Alternate's Reality

Google malware goes Cuckoo :)

Alternate — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:32:08 +0000

Google’s malware detection program went a bit crazy for a short while today, marking every single search result as malware!

Here are my screenshots:

I wonder how many (million) other people spotted the event .

Tata indicom: On average offline for one of every 4 minutes :P .

Alternate — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:27:10 +0000

I’ve written about my internet connection instability worries before… Just to be sure it wasn’t all just in my head, I wrote a simple script a couple of days ago and put it on my shell account at TX0.org to measure my connection satability.

My system is a VAIO laptop; and I have not shut it down for the last 3 days. The modem is now connected to an old UPS. So Ideally, the connection should be always up.

The script running tx0.org is rather simple:
while true do date ping -c 1 -w 2 [mysystem].dyndns.org sleep 60 done;

As you can see, it pings my home system every minute. I redirect the output to a file and do a quick grep | wc and here’s what I get:

For the last 4193 minutes recorded, the connection has been down for 1037 minutes; a total downtime of 17.28 hours in under 3 days.

This is all while the connection is ‘working’ according to Tata and is non inclusive of the cable problems that occur for a few days every month or so.

Pretty bad eh .

Take a look here for live results : http://jeevan.tx0.org/showuptime.cgi (
The full ping log is available here: http://jeevan.tx0.org/showpinglog.cgi

OpenSource ERP on the SourceForge top 20

Alternate — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:45:03 +0000

As on June 13th 2007, 4 of the 20 most active projects this week on sourceforge.net are ERP related.

People will click on anything.

Alternate — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:20:15 +0000

That was made clear by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs.

The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:

Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info

Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,274314,00.html

A walk through Munich

Alternate — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 09:06:18 +0000

I’m in Munich!

I landed here flew in from Bangalore last Monday, and promptly caught myself the death of a cold thanks to the climate change. The cold lasted much of the working week. Fortunately, I got much better in the weekend; so I could do some exploring .

Munich is a pleasant place to take long walks. The environment is awesome, pollution is low, there are amazing parks all around, traffic is well organized, sidewalks are clearly defined and traffic signals are everywhere. But even more important than all the afore mentioned blah: people with vehicles follow the rules, and are very courteous to pedestrians. I was quite shocked to see 2 BMWs and a Volks-Wagons come to a full stop in queue at a zebra crossing to let me across ; with no signal and no cop in the area ). Imagine that!

So, of-course I did quite a lot of walking. Click here for a few pictures from my walks
.

Oh, and speaking of cars, Munich is packed with A-Class cars. Unfortunately the BMW museum is closed at the moment but I see some pretty classy cars on the roads anyway .

I apologize for the lack of blog and software updates of late. I keep writing stuff and later decide that it’s too personal or incomplete to post A weird sort of writers block .

Still offline (thank you very much Tata Indicom)

Alternate — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 10:41:25 +0000

Now I’m paying through the nose for a Tata Indicom connection (30 Rs. a day, indeed). . . and I have not been able to get online for over a week.

I’m not able to get anything done . Gaah, I hate my life.

Back online : a footnote on broadband connectivity from tata indicom

Alternate — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:18:40 +0000

The connectivity from tataindicom does not live up to expectation. Connectivity is unreliable, and customer service is not so responsive.

My advice: don’t get yourself a Tata connection unless it’s your very last option.

DNA for Data Storage: What’s on your genes

Alternate — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:02:36 +0000

I ran into an interesting idea recently - Scientists are experimenting with the possibility of using DNA as an information storage medium. There seems to be a lot of work going into this topic as revealed by a quick google search. And it’s not just a vague theoretical exercise. Scientists have successfully written the equation e=mc2 1905′ on bacterial DNA.

Think of the sheer VOLUME of data that could be stored on our planet. . . Like one big giant harddrive - 100,000 * 10^x tetraBytes and counting.

I guess that makes India the worlds fastest growing storage sector . The aliens will be pleased.

On a related note, I also stumbled onto this youtube vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKdtmOjxiHw&eurl=

The video describes a technology that was under research in the 1980s - information storage at a molecular level. Amazing technology - which still sounds futuristic - and they were doing this even before I was born .

Back Online . . . finally!

Alternate — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:03:01 +0000

After over 3 months of fruitless waiting for the BSNL chaps to wake up, I applied for a Tata Indicom (VSNL) prepaid connection.

It took them 4 days to get through the formalities and bring the wires up to my house. And after a few hours of configuration pains, it’s done.

I’m back online!

JOY .

A footnote:
Incase you got here by search engine, over time I have learned that Tata indicom is provides unreliable and unfair service. I do not recommend it unless there’s no other option in your area.

Port25

Alternate — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:17:14 +0000

Port25 is the website of the Open-Source Software Lab at Microsoft.

They seem to be quite busy. . .

And the DO offer code for download ! They distribute their code under licenses which they call ‘Shared Source Licenses‘ . There’s a nice summary on Shared Source Licenses at the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source .

Or, you could read the licenses themselves also of-course .

Port25 also contains info on how to make some open-source tools work along with Microsoft’s tools, Straight from the horse’s mouth. A good to have resource, of course.

Take a look: http://port25.technet.com/