I get only spam in my JumbledThoughts inbox nowadays. My wife never misses to make fun of this; Though it is irritating (getting spam, not my wife’s jabs!), I have learnt to live with that, like all the other netizens. Daily my mail client downloads close to 50 mails, 40 out of which tell me why I should buy viagra or how to become the next richest man in the world (Have you ever wondered why the person who sent that didn’t become richer using his *own* technique??). After being spammed for 10 years now, I have kinda become an expert in weeding out the unwanted mails. But, amongst all the usual crap, the following mail caught my eye some days back.
Dear Sir/Madam,I am Mr. G. Bertino, STMicroelectronics Company. GENEVA SWITZERLAND.Our company deals on the importation and exportation.
Such as we mainly manufacture & export all kinds of micro and electronics,who has it worldwide headquater s in GENEVA SWITZERLAND.
My company is currently recruiting Representatives/Agents that will assist us with some logistics jobs as well asreceiving payments on our behalf and remitting back to us.Please contact us for more information if you are interested in being an agent of my company. You will be given more information about the job and your remuneration.
I expected this to last only 2 hrs max, how wrong I was!! Its been 2 days now and still I have 2 more blogs to migrate
I moved to a Linux hosted plan, from my Windows one (host being the same). This move, I am sure, is going to be good for me in the long run. Anyway, I was not making use of any ASP.NET or reporting services or blah blah…all I needed and ran was pure PHP and MySQL! Now that, I have got my blog up, I can really appreciate how easy it is to setup things in Linux…SSH rocks! Till the entire migration completes, expect to see broken links and dead pages.
I also am trying out WordPress MU…needs some changes to be done by my host. If that pans out well, I might think of implementing one of my ideas based on that…lets see (fingers crossed!). BTW, I finally got rid of my old bloated theme…how do you like this new theme?
P.S: For the “in house thinktanks”, PCAD is up at the usual URL. Login and brainstorm!!
Do you remember the hoax (?!) mail that circulated circa 2002 which claimed President Bush’s IQ to be 91?? You watch these videos posted online and you will start believing them
Compilation of Bush’s goofy moments from his speeches:
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:
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
Great song. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with RichterScales‘ viewpoint, you need to admit it is funny. Click here to get the MP3 of this song.
“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 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.
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.
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!
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!
Not feeling well, don't seem 2have the energy to do even normal thngs - only adv is it gave a perfect reason for skipping work today! Yay... 1 week ago
 
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.
