The Daily Drudge

Deep Thought

2009-02-25T10:06:00.002+05:30

Deep Thought thinks that today I happen to be the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Philistine tongues abbreviate that down to 42.

66 pages of Microsoft Evilness

2009-02-18T16:03:00.002+05:30

Excerpts from Microsoft's corporate philosophy (Yes, official corporate philosophy delivered by MS's top company stewards James Plamondon and Marshall Goldberg.):
"ISVs are pawns..."

While I do not agree with the Boycott Novell philosophy (I use OpenSUSE), the site does have some interesting material on Microsoft.

Bespin

2009-02-18T15:27:00.004+05:30

I rarely say "Wow" when I see some new technology. I give it a good hard jaded look and give it an occasional grudging 'Nice!'. But check out Bespin, a web code editor using Canvas tags and ECMAScript with a standards compliant browser (yes, that means don't use IE). This one does deserve great big jaw-dropping WOW!

A good idea gone bad...

2009-02-17T17:14:00.003+05:30

Why you need to do stuff yourself.
No, never let your boss / colleague do it for you.
Way too much chaos can ensue...

Reese With*spoon

2009-02-16T15:41:00.000+05:30

I always love a good pun :D

7 things...

2009-01-16T10:47:00.002+05:30

Seven facts of minimal significance about me, and probably less-well known:

I never met my best friend in person for a long time. Then I married her.
I have terrible stage fright.
I don't drive cars - don't even have a license.
The first programming language I used in a professional capacity: x86 assembly
Three years before I even got to know there was this thing called an Internet, I wrote a large part of the curses library in Turbo C 2.0 and TASM.
I like to eat any kind of cream biscuits in multiples of two. The way I eat them, I *need* to - no, I'm not saying any further.
I'm pretty much an open book - unfortunately its the kind that gets banned in some countries. ;)

May the farce be with you

2008-12-02T16:50:00.001+05:30

China accuses Microsoft of Patent Infringement

2008-11-13T12:15:00.001+05:30

Good God! Classic case of a wok calling a kettle black.

http://www.chinatechnews.com/2008/11/12/7971-microsoft-accused-of-patent-infringement-in-china/

Batman sues Batman over Batman

2008-11-13T12:05:00.004+05:30

Groan! Another stupid lawsuit. The Mayor of a city called Batman, Turkey, is suing Warner Brothers for using their city's name without permission.

Next we'll have Scots go 'there can be only one' and sue the ~~pants~~kilts off for Highlander.

2008-10-13T14:49:00.003+05:30

The Donation Coder forums had this forum topic:

One answered question before you died?

Visit the forum for the complete thread. Here are a collection of some witticisms from the thread, answered before you die ;-)

Q. How does our universe work?
[A. Very good, thank you.]

Q. Who made God and why did they make such a terrible job of it?
[A. People and they had very tight deadline.]

Q. Is 42 really the meaning of life?
[A. No. 69.]

Q. Where do I sign up for the next life?
[A. Nowhere. You've got only one. Use it well.]

Q. WHY?
[A. Because]

Q. What caused the 'singularity' event that preceded the Big Bang.
[A. Syntax error in "Preceded": there is no before in timeline.]

Q1. Can AI eventually demonstrate sentience/consciousness.
Q2. Can humans (as a species) move beyond superstitions
[Personally I think those previous questions work better the other way round.]
[A1. We might actually live to see that *before* we die.]
[A2. Sure in a couple of generations (Touch wood)]

Q. How does the brain work?
[A. Pick a person and I will tell you.]

Q. Is there a universal truth?
A. No, just personal interpretation?

Q1. How do I get a girlfriend in my next life?
[A1. Dude, you might just *be* a girlfriend in your next life. Most of
the time, my question was "How to get a girlfriend in THIS life?"
I never thought I'd figure that one out, either, but when I
stopped trying to answer it, the answer came to me.]
Q2. Ok, in that case, how do I get a girlfriend in THIS life?
Note condition: Works 10 hours a day, 7 days a week
[A2. Error in condition. Please correct and try again.]

If a voice shouted down at me as I lay on my deathbed
"what do you want to know?" I'd be stupid enough to
answer "who do I have to ask?"

[My fav:]
Q. Can I speak to a supervisor?
[Too busy laughing to answer this one]

Q. What happens after I die.
[A. Depends on your faith. If you believe in Eden, fine, you got it.
You believe in 72 virgins, fine, just don't expect them to be
spring chickens. You believe in recincarnation, cool, come back as
a bug. Me, I believe in eating tasty junk food for all eternity]

Q. What would God's last message be for mankind?
[A1. Any inconvenience caused is regretted...
A2. So long, and thanks for all the fish.]

Q. Why did SHE do that?
[A. Isn't it obvious? It's only a mystery if you have testosterone.
It clouds the judgement.]

Maybe the last question really should be:
Q. "Why are humans so arrogant as to think they have any greater
importance in the universe than anything else?"

The Battle of Lesbos

2008-04-30T17:14:00.002+05:30

Residents on the Greek island of Lesbos have launched a lawsuit against the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (Olke). According to them, they alone have the right to call themselves lesbians! More here.

ISO approval: A good process gone bad

2008-04-02T11:01:00.002+05:30

ISO approval: A good process gone bad

Couldn't agree more. ISO might as well mean "I Sold Out"

TCS, Infosys, NASSCOM need their head examined

2008-03-27T08:04:00.005+05:30

India correctly voted No for approval of OOXML as an ISO standard. Not surprising - anyone with half a brain who has read the OOXML specifications would know it is atrocious. Unbelievably, Microsoft filed a complaint to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs about the panel tat voted "No". The committee voted "No" after more than a year of reviewing it. This is how the committee voted on the question, "Should India change its NO vote on OOXML?"

National Informatics Center - NO
Center for Development of Advanced Computing - NO
Computer Society of India - NO
Department of IT - NO
IBM - NO
Institute for Electronic Governance - Absent
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad - NO
Indian Institute of Science - NO
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - NO
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay - NO
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkatta - NO
Manufacturers Association of IT - Abstain
National Institute of Smart Governance - Absent
Reserve Bank of India - Absent
Red Hat - No
Standardization Testing and Quality Certification Directorate - NO
Sun - NO
Tata Computer Services - YES
Wipro - YES (for changing India's vote from NO to Abstain)
Infosys - YES
Microsoft - YES
National Association of Software and Services Companies - YES

As that list shows, most of the places with the real intelligence voted NO for this half-baked format. But TCS, Infosys and NASSCOM voted YES! - I wonder how many stalwarts at these places even bothered to read the specifications prior to approval. Given how MS has been ballot-stuffing, it's likely MS approached them giving them the usual preferred-partner/strategic relationship nonsense or arm-twisted them into voting Yes. Why else would they vote YES to a 6000 page specification they cannot fully implement?

Update 1: Apparently Microsoft also slurred the chairperson of the meet (Mrs. Neeta Verma.)
Update 2: Nothing new for Microsoft though. It seems those who don't agree with Microsoft's stand on OOXML end up as victims of a smear campaign.

Dhansak Recipe

2008-02-19T19:38:00.002+05:30

We've been asked really often to provide the recipe for Dhansak. So here it is:

Dhansak
Rice
Ingredients

* 200 gms rice (1 small glass)
* 1 onion – sliced finely
* ½ teaspoon sugar
* 4 cloves (lavang)
* 1 inch piece of cinnamon (dalchini/tuj)
* 1 teaspoon cumin seeds (jeera)
* 3 to 4 pepper-corns
* 3 to 4 cardamoms (elaichi)
* Salt to taste
* Oil

Method

Wash the rice thoroughly and drain all the water
In a cooker, heat oil.
Add onion and sugar.
Fry onion till golden brown
Add two small glasses water, cumin seeds, cloves, pepper, cinnamon, green elaichi and salt.
When the water boils, add rice and stir gently
Close the cooker
Allow two whistles and lower the flame
After two minutes close the flame
Allow the cooker to cool.

Dal
Ingredients

* 75 gms tur dal
* 20 gms moong dal
* 25 gms masoor dal
* 1 small piece of red pumpkin (bhopla)
* 2 small or one medium sized tomato, grated
* 1 spoon chopped coriander
* 1 teaspoon chopped mint leaves
* 1 chopped onion
* 1 sliced onion
* ½ teaspoon turmeric (haldi) powder
* 1 ½ teaspoon chilly powder
* 1 teaspoon garam masala
* 2 green chillies slit in half
* Salt to taste
* Oil

Method

Mix all three dals and wash thoroughly. Soak dal for 15 minutes.
Wash the chopped onion, coriander, and mint leaves.
Peel and cut into cubes the small pumpkin piece and wash
Wash and grate the tomato
In a cooker add oil and when warm, add the finely sliced onion
When the onion becomes golden brown, add grated tomatoes, chopped onion, coriander, mint leaves and slit green chillies.
Stir for a minute.
Drain the water from the dal and add to the cooker
Add turmeric and chilly powder and stir.
Add 2 ½ glasses of water (200ml x 2 ½)
Add salt to taste
Add garam masala and stir
Close the cooker and after the 1st whistle, lower the flame and let the dal cook for 7 to 10 minutes.
Close the flame and cool the cooker.
Open the cooled cooker and sieve the contents.
Mash the dal and pumpkin pieces thoroughly through the sieve.
Test for consistency. If too thick, add water and boil the dal for 3 minutes.

Yahoo mail problems [Solved!]

2008-01-02T15:48:00.000+05:30

Haven't been able to login to Yahoo mail even after entering the right password. Weird thing is I clicked on the Forgot Password link, and put in all the private stuff needed for a new password. I then got a new password, but oddly I still cannot access mail. The my.yahoo.com page shows my credentials, but mail.yahoo.com obstinately denies me access. BLAARRGH!

Update 1 : Now I get an error saying 'FEATURE_ERROR_USER_OPEN_NO_ACCESS' when I tried to change the password yet again.

Update 2: Chatted using the URL https://sales.liveperson.net/hc/63758332/?cmd=file&file=visitorWantsToChat&site=63758332&SESSIONVAR!skill=emailplus-english&referrer=http%3A//help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/forms_index.html&SESSIONVAR!EmailTier=Plus to a customer care rep called Gwyneth. Quite helpful. Still no mail access, tho'.

Update 3: Woo hoo! It started working again! Thanks a ton Gwyneth!

Books ...

2006-09-15T12:19:00.000+05:30

One Book That Made Me Cry: None yet
One Book That Changed My Life: None yet

The Book I Have Read More Than Once: All Calvin and Hobbes books, HH2G (Douglas Adams)
The Book I Would Want On A Desert Island: Calvin and Hobbes :)
One Book That Made Me Laugh: Calvin and Hobbes :)
One Book That I Wish I Had Written: Calvin and Hobbes :)

One Book I Wish Had Never Been Written: The Microsoft Exchange 5 manual
One Book I Have Been Meaning To Read: too many to list

Fussing for Pluto

2006-09-08T11:52:00.000+05:30

I'm a bit surprised at the agitation of people who are protesting Pluto's demotion. I mean aren't there more serious issues on Earth than caring about what the 9th really big rock from the sun is called?

In any case, I like that these protesters haven't lost all their sense of humor. :)

A Take on the "offensive" toons

2006-02-22T10:57:00.000+05:30

This piece by Jackie Mason.
--
Muslim fundamentalists have decided that even if you never saw or heard of the cartoons, you deserve to be hit with rocks, have your car wrecked and your embassies destroyed.

Ironically, the cartoonists were not insulting Islam; they were satirizing fanaticism. Now the fanatics have decided that there are no laws, limits or boundaries that apply to their behavior. They not only have the right to take your life; they now have the right to rob you of your freedom of expression.

Could you picture a Jew killing anybody for such meaningless reasons? If a Jew gets mad he might sneak into your house and steal your Lipitor or he would make a deal with your doctor to lie about your cholesterol number, or just when you have fasted a whole day on Yom Kippur he would sneak into your house and steal all the pastrami sandwiches.

I never saw a Jew going into meaningless fights. That is why you seldom see Jewish football players. A Jew is not going to take a chance in spraining his neck or tearing a ligament in his knee just because he was fighting with somebody about catching a ball. He would rather go to a store and buy another ball and avoid the whole problem. That is why there are also no Jewish hockey players. Hockey players spend all their time hitting each other in the mouth with sticks. When Jews saw how Gentiles played hockey, that is how Jews found out that instead of becoming hockey players they would become dentists, and that way they decided to let other people play the game while they found a way to make a profit from it.

Jews are never known to get into unnecessary physical battles. That is why people are never afraid of being attacked by a Jew. Did you ever hear anybody say, 'Don't go into that neighborhood, it is very dangerous, there are a lot of Jews there'? Jews have so long been accustomed to being threatened and persecuted all over the world that they could never dream of creating needless violence anywhere, because they would be grateful to find a place where they are allowed to live in peace.

Meanwhile, the world is reacting with an amazing cowardice. Instead of a collective fury, we are pleading forgiveness and promising not to offend them with any more cartoons. Could anything be more perverted?

2005-08-25T11:57:00.000+05:30

People avoid information they don't want to hear. Even if the truth is up there and millimeters from biting them in the ass. While this type of behavior isn't the same thing as lying and while intentional ignorance isn't necessarily dishonest, it doesn't reek of the smarts either. Today's Dilbert reminded me of this:
---
PHB (Pointy Haired Boss): How's the coding coming along?
Dilbert: No problem, unless some moron tries to standardize on a new programming methodology in the middle of the project.
PHB: What if it's me instead of some moron guy?
---
Most people are built this way - they do not like bad news (heck, nobody does) and they do not like to be wrong. The real problems take place when such people hold a powerful position. That's when they use their authority and abuse their powers to twist the situation to suit their liking or simply present it better to the world.

But unfortunately in business, those who put a positive spin - even if it is not entirely true, or is the truth twisted - or horribly bent out of shape - are often up for a lot of management pats-on-the-back.

Whee! Just upgraded CentOS 4 to Centos 4.1

2005-08-04T17:06:00.000+05:30

It's really not a big deal upgrading CentOS 4 to CentOS 4.1. I just sort of did an
rpm -Fvh *.rpm
after disabling selinux and then manually upgraded my NTFS rpm dependencies and after a few moments, *ta*daaaa!* Upgrade over! At least that's all it'll take if selinux has never been enabled on the target machine. Selinux enabled machines (like mine) need a further step or syslogd and portmap will puke. But a
fixfiles relabel
(and a long wait) later, everything seems to be hunky dory. And oh yeah, updatedb while you're at it :)

Why a good lawyer is a dead lawyer

2005-07-13T12:52:00.000+05:30

I saw this story on groklaw today. Says a lot for corporate greed, when said corporate (a bus company) wants to get cars belonging to cleaning women confiscated so that they *have* to take a bus.

AMD processors and Intel compilers

2005-07-13T11:04:00.000+05:30

Got an AMD processor and an Intel C++ community edition compiler like I do? If you also use and stick with gcc. The code produced by the Intel compiler checks to see if it's running on an Intel chip. If not, it deliberately won't run SSE or SSE2 code, even if the chip capability flags (avaialble through the 'cpuid' instruction) say that it can. Of course, if you're not using SSE code, no need to bother. :) More details here.

Cool comparison of MS Office and OpenOffice

2005-07-08T18:46:00.000+05:30

If you think OpenOffice.org 1.1 gives MS Office a good run for its money, I've been using OpenOffice 1.9 - the beta - soon to be OpenOffice.org 2.0. Even with bugs and all, it's closer to the MS Office suite. Bruce Byfield has written an article comparing OOo and MS Word. It's pretty detailed, and an excellent read - especially for OOo lovers.

Bruce Byfield has also written another good article comparing OpenOffice and Framemaker. That too seems to make a good read. I don't think OOo can replace Framemaker for use in our organization yet. It's not really got needed capabilities like creating cross-references and decently linked TOC with HTML pages from a master document.

EU patent law rejected

2005-07-08T18:11:00.000+05:30

The European Parliament has voted against the controversial 'Computer-implemented Inventions Directive' - i.e. software patents. Not by any small margin either. A whacking great 648-14 vote (with 18 abstentions).

Now hopefully this whole software patent thing dies and no other country takes it up. The USofA are notorious for flinging lawsuits based on s/w patents.

EU lawmakers stated that software patents could limit innovation, cause difficulties for businesses and that human knowledge cannot be patented.

They don't intend to reintroduce the issue either. Hopefully it never resurfaces. Now if American lawmakers actually think of something for the American people - instead of only rich lobbyists - just maybe, such a thing could happen in the USofA too. I wouldn't keep my hopes up tho'.

Problems with Solaris screen grabs

2005-07-05T16:20:00.000+05:30

I just had a ball getting screenshots off a Solaris box. Solaris ships with sdtimage which is supposed to take snapshots of a window or display but for some reason it kept crashing. No big deal, let's use gimp. Turns out the installed version is version 1 - it's screen capturing dithered all the colors - could hardly make out the borders. Just when I dreaded that I'd probably have to play with xwd, I remembered ImageMagick. Phew! Rescued by ImageMagick's import. Screencaps all perfect now, with no additional headache.

SI units and Firefox

2005-06-30T08:44:00.000+05:30

Ever check the cache usage in Firefox with

about:cache? It shows:


Maximum storage size:  31744 KiB
Storage in use:  2110 KiB
Inactive storage:  1067 KiB


Whoa! KiB? What the heck is that? Did those programmers suffer a slip of the finger on the keyboard? No, not really. SI prefixes for binary multiples show that the programmers are right!
 The binary prefixes for 2¹⁰ is indeed Ki, short for kibi. Also, a byte uses the suffix B is used to represent a byte (as opposed to b which represents a bit) - of course you already knew that.



Fonts and Linux
2005-06-30T08:36:00.000+05:30
Okay, so you just installed an OpenType font in Linux and OpenOffice, gucharmap and other apps show the font. So it'll work in all GUI apps right? I couldn't be more hopelessly wrong. An app compiled with wxWidgets 2.4 refused to see the dratted font. Yup, so I linked it against wxWidgets 2.6.1 and it did work, but wxWidgets 2.6 is different enough that while it displayed the typeface correctly, it broke the rest of the app. Bloody hell! I eventually worked it out by examining the font's license - it was lenient enough to allow conversion. On converting the typeface to Postcript Type 1, the app finally saw the font. Phew!



SHA1 and MD5
2005-06-22T14:27:00.000+05:30
Ack! The folks at Fedora have stopped publishing MD5 sums of their ISOs and have now started publishing SHA1 sums. I know MD5 was once considered secure, but I guess theres a bit of paranoia what with 2⁴⁰ operations required to find an MD5 collision. SHA1 too can end up with collisions tho' far greater than MD5 - apparently 2⁶⁹ operations needed. 

It would be even better if they published both the MD5 sums and SHA1 sums. Even if the iso were tampered with or suffered a flakey download, assuming by chance one of the checksums match, it's still not likely that the other checksum would go thru.


Nice site to post pics
2005-06-16T17:12:00.000+05:30
Found this cool site to post pics from my digital cam. I love the EXIF info shown. I posted a few of my pics here.


OpenDocument or OpenOffice?
2005-06-15T13:48:00.000+05:30
Now that the OpenOffice file format is an OASIS standard, I dont think it would be correct to refer to a file created by OpenOffice.org to be in 'OpenOffice' format. I guess it would be more accurate to refer to such filse as OpenDocument files, given that the upcoming KOffice 1.4 too supports the OpenDocument specifications.


Nice article on groklaw on SCO
2004-07-08T14:08:00.000+05:30
The current SCO group makes a big fluff about 

being there all of 25 years with Unix. Apparently 

not when it comes to paying taxes tho' - and the 

taxman here is our own govt. How'd ya like that?



As the groklaw site maintainer (Pamela Jones) states: 

"How do you like them distinguishing themselves from Santa Cruz? Now, when the tax man is calling, they aren't Santa Cruz after all and aren't celebrating their 25th year in the UNIX business? They have that slogan on their web site: "1979 - 2004 Celebrating 25 years of UNIX® Solutions". And SCOForum this year is supposedly about celebrating that anniversary. Whoops! I think they need to rewrite their complaint in the IBM law suit too. Here they've been telling the world they are Santa Cruz, and somebody in India is taking them up on it."



Hah! I just love this :)




ADTI  twists Linux fact into fiction [update 1]
2004-06-07T10:34:00.000+05:30
There's this so-called 'think-tank' called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution [they've apparently tanked their thinking]. Its president, Ken Brown has written a book stating open source using GPL is a bad idea. He makes further preposterous claims, stating Linus Torvalds stole Linux from MINIX. This junk is found on this page



Linus Torvalds posted a hilarious response to this.



Andrew Tanenbaum, author of Minix, didn't really appreciate Ken Brown's report. Neither did he appreciate the way Ken Brown presented his so-called 'research'. You can read that bit here



Ken Brown didn't quite take to Andy Tanenbaum's critique and posted his replies here. He tried to further muddy Andy Tanenbaum, Linux, and Linus Torvalds.



Andy Tanenbaum couldn't resist writing this rebuttal.



Will someone stop funding these ADTI jokers? They're a waste of precious time and energy [as Andy Tanenbaum's rebuttal indirectly states.]



[Update 1]: 

Groklaw posted this hilarious parody Is Brown Really the Father of Samizdat? - A Parody by Justin Moore






Nice day at work
2004-05-28T15:35:00.000+05:30
Lazy lazy lazy day. Did get slung with a new thingy to do. 

Need to script share creation and set permissions from the command line. Can't seem to set permissions on sharenames with the stock stuff supplied with W2k. Found something called RMTSHARE.EXE that does the trick tho' - phew!