Nirenjan’s Space

The Codebreakers Revised Edition by David Kahn.

I got this lot through e-mail. Enjoy…

A first grade teacher collected old, well known proverbs. She gave each child in her class the first half of a proverb, and had them come up with the rest.

As you shall make your bed so shall you - mess it up.

Better be safe than - punch a 5th grader.

Strike while the - bug is close.

It’s always darkest before - daylight savings time.

You can lead a horse to water but - how?

Don’t bite the hand that - looks dirty.

A miss is as good as a - Mr.

You can’t teach an old dog new - math.

If you lie down with the dogs, you’ll - stink in the morning.

The pen is mightier than the - pigs.

An idle mind is - the best way to relax.

Where there’s smoke, there’s - pollution.

Happy the bride who - gets all the presents.

A penny saved is - not much.

Two’s company, three’s - the musketeers.

Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and - you have to blow your nose.

Children should be seen and not - spanked or grounded.

When the blind leadeth the blind - get out of the way.

Kiruba posted a bomb. Is he really shutting down shop, or is it just an early April Fool’s day gag???

My net connection at home, for some reason, is horribly slow. Broadband’nu peru. The net’s much better here in the office…

… of the Blogger’s meet which was held on Saturday eve. Like the good boy that I am, I reached the place at about 6.15 and saw that our man Vijay had been following me. Me being stone deaf, I didn’t hear him calling me until I had almost reached the “landmark”. Turned out that he had been waiting for almost an hour. Anyway after the usual pleasantries, I called up curses (who apparently was hogging on Ferrero Rochers with Ferrari & Praveen). And curses in his usual style said they were at the famed Planet Yumm and would be there in a few minutes. Vijay & I kept chatting for a while until they came and Ferrari saar insisted on taking a couple of long distance shots of us.

Kartik & Joshy soon joined us. Kartik, ever the “charmer”, was still upset at the report of the first meet. Soon, Two Penny - also known as TP - joined us. Since TP wishes to remain anonymous… Also among the usual suspects were Ravages and Pleomorphous. Morphie did not reveal his true identity throughout the meet. Some kinda secret agent probably… Among the other newcomers were The Optimist - Murali and Lean Dude who looked like he hadn’t had a haircut since he was born. Sorely missed was our thalaivar S.K. who even asked for directions but didn’t turn up.

The meet started as usual with Kartik wanting an intro about everybody and how they got into blogging. The oldies (Ravages, Morphie & me) were fairly tired of this old routine and wanted something different, but Kartik got his way (or so it seemed). There were the usual talks with our controversial topics, what we wouldn’t blog about, etc., etc., zzzzz… Then there was the occasional encounter with the jakkamma, pani puri guy and sundal vendors. Not to mention our fair share of beggars, who were shooed away, though they always returned, and in greater numbers.

Sophia and Sangeeta called in. Ethereal (or should I say virtual) presence was better than nothing I suppose. Anyway, they wanted to say Hi to everybody. No prizes for guessing who shouted Hi the loudest.

Finally, our celeb journo called in. Turned out that she was waiting near the Baskin & Robbins store. Ramya Madam - no report in paper???

After catching up with Ramya, Vijay, Kartik & Joshy beat a hasty retreat (if you could call it that) and the rest of us made tracks to the nearest bajji stall. Molaga bajjis all around. (Not to mention Vaazhakka, Uralaikizhangu, Vengaayam and Cauliflower). Dripping in oil and smothered in chutney, these bajjis tasted like manna to us folks. (Seri over build up vaendaam). Curses was silent and every word he spoke was a miracle. Seemed that he was attempting to message one of his many girlfriends on the sly. Praveen was equally silent. Probably those two were contemplating how to snick the remaining Ferrero Rochers from Ferrari (if he had any left after the first round).

After the usual 2 (and sometimes more) rounds of bajji gobbling and photo snapping, we had to disperse. Nalla bajji saaptaacha, ippo thoonganum baa. Wogay, guddu nait…

I’ve downloaded a new newsreader called RSSReader from http://www.rssreader.com/. The interface is very simple and intuitive. It also supports feed icons and images, just like BlogLines. But this is a totally free software (not that BlogLines isn’t), for which the source is also available. The only thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t support categories like Bloglines does.

For some reason, the server hosting my site seems to have gone a bit crazy. The server clock somehow seems to have advanced by an hour, thus putting IST at +4:30 GMT instead of +5:30 GMT. Wonder what the issue is…

Anyway, until this is resolved, I have to manually set the time of each new post back by an hour…

Update: United Kingdom has gone into Daylight Savings Time as of today morning. All clocks have been set forward by one hour. As my server is located in the UK, my server time is also set one hour ahead, thus erroneously calculating India time as 1 pm when it was actually 12 pm.

It also turned out that I had hard coded the offset +05:30 into all my pages. I had to manually remove all the hard coded offsets and change them into a constant variable which is defined in a common file. To top it all, my server kept breaking my connection while I was uploading the various pages and I had to reconnect time and again to upload the full lot. Anyway, the problem is now resolved…

I’ve put up a new photoblog at http://ninjablogs.blogspot.com. I’ll be showcasing all my photos there.

I came back this morning from Ooty, with fond memories, and with a nasty sunburn as well. And unfortunately or fortunately (as one professor used to put it), I had to attend office today. I’ll put the photos up online whenever I get the chance.

I’m off to Ooty on a trip organized by my office and will be back on Monday morning. Updates as they come…

I was just browsing, when I came upon my old site at nirenjan.blogspot.com. I was pretty surprised, since I had released that subdomain quite a while back. When I looked at the site, I got the shock of my life.

Some _____ (fill in the blank as you wish) by the name of faizal (yeah all lowercase) has taken my domain. Not only that, this _____ (again, fill in the blank) has taken one of my (very old) posts and posted it on the front page for the world to see. View the original post.

Any suggestions???

This has got to be Microsoft’s coding style…

From Sudhir’s Humour Blog

Now it looks like you can get spyware installed on your system, even if you use Firefox. An article posted by The Register says that your system can be vulnerable to a spyware attack, if the user using Firefox visits a malicious site. VitalSecurity, however, reports that this particular vulnerability only affects users who have Sun Java(R) Runtime Environment installed.

View the original Slashdot article.

I couldn’t resist posting this. It is too good…

Q: What are the names of Kumble’s parents???
A: Aamble & Pomble!!!

If you thought that one was bad, wait till you hear this one…

Q: What would you name a female spin bowler???
A: Balathiruppurasundari!!!

Hahahahaha…

A why I hate Microsoft rant. Pretty long.

http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

Via Sudhir