Will moon fall upon earth someday?

I was thinking about tidal waves. From what I know there source of energy is the rotation of moon.The simplistic view suggests that moon's kinetic (rotational) energy is what is getting converting into all kind of energy thru tidal waves. It implies that there is energy loss everyday. Does it mean that Moon will fall onto Earth? Or will it spin away?

Interactive TV, making a buddha out of you.

There is an interesting thing called Interactive TV. Nowadays, it has lot of mind share in Cable world. The whole food chain is very busy churning out iTV specs, tools, white papers, conducting seminars, workshops and doing everything else that makes it a dynamic field.
iTV is all about making the TV interactive. It does so not by making the TV interactive but, adding another component called set top box, which is like a PC with VCR like looks. The funny part about the set top is that you can not put the TV set on top of it, it will get crushed, unless you use an Entertainment Center (Do you think it is funny? You can ask TBS Superstation!). The not funny part is that these modern set top boxes always lag a modern PC by a decade in terms of hardware and software available on them.
Coming back to the point,
Today, if one watches a soap or game, he or she is completely involved in it. Or at least the producers want it to be like that. Success of a show is gauged by how involving it is. The idea is the viewer does not flip the channel and they can show the ad. If you thought purpose of cable company is show entertaining programs, get it right. The purpose is to show ads. They use sports, news, soap, reality show and all to fill the space between advertisements. Any way, a good show captures all the attention of the viewer. So if Jack and Jill are fighting over who will clean the kitchen after the party, A good director will make the viewers empathize with Jack or Jill.
But that will change with iTV. A typical application that iTV experts have been trying to get going since last couple of years is being able to conduct polls in real time, thankfully none of such application has gone beyond the state of being hacked-demos yet. With such applications, the user can have their say about the bout between Jack and Jill. This is the time when buddha jumps into the story.
A important theme in Yoga is the ability to split your brain into to two, one performer and the other observer. Buddha is a state of such Yogic achievement. iTV will enable all of us to become buddhas by making up for the observer part. So when you will be watching the Jack and Jill fight, while iTV will be observing you watching the fight. And suddenly when you are about to feel strongly about why Jack should the cleanup, iTV will pop up a question, Do you think Jack and Jill will make out after the fight? Select A key for Yes and B key for No.
You can't be non opinioned about this? Can you?
So iTV has a malign unintended consequence of detaching viewer from the show he is watching but a benign unintended consequence of fast track to becoming buddha.
Can't complain about this.

Teching a kid how to read.

My daughter is 5 years old and we are trying to teach her reading. My wife enrolled her in local Kumon classes. They started giving their worksheet and my wife made my daughter do them.

It was useful exercise initially, till she could learn alphabets. After that it kind of stalled. She was not able to read even simple words like cat and rat.
I think there is a problem with with the approach that was adopted to teach her. What they were trying to do is teach English as a phonetic language. They were teaching the sounds of the consonants and vowels separately. Then encouraging the kids to join them together.
After several failed attempts I gave up on that approach. I prepared this table for my daughter and taught her the pronunciation of the consonant and vowel together.

	a	e	i	o	u
b	ba	be	bi	bo	bu
c	ca	ce	ci	co	cu
d	da	de	di	do	du
f	fa	fe	fi	fo	fu
g	ga	ge	gi	go	gu
h	ha	he	hi	ho	hu
j	ja	je	ji	jo	ju
k	ka	ke	ki	ko	ku
l	la	le	li	lo	lu
m	ma	me	mi	mo	mu
n	na	ne	ni	no	nu
p	pa	pe	pi	po	pu
r	ra	re	ri	ro	ru
s	sa	se	si	so	su
t	ta	te	ti	to	tu
w	wa	we	wi	wo	wu
y	ya	ye	yi	yo	yu
z	za	ze	zi	zo	zu

So effectively she had to memorize about 90 combination. it took her about 4 days ( 1 hours each day).
Equipped with this knowledge she was able to read lot of words which encouraged her to read more and as and when new combination cam she learned them.
Here is how it was:
After memorizing this table:
Was I mad? Yes dad.
Can I sit on mat?
Rat and cat ran on his bed.

and then gradually,
Will you play with me? Yes, said the small boy.

I thought I will just post it, may be someone will find it useful.

Ubuntu and Win2k

I recently installed Win2k in another partition and quite surprisingly it did not mess up my Ubuntu installation.
Initially I had Win2k only. But then I installed Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) and it really took care of my windows installation by putting it under chain loader. I was thinking this new installation of Win2k will mess up Ubuntu but not it appeared as another option in the chain loader itself. That was good.
Anyway I liked Ubuntu but it was kind of slow (specially Beryl almost killed it) but I am not upgrading my hardware soon.
So back to windows in another partition.

Using VLC to stream videos

Streaming Videos using vlc.
vlc is a versatile audio video streamer. Please look at http://www.videolan.org for more information.

1) start vlc
vlc --intf telnet
This starts vlc and makes it listen on port 4212 for incoming connections.

2) Telnet into vlc.
telnet 127.0.0.1 4212
Use 'admin' as password. If you want to connect from another machine can you use the IP of vlc machine instead of 127.0.0.1
You will see messages like below,
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
Password:
Welcome, Master
>
3) Now create a media

>new unexpected broadcast
>setup unexpected input /home/developer/mpeg/Unexpect2001.mpeg
>setup unexpected enabled
>setup unexpected output "#duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.11.6:1234}}"
>setup unexpected loop
What are we doing here? We are creating a media named 'unexpected'. The input file is '/home/developer/mpeg/Unexpect2001.mpeg' and output will be streamed in udp (access=udp) packets as mpeg transport stream (mux=ts) to 192.168.11.6:1234 (host:port). If you want (for IPTV etc ), you can use multicast IPs.

4) Play the media
control unexpected play
This will start playing the media.
If you do these operations frequently then,

5) You can also save these commands in a file by
save commands.file

a file saved like this can be reloaded some other time by
load command.file

6) After loading the commands files you can play the media as mentioned in step 4.

The loop at the last line in step 3 means that it will keep looping till you stop playing (control unexpected stop)

Note: You can use the same instance of vlc to stream multiple media streams by creating different medias.
You can download free videos from http://www.archive.org