Alchemist

it was a few years ago while i was still a bumbling youngster, in the prime of my life, more spirit than sense, that i came across a bamboo hut during a walk through the forest.

on my first glance, i disregard the place as a potential night shelter for myself. the structure looked too flimsy to offer any protection from what i was expecting latter on that night. the dark clouds looked foreboding.

while i was walking away , I heard a sound which chilled my blood. made me quickly glance behind me. I giggled when I realized that it was just a strange man laughing crazy, it was a crackling rising laugh, it sounded out worldly. It was only latter that he told me that I was the first human he had seen in a number of years, strange.

i wondered what was wrong with him. He started talking to me. At least I think he was trying to talk to me. But all I heard was strange rumbling sounds coming out of the man.

i decided to stay there that night and see what this was all about.

after a few day I slowly began to understand the words the man was talking, was surprised to realize this was a language I had spoke from the time of my birth. He started telling me his story and what a strange story it was.

what I am putting down today, on the papyrus is just part of this man’s strange story.

“I do not remember the name my biological parents had given me” he told me. “as far as my memory goes I remember being called the Alchemist” . I shuddered when I heard this. For this was a name which I have heard brave men whisper in dread.

this dread was not the dread mere mortal feel. This was a supernatural dread. A dread which is allied with the night terrors.

he continued “I was given the name Alchemist by my master, when I was less than a year old, for he had sensed and seem what my future holds for me”

“from then on, all that my master talked to me was on how to awaken the strange power which were innately part of my life. These were magical moments of my life, the joy of learning the secrets of controlling my telekinetic and clairvoyance powers”

“I became really good with the sword and I had gone beyond what the best of the martial arts students knew, why I had gone beyond what the masters knew of martial arts, and all this before I was 5”.

(click for chapter 2)

Google Answers for free or indications of my growing paranoia

looks like the "government" has finally lifted the ban on blogger.com. ah no need to use various 3rd party tools to access the blogs.

BUT.....the last few days have been spent exploring a few options of anonymous access on the net. now that's a thought for a long term implementation.

what were the guys thinking?? when they decided to block blogspot.com blogs? but allowing access to blogger.com to update blogs?

from a few of the news reports i did check out, i believe the directive was a few certain blog urls were to be blocked, but i believe the ISP's in their wisdom decided that it was easier to block the whole thingamajig, the reason given was that they did not have tools to block specific urls. hoik.

was this a situation to simulate a electronic network attack and to test the emergency reponse procedures of the government? where they able to handle the situation? i wonder what reports are being written up about this event.

now all "they" have to do is sit down, go through all the blogs where the smart bloggers would be crowing away as to how they beat the "ban". and then next time around all "they" needs to do is block what these smart blogger did.

i am sure something else will be available the next time around.

this seems to a good method of test marketing or it looks like someone decided to use the free version of the google answers. create a situation and wait for bloggers to come up with feedback and other inputs and solutions! the power of collective wisdom and the tendency of humans to share and be happy sure is such a powerful tool for research.

for those 2 or 3 readers of my blog...did jesus really live in india?

guess, what i thought was funny in feb 2005 ,is no longer funny (blog,search and get paranoid)

heaven aint in andromeda, it has just moved into your building. (get the connection in the feb2005 article)

times mumbai is going through

stuff happening in mumbai.

first it was the rain,
then it was the riots and burning,
and we had that 7/11 with lot of people loosing their life,
innocent people who were on the way home.
after a hard day work, to be with their family and friends.

all this in about a 10 day stretch.
life sure aint giving no guarantee, that,
once you leave your home,
that you will get back.
if mother nature dont get you, then, the "people" would.

i wonder what outraged thoughts, infuriates peoples mind.
who is the victim and who has been victimised.

there are those who have got back on the train,
and there are those who would take sometime.
the children wonder, will they meet their father again.
the spouse wonders if they would see each other again.

how many road must a man walk, before he can be called a man.
times, they are a changing.

picasaweb

here is my experiment with the picasa web just got to upload a few pics. for the first time have uploaded a few pics of myself.

here it is
..

mumbai wet again

last few days the monsoon has broken .. and as usual flooding being reported all around. the road leading out of the housing complex i stay in, is kind of flooded. i took about 90 minutes to cover a distance of about 1 km. had to u-turn from my normal road as it was fully flooded.

and on the other road which i finally took, the water was reaching upto the bottom of the car(could hear the gentle lapping sounds of the water) since i was not doing much travelling, i used my mobile to get a few quick snaps while stuck in the "river".

generally things seems to be looking "normal" as normal can be in mumbai during the rains. no reports of scary stuff like last time..



the rest of the pics can be checkout here.

rude mumbai

mumbai has been branded rudest city in the world.
"
Mumbai Judged Rudest City In World
Mumbai is the rudest city in the world, where
door-holding, paper-picking and thanking a retail
customer is not part of the culture.

Reader's Digest magazine sent reporters to the principal
cities of each of the 35 countries where it is published
to conduct a survey of local politeness. Three tests
were employed: dropping papers in a busy street to see
if anyone would help; checking how often shop assistants
said "thank you"; and counting how often someone held a
door open.
etc..
"
i am not a native born mumbaite, i have been living here for the last 6 years. i was surprised to see this take on mumbai.

mumbai is loud and a tough place to live. but rude?

the first day i landed into mumbai, and i was shifting from the hotel to my rented house.(this was somewhere in july 2000) there was some "hard rain" and most of the streets were flooded. the taxi which naina and i were travelling in came to halt at a place where the road had was covered with about 2 and half feet of water(this was in the vertical direction!)

the taxi driver was so concerened, trying to figure out a way to get us to our new home. then we started wading through this water. as is a habit with most of us we were trying to walk on the sides of the road, the native mumbaites, came to our help asked us to walk in the middle of the road, because there would be lots of potholes, and other manmade opening on the sides of the road.

and post the last mumbai floods(july 2005), all kind of stories were published which showed the kind, helpful nature of mumbai people.

of course i do get yelled at,at the stop signs if i take more than 2 seconds to move the car after the light turns green.

the below is a kind of joke ... but is it? i am sure that mumbaikars will have a wry smile when they read it, but i am sure no one is going to be rude about this... (check the below note on being a mumbaite got this from this link)

25 Sure signs that you're a Mumbaite.

1. You say “town” and expect everyone to know that this means south of Churchgate.

2. You’re suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.

3. You have never been to the Gateway of India.

4. You don’t hear sirens anymore.

5. Hookers, beggars and the homeless are invisible.

6. The trains make sense.

7. Your door has more than three locks.

8. The most frequently used part of your car is the horn.

9. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

10. You call an 8’ x 10’ clustered room a Hall.

11. You consider beyond Andheri as “Upstate”.

12. You think Chowpatty & Juhu beaches as “nature.”

13. You’re paying Rs 10,000 for a 1 room flat, the size of a walk-in closet and you think it’s a “steal.”

14. You’ve been to New Bombay twice and got hopelessly lost both times.

15. You spend more time each month travelling than you spend at home.

16. You haven’t heard the sound of true absolute silence since 1977, and when you did, it terrified you.

17. You take fashion seriously.

18. Being truly alone makes you nervous.

19. You have 14 different menus of Free Home Deliveries next to your telephone.

20. Going to “town” is considered a “road trip.”

21. You take a taxi to get to your health club to exercise.

22. Your idea of personal space is no one actually standing on your toes.

23. Rs 500 worth of groceries fit in one paper bag.

24. You have a minimum of five “worst cab rides ever” stories.

25. You’ve mentally blocked out all thoughts of the city’s air quality and what it’s doing to your lungs.

Music setup

finally took the plunge and went in for a marantz setup. the amp Marantz PM 7001, the cd player Marantz cd 5001. both being classified as "budget" equipment. running them on a jpw 188 speaker, this has a single 8 inch driver and two 3 inch tweeters. sounds quite impressive. this was a export material and not available for sale in india. i have not been able to get any further spec's on the speakers. still searching the net for more info on this one. seems to be some sort of "custom" speaker.

i am now working with the audio shop people to organise for a wharfedale 9.5 demo at my house so that i can audition this in its final "work" environment. let me see if i can work this out.

back to the current setup. the amp and the cd player combination is delivering some real wonderful music . still not "blasted" the volume high. mostly playing the music at a low volume (9'o clock) when no one was around did move the volume dial to the 12 o' clock position.

the music and sound at both these low and mid extreme has been crystal clear and perfect.

bhimsen joshi, prem joshua, deva premal,roger waters, pink floyd, deep purple, billy joel(piano man), dave brubeck, ms subbulakshmi, "sound from the grand canyon", muddy waters, miles davis, rainbow, a little bit of led zeppelin have so far been fed through the system intermittently in the last 4-5 days and what the amp and the cd player have been dishing out, the jpw speakers have been able to handle it quite well.

quite happy with the setup as is, other than for a nigiling feeling that i may be missing out on some bass. AND i guess the NEED to spend MORE money on a floorstander is part of a male genetic makeup and i feel the urge and pull towards the wharfedale 9.5's..

wonder if the spouse will buy the genetic makeup crap?

15 days of bliss

i was out of mumbai in kashmir. 15 days of bliss. wonderful place, untouched beauty.the presence of armed forces was continous and quite visible most of the time.

visited jammu,pahalgaum,yusmarg,gulmarg,srinagar, have post a few pics. I am working on posting a few more pics soon.

got quite a bit of photo shooting done...will try and upload some of the snaps over the weekend.

now it is back to hectic work schedule!!

longest break from blogging

24th Feb, seems to be a date which has no major relevance, in my life on this earth. but for whatever reason this seem to be the date on which i had last blogged.

i am getting back online after a long time, never realised that i was off for such a long time. so what have i been upto all these days?

i have been trying to get an o2 atom running wm 5.0 to connect to a firewall, still stuck. other than that, guess just plain hectic work schedule.

last week: i have been trying to audition some audio equipment, looking at upgrading the home audio setup.(currently surviving on a sony minicomp system), also lurking on various audio/hi-fi forums getting a crash course on hi-fi equipment.

what am i looking at? a pure 2 channel stereo amp and a set of speakers. the number of options available is huge, and the cost seem to look huge.

what i have evaluated so far:
- a yamaha ax-496 amp with yamaha speakers and pioneer floor standing speakers(both speakers rejected)
- denon amp with marantz cd player, with wharfedale diamond 9.5, kef iq5, polkaudio monitor50.
- a yamaha ax-496 with bookshelf speakers from jpw ( at a friends place) -no model number- along with custom made cubes and subwoofer.

to be auditioned this week, marantz pm7001 with the wharfedale diamond 9.5 or a kef 1q5.

wharfedale 9.5 were the most impressive.

but the low cost jpw seems to be packing a major punch. guess finally this will be build of my first hi-fi setup(marantz ...hang on will get to you soon!!) yamaha amp with a couple of jpw's and maybe a sony/pioneer cd player this should come to less than INR 20k. not bad for a first hi-fi setup.

other than that...

i have finally got the google analytics invite, the google page invite,(have got a under construction page up already in the 15/20 minutes i spent on this) need to beef it up soon.

will be one year older tomorrow.

why, paranoia?

first impression of the google desktop, it seems to be highly user oriented. giving access to what a user would want on the desktop quickly.

but like the man says, encrypting the search index sure slows the system down.

the sidebar is kind of bothersome. but i like the way it can be customised.
the deskbar/floating or nonfloating is nice.

the scary part was that things which are supposed to be private suddenly appeares on your sidebar the first time you install the application.

a nice feature which i have not yet tried out is sharing the index between multiple pc which one would tend to use. i can see this being a kind of iffy where security is concerend.(hey remember i have not tried this out yet and have no intention of trying it either).

i think i may give it a shot. use it for a longer period of time. or should i wait for a version which can boot up the pc at 0900 hrs in the morning, automatically answer all my mails, handle all my telephone followup's, remotely attend all my meetings, and hit the bar at about 1900hrs and call it a day by about 2400 hrs, while i am roaming around the best beaches in the world, catching up with my reading and music.

this day does not seem very far off, what with softwares/programs analysing your browser cache, and deciding your preferences etc and showing you content tailored to meet your needs. it must be a minor tweak to finetune the software to start thinking and acting like you.

when i wrote this in feb 2005, i was going for the humor part of it. but now it look like, it aint funny nomore.

Google Desktop Beta

came across this today. guess i will take it out for a trial run shortly. going throught the features list right now.

kind of excited and at the same time kind of unsure.

Google Desktop Download


i guess my theory on google world domination aint very far off. :)

seems to be a huge

archive ot jethro tull stuff. hail willerup brothers, way to go

Willerup Bros: Jethro Tull

now i am getting deep into the site. i may find some lyrics of tull songs which i have lost, yet to find anywhere.


one white duck on the wall. fly away peter flyaway paul.

The answer is 42

the world being taken over google style. "rumours mount over googles internet plan" read more about it here.
Technology, Technology news, Times Online

taking off on THAT article, my thoughts follow, Mr.Google please note this is just my creation and i own all rights to these ideas, and if you plan to use any of these you, i am ready to license these ideas to you on a per click basis.(i am launching mysense ad revenue sharing product)

i have the inside dope on the what the google wizards are working on for the future , these are a few of the essential technologies they are working on

a) hyper-drive - essential tool for delivering space travel at the click of a button, will be available as a beta download by the January 2010,
minimum system requirements: G-o/s (google-operating system version 12, patched for hyper-jumps), google space cube human interface hardware, memory requirement : enough to remember history of the last 2 millennium. disk capacity : latest adenine-thymine drives with atleast 240 strands of unused DNA.

b) positronic brains - why hire smart people when you can design brains which are built for one purpose ie. work on world domination by google. the positronic pathway are already in pre-alpha testing. the design document states,that, the positronic brains are not ment to be mobile and walk off from the Google headquarters, so they have skipped the robot exo-skeleton in the design. this is just the BRAINS. wonder if this will close the gates for bill.

c) "Google Guide to the galaxy" : they have already tied up with douglas adams descendants for royalties, they would pay 1 cent for every million copies of the guide sold. this will be the definitive guide to everything this and that side of "The Deep Web", the marketing department is working on a galactic release of "the Guide" (a few of you may have worked on a new tool recently, "Google earth" this is the precursor to the ultimate Guide, thank you for contributing your time in the development of "The Guide")

"Don't Panic: Google instead"

The answer is still 42.

I,Human

i have been reading, and reading stuff which i had read a long time back. While reading "I,Robot" and "Robots and Empire", i was kind of engrossed in the conflict which daneel and giskard get into. i thought it was about time that we get down to defining the 3 laws of humanity. i am using the 3 laws of robotics as a basis for the 3 laws of humanity as they seem to have severed robots quite well.

0. a human may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1. a human may not injure a human being or, through inaction,allow a human being to come to harm.
2. a human must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the Zeroth or First Law.

as you can see that i have used the zeroth law and i have dropped the 2nd law of robotics. the 3 laws of Humanity now look workable.

essentially if you look at the 3 laws being extrapolated here, you would see that this would be basis for any kind of utopian living. simplifying thoughts and ideas from the past, the basic 3 laws of humanity have been around for a long time. and example (refer to the wikipedia article) on utopianism.

The Krita Yuga, the First and Perfect Age, as described in the Mahabharata, an old Hindu epic:

[...] Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich;there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness. [...]



I,Human

happy trails (comet)

journal entry dated 19th January 2006 :
nasa dc-8 stardust mission was a great success. all initial reports from johnson space center looked great. the scientists were ecstatic and happy, they all got down to analysing the collected samples.


journal entry dated 29th January 2006:
on the NASA website. the normally immaculately dressed doctors, i have been noticing over the past few days, were looking totally in disarray, i was wondering why. was the stress of the project getting to them? No one in NASA seems worried.




journal entry dated 31st january 2006:
i push my wheel chair to the tiny window of my small apartment, and look out of my window. curious. the normal bustling streets below seems to be looking deserted, with just a few people walking around in a hapazard manner. i ignore this, thinking that this might be because of the usual political protests, police blocking movement into the street.




journal entry dated 4th february 2006:
the unsual silence around the apartment and the streets were slowly getting to me. all my server logs and the hit counters on my webpage seem to be indicating that web traffic was normal, the visitor patterns were looking absolutly normal. my dread is increasing, though there is nothing to indicate that anything is amiss.




journal entry dated 5th february 2006:
something is up, it was not just me that has been observing the changes that have been happening. a few of the bloggers whose posting i persue deligently, from yesterday,have been commenting or making observations along the same lines as me. i am perturbed.




journal entry dated 9th february 2006:
i have not posted much on my journal in the last few days, i have been actively pursuing my investigations on the web,(i wish i had not given up on my television, when it broke down about 2 years back). my investigations confirm that something is wrong. it looks like people are disappearing in large numbers, and this seems to be instantanous. some of my reports indicate that there have been cases when two people are talking, one end goes silent,suddenly. this report was curious, when the people at the other end of the telephone get this checked, they see that the telephone is lying in a reducing puddle of bluish white frothy gel.




Journal entry dated 4th may 2006:
The airwave are dead, there are no transmission happening, my wi-fi hotspot is dead. The only people left on the world seem to be bloggers and blog readers. The heart wrenching appeal posted on boing boing to all the bloggers to meet where ever they are and get together and procreate to create the future generations seems to have signaled the end of the “invasion� of what the bloggers called the gillette virus.




Journal entry dated 15th may 2006:
This would be my last post to my journal for a long time. I am getting out of this city, my leg seems to have healed quite well and I am able to walk and climb quite well. I am planning to hit the hills and live off the land for as long as I can. There must be a reason why I had a broken leg just before the dc-8 missions was completed. The enforced seclusion with only my desktop as company for the 20 odd days before the break seems to have built up my immunity to the gillette virus, one theory going around, talks of the radiation from the monitor generating immunity in a person…who cares now. I have a higher purpose in life and I am going to find out my purpose.

in the beginning

I wanted to get a feel of how it would have been for a person writing the bible. since i was not there at that time, i thought i would kind of write something along the lines of genesis, but with what is happening currently in the world.
there is no disrespect/intent to anyone or anybody, and this is just an attempt at trying my hand at writing. man it is really difficult, as would see i start off with a lot of fire and than as it goes on further, you would see that i am kind of loosing steam.

well here goes nothing.

1:1 In the beginning Man created the DARPANET and the Private net.

1:2 DARPANET was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Man moved upon the face of the ip addresses.

1:3 And Man said, Let there be connectivity: and there was global connectivity

1:4 and Man saw the connectivity, that it was good; and Man divided the connectivity from the darknet.

1:5 and Man called the connectivity internet, and the other he called peer-to-peer. and the downloads and the uploads were the first day.

1:6 and Man said, let there be firewalls in the midst of the ip addresses, and let it divide the ip addresses from the ip addresses.

1:7 and Man made the firewall, and divided the ip address which were under(behind) the firewall from the ip addresses where were outside the firewall; and it was so.

1:8 and Man called the firewall dmz. and the downloads and the uploads were the second day.

1:9 and Man said, the the ip addresses under the dmz be gathered together unto one place, and let the approved ip's appear; and it was so.

1:10 and Man called the approved ip address static; and the gathering together of the ip addresses called he DNS; and Man saw that it was good.

1:11 and Man said, let the approved ip address bring forth browsing, the content-filter yielding seed, and the approved urls yielding websites after his kind, whose urls is in itself, upon the static ip's:and it was so.

1:12 and the static ip brought forth browsing, and the content-filter yielding seed, and the approved urls yielding websites after his kind, whose urls is in itself, upon the static ip's:and Man saw it was good.

1:13 and the downloads and the uploads were the third day.
1:14 and Man said, let there be valid ip's in the firewall of the dmz to divide the internet from the darknet; and let them be for proxy's, and for 404, and for days, and years;

1:15 skipping from here till 1:19
1:20 and Man said, let the flowing packets bring forth abundantly the moving packets that hath ip header info, and 802.11g that may fly above the earth in the open firewalls of the DMZ.

1:21 and Man created great operating systems, and every living pc that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind and every 802.11g packet after his kind: and Man saw that it was good.

1:22 skipping to verse 26

1:26 and Man said, let us make microsoft in our image, after out likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish(desktop pc user) of the sea, and over the datapackets over the air and over the sun's and novell, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

1:27 skipping to verse 28

1:29 and Man blessed them(microsoft), and Man said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the consumer of the operating systems, and over the 802.11g of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

wtf wmf

i find that my blog posting have become kind of newsgator'ish and not much fun, so kind of working on making up something which is funny along the lines of why i started this blog. hopefully this will turn out as a funny fiction.

and what am i taking up for my "return" to origin? the wmf "vulnerability" in windows. some of the respected denizens of the internet are propounding the theory that this is not a vulnerability but a backdoor deliberatly left by microsoft. you can check out the podcast or the transcript of the the podcast here

i have a simple question to ask. backdoor? in wmf? what about windows itself? is this not the biggest threat to the world? why would anyone want to create a backdoor, when you have the keys to the front door.

was it a billion or 100's of millions of pcs/servers running windows in the world right now? my hypothesis is as follows, and i humbly submit this to the world for digestion. This is not a vulnerability nor a backdoor,but, a preview of the great grandson of MicroSoft Vista. this is the pre-pre-pre alpha or you can call it the proof of concept of the the new version of Microsoft Windows which is to be released in the year 2020, codename "Wolfgang Amadeus" for the desktop version or the server version codenamed "Conjuror".

why did i call it "proof of concept"? if you read the go through the podcast, mentioned above, you will recollect a word which was thrown around there? "SETABORTPROC" , this is the crux to the entire hypothesis. at this point of time i would urge all of my one reader to go through the transcript in extensive detail and to remain focused, once you have done that get back here pronto, to continue with the preview/review of the exciting new version of Windows 2020(aka "Wolfgang Amadeus").

the essential feature of "Wolfgang Amadeus" here onwards called as win2020 is borrowed from Sun vision, ie. Network is the Computer. this "SETABORTPROC" is the most critical component of the design. the microsoft has developed code which will hook onto the WMF "vulnerability" and search for other desktop pc's and servers running the new operating system. once such a desktop is identified, the new code launches itself on both the desktops and they in turn search for other pc's with this operating system. essentially turning the entire internet into a single grid computer, with such enormous computing power, and high availability. As most of you,who, live on the planet earth , are aware that the earth rotates and revolves around the sun,giving us day and night. why did i bring that up here in a discussion on operating systems..hang on, it is highly relevant. the high availability which i talked off, is high availability on a follow the sun(solar sun, not the sun systems) pattern. as people are switching of pcs and going of to sleep, there are other people waking up and putting on their pcs.

so all you gentle folks, please take away this crazy paranoid thought that microsoft has built in a backdoor. but be enormously thrilled that you are all alpha or beta testers for windows 2020.

and why is Microsoft doing this? because they will be using this enormous grid of computers to compile the new operating sytem codename "Ant Walker" to be released in the year 2030. I would be doing a review of "ant walker" latter on.

Pulse of the blog ecosystem

have you ever wanted to get a feel of what are the blogs around, how popular your blog is and profile of the blogger/bloggers? i just came across this site called the blogpulse. click here for the site.

i have visited this site, there seems to be so many options and features available.

quite a lot of the blog resources ("directories") are managed manually, ie someone updates or punches in the url of a blog and then the blog gets updated into database of blogs.

this is the second site where i have come across where there is an automated process of searching and additions of blogs. the first being blogshares.com
i have not seen any categorization option in blogpulse, maybe i need to search more or deeper. Blogshares.com on the other hand has an active categorization process, being handled by the game players and this categorization is in turn moderated by game players who have achieved a certain level of expertise in evaluating such categorization. an exciting game, this blogshares.com and very addictive. just to bleat about it i had managed to reach the top 20 players in the game before the "market crash" and now i do not seem to have the time to play this full time. but i still do spend some time on this once in a while.

getting back to blogpulse.com there are few nifty tools available, Trend Search: gives you ability to plot graphs on blogs based on search terms, Featured Trends : to quote the site "one-click answer to the simple question: "What’s
the buzz?" ", Conversation Tracker: creates a threaded view of the millions of "conversations" taking place on the internet(WOW!),Blogpulse Profiles(this is beta) helps the users find more in-depth information about specific blogs and their authors. the profile did not find much for this blog or for my photoblog

and interesting place this one. keep an eye on this one.


Technorati Tags: blogpulse, blogshares

Microsoft, Apple Sign 5-Year Software Pact

i jumped out of my pants, when i saw this item. was wondering if this was a prank. zoomed into the article and it seems to be looking serious. guys get serious. what is all this about?

find the link to the article here

all this while i was searching to see if i can get max os to work on my intel pc and this happens.(i am not serious here)

this happens only in the us of a, a new spin on spam

Supreme Court refuses to hear Univ. of Texas spam case - Computerworld

this is the original link from where i picked up this new article.

Some sanity in usa. the land of might is right and anyone gets to have his 15 minutes of fame. land where (this is the perception) anything goes and no one can question.

i, for one am happy to hear this. wonder what the spammer's will come up with next?

or would the next bunch of people to come up to the supreme court come with an argument that law cannot stop one from killing/raping/murdering people because of the following reason

a) guess i am not qualified enough to get a new spin on the existing law, and figure out a way of getting a loop hole.
b) reason 2, bloody hell, i just want to take a chance and see if i can get this through.
c) wait and watch.

Jethro Tull

Jethro Tull is to play in mumbai, on 31st jan 2006 and Feb 1 2006. this was the new which was published yesterday morning. i saw this article only in the evening as i was out. quite a few of the FM channels were playing jethro tull and we were wondering what this was all about, never heard Jethro Tull much on the FM's of mumbai.

Ian Anderson has stated that he is an Indophile and loves curry! not that i care much what he likes to eat. What i care for is his music, the man is a god (!? :) )

i still remember the day i got my first paycheck, and going out to the HMV on brigade road, Bangalore and picking up my first Jethro Tull tape, Aqualung.
the title track aqualung, locomotive breath, cross-eyed mary. amazing stuff.

the name jeffrey hammond-hammond, a wonderful name.. a "song for Jeffrey" kind of wonderful song, and Ian Anderson flute is magic.

will i attend the concert? guess not. why? i prefer to listen to music rather than watch music.

Technorati Tags: jethrotull, bangalore, HMV, Mumbai, Concert, tull

Image database search using a drawing interface

Imagine searching a database of images by drawing what you are searching for. Retrievr seems to be a Flickr hack. prediction for the furture of this technology?

this will evolve into a future of visual database searches, someone is right now working on a system where in a person will wear a digital-tactile glove with a wireless connectivity to a huge database of images (has images loaded on from the time the first image was recorded on any media, starting from daguerreotype, the first film, first 8mm, every single frame that has been ever recorded by humankind)

and how will the digitial-tactile glove work as an input device, you wave your hands in the air, drawing images of what you want in the air.

the software quickly scans the database and starts displaying all the images which it can find on the huge 3000 square feet projection display system.

Apple coming into storage?

Apple seems to be coming into the storage business, one of the testimonial is given below. the bench mark for selection? "gut" feel that it is the right technology. guess this is one of the time i am seeing someone truly admitting to the reason for going in for a particular hardware/software. instead of giving a lot of bull supported with benchmarks reports, test analysis etc

South Park turns to Apple for new storage setup - Computerworld


looks good , so should be good. J.J. Franzen , we hail you for being honest!

the neat peice of storage can be viewed here
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, xserveraid

invisibility cloaks

Quite of few of us who had seen the james bond movie, (i am not great remembering names of movies. i think it was "Die Another Day".) were quite thrilled to see his car turn invisible. and those of us who take thoughts forward and like to figure out howstuffworks, there is a post on "How Invisibility Cloaks Work"

the technology is in nascent stages of evolution, guess in another couple of years time this technology should be fully evolved.
howstuffworks.com have given quite a decent writeup on this one.
what would i use this for? may be for birding.

maybe in the future nikon d200M30P models would have this as part of the special software download, which would convert your fancy bio-digital 30 gigapixel camera into a invisibility cloak generator.

and pray what is a bio-digital camera and how does one make a bio-digital sensor? in the year 2009 the pundits in the photo industry realize that the limits of ccd and cmos technology's have reached its peak and there was no other technology which could excite consumers to purchase a new camera, then one of the technicians in nikon sneezes onto a experimental mixture of chemicals which he was working on, his boss gets upset with him and send him off because, that sneeze had costed nikon r department about half a million dollars.

the boss-man keeps this mixture out near a source of microwave radiation and goes home, next day in the morning he see an image of ceiling reflected in this petri dish of chemicales, very excited and starts working on this and discovers bio-digital sensors,of course the guy who sneezed was given the credit for this, but his life was made miserable for the next 2 years, as he was not allowed to get his cold cured, and he was the only source of the virii which could produce this material.

so this a brief note on how the bio-digital sensors came about into existance, and the other foot-note to history, this was the year when canon closed down their imaging business and moved into manufacturing batteries for cars. this was the year when kodak moved from imaging business to be become the worlds biggest photo stock an trader of images.

Technorati Tags: invisibilitycloaks, howstuffworks, photography