The Eternal Truth...

There are only 3 ways to write a blog... The Right Way, The Wrong Way and MY Way :-)

Programming Myself....

If you want something you never had, you must do something you never have done!!! - That's meee!!! can't be better:-)

Dr.APJ in Yahoo Answers

Our President, Dr. APJ. Abdul Kalam answered for a open question in yahoo anwers. Look who else answered...

Kiran Bedi ...
Leander Paes ...
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ...
Akum Longchari ..

Guess how many replies he got ..16040.

Why don't we all say hi there and answer the question and joing with our NEW TREND man ... Go Here and see for yourself

Attitude is everything

Attitude makes all the difference in our lives.
There once was a woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed she had only three hairs on her head.
"Well," she said, "I think I'll braid my hair today?"
So she did and she had a wonderful day.The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and saw that she had only two hairs on her head. "H-M-M," she said, "I think I'll part my hair down the middle today?"
So she did and she had a grand day.
The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that she had only one hair on her head.
"Well," she said, "today I'm going to wear my hair in a pony tail."
So she did and she had a fun, fun day.
The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that there wasn't a single hair on her head.
"YEA!" she exclaimed, "I don't have to fix my hair today!"

Attitude is everything. I know i will have these days soon. But i guess i have mended my atitude like the lady.Gonna shave it all:-)

Wasted in College!!!

Engineering College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -istor, -bes, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the types of television systems we have in the world. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named NTSC and PAL. Sometimes, when I'm watching tv, either at my place or a friends place, i wonder which TV system it is. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.

After you've been through college you can do your masters :-) which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to do a masters that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in compuers,mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on.

Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. But then no one else helped me giving gyan the way i do, so i ended up doing Masters in Software Sytems- what a waste of life!!!

PS addiction

OOh aaah ouch !!! I can't move my hand ! Even my fingers are protesting as I type. Coz all I've been doin` is playing Playstation games on my kick ass TV ! My friends are all having their minutes of fun, havin` a good laugh at me ! But i had my last laugh when they came over to my place and I just turned on a PS2 game - Soul Calibur.. NOW, its them, they are more hooked to that gaming device than me. All day long they call and ask me what time i am back home from work, so that they can play the game.

Getting stressed out at work is normal, but playing a good game of Tennis or Soul Calibur or even mortal kombat is even more stressfull. Its the stress that you would love. I have started t o have a good collection of games now. Smash court Tennis,Gun, Call of duty, Final Fantasy XII, Need for Speed - carbon, Unreal tournament( downloaded from Torrents), Tom clancy's splinter cell,Black( reversed engineered from another DVD),Beach volleyball, Cricket 2007, FiFa 2007, Combat Elite, Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas, Gran Turismo - 3, Top Spin, Sega games collection, God Of war, Soul Calibur, Mortak Komat- Armageddon - these are some i regularly play and can think of now. Trust me, all you need is one game and your are hooked... I am off now home, to play a few more and become the undisputed one.

"yeah d00d u just got pawned by another n00b - 31337"

Fathomless Genius?

On Aug. 11, 1966, a fishing boat came upon a badly bruised man floating in the water off Brest, France, clutching an inflatable life raft. He identified himself as Josef Papp, a Hungarian-Canadian engineer, and claimed he had just bailed out of a jet-powered submarine that had crossed the Atlantic in 13 hours

The media laughed at this, but Papp insisted he had built a cone-shaped sub in his garage that could reach 300 mph using the same principle as a supercavitating torpedo. He even wrote a book, The Fastest Submarine, to answer his critics … but somehow this failed to explain how the sub worked, or why plane tickets to France had been found in his pocket, or why a man matching his description had been seen boarding a plane to France hours earlier.

For what it's worth, Papp did patent a number of other inventions, including a fuel mixture composed from inert noble gases. So maybe he was telling the truth

The Chernobyl Design Pattern

I have done this a lot in the past, but the only thing that was missing was the name. Infact this technique was the one that catapulted my career. It just required some logical thinking and some one to put this into practice. I was thrilled when i stumbled onto this article.. Heheh .. Now i am taking this to the new level, by just giving the link. But just in case you don't have the time to read the whole stuff, here is the funda - "Take your worst bug, the ugliest part of your code, the part that is so bad, so radioactive that no one can touch it without getting killed, and you make it private and inaccessible, and put a new interface around it, essentially entomb it in concrete so that no one can get close to it. In other words, if you can't fix it, at least contain the damage."

This is effectively explained using Intel and Microsoft as the subject. Thier stratergies and what they adopted to be numero uno in this undaunted world. You can read more here. Rob has done an excellent work in coining a very good name for it :-)

Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm

This is what i was waiting for.For a long time now SHA was secure algorithm & was the domain of hopeless research in many scientist's mind. heheheh.. i was also secretly tryin this. But now i guess, In few years from now SHA-1 will be obsolete, Thanks to this chinese professor.Just wondering what the feel would be when you will be the only person who knows a world class secret!!!

More can be read HERE. Just check out how cool Ms. Wang is trying to be!!!

Top 10 Reasons Why I hate Top 10 Lists of Top Reasons of hating the Top 10 reasons!!

I don't know what i did in office today. Just passed time. ok maybe there was 2 hrs of productive work, but nothing more than that. So i thought why not compile a list of Top 10 Reasons Why I hate Top 10 Lists of Top Reasons of hating the Top 10 reasons!!. I know I already feel like stapling my head to carpet for 4 hrs is better than this. What what the heck...

10. I have to count -> binary ??

9. I have to count backwards. This is crazy
8. I hate counting backwards, unless i am in a space shuttle.
7.I am forced to make a list now.
6. I like 6. I want to stop here.
5.5 more to go
4. what for( read four) am i doing this?
3. two, one
2. you still reading, u must be genius.
1. this is my most crappy post.

Global warming and now global dimming!

Knew all about the green houses and global warming but saw a program recently about global dimming. For those that don't know what it is, the carbon pollutants from burning the likes of gas and petrol emits small carbon particles, these then rise and sit in the upper atmosphere. These particles are actually smaller then the normal particles that would sit and attract water droplets which in turn would forms clouds. The result is that there are far more smaller water droplets forming the clouds, these in turn reflect more of the suns light back into space hence the term global dimming.

Global dimming has in effect been countering global warming but recent changes in emmission laws around the world has meant that global dimming is now receding due to the use of catalytic converters in cars and more filtering of carbon emmissions.
Net result is that all the theories in global warming have not taken global dimming into account and the experts reckon that by 2040 there could be dramatic changes (rises) in the earths average temperature resulting in the Greenland ice caps starting to melt, once this starts there's no going back and things will just continue to spiral out of control.
I suppose if you look hard enough you can find all sorts of doom and gloom stories but there's not a lot the average person can really do but what sort of future is there for the children?
There's no moral to the story but what have I done as an individual? Well I now only use my car when I really need it, walk most places, try to work from home as far as possible rather then drive in and changed most of the bulbs in the house.

Bush hid the facts - a bug????

For those of you using Windows, do the following:

1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.
Is it just a really weird bug???

Most people think it’s a Windows Notepad easter egg (I thought so myself, to be honest), but in fact, it isn’t. It’s just a lousy Notepad bug. Let me explain…
I was myself curious about the cause of this phenomenon, and I found out that this text is not the only one to cause problems. There are other strings that cause Notepad to screw up, including “this app can break”, which was another version of the bug that generated a lot of buzz. I’ve personally tested a series of strings that have the same effect, including “this api can break”, “this cat can split”, “jane can not dance”, “text wit hou tcaps” and even “abcd efg hij klmno” and “xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx”. What do these phrases have in common? They are made up by four words made up by four, three, three and five letters, all lowercase. So, by induction, all “4-3-3-5″ strings should work.
Now, let’s get to why this thing happens. First of all, it seems that Notepad writes the files just fine, it just can’t read them again correctly. As a proof, try opening your saved file, the one that Notepad screws up, with another text editor. I used EditPlus and it turned out to be OK. So why the Notepad thing then? Well, it’s a Windows thing. Notepad uses a Windows function that allows it to figure out whether a text file is Unicode or not. And that function, my friends, is the one that screws it up. Because the way it checks can easily be described as “guessing”. And it guesses that the file is actually Unicode, and not Ascii, as it is supposed to be.
Now, two different but similar explanations can be given.
The first is that, after the ASCII-to-hex conversion of the string, Notepad rearranges the hex codes not according to ASCII standards, but to Unicode, and that messes it up. Here’s the example:
Take “bush hid the facts”. The hex codes (they can be seen with any hex editor you want to download) for the string are:
62 75 73 68 20 68 69 64 20 74 68 65 20 66 61 63 74 73
Arrange the codes to make up Unicode characters and you get:
7562 6873 6820 6964 7420 6568 6620 6163 7473
You’ll notice that every code is hyperlinked. If you click on each one of them, you’ll see that each one represents a Chinese (I think) “letter”.
So this whole thing’s cause is the coincidence that the 18 ASCII characters happen to represent 9 Unicode characters. And, of course, Windows’ inability to determine the right encoding of the file.
The second explanation is slightly different, but the basics are the same: the difference between ASCII and Unicode. It’s just a matter of Notepad defaults. You see, when you save the file, in the “Encoding” field, the default drop-down is set to ANSI. So, by default, Notepad saves as ANSI. But if you do a File -> Open, the default Encoding is set to Unicode. That’s exactly what happens when you double click a saved file. Notepad knows the path, but not the Encoding. So it uses the default Unicode encoding, which spits the Chinese characters as explained above.
And that’s about it. No easter eggs, no conspiracies, no Bush interventions. Just plain old Microsoft

Secret Single Behaviour!!!

Anyone who is a devout fan of Sex and the City already knows what Iam referring to, although the term itself is pretty self-explanatory. The key to an SSB, your Secret Single Behavior, is that it is something you do indulgently and exclusively when alone because the presence of another person, especially a girl and extra-especially a girlfriend, ruins it because it makes you self-conscious about your utterly bizarre behavior.

Here are some common examples of SSBs:
1.Dancing by yourself in your underwear when there's no music playing
2.Singing loudly to the radio with the window down in spite of your truly wretched singing voice (extra coolness points if the crazy screaming mofo on the median stops to look at you).
3.Eating your entire dinner over the sink so you don't have to do any dishes (BRILLIANCE)
4.Taking a late shower, and smelling yourself all through the day..
5.Locking the dogs out of the room & mastrubating for 45 mins continuously:-) & reaching office 20 mins late. Heheheheh i have had people tell me this boosts thier morale.
6.Browsing porn in office.
7.Walking around the house wearing nothing but Superman/Superwoman underpants.
8.Working on the laptop while in the restroom.
c'mon readers tell me whats yours ??

Underperforming Men In Blue

The selectors have given Sehwag too many chances.Drop Sehwag, I would be gutted if they pick him for the series against West Indies and Sri Lanka. IMO, ideally I'd want to see Ganguly opening again with Tendulkar like the old times from the mid-1990s; Sachin and Saurav used to be the most feared pair in ODI Cricket before Sehwag even made his debut. And another thing is that they need to look at Dinesh Karthik as a specialist batter. Just wonder if they put half the effort to improve his batting skills then they have worked on Pathan, Karthik seems to have the confidence and the ability to go a long way

And come on, somebody have a word with Sachin Tendulkar. Wtf has happened to him? Watching him bat last night, it felt like he didn't want to be there, he didn't show the stomach to fight and his injury is no excuse. Once a great, most feared batsmen has now become India's most unreliable player. I just cant't believe it. Just wonder what it is that's holding him back, and I feel he'll come to his natural best if he opens with Ganguly in ODIs. He just doesn't get the freedom and is forced to played too responsibly in partnership with Sehwag. That's not him, Tendulkar has never given a livin' f*ck about playing second fiddle, he used to own every partnership which is not the case anymore.
It's never been about ability with India, it has always been about self-belief and desire. This last test match was about who wanted to win the most. South Africa have grabbed this test from India's throat because they showed the desire and they deserved to win, fair and square.

Happy Feet

I am a happy feet now. The day's ended really well today.Just when i was in training a mail popped in my inbox - "10 yrs multiple entry B1/B2 visa granted". I ran out of the training to collect my passport

I guess it would not have been so dramatic, the only masala weilding stuff was that i had been refused visa twice before. oh!!! that was for F1, student visa. But i guess its all leveled now - 2 refusals & 2 grants :-)

The saga continues

I have been contemplating enough now.Other wise how else can you explain this - I sat by the beach to analyse myself, to asses what i have achieved so far in my life and it looks like more plus than minus :-) i am including the plus in my weight also.

Actually, i really did not want to take the appointment with the US visa consulate, this year.Unfortunately my MS results toook some time to come by and I did not want to apply without my MS degree.I had a valid reason though - my earlier student visa was rejected.Atleast i did not want to start a year with rejections.So with a real heavy heart, I proceeded to the consulate.. And guess what.. i think this year has really begun well ...as i told u ... a paid day off on new year, a new project to handle, part of food committee , member of CoE and now Visa...Am i pushing a bit hard on my luck ??? i don;t want to end this luck run !!!

Alternative profession

Some time back, i blogged about how frustrating my current job is getting. No, I am not frustated about not achieving my goals, Infact i am overachiving, but maybe i am not enjoying.Untill I found out that i hardly have anyone to tell :-) I miss my bheema. I am sure he would not understand a thing.But he would listen to them all. After all i would feed him his biscuits :-)

So here I was, wondering how to push my weekends, then this brilliant idea struck me!!!I decided to podcast.I downloaded this software - Mixcraft , which is really good. I then spoke about managing teams and some pointers on how to motivate teams. They were based on my experience & to help you understand - its been close to 3 years now, current team strength is 22 & i haven't had a single attrition..It's a achievement by its own, given the current market trend...So watch out , I am planning to post some feeds for you..Do listen and give me feedback.Atleast now i have a profession i like :-)

Are Bloggers the Person Or the Fool of the Year?

It depends on what you read. According to the Time magazine, people posting user-created content online are its "Person of the Year." Surprisingly (or not), a Wall Street Journal editorial calls the same people "fools": "The Blog Mob. "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

Who is right? I write a blog, so I am biased... Although I cannot speak of my own intelligence, many bloggers I read daily are some of the smartest people you can find. I think the Wall Street Journal got this one wrong.

New year Bash!!!

Well, we have been quite notorious and also adventureous in our new year bashes, considering our history - at dhabas, at terrace tops, friends home, discos's, On road, in Parks ,you name it and we are sure, we had a bash there

So this time we decided to do something more outrageous :-) Play Ps2 games all through the nite.... This was a great idea to start with as Thiru was supportive, but when phani and prasadi decided to drop in, they threatned to kill us.They just wanted to booze all night and watch i dunno what on my kick ass TV. But we were on a roll and managed to sneak and play a few games, while these guys were on a high. We had some kababs, rolls, chips, chicken biryani, coke and some greens. Unfortunately too much time went in chatting , catching up with old friends and other stuff, that we were too full by the time we had dinner. Result - wasted food again :-)It was early morning that we decided to hit bed, and no one had sleep.So here i Was sleep all of monday :-) & just to show how we chilled, i will upload some pics for ya....

Happy New Year - 2007

Happy new Year :-) 2006 was very eventful,I hope 2007 delivers the same, if not more :-)

Looks like it started on a nice note.I was on vacation on monday and all of the sudden our client decided to give us a paid holiday on monday :-) a token of appreciation to our good work :-)

Trip to Munnar errr Wayanad - 4

Sunday - We had to decide how many days to stay here now, return the same day or the next

Eventually everyone debated and we came to a conclusion that we visit the kurvadweep island and head to mysore and probably , if time permits we could do some sight seeing there. after a so called good break fast, we left to the island. The island was awesome, and we really enjoyed the clear cool water in the scenic environment. We could have spent a whole day here though.But the call for home was stronger. So left the place by after noon , in a hope that we would reach pandavpura by dinner. We had a friend's uncle's military hotel to feed us.At around 8 we reached the military hotel, it was awesome and we cherished all the varities and everyone was too tired to talk.We reached bangalore at 12.30 and had a good sleep!!!


Just one pic for ya -

Trip to Munnar errr Wayanad - 3

Saturday - At about 6.00 am we reached the sultan bathery check post and our driver ran with his documents to commercial check post to get a clearance.

While he was gone we slowly got down out of our TT, only to realize that we were in Queue. I mean... many ppl had chosed wayanad as thier holiday destination.We caught up sith some college girls and guys who were busy smoking and enjoying thier chai. After we got the clearance we moved in search of a hotel, where we could clean ourselves up. I guess this was a planned trip, coz we never got a place to stay :-) every hotel turned us down, seeing the hooligan in us :-). With great difficulty we managed to get a cheap room and we rented 2 of them. 4 in each. Some of the speciality of the room was - No flush in the loo, No hot water for bath, Just one electrical outlet to charge any of your electronic devices, No rug and ....No amount of begging pleading or even offerring money could get us hot water for the bath.Some how each one managed to take bath in the super cold water and still manage to stay warm:-) I guess we were still high on spirits..We went to a nearby India Coffee house in hope that we would get some neat nice food. Unfortunately, you know the drill - coconut oil fried items which only double screws your appetite.We then went off to the edkal caves - Man , no one quite told me that it was trekking place, armed with a cheap chappal i went with them. I felt too cheated even to complain. I had sore feet. The trek was really cool, if you are fit and one thing is for sure, it really showed me how fit I am and i need to work out double now. hehehe.. not that i am working out now.With great difficulty we reached the top.Wow what a panaromic view.It was awesome and i forgot all the pain after reaching there. It took us more than a hour to get there, as we stopped here and there for our lousy photographer to click a few snaps, which i intend to upload and also to help the needy girls, who were equally enthusiatic to reach the peak :-) We spent a solid time up there and decided to desend before it got late, out mantra was not to miss the next spot :-) the soochipoora falls :-)Once we got down, we were so dehydrated that we decided to have tender coconut rather than lunch. Also it was almost 4 when we got down.We gulped the cool, sweet tender coconut and tried to recover the lost staminaOnce back to our Van, we headed straight to soochipoora falls, Man the ppl of kerala are really hostile and when asked for directions, they really showed that they don;t entertain tourism. We almost covered 30 kms in the opposite direction, until a kind samatarian s showed the correct route.Soochipoora falls was beautiful, it had a nice water fall and on the otherside a panoramic view against the mountain. We managed to watch both. But beware, do not plan both edkal caves and soochipoora falls on the same day. Soochipoora falls is reverse edkal caves :-) what i mean is , when u start moving, its easy but since we go down here, it gets really tought to get back :-) After hitting the road, we headed straight to a so called good hotel for our dinner, the boys were as hungry as they could be and the ultimate greed of mouth over stomach prevailed and we ordered food like there is no tomorrow and wasted them all. The bill was high, probably the highest ever made in that hotel :-) As we were all tired the moment we hit the bed, we were like snoring :-) in spite of aching body.

Trip to Munnar errr Wayanad - 2

Friday - We left bangalore at about 11.00 am and hardly had we made progress , when some one dropped a boulder :-)

Instead of the planned 12 ppl only 8 were making it. So to adjust this change in ppl, our team lead Raghu changed the destination. His thoughts - Wayanad was nearer than Munnar, Wayanad had beautiful places, we would save time and money :-). I wanted a break so i gave a damn about Wayanad or Munnar.All shouted in unison and off we changed track heading to Mysore - > Gundulpet-->Sultan Bathery. Our poor TT driver was lost in direction but not in spirits, so we enquired all along to reach our destination.We stopped at a dabba on Mysore road and had our dinner. It was more like our drinks session, with everyone rolicking with the alcohol consumed. It was soooo cold that we had to get out sweaters and jackets out. The guys were pretty high on drinks and one of them wanted to play antakshari :-) I was least bothered, i can't sing, i can't remember lyrics :-) So i just sat back to enjoy the audio session.God.... at some point i felt like kicking some ppl out of the TT unable to bear thier cacophony.

Trip to Munnar errr Wayanad - 1

It all started at a booze party,like it always does.

Trust me all the meaning full conversations take place at booze parties( read at the time of ordering the drinks and not after that).For some reasons i had not joined the team on thier previous outings, so this time they insisted me to choose a date and me not miss it. At about the same time my team had planned for an outing:-) and the same date was looking omnious. Neverthless i made a very bold decision and preferred to go my adda boys rather than my project team....So our preparation began.Atleast on paper :-) Raghu booked a Tempo traveller(TT) and that was a milestone in our preparation as no other issue was taken care of.We planned to leave bangalore on Friday and be back on Monday.Things always look rosy at the time of planning.I had a hectic week and sure enough i just made in time for the TT. All the boys were geared up for the day.