Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 7, 2004

Old TV shows are funny

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:26 AM

After a hard day at work its fun to come home and relax by watching a good movie or old TV series. The past few weeks I have been getting old episodes to Dr. Who on DVD from Netflix and they are hesterical.

Today I watched a Australian TV mini-series called “The Girl From Tomorrow”. It was actually pretty nice. Its about this girl who got transported back in time from year 3000 to year 1992 and how she gets back to year 3000.

The special effects look silly but overall the show is worth watching atleast once.

More Details: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098803

October 6, 2004

Is the GPL a virus?

Filed under: Computer Related,Funny News — Suramya @ 5:36 PM

This news just made me laugh:

Clamav a popular opensource virus scanner has been hastily updated this morning to remove a ‘false positive’: the scanner was detecting the GNU Public Licence as a virus.

I know that some people call the GNU licence viral but isn’t this a bit too much?

Source: The Inquirer

– Suramya

Can I take your order please?

Filed under: Funny News,Humor — Suramya @ 11:59 AM

Found this code online and I think it is absolutely hilarious, even to people who don’t even know C.

static void happy_meal_tcvr_write(struct happy_meal *hp,
unsigned long tregs, int reg,
unsigned short value)
{
int tries = TCVR_WRITE_TRIES;

ASD(("happy_meal_tcvr_write: reg=0x%02x value=%04x\n", reg,
value));

/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */
if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE)
return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);

/* Would you like fries with that? */
hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME,
(FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr < < 23) |
((reg & 0xff) << 18 ) | (value & 0xffff)));
while (!(hme_read32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME) & 0x10000) && --tries)
udelay(20);

/* Anything else? */
if (!tries)
printk(KERN_ERR "happy meal: Aieee, transceiver MIF write
bolixed\n");

/* Fifty-two cents is your change, have a nice day. */

I think that the programmer who wrote this was a little bit bored.

October 5, 2004

I hate mornings…

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 4:00 PM

I hate mornings. In the words of Wendy the good witch: “Mornings would be so much better if they happened in the afternoon” Today I woke up at 7 am thinking it was 8 am then realized that it was 7 am so went back to sleep. Then I got a call at 7:30 am from Ruth so that I could help her with her website assignment (I had asked her to call me in the morning, but I had forgotten that her morning starts a lot earlier than mine).

Once we were done with this I left for work and got stuck in traffic *again*. This time a car was totalled on I-280 causing a 1 1/2 mile backup. Not fun. I had taked a photo of the crash but managed to erase it by mistake. 🙁

Email can be used to chat…

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:59 AM

Ok, after posting so many tech news items in one day I think its time to post something else for a change.

I was happlly surfing the web when I thought I should check my email again and I got quite a shock when I saw 11 new emails had come in within the last 15 mins. And none of them were junk, that was the surprising part.

What had happened was that Surabhi, Vinit, Vivek and Ruth were having a 4 way ‘chat’ using email. So I obviously joined in and started shooting off emails, It was a lot of fun. Over all we had about 20 – 25 emails sent in about an hour’s time (All of us were supposed to be working/studying during this time). Then Ruth had to sign-off as she had to work on an assignment so we ended the 5 way email chat othewise there would have been a lot more mail’s…

Thats all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Magic Bike

Filed under: My Life,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:51 AM

Magicbike is a mobile WiFi (wireless Internet) hotspot that gives free Internet connectivity wherever its ridden or parked. Read more at: http://www.magicbike.net/

Here’s a picture I found of it:

Linux based Live CD’s

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:56 AM

As you probably know I a big fan of the Linux OS and find it a lot more useful and stable than Windows. Linux has a unique property that it can be installed on and run from the most unlikely systems/devices.

One of the most useful installs are the Linux Live CD’s. These are compressed CD images of a complete linux OS and are available for free with almost no restrictions. A lot of the live distro’s are created with a specific purpose and are fine-tuned for it.

Below is a list of the various Linux Distro’s and what they specialize in:

  • Knoppix: This is one of the most famous Live Linux distro’s. It is based on Debian and contains over 2 GB of software on one CD.
  • Kanotix: This is a Linux Live CD based on KNOPPIX technology using mostly pure Debian/sid. Contains more updated packages than Knoppix.
  • F.I.R.E: FIRE is a portable bootable cdrom based distribution with the goal of providing an immediate environment to perform forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and vulnerability assessment. Very Useful
  • Penguin Sleuth Kit Bootable CD: A GUI based Bootable CD based on KNOPPIX for forensic previewing of live systems with some security and sys admin tools.
  • War Linux: This distro is dedicated to War Drivers. Officially It’s main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate their wireless network installations but it works great for wardriving also.
  • Ultimate Boot CD: Not exactly a Live Linux distro but still a pretty useful disk to have in your collection. It allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. It has loads of tools and has saved my backside a couple of times.

A more complete list of Distro’s is available at: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I might not reply immediately but I will try to answer your questions or point you in the right direction (I hope)

– Suramya

Bootable live windows CD/DVD is now available

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:42 AM

Found out today that a guy named Bart has created a free version of the Windows Preinstalled Environment and made it available for free at his website. So if you have a valid windows xp/2003 license you should head over there now and grab a copy.

This CD will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.

The CD does have some major licensing issues: You can’t legally create more than one copy unless you have more than one Windows license. on the other hand there are plenty of Linux Live CD distributions available which don’t have any such restrictions so I would suggest that you check them out.

Will post links for them a little later today.

– Suramya

October 2, 2004

Entry for today

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:10 PM

Today was better than yesterday not good but better.

Today I was supposed to be in at 9 am to present my project to the boss, so I left home at time and reached the office at 8:55 am. Then when I try to get into the building I find out that I don’t have my access card with me ’cause I had lent it to Surabhi who forgot to return it. So I called up the office to see if anyone was there to buzz me in, which was not the case so I waited for 15 mins for someone to come by and buzz me into the building (As it was Saturday no was there at the front desk). So I had to drive all the way back home to pickup my card and drive back.

I made the entire round trip in ~25 mins but when I got back Shlomo was already in and waiting for me (Not good…) but he was pretty nice about it. Then we worked for a while on interesting stuff.

When I was driving back home I noticed that the car had a slower pickup than usual and then I noticed that the car was complaing about low fuel. So I hit the reset button so that I would know how many miles I had before I ran out of gas. That was when I almost had a heart attack as the system was telling my that I could drive 0 Miles before empty and the nearest gas station was about a mile away. So I switched off the AC and the music and started praying that I would be able to reach the gas station before I ran out of gas. And on the way every light I passed through was Red but I thankfully made it to the pump before the car stalled.

So the moral of the story is that “One should keep an eye on the fuel indicator if one doesn’t want to be pushing a car to the nearest gas station.”

Now that I am home I will probably read a book or watch a movie and then sleep. Tomorrow I will be playing with my site and will try to add some features/Capabilities to my website and blog

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Another day gone

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 2:38 AM

Today was not a good day. I had left my window open at night to let some fresh air in like I usually do and when I gotup in the morning my room was cold enough to prompt me to raid vinit’s room to steal the heater.

Then once I got ready I left for work and I was feeling happy that I would be there on time for a change… I should have know that wasn’t meant to be and sure enough as soon as I got on 280 I get caught in a traffic jam for 45 mins and the trip which should have taken me about 20 mins took me about 1 hour and 10 mins. When I finally make it to work I walk in to see my boss sitting at his desk, he looked at me and then looked very pointedly at his watch. So I told him what happened and then started working.

Work wasn’t that bad initally but I had to generate reports for billing which is just time consuming and boring. Once I got that done I got to work on finishing the project I am working on. I have to demo it tomorrow so I ended up staying late to complete it instead of leaving early like I had planned.

I was pretty tired by the time I was done and tried to get some shut eye at my desk but I should have known better than to try something like that ’cause that gave John and David to take pics of me with Daffy duck posing on my back. (I will post the pics here once I get them from David)

Then John decided to help us finish the marshmallow cream we had bought yesterday by putting it in his coffee. Below is a photo I took of him doing it. (Yes I know, People at my office are wierd)


Marshmallow cream and coffee, John’s Idea of a good drink.

Over all it was a long day that I am glad is over… This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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