While surfing around on the net, I stumbled across this resource : David Wheeler's Secure Programming book. You find tips on secure programming practices scattered all around the Internet, it is good to have all this information at one place.

Good read, especially for freshers. Secure programming is not included in the curriculum of CS/IT graduates, atleast not in Pune University. And I think the earlier you learn about this, the better it is.

I had been for a company party, to this new restaurant that has come up at E-Square. The scheme is different that there is at most other restaurants in Pune. That makes it interesting. The menu is American/Italian oriented, a whole range of salads to start with, then soup, sandwich of your choice and then a few varities of desserts. A bar in the centre and a live band that plays in the evening.

In one of my previous blog entries, I had written about Gmail's proactive action against messages detected as phishing. Turns out, it is an antiphishing tool, Google is experimenting with. More points to Gmail for the value addition.

Btw, I am no marketing representative for Gmail :)

It was a busy Sunday.

From,
1200 : Treat
1430 : Marathi Play on VCD (Gelaa Madhav konikade)
1700 : Friends
2100 : Socha na Tha
2330 : Meet the Fockers

Well, you know I am always busy :)

I had an off for 3 days. A welcome break after long hours of coding, coding and testing. Fortunately, it matched up with the Holi festival here. Went to my native place and had a great relaxing time with my parents.

Ate a lot of pooran polis :-) (It is an Indian sweet, more like sweet bread, but tastes much better).

Watched 3 days of the India-Pakistan test match, which by the way, India managed to lose from a comfortable situation. But the good thing was great batting by Sehwag. The opponents were simply helpless in stopping, or even controlling runs flowing off his bat.

Google is improving their Gmail product at a great pace.

One of the feature that I like, is the related pages section at the bottom of the email. They really have some great information pointers over there. Since I use my gmail account mostly for the subscription to mailing lists (LKML, fs-devel) the pointers down there take you to informative sites. And the kindof random yet text relevant nature is appealing. Now, since the Advertisement links are right on top of this section, no matter what, you go through them, which is probably good for the advertisers, and hence for google.

Just came across this over lkml. The client doesn't do much but something analogous to the "cvs update" command. Though it will help people to sync directly with the bitkeeper trees on bkbits.net, I wonder how many will start using it, given the limited functionality.

Boy, I really blog very infrequently. I can still see the Concepts 2004 blog pretty near this one.

Well, this year the graduation project competition started today. Had been for the judging of few projects, and will probably be for another day. I'll put up details about some interesting projects after that.
I also have a presentation on stack overflows (phrack 49).

Updated : Apr 2, 2005 : I have uploaded the contents of the workshop.

Right now, we felt the tremors of an earthquake. It wasn't a huge one, occured in the Indian Ocean. You get to see the details here. Lets hope it is not a major one.

Updated 14 Mar, 05: Sorry this one was earlier in the day. The actual report is here

It has been a long time since the 2nd edition of Linux Device Drivers (LDD) was released. A very good book for newbies and practitioners for 2.4 kernel development. Thanks to O'Reilly, there has also been an online version of the book.

And now, there is this announcement from O'Reilly about the third edition, apparently focused on the 2.6.10 kernel.

The authors will have some task to do, though. Following the new kernel development model, the 2.6 kernel is expected to change much more often than the 2.4. I wonder how applicable will the book be to the different kernels in the 2.6 release.

And ofcourse, will it be available online?

Updated, 15th Mar, 2005 : Available online here. Yay !

I came across this link that talks about a case if Microsoft comes up with a strategy of running Linux on Windows.

The goal : provide advantages of both the OSes (kill Linux).

But I guess, numerous possibilities, like these, could be considered. And definitely heads at Microsoft are at it as well.

updated (28th Feb, 2005) : And here is a riposte to the article.
updated (28th Feb, 2005) : Rebounds on John Dvorak's article all over the place.

People keep getting confused between the terms "data" and "information". And often, long explanations do not help. I recently got a FWDed email, which clears all doubt :

Data : "362436"

Firefox recently reached the 25 million download mark. That is roughly around 3 downloads per second, and that too consistently for the past 99 days. And this does not include all the installations made, by buying CDs, burning CDs from the downloaded versions and ofcourse, vast corporate wide updates. That is one great piece of work.

Apparently, as a reaction to this, Microsoft comes up with revised plans for IE.

Ever wondered what the likely and unlikely macros in the linux kernel are ?

The macros are defined as :

#define likely(x)       __builtin_expect((x),1)
#define unlikely(x)     __builtin_expect((x),0)

While I have been using ssh for quite a long time now, the ssh-agent utility was totally unknown to me, up untill very recently. It is quite a handy utility.

ssh uses the user passphrase to encrypt your private key stored on the machine. This encryption mitigates the security issues that pop up when the private key file lands up in the hands of a third party. On the other hand, you are expected to type in the passphrase everytime you have to use the private key. This can turn out to be quite a headache. I frequently need to login to machines with ssh. Even in many cases remote services are accessible through secure access using ssh + port forwarding.