Happy Holi!!

March 26th, 2005

Holi Colours
Holi is the Indian Festival of Colours. Its celebrated for numerours religious reasons, the main of those being the survical of Bhakta Prahalada when her Aunt tried to kill him on his Uncle’s Request. I actually really dont care. Since I was a Kid, I have been playing Holi with friends and family and used to go all out for fun. Holi that way brings India together, for when everyone is coloured in the colours of Holi, then they actually feel a sense of brotherhood and forget alll barriers created by Society. I am going to stop lecturing now and end this post by saying I had much fun today. Have a sneak peek on How IIT Bombay celebrated Holi from the newly updated Holi Picture gallery.

Wish you all the colours in life, have a happy Holi!
-@

Vote for Zishaan

March 22nd, 2005

Zishaan, a friend, a teammate and a Junior has a photoblog: Point and Shoot. He has been shortlisted into the best S.E.Asian category for the Photobloggies 2005 awards. Visit Point and Shoot and if you like it then do vote and support him here.

Had a wonderful and stomachfull weekend!

March 21st, 2005

Coupe of ex-batchmates, Alok and Shariq landed up from states, alok on Friday and Rizvi on Sunday and it was a weekend rushing from one treat to another. Went to Gorai Beach on Saturday, Dinner at Saffron Spice, next morning lunch again at Saffron Spice, Tea @ mocha’s , Light early dinner at pizza hut ending up with a Midnight buffet @ Le’ meredian! … More details will follow!

A heart is like a FTP server…

March 18th, 2005

All hearts are like FTP servers, with all the usual type of logins one has in a default server, like Anonymous and priviledged. You Ping them constantly with your senses, as in when you casually look on a passerby or acknowledge someone’s presence, you also give a port scan when you flirt with someone, and you know of some by word-of-mouth publicity.
Emotions are files kept on this server, they are of different types: Affection, Anger, Admiration, Love, Lust, Happiness, Sadness, Hate etc.. and like wise are distributed accross different logins available for download. Love here is like an infinitely big DVD rip 0-day warez file which everyone wants but only a few previledged users are able to have access to it.
Servers are also of many types: Introverts, Averge and Extroverts . An Introvert server is behind a firewall so you cannot ping to it, or know its there by a casual portscan, you only get to know it by Word-of-mouth publicity. An Average server on the other hand has an anonymous login open at all times 24×7, Mest Hearts are of this category while an Extrovert server is available to all and publicizes itself on bulletin boards.

I’ll now explain the User groups.
Anonymous: This is like a preview login, all basic emotions are kept here. The content is mostly a preview of the main user accounts, and largly depends on the instantaneous mood of the FTP host. By default when you contact a server this is the user group to which a user is assigned to, and if . you behave yourself then you get higher usergroups assigned to you.
Acquaintance: This is an advanced form of the Anonymous user group, and is kept for leechers you cannot avoid. This account has a Bandwidth cap per day which is very strict. The only way to exceed your bandwidth is uploading wanted emotions at this server. It should be noted that main files are not kept at this account. You’ll get things likes Wisecracks,
Friends: This group is a group of previledged users who gain trust and are upgraded from the Acquaintances user group. One doesnt have to barter for any files and can download w/o uploading. This user group has a sense of communion and these hearts link in unison. All except love.avi is available to this account group. However, since this group is based on trust, if you reveal the logins and password to too many people, you may get banned.
Family: Administrators, mostly have the full control over the content and access priviledeges.
Soulmate: Ahha, the prized account, sort of like a super user, whose login and password is given to the most trusted of the friends. This account shares almost the same content base as the family base and sometimes even more. When ever a soulmate connects to the heart it starts uploading and Downloading the Love.Avi file at full throttle. A soulmate can login even when there are other friends/family already logged in to the heart.

This finishes the account summary. Some more analogies from this metaphor comes as:
Hammering: If any account Hammers the heart server (save for Family and Soulmate users) it may get banned.
Extrovert servers are easily accesible, allow more connections per account, but as a result give very low bandwidth, on the other hand, Introvert servers are harder to find, can take less load, but allow higher bandwidth per connection.
Connection Closed by Foreign Host error may occur sometimes when someone from the Family Group sets puts you in the ban list. This may happen due to any reason.

Last but not the least, its also important to realize that many a times people give the Soulmate previleges to a wrong person and later regret it. In such cases when you have half downloaded the Love file (what is half of infinite ?? ) and the connection is closed by the host, one should not despair and should try looking for another server with the same content. There are numerous FTP servers out there on the network, and you are bound to find one. :D :D

If your network has none that you are conviced of, then you can hop networks and shit to a different City and start afresh!

just random thoughts
-Thakkar

First Law of Friendship

March 17th, 2005

v = u + at

This only applies to me (and a few others… ), for the hidden meaning of this rule is:

v(We) = u(You) + at (Abhishek Thakkar) :D :D

-@

What is Love ?

March 17th, 2005

.L.O.V.E. = Loss Of Valuable Energy :D

Super Contra!

March 16th, 2005

I cam across this post today on Samurai Games, thats the name we used to call them in Bhilai too (my hometown in India). The rate was 10 bucks an hour or 100 bucks a day, 15 bucks for an extra game cartridge. Dad didnt get us one of our own till I cleared Xth Std. and got that as a prize for my efforts.

Its been ages that I shifted to PC games, RTS (Real Time Strategy) and RPG (Role Playing Games) genres being my favorites, and I have seen the improvement in the multimedia content which has brought the gaming experiences in UT2k4 and Doom III to a mindblowing level. Yet, when you ask me what is my favorite game, I’d still say it was Contra.

I used to cheat and boost upto 30 lives and go all out on thouse buggers, later I remember I could do it in the default 3 lives.. I cant remember why I stopped playing it, probably it was becoz my kid brother could finish it in 1 life only :)

JP points out here a resource for Nintendo Emulators for PC , must find time to do it…
-@

Confoosions….

March 12th, 2005

Let me say this … the photoblog template is a mod of the the “GreyCard” template by Tim::Hollosy… He has some confusion that I am trying to claim it as my own. So here goes the Disclaimer.. You can read the rest at PixelPost

-@

Wordpress as Photoblog

March 10th, 2005

After maintaining Sizzlers for quite some time … I was looking for a way to photoblog. While Wordpress is an excellent publishing platform, its definitly not a photoblog. Like many users who are in love with this application, I was looking for a way to customize wordpress as photoblog. Unfortunately, none of the options seemed viable. There is ofcourse Pictorialis, but its far too complex to customize. Although I am fairly decent at CSS, but wordpress things meant PHP scripts. Also it would require yet another WP install, which I didnt want to do.
Then the lazy bum which is me started to hunt for a plugin which will make a photoblog out of my Wordpress, there are many plugins and there are many available which convert a Wordpress to a Picture Gallery, but none to a Photoblog, leading me back to square one.
It was an obvious choice to go for PhotoBlogWares… PhotoBlogsWiki has a nice collection of such scripts. I also looked at the top favorites of PhotoBlogs.Org and found that most photoblogs are about the photo. With the world having a common resolution of 1024×768. I can afford a image 700px wide. I installed many a blogs on my local machine and tested quite a few, the ones which I liked most were: Birch, FolderBlog and Photoblogger, but the clear winner was, the one I am presently using: PixelPost .
Like WordPress, PixelPost has a very hasselfree install, and a short, sweet and heavy-ly customizable template. I got it up and running in no time.PixelPost is in essence a Photoblog script, nothing more, nothing less. Plus they have a nice little plugin which shows the latest thumbnail on my WordPress Sidebar, now thats what I wanted. My mainblog can go its way w/o hindering my photoblog visitors with text, and my main blog visitors also have an option to jump to the photoblog if they find it interesting…

And as the thumbnail on wordpress also updates daily, I can say that my Wordpress install is a photoblog too (technically :) )

If you need help in installing PixelPost, then get in touch.

-@

Leo Employees…

March 6th, 2005

Jayshree sent a forward today about how employees are according to Zodiac Signs, here’s what it says about LEO:

Leo workers want to be first and at the center of the office. Even if they cannot lead, they will look for every opportunity to increase their own status — and if someone else seems ahead of them, look out. They will make it clear that they are not happy by pouting and complaining. They want advancement so much that they will take on more responsibility and carry a heavier load than anyone else does in the office. And they are self-promoters. It is likely that they are telling everyone in the office what a great job they are doing as well as giving everyone unwanted advice. They know they are superior and want everyone to know it as well. This arrogance can sometimes cause problems when working with management. But typically, they are just hard workers out to demonstrate just how good they really are. They thrive in sales positions - they can promote a product or company just as well as they promote themselves. Their strength and arrogance is not just show either. In a crisis situation, Leos really demonstrate their true courage. Leos want to lead and will be pushing for more responsibility and rewards. They are happy to train and mentor new co-workers as they enjoy giving advice and being in positions of authority. If you are trying to manage a Leo employee, you will need to give them plenty of raise, responsibility, and independence. They will certainly want to help lighten your load of management responsibilities. Just be careful- the next thing you know they could be taking over your job.

I’m a LEO, in case you wondering why I posted this ..
-@