LisaNova - Competition

It was once said (and perhaps believed in) - "The means are more important than the ends". That meant that the action was more important than the fruit. But something killed that....and that was this world's definition of "competition" !!

Watch this hilarious youtube video on competition:



Personally, I feel the "Harvard guy vs. the Yale girl" is exceptional !

What about you, do you believe that the end is more important than the means?
Have you won even though you played by the rules? Or in today's competitive world, players who play by the rules never win?

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Dawn

From the archives...
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With a cup of tea in her hands, she opened the drapes covering the passage to the balcony. It wasn't morning yet. Just a faint glow was visible, foretelling the onset of the daily wonder, the breaking of dawn.

She got outside onto the balcony to watch this drama unfold. She had seen it a number of times before but since she liked watching the sun slowly appear and spread its light all around, here she was early in the morning looking at nature's canvass again.

"Brrr,....its cold" she thought. She drew her dress closer and sipped her tea.

This pre dawn cold is different. It washes the slumber away and refreshes the mind.

A gentle breeze played with her hair strands.

Out far there, the gentle orange had spread. It was seeking to wipe out the black sky. And slowly light was expanding its domain. It was the end of a night and the beginning of a new day.

She was looking at all this with great intent. She failed to notice him behind. Suddenly she felt his arms around her waist. He was there to join her and watch this spectacle.

They spoke nothing, not even looked at each other. Both looked at the skyline, at the unfolding drama. The play of colours, the birth of light, the soft cold breeze and the silence of the night being replaced with the day's activity filled their senses.

And of course they had each other too.
It was a new day.

(c) Deapesh.

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Zen Poetry

From the book: "Ryokan Zen Monk poet of Japan", translated by Burton Waston.

In this village
coming and going
there are so many people -
but when you are not among them,
it's lonely.

---

When you are busy
you send word that you can't come
because you are busy
and when you are not busy
you send no word at all.

---

Though travels,
take me to
a different stopping place each night
the dream I dream is always,
the same one,
of home.

---

Wow !!

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Tag: Literature Poetry

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Sad Parking

Across my window is a parking lot. It is spacious and there is never a need for more space in it. Consequently it also has parked cars that have been parked from a long time, though a few cars are of the daily kind.

It is a sad parking lot.

It is the dead end of a road which connects the apartments in the apartment block. Most of the cars which come to this parking lot, dont come to park here. Most of the cars come here to back up, to change their direction and it is this which makes the parking lot sad. It feels sad that people use it more like a road, a piece of tar on which destinations are reached and not use it as a destination, as a resting place for the cars. It was intended that way, as a resting place as a destination. But people drive in and then turn back and leave immediately, without stopping. It feels bad, it feels used in a way it was never meant to be used. And thus also becomes lonely, sadness trusts loneliness as a friend, they usually travel together in silence for long times.

And that is the reason why the parking lot across my window is sad and lonely.
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Tag: Literature Prose

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Something...

Would you say 'bye' if I were to go out
through that door?

Would you say "hi" if I were to walk in
through that door?


Would you, would you?
Would you say something to me at all?
Would you, would you?

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Tag: Literature Poetry

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Harvesting emails and chain mails

This Sophos post reveals an interesting hoax !

The new spam campaign asks for chain letters to be forwarded to the spammers (who are posing as a researcher called Gemma). However, Sophos warns that rather than conducting a study of chain letters, the recipients are actually planning to gather innocent peoples' contact details for the purposes of spam and identity theft.

I used to be amazed by the email ids that would be accessible to me through chain mails. Seems like the spammers have got a nice idea here.

A better twist would be to send an email with the following text:

"(whatever-service-name) has decided to stop its (whatever-free-service-name) as many people are using it, which is more than what was expected. So (whatever-service-name) is going to close down the free service and will make it a commercial product. If you want to stop this, please forward this email to as many friends as you can and send a copy (CC) of the mail to (whatever-spammer's-email-id). Thank you"

What is the bet that such a mail will get mass circulated and each person will send a CC of the mail to the spammer !!!!
People !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Tag: Technical

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LonelyGirl15 again...

Excerpts from this news item:

There's a formula for YouTube "stardom": video camera, bedroom, cute young woman, confessional style.

The most important ingredient being the "confessional style". If one does not fool the viewer into believing that all that is being communicated are the innermost feelings, the viewer would not want to watch more. Serials on TVs and movies are for that.

The fact that viewers believed that LonelyGirl15 was being truthful to the medium and was sharing her real day to day thoughts made them all value her conversations. If they knew that this was all made up, they would not hear her out often.

LonelyGirl15 was an enigma wrapped in a mystery disseminated via e-mail, hyperlinks and RSS (a format that sends news to websites Web sites) feeds. Yet her story, which few of the hundreds of thousands who made her "channel" a YouTube top 10 destination seemed to notice, was kind of a bore, as it had been with Brookers and Emmalina before her: a little bit of teenage ennui and rebellion, a lot of charm and intimacy, real or fabricated, and, always, the gentle suggestion of sex.

I wouldn't agree that it was a bore though I agree with the other points made above.

And to end this post:

But most of the fans, it seems, weren't buying the removal of the line between probably-fictional-pretending-to-be-real and definitely-fictional. The LonelyGirl discussion areas were full of the kind of anger that people display when, for instance, they learn that a girlfriend is not who she pretended to be.

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Tag: My Thoughts

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X-Men 3, Ramayana, Mahabharata and the definition of power

Know what the X-Men 3 reminded me of?

Mahabharata/Ramayana Serials I saw as a kid on Doordarshan !!!

In one of the scenes the mutant who can control "coldness" and the mutant who can control "heat" fight it out. This scene reminded me of the picturization of the Indian epics in serials. In those serials, fights between the big and mighty warriors was pretty similar. One would shoot out an arrow which would spit out fire and then the other warrior would shoot an arrow which would neutralize the first arrow. Such a fight would go on until one of the them would be able to shoot an arrow which the other warrior could not neutralize and thus would be killed.

It is very interesting to note that that in these epics which are very very old (Ramayana - 7323 B.C, Mahabharata 1900 B.C. - according to particular references which I got after a quick google search ) and in the future depicted in X-men 3, the one who is the most powerful is the one who can control the 5 elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water ).

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Tag: My Thoughts

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Yahoo and phishing - Sign-In Seal

New idea by yahoo to prevent users from getting "phished" !

Sign-In Seal FAQ.

The idea is:

* on my PC, I will create a special tag/seal/mark/sign and this will be stored on my PC
* whenever I go to the genuine Yahoo site, it will be displayed to me
* if I go to a fake yahoo website, the website will not be able to display the sign to me and I will thus know it is a fake yahoo website.

Three concerns:

1> I guess this will be via a cookie which will be persistently stored on the user's computer. That will mean that users should not clear their browser cache of cookies to have this scheme work everytime. This IMHO is not a good practice to get the users to get used to.

2> What if the fradulent web site owners are able to decipher this cookie (reverse engineer) and display the same?

3> All yahoo portals will now be able to track the particular individual. It would mean that users will leave a trail of their presence across yahoo portals. What if I am just browsing through Flickr (not having logged on)? Surely yahoo will be able to track this visit of mine across the website while I am under the impression that I not being tracked.

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Tag: Technical

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Will 'lonelygirl15' ever act again ?

You surely must be following Youtube. The latest scandal is that lonelygirl15 is a FAKE !! An actress who was just playing her part too well !!!!!!

Now the question which I am interested in is, will she be accepted as an actress on TV/movie?

Will the internet-youtube-savy world forget this and accept her on the idiot box? Or is her career as an actress doomed since she was a key role in this faked up reality?

will the common man remember or will he soon forget?

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Beerwah Railway Station

This photo is undoubtedly one of my favourite sign board shots !!



I wonder if people are really so honest that they would buy their tickets at their destination station. And we were even more surprised when we got to know that neither in the train nor at the destination station, were people checked for tickets !

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Tag: My Thoughts

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Steve Irwin is no more

The world struggles with this sad news. Croc Hunter, the human face which endeared a lot of spooky, creepy, crawly and dangerous animals died while filming a lesser dangerous animal than what he has handled in the past.

A sad day indeed. He brought the animal world closer to us. With his television shows he had influenced millions of humans' opinion towards crocs and the rest of the animals he dealt with.

It will take a long time I guess, before the animals find a new friend in someone who is as effective as he was.

I had visited the Croc hunter's zoo in 2004. It was a nice place. My favourite being the walk through aviary which had a huge number of birds which were extremely exotic to me. To see the Otters have fun in the water enclosure was great fun too. I was taken aback when I got close to a snake handler and saw that she was handling a Corn Snake! The reason for my surprise was that the Corn Snake was from the US and is found in Virginia. I told her that it was really a coincidence that the snake which I get to see very close is the one that was found in the place I lived thousands and thousands of miles away.

I posted some photos from my trip here

Here is a photo of a croc in the enclosure:

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International "o" day

oToday ois ointernational "o" oday. oTo ohonour othe ocontribution of "o" oto our oliterature otoday oevery oword ohas oto ostart owith "o".

oWe othank "o" ofor oits ocontribution.

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"Responsible Disclosure" and "Responsible Behaviour"

The latest Microsoft attempt to hide a serious IE related bug from its users in the pretext of "responsible disclosure" is outrightly pathetic !!

This is from their blog entry:

Shortly after the release of MS06-042, independent security researchers responsibly disclosed to us the fact that they had discovered the crash was exploitable. We worked with them responsibly during the creation of the update. As soon as we knew we would have to halt the re-release, we informed the third party researchers. Due to the fact we did not want to communicate the existence of the exploitability of the crash prior to an update being available, we also began the process of holding our communication on the issue so that attackers would not have clear public information available that the current problem was exploitable.

This was another difficult decision on our part. There was no intent here to misrepresent the issue as not being exploitable. Often times however, we find ourselves in the position of having to strike a balance between providing information equally to users who would use the information to protect themselves, and attackers who, history has proven, will immediately use the information for criminal purposes. In this case, we felt that, due to the fact the platform and specific vector of the crash was known, publicly disclosing that it was an exploitable security vulnerability prior to our being able to provide customers with an update to address it would have breached our position on responsible disclosure and would have put customers at increased risk.

Unfortunately, one of the security researchers who reported this to us disagreed with our decision to hold communications and has publicly pointed out the exploitability of the specific crash and the affected platform. ....SNIP.... Since the exploitability of this is public now however, there is certainly increased risk of attack. We have issued a security advisory detailing workarounds and mitigations for the vulnerability while we have our teams working at full speed to resolve the quality issue and release the update as soon as it meets our quality bar.

It seems that responsible researchers and security analysts have a huge burden of this one-sided responsibility, due to which they are not supposed to tell the general public of the extent of damage that a faulty/buggy software can do and should rather let the company decide when and how the information about its faults will be released!

The company which produces the software has no responsibility however towards the numerous users of their software to tell them about how critical the bug really is.

While "Responsible Disclosure" is expected, "Responsible Behaviour" is not guaranteed.

At the very least, the users of a particular software have to be informed at all times of the bugs which are serious and can be dangerous to the user of the software product. This is what the customer would expect in return for the trust that the customer puts in the company's advisories. But Microsoft did not do this and instead now are faced with this situation wherein they are forced to reveal that they knew of a serious bug and were hiding its presence from their customers who trust them.

eEye in their advisory stated:

This information is already known in various research circles and also with exploit writers. So it is important that IT administrators understand the true threat of this problem that this is not simply a crashing bug as Microsoft has been incorrectly misrepresenting it but in fact that it is an exploitable security bug. Researchers and exploit developers know this, therefore it is extremely important that IT administrators are told what really is going on.

eEye did a commendable job in disclosing this vulnerability to the public.

Microsoft seems to think that the public should and will continue to use a bug ridden product and thus to save the user from harm, it is advisable to not reveal the bugs. They forget, that users will move to other products in case they loose trust. Microsoft itself should responsibly accept the problems in IE and suggest that users use a more secure web browser. That would be real responsibility !


UPDATE: Here is a link to what vendors define as Responsible Disclosure.
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Tag: Technical

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World's end and MS06-040 Exploit

Just after Microsoft released their patch for MS06-040 and in the few days before that, there was a huge hue and cry as to how the world will end due to a worm outbreak !

But things happened otherwise. LURHQ has a nice article on this titled: "MS06-040 Exploit: More Hype Than Threat".

Interestingly the bot exploiting this vulnerability is using the compromised machines for relaying spam ! Business minded hackers/crackers are here. This might be the trend of things to come. There is nothing gained in releasing a worm and crippling the internet to a great extent. Business savvy hackers/crackers can instead make some money out of the exploits if they release it in small quantities out in the wild to avoid detection. The more the impact the more the attention and more would be the prevention measures. Instead an attack which targets relatively few machines rather than the whole internet, would at the least assure of some financial gain.

As it is said, it is futile to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.

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Privacy and Google

Google is making so many inroads into our daily lives that it must be pretty easy for them to know a lot of stuff about each individual.

Using the search engine itself leaves a trace. If Google wishes, then for a given fixed IP address, it can gain a whole lot of personal information on the person/people who use that IP address to search stuff on the web.

Recently we had the AOL blunder which showed how much of data on an individual these service providers can collect over time. And the fact that we can't assume that this data will be safely guarded by the company.

Now there is this new idea of google, of offering shopping coupons (discounts) to customers who used local google maps to search for a store/business establishment. Given the fact that the person using such a service will have to give the home address to get the route to the store, Google will get one more critical piece of information on the user. Combining this information with the IP address and all the search engine logs, will almost open up the life story of a net savvy individual.

blogger.com is also a google product. Anonymous blogs are really not anonymous. What are the odds that a person writing an anonymous blog at blogger.com will not use google as the search engine? What if this anonymous author then decides to use google maps to get directions?

As google gets more and more involved into our daily 'on-the-internet-lives' our privacy is at stake.

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Tag: Technical

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Such small small answers...oof !!

"..kitne chotte chotte ans oof..."

The bigger the question is, the smaller is the answer. Isn't that true?


(?) What time will the train arrive?
(ans) Its running late. It is expected to arrive .....

(?) Did he pass or fail?
(ans) ...silence....

(?) Is it going to rain today?
(ans) This weather is killing me. Yesterday it was too......

(?) Is it a boy or a girl?
(ans) girl

(?) How do I get to the beach?
(ans) Oh, take the second right and then keep following until....

(?) Is he recovering now?
(ans) He is no more.

(?) Can I date you this weekend?
(ans) That would be great! But you know there is this...

(?)Will you marry me?
(ans) yes.

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Tag: My Thoughts

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The 'So' Problem

"So", American English somehow seems to demand that each sentence should start with 'so', even if it is the first sentence. This problem plagues the speakers to such a great extent that once one starts looking out for it, it is tough to control oneself from being amused ! The average speaker will use it a great many times having started the conversation with a 'so' and ending it also with a 'so' sentence.

Dictionary.com defines it thus:
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so
adv.
1. In the condition or manner expressed or indicated; thus: Hold the brush so.
2. To the amount or degree expressed or understood; to such an extent: She was so weary that she fell.
3. To a great extent; to such an evident degree: But the idea is so obvious.
4. Because of the reason given; consequently: She was weary and so fell.
5. Afterward; then: to the gas station and so home.
6. In the same way; likewise: You were on time and so was I.
7. Apparently; well, then. Used in expressing astonishment, disapproval, or sarcasm: So you think you've got troubles?
8. In truth; indeed: “You aren't right.” “I am so!”

adj.
1. True; factual: I wouldn't have told you this if it weren't so.
2. In good order: Everything on his desk must be exactly so.

conj. Usage Problem
1. With the result or consequence that: He failed to appear, so we went on without him.
2. In order that: I stayed so I could see you.

pron.
Such as has already been suggested or specified; the same: She became a loyal friend and remained so.

interj.
Used to express surprise or comprehension: So! You've finished your work at last.

Idioms:
so as to
In order to: Mail your package early so as to ensure its timely arrival.

so that
1. In order that: I stopped so that you could catch up.
2. With the result or consequence that.

so what
Used to express contempt or lack of interest.

Usage Note: Many critics and grammarians have insisted that so must be followed by that in formal writing when used to introduce a clause giving the reason for or purpose of an action: He stayed so that he could see the second feature. But since many respected writers use so for so that in formal writing, it seems best to consider the issue one of stylistic preference: The store stays open late so (or so that) people who work all day can buy groceries. ·Both so and so that are acceptably used to introduce clauses that state a result or consequence: The Bay Bridge was still closed, so (or so that) the drive from San Francisco to the Berkeley campus took an hour and a half. ·So is frequently used in informal speech to string together the elements of a narrative. In most cases, this practice should not be carried over into formal writing, where readers need connections to be made more explicit. ·Critics have sometimes objected to the use of so as an intensive meaning “to a great degree or extent,” as in We were so relieved to learn that the deadline had been extended. This usage is most common in informal contexts, perhaps because, unlike the neutral very, it presumes that the listener or reader will be sympathetic to the speaker's evaluation of the situation. Thus one would be more apt to say It was so unfair of them not to invite you than to say It was so fortunate that I didn't have to put up with your company. For just this reason, the construction may occasionally be used to good effect in more formal contexts to invite the reader to take the point of view of the speaker or subject: The request seemed to her to be quite reasonable; it was so unfair of the manager to refuse.

Regional Note: New England speakers often use a negative form such as so didn't where other varieties would use the positive so did, as in Sophie ate all her strawberries and so didn't Amelia. Since this usage may confuse a speaker who has not previously encountered it, it is best avoided in writing.
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Some of this was new to me!!

Wiktionary has something to say about this word too: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/so

One example of the American use of 'so' spilling out to a blog (which is generally informal) is a recent entry in the Microsoft Security Respose Center Blog.

"So", let me end this now.


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Tag: My Thoughts

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Emails, IMs, scraps and blogs

A long ago, it started out as emails. The person you knew and wanted to contact with, would be sent an email which would be answered in return and thus both sides would communicate with each other and share the happenings of life.

Then it was the Instant Messenger (IM) craze. Everyone would be hooked onto chatting and hours and hours would pass by in typing furiously into the IM client window. It was a completely new thing. There would be so many people to chat with, one could also search for like minded people and add them to the buddy list and thus communicate with total strangers. Social interaction through the internet was reaching new heights.

And now the latest thing is writing 'scraps' in Orkut or writing 'Friends Comments' in myspace (which by the way is missing an apostrophe after 'Friends'). This is again a completely new behavioral pattern. Now not only do people want to get in touch with their friends, but also do not mind others reading their conversations! It seems people would rather engage in frivolous talk with a big group of others rather than send detailed personal emails to close friends. Personal life is all on the web and everybody knows about everybody's life.

Of course then there are blogs, such as this and many many others, which are another way of expression (what I do here) and communication (what I don't do here).

Pick your way of communication and expression. The menu card is big, thanks to the internet !

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Tag: My Thoughts

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Have you?

Have you patched it yet?
a restart much needed,

crawling every where quick,
you won't know when you are hit!

Have you patched it yet?


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Tag: Literature Poetry
Tag: Technical

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