  • Just trying to impress a girl/guy 🙂

{AND}

  • It is summer

Check out the private sail charters offered on Lake Michigan. Unlike the giant cruise boats that you can get onto, at the Navy Pier, these trips offer a more intimate and unique experience. The gaint cruise boats are for the tourists :).

I got to take a trip on one of the sail boats this weekend. The Red Witch, name of the boat we sailed on, is a topsail schooner. Unfortunately, we were not able to raise the sails, since the owners were waiting on an updated “certification” for a new engine they installed this year. But we still got spend a couple of hours on the lake. We brought our own food and drinks, so it was like a picnic on the lake. You can get information on booking tickets with them at http://www.redwitch.com/.

Here are some pictures from the trip

[The Boat]

[The Crew]

[The Moon]

[The City]

June 8, 2009 by Fun Photography Travel Uncategorized 2

Places to eat : 90 Miles Cuban Cafe

If you are ever in Chicago and looking to get some great breakfast or good cuban sandwiches, try out the 90 Miles Cuban Cafe at 3101 North Clybourn, Chicago, IL 60618. I was looking for a place to get some brunch today and Rich recommended that we go to this cafe. I really liked the decor and the simple menu. The food was visually pleasing and tasty. Here are some pictures of the food (credited to Rich).

Rich’s Lechon (Roast pork, Romaine lettuce, grilled onions, sweet plantain, garlic sauce)

Janvi’s Cuban (Cuban ham, roast pork, swiss cheese, pickles, mustard) 

My Frita Cubana (Cuban hamburger, Romaine lettuce, tomato, shoestring potatoes)

And to top it all.. some Banana pudding

May 31, 2009 by Food Fun Travel Uncategorized 0

Live and Learn : Collar Stays

I just discovered that the plastic/metal thingys placed in men’s shirt collars to make them stand up are called collar stays :). I discovered that during a recent trip to Kohl’s.. Here’s how the conversation looked like

Me : hmm.. you know those things in the collar.. that make them stiff.. you know..those things!!

Clerk : What things?

Me : Well.. those things that are made of  plastic and white in color.. you know…those things.

Clerk : Oh..Sir.. “those things” are called “Collar Stays”

Me : Thank you.. I feel enlightened now 🙂

BTW.. IMHO.. every gentleman should have some spare collar stays in his kit. And you can get them for cheap on Amazon.

May 23, 2009 by Fun Shopping Uncategorized 1

HOW TO : Perl subfunction to unmount a partition in Linux

For my record…here’s a snippet of perl code that can be called as a sub function to unmount a partition in Linux.  The magic is in the line “grep m{$mountPoint}, qx{/bin/mount}”, which essentially lets you check if the partition is already mounted or not.

sub UnMountVolume($)
{
    my $mountPoint = $_[0];

    print "Unmounting $mountPoint\n";
	# Check if the mount point exists
	if ( grep m{$mountPoint}, qx{/bin/mount} )
	{
		#Let's try to unmount it
		system("/bin/umount $mountPoint");
	}
	else
	{
		print "$mountPoint is not mounted, so didn't have to do anything\n";
	}
}

As with any perl code, I am sure there are a tons of ways to do this in a more efficient and “cool” way.

May 22, 2009 by Programming Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Find which interface a particular IP address is configured on

There are a ton of scripts to find how many IP addresses  are configured on a system, but I could not find one, whic would show me which particular network interface an IP address was configured on. Here is a one liner, that will give you this information in Linux

/sbin/ifconfig | grep -B1 10.10.10.10 | awk '{if (NR==1) print $1}'

The same script can be changes a bit to support other operating systems too. Essentially, I am doing a grep (search) of the output of ifconfig, which shows all the network information on the system for a particular IP. At the same time, I am using the -B1 option, which will show the line above the matching line. Finally, I am piping this to awk and printing the first row in the first column.

May 22, 2009 by HOWTO Linux Programming Technology Uncategorized 1

Travelocity down due to power outage..

Looks like Travelocity was down early today due to a power outage. Here is a screenshot of the site, right after they came up

According to Pingdom, the site was down for ~1 hour and 29 minutes. If they did come up at an alternate site, I personally think that is a pretty good response time. Running a high transaction web site (and one that is as complicated as Travelocity) is no easy feat and when you throw DR into the mix, it gets pretty nasty. The site is primarily hosted out of the EDS/Sabre/Travelocity datacenter in Tulsa, Okhlahoma.

May 22, 2009 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0