residual self image

Benchmark comparisons - Dell Inspiron 1520

2007-09-13T11:23:00.000+10:00

I will be using this post to compare the benchmarking results of my notebook with those of similar models.

(Updating as and when i get my results & comparable results)

HDTune - A 7200rpm drive beats a 5400rpm drive by a huge margin.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3846
A Samsung 160 GB 5400 rpm drive

The Seagate 160GB 7200 rpm drive has almost 1.5-2 times the transfer rates and burst rates. And access time is less by 25%.

A faster HDD helps reduce the load times for applications and games and also helps to get video encoding jobs done faster. Though the difference is simple usage will be hardly noticeable, you feel the difference while moving from one section of a map to another in a game.

Super Pi - I have a score of 1min 2sec without any overclocking. I haven't found any review with the super pi score for the Asus G1S.

Dell Inspiron 1520 (2.0GHz Intel T7300) 0m 59s
Dell XPS M1330 (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300) 0m 58s
Asus G1 (Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz) 1m 02s
Acer Aspire 5920G (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300) 0m 58s
Dell Inspiron 1420 (2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500) 0m 54s

Mine is a couple of seconds on the slow side, there were too many background processes running, most of which i had never heard of, so i didn't turn them off. Also i had this review open in Word, Paint.net/Firefox was also open & wifi was on, since these were all in idle state i thought they won't affect the test. I will have to retry again by shutting down as many applications/processes as possible.

Review - Dell Inspiron 1520

2007-09-13T10:38:00.000+10:00

Finally, the review of my new Dell Inspiron 1520 notebook. The review template is the one from notebookreview.com and some sections are still to be complete. It should be done by the weekend.

1.Overview and Introduction: The Inspiron 1520 from Dell which is a 15” supposedly budget laptop depending on how you configure the specs. The main specs of what I got are –

Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz (L1 32KB, L2 4MB)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB DDR2
1x2GB + 1x1GB 667 MHz RAM
Motherboard - Dell 0UW306 (PCI, AGP, PCI Express)
Battery - 6 Cell 53Whr LI DELL TM9787
Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium
160BG HDD 7200 rpm Seagate
Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
15.4” widescreen WXGA+ 1440x900 TrueLife
3 year Complete Cover

2.Reasons for Buying: Foremost I needed a laptop. A 15” or a 14” one, since 17” would have been too huge to carry around and anything less than 14” is hardly suitable for gaming. Since I needed the laptop for gaming primarily, wanted the best available GPU & Dx 10 too; settled for the nVidia 8600M GT. CPU, just wanted one of the new Santa Rosa ones, and the T7300 over the T7100 since it had the 4MB cache. Since no 14” comes with 8600M GT my choices were limited to 15” models.

The other notebook models I looked at were the Asus G1S & the Acer 5920 Gemstone. The Aussie G1S model was 30% costlier than the US version and even after that huge markup sticker came with a 4200 rpm drive. It was almost AUD 500 costlier than the Dell 1520. The Acer one was AUD 300 cheaper but with a less impressive config and I tried a 4920 on display at (maybe) the OfficeWorks store, the keyboard had quite a bit of flex and the build quality wasn’t really up to the mark. Since 5920 has the exact same design as the 4920 and general opinion in forums about Acer’s quality & support was not good, I was not very eager to even seriously consider the 5920.

If the Aussie G1S had been better priced and came with atleast a 5400 rpm drive I would have settled for that since it comes with a DDR3 GPU whereas the Dell & Acer only have DDR2 GPU.

3.Where and How Purchased: Purchased directly online from Dell Australia for AUD 2495. Had been watching the Dell site for 2 weeks and hit dirt when the offers I wanted came up. Otherwise stuffing in an extra GB RAM & 7200rpm drive would have been difficult on a budget of $2500, considering that comparable G1S & 5920 come with only 2GB RAM & at the most the 5400rpm drive on overseas models.

4.Build & Design: In next installment

5.Screen & Graphics: 15.4” widescreen WXGA+ 1440x900 TrueLife. The screen is quite bright on 100%. The different power plans allow you to adjust the brightness levels while running on Mains or Battery. I found the display rather dull on less than 90% brightness and am just running in on 100%. No dead pixels yet. There are no light leaks & no uneven backlighting.

The viewing angle on the sides goes up to 60-70 degrees before the colours start fading. While viewing the screen from an elevation of 50 degrees or more the display starts fading.

The only 2 latest games that I have played on this notebook till now are “CodeMaster’s DTM Race Driver 3” & “SiN Episode 1: Emergence”. While playing on 1440x900 Race Driver is just ok enough, but SiN looks marvelous. Both of them, on the highest settings play out between 40-50 fps usually, just dropping once in a while to 25 something fps when under some real stress.

I tried the Dx 10 demo for Lost Planet and there is a performance test mode in the game and the notebook scored an average of 25 fps. But the game was so terrible and with no visible options to play with a keyboard, I didn’t even bother playing.

Am looking forward to getting GRAW2/RainbowSix:Vegas/Crysis to really push the system to its limits. More on the graphics later.

6.Speakers: The speakers are located on both sides in the front. They are quite loud and the sounds are still crisp on high volume. I don’t think a pair of external speakers is required unless you are an audiophile. And headphones are really required only if you don’t want to disturb anybody nearby.

You can really enjoy a movie or a game on this display & speakers.

7.Processor and performance. The Santa Rosa processor helps to enhance the battery life. Performance wise the system is very responsive & with the 3 GB RAM, all programs load up quite fast and time taken for level loading in games is hugely reduced compared to by last desktop (a 2.4 GHz P4 with 768 MB RAM).

Other than NFS MW’s extensive countryside (on the highest settings) causing the framerates to fall below 20 fps while going at top speed, no other performance problems so far. Even in idle state with Word `07, Firefox 2, IE 7, Media Player 11 open, Avast scanning in the background and wifi on, the memory consumption is at 35% or a little more than 1GB. So atleast a 2GB system is necessary to run Vista on Aero smoothly. Resource Monitor at idle state as above -

8. Benchmarks:

Super Pi - calculate Pi to 2 million digits of accuracy; make sure there are minimal processes running in the background. 2M completed in 1min 1.8secs

PCMark05 - In next installment

3DMark05 - In next installment

3DMark06 - In next installment

HD Tune - Run the test pattern for temp and high and low throughput speeds.

9. Heat and Noise: In next installment

10. Keyboard and Touchpad – Both are quite easy to use, but I never did like notebook keyboards and so got a Logitech Ultra Flat Keyboard & a Razer Diamondback Gaming Mouse. I hardly use the notebook keyboard unless am not at my desk and it’s not possible to connect the Logitech keyboard.

For this review I decided to use the laptop keyboard and this is the first time I used a laptop keyboard for such a long time. It’s comfortable and there is no flex. The keyboard and palm rests don’t get hot at all, not even lukewarm.

The media buttons on the front can control any media player. While a media player is in focus, the volume control buttons control the volume in the player. If no media player is in focus, the volume control buttons control the system volume. Even when Windows Media Player is not in focus, the Play/Pause, FWD/RWD & Stop buttons control it; else if another media player is in focus, it gets the control. The media controls works with the lid closed. The Mute button unfortunately doesn’t work on Windows Media Player when it is in focus; it mutes the system volume as a whole. It works well on other media players.

11. Input and output ports: In next installment

12. Wireless and Networking:

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN – Well the N portion hasn’t been tested yet since there aren’t any Wireless N routers around. But the Dell WiFi Catcher is fabulous at catching weak signals and I am able to enjoy free WiFi courtesy Azure and maybe the Gloria Beans coffeehouse located in the ground floor of my apartment building. I receive quite a number of open WiFi networks at different times of the day and most of them don’t show up on my flatmate’s Toshiba notebook, so the WiFi Catcher is a nice addition.

Additionally there is a “Dell Truemobile 355 Bluetooth + EDR” module & for wired LAN a “Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller”. There is an IR port just below the media keys, in the front of the notebook. I also got the Dell IR Travel Remote, which fits into the ExpressCard slot.

13. Battery: The battery is a 6-cell one and with the processor & display at highest settings, I was able to watch 2 episodes of Kill Point (1.5 hrs) then a couple of music videos (10-15min), keep the system idle for some time (10 min) , start a photo slideshow for another 15 min before even reaching 85% battery level. Then I just got bored and stopped. Still, the battery lasted more than 2hrs.

Next I will be trying games on the battery and also usage on reduced performance settings.

14. Operating System and Software: In next installment

15. Customer Support: In next installment

16. Conclusion: In next installment

Dell Inspiron 1520 review - coming soon

2007-08-28T03:24:00.000+10:00

I ordered myself one of the new Dell Inspiron 1520s 2 weeks back and now i feel am obliged to make my visitors sit through its review :D

I got it on 20th, Monday and the burden of project work and unavailability of pirated games in Melbourne has made the task of writing a review a really tough one. It came with Vista Home Premium and this would be the first time am using Vista after trying out a Longhorn build for quite some time in the mid of 2004. So far no problems with Vista other than a couple of my old pirated pc games from 2005 crashing a lot, so i don't plan to rant about Vista/XP. Though i do intent to load XP asap on another drive to compare gaming performance, but that's all to do with XP, time to move on.

The review will be out soon, might be too since the laptop is blazing fast with 3GB RAM. My previous desktop just had 768MB RAM... and i really notice the difference while loading levels in games and moving from one section of a huge map to another.

Config -
2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4MB cache
nVidia 8600M GT (256 MB DDR2)
3GB RAM
Wireless N
160GB 7200 rpm HDD
1440x900
Razer Diamondback gaming mouse

edit : oh... forgot to mention. couple of unsecured wireless routers near the apartment, so sipping away on free internet too :p

How to download pretty much everything from the Internet, except the Internet itself

2007-07-27T19:54:00.000+10:00

Whenever I check the traffic statistics of this blog, more than half the traffic is coming from web searches about saving qtch/mov/quicktime files from a web page and people end up on the page How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk which is almost 2.5 years old now, though the post contents were ok for those times, the world has moved on. In the meanwhile Firefox has taken over the browser market and Linux is the desktop of choice…wait that is supposed to happen pretty much every year, but never does!

But Firefox has really gained strength and I run it all the time (ya, that makes it good for you too and solves all of humanity’s problems; now all we need is enough bandwidth to download the entire Internet). IE7 is good and I use that too sometimes for some sites but it lacks all the goody extensions. So here we are, the main theme of this post, two awesome Firefox extensions that help you save almost any media on a web page.

What do they do? What do you think?

Download Embedded – “Downloads all or selected embedded objects on a webpage. Can be used for downloading movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, or other embedded files (although this does NOT work on video embedded in flash [ youtube, video.google.com, etc....”

What Download Embedded lacks VideoDownloader makes up for it ;)

VideoDownloader - “Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion, ... and other 60+ video sites ! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) ! Directly ...”

So forget what I wrote 2 years back, download ahead with the times. So how do you start?

Step 1. Get Firefox
Step 2. Get there 2 extensions/add-ons for Firefox from here.
Download Embedded (Download Embedded from Firefox extensions site)
VideoDownloader (VideoDownloader from Firefox extensions site)
Step 3. Enjoy the freedom to download stuff from web pages.

BTW, its difficult to get some content like streaming audio/video straight forward. For these try some stream rippers

testing 1 2 3

2007-04-26T17:51:00.000+10:00

came across a really ingenious site that offers downloads only if you link to them. hence this -> MSG for PC

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum

2007-03-27T09:43:00.000+10:00

Crazy line to start a song with but Hilary really pulls it off with her new album "Dignity"

Now you may wonder why did i chose this particular song which is supposedly about stalkers :) to start this post. Well its just happened that yesterday when on the way home i was staring at the girl sitting opposite to me on the tram. After a couple of minutes i finally noticed that she was listening to something on her music player and i decided to do the same. So i whipped out my clix and pressed the shuffle and voila i was listening to "Dreamer" for the first time.

" Then hang around and stare at me and complicate mine
Your eyes must burn so bad cause you haven't blinked
You and me will never be
If that's what you think "

It was so funny, the entire song was so appropriate for the situation that i felt as if the girl i was staring at was actually doing the singing. I had trouble controlling my laughter and i just kept on smiling till the end of the song.

Now returning back to Hilary Duff, the new album "Dignity" is doing quite well and is to be released this week. One sign of the popularity and expectations with this album is the rate at which bootleg copies hosted on the net have been popping up & been taken down pretty soon. So if you are interested ;) get yourself a crash course in stenography and get cracking on this picture. Don't worry its a very basic puzzle. But hurry, if you are too late the goodies might be long gone.

Now my favorite songs from the album are -
"Stranger"
"With Love"
"Danger"
"Never Stop"
"Between You & Me"
"Dreamer" - of course
"Happy"
"I Wish"
"Play With Fire"

I really like 9 out of the 14 songs in the album. Wow that's a really good ratio, now i would be really surprised if this album doesn't do good and Hollywood Records doesn't make a truckload of money on this.

So did you crack the album cover above and get the links yet ;)?

The 2007 Melbourne International Motor Show

2007-03-21T18:22:00.000+11:00

I went to the 2007 Melbourne International Motor Show on Monday 12th march, the last day of the show in the evening and the show was over by 6, so i just got to spent some 1.5-2 hours there. Anyway the show wasn't really huge and concept cars were almost negligible. I did point my camera at anything hot either with 4 wheels or 2 legs and tried my best to get some decent shots.

Cars - Very few good ones (Gallery yet to be uploaded. Will do soon)

Booth Babes - Either the booth babes in Australia are not enthusiastic as their American & European counterparts or since it was the last day of the show, most were hardly interested in getting shot. Gallery (nothing much :( when compared to the booth babes at CeBIT 2007!)

Evolution 5.6 starts Saturday 10th March 2007 00:00 UTC

2007-03-08T09:49:00.000+11:00

Note from the game admins -

"Evolution 5.5: Could be Beta will conclude on Friday 9th March 2007 00:00 UTC. A short memorial service will be held in my kitchen followed by tea and biscuits and a speech from none other than neonDragon himself.

It it hoped everyone will enjoy Evolution 5.6: Name Not Decided Yet Because I Decided To Reset 5 Minutes Ago™. Evolution 5.6 will commence 24 hours after 5.5 finishing, Saturday 10th March 2007 00:00 UTC."

Evo Blog

Play Evo

Game review by a fellow player

Photos of Yarra River area

2007-02-24T18:16:00.000+11:00

I woke up at 6am last saturday, to take nice people free early morning shots of the neighborhood.

F1 is coming to Melbourne on 15-18 March. Note to self - Don't miss it!

Photo Gallery

Night photos of the same area, Coming Soon.

St.Kilda Beach Festival 2007

2007-02-24T17:28:00.000+11:00

St.Kilda Beach Festival 2007. I went there on 11-Feb Sunday on the last day of the festival, so there was hardly anything to see. Most of the good stuff was over.

You can find what all i missed here -> St.Kilda beach festival photo gallery

What i got to see, you can see here -> Shoonya's St.Kilda beach festival photo gallery

:( i missed a lot

Sansa View

2007-01-09T22:32:00.000+11:00

Got it hand it over to SanDisk for making a bang in the DAP market. Over the past few days i had been planning to get the Sansa e280 which is a 8gb flash memory mp3 player that retails for AUD $350 here in Melbourne. But after the Christmas rush i had trouble getting this.

And this week guess what happens, at CES SanDisk anncouned the Sansa View, an 8gb model video PMP for almost the same price as the Sansa e280!! Sansa view goes on retail in the US for $300. So i guess if would be available in Australia in a couple of months for AUD 400-425. And once the wide screen iPod is announced maybe the prices will fall.

for more info on the Sansa view go to SanDisk Product Page
for videos from CES go to AnyThingButIPod
and Engadget

IRiver has also announced new models but as usual they will be quite pricey and Apple might be announcing its new iPod at MacWorld 2007

The latest fad in file sharing is Port 80

2007-01-05T10:49:00.000+11:00

2 years back i when i was still in college, i used to keep my computer on through out the night, downloading stuff on bittorrent, gunatella and half a dozen other file sharing networks. That was the only way to share divx movies and mp3s without anybody; except the Americans (cause the RIAA and MPAA were in their own background ) getting into any trouble.

You used to find the Longhorn builds here and there but M$ would take them down as soon as they came up. still those file sharing networks rocked in getting the latest/popular stuff on your HDD. speeds weren't very high and divx movies at times took 2-3 days to be 100% completed. But that was always fine cause the big stuff, pirated pc games were always available dirt cheap on the local gadget market. most people never knew that file sharing networks existed until any of their friends told them or until they saw the newspapers splashed with yet another RIAA lawsuit. Good old port 80 (HTTP), was just good for mail, game demos and forums. Illegal stuff hosted on HTTP servers was kind of hard to find.

Fast forward to 2007. Internet speeds have multiplied many times, more people are hooked on to the WWW and internet companies are throwing away server space for almost free. GMail is 2 GB, Y!Mail is 1 GB. If they can spare such ridiculous amount of server space on mere mails, guess what they can spare for your files.

There are now filehosting services [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_hosting_service] that give GBs of server space to a user for free, they do charge money for faster access, but the free services are more than enough for most. They make money through advertisements on their site.

So here we are at the latest and fastest way to get stuff on the net! Plain old HTTP, no underground networks, no special apps. Just rip the content you want to share, zip it all up, put it on a file hosting site and publish the url to the world. Yeah the media companies still come after us all. They threaten the file hosting site, the file hosting site already has guidelines against copyrighted stuff being published on their servers, they take down the file, the publisher isn't touched at all. But nobody is at a loss, by the time all this happens, a few thousands have already got their hands on the file, its now up at other file hosting sites, file sharing networks, p2p networks. It has replicated at such a fast pace all over the globe that it is next to impossible to take it down now.

And then finally there are trackers who get the links to all these files on their site, these are mostly forums or even public sites, only a few require you to be a member (memberships is mostly free) to get the links. Most trackers are specialized, some track only music albums, some TV shows, some content for mobiles, etc. Even though these sites have been up for quite sometime now, very few people know about them. I just started frequenting such site 3 months back.

All you have to do to get the latest music album/movie/tv show/game for free is to find such a tracker, become a free member in case it is required, look among the latest uploads, search for what you want, find the link (most of the time you would find mirrors on different servers) and download it over the browser. (for a test tryout http://www.simplemp3s.com/ for music, rest find on your own :P through Google, its very easy).

And if you really like a site and enjoy using the stuff you download through it, donate to help keep the trackers online and help them get more stuff out for all of us.

Plain and simple. No downloading half a dozen downloaders for each network, no more configuring ports and setting speed limits. No more worrying about your ISP or network admin blocking access to a port range.

Simple old HTTP to the rescue :) All hail Port 80!!

Zune Vs Rest of DAP gang

2006-09-26T12:30:00.000+10:00

MS Zune is almost here! And iPod lovers are already asking what’s the point of M$ arriving in the market so so late at a time when Apple rules it.

Well fellows go dip your heads in some history books. There was a browser out there which was completely razed to the ground by Microsoft; of course the phoenix that rose from the ashes in the form of Firefox is trying to be rise again. Microsoft was late then, but they are really ahead now. IE 7 beta builds are matching up to Firefox.

There was also a gaming console called the PlayStation, was… because unless SONY manages to get the PS3 out of the concept phase in a viable marketable product before Microsoft comes out with the 3^rd iteration of the Xbox, it’s a dodo in the gaming market.

These are 2 instances of widely popular end user applications where the first comer never managed to stay the king. Zune is late, but does it really matter?

The market is huge and the current DAP manufactures are ripping off the customers as is evident by Apple’s price cuts which happened even before the Zune was publicly announced. Prices dropped by a huge margin, and Apple is still going to rake in a huge profit margin. Apple had nothing to put up in a new product line up other than introducing a adding a 0.5 to the current generation.

People are complaining that Microsoft is going to hurt its former DAP partners like Creative, iRiver, etc. Well I would say Microsoft is helping bring diversity and competition to the market. Most of the big players never cared to bring good enough products into the market. Some players were really crappy but were still pricier than corresponding iPods. They never tried hard.

Now Microsoft is driving down the price. There are rumors that Zune Ver 1.0 may be priced at US $229, $20 cheaper than corresponding iPod, but with the wireless and FM. M$ has really deep pockets to carry the price war on for as long as the competition is willing to fight. Also don’t be surprised if Apple as to come out with some kind of networking features to match the Zune.

What can we expect in 2007?? Irrespective of how Zune ver 1.0 fares, Microsoft will be coming out with its own improved new version and not another pimped up Toshiba GigaBeat. Its going to either combine Zune with games or a portable Xbox with Zune integrated either was a sure winner in its hands with the right pricing. Apple and others will have no option, but to follow up with similar features and price stickers.

And yes, there are also the big rumor that M$ might give away Zunes for a throw away price of $100, just like they did with IE, with the hope that they can make up with the huge market base such a move would bring and the corresponding earnings from subscriptions. It’s not a far fetched idea when you consider that some online music subscriptions are giving away DAPs with subscriptions.

Kindly take me of this planet

2006-09-07T13:27:00.002+10:00

Tried talking to a beautiful girl I met on the bus today after we got down from the bus. It was quite hilarious. She could hardly hear me speak and I stammering so bad that I wished to choke myself to death right then. Well it could have been because she was way out of my league or most probably because this was the first time ever while talking to a girl that after she said bye that I asked her “When can I see you again?”

She laughed back and said “We will see!” Well I guess that’s NEVER!!! She never asked me my name or anything. I was the one asking all the questions and maybe she was answering just to get rid of me. I am sooo hopeless.

Dear Almighty,
Kindly take me of this planet. I just don’t belong here.

friday, the day and the end

2006-08-19T19:12:00.000+10:00

Friday! Just a few hrs at work and you are FREE as a bird … till monday morning. So I began yet another day at my boring job that’s killing me ever minute I spend on it. One day maybe I will muster enough courage to just say NO and walk away from everything, but till then unfortunately I got to keep going on and on, taking all the bullshit they keep throwing.

Luckily someone had their birthday and we all had a small project party in the afternoon and I was relived to see something else other than mundane work. Couple of the senior management had to crack a few stupid jokes amongst themselves and were laughing as if they were in a laughter club on a Sunday morning. We (me and other like me) i.e just about everybody who was not the senior management smiled along, though I believe most of would have wanted to throw up.

And then it was night already, time to catch the bus home. Friday night… most of the people had already felt and the buses were hardly occupied. I was glad to get a 3 seat berth all to myself and I tuned into the fm stations and just sank into my seat as if that’s the last and only thing I wanted to do on this planet.

And then just before the bus started rolling, a group of people got on and occupied the seats behind me. They were coming from the gym. Great!! Some people sweat it out in the office all day and some lucky bastards get to be on projects where there is no work and they can spend all the time they spend in the office at the office gym and hanging out at the food courts and the smoking cabins.

To make my more than perfect day even better, somebody in the back of the bus had to take off his shoes and let the whole bus catch the aroma of his socks. For a few seconds I wondered if I should continue breathing and let my senses force my stomach into throwing up the slice of the wonderful chocolate cake I had.

I pulled the window as far as could and let the wind hit my face. The faint stink of the partial development of the outer city with the open drains, the heaps of garbage, the 4 lane highway and the Volvo buses plying on it, the poverty and all the imported cars, coupled with the smell of spent petrol and diesel wasn’t exactly pleasing to my nose, but it was a lot better then somebody’s reeking socks.

So there I was having survived another day on this blue planet, humming to the radio and dozing off.

Space

2006-08-17T23:15:00.000+10:00

That’s what I am currently reading. “Space” by James A Michener. It’s a fictional account of the American and German men who made/made possible the journey to outer space and the moon. Historically accurate but no real people and the story extended really long on all sides. So you go as far back as a little before WWII, where you start with the people who later go on to become important people in the race for supremacy in space.

Only one guy is real, the German rocket scientist von Braun but then he isn’t shown as one of the main characters. Operation Paperclip is depicted as it happened, all the locations and most of the stuff were real. Sadly though nothing is said of the

Russia

side of the events.

But the book is really good and keeps you engrossed. Think of it as a movie unfolding before your eyes as you read it and you will enjoy it even more. I almost finished up ¾ of the book and I would rate it as 3.5 out of 5.

back yet again

2006-07-29T16:37:00.000+10:00

ahh!! :(

after so many months i decided that i have ignored my blog for toooo long. so i decided to start writing once again. don't know how long the current mood swing would last, but who cares :D

Tom Cruise boasts of eating placenta

2006-04-19T00:07:00.000+10:00

Tom Cruise boasted about eating fiancèe Katie Holmes's placenta when baby Cruise is born, Cruise said in an interview

Xinhua story ....

what's placentophagy

i think am going to throw up...gotta go

Corporate misbehavior: Bone-headed D-Link’s NTP vandalism

2006-04-10T21:06:00.000+10:00

This is where I first came across the story

“Danish server admin exposes D-Link's "NTP vandalism"”

What does a geek get when he takes upon himself to provide a valuable service to the community? A giant networking corporation screws him really bad and when the person tries to reason with them and get them to admit that they were wrong they try to screw him even harder.

So here begins the story of one Danish FreeBSD programmer Poul-Henning Kamp, who was running an NTP server for the benefit of those in Denmark because they have no national time-lab there to offer a much required time service for use on the internet.

Wait a second … what’s NTP?

Oh! Sorry L my apologies.

“NTP is Network Time Protocol, a protocol that allows computers to transfer timestamps across the internet so that they can set their clocks to the correct time.

A number of NTP servers on the internet are connected to radio timecode receivers, GPS receivers or in some cases directly to national time laboratories primary atomic frequency standards

Now it’s not a good net etiquette to check an NTP server when you wish to set the correct time for a device connected to the net.

Consumer devices should ask one of their ISP’s time service machines (probably running at stratum 3), the ISP will synchronise these to a stratum 2 device that is firewalled off from customers, and that machine will chime with some nearby (same continent) stratum 1 machines. Leaving aside the denial-of-service issues there’s not much point in consumers sending packets half-way across a continent to a stratum 1 machine — network variability will mean that they get as good or better results from a nearby box.”

As I said it’s not a good net etiquette to check an NTP server when you wish to set the correct time for a device connected to the net especially when NTP servers are a part of the key infrastructure of the internet.

And to get back to our story our protagonist Kamp was running a stratum 1 timeserver - an NTP server “GPS.dix.dk” for use of network servers located in Denmark. The server was hosted at DIX, the Danish Internet Exchange Point and since Kamp’s NTP server was providing a valuable service (extremely accurate timing) to Danish ISPs, the charges for his hosting at DIX are waived.

Unfortunately, his NTP server has been coming under constant attack by a stream of Network Time Protocol (NTP) time request packets coming from random IP addresses all over the world. These were disrupting the gentle flow of traffic from the 2000 or so genuine systems that were “chiming” against his master system, and also consuming a very great deal of bandwidth.

On a typical day he’d receive 3.2 million bad packets (that’s 37 a second!) from machines outside Denmark. That’s a lot of network traffic. Kamp’s NTP server was never supposed to even attract a fraction of this traffic (which is why DIX had waived of his hosting charges in the first place). Now someone has to pay for this traffic, that’s how the internet works. So Kamp is now faced with a yearly $8,800 USD bill to keep his free service for his motherland up and running.

What went wrong and where does DLink figure in this???

Kamp enlisted the help of some networking gurus to find out what was going on. And the answer was DLink’s routers among then the products (DI-604, DI-614+, DI-624, DI-754, DI-764, DI-774, DI-784, VDI604 and VDI624)

Read here how the culprit was caught “When Firmware Attacks! (DDoS by D-Link)”

Well the incompetent coders at Dlink decided to hardcode the addresses of stratum 1 NTP servers into their routers bypassing established Internet etiquette for ….well timestamping the router logs with atomic precision!!!! The routers had a list of NTP servers in their firmware and were using this to fetch the correct time and the waiting period for waiting for responses was too low, resulting in the devices sending out many requests to many servers every minute.

Now Kamp’s NTP server “GPS.dix.dk” was in the list too and this server was badly hit and DIX had no option but to slap an $8,800/year connection fee on Kamp.

Now Kamp was a really good guy, he’s an open source programmer in case you forgot. He quietly approached DLink, told them that their firmware was faulty and they should get it fixed. He suggested that DLink might even run an NTP server on its own for the exclusive use of its routers.

He told them that something like this happened before with NetGear products …see “Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server” and NetGear had owned up and fixed their products.

And what does DLink do? Accept their mistake?? Spend a few hundred grand on fixing their products?? NO!!! ….What else, get a big shot lawyer and screw the little guy even more for opening his mouth.

To quote Kamp’s own words –

“I can not publically disclose the specific offers D-Link's lawyer has made, but these documents are obviously available to D-Link management through internal channels.

I can however summarize them: I have been accused of extortion. I have been told that I have no claim, been told that I exaggerate the claim. I have been told to submit myself to California law but would have to sign away all my rights under it.

I have also been offered a specific amount of "hush-money" if I would just shut up and go away, but the amount offered would not even cover my most direct expenses.

In return D-Link would admit to nothing, promise nothing and do nothing to induce their customers to upgrade their firmware.

And nowhere in five months of correspondence have I seen the word "sorry" or "apology" forwarded to me. “

For months Kamp fought a solitary battle with the networking giant with no avail. So a couple of days back he laid bare his story in front of the world about how a big corporate was hell bent on sweeping under the carpet its mistakes and apologize for the damage it has done.

On April 7th, 2006 he put a letter titled “Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism” at http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/ so that the rest of the world could come to know about DLink’s act of vandalism.

Origami + UMPC = Vapourware?

2006-03-03T22:51:00.000+11:00

Eeehh! The suspense is killing me.

Microsoft has a teaser website up at www.origamiproject.com and they are just keeping their mouths zipped up tightly, not letting any details out. Intel also has a site up purporting the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) at www.umpc.com , seems like they (almost) finished work on the UMPC …6 months ahead of schedule.

FYI, the Origami Project is about taking the idea of the Tablet PC further by making it a handheld PC, yeah a PC with the form factor of the Sony PSP (well almost) !!! and cramming in GPS, WiMax, touchscreen while they are at it and oh yeah…a standby time that beats even my recently purchased SE mobile!!!!,

That is what they claim, MS and its friends in this endeavor, Intel, LG, ASUS and Averatec. MS is making the software (less risky???) and the others are going to come up with various flavors of the stuff (the actual machines).

The Origami project and UMPC hasn’t really been that secretive all this while, people closely tracking MS and Intel were aware of this, but with the striptease act starting last week by the giants, the media on the net has been in a frenzy Since there has been no grand announcements by either MS or its friends as they usually do, nor has anybody seen any new recent prototypes of the device

Some jerks who write articles on the net (and actually get paid for it) are even dubbing it as “Origami: Microsoft's 'OrPod' Alternative to the iPod?”
/me scratches my head. “When did the iPod become a full fledged computing device??? Last time I saw it was just playing music and videos (on a really big postage stamp sized screen)

Of course, we have this small problem that some of M$ groundbreaking products are a little futuristic and sometimes (ok often) do not really fit into the present. But will I buy one…hhmmm lets wait till they come out with Vista on it. YES!! Intel says that its UMPC can even run Vista, though the first wave of Origami/UMPC devices to hit the market will run WinXP. So I guess I will signup for the 2^nd wave.

Hope when MS and Intel make their promised revelations next week, my hopes won’t be shattered into a million pieces.

Win vs Mac

2006-02-26T19:12:00.000+11:00

somebody just had to post Yet Another Vista is Coming Article (YAVCA),

http://blog.pcmag.com/blogs/miller/archive/2006/02/22/78.aspx

and allow for comments on that page to spark of Yet Another Win vs Mac Skrimish (YAWMS). I think these sites do it on purpose, publish a YAVCA all over again everytime they hear rumors about a new feature so that they can start a YAWMS, so that people come to their sites to bitch and the traffic goes up, their rank increases in "I am the new Big Brother" Google.

I wish i could gather all the "Windows is good enough for me" folks and meet the "We are holier that you" Mac users on a battlefield and end it all forever.

as my friend posted in a reply to a "We are holier that you" Mac user
"# re: Vista 5308: All The Features Are In @ Thursday, February 23, 2006 12:58 PM

You see those Toyotas? Those fuckers put steering wheels on their cars. Totally ripped it off of Ford. I can't believe it.

Ugh.

Svlad"

btw my thanks to all the people at XEROX PARC who came up with the GUI and adopted the mouse. sorry most of today's jerks would have no idea why i am saying this, but you guys rock :)

the next time you see a YAVCA don't waste your time reading it, jump straight to the YAWMS. I promise its much more informative? and entertaining ;D

Woz: 'I hope Microsoft...becomes more like Apple'

2006-02-26T17:46:00.000+11:00

http://news.com.com/2061-10793_3-6042562.html

ya, why not and i will pack my bags and go to the north pole during the freaking winter for some sun bathing.

i guess when you have really deep pockets like Steve Wozniak and you go to New Zealand during the weekend to play polo on Segways??, you obviously can bitch about anything that comes to your mind, have it splashed on the net and still get away with it.

And on top of that you have loads of assholes who have no idea about how software is developed, who have never ever opened up their PCs to look at what's inside, people who think that windows, macs, unix, linux are things you can compare by just looking at how cool the desktop looks, write about technology on the net.

and i would rather not talk about all the jerks who have to start off yet another Windows vs Mac vs Linux fight on every other page that allows visitors to add their comments.

if you search for articles about Windows Vista on the net, almost every site other than those of microsoft have nothing else to talk about other than the sidebar, the transparency effects, what all things have been lifted from OS X (OS SUCKS???), how inspite of all the millions M$ pours into its products, they will never be as secure as OS X. That apples produces the most secure,user friendly, virus free OS.

Ya, i agree OS X is the most secure..no..cross that out....VIRUS FREE OS out there in the market. and why not?? if i was a virus writer, why would i want to waste my energies on writing a virus for the Mac, when there are millions of windows pcs that i can bring down?? A virus writer has the sole purpose of bringing down as many systems as he can in the shortest possible time and have his net alias entered in the web's hall of fame. when he has more than 90% of the world's desktops running Windows, why look elsewhere??

as one sane person posted his reply to Woz comment
"

Never in a million years . . .

Reader post by: Lawton Pelfrey

Posted on: February 23, 2006, 12:53 PM PST

Story: Woz: "I hope Microsoft...becomes more like Apple"

Microsoft chose the low road of cyber-technology, always willing to
license to anyone and everyone anything they developed. Apple
was, and is, more careful, innovative and profound by choosing the
high road. Woz can wish and hope, but it ain't gonna happen.

Bill Gates to the rescue??

2006-01-27T20:43:00.000+11:00

I had for some time been planning to get the Sony PSP, but its still to be launched in India and i was wondering if i could get someone to bring it from abroad......and i was also thinking of getting a media player like iPod or iRiver.. And what do i find on the net today ??

Possible Microsoft Handheld?

Rumors swirl on a PSP/iPod competitor...

wow .... who want's a Sony or an Apple now?? Bill Gates to the rescue !!!!

Evolution

2006-01-22T00:07:00.000+11:00

I was tired, blood was oozing out from cuts on my body. The Anubis Incarnate was in a much better condition and those monkeys kept coming on no matter how many I squashed with my fist.

A wyvern came to my aid from behind the Anubis Incarnate and the monkeys scattered, the Anubis turned to see what happened. I seized the moment and drove my sword into his heart.

The Anubis Incarnate dropped down dead. The enemy was without a leader now. We went around putting to death the rest of the resistance.

By the time we were done, the third Zarconiun sun was rising from the west. My army had been greatly reduced in the battle, just a couple of wyvern, some phoenix and scores of other lesser creatures from my planet and the allied forces. There were no werewolves and dragons left among the allied armies. A far cry from the hundreds of thousands of us who had landed on the Zarconiun homeworld some ticks back.

The heat was getting unbearable. I looked up at the sky. The 2 suns were shining so bright that I had to shield my eyes from them. I looked around at the battlefield, skewed with dead bodies and soaked in the blood of different colours.

Many friends and allies were dead, but the homeworld of the Zarconiun alliance was our, for now. I raised my sword and my army cheered. We had proved ourselves yet again.

Now, to wait for Keiria to bring in the reinforcements. Just in case the Zarconiuns planned to take back their planet. I doubted whether they would be coming back so soon. This battle must have greatly depleted their numbers.

I sat down on a boulder, my wounds were healing themselves. I was tired, badly in need of sleep. I closed my eyes and dozed off.

I was woken up by the shrieks of the monkeys. I looked up, from the skies scores of Zippy and Titan shuttles were descending. Keiria wasn’t supposed to arrive until after 4 ticks.

They weren’t ours, neither of the allies. The first Titan flew over us; it was the Ultra Alliance.

They must have picked up our communications and known that Zarconiun would be an easy target right now. The enemy shuttles landed at a distance and the creatures started marching towards us. Thousands of creatures; led by creatures from the forest and pyramid paths.

I tightened my grip on my sword. Whatever was left of my army gathered behind me. The enemy stopped at a distance waiting for us to make the first move.

The numbers just didn’t match. I would never get to tell Keiria how much I loved her.

The 2 suns were now directly overhead and it seemed as if they had merged together into one.

I filled my lungs till they hurt and let out a warcry. AAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!

A demon’s warcry always makes a cold shiver run down your spine, if you are on the wrong side, no matter how unbalanced the scales are.

I led my army for one last battle.

Liked the story ?? Come join me and some 3000 others who are playing the 5th round of Evolution at http://ev5.neondragon.net/ . This story is about an evolution battle and can be found on the Ev5 site message board.

So see you at Evo

What’s in a name?

2005-12-20T01:07:00.000+11:00

Maybe nothing…maybe everything. Bangalore is going to be rechristen as Bangaloore or bangaluru. Why ? Because it was so called before the British give it the anglicized name “Bangalore”, I wonder what it was called before that. Why are we just going back to the time before the British landed in India …. opps … Bharath. Why not back back as far as the invasion of the Indian….opps not again.. Bharath… Bharathian?? subcontinent by the Aryans. Or how about going as far as the Jurassic age, probably even the dinosaurs had a name for Bangalore in their dino-talk.

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk

2005-12-09T14:52:00.000+11:00

The post from

Friday, December 09, 2005

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk

has been moved to the Dec 2004 Archive because it was causing some formatting errors on the main page. Please find the original post here !!!

make way...big ape coming

2005-12-09T00:43:00.000+11:00

visit kongisking.net for Peter Jackson's King Kong diaries.

2005-12-01T00:12:00.000+11:00

coming this week: Me, Myself and the IceCream girl

Back yet again

2005-11-16T23:08:00.000+11:00

hi am back YET again..this time after almost a month...been too busy at the office with the current project. and i open up blogger to find lots of spam comments on the blog. If any of you knows how to remove comments from a blog, you are welcome to post a comment :) .

That's all just wanted to say hi, no idea when i might find time for the next posting.

[My Inner Self]-:- "Can we just go back to playing AOE?? I want to be king of the hill before the PM dumps the next set of documentation on you."

Err...As i said am busy. Gotta go. Bye !

never liked IIPM anyway

2005-10-26T23:02:00.000+10:00

long before i joined engg. collage and much longer before i started preparing (half heartdly) for CAT 2005, i used to see the IIPM ads in newspapers. I always had a difficult time controlling my laughter. Was it an ad for the institute ?? was the IIPM trying to sell the book called "Count Your Chickens before they hatch" (or something like that) ?? best in India ?? better than the IIMs ??

Well i had always hated the IIPM ( this just on the basis of their ads in newspapers.....no blogs, no media reports, no B school surveys). So when i came across the IIPM controversy on google news today, i was hardly suprised. Though this news was quite old i still enjoyed searching /reading blog posts on the topic.

And i found this post on CoolAvenues.net that neatly covers all that i have to say about the IIPM.

"

outsider
Guest

Posted: Wed May 12, 2004 12:57 pm Post subject: Re: info on IIPM

I have decided to open an IIPM tower in my colony. The pan shop at the corner will be used as a tower. I must say i have been heavily influenced by Arindam's idea of counting chicks and letting them hatch and so i have decided to restrict entry only for girls in my new IIPM tower.

"

lots of IIPM related blog postings can be found at desipundit.com

Rain rain go away!

2005-10-25T22:23:00.000+10:00

Rain, rain, go away
Come again some other day
We want to go outside and play
Come again some other day

I have not gone nuts. It’s just that Bangalore has been receiving so much of rain lately that I can’t think of anything else to write about. Some of the roads have been closed down since they are no longer visible. People have to go to work taking diversions round the city. Yesterday itself I spent traveling 3.5 hrs to get to the office (the normal travel time is 15-20 minutes). And then we have the great Hosur Road. This must be the only road in

India

that has a variable length.

???

Some days you can travel from point A to B on Hosur Road in hardly 15 minutes, and some days it just might take forever. I have lost count of the evenings when I slept off in the company bus, waking up a couple of hours after, making a dash for the exit thinking that my stop has passed by a long time ago, only to realize that the bus has hardly inched from where I last remember and then settling down back to my seat, to the amusement of my fellow travelers.

Why did I ever opt to come to Bangalore in the first place??

[My Inner Self]-:- “Silicon valley of India!!! Most developed cosmopolitan in India. Girls in nice dresses. The most happening place.”

:((

[My Inner Self]-:-“The costliest city you have ever been in. More time spent on travel everyday than you did in a whole month while at college. Traffic jams, flooded roads, less sleep.”

[My Inner Self]-:-“Cheer up man! You are still alive”

Yeah. I live to see another morning in Bangalore. :(

wake up!!

2005-10-19T23:21:00.000+10:00

[My Inner Self]-:- “Shoonya! Wake up. They have you under their control. You must escape”

What? Who is controlling whom?

[My Inner Self]-:- “There is no time to explain. Follow my instructions. Jump out of the window to your right when I say “now””.

Go away! I have tons of documentation to read. My first ever project! I am not screwing this up. MUST CONTINUE FILLING MY BRAIN WITH USELESS STUFF THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS.

[My Inner Self]-:- “Man, you are not making any sense. What have they done to you??”

MUST CONTINUE READING!!! MUST CONTINUE READING!!!

[My Inner Self]-:- “Since that dude has lost his mind I will be your host for today. So where do we start? Ok …sometime back last week Shoonya moved to Bangalore since his company posted him there. This is the earliest recorded information we have about the onset of insanity. The traffic jams of Bangalore have claimed another victim. Shoonya now spends as much time on travel everyday as he did on computer games while he was at collage.”

[My Inner Self]-:- “To add to his troubles he was put into a lightening fast project (project duration: one month) his first ever. He is the only fresher in his team. This is the first time that he actually has seen Microsoft VSS in action. He has to go around asking for permissions to install software. No more googling, downloading and using cracks. He no longer decides what to do. And as usual every project starts with tons of documentation. Somebody tells him to do this and somebody else tells him to do that and the first somebody again tells him to do something else and then the third and fourth somebody also provide him directions. To cut a very long story short Shoonya is LOST. The characters in the TV series LOST are much better off then Shoonya.

[My Inner Self]-:- “That’s all folks. Bye! Have a nice day. I have to remind my Outer Self that he has to get out of the office and eat something and go home, so that he can wake up tomorrow and find his way back to the office.”

MUST NOT FALL ASLEEP!! READ MORE!!

[My Inner Self]-:- “No Na Na No Na no! Say…MUST EAT. MUST GO HOME”

MUST READ MORE!!

[My Inner Self]-:- “Ok let’s try again….MUST EAT!!! MUST GO HOME!!! MUST EAT!!! MUST GO HOME!!!”

MUST EAT!!! MUST GO HOME!!!

[My Inner Self]-:- “That’s better. Let’s go home. And you all people still reading this I told you to leave. Log off! Go have a real life in the real world”

K508i - To buy or not to buy

2005-10-06T22:12:00.000+10:00

This December I will be celebrating the 3^rd anniversary of my Ericsson A3618. For the information of those who have no idea what I am talking about …long before Sony Ericsson there was this Swedish company called Ericsson that made mobile phones. In the 1980s they believed that mobile phones were not that great a market to invest in. So they decided to concentrate on their core business of making telecom equipment for telecom companies and lost the race for the mobile phone market to Nokia. Now they are fighting to get it back with Sony by their side and Sony Ericsson is putting up a really nice show.

The W800i is really cool, but pricing it as Rs 25k is really bad. But that’s not a problem since there are plenty of people willing to pay that price. Even I was planning to get one before I realized that to buy a W800i or any its new brothers and sisters in the market, I would have to save for a really long time and the purchase would reset my bank balance to zero.

[My Inner Self]-:- “God! Why can’t you give these software engineers a gift of a million dollars after they pass out of college so that they don’t complain about the meager salaries they make as trainees at IT companies?? So what if their meager salaries are way above what an average India makes?? If it can’t get them the latest mobile phones, ipods and laptops, of what use is it?”

So I finally locked my attention on the best possible option in the range I could afford. The Sony Ericsson K508i, I could play 3D games on it, and click the occasional photograph. I could also read MMS that my friends send me. What’s the big deal about the MMS?? Well I have never see an MMS on my A3618…since it has no MMS capability, all it shows is some grabbled up ASCII text when I receive a MMS. And I have only heard and read about technologies like IrDA, GRPS etc…never experienced them.

So I called up my parents to get the green light for the purchase. Though I would be making the purchase out of my own pocket, I thought it would be better to ask them. My father coolly told me not to worry about the money in my bank account…let it grow…get it become 1 lakh …don’t get itchy fingers and blow up money on useless things. My current phone works right? “If you mean I can use it to talk just like I can in a public phone booth? Yes!” So let things be the way they are. Save the money for the future.

It was great listening to dad say all that on the phone, while I tried to cover the phone with my hands least the girl sitting next to me on the company bus sees my prehistoric mobile phone with its paint gone in several places. I was greatly troubled after the call. Should I keep myself ready for the unknown future or blow up money on getting a new phone to play with?

[My Inner Self]-:- “Man! I hate this! Why do you have to dump all these painful policy decision making on me? I have enough troubles to think about already! Tell you what, isn’t there a girl by your side with a Nokia 6600?”

Yes! Why?

[My Inner Self]-:-“Ok…Now listen the Nokia 6600 has everything you want. So why don’t you just knock the girl by your side on the head and grab the Nokia 6600 and jump out of the bus”

No! I can’t do something like that.

[My Inner Self]-:-“Why not? You worried that you will be caught? Or is it about Right and Wrong?”

No! I am a Nokia hater. I won’t even think of doing such a thing in my dreams.

[My Inner Self] and all nearby souls in chorus -:- “OOHHHH!!! We have a Nokia hater among us.”

Nokia phones are so terrible. Ugly stupid designs, useless User Interfaces. I wonder why most people buy Nokia.

[Passing by Soul 1]-:- “That right, when I walked on the earth as a mortal. I used both Nokia and Ericsson. Ericsson phones have a much better UI than Nokia.”

[My Inner Self]-:-“Ok I will sleep over the problem and let you know about what to do”

Yeah! Whatever, its 5pm now, the company’s net server just opened up for net access, gotta browse. Don’t disturb me. And all you souls get lost. No peeping over the shoulders while I type my email passwords.

[My Inner Self]-:- “These software engineers are crazy”

Sleeping beauty and the nasty bus driver

2005-09-27T13:25:00.000+10:00

The company bus - the thing I hate the most but can’t do without. I have to pay an astronomical amount for using the bus though the place where I live is the nearest residential area with respect to my company’s location. And till last month getting the bus driver to stop on my bus-stop was next to impossible. I often had to perform a “tandav nritya” in the middle of the busy main road to catch the bus driver’s attention. But anything remotely female trying to stop the bus was enough for the driver to bring the bus to a screeching halt.

One day, I and another guy from my stop watched the bus fly past without stopping and we had to take an auto to the office. Now this guy had a girlfriend, who also traveled on the same bus. That day she lashed out at the driver and the conductor and hurled abuses on them. From that day onwards the driver always stops even if neither I nor my friend (the other guy at the stop) turns up to catch the bus.

I always have to sit at the back of the bus. Mine is the last stop before the bus reaches the company office. My friend always has a seat reserved for him by the side of his girlfriend. So I walk back to the last row of seats watching him settle down by the side of his girl friend wishing that I too had such a nice and caring girlfriend. The last row always has a permanent occupant.

A beautiful fair girl who is always sleeping. Mostly I sit besides her since there are no other seats available. She never opens her eyes and we have never talked. When the bus reaches the company campus somehow she always manages to know and wakes up. She always dresses quite well and wears socks even when she has sandals on. Maybe she is not keeping well… I always wonder why she is alone. Where’s her boyfriend? I never get to see her id tag...know her name…something to track her identity. Sometimes I wonder whether she is real. Such a beautiful girl all alone. I never get to talk to her after reaching the company campus, people rushing about here and there. I just pray to the almighty that next day she will be awake when I get on the bus and we can have a nice chat. It’s been more than a month since I first saw her. Am still praying.

Back after a week

2005-09-22T22:08:00.000+10:00

I know it’s been a long time since I wrote on the blog. My apologies to all those who check out my blog occasionally, yeah I know about you people. :) I had put a page load tracker on the site through statcounter.com .Thanks for coming back regularly.

[My inner self]-:-“Shoonya, What you are really concerned about is whether anyone on this planet reads this blog. For all you know this blog is visited only by pet monkeys who jumped about on their owner’s keyboard and your blog somehow open up in the browser.”

No I am sure they are real people. The log shows that some of the same machines have checked out the blog 4-5 times.

[My inner self]-:-“Ever heard of the word "coincidence" ??”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you… My Inner Self. He’s going to be with us for hopefully only a few days.

[My inner self]-:-“Don’t even think about cutting me off the blog!”

I had been kind of busy last week rushing through the last stages of my training at the company. A couple of more weeks and I will be either in or out. Another reason that I wasn't writing anything for the past few days was that nothing exciting was happening around, it was raining most of the days and after office my primary concern was to get back to the warmth of my apartment and settle down before the TV with a packet of chips and a couple of 5star bars.

A sudden burst of energy on Saturday evening when I had to run like hell to catch the company bus after office hours made things worse. By the time I reached the gates I was totally out of breath and could barely stand, one of the security guys had to flag down the bus for me. The next day I wasn't feeling really good. I then took the decision to cut down on junk food and get some exercise everyday.

[My inner self]-:-“Oh Yeah??? You are not going to tell them about the poori and paneer that you had this afternoon instead of a proper nutritious meal and the huge burger in the evening??? Great dieting!

I am feeling much better today and that’s why you are reading this now. There is some great news; I might be getting myself a camera-phone this week. So be prepared for some wonderful blogging action.

The Big Fight for the ERP market

2005-09-13T21:56:00.000+10:00

For those who came in late:
The number of major enterprise software players started decreasing in the year 2003. PeopleSoft Inc. bought rival JD Edwards for $1.7 billion. Meanwhile Oracle had already started on its quest to acquire PeopleSoft and by late 2004 had forked out S10 billion for it.

The period saw antitrust cases against oracle in the US. Oracle was becoming dangerously big and the scene was reminiscent of the cases against Microsoft getting too big and dominating in the software markets during the late 1990s. The cases were ruled in favor of Oracle and business continued as usual.

Cut down to present day:
Oracle has just yesterday announced its decision to buy rival CRM software company Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion. With that Oracle is slated to become the number one CRM applications company in the world.

The deal further bolsters Oracle's aggressive drive to overtake SAP as the world's largest maker of business applications software -- the computer coding that automates a wide range of administrative tasks. In the past nine months, Oracle has either completed or announced five takeovers of business applications software makers, an expansion that has cost more than $17.6 billion so far.

This obviously has the other big companies in the enterprise customer market Microsoft and IBM scrambling for shelter. Microsoft was very late to start off its ERP product line and will now find it much more difficult to get a foothold in the market. Meanwhile IBM’s solutions have had compatibility problems with Oracle’s softwares- its focus had been on solutions based on ERP’s like PeopleSoft. And would SAP still be around a couple of years down the lane?

Since Oracle has its own suite of ERP packages it won’t be long before it kills the competing product lines acquired by it. That would leave thousands of businesses with no other option but to shift to Oracle or look elsewhere. How soon that happens remain to be seen. These businesses and software solution providers that have invested millions of dollars in ERP implementation will now have to helplessly watch all that money go down the drain. And there are all those people who would now lose their jobs.

There are a large number of small players bringing out exceptional products. But if Oracle continues on its quest to be the biggest, these specialized companies will be gobbled up either by Oracle or by Microsoft (which has already starting by targeting the small and medium-size companies). Last year Microsoft made an attempt to buy SAP but backed out when it realized the complications involved. Just like Microsoft’s Windows OS runs on more that 90% of the world’s desktops, it won’t be long before somebody totally owns the ERP market. When that happens we would have some really terrible software around ourselves.

i am LOST

2005-09-10T14:14:00.000+10:00

The hit series from the american abc tv "LOST" came to Indian shores last week on Star Movies last staurday. I missed the pilot episode - a transformer blew up near my house and knocked out electricity in the area. Luckily there was a repeat show this friday night.

In Lost, after Oceanic Air flight 815 breaks apart in mid-air and crashes on a mysterious Pacific island, a band of 48 friends, enemies and strangers are forced to work together in order to survive. Shot exclusively in Hawaii and filmed like a big screen spectacle, Lost is almost a movie in multiple episodes rather than a TV show.The survivors are beset by giant polar bears, villainous people, a frightening wraithlike creature, and, worst of all, their own personal demons.

The pilot was something like 2 hours and man it was really cool. The production budget for the two-hour pilot was $12 million, far greater than the cost of most television shows.This led to Disney firing ABC Entertainment Chairman Lloyd Braun for greenlighting the show, which went on to became ABC's biggest hit in years. more "LOST" trivia

Never seen anything like this on a tv show, it's a good thing that nobody made a movie out of this. All the fun would have been compressed into 2 hours. The first season depicts the first 40 days on the island.

You have to admit the story is anything but realistic, but the execution is awesome. Its supposed to be a Sci-fi ...the entire plot is avaiable on the net but i have managed to keep myself from spoiling the suspense. I will just have to make sure that i don't miss any of the episodes.

LOST reminds me of the pc game FARCRY- an offering from a then-relativly-unknown developer CRYTEK Studios. Farcry was a smashing hit, radically different from contemporary shooters. Both Farcry and LOST share the same visual setup-beautiful mysterious islands and an gripping gameplay/storyline that keeps you glued to the PC and TV respectively.

Wish my company sends me on an overseas junket and the plane crashlands on a beautiful Hawaii island.

AOE 3 DEMO is OUT

2005-09-08T23:19:00.000+10:00

If you have played games on PC, you must have heard about Microsoft's "AGE OF EMPIRES". most gamers simply love this game. and now microsoft is out with the latest offering from the AOE series........

AGE OF EMPIRES 3 ......

and.................

The AOE3 demo is OUTTTTTTTTTT !!!!!!!!!!

just released today.........

Download it right here! (~350mb)

I won't say much, I bet you won't read whatever and go straight to downloading anyway!

The minimum specs for the Demo are:

Windows XP
1.4Ghz Processor
256MB of RAM
64MB Video Card that supports HardWare Transform & Lighting (HW T&L)
Approximately 350MB of free HD space, not including the installer and room for the temporary files

Server Busy.....no problem ..... here are the alternatives from FileMirrors

nothing

2005-09-06T22:11:00.000+10:00

am going thru a professionally tough time...lots of exams...bye.

PS: review of "5 Point Someone - What not to do at an IIT" coming soon.

2005-09-01T22:26:00.000+10:00

Rolling the dice

2005-08-30T21:37:00.000+10:00

My office on this Monday was a lot like in a casino in Las Vegas. My ERP trainee batch was to be divided into 10 specific practices spread over 4 development centers. Some dreams came true, some were shattered.

Practices: ORACLE, SAP, EAI, CRM, SCM, BI …and so on. Over 200 boys and girls waited patiently as the HR people decided what to do.

9:30 am: The HR people needed to resolve the matter in such a way that in the evening they would be able to go back to their homes without being mobbed by dissatisfied trainees. Roll a dice, lottery, first come first serve…..they fought over the issue.

“Allocate randomly using a computer program, no human intervention”, somebody suggested.

10 am: I was called in to write a C program to allocate practice and locations at random according to the business requirements.

Now I badly needed the latest Visual Studio 2005 release, so I hoodwinked the cute HR girls into agreeing for a VC++ client and dotNET server application with funky skins, sliding dialog boxes and a great simple user interface that even a miss world could easily use. The company just had to buy the latest Visual Studio Enterprise Edition and leave the rest to me.

We prepared a draft for the knowledge transfer agreement- I was to keep the VS 2005 DVD and no assignments and tests for me for a period of 1 year.

11 am: The department head (a bald, middle aged, high tempered, overweight guy) shot down my proposal with a Stinger missile. They decided to do it the old fashioned way- with a dice.

12 pm:

1 pm:

2 pm:

Java: Nooo !! No java for me ..Anything else.

ORACLE: definitely no!

SAP: maybe… I hope I won’t have to work a lot.

SCM: supply chain management…boring

dotNET: definitely yes!

CRM: Customer Relationship management ??? Am not really good at that.

BI: business intelligence ??? when was the last time I checked my IQ ?

2:55 pm: The HR department was ready with the list.

3:00 pm: The HR department office was empty save for one last guy who stayed back to post the list to the trainees.

3:02 pm: The HR guy attached the list to a mail addressed to all trainees, grabbed his helmet and bag, clicked the SEND button and made a mad dash for the parking lot.

3:07 pm: Somebody checked his/her mail and found the mail about the postings. The news spreads like bushfire.

10-15 seconds past 3:07 pm: Everybody had read the mail. I was going to India’s Silicon City after the training would be complete. I was worried about landing myself into either of ORACLE, SAP, java, dotNET…. Somebody up there in the sky above decides to play a small game with my future.

I was going into EAI – Enterprise Application Integration. I would have to learn a bit about every single ERP package out there in the market!!!

3:08 pm: Civil unrest followed. With a large percentage of the 200 trainees being from 2 major Indian cities and the ERP division requiring people to be spread over 4 locations; it was no surprise that there were a lot of heart breaks and tears.

“Swapping of posting is allowed as long as the number of people in a department at a location remains constant.”-the mail said.

3:10 pm: Mailboxes were clogged with requests for swapping. Some people were reluctant to leave the shelter of their homes and move to another corner of the country. Guys who had never seen either ORACLE or SAP packages….we better not talk about what previous work experience they had , were hunting for department swaps- “I will swap for SAP/ORACLE anywhere on this planet” somebody claimed in his mail.

3:15 pm: The mail server crashed, tensions were high. The people who were happy with their postings maintained a low profile and refrained from celebrations for fear of a backlash from the dissatisfied lot.

3:16 pm: I settled down, my posting was fine. I was happy with it. The office had turned into a marketplace; trainees were bartering departments and locations.

So that was Monday, just another day at office. Some dreams came true, some were shattered.

2005-08-29T23:19:00.000+10:00

Where is the software engineering yaar?

2005-08-25T23:17:00.000+10:00

Seen the movie “Where's the Party Yaar? It’s ok if you haven’t, but catch it the next time they show it on TV. It’s an Indian English movie and worth watching, its fun. Now let’s move over to my problems.

I joined one of India’s top rated software companies to become a big shot coder…ok let’s scale it down to an above average programmer. My posting into the ERP division dashed all those hopes. Most of my work was to be limited to working on ERP packages and java. No working on a particular platform, no systems programming, no cutting edge technologies, no more heated Windows-Linux arguments that we had while at collages.

Just working on “software that manages information flow in enterprises” as my cute HR lady claims. Didn’t sound interesting at first, slowly the realization hit me that I was with an IT company that delivers IT solutions, we make what customers want us to make.

AAHHHHH!! No longer can I work on what I want to work on. If the client and business managers want something done this way, using this and that, all I can do I swallow my pride, learn how to do it that way and finally do it that way. And right now businesses and my company love java and cross-platform softwares, I love vc++ and windows. No prizes for guessing who the winner is.

ERP is currently hot. Western corporations are minting money making ERP packages and South Asian IT companies are making millions using these packages to deliver solutions to other western corporations.

This week was fun. ERP is about knowing business and making solutions for running business. So my company decided that I must know a lot more about business than any average Joe programmer. So began our sessions of business related classes. We had sessions on almost every aspect of business in any big business. Presentations after presentations on Finance & Accounting, Sales & Marketing, Manufacturing and Shop Floor Planning (don’t ask me what it is, I have no idea), Supply Chain management, Materials management, Human Capital management and HR.

We had people with MBAs unloading their B school wisdom into our brains that was already kind of full with the stuff that was pushed in by our computer science department at collages. Many people survived through the sessions napping through most of it. Some others played with their mobiles, passed around sms and mms, and the very brave ones dared to bunk the sessions altogether. You aren’t supposed to bunk classes that the company is paying for, it’s very different from bunking classes at collage. But luckily no one in the administration missed those adventurous guys- I take immense pride in being one of them.

Anyway I and my batch mates survived the interaction with the MBA suits. Business managers and software engineers seem like 2 different sub species of homo-sapiens. The trouble is I have to take exams related to all this business stuff sometime next week and no they won’t give me an MBA when I pass the exams, but they will surely kick me out of the company if I don’t.

The road ahead is green with all the money to make and onsite opportunities (ERP is in its adolescence, 40-50% of the work is still onsite). The question is will the computer engineer in me survive to become the big shot coder that I have dreamt of since joining collage or will the IT professional take over entirely?

2005-08-22T23:25:00.000+10:00

The monk who sold his Ferrari

2005-08-22T23:06:00.000+10:00

This Sunday I started reading Robin S. Sharma’s “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. The cover said that the book was “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” and the title did create a lot of curiosity. The book is no thriller and is supposed to be an inspiring tale that provides a step-by-step approach to living with greater courage, balance, abundance and joy - certainly not my ideal bedtime reading stuff.

But I could surely give it a try. Unlike the protagonist Julian Mantle I do not have a stellar professional reputation, no 7 figure dollar salary, no private jet, am yet to set my foot on a tropical island let alone own one and I certainly do not have a shiny red Ferrari parked in the center of my driveway. Maybe 20-30 years from now all these might be a possibility, maybe.

I got past the first 3 chapters. No shots fired yet, no cars blown up, no conspiracy theories, no dead bodies turned up and no beautiful 2 legged creatures with red lipstick and 6-inch high heels made their entry. Robin Sharma is no Dan Brown, nor is he a John Grisham or an Alistair MacLean. By the time Julian Mantle sold his Ferrari and started climbing the Himalayas in search for the ageless yogis who had mastered the art of mind control and spiritual awakening, I arrived at the conclusion that this book was certainly not written for people like me. Maybe I will read it some 3 decades from now when I become a Julian Mantle.

But suddenly I was obsessed with the idea of having a shiny red Ferrari in my driveway. I checked on the net: How much does a brand new shiny red Ferrari cost? And I checked my bank account. We had a long way to go before the two would be equal. So I decided to settle for the next best thing. It’s a shiny red Ferrari made not by the Italians but by an American company called Mattel, they sell them under the brand name “Hot Wheels”.

References:

2005-08-20T17:42:00.000+10:00

http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/ and http://penny-arcade.com/ : These are the two cool sites from where I pick up comic strips for my blog. The comics are mostly centered on video games and gamers.

And of course we have my good old office mate Dilbert.

the week that the week was

2005-08-20T13:49:00.000+10:00

wasn't a very exciting week anyway,

monday : was India's Independence Day, and our cook wanted a holiday so me and my roommates had a tough time hunting around for food.

tuesday : was raining in the morning,afternoon,evening and night...my nice formal leather shoes got WET WET WET and by evening they were DAMAGED DAMAGED DAMAGED :((

wednesday : bad bad day..................first in the morning the electric iron got overheated and i burned the collar of one of my best shirts :((
then i turned up at the office in sports shoes and was fined (Company regulations, formal shoes monday to thursday)...so in the evening i made a trip to the shopping areas...hunting for waterproof shoes......finally after 2 hours found a suitable pair of shoes.
i also visited 4 titan showrooms....just 2 or 3 old model fastrack watches on display :(( why does it always happen with me??.

thursday: continued my hunt for a fastrack watch... been doing that for the last 2 weeks. fastrack came out with a new range recently and they are disappearing from the showrooms as soon as the company's delivery truck unloads them.

friday: worked my ass off on a java project that started on wednesday evening and was to be given on friday evening. at 9pm the project was complete!

saturday: its just 9:30 in the morning.. nothing much has happened yet. am at the office and am wondering ... why would anyone sane on this planet be reading this!!!.....
anyway i will post the day's events if something extraordinary happens... who knows maybe aliens will takeover my company and turn us all into zombies and later take over the planet ..who knows i might spill coffee on my shirt....so many possibilities....its hurting my brain thinking about all the possibilities.

2005-08-13T20:25:00.000+10:00

The java class is very boring

2005-08-13T14:55:00.000+10:00

The java class is very boring. My mind wanders about aimlessly. What should I think about to get my mind off this class?? Where should I travel to in the realms of my mind to find some adventure?

There is a slight movement behind me; somebody is slowly creeping towards me. I roll over the floor from my crouched position, turn around and shoot the guard between the eyes. The silencer reduces the shot to an inaudible whimper. I catch the guard before he hits the floor. I hold my breath for a minute, apparently nobody heard us. I carry the poor guy’s body into the shadows of the coffee machine and relieve him of the walky-talky and the stun gun. I need those more than he does. I find an access card in his pockets. This should get me through to the electrical rooms in the basement.

“Lambert! I might I found a way to knock out the alarms on the 3^rd floor”

“Fisher! You better hurry up. There is a guard change scheduled in 20 minutes”

I am about to get out into the lobby when the dead guard’s watch catches my attention. Damn it! It’s not a watch it’s some kind of a bio-reader disguised as a wristwatch. Shit! I quickly take off the device and strap it on. Too late. Alarms start ringing though out the building. I guess guards would be here soon. The device must have a location tracker in it.

“Damn it Fisher! The mission’s over. Get out of there”

“Sorry Lambert. Not this time, it’s not your show now. It’s all in my mind. None of your rules in here.”

“Fisher! It’s an order. The game’s over. You failed the mission.”

“I am not playing the whole level over again. I can take down these guys like Rambo does. And put on Cohen, am sick of your attitude Lambert”

“Sam! Lambert’s right. We can’t risk your capture. They will know about the Third Echelon”.

“Great! That’s what you care about? I thought you love me!” I don’t know which troubled me more, Cohen’s talk or the imminent capture.

“HEY! Whose there??” shouts a guard. I turn around. A big burly guard is cautiously advancing towards me wielding a baton.

I shoot him at point blank. But he keeps advancing. I empty the whole magazine into him, but he doesn’t stop.

“Hey! You there!! Are you with us??” Suddenly I am back in the class. The instructor is standing near me staring down at me. He isn’t the only one; I am the center of attraction for the entire class.

“Yes Sir??” damn it, I am screwed!

“What was I telling you about creating packages in java?”

How am I supposed to know? I was day dreaming! Maybe you put some rabbits, carrots and onions in a cauldron, stir it for a while and voila …. Packages are ready. “I am sorry Sir, I wasn’t paying attention.”

What happened next?? I am sent to meet the department HR. I don’t mind seeing the HR once in a while, she’s young and she’s beautiful; but I would rather love to meet her in much better circumstances.

She agrees with me that the classes are boring but the company is paying for me to attend the classes, so that I can learn and work for the company and bring them dollars from Uncle Sam, so that they can pay me in Indian currency, so that I can pay my landlord, pay the phone bills, buy food and go on shopping sprees and of course the most important thing in my daily life…browse the net for hours together.

She is smiling as she says all this, but I know that in the back of her head she’s noted me down as the first candidate when the next retrenchment is to happen. I smile back and drag myself back to the java class.

This cup of java is quite bitter, I want a Coke!

PS- Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights") has signed on to direct the movie "Splinter Cell," based on the Tom Clancy videogame. Paramount Pictures hired Berg to direct the film and write the script with videogame writer JT Petty and John J. McLaughlin. George Clooney is rumored to be the favorite candidate to play Sam Fisher.

2005-08-12T23:01:00.000+10:00

flashback

2005-08-11T23:29:00.000+10:00

For the information of those who came in late…. Which includes just about everybody on this green and blue planet other than my family and friends.

On the morning of July 11^th 2005 I joined a big huge MNC IT company that makes millions of Indians proud and has thousands of jobless American programmers swearing by the mere mention of its name. I later signed on the dotted lines on a stamp paper that I will remain faithful to her (the company) for at least 1 year. Did I just pawn my soul for a year??

Anyway life was good in the beginning. We, me and hundreds of other freshers from engg collages were put in a nice huge residential campus for 10 days. Then the problems started. On yet another fine morning I was asked to pack my bags and leave to a development center in another state. I was to be trained in ERP.

When I arrived at my new workplace I asked the HR what ERP was….since the only things I knew were c, c++ and java. The female tried hard to explain it …. After some business related mumble mumble I understood that she knows as much about the technical side of ERP as my grandma about the difference between Windows and Linux. I gave up. Finally she told me that at the end of the training i.e after 2 months I will figure out what ERP is. That was the only single sensible thing she said that day during her 30 minute presentation.

Now a fortnight later I have covered databases, learnt how to use UNIX, oracle and java but what will I be working on in ERP means still eludes me :(

learning to java

2005-08-11T22:57:00.000+10:00

The following excerpts are taken from my notebook for the classes that I attended today morning… I was having a java class and the teacher was boring me to death! And so I stopped taking notes and wrote this instead.

“According to the Big Fat Bastard, C is a terrible language to work in. But since computers have been in existence decades before Java was born and C has been there since the 70s and C++ since 80s, the programming world was in the dark ages. Circa 1995 enters the knight in shinning armor: Sun Microsystems’s Java that brings an end to the sufferings of millions of C programmers.

Big Fat Bastard finds faults in anything related to C. According to him OOP started with Java. Obviously he has never heard of C++ that came out with the first standardized version well before the nuts at Sun even thought of Java. Can the Big Fat Bastard let me know of any OS that has been written in JAVA?? I rest my case.”

boring week & no visitors yet :(

2005-02-12T06:08:00.000+11:00

oh my god, this is horrifying,

no visitor yet, and i was thinking i could use Google Ads on my blog to make some money..... ah...nothing goes right around me!!!

so lets see what all went wrong with me this week

Monday: didn't talk to the girl i love, she doesn't like me :((
Tuesday: had an exam, will get good marks, problem is others will get better.
Wednesday: had another exam....just ok....
Thursday: couldn't find the courage talk to the girl i love, she still doesn't like me :((
Friday: At college, 1:45 pm: ..... she and me....its just not going to work.
My room Evening: started working on my main project for my engineering degree in computer science,
12:50 am: posting this ....wondering "will anybody ever read this?"
12:51 am: you know what........she and me...maybe we will be together one day :-)

bye, am going to bed....this world is so boring.........atleast she's with me in my dreams :-)

the mental projection of your digital self

2005-02-08T04:39:00.000+11:00

make that "my" digital self........

this is the 7th of February 2005, unless my body is in the power plant somewhere near the machine city, and you happen to be reading this since i thought the world would be interested to know about my life. I am no NEO, just a average college student, completing his graduate studies in computer science. And no, i am not a hacker either, you wouldn't be reading sci-fi stuff here.

As i said this is my residual self image, my simple story, no mirch, no masala.

Will start posting with in a couple of days, have 2 exams to take care on tuesday and wednesday and i have prepared for neither.

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk

2004-12-09T18:59:00.000+11:00

I am sure most of you have seen/listened to streaming video/audio on some web page. Wish to keep those on your hard disk without having to purchase/crack QuickTime Pro to save all those goodies??? Read ahead.

Method 1:

QuickTime downloads the files from the web page and keeps them in the folder

“Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\QuickTime\downloads”

in some sub folders with file names like

“4f8a29ef-5cfbac59-febe5025-a5d5a4de.qtch”.

Now the “.qtch” stands for QuickTime cache and these files are sort of are encrypted. You could try renaming the file to .mp3 or .mov …or whatever if you have any idea what the format might be. But since the files are encrypted…some files may not play at all or play with some distortion in the background.

Hope you have atleast tried doing this…did it work? No? Read ahead.

Method 2:

Some Mac users have posted workarounds to get the source for the media stream and download it without opening it in QuickTime. I found two that work….though some might require you to install network monitoring software and put in a little effort ;)

1. www.macosxhints.com link to hint

A summary of what to do…

“Using tcpflow, which you will need (entropy.ch has a great Mac OS X binary available), I was able to capture the request for the video off of Apple's servers with the following command.

sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -c -i en1 port 80 | grep -oE \

'\|Host: *.*'

The en1 refers to the Airport I am using for internet access. If you are using ethernet, it should be en0.

Install tcpflow and run the above command before you try to watch the video. Click the link to start watching the video in iTunes, and the GET request will pop up in the Terminal. A bit of excess info will pop up as well, but you are looking for two things: something like /Features/xxx/xxx/dj.sdsd.mov and something like axxx.phobos.apple.com. To download the video, paste the ...sdsd.mov URL into the Download window of Safari, and the download will begin!”

2. www.highdefforum.com link to hint

A summary of what to do…

“Just install QT7 (preferably using the stand-alone installer, unless you want some iTunes app as well) When you click on the trailer of your choice, the QT7 app will open in it's own window. Hit and an information screen will open showing the movie source. Select all of the source and you've got the url to the trailer directly. Copy & paste it into your download manager of choice (I use GetRight) and it will start downloading the trailer to where you want. Once that starts you can just cancel the QuickTime window.”

Nothing works :(( …welcome to the world of Shoonya…where things just don’t happen the way you wish them to be.

Method 3:

The credit for which I would like to keep. No tools required. Just use your common sense.

Click on the link for the streaming media. If the browser opens the QuickTime plugin in a new window or the same window and it looks something like this.

Sorry had to distort the image to hide the identity of the site ;) don’t want you all to try it out on the same site

Don’t close the QuickTime window….let the file continued to be downloaded/played.

Now take up the html source of the window. How to X-( !@^%#$ ??

Right Click > “View Source” in Internet Explorer based browsers

Right Click > “View Page Source” in Firebox based browsers

In the Html source find a tag like.......... e.g

 src="media/Black_Eyed_Tomatoes_We_Go_Again.mp3" width="200" height="32" stop=""

Copy the path ….now if you were on the page http://artist_page.com/audio.php... or something like this …change the path to http://artist_page.com/media/Black_Eyed_Tomatoes _We_Go_Again.mp3 and hit ENTER. The file should now be downloaded to your hard disk…or you could try using your favorite download manager. Now creating the path is not a very difficult task…try combinations of the url of the page with the link to the streaming media + the path obtained from the html source.

http://artist_page.com/ + media/Black_Eyed_Tomatoes_We_Go_Again.mp3

Preferably use the browser to download the file since the streaming media is already being played in the browser. When you hit ENTER after http://artist_page.com/media/Black_Eyed_Tomatoes _We_Go_Again.mp3 the browser will simply take up the file from its cache and put it in the destination specified by you. There is no need to download the file again and waste precious bandwidth.

Still can’t get it working…WOW…I don’t know what to say.

residual self image

Benchmark comparisons - Dell Inspiron 1520

Review - Dell Inspiron 1520

Dell Inspiron 1520 review - coming soon

How to download pretty much everything from the Internet, except the Internet itself

testing 1 2 3

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum

The 2007 Melbourne International Motor Show

Evolution 5.6 starts Saturday 10th March 2007 00:00 UTC

Photos of Yarra River area

St.Kilda Beach Festival 2007

Sansa View

The latest fad in file sharing is Port 80

Zune Vs Rest of DAP gang

Kindly take me of this planet

friday, the day and the end

Space

back yet again

Tom Cruise boasts of eating placenta

Corporate misbehavior: Bone-headed D-Link’s NTP vandalism

“Danish server admin exposes D-Link's "NTP vandalism"”

Read here how the culprit was caught “When Firmware Attacks! (DDoS by D-Link)”

He told them that something like this happened before with NetGear products …see “Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server” and NetGear had owned up and fixed their products.

On April 7th, 2006 he put a letter titled “Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism” at http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/ so that the rest of the world could come to know about DLink’s act of vandalism.

Read more about this at

Origami + UMPC = Vapourware?

Win vs Mac

Woz: 'I hope Microsoft...becomes more like Apple'

Never in a million years . . .

Bill Gates to the rescue??

Evolution

What’s in a name?

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk

Friday, December 09, 2005

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk

make way...big ape coming

Back yet again

never liked IIPM anyway

Rain rain go away!

wake up!!

K508i - To buy or not to buy

Sleeping beauty and the nasty bus driver

Back after a week

The Big Fight for the ERP market

i am LOST

AOE 3 DEMO is OUT

nothing

Rolling the dice

Where is the software engineering yaar?

Seen the movie “Where's the Party Yaar? It’s ok if you haven’t, but catch it the next time they show it on TV. It’s an Indian English movie and worth watching, its fun. Now let’s move over to my problems.

Just working on “software that manages information flow in enterprises” as my cute HR lady claims. Didn’t sound interesting at first, slowly the realization hit me that I was with an IT company that delivers IT solutions, we make what customers want us to make.

ERP is currently hot. Western corporations are minting money making ERP packages and South Asian IT companies are making millions using these packages to deliver solutions to other western corporations.

The monk who sold his Ferrari

References:

the week that the week was

The java class is very boring

flashback

learning to java

boring week & no visitors yet :(

the mental projection of your digital self

How to save QuickTime streaming media onto your hard disk