I casually reloaded by mail only to find a danger sign at the top of my webpage. First thought, do I have a virus ? Took me couple of seconds to realize that Google is very sensitive about its security and hence the icon.

A little too drastic I thought, but may be that is what’s necessary to prevent people shooting themselves in the foot and to keep snoopers at bay. Here’s a snapshot of the ominous gmail 🙂

So I bought this sweet XPS 1340 laptop which has some great specs and is lightweight while still providing enough power to run my PhD code ! I threw out the Vista it came with and installed Win7 ultimate on it. Now, as part of the painful process of installing the new apps I needed to make the laptop usable for work, I came to the part where MATLAB installation started.

I found out the hard way that Win7 does not like the Java version that comes with MATLAB 7.0 and hence ran the setup itself in a deprecated mode. And once the installation finished, even the splash screen would not be displayed anymore. Searching the internet yielded very little but then looking at MATLAB/work directory, I found several error logs related to Java again.

The next logical thing was to update my Java version to the latest one and I changed the “MATLAB_JAVA” environment variable to the right location. This useful nugget via Mathworks solved the issue. Of course, I spent couple of hours trying to figure this out based on several other forum postings but none of them helped. And some of these fixes were complicated too.

Amazing how often the simplest solutions solve the problems we encounter most elegantly !

You have to see it to believe it. This is so amazing. I can actually see an aerial view of the exact place I live, in College station using Google Maps. So all my friends who are still wondering on what kind of a village i’m living in, here is something that’ll feast your eye.

Check out this link to get a real time look at the place. You can move around, check the map or the satellite feed and can zoom out and see where it fits in the bigger picture. Definitely lot of fun to waste my time this way in between breaks.