Moved

http://doughnut.wordpress.com

About to move on...

This itself is some kind of a record that I am posting the 3rd entry on the same day. However, I'll be shifting this blog soon to http://doughnut.wordpress.com.

Any comments on the name or design welcome!

And if you interested in a wordpress.com blog for yourself, beware that templates cannot be edited. Other than that everything else is *much* better.

Coding Horror Blog

I too am getting into coding horror

Instant Messengers

I absolutely don't like all the messenger clients hogging up system resources and precious taskbar area. The alternative till now was to use a multi-sign-in IM client like trillian, gaim or jabbers. I've also heard friends working in other organizations complain about these IM clients disabled in their network. Well, not anymore I guess. Check out the browser-based meebo, brining IM to Web 2.0. Ofcourse, it doesn't have all the additional features like sounds, emoticons, webcam sharing, etc, but good enough for one-on-one text chat. Also, recently launched is gtalk on gmail.

The Code Book

On one of my previous posts, a friend recommended The Code Book by Simon Singh. I got one but being an occassional reader, it took me almost a couple of months to finish reading through it. Its a great book with an interesting account of evolution of cryptography.

With each new encryption algorithm, there is an initial feeling that its "secure enough" and not breakable practically. But through the history, we have seen most of them being broken.

Anagram Generator

If you have ever played texttwist, you would know the importance of getting the anagram in less than 120 seconds. Apart from making the smaller 3-4-5 letter words, the objective is to get the 6-letter anagram correctly to keep the game going on.

It was a friend's interest to develop a brute-force crack to cheat on the game. The first task is to generate all possible anagrams with the characters and then lookup each entry in a dictonary. Ofcourse, such programs are already available on the net, but its a good exercise to build one on your own.

Generating anagrams, looked like a simple task, and actually is :), but I got lost and it took some time to finally get a recursive function ready. The actual part of finding meaningful words through a dictionary lookup is still TODO. If you are interested to have a look at the C# code leave a comment and I'll try to post it.

command prompt bar

Windows, Skins, GUI is all good, but I do often find myself launching the good old command prompt for various little things. Command Prompt Explorer Bar is a wonderful little utility that adds hooks to plug-in the command prompt window right into Windows Explorer.

It can keep track of your browsing in the explorer and sync it to the path of the command prompt. Also, a set of frequently used commands are stacked up for reuse. Ctrl + M it is!!

Update 2006.02.17: Documentation of all the win xp command line tools.

ie7

I've just got the ie7 beta installed; I'm liking the design and looks but too bad that I could find a couple of glitches within first 10 minutes. There must be many more bugs and I'm sure that guys at ms must be working hard on fixing them. And as with any of their product's new version, the memory footprint is huge. Here is the link to download ie7 beta 2.

Media Player 10 required Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation before you could download the setup files. But, I've read of reports that it was cracked (with almost no effort and in almost no time). With IE7, the WGA is built-in to the setup, so that it validates every copy of windows on which you want to install the new browser. Hmm.. just a matter till another report, i guess!!

Template Change & 26 jan

Following the change of my blog's title to about:blank, here is a template change too. I did try looking up here for blogger templates, but settled for a simple default one. Ofcourse, a little customization and I like it for now.

Adding links to India Flag VML and SVG today being 26th Jan.
Kalam's address to the nation, Jai Hind...