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gain first place, knocking off my tripod site, which is (supposed to be) my established homepage (although its truly outdated), and yes!, there are no backlinks associated with my blogger profile (but there are as far as my tripod site is concerned).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