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Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:16:30 +0000

Wow. Its been only 10 days, but it seems like forever since I last wrote anything here. Infact, for the past week I’ve been so cut off from the outside world, missing my lunches, not following the news (no, not even Slashdot). But its all finally over, and hopefully I will catch up with my life in the next couple of days.

In unrelated ramblings, I was really shocked by the Pramod Mahajan shooting incident. Some brother he’s got. Why is there so much violence in this world?

Slow

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 03:58:14 +0000

Asim mentioned couple of days back that lately my blog has been “slow”. Well, what can I say, it //has// been that way. I’m keeping busy with the daily routine and I just didn’t get around to write anything. Besides, nothing popped in my head in the meanwhile that just had to be penned, and so…

Anywho, this short post is just meant to be a I’m-here-but-not-dead shout to the [[wp>lazyweb|lazy web]]. I’ll be back later with something better to say.

Swades

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:40:50 +0000

The day is finally here! Yes, I’m going to India for slightly less than 4 weeks. I’ll be leaving this Wednesday. So the blog is probably going to be silent for the bulk of this month. Although, if I do manage to get a broadband connection at home, that might change :)

Strangely, I’m not as excited as I thought I would be. It probably hasn’t sunk in yet. But it should be fun nontheless.

I’m not going to be travelling a whole lot, and will probably spend most of my time in and around Gwalior, chilling out with my family. But I do want to catch up with a whole bunch of people, so we’ll see how it works out. If you’re in India and want to get in touch, do drop me a note!

On a side note, I’ve become bored with this site design. So after I’m back, expect a change. I’ll still be using WordPress, but probably switch to a different design. WP 2.0 should be out by then hopefully. Also (and this is a secret), I’m trying to hack up my own static website generation tool. No no, nothing against Forrest — Forrest is //awesome// — but I just wanted to dabble around some more with Python and this seems like the perfect toy project. Besides, at times I feel I need something even simpler than Forrest for my needs.

In other news, I bought a video iPod for my sister, and have been playing around with it the last 2 days. The iPod seems very nice, but I must say I’m truly, utterly disgusted and frustrated by iTunes. Its the //worst// music management software I’ve seen till date. I’ll post a detailed rant some other time.

Secure products, not security products

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 03:15:26 +0000

We had a speaker from Goldman Sachs today for the [[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/05au/|Homeland Security]] class. Pretty interesting talk. I was impressed by the amount of efforts giants such as Goldman-Sachs have to put in to be on top of things. And I was surprised by how knowledgable (technically) the speaker was. It seems they are really doing a lot of things to safeguard themselves against all kinds of attacks and catastrophes. They are trying to build what they call a **resilient enterprise**.

I liked one quote in particular from his slide: We need //secure// products, **not** //security// products. Its an interesting thought — if our entire hardware, software infrastructure was built ground up with security in mind, would we still need things like virus shields and spam filters and intrusion detection systems?

Back to school

Diwaker Gupta — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:28:48 +0000

As you can see, I haven’t blogged in almost a week now. Its back to school week for me, and its keeping me pretty busy.

Saturday went away in the drive. By the time I got here I was dead tired. Then I went to Himanshu’s for a fantastic dinner and some time. Then came back and just crashed.

Sunday morning went away unpacking. Sunday afternoon we went furniture shopping to IKEA. I got a really nice corner desk and some drawers for myself, and Ragsy //finally// bought a bed. We ate at a mexican place and the food was **so** good… yumm… After that we did some more shopping, went for a movie (Transporters 2) and also enjoyed some ice-cream at Baskin Robbins.

Monday was just busy as hell. First day at school: finish some paperwork, get access to building and labs, try to setup my machine, meet with Amin, goto OGSR to grab extension vouchers. Came back home and spent 4 hrs assembling my desk and Ragsy’s bed. In between also went downtown to test drive a car for Ragesh. Phew!

Tuesday was just as bad. I had to finish assembling my drawers. Finally got my lab machine setup. Started setting up workspace. SOSP registration and flight plans. Talk to Lucy, try to do some HP work. Just too many small little but important things to take care of.

Wednesday was similar. Prepare for thursday meeting, my turn to took, called Himanshu over for dinner, SOSP registration etc etc.

Anyways, its thursday now and I think I’m almost settled down now. So trying to get back to work now. This is a dull post I know, hopefully there will be more interesting stuff soon :)

Back in San Diego

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 07:19:25 +0000

Long day, and tiring. Am too lazy to give details now, but hopefully I will follow up with some details on the internship and the general experience over the summers. Right now, its guten nacht.

Of this and that

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:08:00 +0000

Nothing much to say. Actually I’ve been meaning to write a bunch of stuff, but I’m really knee deep with my internship work, so haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. I will. Soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing a lot about [[http://feedburner.com|FeedBurner]] these days. So I decided to give it a try. Setting up was trivial using [[http://orderedlist.com|Steve Smith's]] excellent [[http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/|WP FeedBurner plugin]]. So as of now, all my blog feeds are routed through FeedBurner. As always I’m a bit suspicious about everything, but so far they seem to have good intentions.

In other news, I saw [[http://www.glamsham.com/movies/reviews/noentry.asp|No Entry]] on friday night. A mostly crappy movie, but I had tons of fun because I was in good company :-) We were all sitting in the front row laughing our assess of at nothing. Good times :-)

Like I said before, HP internship coming to and end. So I’m busy doing my slides for the talk on Wednesday, wrapping up some final graphs and so on. I’ll probably do a longer talk on friday and will drive back down to San Diego (ah, home sweet home) on saturday. Friday night, I’ll be at Asim’s having loads of tea.

Yesterday we also had our scheduled “technical discussion on Mac OS X” :-D It turned out to be pretty good actually. More on that later. For now, back to work.

Snowball

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 05:10:05 +0000

I’m sure everyone’s heard of the [[http://www.answers.com/snowball%20effect|snowball effect]] right? Where a teeny weeny little bit of snow can roll down a hill, piling up more and more snow around it as it makes it way down and by the time you realise whats going on, its too late — you don’t even know what hit you.

I’ve never actually “seen” one happen (with real snow, I mean). But today, I experienced what it must feel like, to get hit by a snowball that you last saw as a miniscule pebble.

Laser Tag

Diwaker Gupta — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 05:49:11 +0000

Today I went to play [[http://www.answers.com/laser%20tag|Laser Tag]] with our group at HP. We went to the [[http://laserquest.com|LaserQuest]] site in Mountain View. It was my first ever time playing laser tag, and I had a *great* time.

We played three games. The first one was a solo mission, and quite surprisinly, I scored the //3rd highest// points! :-) B-)

The second game was a team mission, and my team lost horribly. My individual preformance was just as bad, I think I ranked 15th :-(

Fortunately I was able to redeem myself a little bit in the third (and last!) game. This was also a team mission, my team came second lagging behind first place by a measly 57 points, and my individual ranking was 4th :-)

To top it all off, we had lots of ice cream after the games. Good fun :)

2005-07-13

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 04:03:16 +0000

Came across some really good music recently: Kashmkash by [[http://www.almsforshanti.com/| Alms for Shanti]], [[http://www.raagasong.com/GetHindiMovie.asp?Movie=Virudh | Virudh]], [[http://users.cis.net/sammy/kissme.htm | Kiss Me]] by Sixpence None the Richer (I don’t know why that link shows up as the first hit on Google!!)

Today I also tried out the pool here at Villa Monte for the first time. Felt reallyyy good. I had forgot how much I enjoy swimming :-) Now there’s one more incentive to work well at office so that I can come home to a nice warm swimming pool!

[[http://www.neato.co.nz/ | Christine]] is still working on [[http://www.neato.co.nz/archives/2005/07/13/ultimate-tag-warrior-20/ | UTW2]] and so the tag cloud has disappeared for now. But I have bugged her and the cloud (or heat map, whatever you wanna call it) will be back soon.