Now that's an RFC (The Twelve Networking Truths)

Thanks to /. I got to this RFC. Its a good read, specially for people who have spent nights reading through RFC and think that they are real bore documents with lots of repetation. Some excerpts..

With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The references have been deleted in order to protect the guilty and avoid enriching the lawyers.

As mentioned in my last post I am writing this blog entry from San Jose, California. I am visiting Veraz Networks for 8 weeks.

I took a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, my first international flight. As usual I requested for a window seat with extra leg space, but on boarding I found that a lady was sitting on my seat. They were a couple with a small kid with them, the window and middle seat were more comfortably positioned if they were to keep the baby in the basket in front. The plane reached Hong Kong after a stop over at Bangkok. The flight had a camera fitted somewhere in the bottom and We could see the landing tyres folding and the view from 'bottom of the plane' was good.

I finally managed to get a window seat on the next leg of journey. I slept most of the time, saw flying daggers, a friends episode and some other programs. Didn't read much of the Wodehouse book that I was carrying.

The weather in California is very pleasant and the hotel 'Staybridge' that I am staying at is a nice, small one. They have a 'full kitchen', which is of no use to me as I don't cook, I can only heat the 'Ready to Eat' food. :( First time I tasted 'ready to eat' food and I would disagree with people who don't like it. It is good. I took a cab from airport to the hotel and the cab driver was a spanish chap.. He encouraged me to try my spanish when I told him I have learnt basics of the language :-) He actually had the song 'Maria Isabel' in his cab.

Planning to buy a laptop, am not able to decide between an apple and an IBM.. I know there is no way to compare the two but I need to take a decision anyways.

Next post will be from California !!

Movie Fest

I saw Hitch, The Butterfly Effect, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2. All three except Hitch were good movies. Maria (Amy Hohn), heroine's sis in Hitch does not feature in first page credits of m0vie and does not even have a pic on IMDB but she was breathtakingly beautiful. The movie is enjoyable till they put in Will Smith's love angle in it and after that movie goes down the boredom spiral. Kevin James was the best part of movie.

Had been planning to see The Butterfly Effect for a long time, finally saw the movie and found it interesting. I had read a similar plot in The time of good intentions. I recommend reading the novel and all other novels by Barb for all Harry Potter fans.

I had got real good reviews for this one and had liked the soundtrack. I am a bit late in watching the movie but der aaye durust aaye. Breathtaking action sequence in both the movies, AMAZING soundtrack, background music just seems to amplify effect of all the scenes manyfold. Good story, cool script / dialogues and of course every character in the movie has a style of their own. Uma Thurman is superb.

The conversation between Bill and Kiddo are spell binding and there is a visible chemistry between the two.

In another news, I am travelling to US (San Jose, California) on 24th April for two months. Hope to meet a bunch of people there.

Maria Isabel

Our spanish class at Symbiosis Pune is presenting a song in college's annual fest. We have been practicing this song for quite some time now. The song has been sung by many people in different styles:

Some of them are here and here. We would be singing this version. A fun song with funky, dancable beats. Ninja is trying to supress vocals from mp3, hope he does a good job.

There are different versions of lyrics available and we selected the one I am posting here. Here are the lyrics and here with a translation (may not be correct, I am still a novice :) )

La playa estaba desierta
El sol bañaba tus pies
Cantando con mi guitarra
Para tí, María Isabel

Coge tu sombrero y póntelo
Vamos a la playa calienta el sol
Coge tu sombrero y póntelo
Vamos a la playa calienta el sol

Chibiribirim poropompom
Chibiribirim poropompom
Chibiribirim poropompom
Chibiribirim poropompom

La luna iba caminando
Por las orillas del mar
Tenía celos de tus ojos
y tu forma de mirar

Coge tu sombrero ...

En la arena escribí tu nombre
Y luego yo lo borré
Para que nadie pisara
Tu nombre, María Isabel

And the translation :

The beach was deserted (some more poetic word for this?), and the sea was washing your skin (body).

I am singing with my guitar for you Maria Isabel.

Pick up your hat and put it on.

Let us go to the beach and get hot (warm up) in sun.

chiribiri stuff....

I wrote your name in the sand
and later I erased it
So that noone else steps on it. (am i right here?)
Your name, Maria Isabel

I use Sage a feed reader for firefox to watch some blogs and news sites. Found this article about tsunami. I don't really know who is playing bad man/woman in this episode but following statements from Jayalalitha tells me that Oberoi actually must have done some work.

But Ms Jayalalitha responded to the perceived criticism by saying that Oberoi had done only 10% of relief work at Devanampattinam and the government the remaining 90%.

10% of relief work was done by a single NGO / fund / group of people headed by him (according to officials), we can safely assume that it was atleast 20-25% :) and I would say that is A LOT OF WORK DONE. No matter at what small scale but if you can come up with a 2 digit percentage contribution it is worth a mention. I didn't recall reading about Oberoi.. why is it being said that Oberoi had achieved "maximum publicity" for doing "nothing tangible".

Probably dirty politics as usual !!

I was informed by Ken's message that H3 and 6 won PAF. Cool. Last time 6 paired up with 3 they were barred and H3 had to do the PAF alone. iitb.general mentions that it had rain.

Waiting for videos.

A lot of Interview talks are going around, here are some things that you should not say during yours.. A friend seems to have done that during one of his interviews.

Interviewer: You seem to have not done very well in your courses. What is the reason for that?
Friend: I didn't like the courses that much, but I took some courses in SOM in finance management and they kicked ass.

Int.: Do you have any questions to ask?
Fr.: Ya, Why are so many people quitting you?

:-))

PS: Vivek got his blog mentioned in The Week and now I will have buy a copy of the magazine :)

Gaind makes sure that we watch atleast one F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episode everyday and atleast one movie every week. This time we got vcd of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes. A rather long name really :)

The movie is real fun.

We also saw Be Cool at E-Square and the voice and video were not in sync. Nobody in the whole hall was concerned about this and were watching the movie silently when Gaind decided to take up with authorities. The movie was rerun but there were other snags, lights went out twice and the movie was also cut (maybe to adjust next show). We found that the sound and video were not interleaved and they had two audio tracks one in russian and another in english. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore and decided to walk out, but not before we were given our money back. You don't say no to three 6"+ people when they ask for refund.

We liked the parts of movies that we were able to see in E-Square. Specially appreciated were the SUVs owned by Sin and gang. Uma Thurman rocked in the dance. Good that we got to watch it twice.

The next day we went to INOX for the same movie and were shocked to find that they had put Russian soundtrack and the staff were not even aware that movie is in english. They already had done two shows of the same film. Three of us (me, gaind and machine singh) again stepped in, but this time the crowd was very active and the movie was rerun. So we ended up watching some parts 4 times.

A must watch movie. Gangsta rappers rock... or rather rap. Only person I have seen who can match the coolness of Travolta is Harish. He (travolta) can light up a cigarette, when a gun is pointed towards him.

Go watch it.

I also caught up with many of my batchmates and some juniors thanks to Piyush Singhal. Nitin Ban, Abhishek Sharma (Jhuggi) were the juniors and Satyendra Tiwari, Umesh Goyal (Pappu), Singhal, Amit Sharma, Kedia, Gaurav Bhardwaj and Amol Naresh were my batchmates, all chem.

I went to the left side room, I came in the hall, then I went to the right side room, I went to balcony, looked in kitchen and store room. Also checked bathroom for it. Went again in hall and looked on sofa on diwan on table. Couldn't find it. I was going to balcony again just when I realized I had already wrapped the towel around. I felt so bad about it, mostly because of what H2G2.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Downloaded and read The Coming of Bill by P. G. Wodehouse from gutenberg. Unlike his others works this one is not a comedy in Wodehouse sense. Wodehouse once said, “there are only two ways of writing a novel. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going down deep into life and not caring a damn.”

Plot of The Coming of Bill is very similar to some jeetendra movie I had seen once, artist hero with some sidekicks, rich man's daughter heroin, heroin having a wicked aunt, a brother. Hero-heroine marrying, having a son, heroine's father dying leaving her a fortune, trouble... brother making mistake in business and a series of other events leading to a happy ending story. It is an ok read only if you are Wodehouse fan. I would prefer if I read jeeves/psmith style stories in future.

Another news, I have recently changed flat and shifted VERY close to my office.