Thermal Noise

Every once in a while, where “while” approximately spans a month or so - I find creative ways of destroying my computer. Its not a particular hobby of mine, but it just happens that I execute commands with utter disregard to how they might screw up my machine. In fact the more the probability that a command would cause havoc, the more is my adrenaline rush to execute it. When the command doesn’t cause harm, I smirk at it and laugh about who was smarter. But today was a day where the command or rather sequence of commands got the better of me.

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BeleniX appeared in the Times of India today. For those who don’t know what BeleniX is - It is an OpenSolaris LiveCD featuring a KDE/XFCE Desktop. Its the most user-friendly OpenSolaris Distro. And technically speaking, it contains a lot of innovative ideas - most of it coming from the mastermind of our local tech god - Moinak Ghosh.

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Ever wondered where the omni-present foo-bar came from ?

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It is the hottest news on the Blogosphere right now. India did a China and almost all service providers have blocked access to some popular domains. Not a single blogspot.com or geocities.com or typepad.com sub-domain is accesible. It has been blocked at both the DNS and IP level (on my Airtel Broadband Connection in Bangalore). My ISP just shows a blank page and does not even return a HTTP 502 - as if to simulate a TCP connection drop. Thankfully WordPress seems to have escaped !

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I switched my X desktop-manager in frustruation. It is one of those crazy things programmers do when they get into a spate of anxiety about productivity. GNOME is a pig to be sure and CDE sucks. I am not used to KDE and it is huge anyway. So one of the [*]boxes or Windowmaker was the best option. I ended up with fluxbox.

Take a look at the screenshot.

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What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet;

Not quite.

The other day there was a mini flame going on in one of the mail aliases (more…)

There are times when you don’t mind being swept away by the Consumerist Market and falling into the trap of buying something not because you need it but because its considered cool. But when the iPod costs around 8000 rupees, any average geek would wonder what makes that piece of electronics cost so much. And when you see that Apple is posting a billion dollar profit you know for dead sure that you are falling into an artificial “Its Cool” trap.

This one seemed a more worthy buy for money hard earned. [ After all why should I buy a product from a company which competes against mine ? ]

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“Sports do not build character. They reveal it” said a quote read somewhere back in time. The wrong team in blue won the trophy. But it was not a stupid feeling of having supported the losing team all the way that makes it a sombre night. Even as Italy lifted the Football World Cup 2006 and an inspired France finished second, it was heartbreaking to miss my most favorite sporting hero after Lance Armstrong - Zinedine Zidane. The last ever sight of Zidane was a sorry one - A 34 year old legend leaving the field like a stupid schoolboy. It is simple things that often bring tears to your eyes.

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A couple of days back, I had a discussion with some CS students about Primality and Prime Number testing. They were bright kids and much to my surprise they had two fundamental misconceptions about Prime Numbers. One: They thought that there still does not exist any deterministic polynomial algorithm for primality testing. Two: They thought the existence of such an algorithm will lead to immediate breakdown of public key cryptography. I still remember the shock I had, when I read only last year that Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved in 1999. In the age of Internet I had somehow missed out on the news of one of humankind’s great intellectual accomplishments. But that was atleast explained by the fact that the Last Theorem is not a part of standard school or college text books and it was not quite that extra-ordinary that no one in college or school ever discussed about it. But Prime Numbers and a CS student is like bread and butter !
Anyway, I thought that was a good excuse to rant on the fascinating world of prime numbers.
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