Sports highlights: IndyCar championship

It has been 5 years in a row that a Team Penske driver has a chance winning the championship going into the final race. Well, it turns out a Team Penske driver got runner-up in the championship 5 years in a row, after the final race concluded at Fontana last Saturday. However, this time "another" Team Penske driver became the champion. And it's finally the time for Will Power to be crowned the champ. I wrote about Will Power's struggle in the 2010/2011/2012 seasons before: every season he built a big lead on road courses which evaporated near the end of the season due to miscues and misfortune (and oval courses.) Again, he had an early lead this season. However, one could sense how comfortable he was with oval courses this season, unlike in the past. The confidence was probably built from his oval course victory from the final race (Fontana) of the 2013 season, in which he started so poorly that he was not even in the hunt for the championship. And he won again on oval this season (Milwaukee) However, there were still doubts whether he could close the deal. After all, he still had a few pit road speeding penalties and an unexpected spin in the previous race at Sonoma, a road course he is usually good at. 2014 proved to be a different year though: he started near the back of the pack at Fontana hoping to stay out of trouble, which he did. Calmly drove back to the Top 10 and maintained his points' lead even though for a few laps his closest competitor, Penske teammate Helio Castroneves took over the lead. After getting to the front row on a restart, he briefly turned on his "crazy mode" and raced with leader (and eventual winner) Tony Kanaan fiercely but then quickly settled down. And late in the race Castroneves got a penalty for improper entry to pit lane. That pretty much sealed the deal for Power. Congratulations to the 2014 Verizon IndyCar champion Will Power of #12 Team Penske sponsored by Verizon. (BTW, the other Verizon driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, finished 4th in the championship standing in his first year back to IndyCar. He actually won the A.J Foyt Trophy for most points on oval in 2014. Looks like Verizon made a good investment in their drivers, and the series too! Verizon got some good exposure in the home country of Power, Australia)

Refreshing and tailing a file loaded in Emacs

Let's say you have already opened the file you want to view in the current buffer of Emacs, to refresh it, hit C-x C-v RET (FYI, the command is "Find alternate file") This is particularly useful when monitoring log files. And for automatically displaying the end of a log file, I would use tail on Linux but Emacs could achieve the same purpose (simply type M-x  auto-revert-tail-mode)

Slingbox and Ubuntu

According to the official Slingbox website, Linux users are not supported. In fact, if you try watching your Slingbox from their site, it will refuse to do so, which is a bit puzzling since Slingbox is offering a web-based solution. And there's workaround to this restriction: all you need is an i-frame!