How Geeky are you?

How Geeky Are You

My score was 53 (heading towards geekdom) according to Newweek. You can take the test here.

I took a similar test a couple of months about my geek rating. I posted the results at my old blog here.

Your Geek Profile:

Movie Geekiness: High

Music Geekiness: High

Academic Geekiness: Moderate

Fashion Geekiness: Moderate

Gamer Geekiness: Moderate

Internet Geekiness: Moderate

Geekiness in Love: Low

General Geekiness: Low

SciFi Geekiness: None

How Geeky Are You?

http://local.live.com

So I decided to test drive the mapping service from Microsoft today.

The first thing I usually do is to directions for the unlikely senario that I have to drive from Miami to Seattle. The first time I tried it, I got the "server is busy. Please try again" message. That put a little damper of my opinion.

Then I decided, that I would do comparison of different routes that I take home to work. Now, most other mapping services like google's and yahoo!'s and Rand McNally's ask you for a start and end addresses, and then find "best" directions. These directions are often not the best if you have some local knowledge about shortcuts either from a person who lives there, of having been to the place, you have some vague memory of it.

Microsoft's offering on the other hand allows you to locate the locations you're interested in without specifying the address. All you have to do is point, right-click and select either "from" or "to". Now this allows a user to plan the route in stages, or if the user has some local knowledge, use it for route planning. I'm pretty sure Google, Yahoo! and RandMcNally must have thought about this, but they must have figured that most users would just want to input the start and end address and get the directions. The Microsoft user experience for me was pretty good, except for the the initial hiccup about the "server being busy…" but I dont think its going to go down well with users. At least I dont think they will use the service to its full potential.

The one other feature I was curious about was the "locate me" feature. I clicked on that, and a window opened up giving me three choices.

• Install an ActiveX control.
• Use an IP address
• Cancel

I'm betting that most users are either going to skim down the text, see the cancel button and click on it, or alternatively, they're going to see ActiveX control click on the small "x" on the top-right corner. This is typical Microsoft UI.

All in all, my initial reaction is that its a great and feature-rich service. While it may win me over, I dont think it will over rank-and-file consumers, either because of the halo effect of google and yahoo! or they might not use it to its full abilities.

…I'll be writing more about this as I use the new services more.

Mini-Microsoft: Vista 2007. Fire the Leadership Now!

I read this post a couple of days ago on my RSS aggregator. I think that was one day after MS announced, that consumer version of Microsoft Windows Vista would be delayed about 6 to 8 weeks. At the time there were like a few comments on the post. Right now there 419+ comments.

Some MSFT employees are really pissed.

How to tell if you’re an Apple Fanatic.

So, here on almost the 30th anniversary of the company's founding, how do you know if you're hooked on Apple? Well, you might be an Apple fanatic if…

Let's see how I rate

Apple users are more likely than PC users to

– Have a higher household income. nope

– Have received a graduate degree. check

– Be self-employed. nope

– Live in California, Massachusetts or New York. check

– Live in big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. nope

2 out of 5. Guess I'm not really a Mac person…
 

read more | digg story

Maximizing your ROI on your Pizza Hut’s Salad Bar

Pizza Hut has a rule that you can only go to the Salad Bar once. Some people (probably some poor college students) came up with a hack to make that trip worth it. Provided you don’t get kicked out first. Check it out its hilarious.

5 Algorithms you must know

Algorithms is underrated and probably underused – it comes up maybe 1% of the time, but in that 1% of the time, it's 100% important. These represents real algorithms, though the lesson is in the paradigm…

read more | digg story

this is something important.. so I though I should link to it. I think there are too many developers out there who seem to ignore the importance of algorithm design and implementation. I've seen programmers using simple linear searches for data, even though it would have been better to use a map or hashing table. When pointed out to them, they simply shrug their shoulders and say its "good enough" and they dont have the time to do design.

Spring…

I’m listening to KCRW.com right. The show is Studio 360, the guest is Bruce Stutz. He’s written a book on the various celebrations of spring held in the United States. Here in B’Ville, I think we’re still in the middle on winter, even though its late March, (well almost late March). Listening to the program, made me think of Basant, the annual spring festival held in Pakistan. I remember how people used to make sure that they had some yellow on their dress, and did lots of kite flying. It was always a good time. This year unfortunately, the government banned it, apparently because of the use of glass rubbed string (which admittedly was a big cause of injuries and deaths). Of course, there was the religious fundamentalists who always want to put a damper on everything cultural in Pakistan. Read more it here.

Rules for Unix Programming

It had been a long time since I had posted anything on my blog, so I thought I’d post this.
This is an extract from the online book  called “The Art of Unix Programming” by Eric S. Raymond, and summarizes the programming style, and state of mind when writing programs for Unix. I think these rules are applicable in other OSes too.

1. Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
2. Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
3. Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
4. Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
5. Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
6. Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
7. Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
8. Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
9. Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.
10. Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
11. Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
12. Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
13. Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
14. Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
15. Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
16. Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
17. Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Or if you want the lesson in one “affectionate” word,

Also read the the section on applying the Unix Philosophy.

VM Rootkits: The Next Threat

I found this a reference to this article on slashdot(link). It describes how researchers at Microsoft Research have combined virtualization technology and rootkits to run spyware and malware on a target computer. The idea is is still in a proof-of-concept, but with open-source virtual machines like Xen and how-to guides for making rootkits, I dont think that hackers will be far behind in figuring how to exploit this.According to the article.

The proof-of-concept rootkit, called SubVirt, exploits known security flaws and drops a VMM (virtual machine monitor) underneath a Windows or Linux installation.Once the target operating system is hoisted into a virtual machine, the rootkit becomes impossible to detect because its state cannot be accessed by security software running in the target system, according to documentation seen by eWEEK.
…
Today, anti-rootkit clean-up tools compare registry and file system API discrepancies to check for the presence of user-mode or kernel-mode rootkits, but this tactic is useless if the rootkit stores malware in a place that cannot be scanned.

“We used our proof-of concept [rootkits] to subvert Windows XP and Linux target systems and implemented four example malicious services,” the researchers wrote in a technical paper describing the attack scenario.

“[We] assume the perspective of the attacker, who is trying to run malicious software and avoid detection. By assuming this perspective, we hope to help defenders understand and defend against the threat posed by a new class of rootkits,” said the paper, which is co-written by researchers from the University of Michigan.

…Read the article to find out more.

Google in 20 years

I’d be pretty scared if this ever came to pass

…brought to you via digg