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

a new one. instablogs

i came across instablogs.com today, was looking at the blogging formats employeed and i thought to my self, maybe this instead of struggling with moving everthing i own in the blogsphere to here. and then i read the splash page on instablog.org and i says it is by invite.

Dammmmmm!

well ladies and gentlemen, can i invite myself in?

Technorati Tags: instablogs, uninvited

for the birdies amongst us

there is an exciting race which is scheduled on january 22nd 2006 in mumbai, the HSBC Mumbai Bird Race. this is the second time the event is being organised in mumbai. and seems to have become an annual event.

last time there were about 277 species of birds spotted ! bravo birders!.

where to get more info on this? click here "HSBC Mumbai Bird Race"

Technorati Tags: Birding, BirdRace, Mumbai

Turking

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.

this statement was what caught my eye.

i have taken the definition of "turking" from blogshares.com , you can find a list of blog/blogger who are writting about "turking" here

Definition:
Turking is an act of accomplishing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) on
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Workers are paid for the numbers of HITs they
accomplish. Since the Nov. 2005 launch of Amazon Mechanical Turk,
turking has become a popular online activity for many college students
and computer enthusiasts.

a very interesting concept. i can see the future were in lot of people would get involved into turking. the profile of people currently seem to be like the definition college students and "geeks"(?!).

i can see a future were in there would be new companies formed, whose main source of income would be from turking. would they be looking at outsourcing this activity to people who are looking for work? possibly the companies formed would hire infrastructure, possibly high bandwidth, have remote access servers to which hundreds of college students and techno-managers with spare time would be connecting to handle HIT's.


why do i think companies would be get into this business?


one simple fact, currently there is a process of qualification based on which a HIT is assigned to a person, the companies would have a higher turn around time in archiving and building on this qualification requirement. (by the way i had qualified to handle a few hits, and the first one i took was for a man who wanted to decide if he looked good with a beard or without a beard, in case this is accepted i guess i will be richer by $0.01)


i guess more qualified you/entity are, more HIT's will be assigned to you.


for an organization, this would be one continuous stream of HIT's


will pen more on this latter. but one this is sure, this is one definite activity which will be on peoples radar for some time. this could turn out to be as popular as RAP music.

Technorati Tags: Turking, Amazon

trying the performancings blog this page

I was just waiting for something like this. I guess it should be soon available in india.

Boing Boing: Kill-A-Watt electrical usage meter

Technorati Tags: firefox, extentions, performancing

on the roll

i have not blogged so much in one day as i have done today. and i started blogging in november 2004.

i guess this is because of the convenience of PerFormancing extension for firefox.

viva la PerFormancing

Test post using Performancing for firefox 1.5

This is just a test post to check out how performancing for firefox 1.5 works....looks good so far!

update 29th dec 2005.

still getting used to this interface, looks extremely powerful and convenient to use. maybe i can get to figure out how to connect to blogzy.com blog and transfer my content from blogger to blogzy.

why am i looking at moving to blogzy? one simple reason, categories which blogger does not seem to have and the work around's seem to be involve lot of work. currently i am maintaining a number of individual blogs just because i want to categories the contents in a particular way.

i have been working with firefox for quite sometime now, i am a FAN.

the firefox extensions are amazing. performancing for firefox is great and you can find it here at

Performancing

Technorati Tags: Performancing, firefox, blogginginterface

On photography and people

not sure what exactly that i want to post. i have been working on 2 ideas for my normal humor/sci-fi writing, have been cooking this for about 10-15 days not much progress.

i seem to have got over the craze of playing blogshares.com. and this is giving me some time. i still log in every now and then. after about 10 months on this wonderful game, i am getting back to photography, and you guessed it....blogging.

(just a footnote in the history of blogshares, i had reached the 20th richest player about a month back. and now since the market crash i have been pushed down to what? 30? 36? place, the new turks are on the rampage give the old rich players a run for their money)
today i was browsing through the forum at jjmehta.com

and it was wonderful to see all the great photographers and their photos.

and posted one which i was working on...using a br-2a and a 50 mm nikkor reversed on a d70.

came across a guy going by the nic of "The Rider" and he reminded me of abijeet, the one whose blog is linked to the right of this post. Going through his blog i got a link to his wifes blog, and man i was crying after seeing the posts there...she was talking of walking around on brigade road and other great places in bangalore. and this is Priti's blog

i guess i am really missing bangalore.(or bengaloore or whatever they want to change the name to) wonder if Pecos pub is still around,they had a gobi manchurian which was absolutly out of the world, never had it so good anywhere else. dry and crisp went wonderfull with the beer.

Indian, the burger joint on st.patricks complex, "stars and stripes" in the same complex, the man running the place used to make apple pie once in a while and it was mind blowing, i was lucky couple of times when i was there(before marriage) that i got to eat this pie.

fanoos kebab rolls, his beef masala and roti was wonderful, the wet spots you see on these pages are my saliva....drool droooool.

there was this tiny mallu joint somewhere at the back of wilson garden, the food was real cheap, and quantity was big and quality was wonderful. hygine forget it! i think this place was called "Saigo"

enough about the food and bangalore( watch out bangalore i should be visiting soon!!)

i am still trying to figure out photoediting, it is slightly more than a year since i had picked up the d-70, still figuring out monitor caliberation. i have a feeling that this time i will be getting a hang of it.

had a wonderful day, this christmas, had a few friends home over, gala time, no booze, only veg food and also some jain food going around!! in the evening was invited by kumar to view the puja for the pilgrims who are heading for shabrimalai. kumar was one of the participant in the event.

and the event? fire walking! for those who have been looking at my photoblog, they would remember photos of a similar event 25th december 2005.

will post the photos soon.

guess that's it for now.

Technorati Tags: bangalore, food, memories

Himalaya pictures

i was trawling the net and i came across a post on ramesh dhami! on a blog. have given the link here On the Edge - René Seifert's Insights: Exhibition in Bangalore: Himalaya Pictures

having seen a few of dhami's pictures, this must have been an absolute fantastic show.(not this shows one)

i guess this is one more reason why i need to look at bangalore! missing out on a lot of stuff there.

on the other side, life if real interesting in mumbai. from a different point of view, i have met lot of amazing people from tania's school. the parents, the teachers(didi's) a great man called Manoj Lekhi, a person who is sooooo active in ISP and SSY and the school.

all such high energy people. so charged.

keeping in touch

Posting here after a long time. This is just to let blogger know that i am still around. I have been totally bogged down with work and personal commitments.

In the last few months i have spent quite some time travelling, have been to ooty,coonor, mudhumalai, mysore,ganapatipule,cochin. these are some of the places i can recollect off hand.

I have become an uncle to a beautiful little girl.

my daughter has been awarded the yellow belt in karate, she is 4 years old!

work has been continiously interesting. the chinese curse which goes "may you live in interesting times"

i have been spending quite some time in photography. also thinking of taking up a formal course in photography.

have started working on macro photography(or photo micrography as it is known) have posted a sample of a dead fly i found in the house at http://pvvpics.blogspot.com

i have not picked up a macro lense. i am doing macro photography using a lense reversal ring, br-2a for nikon, reversing a 50mm 1.8 lense onto a d70.

a few rounds of this has convinced me to start saving for a macro lense. he he.

with a br-2a all metering and auto features of d70 disappears and it becomes a manual camera!

till the macro lense comes in guess it is nikons br-2a to the rescue.

I have been regularly posting images here

I had very briefly met the actress Sonali Kulkarni at a birthday party of a friends neice.