enginerd

This is something I never encountered before. Internal server error with Blogger. java.lang.OutOfMemoryError! And no, I am certainly not playing Fools Day here. It may be April 1st today, but this error was for real. I wonder how often Blogger encounters these.

Reverse Engineering could be so much of fun! ;)

Yahoo! 360 is up and as I have lots of invites available, drop in a line if you want one ;)

This past weekend, I finally managed to complete things that were for so long left neglected. Thanks to Jonathan who took out time to respond to my email query and his super informative site on Lenya, I was able to redo the template for Lenya. I also did something that was for so long pending - reorganizing some of the stuff on my PC. What else... I also worked on the online Picture navigator that I had planned to do so long back. Finally the work is underway, only not too sure about the tagging of pictures. Meanwhile Yahoo! 360 is up and I just got an invite :) Got to check it out, heard that 360 too ofers a blog and some other so called "cool" features that these social networking sites provide(?)

Boy! Isn't minghong's blog interesting? I wonder where he finds such fun stuff! This is what he recently posted. Now. Go ahead and act smart. Get the latest Firefox 1.0.2

I just found out that the past week Yahoo! launched its search for content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license. Who knows, this may be useful some day. Someday I say, because till date I haven't found anything really useful protected under a CC License, except perhaps some people's daily raves and rants. Update: Did I write that?

The Kingdom of Bhutan has unveiled a new constitution, and put it on the web asking its people to comment on it!!! The Constitution pdf is available here . (via Boing Boing)

I just happened to reach Burnham's Beat , a wonderful blog on software tech and investing, via emergic . In his series of Software's Top 10 2005 Trends , Bill writes on Open Source: One of the biggest questions facing the software industry in 2005 is whether or not Open Source will “jump the species barrier” and start to become a major factor in the enterprise applications space. A quick look at Sourceforge confirms that to date most Open Source efforts in the applications space have been confined to niche applications in the academic space, but there are now numerous efforts underway, such as SugarCRM , to try and create enterprise-ready Open Source applications. Whether these applications efforts are successful or not is one of the key issues keeping software company executives up at night. For software executives, Open Source presents three major choices: beat it, join-it, or co-opt it. The conventional wisdom suggests that the way to beat Open Source is to “out-en...

This blog is currently eighth on Google's listing for "sania mirza pictures". Quite an achievement, considering that there isn't a single picture of Sania Mirza here!!! (except maybe an odd remark about her being the new fad in Indian Sports!)

I just got done with reading 'Digital Fortress' by Dan Brown. Picked it up with huge expectations after reading The Da Vinci Code, only to be extremely disappointed. The end was the most tortuous, imagine the top guys at the NSA (supposedly the accumulation of the brightest minds on the planet, according to the novel), not knowing their seventh standard chemistry. I'd expect them to figure out the difference between the isotopes of Uranium, an element we hear and read more than we do about others, O2 for example. If you're reading this book, be ready to be told the "very basic" facts of cryptography, in a way so as to demo the "superlative" cryptography knowledge of the lead characters. The Da Vinci Code was good. Digital Fortress isn't.

This blog has been announced as the "Net Culture Site of the Week" on Seven Wonders !!! enginerd: "Net Culture Site of the week" on Seven Wonders Welcome to all new visitors dropping by from Seven Wonders!

Hearing some praises about Netscape 8.0 beta from a friend, I thought of giving it a try. The most impressive thing it did: It blocked a pop-up. Cool. Then it popped up a window informing me that it blocked a pop-up!!! How smart...

MS Paint has a successor. Browsing through minghong's blog , I got to know of this wonderful CS design project at Washington State University. From the Paint.net website , Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP or 2000. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions. Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers. This is a screenshot from their website : Paint.net - Screenshot And, in case you are wondering, the source is freely available for download!

Just read about Google Code on Scobleizer . An open source effort from Google. From Code.Google.com FAQ What is code.google.com? Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.

GoogleX mysteriously disappears from Google Labs ! But you could still find it on this mirror: http://www.theplaceforitall.com/googlex/ Real cool!

I just observed that more and more people are dropping by this blog looking for Sania Mirza's pictures. I think this has to do with an earlier post of mine. But that is not entirely my fault if Google and Yahoo, and even MSN (which for some reason doesn't like showing my blog in its results, most of the time) are misdirecting people. By the way, this reminds me that Sania Mirza got to talk to Shekhar Gupta on NDTV's Walk the Talk . Now that is some achievement, joining a list that includes Sonia Gandhi, Narayan Murthy, Ratan Tata, Jagadish Bhagwati and many more distinguished personalities. (Interviews of these four have been my favourite on WtT till date.) But frankly speaking, the Sania Mirza interview was a huge disappointment. It'll have to go down as the dullest ever on WtT.

Something is definitely going on at Blogger dot com And it's not just with the commenting system! We have all been experiencing that "Blog not found" error with the Blogger Commenting system for a while now. But what would you say about finding the Blogger news on your dashboard going back to 2003? Check this out. And there's also a screenshot included!

Updates on this blog will be sporadic over the next few days. I am caught up with simply too many things.

My college has decided that its time we come up with a new solution for our content management needs. And so I begin the hunt for for an open source XML based CMS and end up with Apache Lenya ! Getting a test site running was a breeze. The download and install part is real easy. The only prerequisite is jdk and after downloading the binaries it took only a while to get my test site running. But then as it comes to customizing it, it becomes real complicated. There is hardly any documentation available about Lenya, and whatever exists is very very hard to comprehend. So it is in customizing the CMS part where currently I am having to spend a considerable time butI hope it should get done in not so long from now. I am just waiting to see how far we go with this Lenya thing. It definitely is exciting. Only a bit raw as I feel, which should improve in the coming versions and with the influx of more community participation. However, just in case the authorities say they would not prefer to ...

If things had gone the way C.V. Raman had planned, India could have been home to some of the most prestigious scientific research in the middle of the 20th century. According to an article in Frontline , during the height of Nazism in Germany, CV Raman had offered the jewish scientists in Germany to settle in Bangalore and pursue their research at the Tata Institute. And scientists such as Schrodinger and Max Born were genuinely interested! Being aware of the plight of Germany's Jewish scientists, Raman invited them to settle in Bangalore and pursue their research at the Tata Institute. It is reported that scientists like Schrodinger, Rudolph E. Peierls and Kuhn were seriously interested in coming to India. Max Born was selected as the emissary of the German scientists to come to India to study the suitability of the prevailing conditions. He arrived as the guest of Raman, and he found the climate of Bangalore and the facilities at the Tata Institute satisfactory. When Raman ...

No matter how much Saurav Ganguly may go on saying that there is tremendous hype surrounding the Pakistan's tour of India, but as I see it this series is failing to create any buzz that any regular Indo-Pak encounter does.Any clash between these two cricketing giants is bound to raise the fervour, and in the past it has always done so. But this time around things are seemingly different. While in the past we had media, especially print, covering any Indo Pak encounter (or for that matter, any touring Cricket team) ever so extensively, this series has failed to attract a coverage anywhere close to it. In fact, I'd say this has to be one of the least hyped cricketing event for a very very long time. Nobody's discussing the outcome of the series, no one is discussing tendulkar's tennis-elbow, nobody's doling out advice as to how should Ganguly adapt to playing short stuff from The Pakis. The Cricket pundits too seem to be in hibernate mode as of now! But what we have i...

Who is the leader of the open source movement? Now that does become a very tricky question, when you come to think of names like Stallman and Linus and others! According to Dana Blankenhorn , ... As with open source itself, leadership in the open source movement is distributed and diffuse. Open source has many leaders. Richard Stallman is a leader. Sam Palmisano of IBM is a leader. Linus and Alan are both leaders. There are others. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a bus could run over any of these great leaders tomorrow and the open source tide would keep rising.

Y! celebrates its 10th birthday. Amazing. I remember the excitement getting hooked on to the web for the first time. And the site I then opened was, you guessed it! Yahoo! Visit the special site celebrating the web's history over the past decade .