Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 29, 2006

Side by side or miles apart, dear friends are always close to the heart

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:17 PM

Don’t remember who exactly said this but its true. Friends are always close to a persons heart no matter how far apart you might be at the time. These past few weekends have been really awesome because I got the chance to meet some old friends some of whom I didn’t meet for over 8 years.

On the 19th we had a get together at Yash’s place for AFBBS (Air Force Bal Bharati School) 12C 1998 batch. This get together was planned at the last meet we had where seven of us met at TGIF for lunch. This time 12 of us showed up (Plus +1 for Nora) which was a big achievement as it was the biggest get-together for our batch ever. We spent the whole time talking, catching up with each other’s lives and generally having fun. We were up talking till I think about 1:30 am thats when every one left as they had to drive back home…

The pics from that party are at: http://photos.suramya.com/GetTogether_19thAug2006/, I will be putting them up in the photogallery sometime soon. (No really I will)..

Since this party was so much fun and there were a couple of people who couldn’t make it to Noida we decided to have another one at Ankur’s place in GK-I on the 26th. This party was even better as a lot more people showed up: Ankur, Arundhati, Aditya, Gautam, Gaurang, Kashif, Kunal, Praveen, Samarth, Tarini, Me, Vivek and Yash along with Rahul (Tarini’s fiance) and Parul (Vivek’s fiance). So it was a lot more fun. This time we managed to convince Samarth to sing for us (Which he did and was pretty good at it), Vivek and Parul to dance for us. Once they danced all of us also decided to join in, and it was surprising that Ankur’s neighbors didn’t come knocking asking us to turn the music down.

The pics from this party are at: http://photos.suramya.com/GetTogether_26thAug2006

Apart from school friends I have also gotten in touch with friends I had in 8th standard (~1994) and hadn’t seen/spoken to since. Ricki and Saurabh are two such people I have gotten in touch with on Orkut after having no interaction at all with them since 1994. Thats over 12 years!

Lets see if we can meet up some time…

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

August 19, 2006

Starry Night LEGO Mosaic

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 11:54 PM

Lego’s have been used to create the strangest things… In past they have been used to create Churches but this one is really cool.

This guy named Ed Hall used lego bricks to recreate his favorite painting: “Van Gogh’s Starry Night”. It took him several months and approximately ten thousand bricks to complete but the result actually looks cool as you can see in the photo below:

starry5.jpg

Check out Starry Night LEGO Mosaic for more details.

– Suramya

August 15, 2006

Huge Firefox crop circle

Filed under: Funny News,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 3:21 PM

I guess even aliens prefer using firefox… 🙂 Actually it was the work of OSU Linux Users Group in Oregon.

From project wiki:

“The Firefox Crop Circle project shows that we have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space! Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky.”

firefox-cropcircle-photo.jpg
FireFox Crop circle

More details: Linux Users Group – Oregon State University

Thanks to nixCraft for the link.

– Suramya

August 9, 2006

12-C from Air Force Bal Bharati School 8 years down the line

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:54 PM

This past sunday we had a small get together with my class mates from high school (12th) who were in Delhi. Seven of us from class showed up: Kunal, Navneet, Samarth, Suramya, Tarini, Udit and Yash. Rahul was also there to give us company.

We met in TGIF in the Priya Cinema complex, Vasant Vihar at 1:00 pm and were in there for a couple of hours.. I think the people over there were getting ready to throw us out when we left 😉

It was great meeting friends after such a long time. I was meeting Navneet and Samarth after almost 8 years. It was fun catching up with each other’s lives. Got in touch with a few other classmates so we will probably be having another get together next weekend.

Below are some pics we took during the meet:


c3af.jpg
Udit, Kunal, Samarth, Yash and Navneet

f028.jpg
Navneet, Kunal, Samarth and Yash

fd03.jpg
Udit, Kunal, Rahul, Tarini, Samarth, Yash and Navneet

d041.jpg
Tarini, Samarth and Yash

73df.jpg
Me, Udit and Kunal

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

August 4, 2006

Upside-Down-Ternet

Filed under: Funny News,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:12 PM

What do you do when you find someone else stealing bandwidth from your wireless network and you don’t like it? You Lock it down correct? This person didn’t do that, he decided to have a little fun at the expense of the unauthorized user…

So he ran squid with a trivial redirector that downloads images, uses mogrify to turn them upside down and serves them out of it’s local webserver. So the visitor gets websites that look something like:

Check out Upside-Down-Ternet for rest of the crazy things he did.

– Suramya

August 1, 2006

CD-Sextant: Build your own sextant using old CD’s

Filed under: Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:56 PM

This cool DIY (Do It Yourself) project teaches you how to make your own sextant to experiment with celestial navigation using the following items:

  • A CD with box (you can use those free AOL disks).
  • A4 Sticker paper (full page, without label cuts. For printing the scale on inkjet or laser printer)
  • 2 small glass mirrors ( 40 mm x 22 mm x 3 mm thick ).
  • 1 2×4 Lego brick
  • 2 2×1 Lego plates
  • 1 2×2 Lego brick
  • 1 2×2 Lego plate
  • A couple more Lego bricks for the shade support (depends on your design)
  • Cyanoacrylate glue (Loctite Superbonder).
  • Paper cutter (Olfa cutter)
  • Ruler
  • Scissors

As you can see you only need some commonly available items and the instructions don’t look that hard to follow. Might try making this one of these days…

Check it out: Here

Update (4th Aug 2006):

Since a couple of people got confused and this post was an OHT (Over Head Transmission) for someone here are a couple of links with more info on Sextants:

* Define Sextants
* Wikipedia entry of Sextant
* The Sextant
* How to use a Sexton

– Suramya

July 31, 2006

ScatterChat: A secure instant messaging client.

Filed under: Computer Security,My Thoughts,Security Tools,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:15 PM

Now this is a cool software. It allows a user to encrypt all communications using end-to-end encryption and routing based on Tor (Tor Overview)

The program is a ‘friendly’ fork of the Gaim project. In case you are wondering what a fork is, a project fork or branch happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes a copy of source code from one software package and starts to independently develop a new package.

The software itself is pretty cool, but its likely to come under heavy fire from various govt and ‘spy’ agencies because the design of the software makes it really hard for anyone to eavesdrop on anyone. They will claim that this will allow terrorists and child pornographers to communicate anonymously.

It might be used by a terrorist but then so can a car (used as a getaway vehicle), a cell phone (used as a communication tool), watch (to sync timed attacks)… does this mean all of them should be banned as well? Any technology developed can be used for good as well as bad purposes.. starting with fire all the way upto a nuclear reaction… now that the genie is out of the bottle you can’t stuff it back in.

I think it will be useful for all sorts of people including:

Spies, to let them communicate with the home office, report anonymously
Corporate whistle blowers: they can report wrongs/broken laws without getting into trouble
People behind the great firewall of china, where you can be arrested for disagreeing with the government.

Check out the software: ScatterChat

Thanks to Schneier on Security for the link.

– Suramya

PS: I haven’t tried the software yet so don’t know how stable it is. Though I will be installing it shortly so will let you know how it goes.

July 28, 2006

Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:26 PM

This is really cool stuff. It lets you use AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml) without cluttering your HTML code with javascript tags. So essentially you are separating javascript and html making it easier to maintain code. The best part is that the process looks really simple to use. I am thinking of trying it out for a couple of test pages and see how it works.

Check out Behaviour’s Extended Demo page to see an example of what all you can do with it.

The main problem I have with 100% javascript controlled pages is that if the visitor has JavaScript turned off all your flashy jazz is of no use to him. Plus with all the new hacks/exploits that are coming out that use javascript more and more people are browsing the net with it disabled… So no I won’t be converting suramya.com or my photogallery to something javascript driven or flash driven anytime in the near future.

Check it out: Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

– Suramya

Why can’t Microsoft make their messages more specific and meaningful

Filed under: Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:03 PM

I don’t have anything against Microsoft. Their software has its uses and while I do use Linux on my primary system and on all the servers I run/manage I also have windows XP on one of my systems and on my laptop and am happy with it as It doesn’t crash as often as earlier versions of windows and mostly does what I want it to do. Now that being said, lets move on to the topic of my rant.

I was updating windows using the Windows update tool and I got the following message:

“To use microsoft update, you must first install the latest version of some Windows components. This will allow your computer to work with these new features on the site:”

(Emphasis mine)

Could they have made the message any more vague? Can you figure out what it wants to update? I couldn’t and guess what this latest version of some Windows component was? What, No idea? It was Windows Genuine Advantage(WGA) verification tool. Now my question is, why couldn’t they just say that you need to install WGA verification tool before you download updates? Why did they have to be so vague?

You know what the best part is? WGA is not a default part of windows, its a new software that MS is pushing out to detect pirated copies of windows, so doesn’t this make their message about it being the latest version of a windows component false and misleading?

Below is a screen shot I took of this interesting message and what was actually installed:

Vague Windows message
Vague Windows message

I have the same issue with other portions of MS update. They almost never tell what a particular update is for, I know they give the Knowledge Base number, but why can’t they tell you right over there exactly what issue a particular update fixes? Having that info over there would help me/other users decide if a particular patch needs to be installed immediately or can be installed later in a regularly scheduled update cycle.

Well this is all from my side.

– Suramya

July 20, 2006

How to become a Ninja in 7 easy steps

Filed under: Humor,Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 1:59 PM

How to become a Ninja in 7 easy steps

– Suramya

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