Thermal Noise

Technical Marketing: It doesn’t get more creative than this

http://www.ipv6experiment.com/

By the rules of propositional calculus, the following compound statement is always true:

( (Man is God’s greatest mistake)

(or)

(God is Man’s greatest mistake) )

BeleniX 0.7 has been released just a few seconds ago.

http://www.belenix.org/

This is the most kick-ass version of BeleniX ever. Among the most important features is the ability to install it to the hard disk and use it as a regular desktop OS. Release Notes details the other changes:

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=ReleaseNotes_0.7

I am just waiting for one more feature - An IPS repository of BeleniX packages and then I will make BeleniX my primary Desktop Operating System

I have always relied on sky charts to guide me through the heavens. Printed charts suck because they usually calibrate the sky for 40 degree North (or south). So I end up using KStars.

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http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

void foo() {
switch(0) {
case 0:     do{
case 1:         printf("Hello World\n");
}while(0);
}
}
int main()
{
foo();
return 0;
}

Surprise. Surprise. This program compiles and works due the fall-through definition of C ! Tom Duff discovered this accidentally (about 25 years ago) and said: “It amazes me that after 10 years of writing C there are still little corners that I haven’t explored fully.”Wow, Some discovery ! In a discrete system with finite states whose permutations can never be fully explored in a entire lifetime, it is a question of whether you hit a permutation that happens to be interesting

The world is going BeleniX crazy ! I setup links to the isoHunt torrents on the BeleniX download page a few weeks back and the isoHunt folks responded most kindly by setting up a special box for seeding (Have you ever heard of that ?) and ran a front page article on BeleniX as a model project to use BitTorrent constructively.

As of today, the BeleniX DVD has more than 18000 (Yes Eighteen Thousand) seeds ! How many other torrents can claim as many seeds ? aXXo’s latest torrents have no more than 5000 seeds.

Is that frigging cool or what

P.S: For those who don’t know, isoHunt is the world’s most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine !

Take a look at the amazing new “Sky” feature on Google Earth

With a magnetic compass and borked old binoculars, I could isolate the constellations easily. With a little investment on a Telescope - Venus, Orion Nebula, Saturn’s Rings and Andromeda should be easy pickings ! Google Earth kicks ass

I was hoping to read the final book of the Harry Potter saga on Sunday. And I had ordered the book online. But that is certainly not the earliest time you can lay your hands on it: Harry Potter and the Deathly hallows was leaked on to bit-torrent networks yesterday. Someone took a page by page photo of the book sprawled on the floor and uploaded it. If you are smart, you will know where to find it. Although its not possible for any American or British publishing corporation to sue you due to lack of strong copyright laws in India, I would recommend you not to download it unless you have already paid for the Book.

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I do some senseless stuff from time to time. But this is really wierd. Why would anyone want to run Internet Explorer on Windows let alone Solaris.

But then the Government of India doesn’t seem to think so. Some of their Income Tax Department pages are thoroughly broken on Firefox. Anyway I got wine running inside Solaris and ies4linux worked like a charm. Click on the link for a high-res picture of microsoft.com on IE on wine on Solaris on AMD64

After having vowed to watch only foreign language movies for the last three months (and occasionally failed it by digesting patent non-sense such as Shivaji, Shrek-3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Thirteen etc.. at the theaters), here is a vanity list of the creme de la creme.

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Friday was a day to remember, for I had the good fortune to meet in person, Scott McNealy - Co-Founder, Chairman and erstwhile CEO of Sun Microsystems. He was here in India to preside over the Sun Technical Summit 2007, where I was one of the speakers.

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Computing is interesting because it is fraught with problems. The argument that those problems are not interesting because they are man-made, is fallacious because problems of living and day-to-day life aren’t created by god either and they are usually more pointless. But that is besides the subject, which is actually something that sounds mundane but is frighteningly complicated to implement: “How to validate an Email Address ?”

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It is impossible to be dispassionate about cricket if you are an Indian. The Indian Cricket Team’s stunning (?) loss to Bangladesh in the ongoing World Cup has given everybody something to talk about.

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I was a part of the largest developer conference in Indian History last week and was speaking about Solaris technologies.

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Some embarrassingly bad code in OpenSolaris has been exploited. Here is kcope’s original description of the attack

(Warning: Do NOT read further unless you are a sysadmin wishing to secure your systems. Using this exploit on systems that you have no business logging into, is a Federal Offense. The author disclaims all responsibility of this publicly available information)

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Yes. Yes. Yes. This is the moment I have been dying for:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/23/sun_q2_profit/

There were over a 1000 articles on this news. SUNW continues to be among the Top 10 traded stocks at NASDAQ and the NASDAQ index is up because YHOO and SUNW are going strong ! W00t !

Nice guys don’t *always* finish last and I got atleast one of my predictions for this year right ! Way to go SUNW !

Historic day in the Semiconductor buisness.

I guess I couldn’t have screwed up more on my technology predictions for this year. In hindsight, AMD had it coming. Sun-AMD was always a one-way partnership - we don’t even have a decent ATI driver for Solaris despite AMD buying ATI a year back. Whereas AMD took off only because a company like Sun decided to abandon Goliath and go with David. Heck, its all Wall Street Madness…

I was at my alma mater last week to give a presentation on Debugging Tools and Techniques. It was a part of a week long seminar on FOSS Technologies. You can find the presentation here. The talk wasn’t half as scary as the presentation, which looks completely crazy with useless command line options. The “uninitiated” second year students of TCE were the main audience along with a few third year students. It was great to find a lot of wannabe Unix programmers out there.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the spring of hope, It was the winter of despair ….

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Every conversation with geeks not working in Sun this week has been about ZFS and ZFS making it to Mac OS X - Leopard. I get thoroughly drilled on Sun’s financial strategy and how we plan to make money rather than being asked about instantaneous snapshots and self-healing capabilities of ZFS. Thats one of the disadvantages of working for a “Non-Profit Organization” (of which we are very proud, anyway)

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Christopher Nolan is my favorite director after Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. He has an amazing talent for storytelling and direction.

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Of all the public houses in Bangalore, Opus is undoubtedly one of the best. The music today was mind-boggling to say the least. German Band Wolfgang Haffner Quartet and the Indian troupe led by Dr Suma Sudhindra who had never met each other before, combined to unleash Karnatic, Fusion and Western upon our senses, second after second in extra-ordinary style. To add to the fun we have a G.K quiz on Thursdays ranging on subjects from Nuclear Physics to Rock And if you end up with the most questions right, all your booze is on the House. Consolation prizes include a pack of Beers. Despite having no affinity for liquids other than H₂O, I had an awesome time. Head over to Opus if you have nothing better to do in Bangalore.

FOSS.IN/2006 has arrived in town. It is the place to be if you are an open source enthusiast in India. I will be at the Sun Microsystems stall on all three days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) giving demos and helping Kishore with a presentation on Branded Zones. Catch ya there !

http://foss.in/

It might well go down in history as the month that changed the World. Or atleast the part of the world that me and my fellow humans who get paid for creating strings of ones and zeroes are primarily concerned with.

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