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.