To Chandu's

While returning back from Chilly and Peppers on this weekend evening, we  (Poppy, Paro, Pankaj, Majji & I) leisurely walked into Chandna (and Dixit & Pappu & TinTin)'s flat; and a hilarious time we had there. The flat's good (looked good even at the night time that we had entered). Boxes strewn all over in the main lobby greeted us (looked a lot like TinTin's room in the hostel).

We began with the Sutta na Mila song. These IIT guys have done a fun job with their band and we made the fullest out of it.

Pappu has grown his hair neck-long. Heard about his amorous successes due to this while he puffed in the balcony (they don't allow him into the rooms with his cig on). TinTin denied that he was overworked (as were the rumors); but did not let out any internal M$ secrets. I anyway rubbed salt by (falsely) announcing that M$ was to release a Linux distro in some time. He didn't argue much, though. Dixit was mostly quiet and chubbily laughing as ever. And Chandu -- wait, I notice it just now -- Chandu too was quiet. Perhaps his 24x7 workday is a reality. Oh God, give the boy some more hours in the day -- so that he can have like 25x7 or 30 x7 or make it 48x7! :-)

By 12:30 at night when we started to leave, it was sure that we wouldn't get any conveyance back to campus. A truck carrying bricks formed our voyage. We sat on the bricks -- ephemerally stood upright on it in "Chaiyya Chaiyya" mode; the weather was good. Hyderabad is always wow! in the evenings no matter how the day is.

SCO's prime business?

www.SCO.com claims it to be a provider of software solutions for small-to-medium-sized-businesses (SMBs) and ... but I feel that it's primary business (or expertise) lies in suing. With bigwigs like IBM, Novell, RedHat, AutoZone,Terent in its sue-list it did not fail to sue even Daimler-Chrysler! I'm not surprised that they maintain a dedicated portion on their site as "The Right Place for SCO Intellectual Property Information" where they put to proud display the organisations against which they are engaged in mortal combat with.  In fact, what actually surprises me is that they don't keep all this on their first page itself! Even though SCO owns the rights for the UNIX operating systems, a google search for SCO reports groklaw as the second result, next only to SCO's own site and before everything else. Groklaw, by the way, is a site which maintains a listing of all such legal expeditions. I'll recommend my little brother (he's studying law) to seek placements opportunities with SCO. And now I'm afraid SCO might sue me for writing all this.

The drenching pizzas

It was a drenching excursion yesterday evening to Pizza Corner, HiTech.
It was my second time with Pizzas, for having not quite liked them the
first time, I had to be coaxed to budge this time. On the upstream way
we discussed Harry Potter. Parry (Parry Potter), at his enthusiastic
best, leaded the Potter club hullabaloo with ever-stupid Amal and
vicious Majji. Ranta & Rawat however were on the outer side of the
Potter ring and were cheesily muttering mischievous verdicts about this
community, much to the frown of Parry (and me). But the best experience
of the evening was yet to come.

Thanks to Manjeet (or was it Bansi?) for the pizza treat we took turns
with several of them. I, for one, didn't quite dislike them -- they were
good :-) . The departing bell at the Pizza corner is amusing. With every
ring, the waiters would sonorously burst with a "Thank You". Whatever be
the business mischief in this, it is remarkable. But now the rains were
out from the clouds, and heavily so. Standing for some time outside the
shop, we realize that the rains were in no mood to give in; so we did.
Amiable Ranta crusaded into the rains to get an auto and six of us (me
not included) left away in it. The rains were torrential now. Now it was
our turn. With no other way with the temptingly delicious rain, Amal and
I barged into it for another auto and by the time we got one, we were
dripping. The auto had to delineate towards the Petrol pump. The petrol
pump guy, though standing in the rain with an umbrella wasn't ready to
give any fuel. He needed some coaxing and then yielded, amusingly. The
auto, thereafter, was wading through the torrents. Water washed the
front glass and we were getting wet from both sides in the auto. Amal
continued with his stupid smiles, Manjeet with his cheesy remarks, Ketan
with his seduction and Rawat with his thoughts. I am happy I don't keep
a cellphone anymore. This is just one of the reasons.

The pizza excursion was a truly dripping one. Everyone of us was drenched.

Tech features, etc explained in a lawsuit!

That AMD has recently filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Intel is common knowledge now but I was rather amused to find some technical description about processor architectures in the actual legal complaint that was filed. The 48 page pdf complaint even cites the benefits of a 64 bit processor architecture as against the traditional 32 bit one. The complaint begins with a hardcore and stoic legal lingo on the first page but graduates to a nice reading about the historical evolution of AMD with growing harshness from Intel orderly detailed to bring out the reasons/motivations for Intel's coercion towards large and small clients to maintain undue and society-unfriendly monopoly in the x86 processor market; journalistic lingo including terms like "economic muscle" are not nearly phrases I expected in anything of the semblence of a legal complaint!

Near-technical description being so flamboyantly detailed, I was finally surprised that they didn't draft this document in LaTeX (The pdf text reveals that it was converted to pdf from Complaint.doc with Adobe Distiller by joni!)

Forced to blog

I see Ranta blogging, reading blogs and commenting to blogs for so long now that I've seriously taken to supposing my life a waste without blogging. Falling in line with what I carelessly comment about him: "Talk him about something and he'll blog it", he actually blogged this after I had a small discussion with him about Einstein marrying his cousin. I understand that this news means more to him than plain curiosity about consanguineous marriages, but today enough was enough. I mean, for how long can you really watch a guy on your left blog-involved, before you actually get across the "To blog or not to blog" frame of mind and jump into the fray? And I blame it all on Ranta.

So, to begin with, I started going through some blogs on the IIIT blogroll and God! people have become so interesting at writing. I landed myself to this How to Blog blog. It's a blog every blogger should read and understand well before getting to real-time serious blogging (if that means anything). And who knows, someday one might be offered a job for blogging ingenuity.