Archive for September, 2006

Vacation: day 1

Went by car to mysore, though the journey was long for rest of the family, was no big deal for me cause I travel so much nowadays. Passed time in deep thought and listening to the somewhat psychadellic song by lostprophets, a 10 minute song called “sway”.

Anyways, we’d gone to the infosys guest house. Like all infosys things, this was beautifully managed and the place rocked. The day passed in mainly swimming(I really cannot swim, but I do stupid yet addictively fun things in water…more on this later.)

We also went to see from outside the world famous mysore palace in dusshera when the whole place is awesomely lit up.

Gotta go now, will upload pics when I’m back.

P.S. Every room frickin has broadband, but dad has to check his mail and I’m hogging the laptop, digg is such a time waster.

Going on vacation

I’m going on vacation for the weekend. So for all the two of you actually following the blog, there’ll be nothing for the weekend(unless the place has net access)
I’m going to some relaxing place in mysore.

There’s always google news if you’re looking for something to read :)

What me, Worry?

I recieved a strange email, I think it’s something to do with the nigerian money scam. I haven’t read the whole thing, but It’s pretty suspicious and I’d read something about it before.

Confidential

Good day, I am Mrs. Nazek Audi Hariri, wife of the late Mr. Rafik Baha al-din Hariri a very successful businessman and proficient politician in Lebanon who was assassinated in the massive explosion that rocked central Beirut’s fashionable seafront district, on his way back from Lebanon parliament on 14th February 2005. I am contacting you with the hope that you will be of great assistance to me; I currently have within my reach the Sum of (13million united states dollar ), which I intended to use for investment purpose outside Lebanon.
This money was generated from cash payments from my husband business associates. Though I knew my late husband was politician and the money was reserved for election campaign. We have decided to have this fund invested immediately in commercial and residential properties in abroad as well as profitable ventures, now that the Israeli Government had bombing all the Airports, Roads including infrastructures and we don’t know what is going to happen, hence we sincerely propose to you to render us your most needed assistance in this regard. If you agree to render us your assistance. Your role in this project will be to act on my behalf as a trustee to receive the safety deposit containing the funds from the Security firm.Though I believe this transaction should be based on mutuality, a family Attorney, will protect my family’s interest, and I have informed him that I am locating one of my husband’s business associates (you) to handle the funds for investment purpose Bearing in mind that you may assist me, I have decided to offer you some percentage of the total sum for your assistance.
I will forward your contact to my family Attorney who will be representing us, and also give you his contact for both of you to communicate and proceed with the transaction. He will be working with you for a mutual conclusion of the process and I look forward to a long lasting business relationship with you.

Please all your correspondence should be forwarded to this email: haririnazeka@yahoo.com to enable me forward it to my personal
Attorney who reside in Spain, he is the only person in position to direct on how to proceed with the transaction. This transaction demands utmost confidentiality, to avoid jeopardizing the family’s position and it is 100% risk free.

With warm regards,

Mrs. Nazek Audi Hariri

utter confidentiality my ass.
check this http://sweetchillisauce.com/nigeria.html

now playing Death - Bite the Pain

New page

Wrote a page on the kind of music I like. I had this in my head for quite a while now, but I finally sat down and wrote it,

Edgy Eft Beta Out

Linux-ish article, beware

The version of ubuntu linux, ubuntu 6.10 or ubuntu edgy eft, got out of alpha and into the beta stage today, and I’m gonna upgrade to it asap. It’s pretty cool and ubuntu has a pretty fast devolopment cycle. It seems like only yesterday dapper drake went out of beta and into final release.

Anyways, there seems to be some real interesting new things with edgy, including a cooler booting system which is more customizable and a better bootloader. Also in the works are bleeding edge upgrades like installation of gnome 2.16 and some betas. I’ve been wanting to install the new gnome.

Apparently, Ubuntu’s taken a few notes from suse and added a few apps including tomboy and fspot(a note management and a photo management system). Also in the works are a new beefed up preinstalled compiz system, and a *yawn* bon echo beta.

The new compiz seems good. I haven’t been able to install xgl and compiz fully on my comp yet, but I’ll somehow succeed. I’ll upgrade to edgy eft as soon as the release candidates are out and hopefully it should be a smooth upgrade and not upset my current installation

Browser Wars Pt.1

Somehow I feel that firefox is one of the most overrated products in the world. In fact, though I have been using the browser for a considerable amount of time, I?m not one of it?s biggest fans. I initially was big with the opera browser and was using it back from when it was ad-supported. Back then I had a problem because firefox wasn?t working for some reason and kept crashing. Opera was good with tons of features and it started the tabbed browsing thing out. When firefox started out, it struggled for a good market share, and it copied almost all the features from opera and added one ? ability to have extensions, courtesy, an open API. But still I run firefox with absolutely no extensions.

Now opera had all it?s original trademark fetures, tab management, bookmark management, an integrated rss reader, everything, mouse gestures?And all of this from the very beginning. The sucky part is that the system wasn?t open source and it initially wasn?t free. But I see a drift of market share into opera again. For starters, I tried firefox rc1 2.0, and it sucked, there was practically nothing new. Except for the spellcheck which was pretty nice but it became annoying at the forum and blog posting. Internet Explorer 7 release candidates looks awesome and real tempting but there?s nothing on it for linux.

Problems in opera:
1. Opera rocks, but it needs a few more plugins. The widgets are cute, but simply not enough.
2. Opera breaks with ajax a bit. I?m hoping they?ll fix it soon. Like the chat in gmail doesen?t work, along with some other gmail.

Cool things about opera:
1. It renders better for me than firefox. It fetches the text and loads accordingly, though there?s no css then, it allows people like me with almost dialup speeds to get some pretty decent surfing.
2. the editing works better with the crash recovery and session saving features that are native to opera and can be accomplished with extensions in firefox.
3. Voice support, this is supercool
4. It just looks and feels a little more better, mainly the default setup is really non-windows.
5. It has been around for while.

More on this later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(browser)

my current desktop

Since I’m back at home, I’m using my old computer, also, ahem, the ones which my parents use. 32mb ram, 10 gb hard disk, p2 233 mhz, compared to my current 1gig ram, 120+40gb hdd, amd 3200, Nvidia 7600gt.
hehehe

click on the thumbnail to see a screenshot

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

The worst trip ever.

For some reason or another, whenever I travel from kharagpur to bangalore, something always goes horribly wrong. I’ve done it all, got conned at railway station, lost wallet with photo id 10 minutes before having to get on the flight and they wouldn’t let me on without photo id and unable to get any trains, getting suspected of smuggling a cpu, almost having my 14000 rs graphics card detained at the airport because they thought I was gonna stab people with it, and there was once when I (not accidentally, could’ve happened to anyone) got on the wrong train and had to jump off a moving train at the next station.

Well, not this time, I thought. This time, I was going to travel hassle free and with no problems. I checked, double checked everything. I had everything I could need.
I reached the station on time. Nothing wrong till now, comfortable ride on the cycle rickshaw, and got a train ticket for calcutta. The train came on time at 1:30 and left on time. Strange… Nothing’s gone wrong yet. And I reach on time, there’s no big delay. Very strange… The travel god must have something real bad up his sleeve.
As anyone who’s travelled by a local train from kgp to cal knows, it’s a trecharous and horrible experience. All the loud annoying people and the strange smells, the bad seating and legspace and yeech. Thankfully I just plugged my cd player in my ear and survived the trip.

I was literally shaking in fear. Something really bad might go wrong. There are two hours left before the flight leaves. While trying to catch a taxi, some local told me there’s a terrible jam and it’ll take atleast 2 hours to reach the airport. I knew it! I knew it! and given with no choice, I got into the taxi and to my “dismay” reached the airport in an hour.

For the security check there was a mile-long line… the travel god didn’t let me down(or up or whatever) but my cd player came to the rescue again. I started Dream Theater’s “Six degrees of inner turbulence” whent i got into line and by the time it was done, it was my turn (note that the song was 45 minutes long). I hadn’t eaten lunch or breakfast and I was hungry so I bought a cup of coffee, and the shit had no sugar in it. I managed to gulp it down making extremely disturbing faces as I did so, and got on the plane.

The flight was delayed by an hour but eventually it reached more or less on time. And it’s official, plane food sucks almost as bad as mess food. The food was just plain sucky. And the coffee was black and way too strong. Finally I reached and nothing was wrong at the end of it, and I thought to myself “I did all that preperation and worrying and anxiety for nothing”

The travel god had pwned me after all.

It’s been a while

Not posting until further notice.
Exams, after that, partying, and Linux switchover, eventually will write about this.

Happyfaces and cations galore

Inside Joke Warning

Dr. Evil is back.
That’s all for now.

Now Playing: Children of Bodom - Follow the Reaper