Real speeds and download caps.

In my previous post comment,

Sushubh said...
unfortunately sify broadband. the only other option i have in my area is dialup or gprs (max 40kbps). as for limits i believe airtel is giving 128kbps unlimited for 900-1000 bucks... isn't it true?

Of the evils choose the least, eh? Yes, touchtel's (airtel) does offer unlimited 128kbps for Rs.900, but the problem with airtel's is that its 128kbps comes only to around 13.5kBytes/sec rather than the expected 16KBytes/sec (128 divided by 8). On inquiring, they responded that the ATM backbone's header combined with the IP and TCP's headers take up almost 10% of the total bandwidth. And infact, they said I was lucky enough to get 13.5KBytes/sec.

[For knowing my bandwidth, I used download accelerator's read-out, DslReports.com (excellent) and a lot of other sources (streaming servers, ftp, etc)]

What's the loss? Well, some streaming sites detect my connection as 128kbps and send data AT 128kbps. The result? No streaming songs/movies appear continously for more than some 5 seconds. And the next best bandwidth available to me is at 56kbps, which is totally horrific to see or hear.

Though some sites with wmv optimised videos (msdn blog videos) stream at 103kbps "intelligently", which is fine with my connection, I still see stuttering sometimes. So, the decision is made. I am opting for Reliance Broadband, if available in my area, or BSNL's DataOne.

Download caps suck. I really hate DataOne. And all services that are like DataOne too. I mean, what's the use in providing broadband and setting a download cap of 250MBytes? Clearly, people are not paying for broadband just to check their mails faster, or are they?


"Fabulous offer! 1GBytes/second* Internet access for Rs.1000/month!"

Anyone interested?

*maximum 250MBytes/month. Rs.500 for every extra Megabyte

Reliance Broadband too has a download cap, but at a reasonable 10GBytes. I am still unable to get any information from their customer service on whether I will be behind a NAT based network or a DHCP based one. The type of network is not that critical with current P2P networks able to operate transparently in both the environments, but my friend sriram krishnan has problems accessing the Shareaza network from his Net4India network.

I was concerned that with the high data rate that I am about to get, my download habits may change and the 10GByes/month download cap will seem unrealistic too soon. But a distant memory of a economic model (or something) which said something in the lines of "After a few months of the introduction of a hike, the initial interest will subside and become a uniform line below the hike", comforted me. (Don't stone me for such a badly formed statement, but the statement was in the one page that I saw in a library book.)

Oh, and I appologize for confusing Reliance Netway with Reliance Broadband service. Both are different. My bad.

BB hunting

This is December. The time of the year when the semester exams get over and serious gaming days begin. It's also the time of the year when offers from Internet providers are coming! So to the BroadBand providers, "Let the competitions begin!"

Since I am changing residence, I figured this would be the best time to change my internet connection as well (yea, not the best logic in the world).

I am currrently hooked up with TouchTel which is now AirTel after being acquired by AirCel. I am with the Rs.995 per month for 128Kbits/sec for 25hours plan. Though the price is too much and the hours offered is too low, I think this is the most consistent and reliable BB provider in India.

Since my family is moving residence to the next street, we get to keep the same phone number. So I don't have to change the Telecom provider (which is Touch Tel, ofcourse), but I can withdraw from their DSL offer and choose some other BB provider.

I used to be the run-of-the-mill dial-up (l)user before I switched to my 128kbps line. I've been receiving bills in the range of Rs.3500 to Rs.5000 per month. Ofcourse this includes the phone charge, but we use the phones for receving calls more than making them ourselves. That makes our phone charges around Rs.100 to Rs.300 per month.

[Heh, I recall the last month when a TouchTel customer support lady ringed me up to tell me, "make more phone calls". No kidding! :)]. At that time when I bought this plan, this was the best out there (with a phone atleast) in my area. It introduce me to the incredible world of Gigabytes: warez sites, gnutella, kazaa and recently BitTorrent. After having tasted the speed, I naturally want more...

So, I am hunting for new "BroadBand" service. If you had noticed the quotes, then you know that there is a catch: In India, there is no real broadband. Only during the middle of this year the TRAI fellas 'upgraded' thier definition of BB to 256kbps (from 64kbps?). I don't know the official definitions but they seem to be around 11 or 12 mbps. Sure, a lot of fellas seem to offer that kinda service nowadays, but they are experimental and after more customers are drawn into their network, there WILL be a permenant bandwidth/download cap.

So far I have considered SIFY, Reliance's Netway and BSNL's Data One and DIAS, in that order. I am yet to decide on whom to give my (father's) bank. These are big players with B.I.G big plans for BB in India, mind you.

First off, Reliance:

Reliance is a big company ruled by an awesome man who said "India is a land of billion oppurtunities", when asked about his plans for NetWay in India. Netway is gonna be simple: Provide a 100MBytes/second per household in India by the end of 2005. This is carried by Reliance's optic fiber backbone running through the country's streets (motorists will remember this one). This may look puny to those who have read the 1GigaByte/second plan in Japan, but it will work for me. But then again, I don't want to wait till then.

Currently, Netway charges Rs.1200 for 256kbps with a download cap of 10GByte (Rs.1.40/MByte afterwards). Nice. Will have to think about it though because there's one more plan for 512 kbps with the same download cap, but for Rs.3000 ;) BSNL's Data One: Reliance was good, but to further reduce costs, I went onto look at the newly advertised Data One service, named after their Cell One cell phone account. BSNL says that they would affer 256kbps to 8Mbits/sec on ordinary copper cable (DSL) from Rs.500 onwards. That is pretty cheap. But a lot has been left unanswered, like download/bandwidth caps, distance from exchanges, etc. But this service won't be available untill after December of this year. Also, since this is DSL, I will have to pay for a new phone line as well. But if the final costs come to something cheaper than it is now, I will happily keep a second phone (prolly in my closet). BSNL's DIAS:

I don't have much info on this one than that it stands for Direct Internet AccesS. But it seems that depending upon your distance to the nearest digital exchange, you will get speeds ranging from 128kbps to 2Mbps on an existing telephone line. Rate range from Rs.485 to Rs.3000 for corresponding download caps from 200MByte to unlimited. (I am going to find out if I am lucky enough and there's a BSNL exchange near my house.)
This is all I can gather from their home page. What it doesn't say is, whether the price is the same for both 128kbps and 2Mbps connection. What, should a company be lucky enough to get a hi speed connection?

SIFY:

This is a really bad egg. Do a google on it and you'll be surprised at how a single ISP can influence so many hate clubs for itself. I guess SIFY broke the record for that one. One of the most active clubs for this I have seen is Sushubh's. And recently my friend Balakrishnan was a victim of their adverisement fallacy. Since I don't feel like starting a YASHC (Yet Another Sify Hate Club), I think I will stay away from it.


I am sure there's more so called Broadband providers around redefining Broadband as 115kbps (Reliance infocomm and Tata Indicom), but no thanks. It seems, "If enough people use the term wrongly, it would be correct". Well, to those people, think again if you want to get (and make) India faster.

One provider that I forgot to mention was Net4India, a Brit company that has launched broadband internet for homes and businesses. My friend sriram krishnan, has this connection since he was lucky enough to live in the test area (the lucky pig) and he seems to get speeds ranging from 2Mbits/sec to 15Mbits/sec. But recently, due to increase in customer base, that has come down to less than 1MBits/sec. There is a franchise of Net4India in my area, but since I live outside of his cable limits, I can't have it. And he is still in experimental phase of launching. Such is fate :(

[Quick facts:
As of May'05, countries like canada, usa, japan, etc had more than 75% BB users. In India, there were about 0.02%]

In the end, my requirements (low cost, non-NAT, Broadband (the indian kind: atleast 256kbps), no or very high download cap) are met by TouchTel, Reliance Netway and BSNL DataOne (also DIAS). I am sure my current provider and all the others will come up with massively attractive bandwidths and other offers. So I guess I will let the companies fight themselves in the market and jump in when things simmer down.

Bashed :(

I've been doing a lot of bashing around these days. Hardly a week passes before I read atleast a hundred quotes. Though I don't like the profanities, I like the humour in those quotes. The metaphorical devil in my idle mind spews out a lot of sarcasms and jokes from time to time, and what's a bit unnerving is that they seem to have mutated lately to follow the chat format. And, of late, with a soupcon of profanity (don't tell mama!)

I will write a few of the impromptu ones that prompted me to write this article.

The other day, I was watching "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" in my Onida HomeTheater and came back and switched on my computer. Then I was imagining what would people say if I was talking about this on irc (Actually, I don't chat on IRC. But I like bash.org quotes.)

A): What do you think of the T-virus?
B): T-virus? Does it go well with tea? :p


[Then I just said "no sh*t" while actually typing "sh*t" as the password at the login prompt!(Meanwhile, my computer's password is "sify") Nah, I don't mind giving away my password.
What's that you say? You sayin' "Stupid password"?Well, the password is the way it is just so that my mom or dad won't accidentally type a few random characters and accidentally hit enter and accidentally enter my login. That is, assuming they accidentally clicked on my account icon rather thatn on their's at the login prompt. Considering my dad's and mom's knowledge of computers, I would say the probablity of these things happening would be
somewhere around,

Math.pow (iReallyBigConstants.INFINITY, -1)

And this ofcourse decays with a rate equal to , the half-life of my parent's ignorance of password cracking skills. Or so I hope. I mean, do I have anything to hide from my parents? ;p]

I was sittin' around idly and the devil cranked out a "joke" from his workshop, again in a bash.org format:

A): So what excites you about going to America for your M.S?
B): Hmmm....well, I am going to get aids there.
A): ...
B): Er..the financial kind.

It's time I stopped reading irc quotes, I guess :(

Home Raider!

I am a sort of movie watcher that asks for original DVDs or VCDs whenever I rent movies. And I am also the kind that mostly watches those movies that are critically acclaimed in the Internet Movie Database and saves those movies onto my harddisk for viewing it till I am satisfied (read: bored) with it and have proudly screened them to my family. I guess I am the kind of user that's truly one of a kind :p

Now DVDs cost space (around 3.5 to 4.3 GB per movie, I recon). So I usually uninstalled those games that I play less frequently to make some space. After watching the movie to my heart's fullest, I normally either archive it by encoding it using those brilliant tools based on the DivX;) format or delete it depending upon the movie's ability to appease me.

Compressing a movie is a long, arduous process that I seldom mind to undertake unless the movie justifies itself for the time spent. Though tools of late could provide you support while you are groping in the dark trying to compress the movie, they can only help you as far as suggesting you the compressiblity of the movie; the actual size and resolution of the final movie is left for you to figure out. Tools like Dr.DivX can automate the entire process and certainly is suitable for almost all movies, but for a queer few movies, the resulting thing won't exactly please the senses.

So, after all these juggling with deleting and encoding which inevitably reduced quality, I've decided to buy a new hard disk for my computer. I am currently contemplating the possiblity of purchasing another Hard disk as my current 80GB Samsung Spin Point is full to the teeth with data. Since adding another disk to the ide channel might decrease performance, I have decided also to do a raid-0 on the two hard disks.

(Why Raid-0? Because it splits data into "Stripes" of some size, say 128KB, and then stores alternate stripes into alternate disks, hence almost doubling data read and write speeds. Infact, since there is no redundancy involved here, 'RAID-0' must be called just 'AID').

I was excited with this idea and so went to a computer shop to which I frequent. I swear that the guy got really panicky when I mentioned the word "Raid". (Which I presume is because of his stash of pirated game disks. Sometimes I get a feeling that these computer shops get real prfit only from selling these games than from selling anything with a hint of hardware in it.) So I trudged on to another "Computer shop" where I was told that raid cards cost around Rs.600 to Rs.1000 and that a hard disk similar to the one in my keep will cost me Rs.32oo. I thanked him and walked home. Operation "Home Raider" is finally assesed to be feasible and now all that I have to do is to wait till my exams get over, which it will do so on December 9th 2004.

But I wanted to know if that is the best I can do to my system. Then the thought of SATA hard disks hit me. But a quick visit to a few forums informed me that a Raid-0 is faster than a SATA, since a SATA hard disk is only mariginally faster than a equivalent IDE HDDs and so a Raid-0 of IDE HDDs must be performing much better than a SATA HDD.

But a visit to one particular site acted like a BSoD and brought my this endeavour to a crashing halt.
According to this site, for home users, the most that a RAID configuration can do is to waste the time you spent considering it. I claims that an ordinary home user can expect a performance increase of around 1 to 4% when comapared to a single hard disk. As an added bonus, you will also be reducing your hard disk's life by two, since even if a single hard disk fails, you lose your data entire!

But another site here, seems to tell me a completely different story. This site seems to take care of performance while gaming, movie encoding and that kinda stuff, so this test might be closer to what my requirement would be. And the disks actually show atleast 40% increase in performance there!

So, I have decided to bite the bullet and go for the raid configuration. Extra performance is not the bone of why I am buying another hard disk for and so any extra performance is only an added bonus than a prime factor in the final decision. I haven't yet finished the stage where I find out the max. speed vs max. perf. For example, I haven't looked into a SATA raid configuration yet ;) I am awaiting the end of semester exam days to continue pursuing my this raiding of hard disks.

What kind of blogger are you?

If you say so!

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

What kind of blogger are you?

Found the above site from this blog. The blog looked cool, but was a bit (too) profane.

While the above may not be an exact description of my blog , it might be *ahem*very*ahem* close.

What is the science behind barbie and other crazy stuff

Just how cuckoo can a research topic for a paper be? The answer is that it can be really very much indeed.
Here are a few of the research paper topics that I found in a magazine that tries to turn science upside down:

Research topic1:
Do too many cooks spoil the broth? Questioning the proverb!
Reasearch topic 2:
Why Barbie is perceived as beautiful? Barbie ain't human!
Research topic3:
Conclusive proof of global warming from studies of frozen confectionary.

And the one that I found totally cool was this:
Staying dry in the damp: Should you run or walk in the rain?

There are a few more and then some under the guise of articles, experiences and stuff. Fortunately, this is the first edition of the magazine, and nothing more than an epitome of trivialities. (Hmm....and what would this blog be if I were writing about such sites....Yikes!)

SP2 me!

I've got it!

It's awesome getting something free via airmail from microsoft! (though, i understand that the cd was distributed from "Navi Mumbai").

BTW, that got me thinking. Why wud microsoft send free cds worth Rs.100 for EVERYONE?

My theory is that, microsoft don't want any windows owner, even if he is running a pirated version of windows, to get a sp2-less vulnerablity. I guess most of the windows users are free software believers (euphemism for piraterss [more on this in later post]) and obviously wudn't wanna spend their fortune to download the hunky sp2. This will leave a lot of whiners whining how their pc got hijacked or was on the receiving end or giving end of a DDos attack and stuff like that, if there was no one to patch THOSE guys up.

So ask them to give their address and don't ask for a identity revealing productID or any commitment for the user.

Neat idea, that is, if that is what is behind this free sp2 thang. Anybody know the actual reasons?

Really Frightening Codes (RFC)

How did RFC become Really Frightening Codes?

A few days ago, my fellow blogger, sriram mailed me the regular expression for finding out the validity of email addresses. Then I began reading the underlying RFC and this is what I learnt from it:

"There's always the easy way and the hard way. And, unfortunately, it seems that the hardest way is always the most correct way too. Almost always"

Life's got too many examples for this. Let me post two of it:

1. Parsing an Email address:
The supposedly correct way for doing it is here:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
And the program to generate the regex is here:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address/Mail-RFC822-Address-0.4.tar.gz


2. Parsing an URL:
The RFC (and, you guessed it, the hard)way of doing it right:
http://www.foad.org/~abigail/Perl/url3.regex
And the program that would generate the behemoth:
http://www.foad.org/~abigail/Perl/url3.pl

But you've got to be wise in choosing a way when there is an easy way and a hard way. Because of the presence of those cute things called "exceptions". Now, the RFC equivalent of email address and url parsing are a bit old. They include regex to cover the following types of email addresses too:

Alfred Neuman@BBN-TENEXA
:sysmail"@ Some-Group. Some-Org
Muhammed.(I am the greatest) Ali @(the)Vegas.WBA


Now really! Valid? These are unheard of in the real world, people. So, you see, there are exceptions and they are cute too.

Now I Request For Comment.

Mobile phone rant

"Mobile phones. They are everywhere. So many brands, so many service providers, so many offers, so many new services... Isn't it becoming a bit of over-crowded with moblie phones in here?", you might ask.

Yes, it is. Infact, the number of mobile phones is currently more than the number of wired phones and then some. And they all use the the same spectrum of radio waves alloted for cellular communications.

Some fellow named Marty Cooper was interested in this, and like all researcher with too much data and too much free time, announced a law, not surprisingly named, the "Cooper law", which states that the number of conversations that can be conducted concurrently in the same spectrum has doubled every two-and-a-half years for the past 104 years. By the way, Marty Cooper also happens to be the creator of the Mobile phone.

Now before I take you to wonder land, let me show you around kansas first, Alice.

Assuming that you know the basics of how cells are created, let me tell you how cooper's law has been kept up for so long.

Frequency planning: First off, people created the basic "cell", a hexagonal structure in theory for easily dividing the given area(city, state, county) and at the same time covering the most area with the least uncovered area, than considering the entire area as a single broadcast area. Adjacent cells avoided using and listening to the same radio frequency band, and thus avoided a few bad words in communication, which I will name only once for you: "interference" and "Noise".

Some decades later, as DSP (Digital Signal Processing) technology got better, so did the ability to eliminate the effect of the bad words. People started spliting cells into microcells and pico cells.

Sectorization: Now a single cell can use the same frequency band by spliting a cell into "sectors". Sectors are created by directional antennas, which effectively cuts the cell into three or more sectors. Each sector behaves like a cell.

Now that you've got the low-down of existing cell site architectures, let me take you to Wonderland.

How would you like a dedicated cell site for your mobile phone/laptop?

Enter "Personal Cell Core Technology". Let me lay it all down for you before I continue.

What PCCT acheives is this: Instead of wasting radio energy by broadcasting, the smart antennas can locate a user, target the conversation only to the user. This creates a personal "cell site" for the user and follows the user as he moves around the city. Since there is a personal connection with the user, the cell site can allot the same frequency to many other users in the same cell.
What if all the users, allotted the same frquency, call from the same direction? Will the antenna be able to discriminate their signals correctly?
Yes! Hell, It can even discriminate two users even if they are using the same frequency and just inches apart!

PCCT uses an array of "adaptive smart antennas", developed by ArrayComm.

This magic words behind PCCT are GPS sattellites, "Super amplification" for the correct user and "signal supression" for other users, etc. , all handled by ArrayComm's adaptive algorithm and other intellectual Property.


The implications of noise free, full bandwidth, anywhere online and always online properties of ArrayComm's PCCT didn't go unnoticed. iBurst, an australian broadband company, implemented it as a low cost, high bandwidth technology for mobile phone users. Their service provides an always-on connctivity for laptops and mobile phones at a maximum data transfer rate of 1Mbps! (This is considered 4G by some, but that's a topic for another post). All that at the cost of an ordinary dial-up. No need to wait for other users to get off the network or to wait for a spot where you will be within the base station's range again.

And iBurst also created the "Liberate you laptop" campaign. If u don't have the time for stupid things in life, then don't bother:)

One of Marty Cooper's comment on the objective of the mobile phone comes to my mind:

"When you call a landline, you call a place. But, when you call a cell phone, you call a person."

2005's Blockbuster revealed!

Which game made you run with dread in your eyes, from one dark corridor to another while never letting go of the trigger? (and most often never making it there alive:)

Which game made you cringe into the shadows for 10 minutes before you calmed youself down before you entered another dark corridor?

Which game made you swear for the amount of adrenaline it required for you to play it?

Which game has the most fantabulous graphics that left many to loathe their old PCs?

Which game's demo marked an unpercendented tens of millions of downloads?


Well, I'll be Doomed if I gave away any more clues!

The awesome news is that, Universal Pictures says that the most awaited game ever is going into production, Aug 2005!
Dave McCallion is writing the story and Enda McCallion is producing it.
No more details are available yet. But here's a link.

I have but one wish: Just make sure that the movie lives upto the game!

The AABBA teens?

Question: How can you make remember a word easily?

The Answer is what the rest of the post is all about.

In my 14'eens or 15'eens, I joined a program named "Max Excel". It was an improve-everything-about-you-but-your-looks program. They promised (and it did work, I should say, for some people) to improve your memory to Guinness levels, improve your handwriting enough that you wouldn't need to learn hypnotism, teach you to study well, breath correctly (yeah, correctly), relieve yourselves of tension, activate any side of your brain at will, etc.

I should say, they worked pretty well for me too. But just like any park opened in chennai looks like a "petrified forest museum" after a few weeks of its inaguration due to immaintenance, I've lost the super memory thing.

I will concentrate more on the memory thing in this post. I can promise you the rest of the techniques in future posts.

The way to have guinness standard memory is really simple:

1. Create folders or drawers in your mind. This step is somewhat of a one time mugging up of a seqeuence of 100 to 200 names for neophytes and some thousands for the insane...er... experts.
For the names, we were asked to write down and memorize 200 friends' and relatives' names in the decreasing order of love and affection.

For example:
1 = Neo
2 = Morpheus
3 = Trinity
4 = Oracle
.
.
.
.
199 = Vivek srikumar
200 = Sriram krishnan

2. After you are able to name any relative's name given their index number, you have created a near-permanant (I can't remember the list now. Needs maintenance, as I told ya already.) Folder structure or named drawers in your brain.

3. How is this used in storing and retreiving data, fast?....or retreiving at all?

The crux of the technique is that, human beings tend to remember things that have a strong sense of emotion to it. In "Max Excel", they chose humor as the strong emotion. To remember a word, you take the first data to be memorized and invent a funny story involving that data and the relative/friend in that slot.

Say, you wanna memorize the periodic table, eh? (No, I am not Canadian.)
For example, you wanna remember that Hydrogen's position in the periodic table is number one. So you invent a funny story involving the element "Hydrogen" and "Neo".
Like,
"Neo takes the red pill and starts floating toward the ceiling, and morpheus shouts at him, "Haha, gotcha! That was hydrogen in that , fool!""

Ok, I am not good at making up funny stuff, but you get the idea.

4. Now comes the retreiving part. This is the inverse of the memorizing part. You see either the number "1" or the name "Hydrogen", you will remember the strongly humorous scene playing back in your mind, and then you'd get the answer automatically.

How do you manage multiple sessions? That is, you wanna memorize the periodic table and the India EPCO standards (or those Environmental laws, for us Fourth year under-grads). What then?

You can manage multiple sessions, alright, but it will require you to actively carefully conjure up stories involving also the context. (periodic table=chemistry related funnies, EPco sections=Law and ethic related jokes, etc...).


All that flashbacks aside, now for the thing that invoked the flashbacks: OEDILF
which stands for the,
Omnificient English Dictionary In Limericks Form.

This is a novel dictionary which describes and explains english language words in a limerick form. It is totally , unbelievably, astonshingly, technically, ingeniously, superfluously funny way to remember a word. You've got to see it to appreciate that.

Believe me, you would be craving to cry out your own AABBA after reading through the site. Seriously.

What's a "Limerick"? How's a limerick different from a freakin poem? AND WHAT"S AN "AABBA"?

I come prepared for that query. Let me try to explain "Limerick" via a limerick...

AABBA is how a Limerick goes,
If not then it's some other prose.
There are two line pairs
That produce different airs,
While the fifth line, like the first pair echoes.

That should clear it up.
BTW, Limericks are supposed to be very funny so that you may remember the theme word in a flash, accomapnied by a funny feeling (Hmm...that could be misundersood.).


Here's my few other experiments with Truth and Fun:

Next time a pirate asks you to walk the plank
You don't have to look blank.
Walk in the direction away from the pointed sword
And jump feet first, praying to the Lord
That you don't sink like a tank.


The little penguin called Tux ,
Can be had for zero bucks.
As many distros does it come,
And not a single virus is welcome
In any flavour of Linux.


To be very frank,
Your site needs more Page Rank.
To get more, you need
More sites pointing to your home-stead,
With big pointers giving you more rank.


Yes, you can add your own Limerick to the OEDILF site. But as of this writing, they are archiving words that start with "A" only. It will take some time before they move onto higher alphabets.
That's because, the review panel is composed of slow, pathetic humans and so far, humans are not able to convince machines of the fact that there is such a thing called "humour".

I am a great fan of IRC quotes databases and visit the king of all online quotes database, Bash.org, but still I think the OEDILF is much funnier than the quotes.

And that's saying something.


PS: You don't get 5 points for guessing the theme of any of the above Limericks.

PPS: And oh, the Limericks are Trade Marked, Patented, Copyrighted et al by me. So don't plagiarize these without reference to me and my this site. [I am hoping to improve my Page Rank :) ]

System Idle Process.

Heh. This is one of those random thoughts which I argue with myself in the backof my head while I am coding or doing something important.

It was like, "What do you think is the difference between solving problems in maths in your lower classses and solving problems after you graduate?" I ask myself.

And snap came the reply, like:

"Heh heh, that's simple. When you solve some problem in maths you don't improve algebra or anything. I mean, you don't see any kid going like:

"Look ma, I solved a problem in addition! Do you think, I can present a paper on it or something?"

Nah... But you can very well do it almost everytime and for everything that you find out in your college/university life though. Like:

".........And so our proposed method increases efficiency by almost 0.00001%, provided the #$%@!* holds up which it does so with a probablity of 0.003......" "

Now that I have satisfactorily answered my own query, I look for some other nagging questions to chew on while I debug.

And I find one.

It went like "Is being a herbivorous human being good? Is it worth it? Is it natural? What does Nature have to say on us being omnivorous? I mean, does she show explicitly by some creature whether we must be flesh eating or leaf eating?

The last question brought in a barrage of visual answers, some of which I will try to code...er...type in.

The answer thoughts were like this:

"What does nature say on all this plant vs flesh, you ask. Ok..Try this. People say "Strong as a Bull". So Bull is a symbol for strength and machissmo, we must eat the bull's diet, right?

......No wait. A Bull ain't at the top of the food chain. A Lion is. So be a carnivore because a Lion is stronger than a bull?

Ok, that was because you assumed Lion is stronger than a Bull. Think about the African Bull or ox like thing which can fend off a lion.

Hey! that's not fair! I don't want to lose!
[I am a non-vegitarian :)] [At this point of desperation, I even doubt the diet of an african bull and imagine it eating meat and stuff, then think it off]
Ok, here. The African Bull fights only when in herds by standing in circle. Even then they may lose one or two young one or weak ones. Whereas the lion, He fights single or in threes. Ha ha! So there! Carnivores win!."
[And to assure that I win, I add some more arguments ;)]
"Look, even the crockadiles, which are not eaten by anything, is a carnivore!
Also, carnivores live a longer life than the herbivores :).

Wait a minute! Turtles are the oldest living things. And even Elephants. I don't see THEM eating any meat. So herbivores win by your argument of living longer! "

The rest of the argument was cut off by the thought which said I have to blog about it :(

I know it all sounds so abrupt, but that's what happens when you dump out your actual thoughts, I guess.

But whatever happens, I am remaining an omnivore :)

Marine, go frag that penguin!

The linux version of Doom 3 has been released yesterday alongside a free demo. But if you are not a serious-playful penguin, then the latest demo might be something that you might want to try out atleast, that is if you can download the 460 MB binary.

Oh and don't bother if you pwn an ATi card.

"ATi drivers are not supported yet. New drivers are being developed ASAP at ATi"

Nuff said.
A great anti-great news along side a great news.
"No downloads for my penguin for now.", I hear many people say.
Much louder than the rest, is my voice.

I will let you in on somethings about ATi. Now if you don't own an ATi card and/or you have been living under a rock, you won't know that ATi announces a driver almost every month or so. And that those releases are covered as a main headline in many tech news feeds.

Given that fact, ATi also released a "Doom 3 Hotfix" driver well before schedule for its next installment of driver. (Infact, the hotfix was Catalyst 4.9 whereas the next expected driver version was Catalyst 4.8, and that too not until some weeks later!). This release coincided with Doom3's windows release.

My point is, ATi had obviously worked overtime to ensure windows compatiblity, but skimped with the linux version of its drivers. Actually, ATi doesn't devote a lot of developers for its linux team and even points out the fact next to a sentence pointing to other third party forums that are developing the drivers.

"Maybe it's because not a lot of its users are linux fans?", you think.
Maybe.

"Maybe linux doesn't need constant updates?", you say, proudly showing off your tux tatoo.
No, the drivers are for the 'ardware not the penguin! And considering that Doom3 won't run correctly in the current driver, think for youselves #!!@#.

It's not that I am a Linux fan and want to game in linux or die trying(swear, it's not a double-entendre!). Just couldn't leave this topic "unranted"©.

Read through this forum thread for links to demo and a lot of geek noise on carmack's latest port.

This means war!

Originally recruited by the military to create a War Simulator for the then covert operation of training the soldiers about MOUT combat even in their vacation, Pandemic's Full Spectrum Warriors is a true war-time simulator. In short, FSW is a no-relation-with-Hollywood game. Infact, a look at the trailer would change your ming about Half life 2 being the king of all games.

MOUT, or Military Operations on Urban Terrain, is becoming the only kind of battlefield available today. This is either because of the fast growth of cities or becuase of civilian insurgencies that is plaguing our planet. MOUTs are thousands of times more deadly than a desert or open field operation. A Soldier's fear of MOUTs spring from the fact that they have to walk, eat, shoot and take cover in the enemy's own backyard.

The game is set in contemporary times at a place called, not coincidentally, Southern Zekistan, a fictional country experiencing the real world problems of ethnic cleansing and terrorist sponsorship.

Everything about FSW is different from the run-with-your-guns-ablaze kind of FPS that is prevalent today. For starters, in some operations you don't get to shoot a single bullet. Just command your men to do so. The game is based on real life scenarios and expect you to act like you are in one. The game is more of a soldier's fodder than your normal FPS gamer's.

Though I am yet to buy the game, which I doubt I will, the laurels and accolades that it had received is simply awesome. The game's trailers and screenshots are also a must see. FSW excels at all levels: graphics, sounds, physics, game play, user interface, voice acting, realism....

Saying that this is the best war game is an understatement. In the game, you can employ all the tactics and strategies that you would employ in the real world. The website provides a list of tactics that can be tried out in the game. Some are like providing "for the effects" gunshots while your team mate runs accross an open space, moving in "Stack-formation" along side a wall or a vehicle, using smoke grenades and coverfire to block out the enemie's sight, searching for weapons on enemy dead bodies with two soldiers covering you and a third soldier guarding the body, and the list goes on....

The above tactics apart, the game also supports a wide variety of strategies. Since the game relies on realism, don't expect to see Soul cubes and UFC Plasma guns from DoomIII.

And talking of weapons, something has to be said about the game's physics. Taking cover behind structures is what you will be doing a lot. Expect the same from the terrorists as well, only the terrorists will be sitting in their own house cooking some home-made bombs in their kitchens, to lob at you when you pass by their windows. While taking cover, the "stack formation" comes in handy. But don't expect your cover to remain forever. Building's walls chip away naturally, as bullets and bombs wear them out. Also, don't stand too close to your cover wall, lest you want the concrete chips inflict damage to your face. Bodies too behave naturally to bullet wounds.

Unlike in contemporary games where you are either alive or dead, FSW characters can become injured in the spots where they are actually wounded. Enemies fight even till all they can do is pull the trigger. But as soldier or seargent, depending on what you are, you are supposed to help out other soldiers that are wounded. One of General Patton's many quotes comes to my mind:

"The point is not to die for your contry,
The point is to make some other bastard die for his"


Another war game that was recently released with much controversy is "Shellshock: Nam'67"
The game's cover says :

" "The fear, chaos and atrocities" of our country's (US) involvement in South-East Asia "

and infact, the above statement about summarizes the entire game. What the above statement seems to miss are heads of various men and women on stakes, men being beheaded, diced, sliced, smashed, etc, watching your fellow soldier writhe in pain as he is caught in a vietnamese booby-trap, captured vietnamese soldiers and farmers committing suicide and a lot more common violence, only in close-up.

The game, according to the makers and some critics, is filled with the same fear that US soldiers faced in vietnam. Booby-traps galore, along side headless bodies lying in a pool of blood. And if that ain't gritty enough, you can return to base camp and visit the local brothel.

Your life in the vietnam camp is spent watching the above mentioned visuals in gritty detail, coming back to the base camp and then going back to watch them again. So you will find yourself spending more time in the basecamp.

The base camp is more closer to home than the paddy fields of vietnam. Some 67's radio hits blares from the bull-horn speakers. You can buy a cool one from the bar and sip on it while listening to a DJ. You can also check out the hospital to "visit" the nurse there.

Realism and bringing out the truth behind wars aside, truly, do we need such games? After all these years of playing sugar-coated games which potrays death as a mere delay before respawning, how much of a shock will these games be? With the Doom series getting the blame for bringing gore and violence into teen minds, where will these games be?

All those ethics and morals apart, would you be buying these games? Most people don't want to invest in no-fun games. But times are a changin, with "Counter Strike" like games coming to the front, maybe everybody will get these war simulators and play someday.

But until that day, if you enjoy button bashing action games, then these simulators are not for you. Though I am not sure about "Shellshock:Nam'67", the visuals and other realisms of Full Spectrum Warrior are nuff reasons for buying it.

What's your ISP's capacity?

How do you find out the maximum number of clients that your ISP can handle?

Simple. A bit difficult actually. Okay, it is tough, because I've been doing a lot of research to find it out. But nonetheless, the actual process is straight forward.

1. Ok. You start by finding out your IP address. If you lead a normal life, then going to "Command Prompt" and typing "ipconfig" in a windows box ("ifconfig" in a linux box) will do.
For those eccentric few behind a NAT, you will need to go to a third party website like www.whatismyip.com or www.proxydetect.com to find out your ISP assigned IP address.

2. Copy that IP address and head down to this sweet looking URL.

3. Paste that IP address in the search box. Don't click on the "Search" button yet.
As you can see, there are buttons to press and choices to make :-)
Ok. Here's a minimal list of things to be done.

a. In the alternative databases, select : If you are from,

North America = ARIN
Australia = APNIC
India = APNIC
For the rest of you, try one of the items in the list or go through this list.

b. Next, the object types, select "Route" or leave it to "All"

4. Now click search. Here's my output:
route: 61.95.128.0/17
descr: BHARTI-IN
descr: BHARTI INFOTEL LTD.
descr: Class A ISP in INDIA .
descr: 234 , OKHLA PHASE III ,
descr: NEW DELHI
descr: INDIA
country: IN

5. Take the number-looking part (61.95.128.0/17) along with the slash and the next number to it too and put it in your clipboard.

6. Goto this amazing site. Kinda looks like a cemetry of textboxes, doesn't it? Anyways, search for the text box named "CIDR and Netmask Lookup". Paste the IP there and click search.

Et Voila! The last data field in the next page is what we're looking for!

Here's the data for my IP:-
Number of useable IPs in range : 32766

Have fun!

ATi XP

I felt like the coolest kid in the block....No wait, in the country, maybe.
All the low scores in the tests are not going to keep me down. Infact, now nothing mattered than waiting for my mére to come to India.

For the few weeks before my mother's arrival, I was walking on air. I was ranting to anyone and everyone that stopped by to talk to me about this preciousss...my precciousss...

It all started when I first heard that ATi was tired of sleeping in the ashes and decided to rise out of it. They did and NVidia didn't like it. ATi planned to release a graphic card that skipped many generations. The ultimate cutting edge of a graphics cards were to be released under the name, the ATi Radeon 9700 series.

The ATi 9700 pro, which I had ordered via my brother-in-law and my sister, whom my mother had went to the US to meet, was like a Goliath in God mode. The David of an NVidia watched baffled at the giant while he captured all the market from NVidia, the former one and the only champion.

My old computer was a boxed PC from HCL. It had some antique parts like:

PIII 450 MHz processor,
Intel 440BX motherboard,
32 MB Ram,
20GB Hard drive,
Built-in graphics,
a 15" monitor and
other cheap cards from Aztech(bankrupt) and BitWare.

I was proud to run MS Millennium edition on it. Soon, as it happens in the hardware world, my machine was the slowest in the block.

The timing couldn't have been perfect. I had been planning on upgrading my old jalopy of a computer for some time and was about to proceed to the infamous Ritchie Street to grab some cheap hardware. Since I was, and am, a regular to www.TomsHardware.com, I followed the ATi Radeon's slow progress from a side-bar news headline to a full blown review. I was amazed, like everyone in the hardware world, at the new architecture and all the stuff that I could not comprehend, but I was astounded nevertheless.

I used the fact that my mother was in the US and the fact that my dad isn't too tech savvy (My father asked me if it was essential for my computer education, and I said "Totally!" all the way thinking of Max Payne and other contemporary "educational" softwares). And all that remained was choosing the online reaseller ad sending that list to my BIL and sister. My BIL paid for the card which was reimbursed by mom. All through the weeks that my mom stayed there, I would ask her in the phone if my Radeon has arrived. Even when it did come to them via mail, I bugged them asking how the card looks like and then asking them not to touch it incase some static remained in their fingers and damaged the precioussss circuits.

My biological clock played fool with me almost everyday. Everyday, I will wake up thinking that the day my mom came home will be this week. And almost everyday, I go check the calendar. I wished I was encased in liquid N2 in some suspended animation and thawed me on the day that I would receive my Radeon. Thus went the three weeks....

Another day, and I went to check the calendar. This time, it was not only THE week, but also THE day! My brain seems to have taken the brute-force method of finding out the day or whatever....

My mom landed. We greeted her. We came home. I looked at my mom and my mom just said, "It's in this bag". The world seemed to go slow-mo, as I turned and marched toward the bag. The slow motion was filled with all the junky details like the number of vertex pipelines, the fill-rate, the level of anti-aliasing, the level of anisotropic filtering, the various benchmarking tests and yada yada yada....

For the first few days, I was afraid to try the video card in my old computer. My old computer was AGP 1.0 or AGP 2x, meaning that the maximum data transfer rate was 512MB/sec running at 133MHz (where, x = 66MHz, the speed of pci). The signalling current for AGP 1.0 was 3.3Volts.
This scared me as the Radeon 9700 pro was designed for AGP 3.0 or AGP 8x, at a signalling voltage of 0.8Volts. The 32bit bus runs at 533MHz (8 x pci) with a maximum data rate of 2GBytes/sec.
I knew that the card was a Universal AGP one, but I wasn't gonna risk it. So after countless referencess to ATi's site, tomshardware, AnandTech, sharkyextreme and countless forums, I decided to try my card in my old mother board.

The result was nothing short of amazing. The difference between my old built-in and ATi radeon was evident right from the BIOS screen. I had my mother and father assembled near my monitor and I was like all over the screen while pointed the difference the card made to the display. I was like, "See, look how deep the colors are? It's unbelievable!". And my mama was like, "Uh..huh...You sure it works fine? Then it's ok. I think I see the quality.... I think I left something in the kitchen."

I didn't matter if my mama saw the difference or not. The fact cannot not be denied. I spent the following days playing all the old games and just stood there as the Radeon Pro redefined the way to paint a pixel on the screen.

Then, after a week, I went to the Ritchie Street. Had a blank cheque in my hands. My mind preset with the configuration that will not make my computer the bottleneck for the Radeon God. But unfortunately, this is India, where the costs are sky high and generations old components are the only ones available.

But as it turned out, many of the components that I had in my mind won't fit in the budjet (The Blank cheque? Yeah, but my pop said, "Fifty's tops"). So I squeezed in all these into the Fifty big ones.

P4 2.4GHz processor,
512MB DDR266,
80GB 7200rpm HDD,
Intel i845GBV MoBo,
Microsoft kbd and wheel-mouse optical,
a 17" flat samtron and
philips 2.1 1200Watts speaker

It looked prety neat config back then, trust me. Everyone, after hearing my config, said that that will be their config in two years. All that made me feel good. But I still feel bad not to have bought a 3Gig processor and maybe a faster MoBo. The problem with my current MoBo is that, it has only a AGP 4x slot. Which translates to around 1.1GBytes/sec only :-(

Though all my hardware sources said that no game in the market will require more that an AGP4x and also that only at UXGA resolutions (Ultra eXtended Graphics Array) and more, I still can't help feel that I am not experiencing all of Radeon's goodness.

The night we (me and my "Ritchie street" friend Venkatesh) took all the parts from the store and to my house, he started unpacking the processor. He held the processor and Mother board in his hands, with the anti-static packaging material gloving his hands. I was in a hurry to see the config assembled, bu he kept studying the components and said, "Wait for some time...Do you think it's everyday that I come accross such components?"

After drooling over the components (not literally, ofcourse), we finally started putting it all together. The tower seemed to lack a few screw holes and we had to wait for the next day to go to Ritchie street and change the case. He left. But I was relentless. I assembled the mother board on top of a newspaper spread over my desktop and installed everything there. I even used a screw driver to short two jumper pins to make the machine boot-up. Before the day was over, I had installed a few games and was catching glimpse of how well the card handled all the games.

Enter DaD.

Now I have to tell ya, my dad was opposed to my idea of going to ritchie street to buy my computer. He was into "Branded" PCs like HCL and the like. I for one, knew enough than to buy boxed PCs. They are usually over-priced junks hiding behind colorful and attractive boxes (Kinda reminds you of some expensive software, doesn't it? An OS, maybe. Not sure.)

So now you can imagine the attitude in my father's voice till I got back my Tower. It was one of the, "Told you so"s.

The new configuration felt very light as my radeon took away the burden of graphics processing and rendering from the rest of the computer.
I acquired a lot of games from friends at first and then slowly I started buying them myself. The first few weeks must have driven my radeon crazy. I was constantly running banchmark utilities, in-game benchmarks and yada yada yada, while constantly trying to beat or atleast equal the benchmarks reported online by peers. Then slowly the mania faded, but still lives, leaving only the passion for games.

But I don't enjoy a game completely, if I don't look at the beauty with which my Radeon rendered it. For example, If I had finsihed playing, say DoomIII or Farcry, I usually go through the game again, if possible in fly mode and take in all the beauty with no hurry.

ATi's catalyst (Driver for the card) team is called the best driver team in the graphics industry. Even as the Radeon series was introduced, ATi announced that it would be releasing atleast 8 or so drivers a year. Though it would mean no artefacts in a new game and better stability, it also means that you have to update the software constantly, in addition to updating the DirectX API.

At some point of time, as the Radeon 9800 XT and NVidia's FX series were released, my sister and BIL were preparing to come home to India. I asked them if they could buy me one of those, but they were seriously in need of money and couldn't spare a dollar. Infact they didn't even have money to buy me a iPod or an XBOX.

So I wait. And thus, waiting, I write this blog post, hoping that some of the present tenses would become past tenses.

Parallax Error

Want to play a 3D game of an entirely new sort? Try solving this maze.
"Why would that be new?", I hear you say. Simple. The maze can be seen only by people with cross-eyes or at least pretending to have one.

I am talking about those ever-fascinating "Stereograms".

The first time I was intoduced to one of those was when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I was presented with one in a Rotary Club Get-Together meeting (My father is a member). Naturally, I couldn't help thinking why they would want to present me with a board printed with random noise. And I didn't believe them when they said that there was an animal hiding in there, either.
All I could think of was they cheated me by giving me some cheap "Modern Art".

It took me some time to get over the ridiculous idea of seeing an animal "inside" the random noise, when my sister said she saw something (yes, i always believed my sister). When, later I did actually saw the T-Rex inside with perfect 3D effect, with the background moving when I moved my head, I was completely captivated by stereograms. [Mind You, that was a time when even 2d cartoons were new to me. No cable and no video back then]. From then on, I asked my cousins to show them to me whenever they encountered them in any books.

But only recently did I have the time to find out about them. Stereograms work by deception, which should be obvious. It is one of the illusions that use the eye's ability to perceive depth. It uses slightly displaced dots in horizontal and vertical fashion to create a sense of parallax difference, which the eye perceives as depth. What is ingenious is, actually using that to hide a picture in another picture.

Not just random dots, even text can also be a stereogram!
See hundreds of cool hi-quality stereograms here. Think you have mastered the art of stereograms? Try Stereogrammatical movies. And for people that can't seem to get a hang of it, ther are parallax glasses to the rescue!

I can't help but think of applications for this. Maybe we could write programs to use stereograms to hide another picture/data in an image. The secret could be the depth at which the image is stored or one of the objects in the stereogram itself.
Or maybe a....nah....a 3D display? Nice and fast way to a permanent cross-eye disease.

Our Favourite Gnome is now 2.8'' tall!

Gnome 2.8 just got released. Though KDE has very good Taskbar and a okay looking file explorer, I like Gnome for its elegance and its "just works" attitude at providing simplicity. Gnome has grown from 2.6 to 2.8, but what treats has it to share with us?

According to the developers, Gnome 2.8 has an improved device detection for auto-plug devices and improved network functions. Sriram will need to check this one out. He really needs his usb pen drive and sound card auto-detected. The network improvements, though touted as a major improvement, as far as i can see involves consolidating network applications into one console.

I really liked the macintosh theme (Tiger?) than the others in the screenshots page. Also check out the other major and minor changes done to the Gnome.

My opinion? Gnome 2.8 is not really tall enough to be released.

The Geek sees light, almost.

Sriram was clever enough to get a temporary cathode-based-visual-computer-interface thing, in non-geek terms: a monitor, from the repair guys while they operate on his dead cathode-based-visual-computer-interface thing.

So, the story ends there. The geek will never be back to his human form. Ever.
Even today I saw him lying on his desk while the classes were going on.

"There goes the geek again".

But the real reason for his tiredness was ranted onto us by the geek himself later when he woke up at the lunch break.

The placebo monitor turned out to be, "a thing that flickers badly", to quote him. The few hours that he had spent trying to sync his eyes with the slow refresh rates was not so helpful to his eyes and added to that the cravings of your everyday geek to go through the latest messages from his geek-community. Very bad for the eyes.

Actually, I shouldn't be talking about burning ones eyes with a monitor. I run my monitor at 1280x1024, the highest my monitor would go, at 60Hz. I do see a bit of flicker sometimes, but they are very imperceptible to me. I am thankful for that, because I have heard of people seeing a flicker at 120Hz and above. Weird.

As for sriram, I wish his monitor will be ready on time. Otherwise, we will not have a sleeping beauty of a geek in our college, but a sleeping beauty of a geek with fast flickering eyes.

Dance of the Monkey Boy.

Guess who you will find in the link below and get the monkey boy for free!!!

In there, you will also find the Monkey Boy, nicknamed Stevo by some weird coincidence, in his very own music video! Don't miss the chance!

Step right in folks!
http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html

Welcome to the zoo

Cougar
Panther
Jaguar
BobCat
Tiger
Coyote
Cayman
Falcon
........



More Microsoft codenames here:
http://bink.nu/Default.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=8

Door Knocking

Bob : ...Knock, Knock.
Alice: Who's there?
Bob: Port 2000, Port 14979, Port 56743, Port 1984.
Alice: Well come on in!

Most of the geeks would have got the clue from the characters' name (Alice, Bob) that it somehow relates to security. And a few of the up2date geeks would have known instantly that I was talking about "Port Knocking". Thus the name of the blog, where "Port" in french means "Door" in english :-)

This in itself is not a new concept and definetly not the best way to protect youself from incoming connections. But it adds an extra shell of security to your computer ports. Oh, and this is definetly not for use in public domain ports. Announcing the sequence to the public kinda destroys the concept.

It basically expects an incoming connection from a "friend" of the user who knows the sequence of knocks. A logging Daemon monitoring the ports identifies the knocks. It can also be made time dependent and other Bells and Whistles like multiple knock sequences each for unlocking different ports/services and the like can be attached too.

Kinda reminds me of Harry Potter novels where wizards touch a sequence of bricks to go through to the Diagon Alley. Or those classical movies where theives and detectives use a musical way of knocking the door.

Where are they to be used?
Obviously on any non-public domain ports. I think it is a good candidate to be used in P2P arcitectures like Gnutella, kazaa, etc. But i seriously doubt it will be used in announcing Tracker files in BitTorrent. (What is BitTorrent).

For further info follow this path:
www.portknocking.org

The Animal Connection

Ya know, people have been pretty successful in bringing in animal societies into software architectures. Stuff like social networks, security algos, fault tolerance and plenty more have been modeled after animals.
The latest i heard was a project called "Ant" which imitates an Ant's way of looking for food into the p2p world. This is supposed to reduce risks of RIAA or MPAA following/tracing you.
The project can be found here:
http://antsp2p.sourceforge.net/

Ya know, all this got me thinking. Why not bring in some other animal society into software or something. This i found was not one of my fortes. I started seeing bizzare architectures that would scare the living daylights out of anyone! I mean i was really so desperate, that whenever i see an animal either living or dead, my brain automatically kicks into actions and tries to find where exactly the animal could fit in or something. So far in vain, but it's a real time killer, if you ask me.
Who knows, maybe one day i may be successful in seeing the right connection. Either that or I go mad. Some of my friends are really doubtful about the former though. ;-)
Maybe the connection was all along inventing a game called Connect-the-Animal-While-You-Are-Free-And-Blog-About-It. Who knows.

Geek gone blind.

Today, my "big" friend, college geek and Microsoft luna..er..fanatic was in very bad shape. No not talking about his fat deposits. Let me clue ya. He read the textbook for today's unit test, he wrote his test well, he looked fresh for all the 8 periods, he didn't sleep on the desk,... Certainly, something was wrong with him today. The answer didn't need any questions to be asked. He was lamenting on the terrible thing that happened to him that would cripple him to his current state for almost a week, to anyone that would listen or not listen too. And then the truth was upon us.

Yesterday, during one of his usual 15 minute email check which would eventually add another 100 or so MegaBytes at the end of the day to his Outlook folder, he said he heard a weird rattling sound inside his monitor and then the monitor has gone black, like a creature that has breathed its last rattling breath.

Though some didn't know how to react, most of us did the right thing to cheer him by laughing. But unfortunately, we didn't know he didn't want to be laughed 'at' :-)

More about him in later entries.
He blogs at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/sriram

Hello world!

Just like any geek wannabe, i start this with a Hello World stuff.
Hi blog. I am new here. I will try to talk to you whenever i allow myself. It will always about me and myself, though i might refernce someone sometime too.I am usually laconic when talking, though you can expect me to be wordy online. I will treat you with respect and like a peer (not the English peer).This is not for others to overhear, though they can. T'is more like a penseive or a log sort of thing, where i put in information that sometimes may make nuff sense only to me. No, they will not be encrypted, but out-of-context or irrelevant sometimes.

AK A

Hot Fanta anyone?

This uncool thing was forced on me one dreary day...

I went to ssn engg college to attend their IT symposium, Rezzitech. This, i suppose is the third and final time that i attend this symposium. Participated in all but Paper presentation. Though I couldn't participate because our paper was not selected at the last moment, i wish the paper was chosen. I could have practised presenting the paper there. Anyways, I couldn't and I did badly in all the other events' prelims. Before the announcement of the preliminary round results, we had a lunch break. That won't be forgotten easily. It was simply the worst lunch I was served, albeit for free. The "queue", more like an unruly mob, was simply too "dynamic" to stand, literally. After some half or so hour of being pushed and pulled by various college students reveling in the crowd, we were pushed inside the dining hall where there was a queue that was as long as the "queue" outside was wider. After some slow progress, finally got some food on the plates. I figured i can't stand in the queue again in case I ran out of food and so asked for extra helpings of each (food) stuff that was being served. Since i was too hungry, I ate some of them without complaint. But the revulsion to such foodstuff overtook me and i abandoned the plate on the floor. The organizing committee figured that most of us would be so stuffed with that food, that they thought only some will ever need ice cream and so I was left with no ice cream. No ice cream! Can you believe that?

Disappointed, me and my friend Anguraj, went to the proper canteen and bought ourselves a Fanta and a Sprite. Of all the firsts in my life, that was the first time I actually drank a hot fanta. The man serving there said that he kept it in the refridgerator just then. We sat inthe canteen for some time, hoping that our fanta and sprite wud cool down to room temperature. We gulped it down anyway because that never happened. The hot wind that was blowing prevented it.