Q: Do you know what makes me an amazing uncle?
A: An amazing nephew! :) It's sad that I am slowly but steadily getting bored to post entries here. But I am not giving up on me. I believe that I still have some creativity left and will keep pushing myself to post something more regularly until I give up on me. Whatever that means.

Ok. So here I am. On last Friday, I caught a bus to Mumbai. The journey was uneventful as usual. At a place called Loni-Kalbhor near Pune, there was a huge traffic jam for, as it is the case always, some unknown reason. We were trapped in it for more than two hours. Finally I got so bored that, when it reached Pune, I got off and went home instead of going to Mumbai. I kept my (heavy) bags there, took a shower, had breakfast and left for Mumbai.

At station, rather that going for the standard volvo, I tried something new. I got into a Indica taxi. The driver dropped me at Powai. On the way, he told us that he was on duty of some company and had already got 2500 bucks for this trip. And the 200 Rs. he took from the four passangers, including me, were going into his pocket. From Powai, I went to Smriti's place. I had a nice time there.

In the evening I came back with my father, brother and some other people in the Car. On the way back it was windy and raining, lightening and thundering. And we were listening to the radio. England Vs. WestIndies ICC champions trophy final was on. It was the most amazing match. And the whole atmosphere made it more memorable.

Sunday and Monday I lazied around the house. Caught up with old school friends and went and met my new, shiny and tiny nephew. :)

Tuesday morning I came back to Bangalore. Its back to routine now, hopefully.



This is my new camera in action. Taken from the terrace of my office. Pretty impressive.. isnt it?

You are dreaming about something nice, all snuggled up in the cozy blanket. And your alarm clock asks you "Beeep beep beeep beep?". You look at the watch and it says "6:30am!". You think about snoozing the alarm but decide against it because the meeting starts at 7. Somehow you manage to get up and get into some kind of presentable shape. You come to office in a hurry. You check the mails as a habit. And you find a mail from your boss saying that "Today's meeting is canceled. Sorry for the inconviniece".

What else can you say but "WTF!"
Next few days, we at home, celebrated. I clicked a lot of snaps. I came back to Hyderabad on Monday. And tomorrow I am going to Mumbai and then to Pune and from there to Bangalore.

Sync complete. From Monday I will post from bangalore.
Thank you very much.
I am posting this just because I dont want to stop the one good creative thing that I have been doing for this long. But I am not in a mood to post. But I will.

Thursday16th:

9:30 pm:

As I was about to pack my bags to go to the new company guest house (actually the one was staying at was new.. I was planning to move to the old one), my cell called me. The news I was waiting for some weeks was given to me. I had so many ideas about how I was going to react to the news but when I got it for real I was as clueless as the crows on electricity cables. My mother told me that they are going to hospital and my sister-in-law is going to deliver my first nephew the next day. I dont know what happened but for next few minutes I was in a surprise shock. I dint know what was happening and what I should do. One thing was for sure that I wanted to be there.

I called up Smriti and asked her to help me finding out the ways out of this city into my home city. Prompt as always, she did some googling and came up with all the flight schedules and airline phone numbers. I called up everyone but half of them were not picking up and half of them said no flight is available. I put my bag in the new guest house, packed one small backpack and left for the airport.

10:30pm:
No airlines had flight to Pune till the next morning. Ok. Plan B. Go to Mumbai and then Pune. Only AirIndia had an international flight to Dubai (or NY) which had a halt at Mumbai. Somehow I got inside the airport (they dont allow you to go in without a ticket). I asked the man on the AirIndia counter and he said the flight departs at 2:55am and asked me to come to the same counter at 2am. He said I would surely get a ticket. I confirmed that they accept credit cards as I dint have much cash on me.

Friday 17th:

1:55am:
I was sitting on the same chair for last 2-3 hours and I was pretty confident. At 2am, the same guy confirmed that he had some first class tickets left. I went to the cash counter and asked for a ticket. As he was swiping my card, the machine died... right infront of my eyes! I dint have cash to buy a first class ticket but I had enough to get an economy class one. But fate! They were out of economy tickets. There is not a single ATM in the terminal. I came up with Plan C, Plan D.. Plan Z. Nothing worked. And I was left alone at the counter. I was waiting for some miracle and it came running towards me in the form of one Mr. Madhav. This guy told me that there WAS one economy seat. He called up the control room and asked them to delay the flight for some time. I ran and ran and finally goy myself in the cosy little economy class seat.

4:30am:
After 55 minutes in air I got out at Mumbai airport. As I got out of the terminal, I saw a boy with a pluckard in hand that said "RK Travels to Pune". I asked him and he said they have a Toyota Qualis and would leave in a 15 mins. As I was waiting in the car, some Cab drivers came and started fighting with the travels people. Apparantly, they are not allowed to do business inside the airport. They were planning to take those boys and the driver (who was from Bhor, a place near Pune, and whose name was Subhash. Yes, I talked to him for a couple of mins :P) to the police. One of them asked me to come to police station with them. I was laughing. I told them I just want to go to Pune! So they put me in a prepaid-taxi to dadar. The cab driver (Bhekhlal Yadav from Jharkhand, who thinks that cab-business was in boom in 1994-95 and went bust when he got into it when he was 16-years old by getting a driving license by bribing a cop and he was much better off when he was working in a factory before that. Whew!) dropped me at Dadar.

6:00am:
"Poona, Poona, Poona", "do seats, do seats", "100 Rs, 100 Rs".. this is how the private taxi drivers (mostly unautorized) holler to get the fares. I was sitting in a Tata Sumo and the driver was waiting for 3 more people. They have to take 10 passengers to make some profits in a single Mumbai-Pune trip. I could have taken a bus but bus takes 4 hours and time was running out. In 15 mins the Sumo was full. 4-5 people from Jaipur (i guess) were the first time visitors. The driver was absolutely reckless. I was on the edge of the seat was and was biting into my lip to stop myself from screaming. It was terrible.

7:45am:
We were on the express highway. My cell rang. These reliance guys have a good, no great, network. My father told me, that my nephew had arrived a couple of mins back. Amazing! :)

9am:
I was at the hospital. This was one of the most memorable day of my life! :)


Last two days were action packed beyond all the imagination and expectations. For starters, I am in Pune now. I will write more about it when the action is finished and the dust is settled :)

A man is taking a walk in Central park in New York. Suddenly he sees a little girl being attacked by a pit bull dog. He runs over and starts fighting with the dog. He succeeds in killing the dog and saving the girl's life.

A policeman who was watching the scene walks over and says: "You are a hero, tomorrow you can read it in all the newspapers: "Brave New Yorker saves the life of little girl" The man says: - "But I am not a New Yorker!"

"Oh then it will say in newspapers in the morning: 'Brave American saves life of little girl' " - the policeman answers. "But I am not an American!" - says the man.

"Oh, what are you then?" The man says: - "I am a Pakistani!"

The next day the newspapers says: "Islamic extremist kills innocent American dog" .




Funny? I have been using for some years now and it's a great tool that increases my productivity. It helps me take my mind off stupid things like rpm switches, hostname etc. Just press tab and it will present you with a list of relevent choices. Great.

Another thing that I often do is "grep". I am known for that. I am comfortable with it and many times use it instead of ctags. One thing annoys me (or used to annoy me) is I have to remember C variable names to do a grep on it. I wanted to write a tab completion, using programmable bash completion feature, that searches into tag files and complete variable names in grep.

For example, in the current directory, you have a .c file with "int mynameisrumplestiltskin;". Now you want to grep through all the files for "mynameisrumplestiltskin". You should be able to do that with "grep myn[TAB]" and it should complete.

Today I found some time to do this. Turned out to be very easy. Just put following code in you bashrc file. Go ahead give it a try.

_grep()
{
local cur exp file
COMPREPLY=()

exp=${COMP_WORDS[1]}
file=${COMP_WORDS[2]}
if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ]; then
COMPREPLY=( $(ls *.c *.h 2>/dev/null | ctags --filter=yes | awk '{print $1}' | grep ^$exp) )
fi
if [ $COMP_CWORD -gt 1 ]; then
COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -f -- "$file" ) $( compgen -d -- "$file" ) )
fi
}
complete -F _grep grep

Did it work?


If you want to be truly amazed, just take a look at this . Look at the two R's at the bottom, let them cross so that there are three R's, and read the message.

Simply Mind Blowing!

In Pune, I found my 4th standard History text book. I found out that they are still teaching the same thing after some 20 years. Then I checked the First Published date on the book. Its the same thing they are teaching since 1970. For History its ok. I just wonder if they are using the same text books from other subjects also.

Anyways, I read through the book and enjoyed a LOT! It brought back a lot of nostalgic past. It was fun. I'm glad I did it. :)

I am still bored to write. But maybe I'll start writing and things will fall into place. So here I go:

I left on Friday evening. I took my usual 7:35 pm APSRTC volvo to Pune. It was quite an uneventful journey but a comfortable one. The bus was partially empty and I could stretch my legs and put the on the other seat and sleep. Surprisingly the overhead lights were also working and I could read .

Reached Pune at 6 in the morning. Whenever you get out of a bus, doenst matter in what city you are, the rickshaw guys will jump on u like vultures. One of them said it will take 70 bux to go to my home. That was rediculous. I started laughing and told him that even though I got off from the hyderabad bus, I am NOT from hyderabad. Finally I took another rickshaw.

Home sweet home. Sleeping is what I mostly did at Pune. On Saturday, after reaching home, I slept till 2 in the noon. I got up and they were showing India Vs. Kenya ICC Champions trophy match. I watched that. We won. I was watching TV almost after a month (thats some kind of a record in 21st century) and enjoyed it.

Sunday. I got up and decided that I should work on Project Digicam. Me and my cousins were the men on the mission. We prowled from place to place in search of the 4 megapixel beasts. (Yes! I'm warming up now!!). Finally we found and without even blinking hunted it down. Now I have the weapon and I will shoot at will. Watch out!

I, with 3 other friends, boarded a non-AC, non-volvo bus at 9 from Pune. It was largely uncomfortable and damn slow. We reached Hyderabad at 9 instead of 6. I have sworn not to travel by non-volvo buses.

I am back in Hyderabad. I'll write about my trip tomorrow. I'm pretty sleepy now and there's so much to write about. Rather than doing it now in a hurry, I'll take my own time tomorrow.

Note: This post has No Title because I am sick of posts with the title "Hey".


I'm off to Pune in some time.

Ciao!

Last night, after the movie, I came back to office. I dont know what I was thinking and had a cup of black coffee. So I was awake till 4 in the morning (got up at 12). As a result I am done with Zen and the art of Motocycle Maintenance. And here is what I think about it:

It is a good book. You would pick up some ideas from it. You would think about them atleast. But in the end you would feel cheated. You can compare it with "Kill Bill". You would think that there is some purpose, some message in the book but could not find it in the end. Atleast I could not. Just think about it this way: he wrote the book cause he wanted to. It is about him. Not about the world. But a good book none the less. Very well written. I wish I could write like that. And it touched me in some way that I cant define.. just like the Quality. This book has a lot of it.

Definitely reccomended.

Yesterday evening I saw . This movie costed Rs. 20 crores and it shows. Day by day Bollywood is moving closer to Hollywood technical standards.

The movie has a big star cast. And everyone tried to do their best. Movie revolves around Bips. In this times, when all the actresses are shredding clothes, she has gone the other way. She is the one who started this skin-show with Raaz and Jism. But in this movie she plays a widow and mother of an 8-year old. Still she looks oh-so-hot! Its her movie and she carries it amazingly well.

On the other hand Amrita Arora tries her best to look hot but fails miserably. Neha Dhupia has absolutely no role. Abhishek Bacchan and Yana Gupta are the Item Bombs. Sanjay Dutt looks old but tries his best.

Sunil Shetty. He has done surprisingly well. He plays a mentally retarded garage mechanic. Watch him. He CAN act.

Pros:

• Good performances
• Technically polished
• Good background score
• Somewhat scary in parts :)

Cons:

• Weak characters
• Weak direction
• Weak storyline

Watch it in a good theatre with good sound system (like I did) and you will partially enjoy this.


This is positively scary. Last post I wrote was some eight hours back and I could publish only a few minutes back. There was a problem with blogger. I was feeling restless. I have been blogging for last 8-9 months and if this service goes down (and take all my hard work with it) then I will definitely feel bad about it.

Lets see. If this happens just one more time, I will move to some other service. Or write my own, and host my own site! Not because I dont like blogger (oh.. I love it) but because I dont want to lose my blog.


I am planning to buy a digital camera so that I can take a lot of snaps and flood this blog with some-random-snaps to go along with some-random-thoughts. :) The main requirement is small size. I am planning to make it a thing-to-carry-when-you-leave-the-house alongwith the cell phone and wallet. It has to be compact. Following are some notable short listed products.

• . (Just click on the link and make sure you look at the camera and not the place where it is kept) ;)
• 
  
• 
  
• . (Its pronounced as "Deemaaaj".. Whatever!)

So thats it, I will look around for more. If any of the readers have some suggestions, well, I'm an open minded person!

Some years back, a mail was floating on the net. It was about a 12th std kid from Haryana, India. It said that he has created a 32-bit OS with GUI (oh man!) alone and its better than Microsoft Windows (oh shit!!!).

People are generally being innovative these days. They took this to a whole new level. They named this os "O-YES". You can checkit out at . You must download and try it out. Its awsome. Check out the screen-shots also.

This rocks!
I heard someone say "Whats up?".

I will try to answer that.
I am sitting here in my chair in my cublicle. My ears are tuned into whats happening behind my back.. literally. If I hear footsteps I do Alt+Tab. The guy in the next cube is talking on the phone explaining how frustrated he is and how hard he is working. But my feeling is he doesnt care and actually enjoying passing the buck to others.

One guy, some cubes away, is showing off his new
with a cool camera. Pretty good stuff. I can hear mouse-clicks and key-presses. This is like a constant backgroud music in any office these days. And experts can separate out space-key presses and Enter-keys thuds from all the clickety-clicks just like you can sometimes separate out guitar vibration from a 10-instrument orchestra.

Sporadic door-thuds are also a part of this office orchestra. And before every door-thud you can also hear the beeps on entry-exit pads. Its like *beep-beep-beep-beep-pause-long beep-door thud*. Paper-rustles are comparable to the triangles. Faint but important. You might not notice it but you will miss it if its gone. Every now and then, a cell-ring can be heard. These days , with all the fancy ringtones you get, its pretty easy to know whos cell is ringing by listening to the ring. And many times these ring tones are cut off by the cell owners before the entire melody is finished. I know most of the melodies and I generally whistle it till the end.

Somehow this "ringtone -> cell -> owner" connection is very strong in my head. When I wan in Pune, one of my friend had this particular ringtone. When I moved to Bangalore, one day when I heard this ringtone I started thinking about that friend :).

Some of the guys try to contribute to the whole office-orchestra by constantly chewing on some junk food. Peanuts, chips, biscuits. You will be surprised to see so many cups of coffee are dispensed in a normal working day. Just watch out for all those *fussssss* sounds from the coffee dispenser. This makes me hungry.

All this orchestra is underlined by a silent *hummmm* of the AC and the machines. I think they act as a well behaved audience to all the show we put up in the work-hours.

Thats it for now.

I'm having such a slow boring day. I dont really want to write about it.

Yesterday I had gone out to a place called "Koti" or "kothi" here in Hyderabad. Its a market place and it was very crowded. The reason I had gone there is to hunt for old second-hand books. You will be amazed if you see the number of used-book stalls put up on the streets and sidewalks there. I usually go to Crosswords and the books you see there are all too familiar and they never change. But here you will find books by so many different authors. And they are dirt cheap. Some of us bought some books for 20 bux. Beat that!

From there I went to "Eat street". This is a food mall on Necklace Road. Pretty good. You sit by Husain Sagar lake and enjoy the food and have a nice time. This is where someone mentioned the algorithm used by unix utility. It is an interesting problem. The simplest solution is . After coming back, I attempted to implement it in perl. I still have not completed it.

Pretty slow day indeed.

Last night I was invited by a friend for the sixth anniversary of the company he works for. It was at a 5-star hotel and the main attraction for many was the on-the-house booze. I went there for free-food :P. It was strange because this company doesnt believe in free (as in free speech and knowledge).

Anyway, the food was ok. The crowd was ok. And they had invited Leslie Louis. It was good. He performed many songs. I had a nice time. But I missed his other half, Hariharan. It was also a birthday of some "Shruti" and he called her on stage and sang "Happy Birthday" for her. While he was doing that, another guy from the audience climbed up on the stage and told him that it was his birthday too.. It was hilarious. He was pushed back into the crowd.

If you are wondering about the title for this post, "kay zala?" is a song by colonial cousins and he performed it. :)

Saturday morning usually starts at noon. And it lingers aound till the evening. This is my faourite time to catch up on reading and thats what I was planning to do today. These days I am reading (This was gifted by Geetika and Ketki in Mumbai when I was there).

I was all geared up to read it and suddenly it started raining. I completely ignored it at first. But then, as it usually happens, it resulted in a black-out. I started cursing the rains for almost ruining the beautiful Saturday afternoon. I hadnt eaten and there was no way I was gonna go out in that rains.

Soon I found myself, as there was nothing else to do, thinking about the rains. I was taught in school (3rd standard) the scientific reason for rains. There used to be a 100% chance that the question regarding it would pop up in the exams. So I had learned it so thoroughly that I could still remember it today, after some 20 years. It goes like "Suryachya ushNatene samudrachya paNyachi waaf hote etc etc." (That's my mother-tongue Marathi). I knew the reason why it was pouring and thats why it was boring. Then I started thinking about it as a magical mystery and suddenly I found it interesting.

Things are much more fun that way. :)

He worked in a video store for many years and now he has his own direction-style. Last night I saw his latest movie and I am still wondering about it. He is none other than Quentin Tarantino.

I saw a year back and I was shocked. It was so full of voilence and blood that I was actually surprised to see me not throw-up. On the contrary, I was praising it a lot. The movie was weird. It made no sense. But it was something that you have to see. And most probably you will enjoy it. But you wont know why.

If that was weird, , which I saw last night, was weirder. It was a mix of a western, kung-fu movie. It was also a love story. More you try to analyze it, more it looks senseless. The thing is, it is NOT suppose to make any real sense, just like most of the Picasso art. Its just a collage of all the things QT likes. But it is beautiful. It is a master-piece. Why? Just dont ask that question or you will be a spoil-sport. Just enjoy it.

By the way, The Bride's name is Beatrix Kiddo. :)

Some days ago, someone posted a message that . If I had stumbled across this headline a couple of weeks ago, I wouldnt have found it interesting enough to click on the actual link. But, with my new interest in cryptography, I find this not only interesting but exciting. They have also managed to get collisions in MD5. Oh Shit!

Well, detection of collisions is not shocking. Everyone knows that hashes will have collisions. But if you have an algorithm that can generate a key with same hash then you have a problem.

This is definitely a good news for Eve. And Alice and Bob should be worried and start looking for a better hash function. If you dont understand why, you need to know who are.



You know what? Yesterday India played againt England in first Natwest ODI and I dint even know about it. This is unheard of and this is one of the reasons why I was not depressed/angry yesterday.

I am glad that I am tuned out of this series. Today morning when I was reading the news paper (on the net ofcorse) I came to know about the match and the trademark-everyday-pathetic-indian-performance. They just suck. We were able to make 170 first and could dismiss three (yes!! not one, not two but THREE!) english batsmen. Second innings was over in 32 overs.

But hey.. who cares!
Last night, after the dinner, I saw . It is a truely different movie. It tells the story of a brave woman who is willing to fight against HIV. This is heavily inspired from Jonathan Demme's 1993 classic . Nothing wrong in that.

This movie is different that other hindi movies mainly because you dont see hindi directors making movies based on taboo issues. On the other hand this movie is not about AIDS but about the victim. The story is told very matter-of-factly. Revathy, the director, doesnt try to educate the audience about the technicalities of the disease and that makes you feel that this is not different than any other disease. I liked the way the director has handled it. Other thing that makes it different is lack of hindi-movie-special melodrama. Its easy to get carried away when the main character is a victim of this tragedy. Revathy has controlled the emotion-meter very well.

Performances are REALLY good. This film belongs to Shilpa Shetty, otherwise known for her perfect-10 body. She looks good but not glamorous. I think she will win some awards for this role.

Watch out for Abhishek Bacchan. If he was good in Dhoom, he is better in Phir Milenge. Two movies, two totally different characters and he could give justice to both. He is improving everyday! I think Bollywood has found a good actor in him and he is gonna go places. I am willing to bet all my money (whatever little I have) on him to win best supporting actor for this role.

Salman Khan has not much of role but he fits in quite well. There were only 2-3 songs and background score is good.

Only problem is movie moves very slowly. Its about time hind movies should get over the idea of 3-hour-movie.

Its a different movie for sure. Finally hindi movies are trying to break out. Good for us.

This was pretty lame. If you know how to use google, you know how to crack Vigenere Cipher. These days, before solving any problem, I generally google for it. Thats what I did with .

The cipher used in this case was Vigenere Cipher. The Vigenère cipher is a method of encryption invented by Blaise de Vigenère in the 1550s. For next 300 years it was known as "le chiffre indéchiffrable", or "the unbreakable cipher". But one fine day (well.. it must have taken more time than that) one Mr. Charles Babbage and Friedrich Kasiski broke it independently in 19th century.

And now, it dint take more than 10 mins for me to crack this. The thing is, cracking this is a mechanical task and there is a proper defined algorithm for this. Once you know the algorithm, it doesnt take much to create a computer program that does it for you. As a matter of fact there are 1000s of java applets available to crack it. I found this excellent in google. I just copy pasted the cipher text in the applet, pressed one button and *TAADAAAA* it found the key for me. Pretty unexciting. :)

The message was by Charles Baudelaire.

I am planning to write a Vigenere Cipher cracker soon. It would be interesting.


A couple of days ago, Apple revealed their latest G5 iMac.The new model, like EVERYTHING they come up with is sleek. But somehow I liked the dome iMac design. I wish I had plenty of green to buy these seductive machines. I want to buy powerbooks, ibooks, ipods, xservers, iMacs, emacs with accessaries. :)






When I was away on vacation, someone (thats still a mystery) fiddled with my desktop. That "someone" also changed the root password. This is easy to do if you have access to the machine. Just boot into single user mode and change the password. So much for the security.

Today I did the same thing to change the root password and found out the way to stop others from doing it. One way is to use . The other is to use grub password. I chose the later for no particular reason. It was very easy to do and it worked. I think I will stick to that.

The way to do it is :

• start grub shell
• type 'md5crypt'. This will ask you for the new password. Enter the password of your choice.
• This will give you md5encrypted password.
  
• Put "password --md5 " in /boot/grub/grub.conf.
  
• Reboot. (You dont have to.. but just to test) :)

Now noone can change the kernel command line until and unless he knows the grub password. Pretty Good Security now. Only way to change the root password is to boot up using a rescue CD.