Author name: S Anand

Update: There used to be an unflattering (Photoshopped) picture of Amitabh Mall here. It’s been taken down on request.

I got a digital camera. Here’s a snap from it.

Now, you may be wondering why the snap looks bad. That’s not true. Meet Amitabh, friend and colleague. Looks a little different. Unfortunately balding early. After all, he’s a consultant. Currently unsatisfied with the object of his attention (either the food or me) to the extreme. Following a unique love-life model.

Meg calls for professional blogging. I agree. Like all good things, blogging will have to go commercial, and like Faraday said, “… someday you can tax it.” (Note: Actually, Faraday didn’t say it.)

Forbes has a list the rich and the dead (dead celebrities who continue to earn a lot.) Elvis, of course, tops the list, but it’s good to see Charles Schulz and Tolkien on the list as well.

Domino’s Pizza is trying to charge for delivery. But I thought the whole point of Domino’s was to deliver pizza, as opposed to eating it “there”. They may as well hike the price — which is what this effectively translates to.

Speaking of which, I ordered a Deep Dish with jalapenos, tomato and onion a couple of weeks ago. I really liked it. When I called Domino’s yesterday, they remembered the order and delivered it within 10 minutes. Impressive.

Oh, and their spelling of Indian locations sucks. Spot Adheri (W), Ahmadabad, Banglore, Hyderbad and Maylapore at their locator.

In June, Peru decided to use open source software. Today, California plans the same. If governments catch on to this trend, and go further by enforcing suppliers to use compatible systems, it’d be a real big boost to open systems.

The Google toolbar has security holes. But they fixed it, and the toolbar’s automatically been updated! (At least, it’s been for me.) Pretty quick.

Prof. Manindra Agarwal and his students at IIT-K have figured out a polynomial time test for primality. It was an unsolved problem. The RSA algorithm assumes that this is impossible. (NYTimes)

Of course, others have claimed the same. To my knowledge, none is conclusively proven.

What if they’re true? Well, in a few years, our cryptography algorithms will be useless. So it’s back to the drawing board, with security-related dot-coms from Univs popping up.

Berkeley’s course on weblogging has some pretty good links.

The first link I found on Google when searching for “Moria” was Moria poetry. Now, Moria is this text-based game that I used to play until day-before. I like it. I don’t like poetry. Still, I gave it a shot, and before long, I read stuff like

“Buffa in the seria
of my sights split infinitive sunrise
cicadas and more cicadas.”

Sounds Vogon. No offence meant. But the only poetry I’ve enjoyed till date is Alice’s The Mouse’s Tail.

Incidentally, the full-text of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available. (Note: you can’t click the links on the site. You’ll have to modify the URLs a bit.) More hitchhiking to keep you busy.