My thoughts in e-text

I just finished watching one of the best PBS NOVA episodes - "What Darwin Never Knew". It is exceptionally good. I was finally able to understand a little about DNA - the building blocks of all living creatures. In this episode they explain how evolution is happening and why there are so many species and why even animals from the same species look so different. How complex DNA is and what a gene is. It still did not answer all my questions but got pretty close. Here is one part I found on youtube, but please watch all parts. It is very good. So now I know that DNA is a very large sequence and it contains genetic instructions to synthesize various parts of a living creature. In simple layman terms there are three kinds of genes identified so far Genes that actually are used to create stuff. These are the sequences used to synthesize proteins and other things - the building blocks Genes that simply act as switches which can be on or off. When on the "stuff" crea...

At work we have several java files that have javadocs with links that are not hyperlinked with . So I wanted to covert the links to hyperlinks. We wanted to convert only links that start with "Automates ", followed by one or more links that ends with a number. Example "Automates http://something/12345 and http://something/67890 but not http://something/54321". I wanted to do the conversion with one line of a bash command (trying to avoid writing the bash script). While tackling the problem I learnt a few things that I want to share and record here for myself to look back again in future when I forget. To start with I needed to find all the files containing "Automates http://". I just wanted the filenames containing that string. And so comes grep to the rescue. With -l switch to list just the filenames instead of all the lines that match. grep -R -l "Automates http://" * Then it is time to replace the links with <a href=link>link<...

Recently I had to go through the motions of getting a General Power of Attorney (GPA) document attested in San Francisco. I am an Indian by birth. My parents were trying to buy a house back in India for me. Since I did not want to travel to India they needed a GPA so that they can act on my behalf to sign all the documents required to buy the house. The problem however is that they needed it urgently because the seller lives in UK and wants to get all the things done quickly so he can go back. My parents send me a GPA document that they obtained from a lawyer. This is a document that will give the power to my parents to buy the said property in the document on my behalf. The lawyer said that I will have to get the document attested at an Indian Consulate in USA. The closest one for me is in SF and I can drive there in about an hour from where I live. So I though it will be like a day's work to get all the things done. I looked up at their  website  for the procedure t...