Nirenjan’s Space

The photos of the meet are up here.

Folks, it’s that special time again.

The next Chennai Bloggers Meet is coming up.

Date: Sunday, 22nd May 2005.
Time: 5.00 pm onwards - for those of you on Military Time - 1700 hours onwards.

Location:Java Green outlet, Panagal Park, T. Nagar.

All bloggers, current, past and future are welcome. Do drop a comment if you are coming.

Update: Ravages has directions to the venue on his blog.

Update 2:Vijay has also linked up to this post. Check it out.

Till the evening - actually, till now, Friday the 13th has never reared it’s ugly face to me. Until now.

7.20 pm on a Friday evening, when I’m ready to catch the van, I get to build the software and test it. Even that was tolerable compared to what was to follow…

9.00 pm: I hitch a ride with a colleague upto Thiruvanmiyur, but just as we are about to leave the office - BANG!!! Tyre puncture…

9.15 pm: I board a D70 cut service going upto Guindy, and the bugger turns away from Guindy at Kathipara and heads towards the airport. Stops at the shed, a good 3-4 kilometers away from Kathipara…

10.00 pm: I catch an auto fellow at the Guindy shed to go upto Adyar signal and the damn fellow grabs 80 bucks…

10.20 pm: I stop at Pizza Corner for a dinner and when my pizza finally arrives, the mushrooms are all soft & slimy - not like Domino’s where the mushrooms are dry and tasty…

11.00 pm: Manage to get back home and see my sister watching The Phantom Menace - in Tamil! On Vijay TV! Kodumai!!!

12.00 am: Friday the 13th is officially over in India - hopefully the effects will vanish soon.

I had posted on this topic quite some time back. Here is the original article.

It seems to be the bane of site owners everywhere. Your server logs contain some vague links to poker, drugs, yadda yadda yadda… exactly like normal e-mail spam. You don’t even know where they came from. The problem is that it’s being written by some spam bot which doesn’t care whether it views the page or not.

At first sight, it seems to be pointless - the only person who’s going to see the links is you - the site owner. Nobody else is going to see them, and eventually click on them. Unfortunately for us, there are a number of sites out there which publish the referrers. What good does it do to the spammers? The answer can be summed up in just one word - PageRank. The sites which publish their referral logs are likely very popular and enjoy a very high PageRank on Google and other search engines. If just a few of these spam links are displayed, Google will assume these links to be good and boost their PageRank.

Unlike such websites, my access logs are private. Only I get to see them. So what’s the point of spamming me and others with private access logs? The problem is that these spam bots don’t know and don’t even care whether the site publishes their access logs or not. The biggest advantage right now is that there is no law against accessing a website. So these bots could give a GET request all day long without breaking a single rule. This results in a major problem for all site owners.

First of all, it is one hell of a pain in the ass. What is the purpose of a referral log if all you get to see are links to Viagra and poker? The second major problem is the bandwidth consumption. These bots don’t care about what data they receive, but it hits us where it hurts most - our bandwidth consumption.

The problem with implementing a table based blacklist is that it can slow down normal page loads. We need something that doesn’t affect normal users - but can still give the spammers one big kick in the rearside.

Previously, Sat had commented that he’d never received such spam. The point is that you never get to see your access logs on BlogSpot blogs. Nor are they accessible by anybody on the outside (of Google that is). Nor is your bandwidth metered. So there is no issue for BlogSpot owners, unless they are using some third party tool to monitor referrers and the tool doesn’t implement a blacklist.

OK guys, its that time of year again, when we (re)start the prayer club for Magix and his friends. Eggjam time baa. After one horribly tough paper, Magix is almost ready to heap Curses on his university paper setters. OK, bad pun.

Seri freeya vidu. All wishes to them to clear their papers without any arrears. And for those who want to say “Arrear illadha manidhan arai manidhan“, think once again. Madras University was nothing compared to these new tyrants. As far as the underdogs are concerned, only thing is to complete 4 years of service under the demons and ESKAEP!!!

Good luck guys. May the Force be with you.

Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. So they loaded up Jack’s mini van and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard. So they pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.

“I realize it’s terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I’m recently widowed,” she explained. “I’m afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ll be happy to sleep in the barn. And if the weather breaks, we’ll be gone at first light.” The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night. Come morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way. They enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.

But about nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend.

He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, “Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up North about 9 months ago?”

“Yes, I do.”, said Bob

“Did you, er, happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?”

“Well, um, yes”, Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out. “I have to admit that I did.”

“And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?”

Bob’s face turned beet red and he said, “Yeah, look, I’m sorry, buddy. I’m afraid I did. Why do you ask?”

“She just died and left me everything.”

Yeah, I know this is pretty late, but given that I saw the movie only yesterday, I can give the review only now. But first, a word of caution. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read this.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

*** WARNING: DO NOT READ FURTHER ***

*** ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO READ THIS??? ***

OK, since you are still here, I claim no responsibility for your condition after you read this piece. Now you are forewarned…

The movie starts off with some goons beating up Senthil’s (Prabhu) engineers, when Saravanan (Rajnikanth) comes in and picks them off one by one with a fight scene taken directly from The Matrix. After this, Senthil announces that he and his wife Ganga (Jyothika) are going to move into the old mansion in the site where his company has won a contract.

After a lot of comedy which falls pretty much flat on it’s face, they move into the mansion, which is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of Chandramukhi. Chandramukhi was a dancer in a king’s court about 150 years prior to this story. The king lusts after her, but she is already in love with another dancer. The furious king chops off the dancer’s head and burns Chandramukhi alive. He died a few years later, but the ghost of Chandramukhi was still rumoured to haunt the mansion, seeking revenge on the king.

The story continues with Ganga opening the forbidden chamber, after which Chandramukhi attempts to kill Senthil and causes chaos around the house. Everybody winds up blaming Durga (Nayanthara), the gardener’s granddaughter, and even Saravanan at one point of time. Eventually, Saravanan reveals that the cause of all the chaos is actually the spirit of Chandramukhi, now in Ganga’s body, still seeking revenge. Finally, they manage to rid the place of the spirit and everybody lives happily ever after.

Jyothika in the climax of the movie would actually scare the shit out of Satan. Take a good look at her eyes there and you’ll see why. All in all, the movie is a poorly woven together storyline, with a couple of Matrix style action scenes. It’s an OK movie, and can be watched maybe once or twice, just to understand the story. Personally, I liked Baba better. At least there, I could understand the story, not so much here. Either way, it is pretty clear, that Rajini is pretty much out of his prime.