Pentagon's Psychological Warfare

According to the reports of Matt Kelley of USA Today, Pentagon is launching a psychological warfare, which includes posting of pro-USA messages and news in foreign media without revealing themselves as the source. Most of these works are concentrated on allied nations. The US military has to fight an information warfare against Al-Queda and other anti-US terrorist groups. Pentagon plans to do it by spreading pro-US news through newspapers, TV channels, hoardings and even T-shirts. Remember...none of them will carry the "Made in USA" tag. Sounds like paranoid? Who knows?; it may be yet another hoax. Click here to learn more.

Lot o' work

Today, my team mate is on leave, leaving me with a heavy workload. I will try to complete most of them today, even if it requires staying back. Tomorrow, I am going to Madurai, my birth place and the place where I did my graduation. I am so happy about going back to see the places where I roamed during my college days. Since I have to catch a train tomorrow, I won't be able to stay back and work. Also I do not like the concept of working overnight before weekend. So, I will finish a big portion of my work today to ease my pressure on Friday.

For Unix geeks @ Universities - Sun Solaris Challenge

Sun Microsystems is conducting Sun Solaris University Challenge. Form a team of 4 smarties in your university for the challenge. Because, the payout of this competition is huge. Here is the deal.
One individual or one team of up to four individuals from the same university will be awarded the Grand Prize - US$5,000 prize purse per individual, plus a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation. The winner's university will receive a credit with a retail value of US$100,000 good towards the purchase of Sun Microsystems products including Sun Fire x64 systems and UltraSPARC processor-based systems.
For more information, rules and regulations and periodic updates, please click here.

My friend blogs about UNIX history

My best friend Ananth Shrinivas is working in Sun Microsystems, Bangalore. He had produced one excellent article on the history of UNIX-based OS. Just within half-a-day, it marked a whooping 700 hits, a testimonial for its high quality. Go through it, if you have time and interest.
Personally, I found it to be biased towards his company's open Solaris OS and to some extent Linux. That's because the resources he got for this article talks more about these two OS. There are a few more flavours of UNIX-based OS, which could have been mentioned. Secondly, it takes more time to load, which is clearly not his fault. But in overall it is a good one.
P.S.: Ananth has personally explained me why the article was somewhat biased. He has also substantiated that it is one of the reasons for its success.

Saturday Freak-outs

This Saturday at around 2 in the after-noon, I went to my friend's place. We shared a veggie pizza for lunch and solved a sudoko. Then we decided to go to the British counsil. There I borrowed "Schrodinger's Kitten", after reading its review. Personally, I feel that the fee I pay to become the member of British Counsil is too high for its collection of books. If someone says, in British Counsil you can get all the books you want or that you need not have to be a member of IEEE if you are a member of British Counsil, give her a kick on her jaw. May be, it will help for those who want to do their graduation in England.
From the library, we went to Spencer Plaza. In Spencers, we had a Cappucino in Java Green. I had had better coffees in my life for one-sixth of its price. But still as a software engineer, I did not complain. Another friend of mine called and asked us both to join him for a movie. It was raining, but still we went to the theater to watch that highly-sentimental movie about one no-idea-what-to-do kind of a dad and his insane offsprings. The three and half-hour movie did not impress me a lot, but a forty year old sitting nearby gave a standing ovation. Then I went back home at around 10. Read about Copenhagen Interpretation upto an hour after midnight and went to sleep.

Team Lunch

Engineers in Software companies are not experts in software. But they sure are in killing spare time. Today, we had what we call a team lunch. We went for a lavish 5 starer near our office. There was a big parking lot, followed by a hall with pompous arrangement of furnitures. There were two restaurents and we chose the simplest. There were more Germans in that North Indian restaurent. I ate food with lot of fat contents to add one more layer of cholestrol to my arteries. Most of the food went as waste, which I did not like. When the waiter brought the check, I got aghasted. I did not know whether they are charging for the food or the dining table. My "team" tried to call it my treat for some birthday on which I did not throw a party. I refused. If I had paid for it, my mother would have looked at the bill and thought I had bought a new motorcycle. Food tasted awesome. But they are just charging too much. We made it a dutch. I don't know whether this is the way in which people in Holland have party, but by "dutch" my team means share the money.

Blogspot, here I come

Until few days back I did not have a good opinion about blogs. Of course, it gives every internet user some freedom of speech, but still I considered that as a waste of time and bandwidth. The only blog, I have been visiting regularly is the one hosted by Bruce Schneier. But after reading a lot of blogs, I find them more interesting and a good way to ventilate whatever you feel. Besides, I also have a lot of spare time (and bandwidth, of course), which I can spend for this blogspot. I will be blogging more.