Hi,

For next two days I will be cooling off on the beaches of Suratkal. I am leaving tonight and will be back by Tuesday since Monday is a holiday. I am planning to make full use of the 256 MB SD card I bought yesterday for the digicam.

Ciao.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

Even though it is (was, rather) a Saturday, I have come to office so that I can take a day off later when I go to Pune for Diwali holidays. And, after finishing the work, I thought about tweaking this template so that it should look the way it is supposed to on all browsers and platforms. Instead of tweaking, I did from scratch. I checked it in IE, Firefox and konqueror and it looked almost the same (except in IE the font rendering is terrible!). So far so good.

Can you see it?

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

According to me (and I'm not alone) the current Indian Cricket team is THE MOST PATHETIC group of 11 men ever assembled in the history of cricket. The whole credit goes to the Selectors (aptly called as the Jokers by Amarnath). Congradulations.

Yesterday, they lost to Aussied in the third test at Nagpur by 342 runs. I have vowed not to watch the next test. Thank you.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

I had gone to a restaurant called "Shiv Prasad" in Pune. It is right next to "Kinaraa" hotel near Vanaj. It was recommended by someone who is known for his love for food. It is a small place and you will not go there until someone recommends it. So, here I am. Highly recommended if you love sea food. That too, malvani style. Lots of coconut. *slurp*

Go there, order a "Fish Thali" (which, for some strange reason, is not listed in the menu) and start licking your fingers. Happy eating! :)

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

In Pune, I saw . At the start of the movie my friend said "Watching a horror movie is just like sitting in a roller coaster.. You know its a bad idea the moment it starts!". Well.. all in all, she was right. It WAS a bad idea. The movie was good (read: scary) in parts. Chakravarti ("Satya fame") was pathetic. Sush has done a good job. They must have made that kid see "Sixth Sense" atleast 20 times. But he has done a good job.

Backgroud score is ok. But every now and then director throws in a slapping sound. We concluded that it was the sound of camera man getting slapped. Ghosts were all over-powdered white faces zombies. And the climax sucked big time. Movie was bad, but we enjoyed it. :)

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

In the bus to Pune, I saw a new movie. Ek se Badhkar Ek. I dint know about this movie. I dint know it existed. And I was planning to sleep when it started. I missed the titles and dint know the name of the movie. Somehow I started watching it and it was funny. Shekhar Suman and Sunil Shetty were doing a good job and Raveena was amazing! I enjoyed the movie very much. Later someone told me that its a Kundan Shah movie. Well, its definitely not as good as Janey bhi do yaaron. Thats one of my all time favourites. So if you are giong to watch Ek se badhkar ek as another Kundan Shah movie then you might be disappointed. I read some reviews on the net and all say the same thing. But when I saw it I wasnt expecting anything. I think thats the key to enjoy this movie. And I would recommend this to anyone who likes a decent funny comedy.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

A week back, I had nothing better to do and did some reseach on *yawns*. Everyone, including some animals, yawns but noone knows exactly why. Common knowledge says that we yawn whenever we are bored. In medical schools, they learn that we yawn when we are low on oxygen and need to take in more air. This, probably, isnt true because 2 weeks old fetuses also yawn even though they dont breath throught the nose. Evolutionaries say that we did away with the tails in the process of evolution but yawns are the residues of those dark ages. I have my own theory too. According to Doctor Rumple, whenever we breath in and out, a small amount of air is still trapped inside the lungs. Lungs somehow are not powerful enough to contract and take this air out. So we breath in and take lungful of air in and now that lungs are fully stretched enough pressure is generated to take out all the stale air with the new air. That was just a guess. :)

Whatever maybe the reason we still yawn. Just thinking or reading about yawns can make us yawn. (Most of you are yawning when you started reading this.. arnt you?). One thing we know is that yawns are contagious. Try it.

When I was waiting in the waiting room for my bus to Pune on last Thursday, I tried to test it. I started yawning. Yawn after yawns. (I was good at it!). And in a few minutes 12 out of 15 people yawned. Some of them multiple times. :)

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

I am Back2Bangalore. I had a nice time at Pune and Mumbai except for a few minutes I spent in my old office. I will write about it later.

One thing I found out in this trip is all browsers are not alike! This is not exactly new information but I am surprised to see how different this blog looks on other browsers and other platforms. This is how it looks to me and how it should look. I am on and .



Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

I would not have posted this entry but for one funny incedent that happened just now. Dussehra Puja was going on in the office and because of agarbatti the fire alarm went off. We are expecting fire brigade any time now. (Well.. not exactly.. they dont come unless someone calls them and tells them that 25 people have already burnt alive and another 100 will die if they dont come).

Ok then. I am leaving now.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

On a Quiet Night
by Li Po

I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the bright moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.

Thats one good poem. One of my favourites. The reason I am quoting it here is the coming long weekend. Tomorrow is a holiday and I am taking next Monday off. I will be leaving for my home in the afternoon. See you there!

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

For last couple of days (maybe weeks) blogger is not keeping correct statistics for this blog atleast. The post count as well as the word count is stuck. So I decided to find out the real stats. I changed the the blog settings to show all the posts on the main page. After republishing I converted that page to text. After some "cat"ting and "grep"ping and "awk"ing and "wc"ing I came up with following :

Number of characters : 187635
Number of words : 33093
Number of posts : 271

That means, it has past another landmark of 30,000 words atleast a week back. Thank you.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,
Today morning when I was tracing my routine path to light switch with eyes half closed, I caught a glimpse of the news paper front page. Next moment my eyes were wide open and I was staring at the headline. .

Veerappan was India's one of the most wanted man. He was responsible for many murders and kidnappings. For almost two decades he terrorized the forest area on Karnataka, Tamilnadu and Kerala borders. But the end was almost anti-climatic. According to special task force (STF) men, Veerappan was going out of the forest in a vehicle, they were waiting for him and they shot him. He came, We saw, We killed him. So much for the untracable jungle king Veerappan!

Most of the people, including me, are skeptical about all this. In the end it sounds too easy to be true. My version of the (imagined) story is like this: Veerappan, for some reason (maybe health issues) wanted to surrender to the police. He kept his promise this time and surrendered. STF guys had strict orders from politicians who were involved in protecting him. STF guys called these politicians and told them about the surrender. Politicians got cold feet hearing this news. They were worried that he might reveal the details of the deals they had with him. They order STF guys to shoot him and SFT guys obey their orders.

Another version is: Veerappan knows that there is no way out for him. He cant surrender because politicians would stage an encounter and kill him. And he is not growing younger as the time passes. He spots a man with similar looks. Only problem is that man doesnt have his famous handlebar moustache. Doesnt matter. He sends that man out of the forest for some reason and SFT guys mistake him for the notorious bandit.

Choose your version.

Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

Sometime last week I was coming to office in the morning (or I was going back from office). I was in the car and was listening to Radio City 91 FM. They announced that on Saturday two of the biggest names, two living legends in Indian classical music are going to perform in Bangalore. I dont understand much about classical music but the music feels good to my ears. I generally attend classical concerts once or twice a year. So when I came to know that Pt. Bhimsen Joshi and Balamuralikrishnan were going to perform together for a Jugalbandi, I knew that it is once-in-a-lifetime oppotunity.

I, with a friend, reached the auditorium at 7:30 pm without tickets when the program was supposed to start at 7. Somehow we managed the tickets and got into the seats before they started. It was awsome. I dint understand the technicalities of the music but I could sense the power of music. It just swipes you off your feet. Amazing. From the little I could understand, they sang Raag Malakauns and Bhairavi, as usual, in the end. Just too good. Hats off to the maestros.

The auditorium was not packed as I had imagined. I couldnt have imagined a place to stand if it was in Pune. I think Pune people are much more classically inclined, atleast they pretend to. :)

Here's a little souvenir of the magical moment.



Yours Sinerely,
Hi,

On Saturday, I finished Foundation by Asimov. Truly wonderful book. Well written (and everyone knows that). It is classified as a sci-fi story. Maybe because it happens in futuristic canvas. But basic theme here is human psychology. The way human mind works will not change in the next decade.. it will never change. Period. The reason why these stories are timeless is that the human psyche is timeless. My favourite character in foundation (atleast in the first book) is just because his quotes are interesting and thoughtful.

Yours Sincerely,
Hi,
To make this template look different from others, I will be signing off with a small signature. Lets see if looks good or not.

Sincerely,
HTML is greek and latin to me. So when I wanted to make some changes to the blog template and I had a close encounter with something called as CSS, I was stumped. I had used DreamWeaver before and I wished they had something like that on linux. Infact they do have something like that on linux. Its called . In my opinion it is as good as MS Frontpage. Easy to install. Almost no (or flat?) learning curve. I could experiment with my template and fine tune it with their CSS editor.

Thats a killer app for you. I dont know if it is as powerful as other commercial products (I dont know why it couldnt be) but it certainly does a great job for amateurs like me. I am all thumbs up for this.
Second test in Chennai. Today is the 5th and the final day. Indians need 210 in 90 overs and 10 wickets in hand. We fancy that we could win this test after losing the first one. Here's the latest report of the happenings in Chennai.

Update (5:15 GMT) - unfortunately things have gone worse here, at the moment it's bucketing down and chances of any play happening today looks very bleak!

Clear evidence that the God is an Australian.


Just to cater the feeling of nostalgia, I am putting this blog's old clothes on display here.



That's how I am, I never throw away anything. Last night I (finally) finished . Tom Robbins is a good writer. He will make it sound very interesting. But I am not very sure that the book made any sense to me. But I enjoyed it none the less. Its just the way he writes. Its fresh and interesting. It doesnt get boring atall. Well, sometimes it does. When I wrote the previous post and read it again, it was clear to me that I tried to imitate his style. And they say that "Imitation is the best form of flattery". Clearly, I liked what he has written.

Since I am done with the Blues, I started on a new book. Two new books actually. I was reading by Asimov in parallel with the Blues. I had encountered the Encyclopedia Galactica in "Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy" before. Now I know how it came to be. It was written ("foundation".. not EG) in mid-ninties but it still as fresh as any other sci-fi. I am hooked and I am sure that eventually I will read all the Foundation books.

The second book I have started with is by Simon Singh. I hope, no, I know that it is gonna be as interesting as his other book was.
Hello to all the readers,

If you have visited this blog before, you will notice that it has changed its look.. with some help from the author (thats me). This is what the author (thats me) calls a "Clean look". More white, less color. This is what the author (thats me) calls a "Simple look". Simple font, better line spacing. This is what the author (thats me) calls a "Neutral look". No link to profile, no ads. The author (thats me) also thinks its a "To-the-point look". Less posts on the front page. This blog is trying be clean, simple, neutral and to-the-point. But the author (thats me) might have some other ideas in the future.

-Signing off
Your Author.
(Thats me!)
Right now, I have a strong temptation to change this blog name to Blabberwocky. Why? Because its a cool meaningless word that I just came up with. And its not altogether meaningless too. Its inspired by my favourite poem.

Blabberwocky = +

Isnt that a perferct PERFECT name for this blog? :)
As an optimization, linux kernel 2.4 doesn't probe for scsi lun greater that 0. To do that forcefully, you have to compile the kernel with CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN option. But wait! there another way!

Most of the stock kernels come without the builtin scsi support but with scsi modules. You can pass a command line parameter, "max_scsi_luns", to the core scsi module, "scsi_mod". If you are manually insmodding it, you just have to do

# insmod scsi_mod.o max_scsi_luns=[your_max_number]

But if your root is on some scsi disk and the insmod is happening at the boot time through initrd then the method told by google is to put "options scsi_mod max_scsi_luns=[your_max_number]" in /etc/modules.conf and remake your initrd image. This is way better than compiling the whole kernel. But alas! This method doesn't work. Atleast it dint for me. I did a little investigation and found that the culprit is /sbin/mkinitrd script. Well not exactly a culprit but something similar. I found that you need to put "options scsi_mod.o max_scsi_luns=[your_max_number]" in /etc/modules.conf. See that little ".o" in there?? That should do the trick. Atleast it worked for me and I am a happy man today! :)

Note: Just to make this tip foolproof, replace [your_max_number] with some sane integer. :)

Ok, agreed. File system integrity checking is a good thing. Some good utilities (like ) are available. But the way MS does it makes me go "huh?".

Yesterday my friend deleted a system driver file from Win2003 machine. When he did a "dir" immediately, he found that file there again! We checked the eventlog and found that something called as is constantly looking for some changes in the system files and if the user (or hacker) tries to delete or modify these files, it will immediately replace it with the correct files from the cache or CD.

It is an event driven thing. Something like DNOTIFY in linux. (on a side node: they have INOTIFY in 2.6 kernel for the same purpose.) Checking for the file is ok but replacing it looks wierd to my Linux brain. If you dont want users to modify/delete this particular file, just make it read-only or protect it with NTFS equivalant attributes. And even after that if someone manages to change it then tell the admin about it rather than silently replacing it.

I dont know. Maybe I am too linuxified to understand this thing. :)

Why do Software Developers smoke so much? Dont they read "Cigarette smoking is injurious to your health!" on every pack they blow away? Ofcorse they do. Only thing is they ignore it because its just a WARNING! If you change it to an ERROR then they might give it some thought. :)

Good idea? :)

It happened again! Most probably this is the first time with my new watch (which is some 2 years old now). Its the . My old faithful casio is retired from its lifelong thankless hard working job. Its still my favourite though. But this one isnt bad either. Both of them were gifts from my father on my birthdays. First one was when I was 15 years old and this second one 2 years back. :)

Today I was going through the list of visitors to this blog and found this amazing google query that somehow points to this blog. I dont know what to say. Google took the keywords in the query and matched it with the content in the blog alright. But what kind of person will search for ""???

World is full of truly weird people!


Christopher Reeve is dead. But Superman goes on.

They are saying the the role of Superman is cursed. I dont know about that. But Chris was the best Superman. No one can replace him. Superman Lives!
Yes. I had gone to watch . I knew it was gonna be a poor performance by the Indians. One friend asked me why did I come back early from the stadium. I said "It was boring". Then she asked "why did I think that a test match is not gonna be boring?". I said "It would have been interesting if Indians would have played well". She asked "Why the hell did i think that India would play well?". And I answered "I took a chance!"

Thats what I did. I got up at 6 in the morning and went to stadium, stood in the queue for tickets, cheered for every Indian run, waved indian flag. It was sad the way we played. But I had fun in the stadium. And not to mention, we bowled well!

Sehwag was NOT out!!!
I was just waiting for some test to finish and I saw one whiteboard marker on my desk. I had nothing better to do so I googled for "whiteboard marker". As a result, I found this very interesting site about . Read it if you have some free time. They take you through the lifecycle of a whiteboard marker and show how it impacts the world we live in. I was and am always a believer that smallest of things can have some subtle implications that you will never be aware of. Thats why I like this story called by Ray Bradbury.

Ok. The test I was waiting for is over. C ya! :)

I just upgraded my system here from RH9 to Fedora core2. I was using FC2 in Hyderabad and quite liked it. I used RH9 for couple of years and it was good. Main reason to upgrade: yum! The upgradation went smoothly. No problems as yet. It took 1 hour and 25 minutes from reboot to reboot. I am impressed. :)

This is what someone said about this blog and me.

My complaint about Mr. Rumplestiltskin

I'm sorry, but I just can't avoid talking about Mr. Rumplestiltskin. Here's a quick review: Rumplestiltskin can't attack my ideas, so he attacks me. It could be worse, I suppose. He could cure the evil of discrimination with more discrimination. I am making an appeal to the intelligence of the reader not to be fooled by his demagoguery, yet he reports the news selectively in order to advance his agenda. This sort of vertiginous paradox is well known to most wretched, lecherous low-lifes. Think of all the lives that could be saved if we would just fight tooth and nail against him.

Let's consider for a moment, though, that maybe there will be foul things said on both sides of this issue before you know it. Then doesn't it follow that Rumplestiltskin uses vulgar language and makes obscene gestures at those whose opinions differ from his? For the nonce, he is content to retard the free and natural economic development of various countries' indigenous population. But by next weekend, he will inaugurate an era of jaundiced opportunism. Quite simply, if he succeeds in his attempt to distort and trivialize the debate surrounding gangsterism, it'll have to be over my dead body. Perhaps Rumplestiltskin has some sound arguments on his side, but if so, he's keeping them well hidden; all the arguments I've heard from him are thoroughly misinformed. He minces to the twang of a different zither. Excuse me; that's not entirely correct. What I meant to say is that the reason Rumplestiltskin wants to interfere with my efforts to fight to the end for our ideas and ideals is that he's entirely insipid. If you believe you have another explanation for his conniving behavior, then please write and tell me about it. I could be wrong about any or all of this, but at the moment, the above fits what I know of history, people, and current conditions. If anyone sees anything wrong or has some new facts or theories on this, I'd love to hear about them.

WOW!! or WHEW!!! Am I that bad???? This man also has this complaint against me.

Somewhere on the net, I found an aptitude test by Google. This was the first riddle.

WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM

Only available information is E and M can be interchanged. I spent some 10 minutes on this and came up with the answer. Not very difficult but fun to do, a warm-up for the gray matter. :)

I am posting the answer below. But I dont want to spoil the fun for those of you who want to do the warm-up. I am posting it in white. Just select it to see it. :)

The answer is : 777589 - 188103 = 589486

Pretty.. isnt it? This is made by my friend Smriti. If you want one for yourself or to gift it to near and dear ones, post a comment here. :)
I wanted to do some upcalls from linux kernelspace. Here is the code for that. Any command that works on bash command prompt will work here.

void do_upcall(char *cmd)
{
char *argv[4], *envp[1];
char swtch[3];
sprintf(swtch,"-c");

argv[0] = "/bin/sh";
argv[1] = swtch;
argv[2] = cmd;
argv[3] = 0;
envp[0] = 0;
call_usermodehelper (argv [0], argv, envp);
}

This is not a breakthrough. Most of the linux hackers would take not more than 5 minutes to get this right. I am posting this just for the heck of it. :)




Who could ask for anything more. :)
Since its a slow day and I have nothing to post about, I am posting this stolen link to some stupid news. Here you go: . It only confirms that Nigeria is a place in some c-grade bollywood fantasy film.