Alternate’s Reality
The World, according to AlternateLifeform .

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

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

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

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 .
Read the rest of this post »

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.

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.

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 .

Read More:
Google Results for DNA Storage
E=MC2 on DNA
Youtube Vid on Molecular storage

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 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/

It’s been more than 3 months now since I’ve moved to my new house, and likewise, over three months without a broadband connection at home.

Airtel does not cover the area I’ve moved to, and the BSNL chaps are taking their own sweet time with their ‘process’. My last few posts are made from a cybercafe.

Life eez terrible.

I’m thinking of buying a TV and looking at other (more conventional) pastimes.