Sumit Dutta

Here is where you can read about some experiences and guidance I have to share.

After two full years, since March, 2020, I returned to the office. I am glad that the sensible people and leaders in the city of Austin have continued to take steps to keep us moving on during the pandemic. It was especially music to my ears that our office would have measures in place such as increased sanitation frequency, availability of soap and sanitizer for additional recommended hand-cleaning and surface cleaning, required vaccination, packaged food, and an outdoor area to eat unmasked. There was an election today too which I would encourage all eligible voters to get informed on and vote in, as well as in the upcoming runoff and general elections later this year.

The coronavirus pandemic is still getting many items to be out of stock because demand is exceeding supply. Some of those items are: bicycles, high-end processors, the PS5, furniture pads, and compost bags. One solution that may be helpful for those who cannot find the biodegradable compost bags for food waste in stores is to use paper grocery bags instead. Even if you have to pay for paper grocery bags at the grocery store, it may be worth it in any case.

This Thanksgiving, many of us are in isolation due to the pandemic. I wanted to share several illustrations to cheer you up, wherever you may be, and remind us that in isolation we are caring even more so for one another.

The instructions at the Nodesource Github page encourage you to blindly run their commands as your local superuser. This is an awful practice, and as such I have a proposed alternative.

If you visit the and scroll down to the "Installation instructions," you will find the link to the script they want you to foolishly run as your superuser. Here, we assume the example is https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x. Please open that URL.

Now, pay close attention to the variables set in the beginning and the lines close to the end, and make sure that you run just those in your shell!

NODENAME="Node.js 14.x"
NODEREPO="node_14.x"
NODEPKG="nodejs"
DISTRO=$(lsb_release -c -s)
echo "echo 'deb https://deb.nodesource.com/${NODEREPO} ${DISTRO} main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list" | sudo bash
echo "echo 'deb-src https://deb.nodesource.com/${NODEREPO} ${DISTRO} main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list" | sudo bash

Once you have run the above commands, run "sudo apt-get install -y nodejs" and then Node.js will be installed on your machine. Note that this includes Node.js and its dependencies including the "npm" package manager. Now you can use the "nodejs" command to run a server script you write, and you can use the "npm" package manager to install more useful libraries for your scripts.

This is a public service announcement about avoiding apps that share your location and personal content with undesired organizations. A major recent suspect is TikTok, a Chinese company that has no choice but to comply with any request from the Chinese government. I would strongly recommend people who need to keep their name, location, and views out of those undesired organizations to use alternative apps and websites. This is especially importantant for any government-employed people, and we can thank Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Chuck Schumer for making official rules for this in the US government. It may be worthwhile to petition the app stores to ban the app since data is used inappropriately. Here are some excellent alternative apps:

1. Dubsmash (Google Play Store and Apple App Store): This app has great reviews, and that's why it's first on my list. The company is based in democratic Singapore and the app is used globally.
2. Triller (Google Play Store and Apple App Store): This app is inpsires and focuses on your own singing. The company is based in the US and the app is used globally.
3. YoPlay (Google Play Store and Apple App Store (India only)): This is not in US markets yet.

To aid voters in Texas in the elections of 2020, I created a page about voting issues and how to vote given the covid-19 pandemic. Please visit it here!

From conferences to interviews to vacations, my travel plans for 2017 know no boundaries. One would think that I would take the time to write all about my experiences, but I would rather just talk to you about them in a social setting. To tease your interest, you can see a list of all the states and the Canadian province in which I have been a visitor in 2017 before starting my job:

1. Maryland
2. Massachusetts
3. Québec (Canada)
4. Vermont
5. Louisiana
6. Arizona
7. Idaho
8. New Jersey
9. Texas
10. Pennsylvania
11. Maine
12. New Hampshire
13. Connecticut
14. District of Columbia
15. Washington
16. Virginia
17. New York
18. Rhode Island
19. Tennessee
20. Arkansas
21. Oklahoma
22. Illinois
23. Missouri
24. Kentucky
25. Kansas
26. Nebraska
27. Wyoming

If you have many PDF files accessed through Linux, you can still search through those files to find some text. Rather than simply using "grep search_for_this x.txt" as you would for a text file, you use "pdftotext x.pdf - | grep search_for_this" instead. Below is a nifty shell command to search through all your PDF files in a directory. Be sure to replace "search_for_this" with what you want to search for!

for i in `find | grep \.pdf$`; do echo "*** Found in $i:"; pdftotext $i - | grep search_for_this; done

If your organization's Subversion repository is located on a central Linux server, you can check out that repository or a subdirectory thereof in Windows. It's not a straight shot though. On Windows, the repository can be accessed by using an svn+ssh type of method. Essentially, you need to tunnel the Subversion server's SVN communication port to your Windows machine over SSH. Here is how:

1. Download and run PuTTY.
2. In PuTTY, enter the hostname of your server with the Subversion repository and go to Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels. There, enter Source port 3690, Destination host-accessible-hostname-with-the-repository:3690, and check Local and Auto. Then connect.
3. Download and install TortoiseSVN.
4. Right click an empty folder in Windows Explorer and open TortoiseSVN -> Repo-browser. Enter URL svn://localhost and you should see the repository. You can right-click and check out any directory.

Earlier this month I instructed you all to use Windows Media Center instead of ArcSoft to watch TV with your TV card. If you happen to have an AMD Theater HD 750, you will need some other software to watch the composite video input should you choose to watch that instead of your usual digital or analog TV channels. Here is one way you can use the ubiquitous VLC Media Player to watch composite video:

1. Open VLC Media Player.
2. Click Media --> Open Capture Device.
3. Next to the "Video device name," choose "ATI AVStream Analog Capture" (or the name of your TV card) from the drop-down list.
4. Next to the "Audio device name," choose "ATI AVStream Analog Audio Capture" (or the name matching that of your TV card) from the drop-down list.
5. Click "Advanced options..." Most of the options here should be kept at their default values. Usually these values are set to -1.
6. Set the "Video input pin" option value to 1.
7. Set the "Audio input pin" option value to 4. This means that your red and white audio signals should go into the ATI Theater HD 750. If you have a different TV card, you may have to try a different number or just directly amplify your audio signal.
8. Click "OK."
9. Click "Play."

The previous steps should get you to the point where you can see the input video signal and hear the input audio signals from your computer. However, this configuration may not be good enough if you play videogames. This is because TV cards have some delay between the input signal and output on the screen. Many TV cards let you adjust the time spent on hardware re-coding so that one can reduce that time to get less lag between the input signal and output on the screen. The tradeoff is that your picture quality may not come out as well when you reduce this lag time. Since we all prefer to beat our games rather than awe at just the first level's graphics, here's how to lower the lag:

1. Follow the same steps as instructed earlier up to step 7.
2. Check the box to "Show more options."
3. Reduce caching from the default value (300ms) to 0.
4. Continue with step 8 and complete the steps in the earlier instructions.
5. The audio may appear choppy now because the TV card has no time to digest its inputs before sending them to VLC. One can mitigate this issue by simply routing the audio into the Line In port on the back of his or her PC, instead of to the TV card. Then open the Control Panel, open Sound, click the Recording tab, select Line In, click Properties, click the Listen tab, and check "Listen to this device." Then click OK on all those dialogs and the audio signal will play aloud. Since the audio is playing in real time, it should match the video which is also playing very close to real time now.
6. Don't resize the VLC window. Doing so may add some software re-coding delay and thus add lag. A better solution to make the video appear larger on your screen would be to use Windows Magnifier, available in the Start menu.

Enjoy your enhanced entertainment system!

In June I bought a beautiful, sexy HP Pavilion p7-1240 featuring a top-of-the-line AMD A10 processor. I modded the machine to death to give rise to the most awesome personal supercomputer I have ever used. This machine can play three intense 3D games, run virtual machines, show HDTV, and display different content on three screens simulataneously!

You might wonder what the actual technical specifications are. For starters, I will just say that it has an AMD A10 APU, 16 GB of RAM, 1.8 TB of disk space, and a high-definition digital and analog TV tuner.

The point of this post is not for me to brag, however. I had one problem with the TV watching software that really gave me a hard time. Here's the long story short:
Use Windows Media Center instead of ArcSoft TotalMedia

Essentially, ArcSoft TotalMedia kept crashing my 64-bit Windows 7 at random times. The ArcSoft software code is full of bugs. What's worse is that ArcSoft TotalMedia runs in the background even when you don't want to use the application! After I left the computer on for a long time, the software would then crash Windows without a blue screen or anything. Fortunately, I uninstalled all ArcSoft software and switched to using Windows Media Center to watch HDTV. Now I have left my PC on for weeks and it hasn't crashed and won't crash. My point is that the 32nm GlobalFoundries-manufactured AMD processor works very well, to run Windows, Linux, or anything else.

In addition to this site itself, I feel quite involved with a number of new websites. My primary website which I work on with Chris, Cosmos Gaming, is due for an upgrade. There is also my friend Zach, whose interest in sharing videos and ideas with web design has spurted. His website, Zorro's Web Page, has been redeveloped from the old page with some help from me.

Another almost equally exciting news is that I am getting more involved with working with the websites for the nonprofit organizations that my dad is a part of. These include the Yamuna Foundation for Blue Water and the new 501(c)(3) corporation Rivers of the World (this page has a temporary working link).

After all this, who knows? I may as well be more involved in website development for all of the clubs and organizations that I am in. I will probably be more active with web development for UIUC UNICEF, of which I am a prospective officer of. Other than that, I still consider Engineers without Borders and IEEE to be good candidates.