My Friend goes to the office early in the morning. Switches on his computer, checks his email, checks his tasks to be done for the day. He goes to have some coffee to freshen up his mind for the daunting task that stands ahead of him.
After the coffee he comes back and starts playing one of the online versions of poker. Before lunch, his boss peeks into his cubicle, expecting my friend to be sincerely engrossed in his work. My friend's back is toward the door...

For quite a while I was wishing to have a random wallpaper for my desktop. In this week, I got to take a stab at it.

A little search on the net showed that I could use the gconftool-1 interface to make configuration changes to Gnome. Great job Gnome guys to open up such configuration interfaces to the world. More about GConf here.

From, Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein.

This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.' - Elrond.

What we had read mostly as a fiction is right here in front of us. The Planetary Societyprepares itself to launch the first spaceship powered by Solar Sails hours from now.

After staying with an unsupported version of RH9 + Ximian Desktop for a long time, today I installed Suse 9.3. It is a great product (though a bit problematic for me, since I was used to the RedHat configuration style, and many a things change in Suse). The installation, boot up, login screens, and the desktop environment are very polished. Some of the features that I am looking forward to, are Xen, beagle (probably alpha yet), dashboard. Good to see I got the latest Firefox (1.0.4) and the latest 2.6 kernel (2.6.11.4) shipped with it as well, though that is not the case with gaim which dates way back. The YaST tool takes care of online updates, configuration and management, troubleshooting and lot of other things.

Given this setup, who says Linux is not suitable for home users?

I just finished up reading this book. It is a wonderful book about/by Mr. Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel prize in 1965 for his works in Physics. It is a collection of short stories in the life of Feynman which shape up to form his autobiography. It is a wonderful book, feels as if a person that you have long known is chatting with you about the different experiences he had.

A recent study, conducted by PrivacyActivism, on accuracy and responsiveness of Data brockers Choicepoint and Acxiom shows very discouraging results. The report states, "100% of the eleven participants in the study discovered errors in background check reports provided by ChoicePoint. The majority of participants found errors in even the most basic biographical information: name, social security number, address and phone number"

See, idenity theft is really mangled-identity theft!

I see different styles of demarcation/lines in the documents/code that I come across. People use a preferred style based on their ways of thinking, backgrounds or creativity. It is interesting to look at how people express themselves in minor things as these.

Like, a C developer will have an line made of asterisk (*)

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

This year (2005) marks a century of the landmark paper, "The special theory of relativity", published by Albert Einstein, the man who changed our view of the Universe.

An explanation from Stephen Hawking can be found here.

The other day I was having a conversation with one of my friend, who happens to be a MBA student. The conversation led to his interests in the marketing field and how he gets to learn a lot on the topic in his MBA studies. He mentioned a couple of marketing principles that he appreciated very much. I smiled as I heard those principles.

A simple lookin mail landed up in my mailbox. The contents looked as follows :

If the message will not displayed automatically,
follow the link to read the delivered message.
 
Received message is available at:
www.my_company.com/inbox/support/read.php?sessionid-27802

"whenever all other possibilities have been ruled out, the improbable, however unlikely, must be the truth"
- Sherlock Holmes

I am a great fan of Sherlock Holmes, I have read all the mysteries more than once. His methods, his philosophy, is exceedingly intriguing.

As I read Sherlock Holmes, I can't help map the efforts taken by a detective to solve a criminal case, to the efforts taken by a developer while chasing a bug. Both these share so many elements, the clue, the analysis, the tactics, the rush of adrenaline, the heat, the trap, the patience, the chase, and the triumph. And then back to another mystery.

This weekend I was stunned to read this headline in the Times of India, one of the two major newspaper all across India. I thought it was in bad taste. And lets not get started on the pictures. Well agreed, sex sells, but that does not mean that publishing houses should exploit every opportunity to introduce provocative material in their newspapers.

Taking a cue from Mr. Kanetkar (l1w0lf), I started looking at, and then reading the book "A New kind of science" by Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and the founder of the Mathematica software. Having recently started, I haven't finished much of the book yet, but it looks to be interesting upto now.

Online licenses are quite common these days. Right from opening a simple email account, reading an online version of a book, to online commerical activities, we have to go through this process of accepting the "Terms of Agreement" that the websites provide. And this does have a legal status. Websites can take legal action against us, the customers, if we are found in violation of the terms of the agreement. Well, that is the website's legal recourse. But what do we, as consumers, have?

Who is to make sure (and how) that the "Terms of Agreement", that we had agreed to earlier on, are the same as the ones being presented. In other words, the "Terms of Agreement" have not been changed?