my_ideas sleep furiously

Story of lIfe

weirdo — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:24:44 +0000

This is a collection of some philosophical lines which I intend to call a poem which I penned down a couple of days back.

Why does Pain have to be part of our lives?
Why do we all walk around with our sharpened knives?
Waiting for the best chance to stab
A stranger, an enemy or even a loved one
Someone who has a heart from which you can grab
Now you’re close enough, it’s just a matter of when

We’re still roaming around looking for our prey
Someone fool enough to come near our way
Of all the creatures, you choose to stab an Angel
Whose only guilt was to come near
Who has a heart even more fragile
Whose pure aim was to wipe away any tear

Now, the Angel lies bleeding on the floor
All you decided to do is to open the door;
Walk away wearing the mask of a victim
And the true victim waits for Mercy
Which even Death is reluctant to grant them
Now, a kind heart is all they dare to fancy

What happens next and how the story goes
This I leave to the audience, not waiting for applause

It’s your own choice to hurt or to heal

Whoever comes your way in this outrageous Road
This cross-road decission of yours, that’s your deal
You can put a smile on a face, or on a shoulder you may place a load...

Real time search by Wowd

weirdo — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 06:14:49 +0000

Using cloud architecture and crowd-sourced data on web pages,Wowd, a real-time discovery and recommendation engine would rank pages based on whether users actually visited those pages and would return results from all over the web, not just a handful of indexed pages, reports ReadWriteWeb Currently it is in its private beta version. The question is whether such an approach succeed?

In my opinion, the biggest hurdle in the success of Wowd would be the fact that it is a downloaded application and you have to download it and install it on your computer, though thereafter it will run in a browser. Moreover, your browsing history is saved to recommend more personally relevant and interesting content. The moment such a user, who has installed Wowd, visits a web page, that page gets a positive vote on Wowd. Therefore, the number of users (who have installed Wowd) visiting a web page would decide the rating or ranking of that web page in the eyes of Wowd. The keywords, PageRank, back-links, etc., would not be directly relevant.

The first question is how many people will actually download and install the Wowd application? If the user base of Wowd does not pick up substantially and remains comparatively small, then its ranking of the pages would not reflect the real position and perhaps could even be manipulated due to small user base. What is a small user base has to be seen in the light of the vast number of people who visit the Internet everyday.

Then there are privacy issues. Even though Wowd claims that the personal information is not stored on a centralized server, yet the fact remains that the browsing history is saved to recommend more personally relevant and interesting content. How many people will trust a new company for their browsing data and moreover, what is the return for sharing such data? When relevant search results can already be viewed by just visiting an established search engine such as Google, how many people will bother for installing an application and share their private browsing data to get skewed search results?

The next important issue is the fact that old web pages will get higher rankings while the new pages will start with zero rankings even if such new pages are more relevant and provide better contents. By the time a new web page on a particular subject or keyword has been added to the web, the old web pages on the same subject or keyword would have already assimilated positive votes on Wowd from the users who have already visited those pages. It means that the new pages would always rank much below the old pages in the search results irrespective of the quality and timeliness of their contents. It is like a chicken and egg story. Older pages will get more views and hence higher rankings while new pages will have to wait for quite some time until the publisher tries some other tricks of pushing his pages. But, the organic method of getting to a new page through search results would not work efficiently. Compare it with the present situation where Google ranks new pages almost instantaneously the moment they are published and many times even a new page can begin with good ranking in search results depending upon its contents and other relevant factors. Moreover, now Google provides options to view the search results from different time horizons, say last 24 hours and there are tricks to view the latest pages added to the web down to last one second!!!

Another issue that I am not able to comprehend is – what will actually happen to a new page? Will it not be listed in the search results till it is viewed by at least one user who has installed the Wowd application? Does that mean that Wowd will not be crawling (like Digg) the web in search of new pages? Or alternatively, will a new page be listed in search results with zero rank? It appears to be a grey area and perhaps a weak link in the logic of Wowd. I say so because Wowd claims to be a real-time search but its logic with regard to new pages appears to be flawed. Is it not self-contradiction?

Yet another problem with such flawed search engine would be that while initially some people may use it to search out of curiosity; but, later, when they don’t see the quality and quantity of the search results, they are likely to forget it in little time resulting into possible unnatural end thereto due to the vicious cycle effect.

While one has to wait for some time till their private beta version produces its results to see how relevant the search results of Wowd are vis-à-vis the established search engines like Google, I’ll not hesitate to stick my neck out and put it bluntly that I am not very optimistic about Wowd being in a position to give any meaningful real competition to the established search engines in its claims of a real-time search. Anyway, meanwhile, Wowd and its promoters / founders can try to derive the maximum benefit of the venture capital that they appear to have secured already. Sorry, Wowd, for my frank comments. I’ll be really happy if you can prove me wrong by your performance as and when your search engine is launched to the public in future.

E-mail addresses you would love to mail to…

weirdo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:28:52 +0000

Today while surfing some sites I came across a few really good email addresses which can be helpful.Say thanks to the new age web to email services, you can do a hell lot of things, like browsing an website via email, converting a MS-Word file, or a MS-Excel file via email, converting a PDF file to HTML via email, yes, you read it right everything via email. Sounds cool, doesn’t it, but how you may ask.

1. pdf@koolwire.com

All you need to do is send any file of format among these types Word (doc, docx), Powerpoint (ppt, pptx), Excel (xls, xlsx), Visio (vsd), MS Project (mpp), Jpeg, GIF, RTF, txt to the above email address as an attachment, shortly you’ll receive an email containing the PDF version of the file you sent. Cool! isn’t it!

2. mp3@koolwire.com

Similar service which accepts a wav file and outputs a mp3 file.

3. ..@photos.flickr.com

Flickr provides you an unique email address, which you can get from here (http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/), to which when you send your photographs as attachment, they’ll appear in your Flickr gallery in a matter of minutes. The subject line of email becomes the photo’s title while the body of the email becomes the photo’s description.

4. www@web2mail.com

Send and email to the above address with the URL you wish to browse in the subject line of the mail. Voila! you’ll get an email containing the text version of the URL you just sent, this one’s a breather for people whose offices block all websites, except the company webmail. When I tried the this service last the response time was quite high, I guess that’s a temporary problem.

5. wsmith@wordsmith.org

Want to know the dictionary meaning or synonyms of a word?? Send a blank email to the above address, just have a similar subject line, “define myword“, without the quotes. You’ll get what you want.

I hope that was some interesting piece of information, well it was for me at least.

CLOUD ANTIVIRUS

weirdo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:23:22 +0000

Cloud Antivirus – What is Cloud Anti virus? After al host of business applications going in the cloud now we also have Cloud Antivirus – an Anti virus hosted in the cloud.

The first question that comes to mind when we talk of the Cloud Antivirus is if the Antivirus is in the cloud how it will protect the PC? We dug little deeper to understand what exactly these services that claim themselves as Cloud Antivirus offer.

How Cloud Antivirus is different from traditional antivirus products?

Cloud Antivirus is a cloud based security solution that can be installed and managed from anywhere through a web console. Since it is a hosted service, it doesn’t require infrastructure investment. You typically have options to delegate your security management to expert service providers.

So it is essentially more about management of Antivirus in any organization that goes in the cloud. There will still be an Antivirus product installed in each PC and laptop you have. However you have options to control the updates, profiles and levels of security from a cloud based control panel. However the installed part on PC is a thin version of traditional antivirus product.

How the Cloud Antivirus is deployed?

Normally the Cloud Antivirus can be deployed in two ways. One in which the user clicks on an email which includes a link that will install the protection agent. The other way is where administrator can push the installation to workstations choosing workstations by name, IP address, IP range or by domain.

What are advantages of Cloud Antivirus?

Cloud Antivirus is service not software and so has follwoing advantages:

No installation required
Update without users intervention – always up to date
Access your account from anywhere
Reduces bandwidth consumption (as large number of workstations look for updates in traditional software)

What are Free Cloud Antivirus?

They are similar to other free anti virus but hosted in cloud. You get advantage of low footprint and up to date packages. An example of free cloud anti virus is Panda Cloud antivirus.

PS1 at Rourkela

weirdo — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:50:28 +0000

It has been just over two weeks when I had come to this place. Rourkela is a small town located in the state of Orissa (India), not known for anything except the HUGE but loss incurring steel plant (SAIL).

PS: HUGE is in capitals coz it is really huge and renders employment to one-fifth of a million people of the town.

What I am doing in Rourkela, could be called an internship. No no, I seriously had no intention of spending my summer in India’s one of the hottest places but my college sees this summer internship thing as an extremely valuable industrial experience and hence is a compulsory course.This is known as PS1 (acronym for practice school) in our college,and is undertaken just after the students complete their 2nd year.

People start discussing about this as they enter their second years. Seniors always told us that PS thing is really casual but no people had to spend hours in deciding their PS station. Even we did (me and my friends), spent hours on choosing which ps stations were the least favourites so that we all could get the same station. We succeeded but a friend was left out and so.. 4 of us landed in rourkela.That explains my business in Rourkela.

As I have mentioned about our institute’s far sightedness in provisioning this course, I think in these two very hot weeks it has taught me somethings I would like to share :

1. Since we were told where we would be going for our PS well in advance, we decided to take accomodation provided by college’s contacts. They accomodated us in NIT Rourkela. I swear you wouldn’t want to know how huge the campus is! All that I can tell you is even the small auto charges 40 bucks to drop us to the NIT main gate from our hostel. They have free swimming pool,gym,sports facilities. But inspite of these I feel really proud that I study in BITS. Many reasons can be attributed to this. The college is a ‘National’ Institute just for the namesake.It admits 50% Orissa students, 50% of the remaining 50% is for reserved category students;that leaves 25%. You know, nothing is more annoying than a group of people blabbering in their local language, and you being a part of that group unable to understand anything. Apart from that, the rooms, the mess, the toilets ; the basic amenities aren’t taken care of properly.What should I do with the huge ass campus! The director refuses to provide internet facilities to the trainee students from other colleges saying how will it benefit NIT if they provide internet to the outstation students.Thank God, we have other means of getting access to the net.

2. Always have faith in what your seniors say. Since the very beginning they said “PS is lite, nahi bhi jaoge chalega!”. And we used to say “Yaar acha project karenge, acha resume hoga”. It is after coming here that we came to know that projects are just a way of keeping us busy here.Everything is copy-paste business here. Even the PS1 instructor is lite

3. Every college whether it’s a national level college or local colleges with no or little brand image, has a few students who are different from the rest. Here I met one such guy, his name is Vikrant.He belongs to a very poor family and with modesty accepts that he doesn’t know much about the world as he has spent most of the time in his village.He didn’t do well in the competitive exams, that explains his admission in NIT Rourkela. When you’ll come across this guy, he’ll seem like an average student from the college. But when I got to know him I was thrilled to know the extent of his knowledge and dedication.He belongs to some reserved category and is doing his B.Tech in Chemical branch. He wanted computer science but couldn’t get a seat. He shocked me with his sheer brilliance on various occasions. It was him who showed me a way to access high speed campus net. Once, I just happened to pass by his corridor, I went to his room to say hello. He seemed a bit busy. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied “Hacking BSNL server because they’ve blocked my phone for some stupid reason”, and in minutes he got his phone unblocked. Once we were discussing about some networking issues, then he brought up some topic by Ankit Fadia and proved it wrong . I really don’t know what else he has in store but continues to thrill me everytime I meet him.

That’s all for today’s post.

PS: i know this post ends abruptly but i am very sleepy.

The Precious Stone

weirdo — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:55:26 +0000

Haven’t been into blogging since past few days.I really want to make it up to my dear blog and the readers.

It was another of my trips to a beach,this time it was Arambol, supposedly the northernmost recognised beach of Goa.We had been there for like a couple of hours. It was 4 of us who had decided NOT to spend the boring holiday in college but rather go out and see new places in Goa.So we decided on Morjim,which was quite far from our college; more about it some other time.

So I was talking about Arambol.Yeah, this beach is quite different from its other counterparts in Goa.Apart from the serene view, the shacks along the beach are surrounded by SHIVA (Hindu god who apparently discovered marijuana in form of bhaang ) hymns and serve marijuana in various forms . The sand looked good, water was clean,some part of the beach was rocky as well Plus it had a superb natural lake very close to the beach. But when we set out to find the virgin lake, we discovered it wasn’t that close. On our way to the lake, we saw a small pool of water surrounded by lush green plants n trees,there we inquired about the whereabouts of the lake from the people sitting around that pool. Man…that was the lake.it was not at all like we had heard and imagined about .But anyways now we had to force ourselves to like it.We jumped in with the jeans on.It was quite a change from the salty water we had been accustomed to in Goa.We were done with enjoying in the lake and the sun was about to set. We watched the beautiful mergence of the sun and the sea, clicked some pics and were ready to leave.

We had started back for the stand where we had parked the bikes when this incident happened.All of us were damn hungry.But we couldn’t risk stopping and eating a full meal because we were running out of time and we had to return the bikes by 8 pm. So finally we all decided to have some snacks in the next shack which looked cozy and then leave.As we walked towards the shack, we saw an Indian oldie carrying a stone covered in sacred cloth on his head. A normal Indian like us would never be bothered by seeing such a sight.But then a fair, tall,beautiful,long legged Russian chic (you know the format ) walked upto him.

He took a seat on the table on our left, in the same shack.The Russian chic seemed inquisitive about the wonder rock the old man was carrying.He put the stone with great care on the table and closed his eyes and folded his hands in reverence.We thought it was part of some shrine which he would have got from someone.When the man opened his eyes, only to find a foreigner sitting on the chair in front of him, we thought that would surprise him a bit.but he had that same calm oldie look on his face.Then,the girl asked him ”What power this stone has?” , in broken english. Contrary to what we had expected, old man wasn’t offended and was more than eager to explain everything about the stone.

“This stone Ma’am? It is the Shiva’s gift for me…for my dedication towards him!” LOL… Now who would even pay heed to this chicken-shit. But later we found out that some people do get strongly influenced by chicken shit

“I have been praying and helping the poor.I even distribute Lord’s PRASAD to people who are in trouble.” he added. We were laughing but his words seemed to have an impact on the russian.

“Oh, does the PRASAD help you get out of trouble even if you dont worship the SHIVA regularly?” was the question thrown the oldie.The unperturbed oldie looked towards the sky and replied “Ofcourse ma’am, if you are ready to accept his Prasad and then worship him at my place.” Without any delay, she asked for the prasad and he gave it to her. Prasad was nothing but marijuana in some form of a sweetdish (we got to know that from the waiter at the shack and that the oldie was a usual customer at their shack!).Even after the high which marijuana gave her, they continued talking.
I couldn’t hear all of it but could make out that the oldie had convinced her to come to his place amd make love to him and pray to lord, to get rid of the problems she was going through.

We were stunned!!That was sad.Not because he was exploiting the outsiders and fooling them in the name of G0d but it was the Russian whose stupidity bothered us. How could she buy the fact that the god will be pleased if you have sex with his old devotee.

Actually the man i have been talking about in the story was not more than 50 but the fucker fooled 20-something chic.And it was nothing other than jealousy that made me call him oldie in the entire story!!If you look from his point of view, he was a million times smarter than that chic!!

Will blog soon…

Enjoy FaceBooking but beware of being KoobFaced!!

weirdo — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:57:07 +0000

“Koobface” computer virus is targeting popular social networking sites especially Facebook. Social networking sites users are most at risk from a variant of the “Koobface” virus, which comes in disguise as a Festive greetings video, hosted on a YouTube site.

The most dangerous part of this virus is that it can spread the malware of infected systems to other healthy systems using the social networks. “Koobface” is capable of distributing other malware, generate pay-per-click advertisements and also to steal useful data like credit card information.

Internet security company Panda Security has been tracking the latest variant of the “Koobface” worm from its labs in Spain and recommended the users that they should not reply to or follow the links that are included in unsolicited Facebook messages . The McAfee Security explains that when “Koobface” infects your computer, it prompts a downloaded service named Security Accounts Manager (SamSs) to load on start-up. SamSs then proxies all HTTP traffic, stealing results from popular search engines and hijacking them to lesser-known search sites.

Besides doing the obvious running an up-to-date antivirus, security patches, and firewalls users should also keep an eye on Facebook’s security page which warns of the latest threats.

Google + Hindi Essay = Hain Baaton Mein Dum?

weirdo — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:27:06 +0000

Google India has announced another contest for Indians after doodle4google contest nearly three month ago. The contest is named as “Hain Baaton Mein Dum?” This contest is held in association with LiveHindustan.com.

The last date for submission of hindi essays is 31th January,2010.

Following are the rules for hindi essay contest:

1) The essay must be between 100-1000 words.
2) Essay should be written in Hindi only.
3) Essay could be written is one of these 5 categories: Entertainment, Travel, Sports, Health and Social, Economic and Political issues.
4) Essay must not contain any unlawful content by regulations of India or any third party material like logo or slogan.

5)Remaining terms and conditions can be seen from Google India’s site.

Eligibility for participating in this contest:

1) Your age should be mare than 13, at the time of entry;
2) You must be citizen of India and resident to.
3) You must not be a person or entity under U.S. export controls or sanctions.
4) You must have access to the Internet as of November 23, 2009.

Prizes for Hindi Essay Contest

Around 300+ prizes will be distributed to the winners.Prizes will be distributed as :

1) One final winner for each topic category. He/She will be receiving a laptop as final prize.
2) Top ten people will be shortlisted from each category and will get internet connection for six months.
3) Best entry prize of Rs.5000 from online book store for students in class 9th to 12th for each category.
4) Google goodies for 50 shortlisted entries across each category.

Go Go Go!!!

Nuance launches Dragon Dictation for iPhone

weirdo — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:49:41 +0000

Nuance is one of the most important companies in the mobile space, yet few cell phone owners have any idea who they are. You know that T9 feature that lets you blast out texts on your number pad? That’s theirs. If your phone does text-to-voice or voice transcription, that’s probably their technology too.

Nuance’s latest move to take over the mobile world: the iPhone. While they don’t have anything on the iPhone out-of-the-box (yet), they’ve just released an App called “Dragon Dictation”, which lets you speak your texts and emails. Drunk texting just got even easier – well, as long as you’re not slurring too bad.

Here’s how it works: Launch the app, hit the record button, and speak. Once you’re done, they pass the clip through the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine, and return the transcribed text, which you can push into an SMS, E-mail, or to your clipboard for use with any other app.

The transcription service was more accurate than I would have expected, though not perfect. My harsh Californian (read: non-existent) accent must have been tripping it up – it would nail “Blu-ray” in one sentence, and then miss it the next time. Tapping any word it got wrong presents a list of other words it thinks you may have meant. It seems to work better when you talk at a certain pace; not too fast, and not too slow. Once you find the right cadence, accuracy is pretty solid.

Whether it’s perfect or not, it’s free – for now, at least. Nuance says that the gratis pricing is “for a limited time”, which means you better grab it while it’s hot.

YouTube for India— Feather

weirdo — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:15:34 +0000

Sick of slow youtube??

Feature, a dedicated YouTube video site from the Google itself was recently launched for those who cannot bear slow loading speed of videos. This test version of YouTube offers “ultra light watch space” which means faster buffering of video and paying less attention to other details like comments and sharing widget.

For years, YouTube had its interest in higher quality videos, HD and even 1080 pixel wide videos (that certainly require higher bandwidth). Nevertheless, YouTube realized that all countries might not have 16MBPS of internet speed and suffer sluggish videos. For us, Indians, even 1MBPS broadband is considered as God’s gift, an extravagant resource. Most of us has to settle for 256 or 512 KBPS. Consider it like watching a 5-minute video, for which you have to wait 10 minutes to load. My workaround to this problem is to open YouTube player and then pause it, as soon as it starts to load. Now come back again after few minutes to find the whole video buffered.

However, Google this time done as a favor by introducing Feather, a TestTube feature. TestTube for Youtube is what a Labs to Google i.e a experiment playground. To use this feature, you need to first join this experiment by going to http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta. Once, you are in the experiment, all the videos that you subsequently watch will feature less flashy content.