Monday, December 08, 2008

Moving on ...

Bye bye Ny/Nj.












Hello Az!

Monday, November 10, 2008

175 random ilayaraja hitz (mostly melodies)

Years of collecting songs, song db has bloated big enuf, that i play mostly the playlists in shuffle mode. Here is the dump of one of the IR playlist (mostly melodies), not by any means complete IR collection.


Track list >>>

IR_Hitz_1.rar
IR_Hitz_2.rar
IR_Hitz_3.rar
IR_Hitz_4.rar
IR_Hitz_5.rar
IR_Hitz_6.rar
IR_Hitz_7.rar
IR_Hitz_8.rar

---------------------------------------------------------------
PS: Here is link to album Vatsalyam by Bombay S. Jayashri. A Collection of Traditional Indian Lullaby.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Strange circle around moon

Never seen anything like this before, yesterday (10/13) night around 10 pm, we saw this huge, perfect circle around the moon. Sky was void of any stars, just the moon and this spooky circle around the moon. Photo taken doesn't do any justice of the real effect, Wiki tells me its 22° halo.

.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

George W Bush: Go Fish!

US Gross Federal Debt, unadjusted for inflation.











National debt when president George W Bush Jr. took office at the beginning of 2001 was about $5.6 trillion and it is close to 10.2 trillion as of today.



"Humble foreign policy" anyone?

Reminds me a line from Jurassic Park, "I don't blame people for their mistakes. But I do ask that they pay for them."

யார் யாருகோ டாக்டர் பட்டம் குடுகிறிங்கோ, இவருக்கு குடுங்கப்பா டபுல் டாக்டர் பட்டம்.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Authentication & Authorization

Use AD for authentication and DB for authorization

I'm trying to reason out the above statement with best of my knowledge, this may be specific to windows environment. Do leave your thoughts if you know of better reasons.

A company intranet website application can be open to entire domain users and hence don't need any authentication at all. But we may need to restrict access to a phone list application to certain groups, this application may include additional authorization restrictions like certain group of users should not be able to view some section of data say for example "personal mobile numbers". Best approach is to authenticate all users with a AD group and use different authorization data store like a database.

Can we not use db for authentication, like use "authorization data store" and check if user is not authorized to do any steps in the application and redirect to access denied page? Though its a technically possible option, in this case, control on who gets access to phone list application is thro' db. Everyone will agree, access to that is weaker compared to a secure AD group membership which are restricted to AD administrators hands. Inherently. access to application db has wider spread, compared to AD. Also AD authentication blocks unauthorized users at the gate i.e stopped even before entering into application.

In other end of spectrum, why we should not use AD for authorization. For simplicity sake, if we have 3 authorization groups for each application and we have 10 applications and toss in 2 environments (dev/prod), we end up with 60 AD groups. Its work on AD admins that in course of time will become un-manageable, worst-case scenario, someone getting access which they shouldn't.

That said, there is room for all shades of grey, for example any enterprise has to maintain AD groups for something or other, like share folder access. Using the same phone list application, if there is a requirement to restrict users from viewing sr. mgmt contacts. I'd rather make that authorization against AD than have it inside my application db.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

BBC - The Story of India

Six part BBC series which attempts to cover the story of India from past to current. I felt they mostly covered Aryan part, shadowing Dravidian side of history.

Friday, August 01, 2008

leanerFox

Off late i was frustrated with Firefox eating so much memory. Its far better from what used to be back.
  • Upgraded to latest and greatest version which has many memory leak fixes
  • Installed flashblock extension
  • Modded following config entries
browser.cache.disk.capacity 15000
browser.cache.memory.capacity -1
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 2 {seldom use back button}
config.trim_on_minimize true {would love if there is a similar thing for lost focus event}
nglayout.initialpaint.delay 0
network.http.pipelining true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8 {for DSL speed}

I have the same problem with Yahoo messenger, felt it became more and more resource hog. I don't want a browser window to open all times for the web version (why can't they provide the msg archive on web to standalone version also}. After googling a bit, did the following, but i still see sometimes it gobbles 30k,
  • switched to classic skin
  • removed all plug-ins
  • remove annoying ad-banner {this patch worked for version 8.1.0.421}

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Sanjana

Updated Sanjana's photoset in flickr.




Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Microsoft surface

Muti-touch, muti-user, device recognizing surface computing from Microsoft. Don't expect this coffee table to hit your home for next few years, hopefully demand should drive down the price to something affordable after 2010. This is just beginning of how things are going to change in computing world, from the not-so-fancy box in the desk or that oversize thing in lap. One of the future features is going to be connected devices with intelligent human interface, bye-bye keyboard/mouse.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

For while i'm not involved with significant development activities, hence replacing Building tomorrow's legacy system, Today! with something that aptly reflects the real significance of my babbles, err i mean the posts.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Armageddon

82 mins to kindle the armageddon fantasy, ABC documentary "Last Days On Earth"

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

$150 by July 4th ?

Last month Morgan Stanley projected oil will hit $150 by July 4th. Are we nudging close to peak or already on the summit of the peak.

Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (Trailer)



full documentary


DVDRip here.

It may be end of oil, but one shouldn't under estimate man-kind's ultimate weapon, "innovation". What if we crack the cold fusion, there may not be high hopes now, but practically feasible solution like combination of alternate energy and energy efficiency, may give us the breather for next break-through.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Scraps for this week

- The .NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

- iTextSharp. Good/Free/Open-source pdf library. Collection of samples here. Original Java library's ebook.

- Today development site was pointing to prod db and client support team told me this even happens in reverse and they told me biz component uses db config from dll's app.config and hence they recompile the dll with different environment config. First reaction to what is happening stumped me, I was under assumption when web app used this component, component should be erroring out as these config entries are not available in web.config or in worst case retrieved empty string as values. Looks like .net embeds, compile time config entries as default values in the assembly. Some more light to what is happening under the hood here.

- Strange skies


Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Google Street View Maps

Google Street View Maps for Knoxville. Looks like they have covered Knoxville left and right.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

r2i quote

Someone sent it to me way back, quote that describes all, happen to read it again today

Passion without action = LIA (x+1)
Action without passion = R2A
Passion with action = R2I

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Nand Nandan ♪♫♪♫

Been searching for this quite some time. Gg wanted this after listening (a bit of this) in Sindhu Bhairavi. Nand Nandan from album "Chala Vahi Des & Meera Bhajans by Lata Mangeshkar". If not any other song in the album, this one is sure to make anyone simmer down.



Listen to full album here. Download mp3 here.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Web 2.x ?

Some useless thoughts of what could be next incremental feature addition in web 2.0 with current available technology.

Speech recognizing websites. How about getting into website and give a voice commands like pay bill, print statement. Web based voice chat apps show the capability to send voice data over the wire and automated telephonic response using speech recognition seems to be much more improved. Can these technologies mash?

Seamless web drives. Platform neutral i/o protocol that will enable users to add personal web space/folder like any connected external drive. People should be able to open and edit a document over web just like one in local drive; underlying protocol should manage connectivity/encryption/transmission with data store in the cloud. With high speed connectivity becoming ubiquitous, it will be a nice feature addition to OS.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Break 2 India :)

After 4 yrs i'm finally taking a break from work for a month to India. I'd be happy to order "Veg Fried Rice" instead of Veg Fried Rice with No meat, No chicken broth, No sea food, ...