My last 2005 post - About the email revolution that google made

Remember those puny 2 MB mailbox that hotmail had?
Remember that 5 MB yahoo had?

hotmail now has 25 MB and its 250 MB for US users.
yahoo has 1 GB. All these web mails reinvented themselves due to the tremendous offering from gmail. Gmail was a late entrant from google in the already very competitive web mail market. There were free providers like yahoo, hotmail, fastmail and paid providers like Juno (i dont know others ;) ). The best of the paid providers gave around 100 MB and the best of hte free was around 10-15 MB. But it took the market by storm. It had a slick AJAX based interface ( i have already blogged about this here). It had 1 GB at the first instance. Google already has a name for being reliable and its redundant fault tolerant servers do just that. Yahoo found that its users need more space only after Gmail gave 1 GB and hotmail seems even stubborn!. Now gmail has around 2GB+ and its growing continuously.

Gmail is growing much better. To compare in a few lines, yahoo has everything in it, the best list of features, integrated account for all purposes (store, games etc.,) but its AJAX based slick mail interface still in beta. Hotmail? where is it? huh!. I have a hotmail account, just because i dont want it to cease existing.

Lets hope this new year brings much more new things to the digital lifes of people around the world.

Happy New Year

A happy and prosperous new year to everyone.

Bye
Varun

How to use Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, MSN behind proxy.

This is a very interesting post about AJAX, the stuff thats currently getting quite a lot of both web programmer and media attention.

The site is called meebo.com. Its slick and cool!!!.

Certainly its one of the best example of AJAX in action that very very cool (apart from GMail and Google Maps).

you can login and chat as you would do in Yahoo Messenger or with MSN. Its just a beginning, so you can see some hitches (it logs off due to network error) and lacking features (it doesnt yet support BUZZ!!! feature). It recently upgraded itself to support invisible feature. Its really really cool. All you need to have is a working browser that can support Javascript!. HuH...Way to go!

With such innovations we are sure to see full fledged applications targeted directly for the web, instead of a particular OS platform.. certainly not a good news to the M$ end. (I for one, welcome our new AJAX overlords )

Acknowledgements: Priya Natarajan showed me this site.

Guido von Rossum moves to Google

This was one of the funniest post i have read at slashdot.

<start >
The winning offer was the one that had first-line indented paragraphs.

We just love a guy that gets so wrapped up in his work!

We've got penguins, we've got pythons, and we've got a lemur with a minigun...this zoo rocks!

After hearing the report, Ballmer threw a Hissssy fit.

Someone reported a problem with a mouse at Google Central and the recruiter got to work on hiring the python guy.

With a keen eye on competition, Google is just trying to catch up to the number of reptiles employed by Microsoft.

</end>

கூகிள் கைடோ - க னா வுக்கு க னா.

ஹி ஹி........

from google import guido

Kaun Banega Crorepati 2

This is a nice tip. The contestant has said the answer, computerji has locked the answer, but Amitabh says a "BREAK" and pleads you not to go away, leaving you thinking whether the answer was right or wrong?. You now have a shortcut, and i have checked it several times and confirmed. May be you too can see for yourself at the next episode of KBC2 and confirm it. Ok, all BLAH BLAHs apart, lemme document it!

• I have highlighted in yellow a block there.
• The result of the answer locked appears there.
  
• The cameraman usually shows all the 6 rectangles (or atleast the top 3 rectangles).
  
• The third rectangle of the first row shows the answer.

Watch KBC2, check whether this works, and comment here.



Bye,
Varun :)

Google Print dissected

I was thinking what the problem is with google print, when its a nice idea to digitize books. read about author's guild sueing google print here

On fiddling with google print, i found out a method which people can use to read the entire book, provided they have the patience to do so.

This is my first few pages. I reached page 4, i am unable to move further. What to do now?













There seems to be some solution ....
scroll down

here i look for something important in the text, here it is the next topic heading (2 Our Clustering Method)













What to do next? OK, search for that word (i searched for Clustering methods) and clicked page 4. Now i have access to Pages 4 - 5 -6.











Now once again i reach page where i cant move forward. Answer: Use the same logic. There are instances when it asks u to login thru ur google account. No big deal. Use one of your gmail accounts, or get one from your friends who have gmail account and create a few. (most ppl have 100 invites in their accounts).











Disclaimer:

1. please dont use this method to read. The author of the book might have worked for years writing the book, its a bad idea to read it for free, when the author deserves monetary credit.
2. by gmail's rules, you are not supposed to create more than one account. having more than one account will be against the terms & conditions that u agree, when u register for gmail service.

Bye

my childhood picture 

Pretty happy with my placement result. Should start preparing for GRE.

The effect of LSI

It was widely rumoured that LSI- Latent Semantic Indexing was strongly integrated into google. see here for some blog saying the same.
Now, i got some tangible proof with my own name as experiment. Sometime back, i got my slashdot profile as the first result in my search. I did not take snapshot. When i searched later, things were back to normal, with my page back in first spot. so i thought that its my dream (to find my homepage knocked off from the first place).

Today, i saw, my blogger profile gain first place, knocking off my tripod site, which is (supposed to be) my established homepage (although its truly outdated), and yes!, there are no backlinks associated with my blogger profile (but there are as far as my tripod site is concerned).

Bye
Varun
PS: chances are good that in the future, this page might come somewhere in the 100-200th pages when you search for Latent Semantic Indexing :-) (and may be on top 10 if you search for "latent semantic indexing backlinks blogger profile homepage" or something like this)
dependant heavily on googlebot indexing me :-S

Star Gazing

Star gazing
I recently stumbled on this site:
http://www.heavens-above.com
In this site, when u register, shows you the satellites that are visible at night in your place of living. have u seen some star (like object) moving in sky when u were in ur house terrace?. now its a chance to glance the sky for moving objects systematically. When u register in this site, and provide ur location, it will show the night sky map with the stars marked, and the time the satellites will cross the sky and the position, u can now wait for say 9 PM and see the satellite and come back to ur room. not only that, i was able to get the exact lat and long for chrompet. Chances are good that you can get for your place too.

Viruses and Social Engineering
I got a virus in my mailbox, the subject tempted me to read the mail although i knew it was a virus.
From: abuse@gov.us
To: my-email@yahoo.com//
Subject: Illegal Website
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 23:33:06 -0700

You have visited illegal websites.
I have a big list of the websites you surfed.

+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Bitdefender AntiVirus - www.bitdefender.com


Attachments
Attachment scanning provided by:

Files:
readme.scr (31k)
Scan result: Virus "W32.Netsky.P@mm" found.
These days, the virus writers are betting heavily on social engineering on spreading viruses, and of course, they are successful in most cases.

The Return of the shuttle

NASA is having a tough time. I read in a paper that the shuttle has around 200 critical(moving) components while the SpaceShip One has around 20. It looks like a terrible nightmare for the managers at NASA, not to mention, Griffin's status, although i read that he is more stoic, showing little or no emotions. Hmm... Lets hope that this bloated vehicle finishes building ISS and retires as quickly as possible.

Some sources you can read about the space shuttle:
http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/ (the official site)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

STS-114 is the current mission to send supplies to ISS. See here about it

The Nigerian Scam

Have you heard of Nigerian Scams? This is the latest:
A sample letter here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_fraud
(but this is American Scam ;-) )
Just thougt might be interesting..., look here http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158277&cid=13260934

Joke of the day:
News: ESA discovers ICE on mars
sarcasm: Now that we know there's ice there, we can tell the Canadians and they'll get a hockey team up there ASAP
(take from slashdot)
Bye
Varun

Map of Chennai

Looking at chennai with MSN virtual earth:
Click here to view chennai with MSN Virtual Earth
Looking at chennai with google maps:
Click here to view chennai with Google Maps
Assignments to you (in order of difficulty):
1) can you show me where katthipara is?
2) GST road?
3) Chrompet
4) Radha Nagar main road
5) My house ;-)

i request you to wet your feet/fingers at the keyboard, and point me where these are and post the results as comments

your last smile

usually for my cliche jokes i crack, most of my friends overwhelm with smilies like this :-) . Now it seems thats imperiled by our software giants.

see here: Link here

Bye, Varun

820 MB over, i have around 20 MB per day usage till this 31st. :-(
God save me!

vettifying..... nothing else
Bye
Varun

there is nothing called Free Lunch

there is timorousness in the air, with BSNL finishing its unlimited meals, i am now into "alavuch" saapadu(limited meals), 1gb per month, not sure if it wud be enuf, lets hope it wud be. There is a saying "Free-as in freedom and not free- as in free lunch". It looks like i am gonna miss both.
-Varun
-----------------------
How does a physicist threaten people? I will have to understand rheology by experimenting your face.

The effect on Anniyan ;-)

Dear { America, Russia, China },
If you are in need of { Astronauts, Cosmonauts, taikonauts}, please consider our tamil film heroes. They can already do zero gravity stunts at normal gravity. Hence, you can safely assume that you need not provide them the rigorous training required for a manned space journey.
Thanking You,
Yours truly,
Tamil Film Fan.
PS: you can also substitute James bond instead of Tamil film heroes (thanks Yogesh for enlightening me). Prosaic industry, what elss, hmm..., nothing original, and the ending too is too banal.

Remote in action

My remote, i am pressing a key, you can see the IR rays! You can use this method to check if your remote is working, or rather if the batteries in your remote has not dried up. (i saw this idea in some forum, tried it out and you are reading it now. This is possible because, webcams also capture IR rays apart from visible spectrum).

The normal remote (no keys pressed)

My remote, no keys pressed!.

Whats gonna happen tomorrow

Something shd happen tomorrow, if u know what i am saying here, decode it and keep it with u, dont let out the secret.

Miscellaneous C Questions

1. How to find if a stack is progressing in forward or backward
direction using a C program?

//This code relies on the fundamental idea that function calls uses stack.

#include<stdio.h>
int* globalvar;
void myfunc(void);

int main()
{
        int i,*x=&i;
        myfunc();
        if((globalvar-x)>0)
                printf("stack progression forward");
        else
                printf("Stack progression backward");
}

void myfunc(void)
{
        int j;
        globalvar=&j;
        return;
}

2. How exactly are \c and \v used in C. when i give them in a printf
statement, strange characters are printed.

according to K &R, any non standard (ie., the one's for which \(char) form is not defined, the result of printing such a thing is undefined!)
for \c ->test.c:6:16: warning: unknown escape sequence '\c'
for \v -> it prints this character - ♂ !! i read here \v stands for vertical tab and is not working (in windows gcc).

3.typedef struct{
char *;
nodeptr next; //this should be nodeptr* next; (updated from algo-geeks)
} * nodeptr;
what does nodeptr stand for?

the purpose of typedef is to provide a compile time new name.
typedef int* integer_pointer; (will allow u to write integer_pointer a; , "a" now is a pointer to an integer. )
you can understand this as:
typedef (structureinfo)* newname;
this causes nodeptr to be a pointer to the anonymous structure defined above.
Although technically right, this declaration is useless!, since the structure is anonymous.
correct me if i am wrong somewhere.

-வருண்
சௌ . வருண் அங்கு ஜீஅஞ்சல் . வணிகம்
;-)

Interview

Quoted from interview101.com about stress interview:
I have heard a story about a candidate being asked to jump from a window. The candidate proved he was good enough for the challenge by climbing on the window and jumping inside the room (nobody said jump out of the window!).

really liked this one, that i want to post it!

Learning C

Few things that i learnt from K & R today.
1) (Page 148) quote from="K&R" A union may only be initialized with a value of the type of its first member: thus the union u described above can be initialized with integer value
The truth is that in spite of all these words by K&R, this code works

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{

        union{
                int ival;
                char cval;
                float fval;
        } u;
        u.cval='a';
        printf("%c %d",u.cval,u.ival);
}

2) (Page 150) Bit fields *should* be only integer, i never learnt much about bit fields, but now i understand their importance.
3)sizeof is a compiler directive
4) you cant create pointers for a register variable, although i knew this, i think, its nice to jot it down here
5) Crooked examples of pointers:
char (*(*x[3])())[5]
x: an array of [3] of pointer to function returning pointer to char of array[5] (you cant get worser than this)
6)typedefs when properly used can save a lot of head scratches!!!. I rarely(when did that rare even happen?) use typedefs in my code.
7) (this one from venks)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
 int main()
 {      while(1)
        {
                fprintf(stdout,"hello-out");
                fprintf(stderr,"hello-err");
                sleep(1);
        }
        return 0;
}

Now i try to compile and execute:

[varun@localhost a]$ gcc test.c
[varun@localhost a]$ ./a.out
hello-errhello-errhello-errhello-err ..... i get this continuously.
[varun@localhost a]$

The question is, why the hell am i getting this? why dont i even get a string of hello-out?
Answers happily invited..

Morse Code-Dash Dots

Hi
I saw a really obfuscated C code, that given the text converts it to dots and dashes

-------------codestart---------------------
#define DIT (
#define DAH )
#define __DAH ++
#define DITDAH *
#define DAHDIT for
#define DIT_DAH malloc
#define DAH_DIT gets
#define _DAHDIT char
_DAHDIT _DAH_[]="ETIANMSURWDKGOHVFaLaPJBXCYZQb54a3d2f16g7c 8a90l?e'b.s;i,d:"
;main DIT DAH{_DAHDIT
DITDAH _DIT,DITDAH DAH_,DITDAH DIT_,
DITDAH _DIT_,DITDAH DIT_DAH DIT
DAH,DITDAH DAH_DIT DIT DAH;DAHDIT
DIT _DIT=DIT_DAH DIT 81 DAH,DIT_=_DIT
__DAH;_DIT==DAH_DIT DIT _DIT DAH;__DIT
DIT'\n'DAH DAH DAHDIT DIT DAH_=_DIT;DITDAH
DAH_;__DIT DIT DITDAH
_DIT_?_DAH DIT DITDAH DIT_ DAH:'?'DAH,__DIT
DIT' 'DAH,DAH_ __DAH DAH DAHDIT DIT
DITDAH DIT_=2,_DIT_=_DAH_; DITDAH _DIT_&&DIT
DITDAH _DIT_!=DIT DITDAH DAH_>='a'? DITDAH
DAH_&223:DITDAH DAH_ DAH DAH; DIT
DITDAH DIT_ DAH __DAH,_DIT_ __DAH DAH
DITDAH DIT_+= DIT DITDAH _DIT_>='a'? DITDAH _DIT_-'a':0
DAH;}_DAH DIT DIT_ DAH{ __DIT DIT
DIT_>3?_DAH DIT DIT_>>1 DAH:'\0'DAH;return
DIT_&1?'-':'.';}__DIT DIT DIT_ DAH _DAHDIT
DIT_;{DIT void DAH write DIT 1,&DIT_,1 DAH;}
==============code end===================
from
-----http://www.ioccc.org/1986/hague.c-------

The nice part of it is that the source itself looks like morse code text ;-) dit dah!!!
-... -.-- . ---.. ? ---.. ...- .- .-. ..- -.
(guess what this is?) Put the answer in comments

Linspire- Uninspire

Linspire - Un Inspire

Yesterday, i got chance to test the Linspire boot CD, got from Digit DVD ISO. I thought it would be a good one and decided to keep a personal copy. So i wrote in CD-R. To my surprise, it was too bad, i really dint like it!!, 1 hour of my precious time before computer wasted ( u know these days my time before computer has become precious? Ppl who know about me know it!!) . My mandrake /fc3 and ubuntu hoary boot CD are far better, i really dint find anything that sticks to the word that "its the next windows". Really speaking i felt there was nothing in it. It was another theme for KDE. eh!. Anyway, that was my taste, but i really liked the theme of linspire. anyway, i usually dont like i586 OS for my system, since they dont support Cool and Quiet and keep my computer temperature high and run at higher clock cycles (My system has Cool and Quiet technology, by which the clock cycle speed is increased on demand, saving power and keeping the system cool and quiet) :-(

Linspire really needs a lot of improvement if it wants to say that it is replacement for both windows and (other) linux OSes. The only thing they had was Real Player and Flash Player pre-installed!. (you can install them both without hassles from their respective sites ! for x8-64 u have problems installing flash-no 64 bit flash support yet!). I could better get away with helix player and use mplayer or xine whatever for linux and good old windows media player for my parents who listen some bhakti songs. Personally, i wish some better distro come up because i can introduce linux easily for my parents, and then they can learn something new (and) in an interesting way. Lets see which distro maker is lucky;-) (this is the other way of saying, i wish some distro maker does this). You can give some reasons saying it was just a demo live CD, yes! it was a demo CD, so what opinion i have may change if i buy ;-) a copy of Linspire.

TOS

TOS - Top of Stack, Test of Strength, Test of Skype.
I tested the video module of skype, and i also tested skype with sridhar, there was some lag (as much as 10 seconds), its good that skype is available for all platforms, and it functions well on all platforms, but has to improve on the lag problem (i guess its coz of bandwidth problems? not sure ).

The end of Gyach Crashes

Finally, there seems to be an end to my gyach story. with the help of sridhar, i found out how to avoid crashes, and that its coz of those animated smilies! doh!. Now everything is back to normal, and that i now have the ability to see who are invisible and those who are really offline.

To solve the problem, you have to disable the smilies, using OPTIONS window. Thats it. things back to normal

The Gyach Story

Today i tried GYACH, the Linux Yahoo Messenger clone, with imenvironment support and audoi chat. However it crashes as it pleases, (seg faults) donno why.
The best joke was this
(chatting with Sridhar-CEG-now trilogy)
me: I recommend you to use Gyach for Y!. Really its cool
The second i sent this, gyach crashed. I think gyach was too modest to be called a Y! replacement, so it decided to auto-crash (like auto-pilot)
<--snip-- > seg fault
Sridhar: hmmm
me:You know, the moment i recommended you, gyach actually crashed. eh!
me :-))
Sridhar: :-))
Sridhar: Blog this
(the exact text was replaced(with no change in meaning) to keep the conversation juicy)
-Bye
Varun

The Poor Quality of Indian Media

The Poor Quality of Indian Media
Reading about Cartosat-1 i found that the Indian media had under written about the issue. It seems most of them except (India Times) seems to have little idea of the state of the art satellite. It can map to 2.5 mts. With that quality, you can successfully find the roof of your house and also the bin in your street. I guess slashdot had a far better and a relatively accurate information about Cartosat. I am probably more unhappy because Hindu that i read very often gave one of the worst coverage here :-(. God save india, when will the quality of indian papers raise? eh!. Most papers that i read provide sensational news and no to the fact stuffs.
Paying 3 odd Rupees and getting an underquality news is really bad. Slashdot obviously covers with the US taste. You can often see people there howling that why should india pursue space research when half a billion population is in poverty etc etc. Typical Big Brother stuff. Let me quote some of them.
Why is India doing this? It is a developing nation with crushing poverty, corruption, debt, and the caste system. They can't afford the luxury on spending resources on high-tech stuff like this. They should spend on education, public health, agriculture, and social programs.
Thats slashdot for you, typical "India Bashing" and there are some better ones too like this:
India has a population of 1,065,070,607 [google.com] whereas the US has a poulation of 293,027,571 [google.com]

52% of 1,065,070,607 is 553,836,715 and 97% of 293,027,571 is 284,236,743. That means India already has 269,599,972 more literate people than the US

Hmm, now what do you say?
You can post your comments in this blog itself.

Preparing for Networks Exam

Day after tomorrow, i am having Networks exam. Preparing for the same.
No other great news. After the exam, i will be installing NVidia driver for my GeForce MX graphics card. Last time when i installed i made a mistake of not keeping the internet connection on. This time i guess i wont make that mistake as my modem does the dialling now. This method of NATed internet usage seems safe since all those Microsoft Network Discovery packets are cleanly filtered. Not only that, most port scans are totally filtered. Above that i have my firestarter in Linux and a good firewall for windows. Today Venks downloaded a 30 MB file (i wont tell what it is! ;-) ) from my system. It took an hour since my upload speed is around 6 KB/s. my bsnl broadband seemed much faster than it usually is. Yesteday i got speeds around 35 - 40 KBs.What happened to BSNL ? Is something wrong? ;-). OK got to study. Bye

bsnl broadband

Hi,
my bsnl brdband is back from slumber. Now it is back to its 256 Kbps +. I have provided a ksnapshotted blog for configuring the modem through the web interface ( 192.168.1.1) instead of using rp-pppoe and/or other packages.
check out here: http://modembsnl.blogspot.com/

I was preparing for the seminar when i found a good content on Run time storage management
http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/CS3723/storage/storage2.html
ciao
Varun

Tough Day, lex and yacc code dissected

today was a tough day. Had to submit record, finished it; but had to skip lunch to finish. After finishing found an easy way with yacc for the intermediate code generator for assignment statement, with just a few lines. Hmmm...
This is the code and explanation
/* calc.lex */
%{
#include
#include
#include "y.tab.h" //needed to obtain represented values for tokens (for example INTEGER is given a number 257 by yacc) and need to be used here
extern int yylval; // this enables to pass values to yacc

%}

DIGIT [0-9]
ID [a-z]
OPR [+-\\*/()]
//guess no problem here
%%
= { return *yytext;;} //returns the char '='
{DIGIT}+ {yylval=atoi(yytext);
return INTEGER; } //sets the value of digit in yylval. When yacc resolves those $x's in case the $x is INTEGER, it reads the value from here.
{ID} { yylval=*yytext-'a'; return IDS;} //same case here. Since my yylval is integer i have to convert char to int this way (by subtracting ascii(a) )
{OPR} {return *yytext;}
[ \n] {return *yytext;}
[ \t] ;
. { fprintf(stderr,"Illegal char %c\n",*yytext); }
%%

/****************************************************************/

/* calc.yacc */

%token INTEGER IDS EQUALS //meaning these are the possible user def tokens
%left '+' '-'
%left '*' '/'
//operator precedence + and - have equal and less precedence than * and / (which have equal precedence)
%{
#include
#include
int tcount=1; //this is same as mktemp function. returns a running var for temp variable(as in dragon book)
%}

%%
program:
IDS '=' expr '\n' { printf("%c=t%d\n",$1+'a',tcount-1);} //assignment statement will always be a=expr\n form.
|
;
expr:
IDS {$$=$1; } //if i have an ID resolved for expression set value of expression to be the value of ID
|expr '+' expr { printf("t%d=",tcount++);
if($1>=50) printf("t%d+",$1-50); else
printf("%c+",$1+'a');
if($3>=50) printf("t%d\n",$3-50); else
printf("%c\n",$3+'a');
$$=50+tcount-1;fflush(stdout);
}
//here if i have a both expr1 and expr2 to be IDS then i have to print tx=a+b where a and b are the IDs resolved.
//in case the expr1 or expr2 are states (i use a convention that if the value of expr1 is >=50, i mean a tempvar rather than ID)
//then print tx instead of some character(i mean ID).
|expr '-' expr {
printf("t%d=",tcount++);
if($1>=50) printf("t%d-",$1-50); else
printf("%c-",$1+'a');
if($3>=50) printf("t%d\n",$3-50); else
printf("%c\n",$3+'a');
$$=50+tcount-1;fflush(stdout);
}
|expr '*' expr {
printf("t%d=",tcount++);
if($1>=50) printf("t%d*",$1-50); else
printf("%c*",$1+'a');
if($3>=50) printf("t%d\n",$3-50); else
printf("%c\n",$3+'a');
$$=50+tcount-1;fflush(stdout);
}
|expr '/' expr {
printf("t%d=",tcount++);
if($1>=50) printf("t%d/",$1-50); else
printf("%c/",$1+'a');
if($3>=50) printf("t%d\n",$3-50); else
printf("%c\n",$3+'a');
$$=50+tcount-1;fflush(stdout);
}
| '('expr')' { $$=$2;}; //if i have a open brackt and close bracket dont worry, the value only is required.
%%
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
yyparse();
return 0;
}
//////*****************************************************************////////////////////

/* makefile */
//this is the order of compilation
//compile yacc, then lex , then the binary code with gcc
all:yacc lex code
yacc:calc.yacc
yacc -d calc.yacc
lex:calc.lex
lex calc.lex
code: y.tab.c lex.yy.c
gcc -g -o code y.tab.c lex.yy.c -lfl -L /home/cs2k23749/lib -ly
Thats it . If you have any problems, tell me. I guess this should be useful for atleast one soul.

bsnl broadband

Yesterday, my bsnl broadband went to sleep. It took 2 days for it to wake up from slumber. Did my networks lab well. Preparing for Compiler lab exam. Lot of work to do. :-(. back from slumber, my brdband went narrow, got speeds upto 10 KBps :-( hmmm. Guess it should be back to its original speed soon. Recently (for a few weeks), i started playing word racer (in yahoo messenger) with my relative venki. He is a great player, and kindles me to do better. Nowadays got addicted to the game, i cant sleep without playing a few games with him. Bye, Varun

This i thought was the best of all. BTW, the body is of a male person(can u believe it?) (i suspected, venks confirmed). all these pictures are courtesy NASA. 

This was the other picture, of tsunami (wrecked) hero Oberoi, Vivek. This was not an exact fit, but still was good enough.  

this was one of the best pictures for the konqueror site (see it at http://varun.siteburg.com) the other best one was of ash (both faces fitted/morphed excellently by Venkatesh!!! ) 

Networks Lab Exam

Tomorrow end semester Networks Lab Exam. The problem with gmail still persists. As GB said, after all gmail is still in beta (a nice reason if something ceases to work properly ;) ). Preparing for the lab exam. Nothing more.
-Varun :)

I just saw Chronicle Lite from chronicle lite.
It's based on Java (hence slow). However is good and the only editor i know that compiled in linux x86-64 (many failed about 6 of them i tried to compile)
Nothing else.
Got to sleep

Actually i am writing this blog from GAIM. This was done using a nice simple plugin available for blogger.com from gaim. If you are seeing this then i shd say that this really rocks!!!!.What else???

கூகிள் பிகாஸா

கூகிள் பிகாஸா நன்றாக இருந்தது. என்று லினக்ஸிர்கு எழுதப்படும் என்று அறியேன். (vasagha dhosam shandhaviyaha)
It was real tough writing this sentence.
Picasa was nice. It allowed me to send photos and even better burn them to CDs, although havent tried it yet.Will try sometime soon.

the google presentation

A nice presentation about google.


Google Presentation

The mess(age) of the day

today i tried installing mandrake linux 10.1. (x86-64)
I downloaded from a mirror and installed, it happily installed properly, but unfortunately when i restarted, things went wrong. it says init not available although i actually passed the init in the grub.
BTW, i actually upgraded from 10.0 official i586 to 10.1 community x86-64. I came to know this only when i started installing :-(. got to do something abt it. I am currently unhappy with FC3 and cant spare a lot of space( i have close to 4 GB space for installation in mandrake partition so thought of installing the new one over the old), but FC3 has a good amt of space for day 2 day works. It doesnt have mp3 and i plugged it up myself (got realplayer & xmms plugin). That made me hate fc3, coz had a tuf time first setting up yum (that too gave me problem) and first had problem installing a simple c program (coz gcc4 was also installed and had incomplete libraries and failed to compile x86-64 program, gave pages of errors etc etc ). I shd say FC3 is fedora crap 3

gmail had a bug i found. I had three unopened mails while it said only one
Hmm, gmail bug i found, I had three unopened, but said only one.