Boy who topped NASA

Just can't stop laughing on this ... it certainly happens only in India ;-) ... The amazing part is that even an Italian newspaper Repubblica.it published this.
btw, this guy anil writes well :-).

Tapestry working now

The Dilbert rss feed is working again ... thank goodness ... Looks like I reached on a conclusion a bit too early, though I thought that 5 days of downtime should be enough for that.

There are a lot of feeds offered by tapestry, but the ones I read are
Dilbert
Peanuts
Wizard of Id
B.C.

All these links will open in a rss aggregator. If you don't have one, try Abilon.

Update: Looks like the above link to abilon is broken right now. This one is working and has better description.

Dilbert RSS Feed not working

There used to be a tapestry which looks like this. It provided rss feeds to various comics, most notable being Dilbert. But the link is broken since Feb 20. Some google search reveals a Feb 15 post in Boing Boing

In a moment of mindboggling, unreasonable blinkered pig-ignorance, United Syndicate has decided that this somehow constitutes an infringement of its copyright -- that's right, reading an RSS feed of their stuff, using Internet Explorer, violates their copyright. They've nastygrammed the creator of Comics for Media Center and he's shut his project down

Here's another post by Chris

RSS supporters, watch out. The feed you are reading might be next.

Looks like tapestry has also fallen victim to United Media. I am not a happy man today.

Update: this blockquote thing is not working as expected. Will fix it later.

Black

Watched Black over the weekend. This movie certainly is worth the hype that has been created around it. Great storyline, brilliant performances by everyone, the most notable one being from amitabh. Never throughout the movie I felt that amitabh is actually acting out a teacher. Talk about being natural, this is the best one can see.
No bollywood movie in recent times would come even close to it. Infact, I am wondering if this could be the first oscar for bollywood. Apart from the great performances, the movie is based on a christian family and has lots of dialogues in english which the hollywood jury can relate to easily.

Statutory warning: this movie has caused tears in the eyes of many people who I thought were not so sensitive.

Gmail Invites

Just in case you still need a gmail account, go to this site, it has over a million invites available. I don't know why gmail is still not public, when practically anyone can open account in it now.

Tools: Image Viewer

Mirror mirror on the wall,
which is the best image viewer of them all
No two minds about this, its irfanview.

This killer app has everything that a non-graphic professional will ever need in his life. Support for every image format on earth, ability to convert between various image types, resize, resample, crop, batch resize, batch rename, reducing colours (changing to greyscale etc.), scanner support, all this and more packed in a meagre 800 Kb setup. Try opening any large image file, and you will know why this freeware gives any commercial tool like acd see a run for money.

Continuing on my purpose of blog post, I have decided to share information about some of the software tools I use that may be useful to others. This post is the first in this regards, All such posts will have a title starting with "Tools:"

Narain on F1 circuit

I know I am late in announcing this, but that doesn't belittle the feat of this man. This Formula One season would be extra special to me, I wish I could listen to Ashin's comments on this :-)