Tidbits
Intel-speak during out-of-office hours
Aug 8th
There is no denying that the corporate work culture has a big impact on our off-office life. For example, if you are a SW development manager by profession, you automatically tend to map many of the things learnt in the office on to normal house activities – ‘Lets put a detailed requirements list for the the new entertainment unit we are going to buy this weekend”, “Hmm…this seems too risky. We need to think of the mitigation plans now before going on with this!”. If your partner is not from IT background, God help you! 
How many times have we checked ourselves after looking at the blank / quizzical stares from others?! It has happened more than once in my case! Today, during lunch time, I decided to watch out for Intel lingo that people use. Kinda funny to notice so many of the corporate terms becoming a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.
Switched to 1Mbps Airtel Unlimited DSL
Apr 19th
When BSNL came up with the 2Mbps and 1Mbps plan, most of my friends who had Airtel 256Kbps line, jumped on to the BSNL bandwagon. I didn’t, for the simple reason that BSNL came with a data transfer limit! That is, only the first 1.25GB or so is free every month and after that you pay per MB. Ridiculous! Since I have had some bad experiences earlier with my 512Kbps/1.5GB-limit Airtel plan, I decided to stay away from all these and stick to my good old 256Kbps *unlimited*. Soon after that, Airtel upgraded me to 512Kbps unlimited, which I took with out much thinking. Now, after 1 year, Airtel offered (again!) to upgrade me to 1Mbps unlimited!!
The total amount comes to 2,222INR/month. Only today the 1Mbps plan got activated. Look at the following picture to see my new 1Mbps in action, downloading MinGW at 128KBps Worth every penny (or paisa…whatever!!)
Site outage: How to handle?
Mar 30th
I recently shifted out of my IIS setup in to a LAMP account. The site’s up time was much better, until yesterday, when suddenly my site was sucked in to the Internet black hole. Repeated help-desk queries pointed me to a routing issue in their end. Finally it got resolved after nearly 7 hours. If you were disappointed (dream on!) to find my site down, I apologize; My site is up again and hopefully will remain so for sometime to come.Due to my site downtime, I got to do other (positive) things.
- Computer offtime: I didn’t get to check my email (my site’s) for the entire black out. I found it actually refreshing! Believe me, it suddenly makes you feel you have more hours per day than usual.
- Got to read some books:
- I got to read the 4 Tamil magazines I bought one month back. No, I am not kidding. I hadn’t even touched those magazines since I bought them last month. I was able to catch up with whats hot (or warm, or cold!) in Gollywood (Tamil film industry) finally.
- Read couple of chapters from the excellent Advanced Windows Debugging (Addison Wesley). Nothing can beat the smell of paper and the feeling of the book in your hand! Kindle won’t be there in my wishlist ever, I guess.
- Sleep: I wouldn’t have believed how refreshing a 3 hours nap could be, if I hadn’t experienced it personally. I woke up fully charged, but soon felt deflated when I found out the site was not up yet. Damn, this site is too much interwoven with my day-to-day activities, more than I’d admit actually.
- TV: Watched Roadies 5.0. Interesting reality show. I wanted Ankita to come in again, but she lost…Hmm, Shambavi being there is also good in a way, as her absence could have reduced the masala in the show.
- Movies: I watched Fargo. I am a big fan of Coen brothers; I am collecting their films, still 5 more to go
Now that the site is up, I am back to my usual blogging self, but I’d surely miss all those other things that I like to do. Computers **do** eat up your time like anything.
Bottomline: Stay away from blogging (and computers) at least a day every week. Enjoy the other good things in life! And, come back to blogging with full josh
Student life: Odd exam superstitions
Mar 16th
One of my school friends had this habit of wearing the same shirt everyday for all the days of an exam – be it the quarterly or the annual, we were sure he’d wear the same yellow full sleeves day after day. The shirt was too worn out, totally faded (I came to know it was actually an yellow shirt, only when he told me!), in fact I remember seeing couple of patches in the arm pit area, but all these didn’t stop him from trusting his old shirt. Nay sir, never ever did he come with out his good old "yellow" shirt!
This made me think why I had no such beliefs or "superstitions" myself….may be if I had something my grades wouldn’t be this abysmal. Anyway, all the shirts I used to wear to college were kind of worn out already – things other than clothes were of interest to me then (no..no..what you are thinking is wrong!) – so I guess I had this same-object luck all the time
Thinking about it, I now realize that nearly all my friends had at least one exam-superstition. One of my 9th standard friends didn’t cut his hair during the annual exam, while another friend didn’t take bath through out the exams This was kind of awkward for all of us as he used to sweat a lot!! I am used to skipping bath too, during exams, but that was purely because I thought I could use that 15 minutes for reading couple of more pages – I used to open the text book only the day before the exam, you see, so I needed all the time that I could get for at least passing the exam. Maths and Chemistry were the prime candidates for me, to skip bath, during my school/UG days.
During the exams, I have noticed God becoming an important entity in all students’ lives. My mom used to shout at me, to see the God before going to the exams, but most of the times her sound advice didn’t penetrate my numb skull as my mind was full of some formulae or some text which I absorbed (read, "mugged up!") in the last minute! My level of talking usually went down during exams – Aha…may be this was my exam-superstition, if you can call it one – "to talk less", as I was afraid if I talked about other things, I would lose the thread of what I learnt for the next exam.
Superstitions used to vary a lot; From "I will eat only 2 idlies in the morning of the exam" to "I will come only by the 8.30 bus" to "I will make use of only this hero pen for all the exams" to "I will wear the same slipper/dress everyday"; there were too many to count here. Luckily, my friends’ circle was made of so many varied characters, I had a nice exposure to this wonderful world of exam superstitions. There were couple of weird habits too – "bringing a peacock feather and keeping it out near the paper during the exam" beats it all! One of my 8th standard friend used to do this. "Tying a knot in the corner of the hand-kerchief at the start of the exam and untying it only after the exam" was an intriguing one too.
I am pretty sure these habits die hard. Only a small percentage of people who used to have these beliefs during their school days grow out of them. These habits are carried forward in to the corporate world too….wait…is this probably why my colleague was stinking so much that day during his presentation?? may be, may be not!
2008 Top 20 Billionaires: What do they do with so much money?
Mar 8th
Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates and that Mexican fellow to become the world’s richest person. His net worth is at $62 billion USD.
Pop quiz: Do you know how many zeroes are there in a billion??
New Yahoo R&D lab: Is Yahoo hiring or firing?
Mar 6th
Yahoo announced a new R&D lab in Bangalore yesterday. This lab, it looks like, will be the center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies. To quote Washington Post: “The company has hired Rajeev Rastogi, who has moved from head of Bell Labs India to lead the new lab, and assemble a team of scientists and engineers to focus on new approaches to information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing, the company said. It did not provide details of the number of staff it plans to hire for the lab. The company plans to hire sociologists, micro-economists, and computational scientists among other categories of staff for the lab, the spokeswoman said.“
Interestingly, only recently Yahoo! India asked 45 of its employees to quit. And, AFAIK, Yahoo is expected to let go many more across the world. So, why is Yahoo! opening a new R&D lab in India now? All the new reqs that have been posted in their job DB, as well as the walk-ins they have setup show that the new lab is not going to be staffed only by internal transfers…hmm…external hiring in full flow, when internally, people are being redeployed. Crazy, eh?!
Also, what is the guarantee whoever joins now in this R&D lab won’t be asked to leave tomorrow, when Microsoft takes over Yahoo?! Hmm..too many “what if”s, I feel.
Yahoo!!! Demonoid tracker is up again…
Feb 20th
Only yesterday I posted something regarding Demonoid. Today morning (IST), I was pleasantly surprised to see Demonoid’s tracker up and running. You know what it means?? I can finish off all of my 27 torrents that stopped when Demonoid went down now Yay!!
It looks like, Demonoid is now hosted in Malaysia. Hmm…are Malaysian laws flexible enough for Demonoid to survive there, or is it going to be another Canadian-saga once more? Lets see. When I was in Malaysis for sometime, I got the impression Malaysian govt. had some strong rules against piracy. Prob, they dont have any stringent cyber laws yet (Off topic: I missed Cyberjaya when I was there, heard many good things about it 
)
Anyway, leave these worries for later and leech away happily, now that the big daddy is back!!
Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!
Feb 1st
Today Microsoft has made a proposal to buy Yahoo!. All the outstanding stocks sum up to a whooping amount of $4.4bn ($31/share). This is an amazing offer and if the deal goes through, Microsoft will get a good holding to take Google heads on. The news just popped up, I am sure before I hit the bed tonight (IST), the web will be abuzz with this. Couple of things I noted in the initial reports:
IndiaInfoline states:
Microsoft has developed a plan and process that will include the employees of both companies to focus on the integration of the combined business. Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.
Hmm…so the headcount reduction Yahoo announced some days back holds good or is it going to increase? Will Microsoft clean out Yahoo’s house…sac all the no ROI projects? Specifically, what is the impact going to be on Yahoo India where most of the work is of sustenance nature (Quote: one of my friends working there)??
Another thing to note is the amount Microsoft is offering – $31/share. Already the prices of Yahoo stocks have gone up by $9.82, after seeing the MS proposal. This brings the price to $29.1. Has Microsoft offered a low price / stock?? I am not sure (my knowledge of how money works is very limited). BTW, you can see the actual letter sent by Microsoft to Yahoo board of directors here.
Interesting things that may happen, if the deal goes through:
- Microsoft will become “Microsoft!“, trying to keep the “Yahoo!” tradition alive
- Finally, you will be able to send messages to Xbox Live from Yahoo!
- Yahoo mail and Hotmail will be merged. More potential users for Hotmail.
The potential beneficiaries will be the Yahoo shareholders – a massive payday for them today
Bobby Fischer is dead!!!
Jan 18th
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“The United States is evil. There’s this axis of evil. What about the allies of evil — the United States, England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers.” — Bobby Fischer
Ex chess World champion, Bobby Fischer, is dead! I am not kidding, this is real news and not some hoax. It was a shock, reading that news item. I know it should not have been, after reading/hearing all his rantings over the years, but still it was. That mystery around Fischer will be missing from now. Has Fischer really left behind a void?? Debatable. But no one can deny the fact that Fischer was a real genius over board and his death is going to have an impact on all chess players’ minds. The reason for his death is unknown.
What is the impact? What will happen now?
- Be ready for the conspiracy theories. Don’t be surprised if you hear that U.S poisoned Fischer, or there was a secret service team dispatched to eliminate Fischer.
- Less news for news papers and Philipines/Icelandic radio stations. They won’t hear anymore anti-semitic remarks from Fischer.
- People will keep debating who is the strongest between Kasparov and Fischer.
- Karpov *can* boldly claim that he’d have crushed Fischer, had their WC match happened in 1975.
- No more updates to his classic “My 60 memorable games“, nor any more fake “My 61 memorable games” possible.
- People who stole money from Fischer, if at all it was true, will sleep peacefully from now.
- U.S. authorities can forget about Fischer breaking the U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslav (in 1992) and start pursuing other useful things.
- No one will know for sure what happened in Pasadena jailhouse.
- No one will claim any more that all games between Russian players were setup or prearranged.
- Chess community will eventually forget Fischer and move on. He will be just another page filler in a chess history book. Â
One thing is for sure: Fischer’s games will be studied and admired by generations and generations of chess players to come.
Let’s forget all the bad things surrounding Fischer and lets just enjoy his games. Hopefully our posterity will remember him for what he was over a Chess board than what he was as a person.
Rest in Peace Fischer; We already miss you
External links:
- Articles reporting his death
- Associate press article
- Canadian press article
- Reuters article
- CNN-IBN article
- Key dates/facts from Fischer’s life.
- Official (?!) Fischer site
- This site is treasure trove of Fischer info. Starting from his Icelandic passport to Garry Kasparov’s appearance fees, you will find many interesting things here. Don’t miss his radio interviews!
- Chessbase article on Fischer’s radio interview.
Crazy online sites & Einstein!
Jan 4th
Every mundane task of our daily lives has its presence in Internet nowadays. Online stores for all those super malls, movie review sites for the reviews in our morning news papers, online magazines of nearly every print magazine out there, the list goes on and on. This is good, in the sense, any one can come up with a good idea or try to emulate the real world task solution in the online world to earn; Talk about entrepreneurship possibilities!
One crazy online-ification of a common real world activity is the bunch of confession sites that have popped up in the recent years. These sites carry thousands and thousands of confessions (petty ones to the really sick ones, sometimes with lurid descriptions) by real people. The idea of providing an online space for public confession sounds like a good idea. But, the problem starts when you start reading others confessions, because 90% of them are related to carnal activities or activities that create an yuck feeling deep down in your stomach. The lurid descriptions can rival Playboy or Hustler anytime!
These sites offer the confessions categorized in to a neat list of containers. For example, look the left pane in one site:
How nice of the site owners to provide us with a “Top rated” and “Most read” lists 
I guess, the top rated list items are determined by the number of “I like it” clicks by the readers, but the question is why would anyone read another person’s confession and say “I like it“? Do they like the confession content or the fact that the other person was bold enough to come online and confess?? These sites just cater to the voyeuristic basic instinct in each one of us.
One other effective online idea is the cyber begging. I am not referring to those sites setup for collecting donations for some natural calamity or something, but these are for covering personal expenditures. Some interesting links:
- Yahoo directory has a section under “Societies and Culture” for E-Pan handling
- Tom Locke sent a snail mail to 100 companies asking for some freebies. Results are listed in his site.
According to Wired, this trend of e-pan handling is dwindling, which may be true. But, that’s what people said about spam too.
Bottomline: you don’t have to be an Einstein to make a quick buck in the internet!
