Jumbled Thoughts
Kannan's personal space (a.k.a. Views of a Patzer!)
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.
Chess UCI protocol tracer utility
Jan 4th
I have this bad habit of starting coding on some application, bringing it to an alpha-ready stage, dropping it and moving on to the next one. Fortunately I don’t do this in my day job, else I’d have got the boot long time back.
Couple of months back, I was working on a chess application. I will not be able to discuss it further here, as I still think that app idea is a good one and is highly marketable. My chess GUI had to support UCI engines. UCI (Universal Chess Interface) is a protocol used by Chess GUI to talk to chess engines (see Figure 1). There are other GUI <-> Engine protocols, like Winboard, but UCI is an effort to create a standard. Since my software had to support all the existing UCI engines, I decided to understand the UCI protocol fully. I looked around for some way to capture the UCI transactions that go in between the GUI and the engine, but couldn’t find any tool to do that. So I wrote my own.
[Figure - 1]
In the attached file, you will find uciplug.exe, the main UCI tracer application. Tracer is a simple pump, which works as shown in Figure 2:
[Figure - 2]
It acts like a network repeater, by passing on everything it gets (either from the engine, or from the GUI) to the corresponding recipient, the only difference being it also logs that message to a file. Multiple instances can be used for running more than one engine simultaneously.
Download
[Download not found]
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!
Interview with Vishwanathan Anand – IBN Live videos
Dec 26th
Recently CNN-IBN ran an interview with Chess world champion Vishwanathan Anand (Vishy). I didn’t catch this on TV, but ,thanks to IBN-Live, found them in their site.
The show is split in to 5 parts. Click on the following links to open them in a new window. The site needs no registration to view the videos, so enjoy!
Oh no, Demonoid is down again!!
Nov 12th
Demonoid, one of my favorite trackers, is down again. I was not running my torrent client last week, as it was used for doing “important” things like playing “Super bounce out” and “Half-life” by my relatives. I saw the “CRIA blocked us” message in Demonoid.com only this morning, a bad start to the week, I’d say!!
Demonoid.com lately has been giving lots of problems – site won’t load, blank pages, torrent files won’t download – all these irritating stuff, and now the site itself has “officially” gone down. Luckily the trackers are up, so your current downloads won’t be affected. Lets pray Demonoid finds a nice home in some country where people have other jobs than shutting down the torrent sites. How about Sweden? 
Talking of Sweden, I read Prince is trying to curb Piratebay with the help of Web Sheriff. What a joke! Read this “fan article” to understand why Websheriff is such an interesting personality.
Good programmer = Sense of humor + Programming skills
Jul 27th
I was trying to setup a debug machine today. My setup required a specific version of BIOS; I booted in to DOS and tried flashing the new version. The flash went on well and during the verification phase, the tool found couple of invalid regions. It automatically tried erasing/flashing again. I was impressed; “Good. The programmer is smart enough to implement this auto-retry option, else It’d have taken ages to find out this data region corruption”, I thought and was silently thanking that programmer. It was premature, immediately the tool stopped and showed me the following screen.
[Snapshot: Tool output]
[Close up of the message]
The tool very helpfully said “Your platform is dead & have a nice day!”. “Have a nice day”??? Though, now I need to take the flash, go to the lab and program it using a flash programmer, I couldn’t help laughing at this cheeky message!
[Spoiler] Harry potter and the deathly hallows
Jul 19th
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I am a big fan of Harry potter (HP)! I got hooked in to pottermania around 2001, since then I have collected all original HP books (all thoroughly earmarked) + audio books (US Version – Jim Dale) + first 4 HP movie DVDs. Like every other HP fan, I went ahead and booked the final installment – Harry potter and the deathly hallows – around June beginning. Indiaplaza provided an excellent offer, which I haven’t seen beaten by any of the other Indian stores yet.  My wife was like – “eh!? why did you spend Rs650 on a kids book?!”, what could I tell her? Certain things are better left unanswered, right?!
As all muggles know, the book is going to come out this Saturday 12.01am. Only two more days to go, yayyy!! This time around, the publishers have really beefed up the security, but still some goof ups did happen and couple of copies leaked out (Check out these torrents:  Complete text of the book, all pages (photographed) )
BTW, I noticed yesterday that the HP5 (Order of phoenix) movie was uploaded in Google Videos, couldn’t find it today though! Should be in Veoh or Youtube…check it out and let me know if you find a valid link 
Though I was determined not to read any of the spoilers this time, today morning I gave in to the temptation and read the initial reviews of the final book here and here. Not much leaked there, compared to the more interesting spoilers in this page, telling us who dies when and other things!
I checked my order status in Indiaplaza and was pleasantly surprised to see the status as “ReadyToShip“. C’mon guys, what are you waiting for? Why not do a DeepDiscount and send me the copy today itself?!
Is Windows XP the right OS for an ATM?
Jun 10th
Have you ever wondered what the ATM runs on? Most 0f the ATMs in India (and all around the world) run some flavor of Windows. Nowadays they use XP (some with SP2, if the technical team is good) but I remember seeing Windows 98 (saw BSOD once in one of the Chennai ATMs); Also read somewhere that they used to have embedded Windows NT, OS/2 and sometimes even Windows CE! I know what you must be thinking now – How safe is it, right? A good design should put the ATMs in their own private network, if so I only will be worrying “Who is going to reset the ATM when Windows crashes?  ”; now I realize why the security person in ATM seems to be knowledgeble on the machines…talk of all the ways one can gain some IT gnaan!
Above is an ATM of the famous VTB bank of Russia, powered by an unactivated copy of Windows XP. Look at a closeup of the activation dialog box below.
I wonder why ATMs don’t have their own OSs! When we talk so much about security / WORMS & malware stuff, does it make sense to use a general purpose OS for something so critical as an ATM? Even a cellphone costing a mere INR 4000 has so any OS flavors to choose from, why is the ATM you withdraw that INR 4000 from is stuck with a most-often-unpatched version of Windows? As Obelix would have said – “These ATM makers are crazy!!”
Check out these interesting links related to Windows Crashes:
- Windows crashes on Flight information screens and ATMs
- ATM crash here and here
- Slot machines too…
- Gallery full of Windows crashes on ATMs/slot machines
- Oh no! Even trains are not spared & other Public computer errors
WinTricks: Collection of Windows Tips and Tricks
Jun 7th
WinTricks is a database of hundreds of Tips & Tricks, covering Windows 95/98/…/XP/2003. No Vista tricks, but hopefully will be updated in the next release. This is a standalone Windows program (what else?!), in an easily browsable e-book format. Download it from here. This can come very handy.
BTW, does this remind you of the great VDAT, or am I the only fellow feeling nostalgic?
Automatically create Podcasts from your posts – How To?
Jun 6th
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Sign up to Talkr or Odiogo. They offer an unique service: They allow you to automatically convert your text posts in to Audio podcasts and publish the feed. The generated MP3s are stored and served by these sites, so you don’t have to worry about bandwidth and server maintenance.
How does this magic work?
Click here to see the different components at work.
If you have ever tried the Text-to-Speech conversion programs in Windows/Mac, you know what I am talking about and need no explanation, if not read this please
Other features:
Talkr has been around since 2005 (AFAIK), Odiogo is relatively a new service. There are even plugins to integrate these services seamlessly with your Wordpress blog: Odiogo plugin for Wordpress & Talkr Plugin for Wordpress. I am sure other blogging platforms can easily be supported with little or no modification.
Personally I won’t go down this path as I prefer to hear my voice in my Podcasts, but this surely is an excellent service for those who don’t want to do everything by their own.
[Update (June 10th, 2007: Fixed all the typos. Thanks Bob for pointing out.]
