USA Bern Embassy Sucks

I am so pissed off right now, I needed to write something.   I applied for a USA VISA on Wednesday last week.  This embassy does not have an online VISA status checking system.  In stead, if you want to pick up your VISA, they give you a slip that you have to bring on the day they tell you to come.  They announce the day just after the VISA interview.

For me, they told that my VISA will be ready on Friday (the second day after my interview).  I was so happy that I will get the VISA and went there on Friday.

It was a hot day and from Zurich, Bern round trip costs 40 francs.  When I went there, they told me that sometimes there is a problem with the system and the VISA is not printed.  They told me to go back and promised that they will give me a call on Monday to tell me when I can pick up the VISA.  They did not even say that they are sorry.  As if its taken for granted that there can be mistakes.

Naturally, on Monday they did not give me a call, even Tuesday they did not.  I at last called them in the morning on Wednesday when they told me that I have to call between 2 to 4 pm.  When I gave them a call at 2, they told that my VISA is printed today.  They also asked me why I am in a hurry to collect the VISA.  That is NONE of their freaking business, but I told them that I have to get another VISA.  Anyway, they told me that I have to come today at 4pm to collect it.  I asked them if I can go at 4.30, they told that 4pm is the time I have to come!  Even though, they started giving out the passports at 4.10 on the day I went.  As if they run on perfect time!

Now they told me to collect the VISA at 3pm tomorrow.  I told them OK.  After 5 minutes, an email arrived asking me to collect it at 2pm!  They are not even sure when they want to distribute it.  I am so pissed off with the embassy, sorry for the negative post!

European guys say Happy New Year in Bengali

I made the dudes from my lab say "subho nobo borsho" which means "Happy new year in Bengali"  They did a pretty good job.

Installing ggplot2 in Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit)

This version of Ubuntu installs an Older version of R (2.x), thus making the installation of ggplot2 infeasible.  Because ggplot2 requires >3.x version of R.

To upgrade the installed R to a higher version do, the following:

1. sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
   This will open up your sources.list file in gedit, where you can add the following line.
2. deb http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu/ version/
   Replace version/ with whatever version of Ubuntu you are using (eg, precise/, oneric/, and so on). If you're getting a "Malformed line error", check to see if you have a space between /ubuntu/ and version/.
3. Fetch the secure APT key with gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E084DAB9
4. Feed it to apt-key with gpg -a --export E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -
5. Update your sources and upgrade your installation with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

This will install a higher version of R.  So you can go inside R and perform a install.packages("ggplot2").

Hope it helps someone.

Moving to Mentalism..First Successful and Unsuccessful Performance Today

For the last month, I have been increasingly interested into magic.  First, I started with card magics and got introduced to the Bicycle brand decks, as they are the mostly used brand my the magician and poker players.  I also bought some "trick decks" as are used in magic like Svengali Deck, Stripper Deck, Invisible Deck.  The sheer genius behind these decks have been constantly fascinating me.  I also constantly started uploading videos in youtube.

On day ( I think it was last week) , I accidentally ran into a website and ran into basic mentalism techniques.  For example, if you ask someone to guess a two digit number between 1-50 whose digits are different and odd, most will select 37.  I got a success rate of 3 to 1 (my dad guessed 35), but still in the case of successes, the reaction were better than the best card tricks.  Thus I leaned towards mentalism.

Yesterday night I was watching videos and reading classic mentalism books until 4 o' clock.  And today, I successfully performed a Liar Detection act on my grandmother (dadan) and mom.  It was amazing to discover how simple clues of body language can detect liars.  It was almost like a science.

But when I performed another mind reading trick on my girlfriend, I was not successful.  Partly because poor internet connection (that's why it was heard to read the body language).  And secondly, I got the routine in a wrong sequence.  I am planning to try it again to my parents or somebody else.  The scientist within me is dying to discover whether really there is a science in human thinking.

Needless to say, I will read a lot of books and see a lot of videos in the coming week.  Though there are many mentalism tricks that use gimmicks, I really don't like them.  I want to do something that is related to science, direction of thinking, eye reading etc.  I will keep you updated.

Learning magic: The KINGS are gone

I learned it today and performed.  Still not prefect.  But practise will make it perfect  :-)

Learning Magic: The four jokers

This is my recent interest.  Though I have found the mathematical self working magic tricks fascinating, I want to perfect the tricks that require actual skills like slide of hands and everything.  I just learned this trick today and performed it.  It is not perfect, but hey, just thought of sharing with you guys.  It is based on Elmsey count and double and triple lifts.

IEEE latex bibliography solution

Well I was preparing my writing for the upcoming PACT 2014 conference (which happens to be in Edmonton, yayyy.  I so want a paper there I can't tell!!).  This year, they are following the IEEE style for the submission.  If you try to download the IEEE standard latex files, the files are downloaded in a zipped archive where you will find an empty bare_conf.tex file that you have to edit. Also the regular IEEEtran.cls file.

Now in the sample tex file (bare_conf.tex), they mention the bibliography in the following format:

\begin{thebibliography}

----a bunch of \bibitems

\end{thebibliography}

It is a good technique, in the sense that while submitting the source files for your submission, you can integrate your citations in the .tex file and submit it.  But obviously, for generating the \bibitems, you have to successfully run \bibtex on the .bib file.  For using the .bib file IEEE suggests the following format.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,mybibfile}

Clearly, you neead a IEEEtran.bst file for successful compilation but they don't supply it with the original zip archive!!  Well, here are the contents of IEEEtran.bst and IEEEabrv.bib as found from the internet.  (Note that, you can also skip creating the IEEEabrv.bib file and use the command --  \bibliography{mybibfile}

IEEEtran.bst

IEEEabrv.bib

Hope it helps someone quickly!!