Nature, Science and Michael...

It has been a long day :p Slept a lot, the only productive part of it was going through the current issues of Nature (Volume 459 Number 7250 pp1033-1160) and Science (Volume 324 Number 5935 pp1603-1754).

If you're reading Nature or Science, definitely you're going to find something interesting, no matter what is your taste or interest. Anyway, to me, current issues of both of the journal lacked the usual glamour, generally I cant pick my clear favourate. One article in Science really caught my attention, the group assayed DNA-Protein interaction of ~100 mice Transcription Factor (TF) DNA Binding Domain (DBD); Vol 324 p 1720. Another paper on formation of functional centromere by synthetic heterochromatin was worth mentioning; Vol 324, p 1716.

Nature was slightly better, there were three articles on science journalsim which I thought worth reading; Vol 459, pp 1054-1057. The research article on membrane fusion (p 1091) and correlation between transcription and DNA replicatio fidelity (p 1150) was quite interesting. But I thought the paper on role of mechanical force generated by the first cardiac pump in embryonic haematopoesis is a masterpiece (p 1131).

Last but not least, I woke up this morning and my brother gave me this bad news: The King of Pop Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest. The news was really a saddening one, but we all have to die at some point of time.

Heal the world... Make it a better place... for you and for me and for the entire human race... RIP Michael.

Repairing XP Boot file

About an hour ago, my sister came to me complaining her XP doesn't start! It gives an error message which roughly says it can't find boot file at C:\Windows location. Right then I knew its a mess, definitely the boot.ini has been deleted. So I asked what happened? The initial story was, there was load shedding, when power supply resumed and the PC was tried to turn on, the message kept on appearing. Then she said, she wrote this code yesterday which deletes files and it deleted lots of files in C: drive and she thought its no big deal since the OS is installed in E: drive. By then I figured out whats wrong, I replied although the XP is installed in E: drive, the boot file is in C: drive and now the PC can't find the boot file, thus no start up.

Anyway, despite my initial thought this would be a tough task, it turned out to be an easy one! I used XP installation CD, selected repair option, then typed \help in the command prompt, there was help on command \bootcfg, I knew I was in the right place, I used the \rebuild command, I didn't understand some of the queries of the command, so googled and came up with this about.com article, a handy one, which solved my problem. Below is the link:

Repair or Replace boot.ini file in Windows XP

I thought I might share in case anyone faces similar problem.

DST from my perspective

The country is clearly another step ahead by using DST, Daylight Saving Time, from tonight. I wont go for justifications (one of my friend, Minhaz seriously doubts its any positive effect and he put forward lots of geographical explanations, lets not go to that.)

What I felt is the government failed to publicize it. Its now just a high class educated society clock time change phenomenon, rather than being an event of mass participation. I can give an example form my own life. The guard at our house today refused to open the gate at 7 am, he was insisting the gate will be opened at 7 but now its only 6 am. My brother, to his utter annoyance, failed to convince him that 7 is 7 and all the offices, schools, colleges and universities will start according to the new time schedule.

But the fact is, I'm not surprized at all, its the way things work in our beloved country. We have some highly talented individuals at the administration who execute their decisions without even the need of planning, let alone the concept of proper planning. Its ridiculous to start DST when technically we have already finished summer and on the brink of the longest day of the year (21st June, DST should be evenly distributed at the both side of the longest day, i.e. if DST is in operation for two months, one should be before the longest day, the rest should be after it).

Hail us and our leaders...


Image courtesy:
http://pakistaniat.com/images/Daylight-savings-Time.jpg