Does it look like a photograph? Actually it is not. It is a picture drawn by ~DiaMonster using one of the most unsophisticated drawing tools available on computer.
Yes it is MSPaint.
This drawing took 500 hours for the artist to complete.
Great work and Great patience too.
Want to design your own website and do not have the expertise with tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver. Well there is help. Just now chanced upon this cool tool called Wizzypage.
A very useful tool that lets you design web pages in a flash. The home page itself hosts a demo that works in IE alone (No firefox for now).
The software is available as a download for Windows XP. I downloaded the 2.5 MB file and was able to install it in my Windows XP machine without any problems. Around 5 minutes of fiddling with the software exposed me to almost all the features in the product. And what is more helped me create a website without needing to align table etc.
And best of all it is free and its license agreement is short and sweet.
If you use the tool for a few minutes and then look at this page, you understand what these guys at esoteric-sensationalism mean.
read more | digg story
Hello world programs, as written by various different people. Starts with High School, student goes through college, professional, etc. all the way up to a Chief Executive! Chief Executive version is just unbearably hilarious!!!
I love firefox the free browser from Mozilla. I love programming and Firefox, with its open javascript programming interface satisfies the programmer’s itch. But IE is the most used browser in the world and sometimes I miss my Firefox on the move.
I came across this site which offers a Portable Firefox for download. I had an old Key-chain USB drive with 128 MB memory. So I decided to checkout this application. The Portable is a 5MB .exe download from the above site. Downloaded it to my computer and then ran the application. When asked to identify the location for installation, gave the Drive associated with my USB drive. The application got installed on to the USB drive. One point during installation (around the 40% point) it looked as if the installation was not proceeding any further. But be patient and wait for the installation to complete.
What is a firefox without an extension. So tried to install an extension that writes to your system. Here is a simple extension called Save Text Area. This lets you save anything written in a text area to a local file.
So fired up google in my browser and then typed a search term. Right click on the text box and you get menu for saving the text on to file. Tested by saving that text onto my USB drive.
Now what does that mean. Just have a firefox installed on your pen drive and go browsing the Internet. Find something interesting save it on to your usb drive. Copy it on to your machine when home. Most importantly, for all those paranoid about saving data on to hosted services, your data is private.
You are paranoid about security. You take care to type the password every time rather than allow it to be stored when your browser prompts. Your passwords are very safe. Right?
Wrong says a recent research. Most of the applications store these passwords in RAM and occasionally in the swap disk space. By using a method called data tainting the researchers were able to mark password related data in memory and track it down to the place where it is stored. All applications and OS including the venerable apache, Linux have this problem. What it signifies that if a worm gets into your computer it is possible to figure out these passwords and circulate them around.
The researchers have a word of advice for application developers. All application developers would have to take security very seriously and adopt either of zeroing or encryption to make such vital information getting into wrong hands. In the zeroing method the memory locations have to be filled with zeroes after the need for the data is over. Better still is to encrypt all data within the memory and swap space. With higher processing power of the machines this should not be a difficult task.
With botnets stealing data left right and center and foxing people to divulge sensitive information, it would be nice if application developers heed to such alerts and make internet browsing safe for everyone.
Many would be aware of Raman effect for which CV Raman got Nobel Prize. Here is one of his lesser known thesis(?). This is an incident related to the formation of CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research). S.S.Bhatnagar was chosen as the first director general of CSIR. Some say this irked CV Raman. He was critical about the formation of CSIR. While citing the reason for his opposition, he said that the establishment of such institutions would wean bright students away from teaching in colleges and universities. Every succeeding generation would be taught by less capable people and would result in the overall degeneration of the education.
Was Raman Right? Seems to be so.
The recent rains are really a boon to water deficient Chennai. Last year too we had good rains, and this year looks OK till now, but some more days to go. Instead of writing about the ususal rant of flooded subways and slush roads, thought that I would share a few Rain related tidbits.
In North of India, I have observed that rains usually herald a change in weather. The weathermen call it the “western disturbance”. Unlike South, In North where the four “seasons” can be felt, usually there are rains at times when the seasons change. And right after the rains, we get the characteristic weather of that Season.
Konkan coast gets the second highest rainfall (or probably first now?) in the world. It is difficult to see Sun for weeks on end. In the Konkan Coast, it is widely regarded that Ganesh Chaturthi is the full stop for the rainy season.
I have read that at some place in South America, it usually rains at 4PM daily.
Can some one give me the name of the place?
Here is yet another article that interested me from Digg ofcourse. Many of the open source software have a lot of options and are really powerful. But in order to really reap the benefits of the software it is essential that it is properly configured. Security being the primary concern, these kind of articles really help in improving the service security. See the read more link below for details.
Do not also forget to see the original story in Digg. In fact you should do it. The comments by other users usually leads you to more improvements.
Like, in this specific post I discovered Fail2ban . Tommorow it is time to check out this. Let’s see how useful it is for us.
Those who are in IT particularly tracking Web 2.0 will know Digg. Digg is something like an user powered newspaper. The news items are provided by the Digg users and voted on by the other users. Digg is one of the sources of the “Knowledge Storm”.
Now onto the topic. While looking at Digg today this caught my attention.
http://digg.com/tech_news/myspace_com_127_0_0_1
The reason is quiet obvious. Every sysadmin worth his salt knows that 127.0.0.1 means a local loopback address that takes you no farther than your own machine. It is funny that a site like MySpace had made such a goof up in the DNS pointing their domain to the loopback address.
The link to the original article in Digg took me to
and presto, I have discovered yet another useful Free Service.
OpenDNS aims to make your internet work better. For those of you in US this should be a boon as your name resolutions, which infact take a long time, can be dramatically improved. Added to that they provide you a safe internet browsing experience blocking phishing sites.
The best thing is that you don’t need to install any software. Just change your DNS settings by following the instructions here and enjoy.
So guys in US start using it while those in UK and Honkong wait for it and we in India are waiting. If somebody from OpenDNS or ISP’s in India are listening, India has the fourth largest number of internet users and growing, You have been intimated.
The intent of this blog to associate Sachin phenomenon with marketing and to try and find out if we can get some marketing tips.
Sachin is no doubt a gifted cricketer, but he got ample marketing support from Gavaskar. He was succesfull in creating the brand image of Sachin is indispensable for India. While every other cricketing team used to fight till the last person, we in India were witness to our team falling like 9 pins every time Sachin got out. There were many in the commentary box at that time who would write off India the moment Sachin falls. Sometimes I felt that these commentators with their doomsday predictions provided more tension than what was happening in the field. To India Sachin was God and anyone speaking against him was unpatriotic. This is the effect that high profile marketing can bring in.
Suddenly I see much less of Gavaskar and Co. in the TV’s but I also find that India has managed to find a way to win without Sachin’s contribution. Increasingly people are talking openly about the Sachin’s contribution or lack of it, in wins. This is the after effect of high profile marketing. We are not prepared to accept that human beings have good and bad times and every succesfull human being comes out of a bad patch. This is because of the marketing blitzkreig which led us to think Sachin is God.
On the other hand I see Dravid who did not get that much marketing ammunition and still has captured the imagination of India. When he does fail, people do not complain that he failed, but instead vent their anger on others. People know what his drawbacks are and are prepared to accept it because he delivers what is promised, most of the time. People are ready to accept that Dravid can fail as he is human. In a recent survey Young India has voted Rahul Dravid as their role model. This is the effect of a subtle marketing campaign that has concentrated on the virtues and does not elaborate or exemplify the skills and traits.
I can even associate the two styles of marketing with the fate of two salt brands Dandi Salt and Tata Salt. The former had thrust too much energy into marketing and failed to come up with a good logistics for production. This led to a demand supply gap and the product was wiped out of the market
Marketing can make or mar a product. Marketing blitzkrieg can yield very good results, but is difficult to sustain long term. For the product to be succesfull, it has to have good feature set, less bugs and help solve problems that it promises to solve. The marketing has to lend support by emphasizing the benefits of the product in a subtle fashion.
