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September 2007 - Posts
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This month (Sep '07) has been double lucky for Indian Sports. Last week Indian Cricket
team won the world cup for Twenty:20 championship in South Africa. Today Viswanathan
Anand has become the new World Chess Champion. The authorities should use this
opportunity to give a sustained improvement to Indian Sports.
After the debacle of Indian team in ODI world cup, the media wanted desperately some
win, they have got this big bonanza and making the best use of it. Too much hype is
going around, which has the risk of making the team over confidence in subsequent
matches.
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Windows has been having a Disk Cleanup utility from Windows 95/98 days, but I haven't
considered it of any use till today. I found today in my Windows Vista Laptop C:\
Drive hardly 2GB of space free out of 31GB. So I decided to delete some unwanted files
to get some space; so I gave the Disk Cleanup utility a try and it did result in cleaning
up few GB of space for me.
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 Yesterday
I finished reading the book "The
Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid" by Bill
Bryson who is a popular writer of travel books which are very hilarious. In this
latest title, Bryson writes about his childhood days in IOWA, USA. Don't be fooled
or put off, this is certainly not his biography - obviously who will pay money to
read about a writer. Like other books of Bryson, he doesn't attempt to make the events
and stories told factual and accurate. Instead he takes a jovial approach and makes
fun of him and the 1950's America in his classic style. The sections on US obsession
in the 50s over Nuclear Bombs are very hilarious.
Footnote: One thing I don't seem to get is why the titles from US or UK most of the
time have a different cover design in India (where I buy the books) than the one you
see at stores in US or in Amazon. Are these publishers customizing the colours and
designs to cultural / national preferences?. Even this title has a different cover
design shown in Amazon (see right) than in the book I own (see left)
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I read in IEEE
Spectrum July 2007, a detailed technical analysis of how a high profile mobile
phone bugging that happened in 2004. It was of Greece Prime Minister, his cabinet
colleagues in defense and foreign affairs, MPs and others. The interesting thing the
authors (Vassilis Prevelakis, Diomidis
Spinellis) point out was the fact the whole episode was undetected for several
months. The hackers (till date even after a Greece Parliament Commission was not identified)
had used very sophisticated techniques to hide traces of their activities and ensured
they left no entries in any logs.
The cellphones of Greece
PM and others were wiretapped to unauthorized numbers by hacking into Ericsson's
AXE Switches used in Vodafone Greece mobile network and installing
RootKit softwares. Ericsson switch software has the ability to patch its Operating
System code without rebooting by using something called has Correction Area. The hackers
installed about 29 blocks of code in this correction area, tampered all checksums
to go undetected, modified (made itself hidden) the list of active processes in memory.
The rogue software stored all the mobile numbers that has to be tapped in memory (there
by avoiding any disk entries) and copied the voice calls to parallel numbers.
From a software best practice angle, what was interesting was this could have been
identified much earlier if Vodafone had purchased a front-end (GUI) software called
IMS (Interception Management System) that maintains a list of legal wiretapping numbers.
This list could have been compared periodically with what was in memory and any differences
between the two alerted immediately. In this case, the backend OS in the switch had
legal wiretapping capabilities enabled and working, but the front-end to manage it
was not purchased by customer. Clear case of not reducing the attack surface area
by removing unwanted piece of software in live environments.
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Many times you might have got stuck not being able to open a Word/Excel/PowerPoint
file because MS Office is not available in that machine. Though OpenOffice/Office
Suites in Linux can open MS Office documents, it is doesn't work perfect with all
documents.
Microsoft has for long provided for free, viewers for these formats. These viewers
can be downloaded from Microsoft.com website and allows you to open, view and print
the documents without requiring you to have full blown (paid) MS Office in the machine.
The viewers now support the new Office 2007 formats as well, with the additional requirement
being to download and install the Office 2007 Convertor as well.
Links to download:
Remember, to visit Microsoft Update and install the latest security fixes as well
for the above software. The MS
Office 2007 File Format Convertor can be installed in MS Office 2003/2000/XP/97
versions as well to open and save in the new formats.
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 This
post is more of my thinking than a finite point on the present world economic achievements.
If you stop and think about what has been achieved in the last 10-15 years
in Economy and Wealth Creation, it is amazing on any parameter you take. Whether it
is China with a Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange reserve, World's large
corporation Market Cap (Google, Citi, WalMart) of each over several hundred Billion
Dollars, Governments Trade Surpluses, Indian Government Direct Taxes Growth of
over 60%, Worldwide sustained economic growth for last 5 years even though Oil
is selling at record high of $70+ per barrel - on any account what has been
achieved now is unprecedented in the modern history.
There are several complex happenings that have enabled this including Globalization.
Being an Engineer and Software person, I would like to think it is because of Computers
and Internet revolution (When I say Computers I do include Mobile Phones as well).
Think about any task in modern research/science, business, life, medicine, banking/finance
- there is no task that is not influenced by Computers and Internet.
It can range:
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From preparing a thesis for a PhD, where you can research papers from around
the world (which would have been impossible to do 2 decades back at this
cost and time) and hence stand on other giants shoulders
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Exchange real-time data and do complex calculations for fundamental research including
DNA analysis
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Access to best written courseware and training materials used for Education
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Access to world wide economic trends
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Learning from Management best practices and mistakes from around the world
and so on... In all these (and you can add hundreds of more items) Computers and Internet
have touched and improved productivity at every facet of our present day life.
Do you have a say on this, leave your comments.
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Being a Sunday I took my son to see the normally huge Ganesha that will be kept near
JYM Mandapam in T.Nagar for Vinayaga Chathurti (Yesterday). Unfortunately this year
they don't have one huge idol, but many smaller Ganesha's. Not wanting to disappoint
my son, I took him next to the display at "Sri Krishna Sweets" shop in Pondy Bazaar,
where 2500 Vinayaka Idols are kept. I was told these are from the personal collections
of the Proprietor of the sweet stall.
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At Vishwak, we value the openness
of WWW and importance of standards for our business; so we are members
with W3C. Representing Vishwak, I am a member in the Advisory council in W3C.
Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in W3C site I came across two interesting
items.
ForgeProofing: SPAM in email is a huge problem nowadays and this
becomes worse if you are in a email group. W3C has added few interesting filters to
prevent EMail Forgery. The way it works is by examining whether mail claiming to be
sent from an email address matches a pattern that you have specified. If so, it is
allowed through. If not, it is assumed to be a forgery and is rejected by our mail
hubs. For example: Identify a pattern in the "From:" line of mail that you send. For
example, suppose the From: line in email you send includes your full name and your
email address. Or it can be a pattern identifying your email client software, indicated
in the User-Agent Header. Though these techniques are not fool-proof they can
certainly limit casual spammers.
FOAF: The Friend
of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing
people, the links between them and the things they create and do. In short, FOAF
is about your place in the Web. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it
easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos,
calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically
extend, merge and re-use it online. You can access my FOAF
here (it is a machine readable XML file).
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I was part of history yesterday (at least let me feel it that way), watching
among millions through TV of course the first ever Twenty20
match played by India. This was the 10th International Twenty20 match. Having
watched a cricket match after few years, I feel the 20:20 format has great potential
and in all likelihood become mainstream cricket just the way One-Day did for Test
matches. The four hours (half-a-day) is very convenient for audience to enjoy a good
cricket match and sight-seeing all within a day.
In yesterday's match (India
vs Pakistan) it was good cricket with typical swings of a India-Pakistan
match till the last ball. I really enjoyed watching the bowl-out which decided
who got the 2 points with each side nominating 5 bowlers who bowled one ball
each. Of course, the way Indians played left much to be desired!. One thing
was obvious, though Indians may not be the champions in the game - Indian businesses
(sponsors) are clearly who are paying for the tournament.
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Regular readers who waste time reading this blog know that I have a 4 year son and
I buy
lot of DVDs (CDs) for him. We try and restrict his TV viewing to an hour or two
per day, not easy many times and requires all tricks of parenting.
Few months back I bought from Amazon (USA) a series of DVDs titled "Max
and Ruby". This series has appropriate content for kindergartners, the main
characters are two rabbits (Max the boy and Ruby his elder sister). Max is a
usual next door mischievous boy and Ruby tries to teach Max lot of basic
etiquettes and behavior on daily settings. My son loves the series
and it reduces his time watching Chutty TV (Sun TV's Kids channel, which
most of the time has content not for his age).
OK, let me come back to why I started this post. These original DVDs that
I bought should be ideally commercials free, at least not disturb me before
the main story. The DVDs start with half-a-dozen commercials promoting other
products from the same company (Nick Jr), which I will have to keep skipping
it till the main story starts. With some other similar Kids DVDs they start with promotions
for movies which are not appropriate for kindergartners. When the content producers
and Hollywood keep complaining about piracy, they should understand to respect the
wishes of a paid user.
Do you feel the same way?
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If you are a web developer you might be familiar with the great free tool - Firebug.
Firebug is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to easily inspect the HTML
DOM/CSS for a page, edit them inplace and many other useful tricks. Recently
I came across another useful tool YSlow -which
is an addon to Firebug. YSlow is from Yahoo! which analyzes web pages and tells you
why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Check them out!
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Nowadays I access my mailbox in Hotmail mostly through Windows Live Mail client. So
I didn't notice the increase in storage until I saw this
post. All Hotmail users are supposed to have got their mailboxes upgraded to 5GB
of space and Hotmail Plus (paid) users like me get 10GB of space. I thought 2GB in
GMail was lot of space, now what do I do with 10GB?. Will GMail now give 100GB
or like Rediff/IndiaTimes offer unlimited storage, let us wait and see.
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Thanks to flyover
(bridge) constructions in T.Nagar and Kodambakkam, the roads here look barren
now. The few roads in Chennai that had trees for over half-a-century included North
Usman Road and G.N.Chetty Road. Sadly all of those trees have been cut down by Corporation
in the last few weeks. While driving I noticed the diameter of the trunk of some of
the fallen trees, they should be more than 5 to 6 feet each. I was feeling sad to
see them vanish. Isn't any way to save them and still construct flyovers?
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