Arbit Scratchpad

Strong, spirited, powerful, inspiring, enlightening GO READ THESE YOU CANNOT REMAIN UNCHANGED AFTER READING HIS WORDS. . . http://www.vivekananda.net/fouryogas/Untitled-3.htm AND http://www.vivekananda.net/ READ MORE ABOUT THE GREAT INDIAN MONK - SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

With the hope that . . . Tons of Success and Joy awaits you and me in the coming New Year; Lots of wishes from my side for great times ahead - 2003 AD and beyond; Reach great social, professional, academic, intellectual and spiritual heights; Always brim with self-confidence, yet maintain strict self-control. May God and his divine providence assist you all the way;

Swami Vivekanada's Chicago Address ( AN EXCERPT ) Response to Welcome At The World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 11th September 1893 Sisters and Brothers of America, It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. l thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects. My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation w...

HUMAN CLONING - The argument continues . . . Cloning produces a new individual using only one person's DNA. The process is technically difficult but conceptually simple. Scientists remove the genetic material from an unfertilized egg, then introduce new DNA from a cell of the animal to be cloned. Under the proper conditions, the egg begins dividing into new cells according to the instructions in the introduced DNA. MORE HERE http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20021228T230000-0500_37258_OBS__DOLLY__SCIENTIST_WARNS_AGAINST_HUMAN_CLONING.asp http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=1063797&nav=0RdED5vb http://www.clonaid.com - the company creating all the news Interesting Read : An Interview with "a software generalist" in the Linux community, who answers technical questions on-line, concerning all aspects of Linux. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/26/1040511127721.html

A stunning movie (though Ebert gives it 0.5/5) - The Ghost and The Darkness , just watched it. Ill give it a *** (3/5) - Man-eating Lions in Africa set in 1898 colonial british era . . . Om Puri in the cast too. The photography and pace is all in all good. Got this article : Indian and Israeli Spy Agency (thats RAW and MOSSAD) Team Up, Target Pakistan

Where DO WE GO from here? FIRST CLONED HUMAN BABY ! [From Google news - Now 9:00 PM - 25 mins ( BLOGGER SETTINGS GIVES ERRONEOUS TIME IN INDIA . . . )]

Tomorrow? Never Know ! Tomorrow's technology begins today - Researchers in industry and academia tinker with self-repairing systems, molecular circuits and more. From New.com CNET Top Ten Trends in 2003 - The Red Herring Magazine is out with the forecast of the top ten trends for the next year. The list includes Wireless, Hardware/Software, Venture Capital, Semiconductors, Nanotechnology, Financial Reporting, Telecommunications, Biotechnology, Broadcasting and Broadband. From http://www.webjives.com/

INDIAN CINEMA Satyajit Ray's Cinema I have watched only a handful of the works of Master Director Satyajit Ray - But Pather Panchali ( Song of the Little Road ) is still pending. Pather Panchali, Ray's first foray into the film making world, was completed in 1955, and proceeded to win the top prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. It's a quiet, simple tale, centering on the life of a small family living in a rural village in Bengal . . . Here are two reviews - Here and here And in direct contrast Ritwik Ghatak About a 100 miles east of Calcutta lies Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Dhaka was the center of cultural activity of East Bengal and, along with Calcutta, saw the birth of major cultural movements in the first half of twentieth century. However, the independence of India in August 1947 saw the partition of Bengal. The trauma of this partition remains etched in the minds of the people whose lives were forever changed by it. Nowhere is this perhaps better...

Added a blog search engine facility - called FreeFinder . . .Lets see if it works UPDATE (sometime later) : seems to be working fine Great ! RANDOM TIP : RedHat users may find out their exact kernel architecture (which is not always the same as "uname -m" output) with the following case-sensitive shell command: rpm -q --qf '%{ARCH}\n' kernel

A Short Summary of Hyper Threading Hyper-Threading Technology brings the simultaneous multi-threading approach to the Intel architecture(where multiple threads can execute on a single processor without switching). Hyper-Threading Technology makes a single physical processor appear as multiple logical processors. To do this, there is one copy of the architecture state for each logical processor, and the logical processors share a single set of physical execution resources. Processes or threads can be scheduled to logical processors as on conventional physical processors in a multi-processor system, and instructions from logical processors will persist and execute simultaneously on shared execution resources. Each logical processor maintains a complete set of the architecture state. The architecture state consists of registers including the general-purpose registers, the control registers, the advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC) registers, and some machine state regist...

FROM Microsoft must include rival Sun Microsystems' Java programming language in its Windows operating system, a federal judge ruled Monday MORE HERE ALSO on Blogs from WIRED KEEP UPDATED ON THE INTEL P4 Explore Intel's Hyperthreading technology Technical Resources Read more about The Simputer - a full-featured, powerful handheld computer. It is an acronym for Simple, Inexpensive, Mobile, People's Computer Also see http://simputer.org

"I am back" Christmas tomorrow - phone was dead, blogging in abeyance from the net; Caldera Linux does not seem to have much though a few things like Aktion media player and Java SDK are pre-installed - no games especially GNU Chess - a favourite of mine though I have never beaten it. ON Monday, December 23, 2002 I have been unable to blog for the past few days because of a dead phone and frequent shifting of cables and the associated repair work. In the meantime something went wrong . . . Here is how it all started - I suddenly wanted to intall Linux into my vacant partition (actually an earlier corrupted install) that I had reserved for the same. I chose Caldera OpenLinux Workstation - loaded with all the dev features. I selected the partition and said 'format' and then the boot loader option(GRUB/Lizard, not good old LILO) asked if it could write into the MBR(Master Boot Record) and I checked the option true and the OS boot options as Linux and pre-exis...

RANDOM LINKS THAT I VISITED - RSS XML RDF etc. An Indian Blogdex coming up ? A step-by-step guide to building an RSS 1.0 document by hand. http://www.newarchitectmag.com/documents/s=5310/new1013637412/2.lst http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ bEYOND html - http://www.newarchitectmag.com/archives/2000/02/beyo/ http://www.newarchitectmag.com/archives/2000/02/beyo/ and FRESH BLOGGER BLOGS

UPDATES FOR LAST 3 DAYS - PHONE DEAD TRY ANOTHER DAY -> I started reading a book called Deep Time by David Darling on the theme - travel of a particle from the beginning of the Universe to its end and further. After A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, I am somehow finding this book not very interesting, am flitting from reading a few pages and then not feeling like continuing again - this cycle repeating again and again and again. -> India has its latest and fastest supercomputer PARAM Padma at 1 teraflops(floating point operations per second). The fastest in the world right now is the Earth Simulator at Japan - 36 teraflops. MORE -> I am yet to read (buy?) Prey by Michael Crichton but this the first book that I have had an overdose of reviews and critciisms and praises before actually reading the book - call it commercialization or brand marketing - brands do sell in this world and the marketing strategy in this case inline with modern day practice ...

The term "zeitgeist" comes from the German "Zeit" meaning "time" and "Geist" meaning "spirit". The term is defined in English by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate� Dictionary as " the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era ." Google believes that this word and its definition appropriate to describe the program it implemented to share global search statistics and trends from the world's most popular search engine. Hence the 2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

Just finished a hilarious book, Headcrash by Bruce Bethke incidently attributed as the creator of the term Cyberpunk. - the book is about the cyberhero's (woefully inadept in real life but a geek all the same) adventures in Virtual Reality with an anti-character virtual identity . . . and how the VR-crazy humans are finally taught a lesson.

Wow THE SEGWAY ! - I had seen mentions everywhere, but never tried to understand the concept earlier . . . The science behind The FAQs

Microsoft into the Embedded market with full force Windows is cheaper than Linux Other TechUpdates

Just check this out : GREAT - Google Viewer and this :

UPDATES - SOME MINOR/MAJOR ADDITIONS AND CHANGES IN THE BLOG AND WEBSITE structure

I got a shock today, I rang up Gangarams Book Bureau to find the price of Richard Preston's The Demon In The Freezer, my my it costs Rs. 1000 (Hardbound, paperback yet to arrive in india I was told, its almost Rs. 1300 at www.fabmart.com ) never have I bought a single book as costly as that. The costliest I have bought till now, Stroustoup's The C++ Programming Language was some 600 bucks. Though TDITF seems like a great book . . . Will wait till it comes down to the flea market.

I am finding lots of references to Richard Preston as an alternative to Crichton though one writes on Non-fiction and the other not. His latest book . O T H E R L I N K S : Excerpt from The Demon in the Freezer Cobra Event Biography MIT presents Richard Preston

Call it racism or whatever - but have you got these looks ? A handful of volunteers decided this; very unfair naa ?

"The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big." Richard P. Feynman - December 29th, 1959 "In not too many decades we should have a manufacturing technology able to: Build products with almost every atom in the right place; Do so inexpensively; Make most arrangements of atoms consistent with physical law. Often called nanotechnology, molecular nanotechnology or molecular manufacturing, it will let us make most products lighter, stronger, smarter, cheaper, cleaner and more precise." Nanotechnology: It's a Small, Small, Small, Small World By Ralph C. Merkle, Ph.D. ON NANOTECHNOLOGY - Introduction & Basics How Nanotecnology will change the world . . .

Bad News: Two Van Goghs stolen from museum ABOUT VAN GOGH - LIFE AND TIMES

Started reading HEADCRASH by Bruce Bethke a funny cyber tale I guess from the first few pages . . . -Review-

Finished CONGO - GREAT BOOK . . . ONE BOOK in which Crichton gets more emotional than others with amy[the gorilla] - Earlier I had read The Great Train Roberry, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Airframe, Timeline and the stunning Andromeda Strain. Need to get hold of Sphere and prey . . .

NOW READING : Congo by Michael Crichton is turning out to be a treat with the rain forests, primates, cannibals, 1979 hi-technology and Amy . . .

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham ( REVIEW CONTINUED . . . ) I had earlier written - a classic book about the duality in life and everything else. If there is good why is there evil - a moving first person narrative describing both sides of life in a character running through the medley of characters their lifes and vanities from early 20th century Paris and London and a bit of America and India too. At a later stage, the book accepts certain aspects of the Indian spiritual knowledge as the most pure and ideal form. It emphasizes in terms of the main character of focus, Larry who is being described by the author himself in first person; about the universal truth that ideal life should be detached from everything - there should be no attachments to anything in life. It also describes the amoral and disreputable side of the social structure prevalent then in Europe and France(Paris) in particular. It depicts, merrily or boisterously at times, the wrong facets of life ...

SOME PRETTY INTERESTING QUOTES : - Even the cactus is beautiful, but never in the company of roses. - I chose to light a candle while they were cursing the darkness. - The toughest part in taking criticism is not accepting it gracefully, but identifying how you can make it work for you. - The Internet cannot be a truly democratic medium unless everybody is able to draw upon the benefits of computers, irrespective of their comfort with English. This belief has gained momentum worldwide and is perceived as the key to bridging the digital divide. - Having seen that babies command greater attention than fancy gadgets, I can safely believe that there's still some hope for humankind.