~ : karakspeak : ~

Specially the ones who give us rain!

This is the 3’rd week that its happening. The weekends are always so very hot and dry, but as night dawns on Sunday the clouds start appearing just in time for a beautiful Monday morning. And guess what, you’ve to get up at 7 get ready and drag yourself to office. And for the whole 5 weekdays, while you keep dragging yourself to office and back, the weather is so splendid. But by the time you take a sigh of relief on Friday night, all the clouds are gone and you’re headed to 2 days full of heat and sweat.

So the whole point is, Gods, either want to save us from agony of work so they give us better weather on weekdays, or maybe they go for a weekend getaway to someplace else!

Maybe these are the best times to use up that holiday quotas and create a weekend during the weekdays itself.

It says it all.. 10k in just under 5 months :)

Remember remember the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason, why the Gunpowder Treason, should ever be forgot.

[1] The Gunpowder treason was a failed assasination attempt in England in 1605, when a group plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament
[2] Guy Fawkes was the person in charge of execution of this plot but was caught shortly before the execution.
[3] November 5'th is celebrated as the Guy Fawkes Night

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cwTGcdZQ9w

YouTube - EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment
  

Just Awesome!!!

This Saturday I went to a seminar organized by CDAC with focus on Open Source and Information Security. The seminar’s content was primarily focussed on students but I had the following takeaways from the meeting:

• There is a strong feeling among the community that for Open Source to win the Proprietary has to lose. This feeling is to the extent of hatred of anything from Microsoft (Windows, Office, IIS) and Adobe(Photoshop).
• The CDAC is implementing a customized version of Linux (BOSS) and they have plans of widespread adoption throughout the country (at least in the government space)
• CDAC already has courses on Embedded Systems and Mobile development, which they run in their centers and other educational institutes (like Anna University), and they plan to include Andriod for mobile development starting this year.
• Not surprisingly, Google is a de facto for online space, awareness of Live/Bing is near to zero.
• Majority still use Windows though pirated (since there is no other alternative) but find alternatives for other programs from Open Source. Office and Photoshop were the most widely pirated applications among the group, no one has ever bought software
• People talk a lot about Open Sources, but are not completely aware of all the strings of open source licenses

In general, there is a lot of noise of stupidity in the long tail of Indian IT community who inadvertently do not have the facts right and work more on conviction driven by their group and limited online activity.

Beauty is a summation of the parts, working together, in such a way that nothing need to be added taken away or altered.

- Quoted by Nicolas Cage in the movie Next

Here is my first item that I put on sale on EBay.

This beautiful painting is done in the traditional art form of Madhubani. This art form dates back to the days of Ramayana and originated at the occasion of the marriage of Lord Rama with Sita at the kingdom of Mithila (now part of the state of Bihar, India).

Madhubani Paintings have been traditionally done on mud walls by the women of villages around the present town of Madhubani (literally meaning forest of Honey). These paintings use natural colors derived from plants, ochre and lampblack.

This painting, done over Silk depicts 3 Hindu deities:

   Saraswati: The Goddess of Knowledge
   Ganesha: The Lord of Success
   Lakshmi: The Goddess of Prosperity

By: Pallavi Singh

At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.

An article came in The Times of India, today’s (June 3, 2009) edition, regarding the flagship programmes of the Government of India. One of the programmes is the TSC: Total Sanitation Campaign (section in the pic on left), which has the charter of creating hygienic toilets in rural areas to prevent open defecation and thus reduce the spread of various diseases. During the last 10 years (1999-2009) this programme has successfully created 5.3 crore toilets across numerous villages through out the country.

The total cost of this programme till date has been a whooping Rs. 5100 Crores!
So doing the math right, each toilet created through this programme is worth 100 crores! (Well almost, just a tiny bit less than that).

Yeah! I want one of those. Or maybe honourable Government of India, lets exchange, keep your toilet, just give me a small villa in Hyderabad, I can be content with a mere 2 crore property!

Turns out i need to go back to school! 5100 crores divided by 5.3 crore is around 1000 bucks! not 100 crore.
Stupid me! Stupid me! So very stupid me!!!

This is really amusing! I am a software engineer and work on web site creation et al. You may not be knowing (and I may be grossly wrong in assuming this), the code 404 in HTTP (a software protocol which is used to transfer web pages) stands for ‘Not Found’.

So essentially, the Day 404 would be a Day ‘Not Found’ :)

[comment #401, which then, essentially means NOT AUTHORIZED]