Paul Graham Just read the Great Hackers by Paul Graham. Wat he says does have a certain appeal, I would like to add a few things about the hackers I have known. [no one famous, but just ppl with extra-ordinary skills with a computer.]

1) They usually do not have a fixed opinion on less important things, but if you express an opinion on any to one of them be sure that you will be provided with an alternative opinion that is the exact opposite, or even beyond what you are suggesting.

2) They do not have a fixed daily rhythm -- Some hackers I have known have a 25-26 hr day. They leave at 2 am today and come back at 10, next day,then that day they leave at 4 and come back at 12 the day after, and at some point it switches back.

3) Most have a sense of beauty in code. They can recognize instantly when a program segment is beautiful, not merely powerful.

4) You can judge them by the number of lines they write to accomplish some thing. (the number of "lines" will be absolutely minimal. and usually the functions that they write stays in one screen. ).  ¶ 6:47 PM 0 Comments

  google and 500 What is happening to google these days?!!!
It is the third or forth time that I am getting
"Server Error
The service you requested is not available at this time.
Service error -27."
from google for simple queries!!, It used to be the icon for stability, now it seems that its expansion has started a rot with in.  ¶ 11:03 PM 0 Comments

  mod_scheme 3.3 Phew, the mod_scheme 3.3.a release is out, :D
I have fixed most of the bugs I know of, and written some docs on how to use it,It is more an apache developers tool than a scheme development platform at this stage,You can easily convert most apache modules [handlers or filters] to scheme or vice versa as it provides an almost one to one mapping with Apache APIs,

ToDo:
more examples
more documentation,
Nice library ? [I keep putting this off.. ]  ¶ 10:34 PM 0 Comments

  mod_scheme It seems that the tinyscheme has moved to 1.35 , so It is imperative that I update the mod_scheme,
now the things i need to do are,

1) to fix the long broken unix build of mod_scheme
2) get it updated to 1.35 of tinyscheme [currently it is 1.33]
4) fix the problems with file handling
5) fix problem with input filters.

Secondly i also need to get the ns_scheme for SunOneWebserver cleaned up,
been down with fever for a few days, so i guess i got enough time to think it over.  ¶ 7:26 AM 0 Comments

  focal My focal [that is perf appraisal for folks out side sun] was on friday, Thank fully there weren't any serious negetive markings, One thing I was told to try and improve was my communication, I am told that I am very quiet, infact too quiet, except when I had something to defend, in which case i am told to be quite ok,,.. :)


I guess that is something i cant help much,,...  ¶ 11:33 AM 3 Comments

  Gospel of the christ. I have always believed in christ as god just as I believe in my karma and vedanta saram,
I do not find any problem in reconciling my Hindu beliefs and outlook with the christian or muslim faith.
however After seeing the pain caused by conversions I can not but ask, did he know that these will come about?

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law--
a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

Matthew 10:34-36

How true it has come about to be!! How farsighted this observation was!!
The conversions by proletysing religions tear apart the fabric of family and society in a way that is too cruel for the words to describe.

I have always believed in the ancient suktha,
matha pitha guru daivam [consider your mother, father and teacher as equel to gods]
and felt it as one of the corner stones of my life and faith.I find it difficult to reconsile what christ teaches with it. and if it is my choice, I gladly choose this suktha rather than any teaching that is in variance with it because as an Indian I value the well being of my family above that of my own always and every time.  ¶ 5:39 PM 0 Comments

  @Sun The life at Sun is like a giant chess game,

Each game is satisfying due to the challenges presented and overcome but in the end I am not sure if I gain any thing of value out of this. Perhaps it is time to take a good look at my career and life.

It is like learning woodwork, each work I do contribute to my expertise with the code, but they do not teach me any thing new.  ¶ 12:45 PM 0 Comments

  Stories. Just back from visiting my parents and sister,
I almost felt like a child of ten again,
Each time I leave my home I feel so bad about what I am missing all the time. I left home at the age of ten and haven't had an extended stay at home until now. And now that my job is of this nature, I cant really hope to have that privilege later too..

That aside, my community, the Nairs of kerala, and the traditional family that I live in have a lot of stories about them, and each time I go home , it is a newer experience and an exposure to old stories some forgotten for years and some newly heard.

My family name is Naduvani roughly translated from Malayalam to English, it means the 'rulers of the land' It is perhaps the last remnant of a once powerful NaduVazhi?... The stories of my land and family like any old story lies entwined in magic and mystery,
It is said that the family came to the central kerala from Malabar (northern kerala) and settled there, and that during a time when our Thaivazhi (the matrilineal line of inheritance which determines the tharavadu or family name) was at the end of line due to scarcity of girls born in the family we had to adopt a girl from the Azhvancheri (an old and famous family of shivite brahmins) to continue our line. We have a kavu [a temple to the goddess of durga] that is associated with the family name called Naduvani kavu where along with goddess durga, our paradaivam and karanavanmar [ancestral deity and our ancestors] are worshipped.
The kavu has an interesting history, It is said that the bhagavathi [goddess] of the temple was one of three heavenly sisters, and the other sisters are also worshipped in nearby kavu's the Oldest of the sisters are supposed to be a very angry person, and hence the temple does not have a roof over it so that the deity sits under the natural elements. Our goddess we consider her as our heavenly mother, but like any mother, she too got angry once, It is said that in the annual festival in which the velichappad [the oracle] was enacting the old purana story of darika vadham [killing of a demon] as a drama-ritual the person acting the part of the demon was killed by the velichappad using the sacred sword [pallival] and was dumped into the well nearby, The annual ritual drama was stopped from then on, and the sacred sword and chilambu [anklet] of devi was then on kept in our tharavadu [ancestral home]. These things were known to the eldest members of the family alone, but when it a prashnam [prophesy through jyothisham according to Indian tradition] was done, these things were pointed out again with out any promptings from our part.
It is also said that our family has another ancestral temple [of shiva] some where in north malabar where our members are supposed to visit.

We Nairs have a matrilineal society and according to it, the family property and the rule of it goes into the hands of the eldest female member of the Thaivazhi. After marriage, the bride-groom is supposed to stay with the bride's family unlike the custom of the majority of world. The females also have greater say in ending the marriage and choosing a new bride-groom if they so wish. This matrilineal form of inheritance meant that while the rest of India wishes for a male child to be born to be the inheritor, the Nair family wishes for a female child to carry forward their thaivazhi. The right to do poojas [worship] in the Tharavadu kavu's etc are with the females. They were also taught the vedas and martial arts like kalari if they so wished.

Though my immediate family lives in the house of Naduvani, we are a different thaivazhi when considered in the strict matrilineal sense, My grand father (mother's father) is of the Naduvani stock while my grand mom (mother's mother) is of chanacham veedu of cherthala (and the sub family padinjare kunnumpuram). That means that though we live in the naduvani veedu, we are of the chanacham veedu (another old tharavadu but from the southern kerala). My mom tells me that as a member family of chanacham veedu, we get invitation from the festival of ancestral deities from chanacham veedu also every year. My father is of a tharavadu called elangikkamali and the sub-family group pookkattupadi.

We also have a sarpakkavu [temple for a personal deity in the form of snake] In our family home.

More interesting details as and when I remember more....  ¶ 12:40 PM 9 Comments

  Fighting spam, a new thought. Having had more than my share of spams in my inbox, I have been seriously thinking about ways to detect and avoid spams.

A spam is usually different from an ordinary mail in these stages.

1) When It is being sent.
A spam is usually never sent singly. i.e. Millions of mails are sent at once from a single account or a server. More over it is a machine that is sending it, not a human. and probably it is a machine that is going to process your replies

2) The from address
The from address is spoofed by spams (or viruses if spreading infected mails) so that you cannot reply back directly

3) The content
The spam usually has content that is unrelated to your legitimate mails.

Until now most of the filters work by using the third difference, i.e Bayesian filters and other content filters identify the spam by the frequency of specific words in it.

Looking at the other two, it seems that we can make use of the fact that it is a machine that is going to read the mails..

The suggestion is this, If you get a mail from some one who is not in your contact list, have a script that will reply back with a technical turing test that will verify if it is a human or a machine, If you get a correct reply [verifiable by a machine] then it is a positive that it is from human, if the reply is wrong it can be sure that it has not come from human. To help the human in identifying the mail for which he is being asked to verify, we might even include the text portion of his original mail in the verification mail or just the subject alone.

The turing test can take these forms,
1) pngs or gifs of words, Let the script reply back with a png or gif that is readable only by human [as is now used by so many free webmails -- i.e obfuscated slightly so that it is hard for machines but easy for us to read.] The sender can reply back with the answer in the subject line. If the answer is correct, the sender and the previous message will be white listed for viewing.

2) Simple sentences like
*what is the value of one thousand X four ? [reply in numbers]*

while this kind of turing tests are less robust than the pictorial one, The number of different sentences that can be composed might make it a good option. More over if it is a machine, It is going to spend considerable resources trying to decrypt it.

3) Identity confirmation questions like
*give me my first name*

the usage of these kinds of identity mechanisms should be triggered automatically when a mail from an unknown sender arrives in your mail box.  ¶ 11:23 PM 0 Comments